Hot off the virtual press.
Posted by | Chris | 18.6.11 | No Comments
Essays by Paul Ennis, Graham Harman and others (plus the sound of your brain) in Continent:
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/issue/current
The first issue of the long awaited Thinking Nature:
http://thinkingnaturejournal.com/volume-1/
The Future Is...
Posted by | Chris | 29.12.10 | 4 Comments
I've got a great deal of respect for Shaviro's Whiteheadianism; Whitehead is perhaps my favourite philosopher and Shaviro's work has done a great deal to present and make clear the relevancy of Whitehead to contemporary debates. I love Shaviro's application of Whitehead to contemporary technological and cultural questions too. However, in the current debate I find I'm more keenly aware of Whitehead's shortcomings than of his sometimes daring, but always urbane, contributions to philosophy.
Graham Harman has often made clear his debt and appreciation to Whitehead, but equally he has been quick to point out the difficulties presented by Whitehead's ontology. Primary amongst these is Whitehead's relationism. For Harman any ontology defined entirely by its relations is unable to account for change. If any entity is defined by it's relations then it is exhaustively defined, there is nothing beyond its relations and hence nothing which might act as a motor for change in the entity.
I find it interesting that while Whitehead's realtionism is the main point of argument in Harman's reply, he makes no mention of 'decision' which holds a central place in Shaviro's Whiteheadian rebuttals to OOO. In Whitehead's philosophy decision is the final act whereby entities become what they are. It is the selection among alternatives which gives each entity its particular view on the world. Recently Shaviro has suggested that some variant of panpsychism might more usefully address problems in the sciences (as opposed to a focus on 'life') by considering mentality incipient in all things. This mentality Shaviro construes in terms of decision.
Perhaps the reason Harman does not address decision is that a criticism of it is implicit in his attack on Whitehead's relationism:
As [Whitehead] puts it early in Process and Reality: ‘The analysis of an actual entity into “prehensions” is that mode of analysis which exhibits the most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities’. In other words, to speak of actual entities in terms of anything but their prehensions is a mere abstraction; the entities themselves are concrescences, or systems of prehensions.(Response to Shaviro: 296).The entities of Whitehead's ontology are nothing but their relations and there is not substance or power left over which could make any decision.
I fear that Harman may be right about this. There are further problems for Shaviro and Whitehead when one considers God's role in every actual entity's decision (the freedom of which is extremely questionable). And yet I'm not willing to concede an absolute victory to Harman in this case. Whitehead's metaphysics may not be riddled with difficulties (or possibly incoherent), but there is more in it than Harman's argument implies.
For one, I reject Whitehead's ontological principle as the measure of his metaphysics. This is contrary to Whitehead's explicit intentions, but it seems to me that Whitehead himself fails to maintain the principle. If the reason for any change is to be found in actual entities then the notion of an actual entity must be expanded to include the eternal objects. This brings me to my second objection: I strongly disagree with Harman's characterisation of 'eternal objects'.
[Whitehead] thinks that qualities pre-exist: he calls them ‘eternal’, after all, and links them with the Platonic forms. No new qualities can ever be produced for Whitehead, for all his reputation as a philosopher of novelty: what is produced in his view is simply new constellations of actual entities, prehended according to pre-existing eternal objects (Ibid: 298).Whitehead certainly deserves some of the blame for this - I wish he'd called his potentials anything but 'eternal' - but Harman's linking them to Platonic forms (in a pejorative sense) needs some explanation. There's little question that Whitehead is a Platonist, but to suggest that his metaphysics conforms to two-worlds ontology of forms is to do a disservice both thinkers.
In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead explicates his metaphysics as a doctrine of immanent law by way of Plato's definition of being as power:
My suggestion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another even for a moment, however trifling the cause and however slight and momentary the effect, has real existence; and that the definition of being is simply power (Plato, Sophist, 247E).A powers ontology is a long way from the traditional two-worlds ontology traditionally attributed to Plato. To similarly complicate Whitehead's ontology, would be to include eternal objects in the creative generation of the actual entities in the manner promised by Whitehead if not delivered.
To pull Whitehead in this direction is to make him something like a philosopher of the rumbling apeiron of thinkers like Grant (see below) and Harman is clear that he rejects interpreting Whitehead in this way:
You can say what you like about Whitehead […] being interested in process and history. But the real point for them is that all such process is produced by the work of individual entities—a claim that would merely be nonsense for Deleuze, Bergson, Simondon, DeLanda, and Grant (Response to Shaviro: 294).Pushing Whitehead to his limits however, I have often wondered how far he extends his claim to the contingency of the laws of nature? Is the process of actual occasions also contingent? What power determines them? Might it be argued that actual entities are themselves the products of powers and therefore not the "individual entities" doing the work?
