Larval Subjects .

Anyone who has followed this blog for a while has probably come to realize that many of the positions I argue against are positions I formally held. In other words, often, in my criticisms, I am working through my own positions and trying to expand them through a sort of quasi-dialectical gesture that both integrates elements of the position I held and moves beyond it. My hope, then, is that my criticism not be taken in the spirit of rejection, But rather of placing a theoretical apparatus in its proper context and recognizing the limitations of that theoretical tool.

With this caveat in mind, if we turn to the domain of critical theory broadly construed (ie, as referring to social and political theory), then it seems to me that we’re faced with a plurality of theoretical monisms that lead to an inability to explain how change is possible. By “theoretical monism” I mean any critical theory that is more or less organized around some conceptual master-signifier or concept that functions as the ground of everything else. That master-term might be the signifier, sign, power, economics, etc. The problem is that when you have one term functioning as the ground of everything else, it’s no longer clear what produces change within a system.

Take the example of Lacanianism. As The Democracy of objects will make clear, I very much remain a Lacanian. However, for a long time I was just a Lacanian. By being “just a Lacanian” I mean that I believed that Lacanian theory provides us with a general theory of the social. Such a thesis might appear surprising to many who perhaps association psychoanalysis with psychology (ie, a discourse about individual minds), however we must remember that for Lacan, like Hume, psychology is, strictly speaking, impossible because the subject is constituted in the field of the Other. In other words, no social, no subject. Consequently, as Freud will argue in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, the ego is essentially constituted inter-subjectively, and psychoanalysis is every bit as much a theory of the social as it is a theory of the subject. Indeed, Lacan’s theory can be read as a theory of the clinical setting as opposed to a theory of mind (a point he endlessly repeats in his seminar).

As “just a Lacanian” I believed, above all, that the signifier structures reality. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XX, “the universe is the flower of rhetoric.”. Impressed by the structural linguistics I had read and work by Lacan such as “The Instance of the Letter”, I came to understand all of reality as structured by the symbolic. First you have the pre-symbolic real (what Lacan and Lacanians often call the “mythological real”), which is understood to be undifferentiated and without structure, and then you have the signifier that comes to structure of reality. What makes a men’s room a men’s room and the ladies room the ladies room? The signifier “man” and “woman”. What makes the ten o’clock train the ten o’clock train? The signifier “ten o’clock train”, not the material train itself. What constitutes the difference between blue and green (note some cultures classify shades of green as blue and vice versa)? The signifiers “blue” and “green” coupled with their differential relations.

In short, the signifier precedes the thing and structures it. There is a pre-symbolic reality, but because we can only relate to the world through the symbolic (all our cognition is linguistically structured) we can know nothing about it. Moreover, because language is transubjective rather than based on individual intentions, the social precedes the subject and reality. As a consequence, question of the political must necessarily be a question of the symbolic because the symbolic, as that which precedes and conditions reality, would necessarily structure social relations, assigning people positions and so on. To act politically would thus be to act on the symbolic. Q.E.D.

There’s a lot that’s right about the Lacanian position, and much here that I still hold, but the problem is that if it is language alone that structures reality it’s difficult to see where change comes from at all. Where is the alterity that allows change to take place? To be sure, there is the Lacanian subject and the Real. The Lacanian subject is that void that always slips away from any signifying chain (there is no signifier that can pin it down and each signifier reproduces it, ie, it’s radically withdrawn). The Lacanian Real consists of formal that no language can handle and that therefore prevents any totalization of the symbolic (each form of neurosis is organized, for example, around such a formal aporia or Real). But while the Lacanian subject and Real open the promising possibility of a scrambling of any totality and possible escape, their very formality leaves specific struggle underdetermined. Paraphrasing Deleuze, these concepts are too baggy to capture the real.

And so it went. I could give formal conditions for change, quasi-transcendental conditions for the possibility of change, but I was unable to give any account of the specific conditions of struggle and why they ought to take one specific form rather than another in a specific context. This, I’ve come to believe, is a result of the theoretical monism of the Lacanian framework. However, what if, instead of placing ourselves with the straight jacket of Lacan or Foucault or Marx or Deleuze and Guattari or Latour, etc, we instead tried to think Lacan and Marx and Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari and Latour, etc? “Wait”, someone will say, “isn’t this what Zizek is doing or Deleuze and Guattari are doing or Badiou is doing?”. Sure, that’s what they say they’re trying to do, but they’re not doing it. Deleuze and Guattari fair the best here, but in the case of Zizek it’s still the signifier that has primacy. In Badiou economics and nonhumans disappear altogether.

