Bruno Latour: May Nature Be Recomposed?

 

The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2010
Location: Nobel Museum, Svenska Akademiens Börssal, May 11, 2010.
The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture is given every spring
at the Nobel Museum by an international scholar of excellence.

[ h/t Adam Robberts ] 

Bruno Latour: Waiting For Gaia

Adam Robbert reminded me today of Bruno Latour's recent talk titled, 'Waiting For Gaia: Composing the common world through arts and politics'. The video introduction is embedded below, and the transcript of the entire talk can be found here (PDF). Latour's work is fast becoming essential for understanding the world we now inhabit.

SOURCE: HERE

Jon Lindblom on DeLanda

I just want to make sure everyone interested was in the know about Jon’s latest post over at Intensive Thinking which includes a transcript of a brief presentation he did about the neo-materialist philosophy of Manuel DeLanda. I couldn’t find a damn thing I disagreed with in his presentation (and I tried).

Below are some highlights, but for Shiva’s sake go read it for yourself:

“[H]ow should we explain the workings of a complex and mind-independent reality? In other words, the first question which any speculative realist thinker has to pose is: what is it that gives reality structure once we have removed the human/world-correlate, and dogmatism, from the centre stage? It’s here that DeLanda introduces his neo-materialism, which, as the name implies, is different from Marxist materialism, in that it ditches the dialectic simply as a transcendental illusion, and also argues that matter not only exists independently of our minds, but also has the capacity to express itself independently of our minds. So this is how he manages to circumvent the deadlock between idealism and naive realism, that is, by understanding matter as morphogenetically charged, or synthetically potent, with autonomous self-differentiating capacities.” ?” [source]

I’m intrigued by Jon’s use of the word potency throughout his post, and hope this might somehow 'catch on', resulting in some serious thinking about what that term has to offer speculative ontography.

“[E]ven if it is true that scientific theories can never give us a complete account of the real that doesn’t mean that they are completely wrong, or inadequate to draw ontological consequences from, as the speculative realist philosopher Ray Brassier has pointed out in response to similar criticisms: ‘The fact that our best current science will probably turn out be only partly true does not license the conclusion that it is all wrong and that it has no authority whatsoever’.” [source]

Check it out: Here

Slavoj Žižek: Catastrophic But Not Serious

...

Slavoj Zizek: Catastrophic But Not Serious from The Graduate Center, CUNY on FORA.tv

Location: New York, NY / Event Date: 04.04.11 

Summary: The Committee on Globalization and Social Change will launch with a special lecture by philosopher and critic Slavoj Zizek who will speak on "The Situation Is Catastrophic, but Not Serious." This alleged message of the Austrian military headquarters during WWI renders perfectly our attitude towards the ongoing crisis: we are aware of the looming (ecological, social) catastrophes, but we somehow don't take them seriously. What ideology sustains such an attitude?

[ h/t DMF ]

On Precarious Causation – Part 1: Epistemic and Structural Relations

Continuing our discussion on the notion of ‘withdrawal’ in the context of object-oriented philosophy (OOP) Adam Robbert has a fine post up (here) probing deeper into the differences between ‘contingent’ and ‘absolute’ withdrawal. To reiterate, I like this distinction and would certainly count myself as firmly within the contingency camp, with one caveat: I advocate contingent withdrawal at the level of structural causality and complexity, while, at the same time - following Wittgenstein, Derrida, Rorty and others - accepting ‘absolute’ withdrawal at the level of episteme, conceptual knowledge and representation. And the separation here makes all the difference.

Let me explain: I maintain that entities can (and must) have direct causal access to each other's substantial being via causally affective force, but that such access is always limited, partial and precarious due to the differential capacities, sensitivities and vulnerabilities embodied by particular assemblages. Moreover, epistemic capacities, especially in humans, should never be confused for or reduced to basic structural relations (e.g., physical contact), if only because the defining (onto-specific) operations of human thought are not primarily material and causal, but mental, projective and imaginal. Put another way, assemblages can affect, associate, amplify, augment, absorb, and in some cases obliterate each other directly at a non-symbolic level of causal relation, with respect to their defining compositional arrangements (or substantial integrity), despite escaping the totalizing gaze and schematic intentions of conceptual thought as such. Objects can and do affect each other in all sorts of ways while remaining obscure and only abstractly apprehended by symbolic consciousness.

In this post and subsequent related posts I want to circle around my thesis of precarious causation by contrasting this position with Graham Harman's thesis of 'vicarious causation' and object-oriented philosophy more generally. In doing this I do not attempt to definitively refute Harman’s framework but, instead, take advantage of the ongoing discussion about ‘withdrawal’ and objects as an opportunity to render my own conceptual biases more explicit and begin articulating what I believe is a more consistent and empirically grounded realist philosophy. Along the way I hope to address either directly or indirectly much of what Adam, Matt Segall (here) and Jeremy Trombley (here) have recently added to the debate.

As touchstone, here is a characteristic description of absolute withdrawal taken from Guerilla Metaphysics:

“Objects withdraw absolutely from all interaction with both humans and nonhumans, creating a split between the tool-being itself and the tool-being as manifested in any relation. And along with this rift between objects and relations, objects are also split in themselves between their sheer unity as one object and their multiplicity of traits” (p. 5).

