Brené Brown - The Price of Invulnerability

From TEDx:

 Synopsis: In our anxious world, we often protect ourselves by closing off parts of our lives that leave us feeling most vulnerable. Yet invulnerability has a price. When we knowingly or unknowingly numb ourselves to what we sense threatens us, we sacrifice an essential tool for navigating uncertain times -- joy. This talk by Brené Brown will explore how and why fear and collective scarcity has profoundly dangerous consequences on how we live, love, parent, work and engage in relationships -- and how simple acts can restore our sense of purpose and meaning:

 

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work where she has spent a lifetime studying courage, shame, authenticity, wholeheartedness and vulnerability. She is the Behavioral Health Scholar-in-Residence at the Council on Alcohol and Drugs and has written several books on her research.

Brené Brown - The Power of Vulnerability

Dr. Brené Brown is a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work, where she has spent the past ten years studying a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness, posing the questions: How do we engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to embrace our imperfections and to recognize that we are enough -- that we are worthy of love, belonging and joy?

Below is her talk at TEDxHouston on wholeheartedness and vulnerability:

 

Theorizing Vulnerability

“We inhabit a time when things have become more fragile and urgently in need of delicate tending. At the same time, a large section of the populace is belligerently opposed to recognition of this condition. It is a time when militant pressure to engage the fragility of things must be joined to acknowledgment of the limited ability of the human estate to master the world. It is thus a paradoxical time.” - William E. Connolly

Vulnerability is a ubiquitous characteristic positioning us in relation to each other, the state, the earth and the whole of existence. I argue that ecological vulnerabilities, corporeal vulnerabilities, existential vulnerabilities, and sociocultural vulnerabilities are different manifestations of a fundamental ontological vulnerability intrinsic to reality.
All existences and objects are exposed and mingle with innumerable elements and essences, all of which combine, dissipate, re-combine, and affect other bodies in ways that can be only imperfectly or partially foreseen or forestalled. Bodies are fundamentally worldly: open and extended outwards in order to sustain and nourish themsleves. Our bodies are intrinsically processual: capable of touching and being touched by other bodies and things, exposed to possibilities we can neither completely enumerate nor fully articulate. 

In her 2004 book Precarious Life, Judith Butler wrote:

"The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do. Indeed, if I deny that prior to the formation of my “will,” my body related me to others whom I did not choose to have in proximity to myself, if I build a notion of “autonomy” on the basis of the denial of this sphere of a primary and unwilled physical proximity with others, then am I denying the social conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy?" (p.26) 

In this sense, my body is ontologically sense-able and therefore response-able to so many other entities (both human and nonhuman) and, perhaps more disturbingly, perpetually open to the precariousness and wildness of being as such. A basic acknowledgment and exploration of this fundamental openness can generate all kinds of social, ethical and existential considerations and conversations regarding human beings. As Merleau-Ponty reminded us, “the world is not what I think, but what I live through” (Phenomenology of Perception, p. xvi-xvii ).

Judith Butler again:

"Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery (an institutionalized fantasy of mastery) can fuel the instruments of war. We cannot, however, will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself, a situation in which we can be vanquished or lose others. Is there something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition? (Ibid., p.29)  

As an important and productive bridging concept between disciplines, theorizing vulnerability in all its onto-specific manifestations is at the core of what I term applied ontography. Applied ontography as I practice it seeks nuanced, non-dogmatic and pragmatic understandings of the dependencies, individuations, interdependencies, flow patterns, meshworks, connections, boundary limits, causal networks, assemblages and material potencies from which our lives and social institutions emerge. Such provisional understandings are then put to use through direct engagements with the practical and political projects of everyday hominid life. To be sure, the resulting heuristics, working models and tentative frameworks are only the expressive/epistemic dimension of these practical (infra-structural) engagements at work in the world - to be used, revised and refigured in relation to specific contexts of application.

In the introduction to Frames of War (2010), Butler wrote:

"I want to argue that if we are to make broader social and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements to persistence and flourishing, we will first have to be supported by a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work, and the claims of language and social belonging. To refer to “ontology” in this regard is not to lay claim to a description of fundamental structures of being that are distinct from any and all social and political organization. On the contrary, none of these terms exist outside of their political organization and interpretation. The “being” of the body to which this ontology refers is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others. It is not possible first to define the ontology of the body and then to refer to the social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology." (pp. 2-3) 

In the video below participants in The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2012: "Vulnerability: The Human and the Humanities," directly address issues of vulnerability in ways that highlight the importance recognizing vulnerability as a universal characteristic of the world we inhabit. The video features brief but fascinating presentations from eminent academics in a variety of fields, and includes a interesting panel discussion with Martha Albertson Fineman, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Colin Dayan, Ilaria Vanni, and moderator Elizabeth Castelli. Each participant discusses the political and practical implications of recognizing and better theorizing vulnerability at multiple scales in the context of their unique projects and research.

This event took place on March 3, 2012 at Barnard College:

 

In The Autonomy Myth (2005), Martha Fineman discusses the “universal, constant and complex” nature of vulnerability and interdependency at the level of health-care and politics, showing how the metaphysics/ideology of the so-called ‘autonomous liberal subject’ is a (mis)leading assumption at the heart of most dehumanizing Western capitalist cultural activities.

Here is Judith Butler again, from Precarious Life (2004):

 "One insight that injury affords is that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact. What this means, concretely, will vary across the globe. There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others. But in that order of things, it would not be possible to maintain that the US has greater security problems than some of the more contested and vulnerable nations and peoples of the world. To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways. If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if that results in suspending civil liberties and suppressing political dissent. Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. I confess to not knowing how to theorize that interdependency. I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value." (pp. xii-xiii)

"[T]here is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other.  