Having come this far from Whitehead's original intention however, it has to be asked if we're strictly Whiteheadians any more. Nor would any of this answer Harman's criticisms of Relationism. But I continue to find The Speculative Turn an exhilarating read suggestive of so many possibilities. I wish Shaviro all the best and I'm totally intrigued by OOO; I'm really excited to see where it goes.
Deviant Intellectual Heirs
Posted by | Chris | 27.12.10 | 4 Comments
Harman's chapter repeats in condensed form some of his recent arguments about philosophies which undermine and overmine objects. Objects are considered either as merely surface effects of some deeper becoming (undermined), or as the bundles of qualities, events, actions and effects which explain away the weirdness of objects (overmined). Harman's primary target in this chapter is the undermining ontology (as he sees it) of Iain Grant - a naturephilosophy of rumbling productivity which makes horses and minerals ephemeral appearances with no power or autonomy of their own.
What is made wonderfully apparent in this chapter (and in Grant's reply) is the way in which despite all of their agreements - and there are many - what separates them is their attitude to substance and power, with each of them coming down on a different side of the argument between Aristotle (Harman) and Plato (Grant).
Harman's chapter proceeds by elucidating comparisons between Grant and Giordano Bruno, another philosopher for whom objects are appearances of a deeper becoming. What Harman opposes in this is the way in which objects are rescinded any power of their own, being mere accidents of the real power underlying everything. Objects have no autonomy or independent existence under such an conception according to Harman and might be said to barely exist at all. What has reality, at the cost of the autonomy of objects, is the primordial becoming subtending the appearance of those objects:
Much as with neo-Platonism, things happen only vertically by retardation, contraction, or emanation from some more primal layer of the world. There is little room for horizontal interactions, as when fire burns cotton or rock shatters window.Grant's reply is brief, though characteristically dense, and repeats his often quoted- for his students at least - arguments about the dependence or antecedence of bodies and powers.
The thoroughgoing contingency of natural production undermines, I would claim, any account of permanently actual substantial forms ['objects'] precisely because such contingents entail the actuality not simply of abstractly separable forms, but of the powers that sculpt them.This argument is one that I'm inclined to side with Grant on, but one that is also a continuing project for me. Grant's reply is not long enough to be really satisfying. He mentions briefly that any consideration of the implications of Harman's retooling of occasionalism must wait for another time which only makes me want to read more. Grant's book has probably arrived from the Book Depository for me by now, but in Bristol which is annoying.
One little phrase used by Harman in his introduction really made me smile, and gave me something to aspire to. Speaking of the book in the context of his dystopian imaginings of the philosophical landscape in 2050 divided between the four schools of Speculative Realism he says: "we can get down to work and move slowly toward the epic battles of four decades hence, to be carried on posthumously by our deviant intellectual heirs".
Looking then to increase my deviancy I wonder what to read next; may Shaviro vs. Harman for round two?
The Speculative Turn
Posted by | Chris | 26.12.10 | 1 Comment
The Speculative Turn, edited by Graham Harman, Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek, is now available in book form and in a free to download PDF! I was about to read some more Cyclonopedia but I can't wait to read Graham Harman and Iain H Grant fight it out in print.Introduction
The Segregation of the World
Posted by | Chris | 4.8.10 | No Comments
Chapter three of Prince of Networks looks at Latour's book "We Have Never Been Modern". Latour's arguments puts him forward as an exciting metaphysician and a philosophical ally to any speculative realism. The central theme of Never Been Modern is to identify the division of nature and society and to resist this division.
Modernity tries to purify the world by dissecting it into two utterly opposed realm. On one side we have the human sphere, composed of transparent freedom and ruled by arbitrary and incommensurable perspectives. On the other side we have nature or the external world, made up of hard matters of fact and acting with objective, mechanical precision (Prince of Networks: 57).This modernity, bequeathed to us by the enlightenment, for instance in the work of Kant and the physics of Newton, has a terrible legacy. Responses to the human/world divide often work within the split rather than attempting to work before it.
[Latour is not] anti-modern, since this sect oddly accepts modernism's claim to have transformed everything that came before, and merely adds the minus sign of pessimism [...]. And he is also no postmodern since this group severs itself from the reality of actants to float pretentiously amidst collage and simulacrum (PoN: 58).To refuse the modernist segregation of the world we begin a project in philosophy that takes us to be a part of and product of the world.