To begin with, as stated in my last post on this topic (here), I think the fatal flaw with the thesis of ‘absolute withdrawal’ is that it conflates ‘knowledge’ (epistemic activity) with ‘contact’ (structural relation) in a way that disrupts our ability to think the messy, co-implicated, participatory and complex nature of reality. By inflating phenomenology to the level of self-referential metaphysic Graham Harman deemphasizes the structureality of material instantiation (corporeality) and overemphasizes epistemic inadequacy, leading would-be ontologists through a series strange logical maneuvers and alienating assumptions. [see, for example, Harman’s ad hominem and condescending attack on materialist explanations of causality in Prince of Networks (2009), p.109]

Ultimately, I believe, Harman’s fusion of Husserl’s phenomenology of ‘intentionality’ (with all its Cartesian-Lockean assumptions) with Heidegger’s observations on cognitive apprehension serves to con-fuse perspective with proximity and qualitative experience with causal indirection. With this conflation Harman sets to work the assumption that human knowledge is no different in capacity and operation from the structural vicissitudes of material life.

*

Notice, also, how Michael Austin characterizes Harman’s position in his essay, ‘To Exist is to Change’ (here):

“When I experience a tree, I have in mind not the real tree, but the intentional tree. The real tree is saturated with detail, the angle experienced, the lighting, my mood, etc, while the intentional tree is stripped of these. Changing any of these details does nothing to the intentional tree in my mind, “which always remains an enduring unit for as long as I recognize it as one.” The real me cannot interact with the real tree, but rather, we interact on a phenomenal level through the mediation of the intentional object. This intentional object relation is asymmetrical however, the real me only ever interacts with the intentional tree and never the tree in-itself.”

What stands out here is how Austin’s caricature seamlessly slips from a description of what is going on in the mind of an observer when he is witnessing a tree (i.e., moods, intentions, qualitative apprehensions) to a statement about a supposed inability of direct interaction without explaining why simply looking at a tree should be considered the paradigmatic example of encounters per se. On what grounds should we consider the cognitive experience of observation at a distance as the primary mode of access in every instance? None, on my account – and I will explain why later in this post.

There are several assumptions in Harman’s four-fold which I reject, especially the split between the Real and the Sensual (which I will address later), but what I want to emphasize at this point is that Harman is taking what is essentially an epistemological argument developed from particular lines of phenomenological thinking and transmuting them into a series of ontological claims.

Now, I can think of two possible genetic reasons for this “radical” move:

1. I believe Harman absolutizes Heidegger’s account of dasein by arguing that the difficulties inherent in relational cognition (i.e, equipmentality) reflects the fundamental structure of the Being of all beings. That is to say, Harman following Heidegger willfully ignores the characteristic and relevant differences between the particular (onto-specific) nature of human existence and the constituent natures of other modes of existence by privileging supposed (conceptually delineated) ontological conditions and under-estimating sensually disclosed differential ontic actualities. Harman believes bullets interact with clay, or dynamite interacts with bricks, exactly the same way humans experience tools. For Harman the structure of dasein is universal.

2. Harman's epistemic/causal conflation also seems to be a direct consequence of his acceptance of panpsychism via his reading of Whitehead. Panpsychism, of course, is the stance that some capacity akin to mentality or consciousness, or perception is inherent to all things and throughout the cosmos. If Harman does subscribe to such a position then it should come as no surprise he assumes that causal relations operate in near identical fashion as human cognition. Every occasion of relation becomes, under such a view, an instance of intention-laden apprehension, or “translation”. Take for example the indicative title of Harman’s unpublished work, “Intentional Objects for Non-Humans” (mentioned in Austin’s Speculations essay cited above).

It certainly seems appropriate given the mix of these two related sets of assumptions (phenomenological inflation and panpsychism) that Harman would be led to defend an ontology of “hidden” and “absolutely withdrawn” realities. If Being as such is believed to be fundamentally structured the way human-beings are, and if the cosmos is shot through and through with mentalistic capacities and activity, then the limitations of animal cognition and human mental operation can be assumed to be simply one instance of a more universal or transcendental tendency of all things.

To unpack the details of these claims would take a book length treatment in itself, and I’m completely unmotivated to take on such project, because, as I have said, my interest is not in providing a sustained critique of Harman’s work (nor object-oriented ontology generally) but to contrast as sharply as possible his views with my own. As supplement and excuse I will irresponsibly suggest that much of the confusion inherent to the claim of ‘absolute withdrawal’ stems from, I believe, Harman's over-investment of his significant analytical powers in the unsubstantiated phenomenological claims of Heidegger – at the expense of various other methodological practices, informative injunctions, analytical resources and invariant corporealities.

The problems with this investment are many, but we need not accept such “radicalizing” and conflating maneuvers. Instead, I suggest that an empirically-informed position can easily differentiate epistemic ‘knowledge’ from strauctural ‘contact’, as non-identical operations in the world. 'Knowledge' and thought about the world and objects happens via animal memory and abstract signification - with very different processes than those involved in basic physical interactions. 'Knowledge’ involves detached (intangible) linguistically dependent biological imaginings (projections), but ‘contact’ involves material-energetic (tangible) structurally affective catalytics. While both involve multi-scaled causal chains and structural vulnerability, the former process is dependent upon symbolic events, involving memory, signs and abstraction, whereas the latter is primarily dependent upon physical and electric events, 

To be sure, I believe ‘knowledge’ is also an embodied capacity activated by brains, but it is not strictly biological in that animal gestures can be externalized, or as I like to say tokenized, through socially mediated linguistic and conceptual markers (schema, metaphor, etc.) in a way that detaches them from rudimentary physical intentionalities, requiring personal negotiation through memory, recursion, plasticity and projection (as imagination, or what I call phantasy). [see, for instance, McLuhan’s ‘extensions of man’ arguments, or the whole corpus of literature relating to the 4EA paradigm in cognitive studies.]

