{"id":1118,"date":"2009-09-09T16:44:30","date_gmt":"2009-09-09T21:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/09\/things-slip-away-on-harmans-latourian-object-lessons\/"},"modified":"2011-08-18T06:56:00","modified_gmt":"2011-08-18T11:56:00","slug":"things-slip-away-on-harmans-latourian-object-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/09\/things-slip-away-on-harmans-latourian-object-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"Things slip away… (on Harman’s Latourian object lessons)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing from yesterday’s post on Graham Harman<\/a>… (Warning: This post is long.) <\/em><\/p>\n


\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Where Tool-Being <\/em>presented a Heidegger flushed clean of his anthropocentrism, Prince of Networks<\/a><\/em> takes Bruno Latour for a ride on a philosophical adventure toward a world not of actors and networks but of objects, pure if not so simple. The book\u2019s first half provides a detailed, clear, entertaining, and precise exegesis of Latour\u2019s metaphysics through an examination of his claims in four books: Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern,<\/em> and Pandora\u2019s Hope<\/em>. The second, slightly longer half investigates some philosophical problems his actor-network theory opens up; explores lengthy detours through Meillassoux (on relationism and correlationism), Whitehead, Husserl (immanent objectivity), speculative realism, and other by-ways; and ends with a detailed explication of Harman\u2019s object-oriented philosophy, which, the argument goes, is made possible by Latour\u2019s \u2018flat ontology\u2019 and deepened through Heidegger\u2019s tool-being (with the aid of Zubiri and others), but which is ultimately Harman\u2019s own. In effect, this is Harman building an all-star collective, enrolling Latour (who participates vicariously) and Heidegger (who\u2019s too dead to tell us whether he\u2019d go along with the project or not), with assistance from others, against the revolution by which Immanuel Kant installed humans at the philosophical center of everything.<\/p>\n

The Latour presented here is the one who follows the painstaking assembly of the obdurate networks that make up the world, not by positing causal determinants, explanatory mechanisms located on a level separate from and therefore unaffected by the machinations of the level which they describe, but by placing them all on the same epistemological playing field and then \u2018following the actors\u2019 to see how they build their worlds. Latour\u2019s world is one of actors or \u2018actants\u2019 (about whom we need make no further assumptions except that they can be said to act) forging alliances and\/or resisting those alliances.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery actor is a proposition: a surprising marriage of components that never expected to find themselves together, or which were at least surprised by the exact nature of their union. And \u2018the relation established between propositions is not that of a correspondence across a yawning gap, but what I will call <\/em>articulation\u2019.\u201d<\/em> (Pandora\u2019s Hope<\/em>, p. 142)<\/p>\n

Of course, the actors in this system are not self-evident, because for the most part what we see when we look at the world are \u2018black boxes,\u2019 things that have been invented to keep us from looking too closely at how they have been arranged.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a sense, all human activity aims to create black boxes. […] In forming a friendship, settling a marriage, or composing a manuscript, our hope is to establish something durable that does not constantly fray or break down. [\u2026] By definition, a black box is <\/em>low-maintenance. It is something we rely on as a given in order to take further steps, never worrying about how it came into being.\u201d <\/em>(PON pp. 37-8)<\/p>\n

\u201cLike Heidegger\u2019s tools, a black box allows us to forget the massive network of alliances of which it is composed, as long as it functions smoothly. Actants are born amidst strife and controversy, yet they eventually congeal into a stable configuration. But simply reawaken the controversy, reopen the black box, and you will see once more that the actant has no sleek unified essence.\u201d <\/em>(34)<\/p>\n

Harman\u2019s goal is to show the boldness and fruitfulness a Latourian turn would bring with it, if we were to take it. A Latourian metaphysics fills in the gaps too often subsumed into clunky metaphysical structures or neglected altogether, and it fills them with the detailed richness of the immanent world of real things — which makes of it not a philosophy to end all philosophies, but merely a corrective that would take us out of our anthropocentric cul-de-sac <\/em>and onto a different, more promising road:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Kant\u2019s Copernican Revolution placed humans at the center of philosophy while reducing the rest of the world to an unknowable set of objects, what Latour recommends is a Counter-Revolution.\u201d<\/em> (59)<\/p>\n

One of the goals of Harman\u2019s book, then, \u201cis to open the black box of the stale analytic\/continental [philosophical] dual monarchy, exposing its interior to the blows of sunlight, eagles, and dogs\u201d: (45)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhereas Latour places all human, nonhuman, natural, and artificial objects on the same footing, the analytics and continentals both still dither over how to bridge, ignore, deny, or explain away a single gap between humans and world. While graduate students are usually drilled in a stale dispute between correspondence and coherence theories of truth, Latour locates truth in neither of these models, but in a series of translations between actors. And whereas mainstream philosophy worries about whether things exist independently of us or are constructed by the mind, Latour says they are \u2018socially\u2019 constructed not just by human minds, but also by bodies, atoms, cosmic rays, business lunches, rumors, physical force, propaganda, or God. There is no privileged force to which the others can be reduced, and certainly no ceaseless interplay between pure natural forces and pure social forces, each untainted by the other.\u201d <\/em>(16)<\/p>\n