This is what flat ontology is trying to do. I hate that I’m repeating myself so much these days but it’s a point that needs to be repeated again and again. The point of flat ontology is not to reduce everything to the same. Flat ontology rejects every hegemon. The point of flat ontology is to think interactions among heterogenous components: technologies, animals, minerals, vampires, corporations, capital, humans, works of art, speeches, video footage, corporations, salamanders, etc.

Look at what happens when you adopt this pluralistic realism: because you have introduced heterogeneity into your framework, refusing any hegemon, you now get tensions among different fields that become occasions for various forms of collective invention. You get singularities. Take the example of the feminist movement in the sixties. Twenty to thirty years ago you had three fields interacting with one another. You had the symbolic codifying the place of men and women, micro-powers with their filiments stretching everwhere structure subjectivity and male and female desire, and the economic-military complex of the factory. Because of the draft and the war effort women enter the factory. Suddenly they encounter a contradiction between how the symbolic and micro-power structures the world. New individuations take place. “Girls can do it too!”

The men come back from the war and kick women out of their jobs. But at the level of the symbolic and micro-power, change and invention is already afoot. Newborn children witness fraught relations between husbands and wives– women bitter, perhaps, at the loss of their professional and economic freedom, men suffering from war trauma and still living in the symbolic and power structures of the pre-war period. Among daughters and sons a new space of possibility glimmers on the horizon. Meanwhile, there is unparalleled economic prosperity due to Keynesian economics, allowing for a loosening of existing power and symbolic relations. Twenty years later a space of invention and creation explodes, like a germinating plant, as these children come of age and form groups to invent new collectives. The outcome is not determined but an occasion is opened where a new regime becomes possible.

Wars, factories, signifiers, weapons, economics, universities, all play a role in occasioning this new group-subject. Occasioning is not causing. Rather, occasioning is catalytic, drawing together a complex field of relations where a group and invention might come to be and where praxis is self-directing. What opportunities do we miss as amresult of theoretical hegemony or monism which renders vision of other actors invisible? Flat ontology strives to overcome missed opportunities.

In contemporary social and political theory it is not unusual to hear questions as to how a subject is possible. By a subject, of course, one means a self-directing agency that is not a mere puppet of context or environment. In social and political theory, the subject does not refer to human individuals, but rather “the subject of history”, eg, the proletariat. It seems to me that we would do well to abandon this sort of talk. The term “subject” renders a number of things invisible, taking a number of questions off the table. This is because subject has connotations of an isolated individual. Sartre draws a valuable contrast between collectives and groups. A collective is a sort of anonymous social relation in which every individual is exchangeable with other individuals and roles are given. He gives the example of queuing for a bus. Everyone takes a ticket and hopes to get a seat on the bus. Each person is alloted a position that is exchangeable with that of any other position. Here we might think of the Lacanian symbolic and how it allots certain ego/social positions.

By contrast, a groups refers to relations where self-directing praxis Emerges among the members of the group. The members of a group are united around a common project, such as, for example, Lacan’s L’ecole. They aren’t merely passive beings defined by pre-existent social relations, but rather actively transcend the given of the social field and define a common project. As a consequence, groups are self-directing.

There are, in my view, a number of advantages to speaking about groups rather than subjects. First, of course, we can seek the conditions under which groups emerge out of collectives or come into being. Sartre has an exquisite analysis of all of the conditions that led to the storming of the Bastille and the invention of a new unity and the broader conditions that occasioned that invention. However, the concept of group rather than subject brings into relief other valuable questions. With the concept of group we get the question of how praxis is coordinated among diverse individuals. In other words, we get all sorts of practical questions pertaining to how individuals invent a group or themselves or mediate their differences. Likewise, we are afforded with the opportunity to analyze the microfacisms that emerge within groups, how groups ossify and become collectives, and how invention becomes self-defeating and alienating dogma.

