On Being and Coping - Part 1: Ontic Relation and Object Access

“Sensing is not ruled by the ‘I think’ which, according to Kant, must accompany all apperception. In sensing, nothing is apperceived. The sensing being, the animal, does not confront its world as a thinking being, but is, rather, related to it simply in uniting and separating.” (Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman, 1963: 197) 

“Language scatters the totality of all that touches us most closely even while it arranges it in order. Through language, we can never grasp what matters to us for it eludes us in the form of interdependent propositions, and no central whole to which each of these can be referred ever appears” (Bataille, Eroticism, 1986: 274).  

"You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions."  (Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, 2007: 1)  

Arran James has responded (here) to my last post (here) with a generous exploration of the thesis that ‘absolute withdrawal’ is a feature of epistemic relations (hermeneutics) only and not of structural relations (material affectivity) of objects generally. In short, objects are absolutely autonomous of our conception of them. Objects are never equivalent to our perceptions, interpretations, or stories. Yet, however accurate such a claim may be, it also remains the case that many objects can and do encounter – affect, influence, absorb, activate, dissolve, empower, etc., – each other directly in structurally efficacious ways beyond or at least ‘below’ conceptuality. This is the crux of my divergence with object-oriented ontologies (OOO) [see here for more detail].

Now one might be inclined to wonder if I am setting up a kind of unnecessary dualism here by distinguishing between structural encounters and epistemic encounters? That is a fair question. To be sure, I am supporting a kind of weak version of the classical distinction between "the sensible" and "the intelligible". But I am NOT suggesting that ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are different substances. They are not. What I am suggesting is that there are different kinds of interactions taking place at different levels of complex materiality (strata). Which is to say material affectivity and structural relation occur at different levels and in different ways than epistemic relations that are often independent of processes of apprehension, signification and "translation".

Without a doubt embodied cognition (which in my usage includes both emotion and logical operations, in mingling proportions as per neuro-anatomy) involves recursion and includes projective subjectivity (‘qualia’) – what I refer to as the phastasmic character of experience, and what Lacan refers to as 'the imaginal’ – not present in less complex objects. Not all material assemblages/structures are capable of mental operations (“mind”) because cognitive activities/powers involve distinctly emergent capacities irreducible to less complex physical processes. Such recursive-phantasmic capabilities (powers) are specific to entities with central nervous systems, and are what affords animals an emergent capacaity for iconic/symbolic signification and epistemic memory. And he biological capacities for recursion, memory, signification and synthetic apprehension (or animal coding) are precisely what allows for what I refer to above as epistemic relations. We experience and imagine; we sense and we code. It is the activity of signifying, apprehending and relating to the world via epistemic coding which remains ‘absolutely withdrawn’ from other entities.

So I certainly agree with Heidegger, Harman, Morton and others when they suggest that objects are never equivalent to our animal interpretations and conceptions. The crucial point with regard to my disagreement with OOO is that embodied human thought as an onto-specific capacity is deployed and operates differently in the world than how, say, dynamite works in relation granite. Non-signifying objects (such as dynamite) often interact with other objects (like granite) in ways that make a structural difference to their material composition below the level of explicit cognitive acts. There are different kinds of entities which enfold different levels of organization, activity and relation, and these differences make all the difference. [see here for more detail]

By this I do not suggest some sort of naïve ‘billiard-ball’ causation where pure substances rub up against each other, but rather that certain types of assemblages/objects relate in ways that directly influence the operational character or functional arrangement (structure) of others through the exchange of information and energy. Causality is never simple or unmediated but always complex and precarious. And so the sorts of interactions (events) that take place between entities are entirely contingent upon the kinds of entities involved - relative to their material and onto-specific capacities. ‘Withdrawal’ at a non-cognitive and pre-reflective level of materiality is then an issue of structural access via complexity (or ‘depth’) and material composition as opposed to an issue of epistemic access within representational thought.

I must admit at this point that my awareness of the problematics of epistemic access/relation is precisely why I enjoy Tim Morton’s project as much as I do. Tim is brilliant at pointing out the alienation, epistemic problems and associated existential anxieties generated by the inability of humans to come to grips with the gap between our apprehension/interpretations and the things-in-themselves (cf. Derrida on undecidability). Morton’s “dark ecology” offers a way forward to begin to thematize (rationalize?) this epistemic gap while simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically activating an uncanny appreciation for the structural intimacy of the world, or of what he calls ‘the Mesh’. I will certainly have much more to say in the coming months about the possibilities Tim is setting forth in his recent work, but I just wanted to acknowledge here the profound influence Tim’s work continues to have on me in this regard.