The promise, then, is that \u201cWhen the centaur of classical metaphysics is mated with the cheetah of actor-network theory, their offspring is not some hellish monstrosity, but a thoroughbred colt able to carry us for half a century and more.\u201d (p. 5)<\/p>\n

All of this is to the good, in my view, and I won\u2019t go into the reasons why I enthusiastically support it (though I\u2019ve given some arguments here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>). The political, or \u2018cosmopolitical,\u2018 promise of Latour’s approach is one that attracts me especially, though it\u2019s also one that\u2019s been questioned rather incisively. A piece of the answer to that questioning is that a Latourian, actor-network analysis makes it possible for us to conceive of things being crafted differently than they are:<\/p>\n

\u201cSystems are assembled at great pains, one actant at a time, and loopholes always remain. We are not the pawns of sleek power-machines grinding us beneath their heels like pathetic <\/em>Nibelungen. We may be fragile, but so are the powerful.\u201d<\/em> (22)<\/p>\n

Another piece has to do with what Latour in his later writings, following philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, has been calling \u2018cosmopolitics.\u2019 I\u2019ll return to that below.<\/p>\n

The remainder of my response, however, will take up an issue with Harman’s own object-oriented metaphysical project, and with one of the close alternatives he discusses but opts against, an alternative he refers to as “relationism.” I should state at the outset that as a non-philosopher (and not necessarily only in the Laruellian sense of the word), or at least as a not-quite-(strictly-speaking)-philosopher, I’m not the best-equipped person to make the kind of critique I’ll be attempting here. I’m in part taking advantage of the medium (a blog) and of the blog-heavy presence of speculative realism and related philosophical movements to forward it here rather than in the safer venue of a journal that won’t likely be read by too many actual philosophers, or at least speculative realists, or the still safer venue of a private diary or a conversation at a cafe with those even less well informed than I am. But here goes…<\/p>\n

At this point I\u2019ll plead the same amendment that Harman relies on in his discussion of Quentin Meillassoux. Harman writes that he finds himself \u201cin the strange position of not wanting <\/em>to convince\u201d Meillassoux \u201cthat he is wrong\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor in the first place, none of us can ever be sure that we have found the proper starting point for philosophy; even a successful annihilation of opposing positions merely strips diversity from the gene pool, which should only be done if we are absolutely sure that they are faulty genes. And in the second place, my disagreement with Meillassoux\u2019s pro-correlationist outlook does not lessen my admiration for all the exotic fruits and birds that spring from it. <\/em>(167)<\/p>\n

— at which point he launches into an eighteen-page demolition of Meillassoux\u2019s argument (about correlationism), ending with: \u201cEveryone knows the old Chinese proverb about the finger pointing at the moon and the fool looking at the finger. But correlationism is even worse, since it claims that the moon is made of fingers. This is not just folly, but a form of madness.\u201c (185)<\/p>\n

Like Harman to Meillassoux, I also want Harman to continue developing his object-oriented philosophy, not least because I enjoy it and because he might be right. I follow his arguments like a good boy scout through the woods of an entertaining and wise guide, and I like where they lead. In particular, I like the Heideggerian turns and the destination, which ends up in a four-fold picture-postcard meadow where he outlines the promise of an object-oriented metaphysics of \u2018time, space, essence, and eidos.\u2019<\/p>\n

At the same time, there\u2019s a (heavy-ish) part of me that gets stuck along the way, stuck in the mud at a few of the forks posted with signs marked \u2018Relationism: Not worth going here.\u2019 Somewhere beyond those posts I imagine alluring but unexplored alternative trails veering off into the woods, perhaps towards waterfalls and overlooks more exciting than the ones ahead on the main trail.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Objects, relations, and the passage between<\/strong><\/p>\n

What, then, is this \u2018relationist\u2019 path not taken?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would certainly be fruitful to consider Latour\u2019s similarities and differences with fellow non-analytic\/non-continental (i.e., basically non-Kantian) thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, William James, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Gilbert Simondon, Gabriel Tarde, Etienne Souriau, and Latour\u2019s own friend Isabelle Stengers. But when this emerging \u2018School X\u2019 is promoted under such misleading titles as \u2018process philosophy\u2019 or \u2018philosophy of immanence\u2019, the result is a false sense of beatnik brotherhood. For in fact, there is a major family quarrel underway on this list over a highly classical problem: the isolation and interbleeding of individual things. On one side are figures like Bergson and Deleuze, for whom a generalized becoming precedes any crystallization into specific entities. On the other side we find authors such as Whitehead and Latour, for whom entities are so highly definite that they vanish instantly with the slightest change in their properties. For the first group, substance is too determinate to be real; for the second, it is too indeterminate to be real.\u201d <\/em>(6)<\/p>\n