The question of political theory is not a question of how subjects are possible, but of how groups are possible. The problem with the concept of subject in political theory is that it illicitly unifies that which must be produced or unified, foreclosing these sorts of questions. As a consequence, we should eradicate this term from our vocabulary when doing political theory, instead asking how a group is possible. It is groups, not individual subjects, that are the subject of political theory.

As I’ve reread Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason I’ve been astonished by the overlap between Latour’s actor-network theory and Sartre’s account of how the social comes into being. One of Latour’s central claims is that the social does not explain but must be explained. As Latour remarks,

In most situations, we use ‘social’ to mean that which has already been assembled and acts as a whole, without being too picky on the precise nature of what has been gathered, bundled, and packaged together. When we say that ‘something is social’ or ‘has a social dimension’, we mobilize one set of features that, so to speak, march in step together, even though it might be composed of radically different types of entities. This unproblematic use of the word is fine as long as we don’t confuse the sentence ‘Is social what goes together?’, with one that says, ‘social designates a particular kind of stuff’ [my emphasis]. With the former we simply mean that we are dealing with a routine state of affairs whose binding together is the crucial aspect, while the second designates a sort of substance whose main feature lies in its differences with other types of materials. We imply that some assemblages are built out of social stuff instead of physical, biological, or economical blocks, much like the houses of the Three Little Pigs were made of straw, wood, and stone. (Reassembling the Social, 43)

The central target of Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) is what he calls “the sociology of the social”. The sociology of the social would be that form of sociology that suggests that the social is composed of a special sort of “stuff” (“social stuff”, not unlike phlogiston) that holds people together in a particular way. Generally sociologists of the social appeal to power, social forces, signs, language, norms, and human intentions.

By contrast, Latour argues that all of these agencies are rather weak and fail to account for why the social (assemblages of humans and nonhumans) are held together in the way they’re held together. In place, the sociology of the social, Latour instead proposes a sociology of associations. The social, for Latour, is nothing more than associations between human and nonhuman entities (and sometimes, many times, solely associations between nonhuman entities) that include semiotic components, human intentions, norms, laws, but also technologies, animals, natural entities like rivers and mountains, etc., etc., etc. Indeed, Latour will argue that it is nonhuman actors that do the lion’s share of the work in associating human beings with one another, and that signs, intentions, norms, laws, etc., are rather weak tea in maintaining certain assemblages or associations between humans. As Latour writes in a justly celebrated passage,

A shepherd and his dog remind you nicely of social relations, but when you see her flock behind a barbed wire fence, you wonder where is the shepherd and her dog– although sheep are kept in the field by the piercing effect of wire barbs more obstinately than by the barking of the dog. There is no doubt that you have become a couch potato in front of your TV set thanks largely to the remote control that allows you to surf from channel to channel– and yet there is no resemblance between the causes of your immobility and the portion of your action that has been carried out by an infrared signal, even though there is no question that your behavior has been permitted by the TV command.

Between a car driver that slows down near a school because she has seen the ’30 MPH’ yellow sign and a car driver that slows down because he wants to protect the suspension of his car threatened by the bump of a ‘speed trap’, is the difference big or small. Big, since the obedience of the first has gone through morality, symbols, sign posts, yellow paint, while the other has passed through the same list to which has been added a carefully designed concrete slab. But it is small since they have both obeyed something: the first driver to a rarely manifested altruism– if she had not slowed down, her heart would have been broken by the moral law; the second driver to a largely distributed selfishness– if he had not slowed down his suspension would have been broken by a concrete slab. Should we say that only the first connection is social, moral and symbolic, but that the second is objective and material? No. But, if we say that both are social all the way through, but they certainly are collected or associated together by the very work of road designers. One cannot call oneself a social scientist and pursue only some links– the moral, legal, and symbolic ones –and stop as soon as there is some physical relation interspersed in between the others. (RS, 77 – 78)

Latour’s point is that if we wish to take account of the fabric of the social, of those assemblages that exist, we have to take into account the role that nonhuman entities play in organizing particular patterns of relations and behavior. Each example contrasts, more or less, a humanist explanation (reference to power, signs, laws, morals, etc) and a nonhumanist example. Thus, in the first example, Latour contrasts control of the sheep through power (the role of the shepherd and the sheep dog) and control of the sheep through a barbwire fence. This example is particularly nice because it shows that for the sociology of associations the behavior of sheep is every bit as much a sociological question as the behavior of humans. The second example contrasts human intentions with the unintended consequences of technology (becoming an overweight couch potato). The third example contrasts agency through law and signs with agency through a nonhuman actor such as a speed bump.