With that said, let me return to some of the wonderful points Arran brings up in his post. Arran writes:

Michael rejects the idea that objects are absolutely withdrawn from one. Instead, Michael suggests that all objects are ontically open to one another in such a way as to establish an ‘intimacy’. This would also be the grounds of possibility for the intelligibility of alterity: how could we speak of alterity if things never encountered one another at all? The point is that if objects were absolutely withdrawn they would recede from any point of access whatsoever. In such a world no thing could ever be touched, held, burnt, used, left, ignored, known etc.

I don’t know if I have ever stated it quite that way but Arran is correct, I maintain that some kind of access, namely structural access/relation, is required as “the grounds of possibility for the intelligibility of alterity”. This doesn’t mean that we can come to total knowledge of any particular entities, because, as I argue above, epistemic closure is impossible, but that through the various structural (complex and multi-leveled) relations with things we can at the very least gain some intimacy with them by phantasizing symbolically and communicating with each other about them. Without structural access/relation alterity would be unintelligibility and epistemic coding impossible.

This is precisely where my pragmatic commitments come to the fore. If humans can only have structural access to things-in-themselves, and only ever fashion approximate knowledge of objects and assemblages through signification practices and epistemic phantasies, then what actually matters is how we pragmatically act, react and cope in the world in relation to them. Insert all the references to Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ and ‘family resemblances’,  Rorty’s ‘ironism’, and/or any other post-critical concessions you want right here. The bottom-line is that immanent structural – or perhaps infrastructural – relations have traceable consequences via the onto-specific powers or potencies (or what Bryant refers to as ‘pluri-potencies’) of things at a pre-reflective level of direct material-energetic affectivity. And the distal stories (narratives, ontologies, etc.) we tell ourselves about these consequential interactions – however poetic or meaning-full, or instrumental (useful) they may be – are basically coping mechanisms to help us make our way in the wild world as fully enfleshed beings-in-the-world.

In a passionate and radically illustrative passage Arran writes:

Absolute withdrawal is a thesis of absolute autonomy of every substance from every other substance to the point where all and every thing vanishes. But that isn’t the world we live in. We live in a world of violence and suffering, of bullets and bombs, of fast food and big screen TVs, of kissing lovers, and 4 year old boys who refuse to let you write blog posts. We live in a world where we’ve gathered a fair bit of knowledge. Hard knowledge garnered from natural science. In other words, it seems that the claim that objects are absolutely withdrawn is false.

As a psychiatric nurse I know that such a claim is false. I use drugs synthesised by psychopharmacologists that, once injected into the flesh, directly do things to the patient’s nervous system. Conversation and phenomenographic accounts of patient experience also relate how this can profoundly alter the way patients couple to their environments. This leads to the enaction of profoundly different worlds. Thinking on such an example is illustrative. I can only do my job because people have had direct if partial access to things. I can only do my job because other things have direct access to still more things. The generation of and radical difference between my experience of an episode of medication administration and my patient’s is only possible because of the specific ways in which we and the things involved in that situation are open to each other. That openness constitutes the kind of intimacy that provides us with experiential evidence of the impossibility of absolute withdrawal. Instead, situations or worlds are produced by the unique ensemble of interoperating operations of uniquely relating substances.

There is no way I could provide a better account than Arran has above. I believe ontographic rigor insists that we respect the power and interdependencies of the things-themselves. When we respect the things-in-themselves we give to them what is theirs but not more: we respect their contingent existence and finitude, and we acknowledge their ontic particularity and irreducible complexity, but we also appreciate their dependencies and the affordances they require to exist. So in this context anthropomorphizing the cosmos by projecting cognitive capacities onto pre-cognitive processes is a failure of ontographic imagination. We simply should not insist that every entity operates according to our all too human metaphysical proclivities. Instead, hominid ontography insists that we attempt to code  our formal relations with entities in ways most consistent with what each thing or assemblage can do structurally via their powers and capacities, and with the networks or ecologies which support and co-enact them.

