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"For one thing that I have found really interesting about the turn to speculative realism is that is has clearly been fuelled by online communities which have turned above all to blogs as an important means of swapping material, revealing first thoughts, and making revisions. I doubt that the growth of speculative realism would have been so insistent without these communities scattered all over the world, or so rapid. Why?"
Videos of Patricia Clough, Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, Graham Harman.
"The real, then, is that which holds open the potential for the new. We can never fully know what’s real. The more we look, the more we see. Endlessly. It’s turtles all the way down, but not quite the same turtles. They keep morphing. And become doves.
All the way down.
And, that, I believe, is what object oriented ontologists are driving at when they make these strange assertions about how objects are withdrawn, how they withhold themselves – not merely from us (for it’s not about us at all, this is not us-oriented ontology, after all) – but from one another. There’s always more object there. Our nervous system can never fully assimilate an object, a real object, to its familiar patterns – which is, incidentally, what nervous systems are ‘designed’ to do, more or less, but not always, not in emergencies.
Objects are withdrawn. They withhold themselves. There’s always something more."
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These are imbroglios, where humans and nonhumans are bound up with one another in complex networks without any particular actor or object standing above the rest. And this, in the end, is what immanence or flat ontology means: a single world characterized by imbroglios, where no actor or object stands outside the others. Perhaps there are gods and spirits, but if there are then they do not stand apart from being or outside of the world, but are caught in imbroglios like all other objects.
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Just as all other objects find themselves caught up in imbroglios with other objects, this requires first that signs, for example, are caught up in imbroglios with non-semiotic objects rather than circulating throughout the world in a smooth space without resistance or encounters with density. If I have been attracted to the concept of memes, then this is because the concept of memes approaches this dimension of imbroglios with respect to signs.
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The first revolves around the Lacanian category of the symbolic and the function of fantasy. If the Lacanian Real– not to be confused with reality –is so disturbing, then this is because it explodes all the boundaries of the symbolic. Very roughly, the symbolic can be thought of as a sort of web thrown over the world that allows the world to appear organized, totalized, and well sorted into a system of categories. Here there is no better reference for understanding the symbolic than Levi-Strauss and, in particular, The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked. Through the simple semiotic categories of the raw (nature) and the cooked (culture), contends Levi-Strauss, the “primitive” mind is able weave a web of signs and narratives that creates an interface between nature and culture. Through this activity, the alien world of nature becomes heimlich or a “home” with familiar coordinates and relations that we can navigate.
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For Lacan a fantasy is not a pleasant imaginary scenerio that we languish privately in the shower. No. Fantasy refers to the frame through which we organize our relation to the world and to others. This in two ways. On the one hand, others are opaque to us. We never know what they’re thinking, what they want, or how they see us. Fantasy provides the answer to that question, creating a sort of schema, not unlike a mathematical function where any random variable we encounter can be placed in the argument position to generate a value according to a rule, that allows us to thematize how others see us, what they want, and what they think of us. If Freud’s encounter with his image as other is uncanny, if it explodes the sustaining framework of his unconscious fantasy organizing interpersonal relations, then this is because, in this fleeting moment, he encounters the otherness of the other or the fact that he cannot master his own image. He sees himself as an other might see him, not as his narcissistic fantasy structure portrays him to himself. His image becomes an object in excess of his self; an object that he cannot master.
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Much of the discussion has revolved around the conflict between actor-network theory and Marxist thought on the issue of totalization. ANT theorists are notorious for making claims like “society does not exist” and “capitalism does not exist”. Of course, such a claim is intolerable from a Marxist perspective insofar as Marxist requires that the social field is totalized by certain modes of production at a particular point in time. A charitable interpretation of these claims made by ANT theorists is that they are rhetorical exhortations to examine the relations among actors in networks.
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Depending on how it is theorized, it seems to me that the Marxists are clearly correct when they talk about totalization. The problem with ANT is that although it places “network” between “actor” and “theory”, somehow networks seem to get short shrift and all the emphasis gets placed on the side of actors. What is missed is the emergence of self-sustaining negentropic networks in which the actors in the network become dependent on one another in the replication or reproduction of the network. Just as Latour would like, these networks are composed of heterogeneous and autonomous actors, but insofar as the relations they enter into are characterized by negentropy, the network comes to organize subsequent adventures of actors in the network. In other words, the network functions like an ecology setting constraints for the actors within the network.