Harman acknowledges that relationism, \u201cthe view that a thing is defined solely by its effects and alliances rather than by a lonely inner kernel of essence<\/strong><\/em>, is the paradoxical heart of Latour\u2019s position, responsible for all his breakthroughs and possible excesses.\u201d (75; italics added) This kinship with Whitehead, et al, comes from a desire to overcome the \u201cprivileged rift between world and humans,\u201d the appearance that there are \u201c\u2018two disjointed spheres separated by a unique and radical gap that must be reduced to the search for correspondence [\u2026] between words and the world\u2019\u201d (quoted from Pandora\u2019s Hope<\/em>, p. 69). \u201cMuch like Whitehead,\u201d Harman continues, \u201cLatour fragments this gap to infinity, placing it everywhere in the world. Everywhere, the universe is riddled with gaps. But they are by no means unbridgeable, since they are crossed constantly by the work of translation.\u201d (75-6)<\/p>\n

For Latour, this translation \u201cis ubiquitous: any relation is a mediation, never some pristine transmission of data across a noiseless vacuum.\u201d (77) \u201cWhile Descartes fretted over the gap between mind and body, Latour is closer to Malebranche and his Arab ancestors, who needed God to enable even the collision of grains of dust\u2014since here too there was a gap, though not one between minds and bodies. Instead of calling on divine intervention, Latour finds his mediators locally.\u201d (77) In fact, \u201cLatour is probably the first thinker in history to invent a local option for occasional cause\u2014one not passing through God (as in al-Ash\u2018ari, Malebranche, and even Whitehead) or the human mind (as when Hume and Kant turn human habit or categories into the seat of all relations). In my view, this is Latour\u2019s single greatest breakthrough in metaphysics, one that will be associated with his name for centuries to come.\u201d (82)<\/p>\n

Latour, then, makes immanent <\/em>what has always been transcendent <\/em>(whether it was conceived as a godly force somewhere over yonder, a physical one buried deep in the structure of things, or a uniquely human space at the central vanishing point in the middle of everything). But he does this at a cost, a cost Harman feels is too high, that being the cost of losing the non-relational essence<\/em> of objects. If all things are relational, then they are ultimately not anything. He credits Latour with being more \u2018boldly consistent\u2019 than Whitehead insofar as his things do not change; they merely perish. \u201cEntities for Latour must <\/em>be a perpetual perishing, since they cannot survive even the tiniest change in their properties. Whitehead partly escapes this consequence by contrasting \u2018societies\u2019 (which can endure) with actual entities or occasions (which cannot).\u201d (104)<\/p>\n

The problem with relationism, Harman argues, is that by reducing a thing to its relations, it results in a homogeneity that is unable to account for change or movement:<\/p>\n

\u201cinsofar as an object is more than its relations it must stand apart from any supposed monism of the world-as-a-whole, since a homogeneous universe of this kind merely gives us the most radical form of relationism\u2014with everything dissolving into everything else in a vast holistic stew.\u201d <\/em>(152)<\/p>\n

But surely not everything dissolves in the same way, at the same rate, into everything else equally? Rather, things arise and dissolve out of their specific conditional contexts and, in turn, give rise to others. Must it be all or nothing — distinct and solid, non-relating entities, or one formless ocean?<\/p>\n

Harman\u2019s solution is to posit a two-leveled ontology, one in which there are not just objects, or not just relations, but rather there are two kinds of objects: \u2018real\u2019 objects and \u2018intentional\u2019 or \u2018sensual\u2019 objects. Following Husserl, quite interestingly, he divides \u201cexperience itself\u201d \u201cin half between unified objects and the diverse contents through which they become manifest.\u201d (193) Unlike Brentano, Husserl’s teacher, who \u201cthinks all consciousness is grounded in presentation<\/em>, Husserl modifies this principle to say that all consciousness is grounded in objectifying acts<\/em>.\u201d (198) (This reminds me of Whitehead\u2019s notion that subjectification and objectification are two sides of the same process characterizing all action\/experience; but Harman doesn’t note that connection.) \u201cReal objects,\u201d in this view, \u201cwithdraw from our access to them, in fully Heideggerian fashion. The metaphors of concealment, veiling, sheltering, harboring, and protecting are all relevant here.\u201d (193-4) They<\/p>\n

\u201c withdraw from all human view and even from all relations with each other. This was the conclusion of the previous section [of the book], which rejected all \u2018radical\u2019 attempts to collapse objects into a monistic world-lump, a virtual realm of pre-individuals, a reductionist cosmos of rock-hard atoms entering larger \u2018functional\u2019 units, a correlational circle of human and world, or a global relational network \u00e0 la Whitehead and Latour. Real objects belong to a pre-relational dimension in which they cannot make direct contact of any sort.\u201d<\/em> (195)<\/p>\n

Being non- or pre-relational, \u201cbelonging\u201d in fact \u201cto a pre-relational dimension\u201d (195), real objects make no contact with other objects. \u2018Intentional\u2019 or \u2018sensual objects\u2019, on the other hand, are completely relational. And real objects connect with other objects only <\/em>by way of sensual\/intentional objects acting as their mediators. So there are real objects, which include persons, markets, rocketships, black holes, the Speculative Realist movement, et al., and there are sensual or intentional objects, which include thoughts and representations of real objects. “The world is composed of countless layers of withdrawn real things, each with a molten core where one of its real pieces confronts the sensual image of another piece, thereby forming a bridge between one layer of reality and the next.” (215)<\/p>\n