It is important to understand that I am not simply relying on my own implicit theory of human cognition here because I could just as easily suggest bundling the assumptions embedded in that last paragraph into the rather innocuous and singular claim that ‘knowledge’ involves extra-biological, extended or symbolic capacities irreducible to the less complex processes of non-cognitive materials. Thus, the kernel of my main argument here is that human cognition and conceptual thought (‘knowledge’) entail onto-specifically emergent and extended – and withdrawn - capacities that do not obtain at the level of composite base materials. This, I argue, is the difference that makes all difference. And by confusing cognitive events (intentionality and symbolic relation) with causal events (materiality and structural relation) OOP mistakes the ‘absolute’ limitations of perspective and detached, tokenized (form-al) thought for the defining features of causal interaction generally.

Unraveling exactly how this fatal mistake effects the overall logical machinery of OOP is a massive endeavor, best left to the ingenuities of academic scholars, and so will not be pursued here. Instead, what I would like to pursue in this series of posts is what it might come of a speculative realism that takes into consideration more complex and experientially supported (empirical) understandings of embodied life. By circling back on the notions of ‘access’, ‘materialism’ and ‘relation’ I will argue that avoiding the conflation and subtle correlationism at the core of Object-Oriented Philosophy and reintroducing the distinction between knowing (epistemic relation) and being (structural relation) enables us to conceptualize better the manner in which causation is both direct and partial, as well as precarious.

Resonance & Flow

from resonance-film.com:

"Resonance is a collaborative project with over 30 independent visual and audio designers/studios. The aim was to explore the relationship between geometry and audio in unique ways."

from mrkism.com:

"The Flow looks at the supervening layers of reality that we can observe, from quarks to nucleons to atoms and beyond. The deeper we go into the foundations of reality the more it loses its form, eventually becoming a pure mathematical conception. Layer upon layer the flow builds new codes that create new codes, each version computing a new, more complex state based on the previous one."

Deleuze Interview

From the Filmmaker:

This film was made upon an invitation by Anna Powell of Manchester Metropolitan University as a part of her ongoing project on Deleuzians from different parts of the world. We did this short film together with Hüseyin Mert Erverdi who is a MA student at Film and TV Dept., Istanbul Bilgi University. After a series of discussions I decided that I should appear as smoking a cigarette through rhizomatic fumes of which I should be saying "re-so-nance" in slow motion. As for my answers to Anna Powell's questions, Mert invented a flow of paragraphs which resonate well but do not synchronise with the sound track I prepared for the film. The sound track includes some excerpts from KOG, by the.clinamen (Z.Aracagök and Anthony Donovan) released by White Label Music, UK, 2009 and my answers.

. SOURCE: sifir0

Obama rejects Keystone XL Pipeline (for now)

With intelligence and leadership U.S President Barak Obama has rejected the application for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline - a project that would pipe raw Tar Sands materials to the southern United States from Alberta, Canada. Here is Obama's official statement:

The White House - Office of the Press Secretary 

For Immediate Release January 18, 2012 

Statement by the President on the Keystone XL Pipeline: 

Earlier today, I received the Secretary of State’s recommendation on the pending application for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment. As a result, the Secretary of State has recommended that the application be denied. And after reviewing the State Department’s report, I agree. 

This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people. I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil. Under my Administration, domestic oil and natural gas production is up, while imports of foreign oil are down. In the months ahead, we will continue to look for new ways to partner with the oil and gas industry to increase our energy security –including the potential development of an oil pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico – even as we set higher efficiency standards for cars and trucks and invest in alternatives like biofuels and natural gas. And we will do so in a way that benefits American workers and businesses without risking the health and safety of the American people and the environment.

Source: Here 

UPDATE: An independent analysis performed by University of Nebraska professor Dr. John Stansbury, an environmental engineer, claims that TransCanada’s safety assessments for their proposed Keystone XL pipeline are misleading and based on faulty information. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry crude oil from Alberta, Canada to Texas, crossing numerous states in the U.S. Read the full (PDF) report: here

Onto-Specificity and the Varieties of Assembly

While discussing the difference between ‘contingent withdrawal’ and ‘absolute withdrawal’ with Adam Robbert (here and here) the always perceptive Jeremy Trombley intervened to highlight a fundamental question:

“[C]ould withdrawal be a characteristic that is not intrinsic to all entities, but which reflects the different ways in which entities are composed?” [source]

In my estimation this is exactly the right question. Jeremy’s question goes right to the core of what I am trying to think with regard to ‘onto-specificity’. My own commitment to onto-specificity (or compositional particularism, if you will) entails that each 'event' must be considered in its own right, and always in context. The argument here is that every entity and situation is irreducibly what it is composed of. And it is the specific composition of things-in-relation that need to be respected, engaged and described in detail if we are going to be able to understand complex nature reality.