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In A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Joseph Catalano writes:

For Sartre, the reality of class is more than a subjective awareness that we are united with others and less than a supraconsciousness in which we all already share… We… experience [my emphasis] our membership in a class, because our class structure already exists as a fundamental structure of our world. (135 – 136)

From an object-oriented perspective, this is already the wrong way to theorize the existence of class. If class exists, it is not an experience or the result of an experience (though it can, perhaps, be experienced), nor is it dependent on individual persons identifying with a class. Rather, classes are entities in their own right. In mereological terms, classes would be larger scale objects that are autonomous or independent of the smaller scale objects from which they are composed.

As such, class would be an example of what Timothy Morton has called a “hyperobject”. As Morton puts it,

…hyperobjects are viscous—they adhere to you no matter how hard to try to pull away, rendering ironic distance obsolete. Now I’ll argue that they are also nonlocal. That is, hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space such that any particular (local) manifestation never reveals the totality of the hyperobject.

When you feel raindrops falling on your head, you are experiencing climate, in some sens [sic.]. In particular you are experiencing the climate change known as global warming. But you are never directly experiencing global warming as such. Nowhere in the long list of catastrophic weather events—which will increase as global warming takes off—will you find global warming.

As a hyperobject, classes are massively distributed in time and space, having no precise location. Moreover, classes are withdrawn from other objects– e.g., the people that “belong” to a particular class –such that we can be entirely unaware of the existence of classes without this impinging, in any way, on the existence or activity of class. Indeed, it is precisely because classes, like any other object, are withdrawn, precisely because they are hyperobjects massively distributed in time and space, that ideology is able to convince us that classes don’t exist or that there are only “individuals” (mid-scale objects of which persons are an instance) that create their own destinies. Here, of course, the term “individual” is placed in scare quotes not because individuals don’t exist, but rather because the term “individual” all too often functions as code for persons, ignoring the fact that individuals exist at a variety of different levels of scale. In other words, a class is no less an individual than Jack Abramoff.

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From an object-oriented point of view, one of the most valuable concepts in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason is that of antipraxis. As Joseph Catalano describes it in his Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,

One of the distinctive aspects of praxis is that it acts in the face of an authorless counterpraxis. Thus, Sartre here examines: (1) how matter becomes totalized by receiving human finalities; (2) how totalized matter then has finalities of its own; (3) how one aspect of the distinctiveness of our history is that these new finalities are counterfinalities, that is, they act against our original intentions; and (4) how certain powerless groups suffer from these counter-finalities and how others use them for their own finalities. (121)

One of the central questions of Sartre’s Critique is that of how societies emerge as entities in their own right from and through individuals. That is, why is it that collectives of people (to be distinguished from groups) take on the specific form and organization they take on at a particular point in history. From an object-oriented perspective, this would be the question of how larger scale objects emerge from smaller scale objects. Part of Sartre’s answer to this question resides in the concept of antipraxis.

Put simply, antipraxis refers to results of our praxis, products of the manner in which we have worked over matter, that then take on a life of their own escaping our own intentions and aims. Latour will make a similar point later on in his “sociology of associations” developed in Reassembling the Social. There Latour will point out that it is not signs and intentions alone that account for the fabric of society, but rather that people are held together in particular ways through nonhuman objects that come to structure our action, field of choices, aims, intentions, and so on. This thesis is developed with particular clarity in Pandora’s Hope in the article entitled A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans. Like the trail left behind by a snail, antipraxis is a residue of praxis that comes to transform the nature of praxis, introducing new aims that were not our original aims.