[[ to be continued ]]

Ecologies of Imaginal Space

"If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.

The first step toward re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination – an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.

To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the waters in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars." [source]

-- Arundhati Roy

“This is not about getting back to nature.
It is about understanding we’ve never left.”
-- Sierra Club poster

Differing Objects: Formally Ungraspable, Ontologically Vulnerable?

Over at Attempts at Living blogger extraordinaire and fellow post-nihilist pragmatist Arran briefly mentions the strong affinities between Tim Morton’s ‘realist magic’ and the work of Jean Baudrillard via the following two quotes.

Morton:

“An object is not an illusion. But it is not a non-illusion. Much more threatening than either is what is the case, namely an object that is utterly real, essentially itself, whose very reality is formally ungraspable. No hidden trapdoors, just a mask with some feathers whose mystery is out in front of itself, in your face. A miracle. Realist magic. This all means that the skills of the literary critic and the architect, the painter and the actor, the furniture maker and the composer, the musician and the software designer can be brought to bear on the workings of causality.” [Realist Magic 2013]

And Baudrillard:

“Objects are such that, in themselves, their disappearance changes them. It is in this sense that they deceive us, that they generate illusion. But it is in this sense too that they are faithful to themselves, and we must be faithful to them: in their minute detail, in their exact figuration, in the sensuous illusion of their appearance and connectedness. For illusion is not the opposite of reality, but another more subtle reality which enwraps the former kind in the sign of its disappearance.” [in 'Photographies']

Both theorists posit an absolute absence (withdrawal or disappearance) of giveness in human perception, and both gentlemen suggest we stop bitching about this absence and start attended more to the miraculous illusions they cast out. For Morton the ‘ungraspability’ of things is a feature of the causal structure of reality, whereas for Baudrillard the reality of illusion is simply part and parcel with what reality has generally and ultimately become.

What both men don’t seem to consider, however, is the ontic difference that makes a difference between epistemic relation (conceptual or formal grasp-ability) and structural relation (physical or material grasp-ability). Not all relations, encounters and contacts are enacted viz. the 'withdrawl' of formal accountability or the disappearance of unmediated sign connection. Some interactions are more direct and consequential, at least in terms of structural composition and operational efficacy. This ontological vulnerability is prior to the kind of thetic coding, logico-linguistic recursion, or formal iconic representations that are at the core of the types of interpretation or “translation” OOO rightfully argues is inadequate for the total comprehension of things. Without a fundamental ontic openness and affective potency intimacy is impossible, and alterity is ineffectual and incomprehensible.

Instead, I argue human cognition and signification is a relatively unique complex and emergent affair, and perhaps should not be taken as the quintessential kind of relation in the cosmos. Nonhuman objects are often co-determining assemblies (ecologically embedded, indebted and enacted) interfacing in non-reflexive, non-thetic, non-psychological ways governed by their material and operational structures and capacities. To reduce the particularity of object-encounters, or to project some sort of anthropomorphic specular theory of reflexive distance onto objects universally, is to be ontographically unfaithful to the contingent nature of things.

I think the easy descent into panpsychism (or rather pan-epistemology, as the onto-theologizing of representational cognition) that certain strains of object-orientation seem to require is a major flaw of an otherwise fascinating philosophical adventure. [also see here]

UPDATE: In the comment section of a great post on Laruelle and Luhmann Levi Bryant had this to say:

What I call “alien phenomenology”, following Ian Bogost, is an analysis of how beings, both human and non-human, correlate to the world around them, e.g., how does a bat experience the world? On the other hand, I take it that the various forms of OOO are pan-correlationisms. What does that mean? Harman, Morton, Bogost, and myself all argue that no entity has access to any other entity; though we argue this in different ways. Rather, each entity distorts other entities in relating to them. Seen within this framework, the claim is not so much that correlationism is false, as that it is wrong to claim that there’s something unique about the human correlation. This is what pan-correlationism means: that there is as much a correlationist structure with how the cat or computer relates to the world about it, as the human. 