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Throughout his post John draws a distinction between reality or the “really real” and illusion. But it is precisely this distinction that is undermined by the ontic principle. As I argue in my post on Flat Ontology, there are not two worlds– one consisting of the really real or “mind-independent objects” and another consisting of mind and the social –but rather only one world, the real, of which mind is counted as a member. Consequently, the first point to make is that the phenomena that take place in the mind regarding the game are themselves real.
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What is taking place in the mind regarding the game is an instance of what I call translation. The principle of translation states that there is no transportation of a difference without a transformation or translation of that difference. In other words, in the interaction between the game and mind a difference is conveyed from one domain (the game) to another (the mind). In being received by the mind– or, for me, more preferably, the brain –that difference is reorganized or transformed in a variety of system-specific ways precisely as John describes. However, the important caveat made by the object-oriented ontologist is that this process of translation is true not simply of mind-object interactions, but of all object-object interactions regardless of whether or not minds are involved. In other words, translation is every bit as much a phenomenon characterizing the interaction of rocks with sunlight as it is of frogs tracking “flies” and humans regarding the Game of Life. There is no object that receives differences from other objects like a glassy reflection in a mirror… Including mirrors themselves! Rather, for every interaction between objects there is a translation and a transformation. As such, translation is not an epistemological limitation that prevents us from ever getting at the “true things in themselves”, but is rather a general ontological feature of all inter-ontic relations among objects. Translation is an ontological process.
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Benoît, criticizing what I call the hegemonic fallacy, remarks that he’s never heard anyone defend the position that there is one difference that makes all the difference. He’s right, you won’t find a single thinker in all of the history of philosophy claiming that there is one difference that makes all of the difference. However, like many fallacies, the hegemonic fallacies occurs not in the positions people defend, but in how they proceed in practice. While no reasonable person would make the claim that there is one difference that makes all the difference, there are a number of thinkers that nonetheless behave as if there were a type of difference that makes all the difference.
Today we interview Levi R. Bryant, author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence and co-editor (along with Graham Harman and Nick Srnicek of the forthcoming The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Many of you will also know Levi from his excellent blog Larval Subjects.
Part of a series of posts on modernism, philosophy, speculative realism. On the relation of speculative realism to literature: names Calvino and Ben Marcus.
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If we are looking for literary equivalents of Object-Oriented Ontology or Onticology, we would do better to look at the realisms of Italo Calvino in Cosmicomics and T Zero, or, better yet, the strange world depicted Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. In The Age of Wire and String Ben Marcus depicts a fantastic reality that is paradoxically more real than any sort of realism we might find in Mark Twain. Here we have a world of imbricated relations between human and nonhuman actors where we can no longer claim that humans are at the center of things, or even where the human begins and ends. In short, what we get is a network of heterogeneous actors forming a collectivity.
Part of a series of posts on modernism, philosophy, speculative realism.
Crucial reading of "Circulating Reference" by Latour
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Philosophical epistemology begins from a stark opposition between words (or, alternatively mental representations) on the one hand, and world, on the other hand. Like the King’s soldiers, it then wonders how it is possible to put these two sundered halves together again. It is not difficult to see how it might be possible to cook up a theory of reference for propositions such as “the cat is on the mat”, but what could adequation between word and “thing” possibly mean for propositions like “the savanna is advancing on the jungle” or “the jungle is advancing on the Savannah”? What would a mental representation or mimesis between idea and world be in such a case? What are the inscrutable markers we find in our mental representation that establish such a correspondence? What resemblance is there between this proposition or statement and the world that it depicts? Posed in this way the question seems irresolvable as we either remain a “mind-in-a-vat” with no access to anything save our own mental representations (and therefore without the means of distinguishing the marks of the true from the false in our representations), or, equivalently, a “speaker-in-a-vat” with no means of distinguishing the marks that distinguish the true and the false in our propositions.
The whole problem, Latour contends, lies in the fact that philosophers always begin too late.
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The entire problem emerges because philosophy begins with its “knowledge-datum” as it appears at dusk, but does so without being aware that it is doing so. In other words, beginning with the product of knowledge labor as inscribed in a text such as the Principia or the Elements, philosophy then proceeds to inquire into how the propositions that compose this product resemble or mimic true reality such that they are adequate to that reality. As a result it finds itself plunged into irresolvable difficulties because, of course, reality shares no resemblance to either these mental representations or these propositions. In other words, when conceiving knowledge as a mimetic adequation between mind and world, word and world, we very quickly encounter an unsurpassable gap between the two. What possible resemblance is there between a chemical equation and the transformation that takes place in a beaker in the laboratory? The two could not be more unlike.
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