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In the first section of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals Kant remarks that “[n]othing in the world– indeed nothing even beyond the world –can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will” (393). What, then, is a good will according to Kant? Later Kant goes on to remark that,

…the first proposition of morality is that to have genuine moral worth, an action must be done from duty. The second proposition is: An action done from duty does not have its moral worth in the purpose which is to be achieved through it but in the maxim whereby it is determined. Its moral value, therefore, does not depend upon the realization of the object of action but merely on the principle of the volition by which the action is done irrespective of the objects of the faculty of desire…

The third principle, as a consequence of the two preceding, I would express as follows: Duty is the necessity to do an action from respect for law. (399 – 400)

For Kant, then, it is the intention that animates an action that determines whether or not the action is an action of a good will, not the consequences that follow from the action. Regardless of whether or not the action produces happy consequences the action is an action of a good will if it is done for the sake of duty alone. Likewise, it is not my desire to produce a better world, insure that my daughter has opportunities, etc., that determines whether or not the action is an action of a good will, but rather whether the action is done for the sake of duty alone.

It is crucial to understand that for Kant we do not arrive at our duties extraneously (or in Kant-speak, “heteronomously”) through education, sacred texts, etc., but rather through reason. Our duties both arise from reason and are given to us through reason. Our duties thus do not come to us from the outside as in the case of a monarch giving his people certain laws. Rather, our duties are given to us by our own reason. We are both the authors of the moral law, the legislators, and our own judges. For Kant, the vocation of reason lies in the formulation of such moral laws. To demonstrate this thesis, Kant presents a rather dated argument from design. As Kant writes,

In the natural constitution of an organized being (i.e., one suitably adapted to life), we assume as an axiom that no organ will be found for any purpose which is not the fittest and best adapted to that purpose. Now if its preservation, its welfare, in a word its happiness, were the real end of nature in a being having reason and will, then nature would have hit upon a very poor arrangement in appointing the reason of the creature to be the executor of this purpose. For all the actions which the creature has to perform with this intention of nature, and the entire rule of his conduct, would be dictated much more exactly by instinct, and the end would be far more certainly attained by instinct than it ever could be by reason. And if, over and above this, reason should have been granted to the favored creature, it would have served only to let him contemplate the happy constitution of his nature, to admire it, to rejoice in it, and to be grateful for it to its beneficent cause. But reason would not have been given in order that the being should subject his faculty of desire to that weak and delusive guidance and to meddle with the purpose of nature. In a word, nature would have taken care that reason did not break forth into practical use [moral use] nor have the presumption, with its weak insight, to think out for itself the plan of happiness and the means of attaining it. Nature would have taken over the choice not only of ends but also of the means, and with wise foresight she would have entrusted both to instinct alone. (395)

In the preceding paragraphs Kant shows all the ways in which reason is poorly suited for achieving happiness, and how it even generates unhappiness when exercised (Kant will make this point even more forcefully in the Critique of Practical Reason, where he suggests that the more we obey the moral law the more demanding it becomes, thereby anticipating the Freudian concept of the superego and pointing the way to an account of why those who strive to be moral are often wracked with the greatest sense of guilt). The argument is thus that because every organ is designed for a purpose that is well suited to exercising a particular function, and because reason is poorly suited for producing happiness, the vocation of our faculty of reason is not happiness, welfare, or survival, but rather morality.

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One way of reading a philosopher is not so much in terms of the letter of what the text says, but rather in terms of the problem to which that text responds. This was the reading method that Deleuze prescribed. Many are familiar with Deleuze’s description of the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery, but elsewhere he says something, I think, far more profound. In his interview “On Philosophy”, Deleuze remarks that,

The history of philosophy isn’t a particularly reflective discipline. It’s rather like portraiture in painting. Producing mental, conceptual portraits. As in painting, you have to create a likeness, but in a different material: the likeness is something you have to produce, rather than a way of producing anything (which comes down to just repeating what a philosopher says). Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don’t tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. Hume, for example, sets out a novel concept of belief, but he doesn’t tell us how and why the problem of knowledge presents itself in such a way that knowledge is seen as a particular kind of belief. The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn’t say but is nonetheless present in what he did say. (Negotiations, 136)

While a “problematic reading” of a text everywhere grapples with the letter of the text, such a reading nonetheless looks for something that is everywhere present in the text but which the text does not itself say. Put a bit differently, a problematic reading seeks the horizon, the problematic field, that render the concepts invented by a philosopher as solutions. Such a reading strives to reconstruct the problem that renders a particular constellation of concepts intelligible as solutions.