Although I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself, I also insist that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of “I.” This is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue. I mean, we can argue with it, but we are perhaps foolish, if not dangerous, when we do." (Ibid., p.31)

Tahltan Nation Continues to Inspire

From Tahltan Central Council: 

TORONTO - The Tahltan Nation of northern B.C. (Canada) [was] honoured [yesterday] in Toronto with a national "Top 10" environmental achievement award for the recent permanent protection of the "Sacred Headwaters" from natural gas development. 

The Tides Canada award will be an emotional victory, because it comes at a time when new coal mining projects are also being proposed for the exact same region, and are stirring worries. "Shell Oil may be gone from our traditional lands, but new coal mining proposals are a major concern too," says Annita McPhee, President of Tahltan Central Council.  

 Last December, Tahltan Central Council, Shell Canada, and the B.C. government announced the end to natural-gas exploration in the Klappan region of northwest B.C. Shell voluntarily gave up its tenure for the area.  

It marked the end of years of negotiations, and a difficult struggle that included protests, road blocks, and elders being arrested.  

The next steps for the Sacred Headwaters, says McPhee, will be engaging constructively with the coal mining companies. She says she is guided by elders who say economic development must be done sustainably, without poisoning the sacred waterways that are home to wild salmon and moose.  

"Our concern is, mining companies are proposing to build right in the headwaters. They want to put their tailing ponds right where our people have one of our hunting camps." "We are not against economic development. We just believe the benefits should far outweigh the impacts." Off limits, she says are certain ecologically and culturally sensitive zones in the Klappan.

McPhee received the award last night on behalf of the Tahltan Nation at the Arta Gallery in Toronto. The Tides Canada award will be shared with Shell Canada, Forest Ethics, Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, and the B.C. government.

The Tahltans still must live and struggle with copper and gold mines that are seeking to expand and intensify within Tahltan traditional lands.

Tim Morton on Withdrawal?

In relation to my recent obsessing on issues of withdrawal in object-oriented ontologies André Ling of Intra-Being is wondering if I'm getting it all wrong about Tim Morton's notion of causality (here). As André writes, "just wondering where Morton says that objects do not encounter each other and have real effects upon each other?"

I think André’s question is a good one. Although I have enormous respect for Tim Morton’s project and general trajectory, I’m not sure I can answer André question precisely if only because I often find myself quite confused by Tim’s version of ‘withdrawal’ (see here). In fact I’m feeling like I’d be groping in the dark even discussing Tim’s position on this issue at all. I still need to read his latest book. But for the sake of exploration let me try to articulate a few ideas with regards to André‘s challenge.

The initial problem I run in to is that just when I think Tim is talking about direct causality and how things have deep impacts on other things, in a more or less scientific sense, he shifts and starts talking about causation as primarily “aesthetic” – in the sense that all things only ever encounter the “qualities” of other things, and not the “essence” of the thing-themselves. I don’t understand how he can split these aspects without suggesting that rocks encounter other rocks phenomenologically?  How exactly does a hammer absolutely withdraw from a nail viz. the nail only ever encountering the hammer’s qualities? Where are those floating “qualities” registered if not in the “mind” of the nail? And why is all of this not still direct? The enactment of 'quality' is particular to entities with the capacity for phenomenal experience. What are the mechanisms involved in hammer phenomenology? If someone could answer those questions I would be in their debt.

As just one example take the following from chapter one of Realist Magic:

“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.” (Morton 2013)

Beyond any kind of access? Herein lies multiple dilemmas I believe.

With regards to those types of beings who are capable of recursive-reflection ('phenomenal experience') I completely agree that our knowledge of things-in-themselves withdraws. Concepts are never adequate to the things they attempt signify, and knowledge itself is slippery, undecidable and constructed. Our ‘understandings’ of things – our synthetic conceptualizations (manifest images) – are entirely abstract. So I agree with Tim fully in this regard, and I quite enjoy his comments on global warming and how humans are perceiving (or not perceiving) and coping (or not coping) with it and other hyperobjects. But as my last post (here) tries to parse out, there is an important difference that needs theorizing between thinking, coding and knowing about something epistemically and being directly affected by or affecting the substantial capacities of actual material assemblages structurally.

As a bit of an aside about 'structural access/relation', I should mention the work done by Ladyman and Ross (2009) in this regard. As Ladyman and Ross forcefully argue there are "real patterns" that have access to us, intervene upon and sometimes afford our powers of operation, and of which we are forced to work with (adapt/cope) in ways in excess of our representations of them. “From the metaphysical point of view, what exists are just real patterns” (p.121). And these real patters are invariant forces that directly impinge upon the being of other 'individuals' as patterned activities. “Individual things, then, are constructs built for second-best tracking of real patterns” (p.242), or “epistemological book-keeping devices” (p. 240). A key theme in their work is the dismissal of ‘neo-scholastic’ metaphysics and the promotion of ‘naturalised metaphysics’.

So I think it is important to think about just how assemblages (objects) not only have have access to each other's substantial being, but how the operational efficacy of things is interdependent upon multi-modal access between and among a multitude of materials and complexes, creating distributed fields of affordances and possibility. Reality is a mingled and uncanny mesh.

But to return to the point, although I don’t think Morton ever says that things don’t effect each other – at least he never explicitly says this - I wonder if his expressed adherence to Harman’s ontology doesn’t somehow lead to some serious contradictions in this regard? My working thesis is that I either don’t understand Morton’s approach well enough yet (very probable) or there are some unacknowledged contradictions and logical problems within the discourse. And I just want us to be clear about what we are being asked to assume in order to integrate an ontology of withdrawal with claims (coming from science and Tim himself) that humans have enough access to the world to know something about how the world actually works (realism?) to exist effectively within it.

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