However, one might wonder, does this compositional view entail a reductionist formulation where everything is viewed as a mere ocean of atomic combinations? Absolutely not. I fully accept the cosmological emergence of complex phenomena endowed with differential and cumulative capacities and powers. So when I use the term 'composition' here I mean to include the myriad of ways quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, etc., become co-implicated together to form various assemblages at various scales. And when I refer to onto-specfic compositions I am attempting to take seriously and call attention to all those levels of organization and material-energetic associations and expressivities present in particular situations/ecologies. The specificity of complex and emergent beings and capacities is exactly what I do not want to gloss over on the way to reified metaphysical categories. As a result, the ontographic project of 'taking seriously' must entail a ‘partnership’ with scientific modes of practice and thought in an ongoing negotiation of concepts, facts, influences, speech-acts and materials.

But to answer Jeremy’s question more directly: YES, entities/assemblages are unique compositions that can be more or less structurally withdrawn depending on their particular constitution and embodied powers. It seems to me there is a wide spectrum of assemblages which display differential powers and capacities for structural relation with and among each other. An object/assemblage’s ability to enter into relations with another assemblage or group of entities is specific to its material-energetic composition as deployed in particular affording contexts. It is the varieties of onto-specific confluences of embodied properties, expressions and affects that I am trying to map out – and which cannot adequately be described as “objects” in every instance.

This, in general, is the problem I have with metaphysics. Metaphysics is an attempt to abstract general axioms about beings and ‘being-as-such’ in ways that often underdetermine the diversity of things and thus do symbolic violence to the complexity of specific realities. In this case, it provides very little philosophical assistance to posit, project or abstract some a supposed universal (ontological) tendency when dealing with specific events or situations which involve so many different scales of interaction, forces, flows and structures. To universally apply a label such as “object” or “process” to actually existing complexes and assemblages seems merely academic in the presence of so many different sorts of events and situations which otherwise overflow, exchange, transgress and organize.

 As Jeremy explains:

 “What I mean is that there's so much talk about how objects are withdrawn as if it's an essential and characteristic trait of all objects. Also, it implies that all objects are equally withdrawn in every circumstance. Maybe that's not what anyone is arguing here, but that's certainly the sense that I get sometimes. But why couldn't an object be composed in such a way that it is not withdrawn at all - at least in certain circumstances? Similarly, why couldn't an object be composed in such a way that it is completely withdrawn in almost every circumstance (neutrinos, and dark matter come to mind)? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to say that different entities are differently withdrawn in different circumstances. Maybe this is what you and Adam mean by "contingent" withdrawal?” [source]

That is exactly what I suggest. Withdrawal is contingent upon the onto-specific assemblages and contexts involved. And, again, it helps little for us to have abstract conversations about a particular framework or ontology if our claims are not checked against the background features of existing empirical and theoretic facts, knowledge sets and methods. Without building in a high degree of specificity to our discourse and research we may never be able to understand the rich nuances of both objects and processes as they actually exist.

Jeremy then goes on to clearly state the main thrust of my comments regarding the problem with conflating 'knowledge' and embodied experience:

 Also, I think there's still some ontological confusion about the nature of knowledge in this debate, and I think you're right to point out the conflation between, as you say, "understanding" and "grasping." The gap between "essence and appearance" exists, I believe (and have argued on my blog, briefly), because the thing-itself and the knowledge-of-the-thing are ontologically distinct entities. The one can never become the other, and so the gap will always persist. Whereas the apple and my body can become intimate through the process of digestion. I'm not sure where to go from there, but I'd be interested to see where you and Adam take that. [source]

This is it precisely: if we willfully ignore the characteristic differences between the capacity for knowledge (cognitive powers) and the capacity for contact (powers of the flesh) we generate unwarranted and empirically invalid assumptions about the nature of object-object relations.  Just because we can never "completely" or "totally" or "absolutely" or "exhaustively" know or symbolic code the inherent structurally withdrawn complexities (depths) of an object does not mean we are unable make direct contact with their substantial being. It simply means that both humans and non-humans only have partial access to them. Mistaking the natural limits of conceptuality for the supposed limits of embodied experience is a fatal mistake for any serious realist philosophy. These capacities obtain at very different levels of organization.

Rather, in order for us to build a robust realist ontology attention must be paid to specific assemblages (and their potencies: materials and expressions) as well as the particular “event mechanics” they are enmeshed within - regardless of the fact that we can never truly step outside our networks and constitutional relations to get a intellectual ‘view from nowhere’. We are of this world in a way that simultaneously destroys our fantasies and affirms our ancestral flesh. The way out of correlationism is through.

Ontological Intimacy, Depth and Deployment

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portrait of a mosquito on display at the 
Smithsonian Institution in Washington

Over at Knowledge Ecology Adam Robbert has responded to my recent post on the notion of ‘withdrawal’ by reframing the discussion with an important distinction. Adam writes,

“I would like to suggest that we can frame this discussion within two conceptions of withdrawal: absolute and contingent (the first associated with the work of Tim Morton and Graham Harman, the second with Michael and Levi Bryant).” [source]

I support Adam’s distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘contingent’ withdrawal. And I am willing to admit favour for a version of withdrawal consistent with a materialist understanding of contingency. I believe entities are withdrawn, but not in the sense Graham Harman and Tim Morton seem to advocate. I believe all actually existing entities are assemblages and events with material and organizational depth often exceeding the grasp and understanding of other entities - but which are nonetheless substantially accessible.