This point cannot be repeated or emphasized enough. The problem to which the concepts of a philosophical text respond nowhere is articulated in the text. Even when a philosophical text says something like “the problem to which this essay responds is…”, the problem that the text articulates, the “intra-textual” articulation of the problem, is not the problem to which the constellation of concepts inhabiting the text intra-textually responds. The problem is not that. Or, put differently, a problematic reading must even account for the problematic field that leads the philosophical text to articulate its problem in this way. Put in terms of object-oriented ontology, then, the problem that inhabits a text is always withdrawn from the text.

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In my last post I mentioned that Joe Hughes, Jeff Bell and I are drawing up plans for a book on social and political philosophy and ontology. It seems to me that Sartre poses the nature of the question we’ll try to address. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre remarks that “…man [sic.] is mediated by things to the same extent as things are ‘mediated’ by man [sic.]” (79). In this regard, Sartre repeats, in his own way, Marx’s famous thesis that “men [sic.] make history, but not in conditions of their own making.” Sartre provides a gorgeous example of how things mediate humans to the same degree that humans mediate things later in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Is Sartre remarks,

In his excellent book, Mumford says: ‘Since the steam engine requires constant care on the part of the stoker and engineer, steam power was more efficient in large units than in small ones… Thus steam power fostered the tendency toward large industrial plants…” I do not wish to question the soundness of these observations, but simply to note the strange language– language which has been ours since Marx and which we have no difficulty in understanding –in which a single proposition links finality to necessity so indissolubly that it is impossible to tell any longer whether it is man or machine which is a practical project. (159 – 160)

Is it humans that define the telos of producing large industrial plants, or is it the specific properties of steam engines that generate the aim of producing large industrial plants? In a manner that will later be repeated by Stiegler in Time and Tecnics, Sartre will suggest that the technological realm takes on a teleology of its own.

In this connection, Sartre will set up a dialectic between praxis and antipraxis. Antipraxis refers to the inertia of the nonhuman realm and the manner in which it comes to structure human relationships and possibilities. One of Sartre’s questions, according to Joseph Catalano in A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles is the question of “…’the condition for the possibility’ of human relations” (22). Because Sartre advocates a metaphysical nominalism in which only individuals exist, he’s obligated to account for how social relations emerge. Among Sartre’s answers is the concept of antipraxis.

How is this to be understood? Through human praxis we create artifacts or products that come to condition subsequent human activity. Take the example of agriculture. Within a hunter-gatherer framework, it is likely that the growing of plants and the raising of livestock was not an aim in itself, but was a causal activity that supplemented what could be hunted and gathered. However, with time the products of agriculture (tilled land and domesticated animals) comes to take on a life of its own. Humans now find themselves existing in a field of inherited products of agriculture, new social relations begin to emerge. For example, people now begin to get tied to particular locations, rather than wandering all over the place, women no longer enjoy the egalitarian position they often enjoyed in agricultural society, paternity becomes important in determining labor and inheritance, time comes to be structured in a different way around the harvest and the rationing of grains over the year, and some form of military becomes necessary to defend against invasion and pillage. This is what Sartre refers to as the “practico-inert”, which consists of the products of human praxis that have now taken on a life of their own, structuring human relations in a particular way.

Those that engaged in agriculture did not intend these new social relations, but rather found themselves in a field– what I call a “regime of attraction” –that produced these new forms of relations. The situation is very much similar to a particular moment on a chess board. Occasionally one of your pieces end up in a position with respect to the other pieces where a particular moves is more or less necessitated by the positions of the other pieces. In Heideggerian terms, we find ourselves thrown into a world that is not of our own making and that structures our movements, ways of relating, even our very subjectivity and ways of feeling in a variety of different ways. Sartre raises questions, for example, as to whether we can univocally say that “primitive man” is anything like modern industrial humans, or whether they even belong to the same species or type. In this regard, he repeats the claims of Marx and Engels in the Manifesto.