All of which reminded me of this cartoon and its translation into a fun Youtube project:
Karl Rove Vs. Kant's Copernican Revolution
Posted by | Chris | 1.8.10 | 1 Comment
I’m reading Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks at the moment. I realised recently that by following his blog I read Harman every day. He writes clearly and wittily which is a great advert for his books and so I decided it was time to read a fuller work than just a blog post.
The subtitle to Prince of Networks is “Bruno Latour and Metaphysics” which precisely explains the purpose of the book: to present Latour, a sociologist and anthropologist, “as a key figure in metaphysics – a title he has sought but rarely received” (5). Divided into two sections, the first presents an overview of four of Latour’s most important works; the second is an appraisal and criticism of Latour in light of Harman’s own Object Oriented Ontology.
Chapter one examines Irreductions and introduces Latour’s metaphysics through four key terms: actants, irreductions, translations and alliance. What makes Latour such an interesting philosopher is his ontology of actants. For Latour there is no dividing line between humans and the world, everything is an actant and in this flat ontology all actants enjoy the democracy of objects. Latour is then an ally in any speculative philosophy wanting to overthrow the orthodoxy of post-Kantian metaphysics.
A rhetorical flourish used by Latour and emulated by Harman is what Ian Bogost has called a “Latour Litany”. Latour Litanies are lists of disparate objects strung together, their juxtaposition in any sentence and the equality of written expression reflecting the fact that no object or actant is metaphysically distinguished. “[F]rozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers” (We Have Never Been Modern: 49-50), all these things are actants and humans are actants too.
Irreduction is a concept I find more difficult but my understanding is that no actant can be reduced to any other. There are levels of complexity and actants may be complex alliances composed of other actants but there is no fundamental substance or form. All actants are equally ontologically valid.
Translation is the causality of Latours metaphysics. Latour is an actualist, there are no portentials or uninstantiated powers and every actant is an event that happens only once. Translation is then the way in which actants are made mobile, stable and concrete by a causal chain of abstraction.
Finally, alliances are the ways in which actants increase their power and reach in the world. Since actants do not have potentiality or substance it is only by enlisting other actants that changes in any system are affected. For Latour every relation between actants is a conflict and it is the more powerful (better connected) actants which win out and get to organise things their way. Networks of this type do not have centres or tyrannical actant dictators however since every part of the network is a relation between actants all networks and all communication are mediated.
Harman’s writing is even better in an monograph than it is on his blog. I have found the book so far to be illuminating, exciting and a really great pleasure to read. It’s unusual to laugh out loud while reading philosophy but I have done precisely this on more than one occasion.
One section in particular describes the way in which alliances of actants may be dissolved by attacking the strengths which hold it together. “Severing an actant from its allies is easier than it sounds, since allies are never as submissive […] as we think” (51). Yet to sever an actant from its alliances one must be an actant in an alliance capable of such a translation.
To illustrate a clash of actant alliances Harman describes Karl Rove taking on Kant’s philosophical legacy:
Let’s imagine that, in our efforts to counter the dominance of Kant’s Copernican Revolution we, we hire Karl Rove as a consultant. Since Kant has the reputation of a quiet, ascetic seeker after truth, Rove might begin by spreading rumours of Kant’s secret moral turpitude (52).
The rumours might even turn out to be true with a correspondence between Kant and the Marquis de Sade uncovered “[b]ut even with Kant unmasked as a shocking hypocrite, no one’s philosophical position will change very much” (52).
Rove’s next ploy involves uncovering documents revealing Kant’s published philosophical work to be a hoax. A document proven to be in Kant’s hand reveals the whole edifice to be an elaborate ruse. Yet:
in the end most observers would probably conclude that it is not so important whether Kant meant what he said. Kant’s arguments would still be taken seriously insofar as they have genuine merit independent of Kant’s sardonic intent (53).
Finally Rove learns of the criticisms made of Kant’s philosophy by a few dissenters. He begins to study philosophy.
Within a few years he prepares his first philosophical case against Kantian philosophy […]. After another two decades of research, the elderly Rove is now a philosophical juggernaut, hailed in many quarters as the most original metaphysician of the century (53).
To assemble the [alliances] needed to defeat the great philosopher Kant, Karl Rove had to become a great philosopher himself […]. Rove’s attempt to ‘socially construct’ the reputation of Immanuel Kant has failed. Instead, the ideas of Kant have constructed the new life of Karl Rove” (53).
More books
Posted by | Anonymous | 29.6.10 | 1 Comment
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