To this distinction between the real and the sensual or intentional (is this the same as \u201cperceived\u201d?) — \u201cthe real sunflower (assuming it exists) and the sensual translation of it that appears to humans or other entities\u201d — Harman later adds another distinction between \u201cthe real moments that the sunflower needs in order to be what it is, and the accidental specific qualities through which the sensual sunflower is incarnated in the experience of perceivers\u201d (206-7) to build the four-fold objectology that comes towards the end of the book.<\/p>\n

Unlike Harman, however, Latour, like Whitehead, has no concept of an \u201cenduring kernel\u201d in objects that would be different from their relations or their \u201cpalpable qualities.\u201d What I’m not convinced of, however, is that the \u2018enduring kernel\u2019 cannot also be fully <\/em>relational. “I”, for instance, include in myself more-or-less-internal relational networks such as the formal-systemic relations between my face, limbs, torso, brain, and so on — relations which are fairly strong, stable, enduring, readily reproducing — as well as others, such as those I experience as my thoughts, moods, individual sensations, and the like, which are more changeable, but also still relations<\/em>; none can exist without some <\/em>others, just as I don’t think I<\/em> could exist apart from others, relational accomplices and allies from bacterial microorganisms to friends and relatives to those whose bodies become my dinner. Being a body is that sort of thing, and being a mind is no different (not that I believe there are two such things); whatever identity there is in me is fully relational, and I don’t mind that at all.<\/p>\n

The difference between Harman’s real objects and his sensual\/intentional objects is that \u201cwhereas a real object is always more <\/em>than the specific qualities that we ascribe to it, an intentional object is always less<\/em>. A real tree withdraws into the dusk of its being, and is never fully expressed by any of its distinct features. By contrast, an intentional tree is always before us as soon as we see a tree, or think we see a tree.\u201d (199) To which I would reply: what is <\/em>the tree apart <\/em>from its wood and bark, the creatures that burrow into in it, the expansion and movement of its limbs in relation to the sun, the flow of nutritive juices between soil and branches, etc. etc. \u2013 in other words, all the relational networks in which the tree is enveloped and manifests as \u2018this tree\u2019? What is a river apart from the valley in which it flows and which it carves over time, the rains that supply it and the ocean (or gravity) that draws it forward, the plants and fish and oxygen that move about in it, etc.? Is there a ghostly \u2018essence\u2019 to each of these that\u2019s somehow unrelated to all these things, that underlies it in some subterranean domain but makes no contact with the fish, the forest, the soil, the air? We call it a \u2018river\u2019 and give it such and such a name (the Mississippi, the Thames), but a fish swimming in it has no need to call it that. Why should a human habit of identifying it as \u2018river\u2019 prevail such that an object-oriented ontology should recognize it as such and not as something else?<\/p>\n

In Harman\u2019s system, the river would seem to be a real object and would therefore relate to other real objects through the mediation of sensual or intentional objects. But this would require positing that a salmon swimming upstream to spawn is not relating directly to the river but is relating to some sensual or intentional object (as in a representation) that it may have of the river. So there\u2019s a layer of reality made up of discrete, disconnected, and relatively invariable things that are unknowable to each other; and another layer of relations made between those things through other kinds of objects (called sensual or intentional objects) which are internal to the first kind (the real) — though they must somehow also be able to exit their hosts so as to meet the objects on the outside in order for that connection or relation to happen. Why couldn’t we just posit the salmon and the river: the salmon equipped with certain capacities for swimming upstream, dealing with river currents, etc., because the relations that have constituted them have made them that sort of thing; and the river also being its sort of thing as a result of the constitutive relations that have made it so, however fleetingly and contingently, in an unceasing forward movement of ever grasping, ever becoming (subjectifying\/objectifying) relationality?<\/p>\n

If by definition, as Harman seems to imply, a uni-leveled ontology, like those of Latour and his relationist brethren, must decide whether it consists of non-relating pieces or a big blurred mass, then Whitehead and Deleuze would probably also opt for multiple levels, at least one of which is thoroughly relational and one of which is somehow slower, more crystallized and compacted, more \u2018black-boxed.\u2019 (In fact, Deleuze does just that with his actual\/virtual distinction.) But can\u2019t a single-leveled universe consist of relative <\/em>consistencies\/stabilities and relative <\/em>blurrings\/relations, simultaneously reproducing and transforming each other as they go?<\/p>\n