The question that Sartre raises so admirably is that of how praxis is possible in a world where humans are mediated by things as much as things are mediated by humans. Put in terms of political thought, how are self-directing collectives or groups possible? Here I think that we should abandon the term subject within social and political theory and follow Deleuze and Guattari’s or Sartre’s advice of talking in terms of collectives or “subject-groups” because “subject” implies an individual or person, whereas the question of politics is always a question of collectives. Contemporary social and political theory is characterized by an opposition between what might be called, on the one hand, Spinozists, and on the other hand, Kantians. On the Spinozist side we have thinkers like Foucault, perhaps Deleuze and Guattari, Althusser, McLuhan, certain variants of Marx, and so on that emphasize the determination of collectives by impersonal forces that exceed the intentions of agents. On the Kantian side we have theorists such as Badiou, Ranciere, and Zizek that defend a sort of volunterism that subtracts itself from any sort of contextual determination.

The Kantians correctly pose the question by asking how self-directing praxis of collectives are possible, but too often end up completely underdetermining context or situations, showing little or no interest in their organization and how they overdetermine action in a variety of ways. As a result, they’re too often left with any nuanced or well developed analysis of what needs to be addressed in situations. Their position remains abstract. The Spinozists correctly pose the question by emphasizing how regimes of attraction structure our possibilities of action and engagement, transforming us into puppets beyond our control, but too often leave unaddressed the question of how any sort of agency or self-direction is possible within a field where we are products of these fields. I am not suggesting that Sartre has the answer, but that he has properly posed the question by asking how self-directing collectives can emerge within a field of antipraxis governed by its own intentionality. This is the squaring of the circle that needs to be worked out: one that is capable of doing justice to the structuration of the contextual or regimes of attraction, while theorizing the emergence of subject-groups capable of acting on situations rather than simply being puppets of forces beyond their intentions. How can we simultaneously think humans making history but not in conditions of their own making?

Keith Woodward has organized two panels on Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology and Geography at this years meeting of the Association for American Geographies (AAG) in Seattle (April 12 – 16). I’m presenting the following paper:

Tangled Geographies: Object-Oriented Ontology and Topological Space-Times

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) argues that being, at its most fundamental level, is composed of discrete objects or units, whether these units be natural or cultural. Insofar as substances, whether cultural or natural, constitute the ground of being, it follows that they cannot be contained in a more fundamental milieu such as space or time. Rather, OOO, following Bruno Latour, argues for a conception of space and time arising from and out of objects. In light of this ontological constraint, this paper develops a topological account of space-time based on real relations between substances. Because space-time cannot be thought as a container of substances, relations such as proximity in common sense space and time cannot be treated as establishing genuine space-time relations. For example, while the person in the office next to me might be very close in ordinary space, it does not follow that they are closer to me in space-time than Graham Harman in Cairo, Egypt. This conception of topological space-time leads to a rethinking of cartography and geography that maps real material space-time relations are forged at a variety of interacting scales despite apparent spatio-temporal distances in apparent metric space.

I’m looking forward to this tremendously.

On December 1st I’ll be presenting a paper entitled Ontotheology and Withdrawal: Sexuation and the New Metaphysics, at the Hello Everything: Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology symposium hosted by UCLA’s Program in Experimental Critical Theory.

From there, I turn around and head off to Claremont Graduate School to present at the Metaphysics & Things: New Forms of Speculative Thought symposium (December 2 – 4), where I’ll be giving a talk entitled The Time of the Object: Towards the Ontological Grounds of Withdrawal. This paper attempts to make a case for withdrawal drawing on Derrida’s account of differance, the trace, and iterability. With any luck it should also come out in article form in the next issue of Speculations

In other news, Joe Hughes, Jeff Bell and I are beginning to draw up a plan for a book on political philosophy and ontology that would attempt to square the circle by simultaneously thinking the role of context (social fields, texts, culture, economics, technology, “nature”, language, biology, etc.) and how self-directing agencies or subject-groups are possible. This won’t happen for about three years, but we’re at least beginning to formulate the issue. Think of something along the lines of Negri & Hardt, Marx, Latour, McLuhan, Deleuze, DeLanda, Spinoza, etc., meet Badiou, Zizek, Kant (of the Second Critique), and later Sartre.

Over at Pagan Metaphysics, Paul has posted a couple of great quotes from Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Hopefully he won’t mind if I reproduce his post here. Paul writes:

I was reading through Dennett’s Breaking the Spell again yesterday and came across an endnote that raised a laugh. Dennett is reflecting on the value and uses of incomprehensibility, mystification and paradox in religion, specifically as mechanisms for bedazzling the mind (effective marketing strategies or tools of transmission), when he notes in a side comment his first secular experience of this phenomenon.