I want to highlight two assumptions embedded in these statements:

First, I want to make an important distinction between “grasp” and “understanding” which seems to go to the heart of Harman’s extension of Heidegger’s tool-story.

Understanding (as 'translation') is not equivalent to structural relation (“grasp”). Understanding is a 'second-order' emergent capacity of recursive biological memory, gesture and symbolic projection coded (abstracted) and afforded by interpersonal (cultural) networks. And the cognitive operations of 'understanding', classification and representation cannot possibly determine or “exhaust” the complexities of things encountered. Embodied symbolic apprehension is inherently non-equivalent and token. Therefore I agree with Harman that the incompleteness of understanding and symbolic representation renders our translative capacities partial and limited, and threfore entities 'withdraw' from each other epistemically.

Yet, without some type of 'access' to the encountered objects of our embodied experience - and therefore access generally between objects - abstraction, codification and semantic approximation (intelligibility per se) would not be possible. As I attempted to argue in my last post on this topic, cognitive apprehension is possible be-cause symbolic understanding and intentionality are not the only ways objects or assemblages relate. Entities also often relate in various non-intentional and non-symbolic (structural) ways at different scales of material extension and organization. Direct relation is both necessary and possible viz. the emanating, composite and substantial elements of any two (or more) entities that have casual influence on the structural arrangement or unique determining patterns of another. [*]

This can be folded into an appeal to the existence of obliteration and absorption events:

Steven Shaviro’s mosquito bite example (mentioned in my last post on withdrawal) is an example which demonstrates how human flesh obliterates the functional operation and substantiality of a mosquito's composite affective capacity. As Shaviro explains:

When the mosquito bites me, it only interacts with a few of my qualities (my skin, my blood, my body heat). And even when I murder the mosquito, I only encounter a few of its qualities... [I]n Bryant’s terms, it is precisely because the mosquito interacts with certain of my powers or capacities or local manifestations, and I interact with certain of its powers or capacities or local manifestations, that we must say that the mosquito and I do encounter one another and interact — this is precisely the way that two entities perceive one another and interact.

In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. The mosquito only apprehends particular aspects of me; but it is “me” as a complete object, rather than just those particular aspects or manifestations of me, that is changed by the encounter. To say that objects do not encounter one another, because they cannot entirely know one another, is to reduce ontology to epistemology, once again. [source]

human digestive process

For me the most striking case of direct encounter is animal digestion. Digestion is an absorption event where the material and organizational depth and unity (complexity) of an entity is directly encountered, disassembled and redistributed. Would an empirically informed critic argue that metabolic processes fail to directly penetrate the structure and capacity of the food animals ingest? I suggest not. And are those penetrating (affective) metabolic capacities integral to an animal's embodied and substantial composite powers? Indeed they are. Not only do animal bodies directly encounter, for example, an apple according to capacities essential to their continued operation, but animal bodies can also completely obliterate an apple’s compositional integrity by absorbing the apple's elements and potencies into its very own system. If such cases do not convince us of direct causal relation and ontological intimacy I’m not sure what could?

The take-away point here is that structural encounters are direct by virtue of their causal efficacy - the differential ability to affect the structure and composite powers or capacities of others - whereas the translations, apprehensions and phantasmic representations generated by epistemic encounters are necessarily “selective”, obscure and partial. That is to say, causality and relation are always direct but partial. The so-called “rift between essence and appearance” applies generally to symbolic operations but not necessarily to material relations and structural causality as such, because cognition, gesture, intentionality and conceptuality are different kinds of powers or capacities than  physical contact and embodied relation. And by conflating the limitations of cognition and representation (epistemology) with embodied experience and causality in general (ontology) the notion of "absolute withdrawal" fails to convince.

To return briefly to the examples above, if a mosquito lands on my arm and penetrates the structural integrity of my skin with his snout we can say the mosquito and I are in direct contact or relation. But we must also say that such contact is only partially because both of us are accessing only a limited portion of the other’s total 'depth' of being. The mosquito may be ingesting my blood but it is not penetrating the structural integrity of my spleen and other aspects of my being. And the mosquito may be resting on my arm with a portion of its extensive composition beneath my skin but I have no access to its internal organs or substantive depths. Our encounter is limited by the inherent organizational and material complexity of both mosquitos and I, and therefore by the availability or lack thereof of our components. And this is what I mean by 'withdrawal' or contingent depth.

The second assumption that needs to be upacked is my appeal to depth. The focus on depth in my orginal statement above is meant to call attention to an entity's uniquely "withdrawn" complex compositional assembly. Every 'object' or assemblage has a contingent and expressive potency particular to its material-energetic composition and capacities. The term 'potency' is offered here as a technical term in my discourse referring to the affective, embodied and expressive properties of individual assemblages. Thus individuality as temporal singularity is to me an object or assemblage's unique potency, in the sense that a giraffe has a particular potency, likewise with uranium and a collection of H2O molecules. "What can a body do?" Depends on its composite onto-specific potency. And it is in the direct but partial mingling of material-energetic assemblages where potencies of all sorts often relate, combine, collaborate, conflict, constrict, or otherwise affect, augment, amplify and generate the myriad of evolved ecologies and terrains.  