Another example related to this inability of relational ontologies to deal with change (or to deal with stasis, since Whitehead and Deleuze seem ultimately to be about change rather than stasis) is Harman’s \u201csitting-man\u201d: \u201cIf the sitting man is inherently \u2018sitting-man\u2019 through and through, then there is admittedly no way to turn him into \u2018standing-man\u2019. What we are seeking instead is simply the \u2018man\u2019 who can either stand or sit.\u201d (130) But a relationist could reply that \u2018sitting man\u2019 is never simply reducible to some \u201cinherently \u2018sitting-man\u2019 through-and-through\u201d but is always, rather, sitting-man who has sat and stood and even learned how to walk and who is the sum total of experiences that have gone into constituting the one who is currently sitting and who may tomorrow walk, jump, or collapse into a heap. To say that sitting-man (let\u2019s call him S.) is capable of getting up does not, to my mind, necessarily mean rejecting a relational universe within which S\u2019s capabilities were co-produced through countless interactions that led to the situation being as it is with S. and his world. Why do the results of those co-articulations need to be siphoned off into an understory of \u201cthe real S.,\u201d \u201cS. held in reserve\u201d? Why can\u2019t they be simply there, whether encoded into his neurons and memory systems or whatever else (or into \u201cS.\u201d, the fictional character whom we\u2019ve agreed to grant the dignity of personhood because it suits us to do that in a socially constituted world)? Are these two views of reality \u2013 S. as rich in the fullness of his relations (which are not reducible to his sitting, but include capacities for movement, neural \u2018memory\u2019, etc.) versus S. as his relations PLUS a hidden \u2018tool-being\u2019 reserve \u2013 necessarily incommensurate with each other?<\/p>\n

Harman argues:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf not for this basic asymmetry between an actor\u2019s components and its alliances, we would have a purely holistic cosmos. Everything would be defined to an equal degree by the actors above it as below it, and there would be no place in reality not defined utterly by its context. But this is by no means what happens. What happens instead is that components sometimes unite to form a new actor, an \u2018emergent\u2019 reality irreducible to its pieces.<\/em>\u201d (131)<\/p>\n

But isn\u2019t there local <\/em>context and the context to <\/em>that context, relations closer and more distant? Latour\u2019s view of reality as \u2018black boxes all the way down\u2019 sounds like a Buddhist onto-phenomenalist view of reality as contextually co-produced all the way down. (Of course, Buddhism, like Whitehead, smuggles in an \u2018occasionalist\u2019 god, though ultimately it\u2019s not a god but simply the — posited — nature of things. But that’s another topic.)<\/p>\n

Or,<\/p>\n

\u201cTake the example of a great philosophical work\u2014say, Heidegger\u2019s <\/em>Being and Time. The relationist would say that this book is no more than what it \u2018modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates\u2019. At this very moment, <\/em>Being and Time is modifying, transforming, perturbing, and creating a certain number of objects, mostly human ones. But is this really the whole of its reality? We can easily perform the thought-experiment of imagining other interpreters coming onto the scene. What they would be interpreting in this case is <\/em>Being and Time itself, not the sum total of other interpretations.\u201d<\/em> (186)<\/p>\n

But this is not so clear-cut. When Harman says \u201cAt this very moment, Being and Time <\/em>is modifying . . .\u201d, he appears to be positing some non-time-bound essence to the text. But Being and Time <\/em>(and one could hardly have chosen a better book for making this argument) is and has always been time-bound. It was produced as a manuscript over several years, got published in German, then translated, read, interpreted, debated, etc. Being and Time <\/em>in 2009 is not the same as Being and Time <\/em>was in 1933, or in 1965. The words are more or less the same, but their meanings have changed (if only marginally), the intellectual debates within which those words carry meaning have also changed (which adds to the different meanings they are likely to engender in readers), its readers have changed significantly (which is why Harman\u2019s interpretation was not possible in 1960 but is now). Being and Time <\/em>today is constituted by a different set of relations, which have accrued over the years onto the relations that constituted it at some point in the past.<\/p>\n

For Harman, \u201can actor is not <\/em>identical with whatever it modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates, but always remains underdetermined <\/em>by those effects.\u201d Yes, perhaps.. But who will ever be able to sum up every single \u2018effect\u2019 that actor\u2019s relations are involved in at any given point in time? In the same way, to say that \u201cwe can discover new features of the black hole at any time, and this does not mean that the black hole is no longer a black hole\u201c (184-5) does not negate the fact that our idea of the black hole will have undergone a change. Whatever the \u201cblack hole\u201d is or will one day, like Pasteur\u2019s microbes, be discovered to have been \u201call along,\u201d what we\u2019ll have discovered is that we hadn\u2019t grasped the \u201csum total of effects\u201d of the black hole as fully as we do now. Doesn\u2019t GH\u2019s complaint about reducing an object to its \u201csum total of effects\u201d presume that we, or someone, can know that \u201csum total of effects,\u201d and in this sense is it not a sneaking-back-in of the human-world correlate, or at least a knower-known correlate, back into the picture? If an object is conceived of not as a static \u201cthing\u201d in a stop-motion world, but as something more like a recognizable form<\/em> (a black box, a Whiteheadian \u2018society\u2019, a collection of actual entities or emergent processes that work together more than they work at odds with each other; and the term \u201cform\u201d is one Harman himself used in Tool-Being<\/em>) that by its very nature <\/em>undergoes perpetual change and does this in relationship to an environment made up of other such forms, then where else could there be a \u201chidden reserve\u201d if not in the actual relational processes that make it up?<\/p>\n