There are, I think, two key points here. First, we must take care never to reduce entities to their correlations. In relating to my cat, I no doubt reduce/distort it in a number of ways, but my cat can’t be reduced to how it is given to me or what it is for me. Second, we must attend to the frame of reference in which claims are being made about another thing or observe the observer. Which observer are we talking about? Jonah? A scientific institution? Insurance companies? Cats? Etc.

Wouldn't these “pan-correlationisms” found at the core of the various forms of OOO also be considered to be variants of panpsychism (or pan-epistemology)? If all objects have a 'alien phenomenology' and all encounters are ‘translations’ then do all object interactions have some sort of processual mind-like quality to them? This seems to me to be universalizing cognitive experience such that all reality operates hermeneutically. And pushed far enough I believe pan-correlationism would lead strait to Idealism. Am I missing something here?

Perspective, Plurality and Pragmatism?

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In this age of dissolution – a general unweaving of the fabric of life and certainty – there is an increasing need to design radically new sensitivities and complex relations. In short, we must voluntary evolve more adaptive ecologies of being, knowing and acting. But what resources will be afforded? What types of cartographies will be required to navigate this hyper-present? And where shall we begin?

My answer to the crucial question of origins lies somewhere between radical phenomenological practice and post-formal constructive logic - or, rather, in their collision. We must start from our animal experience and then extrapolate the contours of an immanent, impinging and impending ecology, context or wilderness of Being, upon which the drama of our phantasies must be written. The clamor of human and nonhuman agents, actants and assemblages must then be dealt with pragmatically and in earnest lest we fail to adapt and then perish.

Rosenthal, Sandra B. (2005) ‘The Ontological Grounding of Diversity: A Pragmatic Overview’. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 19, Number 2, pp. 107-119:

The uprootedness of experience from its ontological embeddedness in a natural world is at the core of much contemporary philosophy, which, like pragmatism, aims to reject foundationalism in all its forms: positions that all hold, in varying ways, that there is a bedrock basis on which to build an edifice of knowledge, something objective that justifies rational arguments concerning what is the single best position for making available or picturing the structure of reality as it exists independently of our various contextually set inquiries. There can be no nonperspectival framework within which differences—social, moral, scientific, etc., can be evaluated and resolved. These positions may, like pragmatism, focus on the pluralistic, contextualistic ways of dealing with life, on the role of novelty and diversity, on a turn away from abstract reason to imagination, feeling, and practice, and on the need to solve the concrete problems of political, social, and moral life. However, pragmatism, in rejecting foundationalism and its respective philosophic baggage, does not embrace the alternative of antifoundationalism or its equivalent dressed up in new linguistic garb. Rather, it rethinks the nature of foundations, standing the tradition on its head, so to speak, and this rethinking incorporates the ontological grounding of diversity.

This rethinking, which incorporates the essentially perspectival nature of experience and knowledge, goes hand in hand with pragmatism's radical rejection of the spectator theory of knowledge. All knowledge and experience are infused with interpretive aspects, funded with past experience. And all interpretation stems from a perspective, a point of view. Knowledge is not a copy of anything pregiven, but involves a creative organization of experience that directs the way we focus on experience and is tested by its workability in directing the ongoing course of future activities. In this way, experience and knowledge are at once experimental and perspectival in providing a workable organization of problematical or potentially problematical situations. Not only are perspectives real within our environment, but without them there is no environment.

Further, our worldly environment incorporates a perspectival pluralism, for diverse groups or diverse individuals bring diverse perspectives in the organization of experience. The universe exists independent of our intentional activity, but our worldly environment is inseparable from our meaning or intending it in certain ways, and these ways are inherently pluralistic. However, such pluralism, when properly understood, should not lead to the view that varying groups are enclosed within self-contained, myopic, limiting frameworks or points of view, cutting off the possibility of rational dialogue, for two reasons. First, perspectives by their very nature are not self-enclosed, but open onto a community perspective, and second, perspectival pluralism provides the very matrix for rational dialogue and ongoing development. And it is within the core of human selfhood that the primordial ontological embeddedness of diversity within the very nature of, indeed as constitutive of, human experience can be found.