My introduction to this somewhat depressing idea came in 1982, when I was told by the acquisitions editor of a major paperback publishing company that her company wasn’t going to bid for the paperback rights for The Mind’s I, the anthology of philosophy and science fiction that Douglas Hofstadter and I had edited, because it was “too clear to become a cult book.” I could see what she meant: we actually explained things as carefully as we could.

OK, not funny so far (although perhaps evoking a knowing smile). Dennett then proceeds to explain a related story.

John Searle once told me about a conversation he had with the late Michel Foucault: “Michel, you’re so clear in conversation; why is your written work so obscure?” To which Foucault replied, “That’s because in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense.” I have coined a term for this tactic, in honor of Foucault’s candor: eumerdification.

Brilliant.

I don’t know if Foucault actually said this or not, but it’s the sort of thing I strangely want him to have said and to be true. Nor am I denouncing such style, as I think such “eumerdification” is a rhetorical technique that functions to produce an effect within the reader. All of this reminds me of an allegory that Lacan relates when discussing the nature of gaze as object a. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan writes,

In the classical tale of Zeuxis and Pharrhasios, Zeuxis has the advantaga of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not on the fact that these grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of the birds was taken in by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhasios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye. (103)

The secret of the veil is that it causes us to wonder what is behind us. And, of course, Lacan’s example here is particularly delicious as it is a painted veil, and therefore veils nothing. There is nothing behind this veil, but rather the veil produces the effect of something hidden. The veil here functions as objet a, the object-cause of desire, becoming the engine of desire. Objet a is not the object of desire, but rather that which causes or occasions desire, that which evokes desire. In this connection, I remember a friend from graduate school who was obsessed with the Girls Gone Wild commercials. Finally, at a certain point, he broke down and decided to buy one of the videos. To his great surprise and disappointment, the videos evoked none of the desire the commercials elicited precisely because the black bars screening the women’s breasts were absent in the videos. It was precisely the censorship of the veil, of the black bar, that evoked or caused his desire, not the object of desire itself (the breasts). In the absence of the object-cause of desire, my friend could no longer desire the object of his desire.

This seems to be what Dennett’s editors were getting at with respect to the issue of whether or not to buy the rights to Dennett’s early book Minds Eye I. Because the book was written so clearly, the editor contended, it was unlikely to become a cult or classic book. Our initial reaction to this anecdote might be anger or outrage. “How dare they reject a book because it’s clear! Isn’t clarity a virtue to be admired?!?!” However, the editor has a point. Part of what allows a book to endure, part of what gives a book the power to last, is precisely a sort of opacity, a presence of the veil, that allows, over time, all sorts of heterogeneous meanings to be projected on to the book as we endlessly wonder what it is that is behind the veil. The veil here functions like an engine or productive device that ensures that the text continue to produce meaning for readers and that we return to it again and again.

I’ve always thought that Lacan’s parable of Zeuxis and Pharrhasios was the core of his analytic teaching, perfectly exemplifying the aim of psychoanalytic treatment. We’re all familiar with the Lacanian thesis that the end of analysis consists in traversing the fantasy and discovering that the big Other does not exist. But what does that really mean? With Lacan the point that should always be borne in mind is that the three different subject positions– neurosis (hysteria/obsession), psychosis, and perversion (there is no “normal”) –are structures of intersubjectivity or ways of relating to the Other. The neurotic relates to the Other’s demand, trying to repress the enigma of the Other’s desire, the pervert relates to the Other’s jouissance, and the psychotic has foreclosed the Other altogether. The neurotic suffers from desire. Here we should recall that, according to Lacan, “desire is the desire of the Other”. The ambiguity of the genitive in this little aphorism drawn from Kojeve allows us to interpret desire as the desire of the Other as simultaneously signifying that the subject desires the Other (that the Other is an object of the neurotic’s desire) and, more fundamentally, that the neurotic desires to be desired by the Other. The neurotic therefore suffers from a persistent and frustrating question: “what am I for the Other?” “what does the Other want from me?”

read on!
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