To reiterate, Harman accepts Aristotle\u2019s critique of the Megarians (p. 187ff.) that \u201cif a thing is entirely relational, then there would be no reason for it to change\u201d; to which the relationist can reply, unless change is its very nature (and there are so many ways of changing, being active, moving, enacting\u2026<\/em>). GH: \u201cThe thing would be fully deployed or exhausted in its reality here and now, and the same would be true of all of the things with which it relates.\u201d Relationist: unless there is no \u201chere and now\u201d; there\u2019s only \u201chere becoming <\/em>here, now becoming <\/em>now,\u201d or seen in a rearview mirror, \u201chere becoming there, now becoming then\u201d (with our use of the same word clouding our perception of the difference between <\/em>this \u2019here\u2019 and <\/em>that \u2019here\u2019)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

GH: \u201cUnless the thing holds something in reserve behind its current relations, nothing would ever change. [. . .] The only thing that will fit the bill is a nonrelational actuality: objects that exist quite apart from their relation to other objects, and even apart from their relation to their own pieces.\u201d Relationist: But what <\/em>are these objects that exist \u201cquite apart from their relation to other objects\u201d? <\/em>Where are the things held in reserve? How, and by whom? <\/em><\/p>\n

Finally, back to Whitehead:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo remove Whitehead from Harvard and put him at Stanford would only destroy Whitehead for those (such as Whitehead himself) who accept the strange doctrine that a thing is entirely defined by its relations. Far more drastic than forcing Whitehead to leave Harvard would be to remove all of his body parts, or to shatter his soul in the bowels of the underworld. In these latter cases the effect would be truly destructive. Nonetheless, all the cells in Whitehead\u2019s body can be replaced by similar ones without destroying Whitehead, and in this sense an object is partly independent of its own pieces just as it is fully independent of its relations with other things.\u201d <\/em>(187-8)<\/p>\n

But what about removing Whitehead from academe and putting him into the elementary school system, or into prison, or into the White House? As for the cells, they are <\/em>replaced, and change; they are not the same cells when he is 55 as when he was 15. But the form <\/em>stays roughly the same. This is akin to cognitive biologists Maturana\u2019s and Varela\u2019s proposition that all living systems maintain their form while interacting with their environments (which they call autopoiesis). In its later form, in Varela\u2019s Buddhist inspired rendition, this thesis becomes the idea that the world of a living being or organism is \u2018enacted\u2019 in the \u2018structural coupling\u2019 of that organism with its environment. The path, as he puts it (and this is all there is, paths all the way down) is laid down in walking. What is staying the same here, and what is changing? Certain formal, systemic — i.e. relational — properties (which Harman would call internal relations) are no doubt staying somewhat the same, though probably not exactly, as every step opens the form up to possible modifications. But is there some hidden thing-in-itself that remains entirely outside of \u2013 fully cut off from \u2013 the realm of relationality for forty years? And if not for forty years, then why even for a moment? Whitehead\u2019s thoughts, desires, etc., all have changed and matured a great deal over the course of those forty years, even if some of them have reiterated themselves over and over in the process of relating to the things they have encountered. If there is to be a \u2018Whitehead-in-himself,\u2019 or for that matter a train, laser beam, or word, apart from the relations that constitute each of them, then where is that Whitehead to be found, especially if he is stripped of his name, his parents and language, his brain cells and his physical nourishment?<\/p>\n

I don’t think this is playing naughty Humean games, since, not being Whitehead, I can ask myself whether and what the inherent, unchanging essence of the thing I identify as \u2018Adrian Ivakhiv\u2019 might be. And the best methods of introspective self-analysis I\u2019ve come up with haven\u2019t allowed me to identify such an unchanging being. But getting into what those methods are and why I consider them the best, would get us back to a Buddhism that I’m leaving aside, since it hasn’t been properly domesticated into a western philosophical context yet.<\/p>\n

Harman acknowledges that Latour, despite his uni-leveled ontology, has a way out to all this, which is his as-yet-undeveloped notion of \u2018plasma,\u2019 introduced briefly in an earlier text but expanded on in the more recent Reassembling the Social<\/em>. Plasma is \u201cthat which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified\u2019 (RS, pp. 243-4). It is \u201cin between <\/em>and not made of social stuff. It is not hidden, simply unknown <\/em>[\u2026 like] a vast hinterland [\u2026, like] the countryside for an urban dweller [\u2026, like] the missing masses for a cosmologist trying to balance out the weight of the universe\u201d (RS, p. 244). (quote on p. 133)<\/p>\n

Harman writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo escape relationism means to establish a metaphysics of the plasma or missing mass to which Latour refers. Only one note of caution is needed: there is no good reason to agree with Latour that the plasma has no format, since this would imply that all format must come from relations. [. . .] To summarize: mediating objects are always needed between any two objects, but a mediator would be needed to touch the mediator as well, and on to infinity. Hence, the world must also be filled with a non-objective gas or plasma in which direct contact is possible. That plasma is found on the interior of objects themselves.\u201d <\/em>(134, 147)<\/p>\n