So I agree with Levi Bryant in that entities can only ever have “selective” access to each other based on each object’s particular (onto-specific) organizational and material-energetic depth, or endo-complexity. There will always be a certain degree of withdrawn substantiality in relations of contingent material objects/entities corresponding to the endo-complexity (depth) of any particular assemblage - just as there will always be some 'distance' between signifiers and objects of signification. While at the same time, I reject the notion that entities are absolutely withdrawn from each other.

As I argue above, entities can and do interact (penetrate, exchange, affect, obliterate, absorb, etc.) directly according to their unique structural compositions and expressive (sensual) substantiating properties - the same qualities that constitute the very fabric and flesh of their actual existence. And it is the primordial  accessibility and vulnerability (ontological intimacy) of elemental life which affords each and every affective and consequential event, encounter and relation. Which is to say, it must be the case that entities are capable of affecting each other directly and substantially, if only partially, lest the notion of causality become unintelligible and knowledge itself be rendered impossible.

As Adam writes,

“Michael’s concern here, as I read it, is that it makes no sense to experience and grapple with a relational, contingent world of affect whilst at the same time suggesting that this panoply of activity is the result of objects that do not touch–clearly all kinds of beings are crashing into one another everywhere! What a mess! So, if real entities everywhere are touching each other nowhere, than how is that anything is happening at all? And further, if it is the case that entities are withdrawn absolutely from one another then what possible sense of responsibility can we have towards such entities (a necessary question indeed)? Can we even be responsible to such entities?” [source]

The answer is, of course, that if objects ‘absolutely withdraw’ both causality and responsibility break down, leaving us with a cosmos full of alienation, Platonic caves and ineffectual vicars. But we don't inhabit that cosmos do we? Withdrawal is necessarily contingent, finite and never absolute.

Adam continues,

“In my understanding, Bryant is arguing not for an absolute withdrawal, but a contingent withdrawal wherein a real object is deployed in and through its relations, though never fully so in any specific set of relations. What does this amount to? It seems to me, if I am reading Bryant correctly, that this form of contingent withdrawal suggests not the absolute absence of the real object, but a real object always-already deployed amidst a “regime of attraction;” objects are withdrawn in the sense that they are irreducible to relations and contexts, but not fully departed from all relations and contexts.” [source]

This is how I read Levi as well. In fact, the more I try to grapple with Levi’s framework the more I find his conclusions consistent with my own. And, like Adam, I find my own ‘ecological’ sensibilities compatible with the process-relational thinking inherent in Levi’s notion of “regimes of attraction”.

However, I would like to push such conceptions of inter-being even further to try and conceptualize the creative nature of mutuality, co-manifestation, affordance and non-linear causality in an intimate and erotic wilderness of beings, exchanges, flows, depth and networks, rather than overemphasizing the role of the temporal agental powers of specifically withdrawn assemblages. It is the very nature of potent “deployments”, in all their temporal, spatial and material complexity and vulnerability that interests me the most about the cosmopolitics of contemporary life - as access and relation are not simply issues of theory, but of application and possible tactics. The onto-specific nature of contingency, 'deployment', and relation constitute a Wilderness of being, becomings and practice from within which all realties emerge.

In sum, I think the following point stands: ‘withdrawal’ is necessarily contingent and precarious as a result of the ubiquitous ontologically intimacy of this immanent material-energetic cosmos.

The End of Capitalism?

WOW. That is all I have to say about a recent post at Indecent Bazaar entitled, "The End of Capitalism". Therein the author lays bare the immediate political implications of trying to better understand the amazing complexity inherent to all social assemblages. The author (who are you?) calls upon important work done by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Manuel DeLanda.

I honestly could not articulate a better understanding of the multiplicity of social systems (and indeed all assemblages) at various scales, as well as the need for analytical specificity in terms of both general ontology and political practice.

Below is my favourite passage from the post, but please do go read the entire piece for yourself:

It is illegitimate and inaccurate to speak of capitalism in terms of a unifying entity (in the same way it would be to speak of the US as a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one) because such social descriptors erase and obscure differences. While feminists have long departed from “holistic expressions for social structure”, conceptions of capitalism as hegemonic, ubiquitous, systematic and so on are still prevalent and resilient. It follows from this virtually unquestioned view of capitalism as the dominant form of economy that noncapitalist and anti-capitalist sites come to inhabit the social margins in the realm of experiment (as recently illustrated over at Necessary Agitation). As J.K. Gibson-Graham contend: “it is the way capitalism has been ‘thought’ that has made it so difficult for people to imagine its supersession.” (There is little doubt that the archive of my blog unflatteringly reflects the same point). As the authors go on to argue, what needs to be fostered instead is a theory of “economic difference;” conditions under which the economy might be “less subject to definitional closure,” whose identity is not fixed or singular. The alternative of “theorizing economic difference, of supplanting the discourse of capitalist hegemony with a plurality and heterogeneity of economic forms” is akin to what Manuel DeLanda attempts in ‘Deleuze, Materialism and Politics’. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of double articulation (the selection of materials out of a wide set of possibilities—first articulation—and the arrangement of these loosely ordered materials into a more stable form—second articulation) with which to conceptualize the process through which material form and identity are generated, DeLanda extends this micro-macro distinction to strata operating at infinitely different scales (rather than only two levels of scale: ‘the molecular’ and ‘the molar’). According to DeLanda, “double articulation is, in its simplest version, the process of joining parts to yield a whole with properties of its own. Since most component parts are smaller than the whole they compose, the part-to-whole relation is a relation between small and large scales.” It would be a mistake, however, to treat the macro and micro as absolute scales. There are never only two scales operating in material or social processes: every entity that is perceived as an autonomous whole is itself populated by component parts, and those parts in turn have their own parts…. “A more adequate approach,” argues DeLanda, “would be to treat them as relative to a particular scale.” For this reason it is problematic to employ terms like ‘society as a whole’ in our theorizing, for the largest entities are every bit as singular and unique as the smallest. “In general, what needs to be excluded from a materialist social ontology are vague, reified terms like ‘society’ (or ‘the market’, ‘the state’, etc.) Only hacceities (individual singularities) operating at different spatio-temporal scales should be legitimate entities in this ontology.”