For pragmatism, mind, thinking, and selfhood are emergent levels of activity of ontologically "thick" organisms within nature. Meaning emerges in the interactions among conscious organisms, in the adjustments and coordinations needed for cooperative action in the social context. In communicative interaction, individuals take the perspective of the other in the development of their conduct, and in this way there develops the common content that provides community of meaning and the social matrix for the emergence of self-consciousness. In incorporating the perspective of the other, the self comes to incorporate the standards and authority of the group; there is a passive dimension to the self Mead calls the "me." Yet, the individual responds as a unique center of activity; there is a creative dimension to the self, the "I" (Rosenthal 2005:107).

Questions? Suggestions? Concerns?

Things Will Not Be So Easy

I truly enjoy how hollywood makes profit by projecting the fears of its own established cultural elites. I don't even mind when such profits are made by making a caricature of the very real and raw impulses motivating many of us who are increasingly organizing to confront those elites - impulses rooted in an organic sense of complete disgust with a mainstream that is fundamentally a manufactured pseudo-civilization with corporate oligarchs and govern-mental disfunction firmly at its core.

I just watched the following trailer for the new film "The East": "a story centered on contract worker who is tasked with infiltrating an anarchist group, only to find herself falling for its leader." The film features actors Ellen Page, Alexander Skarsgård and Brit Marling, and directed by Zal Batmanglij. The film premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2013.

The film's co-writer and star Brit Marling said the following in relation to the film: "Multinational corporations are outside of the purview of any nation-state. These are the entities that are shaping and running the world... The modern anarchy movement is about rebelling against the corporate structure."

Check it out:



Any comments?

#darkestbeforethestorm 

Realist Magic

I have a hard time understanding Tim Morton's notion of 'withdrawal' - suspecting somewhere subconsciously that his version is radically different than what Graham Harman proposes - but I certainly am intrigued. With the open access publication of his latest jazz-tinged literary artifact, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (html version found here) I hope to finally dive deep enough into the object-oriented aspects of Morton's thought to get some sort of grasp on what he trying to do. 

Here is a particularly meaty chunk from chapter one of the new book:

Imagine the cinder block all on its ownsome. A scandalous thought perhaps, maybe even impossible to think. The block is not just a blank lump waiting to be filled in by some “higher” object (overmining). The block is not a blob of something bigger or an assemblage of tinier things (undermining). The block is not made real by some medium (the “middle object”). The block is itself. It is specific. It is unique. We might as well think it as a specific, unique real thing. The block already has qualities, such as front, back, and so on. Yet these qualities are only ever aesthetic appearances, no matter whether there is any other “observer” around to see. Yet these appearances are real aspects of the block: it isn’t a pyramid, and it doesn’t have a swan’s neck. The object itself is riven from the inside between its essence and its appearance. This can’t simply mean that the cinder block is a lump of substance that has a certain shape and color and that those are its accidents. We have already ruled that out. It must mean that in itself the block (essence) is also a non-block (appearance). 

The conclusion seems magical, but it’s a very ordinary kind of magic. It requires no special features, no supervenient soul or mind or animating force of any kind. It requires that our cinder block have no hidden material squirreled away inside it, no extra folds or hidden pockets of any kind. It only requires that the block exist. There is a block, whose essence is withdrawn. Withdrawn doesn’t mean hard to find or even impossible to find yet still capable of being visualized or mapped or plotted. Withdrawn doesn’t mean spatially, or materially or temporally hidden yet capable of being found, if only in theory. Withdrawn means beyond any kind of access, any kind of perception or map or plot or test or extrapolation. You could explode a thousand nuclear bombs and you would not reveal the secret essence of the cinder block. You could plot the position and momentum of every single particle in the block (assuming you could get around Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) and you wouldn’t discover the withdrawn essence of the block. Ten of the world’s greatest playwrights and film directors (let’s say Sophocles, Shakespeare, Garcia Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Akira Kurosawa and David Lynch just for starters) could write horrifying, profound tragedies and comedies and action movies about the block and still no one would be closer to knowing the essence of the block.

Something tells me if I can understand the passage above I might just be able to pick up what Tim is putting down...

Forget Baudrillard?

“The secret of theory is that truth doesn’t exist. You can’t confront it in any way. The only thing you can do is play with some kind of provocative logic. Truth constitutes a space that can no longer be occupied. The whole strategy is, indeed, not to occupy it, but to work around it so that others come to occupy it. It means creating a void so that others will fall into it.” 

- Jean Baudrillard, Forget Baudrillard (interview with Sylvère Lotringer, 1977)