I like <\/em>this plasma, and I also agree with Harman that it needs further mediation. In a sense, \u2018plasma\u2019 plays a similar function for Latour as Heidegger\u2019s self-withdrawing of Being (and I admire Heidegger\u2019s reluctance to even speculate as to where it is where it is that Being withdraws), Deleuze\u2019s \u2018virtual\u2019 (and one of the other thorny issues I have with Harman\u2019s presentation is that fails to convey the commanalities and shared sympathies between Latour and Deleuze), and Whitehead\u2019s \u2018extensive continuum.\u2019 But it\u2019s a little too vague to be useful for the kind of object-anthropological project that actor-network theory was developed to serve. As I\u2019ve argued elsewhere<\/a>, John Law\u2019s conception of multiple \u2018outsides\u2019 or \u2018hinterlands\u2019 fares better in this respect, as it allows an analyst to focus on the fractal differences between rival network enactments or assemblages, which each of which produces somewhat different \u2018outsides\u2019 or \u2018absences\u2019 from out of the reality-possibilities making up their \u2018hinterlands.\u2019 For an ontological politics (or cosmopolitics), an undifferentiated \u2018plasma\u2019 remains too much like the formless ocean Harman critiques.<\/p>\n

But terms, as Continental philosophers know (and analytic philosophers tend to regret or deny), are metaphorical (\u2018plasma\u2019, \u2018objects\u2019, \u2018actual occasions\u2019, \u2018becomings\u2019), and our choice of terminology is more a choice of the more useful and evocative metaphors — a matter of communication, of cognitive-affective connection, resonance, and alliance-building — than of the dry description of reality. For Latour, the metaphors include black boxes, and therefore translators, \u2018all the way down.\u2019 And to the extent that translation is something akin to what Gregory Bateson referred to as \u2018difference that makes a difference,\u2019 it\u2019s also communication <\/em>all the way down — which brings us into the orbit of biosemiotics and of another figure who I wonder if Harman might, in a future work, weave into his thinking (whether positively or not): Jakob von Uexk\u00fcll. My hunch is that von Uexk\u00fcll’s notion of \u2018umwelten\u2019 democratizes phenomenology beyond the human (as Neil Evernden argued, and as Brett Buchanan<\/a> suggests), and that as a result of an Uexk\u00fcllian shift, Latour\u2019s actants would each become world-bearing, not merely there in the flick of the moment of a relational event, but actively pursuing this thing or that thing, or many things at once. But this would depend on their being world-bearing, in capacity at least, to start with. Biologists, like Maturana and Varela, allow this kind of capacity for living <\/em>things; a post-Uexk\u00fcllian Latour or Harman might allow it for other things as well. Others, like complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann (or, for that matter, Manuel DeLanda), attempt to account for how it might come into existence where it doesn’t appear to start with. We may never be able to pin down the place at which the non-world-bearing becomes the world-bearing, nor to measure the quantity of \u2018world\u2019 to be found in any object-relation or network. But I’m not convinced that an ontology of objects provides as sharp a set of tools for getting at that world-bearingness as an ontology of processes and relations, such as Whitehead’s events, actual occasions, experiences each of which has a subject-pole and an object-pole, or Deleuze’s becomings.<\/p>\n

The question Harman poses but does not answer to my satisfaction, then, is whether it\u2019s more appropriate to call the pieces of world around us \u2018things\u2019, \u2018objects,\u2019 or \u2018processes\u2019 and \u2018relations.\u2019 The world presents evidence that would support either case. Certainly a body, a house, a piece of land, a continent, the complete works of Shakespeare, all maintain a stability that allows us to count on them and do things with them, at least long enough for our purposes. But thoughts, moods, nightmares, affective explosions (like those resulting in wars), and sunsets are all made of a texture that vanishes when we try to grasp them too intently; and are all the more precious for it. Are they \u2018things\u2019 that continue their existence in some submerged realm away from our gaze? Or is their slippage built into the fabric of the world, giving it the very texture it has for mortals like us (who also slip away when we may least expect it)? And in between we have love, hate, political regimes, the weather, the colors of autumn, forests and annually returning fish populations, and when these become less predictable and more unruly, then we know that grounds are shifting more rapidly than we\u2019d like them to.<\/p>\n

What I’m trying to suggest is that the question of whether to call them \u2018things\u2019 or \u2018processes\u2019 may ultimately be less a matter of accuracy than a stylistic choice. Processes <\/em>are always in motion, and when we reach toward them, they elude us, or they change us. Objects <\/em>are just that: x, y, this thing, that thing. Latour\u2019s \u2018ding\u2019 is not an object but a parliament, an assembly in which the rabidly untamed world of wild wonders bids to make alliances of conviviality (but which always remain riven through with resistances). His bold move of \u2018flattening\u2019 the terrain between humans and the rest of the universe has opened a door; but what occurs when we proceed through that door is the project of a cosmopolitics that crafts <\/em>worlds — collectively, humans, animals, angels, and all — not just describes <\/em>them by encompassing them within a finer conceptual system. I fear the reduction of these world-building allies to \u2018objects\u2019 because, by definition, objects don\u2019t move unless they\u2019re pushed. Why I prefer \u2018relationism,\u2019 then, may be a matter of style \u2013 that it represents an entering into moving currents, a playing along with uncapturable and mysterious allies, a forging ahead without seeing the whole from a view above the fray. But I believe that the style is part of the substance.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A sort of conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