Yeah, I know, pretty damn awesome...

Riffing On Withdrawal: Difference, Embodiment and Access

In a duo of recent posts at Larval Subjects Levi Bryant takes up the notion of object “withdrawal” in earnest once again by addressing several of the most relevant questions percolating in the thoughts of many critics of object-oriented philosophies.

In these posts Levi not only clearly states the core problem I have with any object-oriented metaphysics but then goes on to skillfully differentiate his own understanding of “withdrawal” from Graham Harman’s by further articulating philosophical commitments consistent with a move towards integrating process-relational thinking with object-orientated investigations.

To begin with Levi states,

“It seems to me that one of the single greatest challenges that proponents of withdrawn objects face is this charge of proposing an empty metaphysical abstraction that makes no difference. I resolve to treat the object as withdrawn from all relations such that we have no access to it whatsoever (this is not, incidentally, my concept of withdrawal). In this way I seek to preserve the object form all erasure under relation. Yet in doing this, what has happened? Have I not won a Pyrrhic victory? Insofar as I’ve claimed that the object is withdrawn from all relation and access, I’m also led to the claim that nothing can be said of the object qua object because the object is withdrawn. As a consequence, the object becomes, at the level of concepts, an empty point. As thoroughly withdrawn, I am unable to say anything of the object. Any quality that I might attribute to its reality is necessarily a quality for me (in relation), and not a quality of the object itself. And this is true both metaphysically (in the non-pejorative sense) and epistemologically. It’s not just that the object is empty for me, the person seeking to know the object. No, it is also that the object is empty for any other object, because the real being of the object is withdrawn from each and every object, existing in a self-contained vacuum, unable to touch any other object.” [source]

This is precisely the crux. If objects, entities, assemblages, etc., are incapable of ‘touching’ or interacting or relating to each other is some sort of direct way there is absolutely no possibility of encountering the things-in-themselves, much less knowing anything substantial about them. As Levi puts it later in the post, “there’s just no way anyone can know anything about it and thus it makes no difference in our thought.” There has to be some sense in which entities make contact or they would never be able to communicate (in the broadest sense of that term). And I would even venture to add that any such world populated by inaccessible, vacuous, isolated objects could only be an alienated, underimplicated prison-house of pure/ideal and forever undetectable substances.

However, fortunately we do not live in such a world. We don’t have to search far to find the myriad of ways humans touch, penetrate, swap materials, propagate, interfere, incapacitate, augment and otherwise intervene upon each other’s substantiality (external and internal), as well as the integrity and constitutional operations of so many other organic and non-organic entities and assemblages. We live in a world with sex, germs and atomic fluctuations. We live in a world of chemical catalytics, metabolic processes, cellular mitosis, symbiotic relations, nuclear fission and co-evolutionary dynamics. Each assemblage of expressive materials enacts a dynamic, or what Levi calls a “regime of attraction”, unique to the wider ecology of flows, exchanges and influences in which particular assemblages are implicated. Our world is extensive, immanent, collaborative, distributed, intensive and enacted all the way down. These facts are as irreducible as any formal metaphysical caricature we might seek to project upon the world.

But the question remains: how best are we to describe and attempt to explain this mix and mingle (and mangle) of things, flows and relations? Is there one great set of signifiers that can explicate and then codify the nature of such a wilderness of being? I can’t imagine there would be since, as Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) remind us, all assemblages and contexts are unique and irreducible to either the processes or elements of which they are composed. Every actual entity is, I argue, a fully embodied material-energetic assemblage with an irreducible onto-specific expressivity, or “individuality” as such.

OOO is right to champion this “withdrawn” onto-specific potency as the flash-point where intensive differences are generated. It is with specific thresholds of actual assembly and organizational unity where causal affectivity takes on its particular character and function. That is to say, the distribution of “objects” and assemblages are difference per se; they are the ‘what’ that makes a difference, and they are the rhythmic punctuations that comprise the song of this cosmos.