After all this relationist whining, however, I come back to my admiration for Harman’s project and for the way he expresses it. I treat these as one, not two, though in his own object ontology, he may have to separate the thing itself (Harman’s object-oriented ontology) from its expression (the rhetoric, the presentation, the interlocution of voices from past and present — Heidegger, Latour, the speculative realists, nature, et al.). This is where I will insist on my Whiteheadian\/Deleuzian processualism, because I can’t conceive of the object (this book, or Harman’s OOP) as separable, ultimately, from the conditions in which it arose, the milieu within which it is carrying out its delivery, and the impact it will have had once we realize what hit us.<\/p>\n

What I like most about Harman\u2019s argument is his insistence on the Heideggerian insight that things slip away<\/em><\/strong>, that they withdraw and retain their mystery, concealing their inner essence behind the veils of a world that is too flush with activity, too busy with concern, to make it possible for us to undress them despite our most frantic efforts. What Heidegger meant was that Being<\/em> — the earth and the gods — slips away, but Harman generalizes this to everything in its very specificity, and that\u2019s a move I like very much. (Derrida\u2019s main lesson, as I understand it, was also that everything slips away, because mortals like us, who use language as our primary means of fixing those things, are ill-equipped to keep them from slipping. That he focused so much on language, especially in his earlier writing, is somewhat incidental to his overall argument; but that’s another matter, too.)<\/p>\n

But there is something in the style of this kind of philosophizing that, I fear, can lead us to believe it\u2019s captured those things, even as they slip away \u2013 which makes it rather different from, say, poetry, which makes little effort to capture the things but simply dances alongside and slips away with them. Heidegger’s poetic vision of the earth, sky, gods, and mortals (which Harman’s explication of is wonderful and highly original), like Harman’s own four-fold of \u2018time, space, essence, and eidos,\u2019 deviate from this will-to-mastery, and so I embrace them as forms of experimental metaphysics, and I hope they will settle in to my own thinking over the time that the book’s ideas resonate with me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing from yesterday’s post on Graham Harman… (Warning: This post is long.) Where Tool-Being presented a Heidegger flushed clean of his anthropocentrism, Prince of Networks takes Bruno Latour for a ride on a philosophical adventure toward a world not of actors and networks but of objects, pure if not so simple. The book\u2019s first half […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4415,688977],"tags":[228,16805,16788,4451,16806,16789,423],"class_list":["post-1118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecophilosophy","category-geo_philosophy","tag-deleuze","tag-harman","tag-latour","tag-mortality","tag-object-oriented-philosophy","tag-speculative-realism","tag-whitehead"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-i2","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8278,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/09\/harmans-reply\/","url_meta":{"origin":1118,"position":0},"title":"Harman’s reply","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Graham Harman's reply to my critical response to his book Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, which appeared as part of\u00a0a book symposium in\u00a0Global Discourse\u00a0earlier this year, is readable\u00a0online,\u00a0here.\u00a0 I won't address the details of that\u00a0reply here. Some of them relate to our divergent\u00a0interpretations of Latour, and since Harman has\u00a0now written\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1117,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/08\/harmans-object-oriented-philosophizing\/","url_meta":{"origin":1118,"position":1},"title":"Harman’s object-oriented philosophizing","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 8, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I\u2019ve been reading Graham Harman\u2019s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. More accurately, I\u2019ve been dipping into and sipping from the first and systematically digesting the second. Given the amount of blogging that goes on under the rising star(s) of \u2018object-oriented\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4151,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/05\/25\/the-beatnik-brotherhood\/","url_meta":{"origin":1118,"position":2},"title":"The beatnik brotherhood","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 25, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Graham Harman's note reiterating his position that Whitehead, Latour, Deleuze, Bergson, and Simondon (among others) do not make up a coherent philosophical \"lump\" -- \"pack\" or \"tribe\" might be more colorful terms here (if philosophers were cats, how herdable would they be?) -- makes me want to clarify my own\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/05\/tumblr_ljsf0kvMnF1qgjltdo1_500-275x248.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1099,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/07\/05\/speculative-realism-its-ecological-sympathies\/","url_meta":{"origin":1118,"position":3},"title":"Speculative Realism & its ecological sympathies","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The philosophical movement increasingly known as Speculative Realism is starting to get attention in these parts of town (the town being Academe, or at least its digital suburbs, and these parts being its ecocritical\/biocultural\/animaphilic ghettoes). News about the forthcoming re.press anthology, The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism, has been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5298,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/09\/13\/democracy-of-objects\/","url_meta":{"origin":1118,"position":4},"title":"Democracy of Objects","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 13, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Levi Bryant's The Democracy of Objects is finally available and readable on-line, courtesy of a wonderfully innovative relationship between Open Humanities Press and the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office. The book is part of OHP's New Metaphysics Series, edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour. As regular readers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1037,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/03\/09\/philosophical-sitings\/","url_meta":{"origin":1118,"position":5},"title":"philosophical sitings","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I really think that philosophy's production site is shifting more and more from the library\/study and cafe and scholarly journal to the web and blogosphere. Kvond over at Frames \/sing has been putting out some very interesting and detailed blogs about Bruno Latour. Larvalsubjects (philosopher and ex-Lacanian analyst Levi Bryant)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1118"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4430,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118\/revisions\/4430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}