However, where I think OOO goes too far (at least with Harman and Tim Morton) is where they assign absolute identities to such potent beings to an extent where there is an imposition of metaphysical boundaries that do not actually exist. Now, to be fair, the understanding of the term “object” varies greatly among the OOO enthusiasts – which, in effect, serves to stretch the term beyond any ordinary linguistic coherence. But what unites these thinkers is a willingness to advocate for the “complete” or “total” withdrawal of all objects/assemblages from each other and even from themselves. This radical boundary-making, I suggest, can only obscure the already complicated project of investigating BOTH the assembled efficacy and individuality of entities (their onto-specific potency, or 'being') and their fully implicated, material-energetic, processual, embedded and temporal relations (their 'becomings') simultaneously. I argue, counter-intuitively perhaps, that it is the onto-specific substantially of entities and assemblages that should caution us to avoid universally characterizing such complexities as “objects” or “relations – and talk more specifically about particular admixtures, alliances, complexes, distributed realities and the ecosystems they enact.

This call for attention to the particular composition of specific entities is echoed in Glen Fuller's recent comments here:

"[T]he composition of matter and energy are entirely compositional and contingent. As energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, then this or that composition of matter and energy is continually being transformed (ie entropy) since the beginning of the universe. The given composition of anything would therefore be a particular contingent composition of matter and energy." (emphasis added) [source]

As well as Jussi Parikka's questionings here:

"I guess OOP wants to treat everything as an object - across scales, genres and epistemological prejudices - and hence bring a certain flatness to the world - to treat humans and non-humans on equal footing, a project which I am in complete agreement with - but does this not risk paradoxically stripping entities, the world of specificity?" (emphasis added) [source]

So as I see it we have two serious sets of problems with OOO at this point: one cluster epistemological and the other ontological. First, as we said above, if all real entities are “totally withdrawn” and inaccessible (and to be encountered as “sensual objects” and only alluded to via metaphor) then, as Levi suggests, we cannot claim to have any real understanding of them. In comparison, however, the related ontological problem of “total withdrawal” is even worse: if we have no substantial, reliable or direct access to real objects then we can have no real affect on them – and thus causality itself breaks down in such an account. Even in Harman’s ingenious “vicar” system of causality the contradiction quickly becomes obvious in that even if we need vicars we must, in some sense, have direct access/contact to/with them. That is, for ontological realism to be intelligibly argued it must be argued that ontological intimacy must be the case. Both contact and access must be possible.

Consider, for example, the following argument from Steven Shaviro:

"[W]e do encounter objects all the time, the entire universe is composed of objects encountering other objects. The fact that these encounters do not involve the manifestation of all the powers or capacities of the objects in question does not mean that the objects are somehow failing to encounter one another, or that there needs to be a split between an object and its manifestations, as Bryant and Graham Harman both maintain. When a mosquito bites me, I am changed thereby, although this is only to a relatively minor (albeit irritating) degree. When I slap and kill the mosquito, it is changed so extensively as to be altogether obliterated. 

When the mosquito bites me, it only interacts with a few of my qualities (my skin, my blood, my body heat). And even when I murder the mosquito, I only encounter a few of its qualities... [I]n Bryant’s terms, it is precisely because the mosquito interacts with certain of my powers or capacities or local manifestations, and I interact with certain of its powers or capacities or local manifestations, that we must say that the mosquito and I do encounter one another and interact — this is precisely the way that two entities perceive one another and interact. 

In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. The mosquito only apprehends particular aspects of me; but it is “me” as a complete object, rather than just those particular aspects or manifestations of me, that is changed by the encounter. To say that objects do not encounter one another, because they cannot entirely know one another, is to reduce ontology to epistemology, once again. [source]

These twin objections to OOO obviously need to be developed further in order to approach academic persuasiveness. However let me go just a little further on the issue of “withdrawal” by suggesting that part of the reason OOO – at least as originally proposed by Graham Harman – continues to assign absolute identities to assemblages in general, despite the obvious objection from anyone with materialist sensibilities that all real “objects” mix, mingle and exchange determining influences, is because of a conflation of cognitive apprehension (epistemology) with structural relation (ontology). Harman graphs Husserl onto Leibniz by way of Heidegger.

In other words, my hunch is that part of the reason Harman and others overextend Heidegger’s hammer-story is that Harman (or is it Husserl?) fails to properly differentiate conceptuality (knowing) from embodied perception (experiencing). Harman seems to assume knowledge equals experience and thereby feels justified in extinguishing all traces of corporeal pre-phenomenological physicality – and its structural-relational quality - from the actual encounters of human objects/assemblages. This conflation of human multiplicity and the elimination of non-cognitive structural relation is then radicalized and projected back unto the physical universe at large. Harman seems to believe that if we or any other objects are incapable of knowing something in its "entirety" we are thus, by logical extension (or conflation), unable to directly encounter it. This completes Harman’s alchemical move of morphing inadequacy (of conceptuality) into inaccessibility, resulting in what I find to be an ultimately alienating discourse that erodes our reckonings of both causality and intelligibility. And this, I think, is a fatal mistake for any kind of realism.

My claims here, of course, remain to be supported with reference to specific passages found within Graham’s work. And I must stress that my intention here is NOT to tear down the house that Harman built. I have learned a tremendous amount from Harman, Morton and especially Levi Bryant. If fact, I consider myself a student of these gentlemen not their peers. But my statements above, as far as they are at all intelligible, reflect my attempt to work through what I think are the main logical inconsistencies and unfortunate rhetorical effects inherent to object-oriented theory.