Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches William L. Benzon January 2013 This document sketchs a pluralist metaphysical system various inspired by the ideas of Bruno Latour, Paul Feyerabend, Graham Harman, J.J. Gibson and William James. The system can be summarized in eight propositions as follows: 1. Objects: Individual entities of many different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. Abundance: These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. 3. Realms of Being: In the large objects exist in patterns of relatively stable interactions among multiple objects. These are relations of indirect or vicarious causality. 4. Unity of Being: Humans desire the ability to access and reflect on memories of events in one’s life. The extent that that is achieved is called Unity of Being. 5. Life Way: A Latourian collective, with human and non-human members, is considered to participate in all the Realms in which any member of the collective plays a role. The ‘envelope’ of those Realms is called a Life Way. 6. Latourian Negotiation: Collectives having different Life Ways have been interacting through a process of negotiation in which differences among Life Ways are resolved and commonalities created or not depending on the desire to extend the boundaries of the larger more inclusive collective. 7. Realms of Abundance: Realms of Being are organized into Realms of Abundance, of which three have appeared to far: Matter, Life, and Culture. 8. The Fourth Arena: The current global Latourian negotiation brings us to the edge of a fourth Arena of Abundance. If it goes well, that’s where our successors will dwell.
From Literary Criticism to Pluralist Metaphysics, an Introduction ................................................. 1 Prelude: The Living Cosmos ............................................................................................................ 6 From Objects to Pluralism ................................................................................................................ 8 Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism ............................................................................................... 16 Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2: Diagrams ........................................................................... 21 Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects ....................................... 25 Unity of Being and Ethical Criticism ............................................................................................. 30 Harman’s Ontology on a Single Level and Objects as Wells of Abundance ................................. 34 What’s an Object, Anything, Everything? ..................................................................................... 38 Matter, Life, and Culture (so far) ................................................................................................... 41 Unity of Being ................................................................................................................................ 46 Unity of Being 2: Choosing Life Ways .......................................................................................... 52 Facing up to Relativism: Negotiating the Commons ..................................................................... 57 Pluralism in Review: The Eightfold Way ...................................................................................... 64 Coda: The Abundance Principle and The Fourth Arena ................................................................ 71 Appendix 1: Something Big this Way Comes—Do We Live in a Pluriverse? .............................. 73 Appendix 2: Cog Sci and Lit Theory, A Chronology .................................................................... 76 Appendix 3: R. E. Shaw, Eco-Psych, Pluralism, Schrödinger’s Cat .............................................. 79 Appendix 4: Of Factish Gods and Modes of Existence ................................................................. 81 Appendix 5: An Eightfold Metaphysics ......................................................................................... 86 222 Van Horne St., 3R Jersey City, NJ 07304 201.217.1010
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From Literary Criticism to Pluralist Metaphysics, an Introduction
To the extent that I’ve got a home discipline, it is literary criticism. Consequently, though I DO know better, I tend to think of philosophy as a hand-maiden to literary criticism. That’s where this introduction begins, with literary criticism, which has provided the problems that, once again, led me to philosophy. After indicating how philosophy has pointed a way out of those problems I turn to philosophy itself. I conclude by discussing the order of posts in this document as a whole.
The Road to Xanadu, as it were The posts I’ve collected at the end of this post resulted from a decision I made some time in the first half of 2011: Let’s look into this object-oriented ontology business. But why had I made THAT wacky decision? After all, as I’ve explained in a series of posts about Lévi-Strauss, I’d abandoned that intellectual tradition early in my career when I’d decided that this new-fangled cognitive science seemed more promising for my particular critical interests. Why return to Continental philosophy, the tradition I’d abandoned? It certainly WASN’T because I’d decided that I’d made a mistake. Oh careerwise, yes, a mistake. Intellectually, not at all. The problem I was tracking was a rhetorical one. My work on literature, and now film, differed from 1) traditional humanist work, 2) post-structuralist, new historical, and various identity theories, all of which rolls up into capital-Tee Theory, and 3) from the work that more recent literary scholars, working independently of me, have done in cognitive criticism. That’s a lot of difference! The chief differences are two: 1) to practice what I now call naturalist criticism one must abandon, or at least bracket, the search for textual meaning, and 2) while naturalist criticism aspires to, well, everything! the single most important task on the critical horizon is description, we’ve got to get much better descriptive control of our texts. Given that the post-philological discipline of academic criticism is built on the search for textual meaning that first difference would seem to be something of a showstopper, no? But in truth, my goal was not so much to convince literary critics to follow me, but simply to assure them that I am not the enemy. Still even for that more limited purpose, that I’m willing to forgo meaning seems a bit, well, dangerous. Who knows what craziness might follow from that? As for description, no one objects to it, everyone does it, but it’s not glamorous. There’s an old formula that says aesthetic criticism begins with description, and then moves to analysis, interpretation, and, finally, evaluation. Academic critics have tossed evaluation out the door, though we have smuggled it in through the basement in the guise of ideological and political critique, while concentrating our attention on interpretation. Description is simply taken for granted. How could I possibly be doing anything at all worthwhile if I regard description as something that is rigorous, demanding, and deserving of our most serious attention. So, in bracketing meaning I mark myself as an enemy, more or less. And in championing description I mark myself as simple-minded and unimaginative. Those are rather considerable rhetorical hurdles to jump. Now I suppose that in some vague way I was hoping that I could cloak the appearance of being a simple-minded wolf with the razzle-dazzle of an object-oriented sheepskin. But there’s no direct way one can pursue such a disguise. Directly, what I was after was 1) an ethical and aesthetic complement to my work and 2) a somewhat different way of rationalizing that work.
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By the time the great ethics scandal broke in the middle of 2012 I’d pretty much decided that object-oriented ontology (OOO) was a bust on both counts. On the second matter, rationalization, object-oriented ontology fails me because it’s not about objects in a sense useful to me, which is akin to what Franco Moretti is pursuing in distant reading. The purpose of “distance” is to allow the critic to treat the text as an object, “out there.” That’s what I do. And I do it because such objectification allows one to see fascinating and, yes, even beautiful and elegant patterns that are rendered invisible through the pursuit of meaning. Describing those patterns is a task worthy of any serious intellectual. Latour understands the importance of description, but these, his fellow-traveling disciples seem oblivious to that side of his work. On the first matter, ethics and aesthetics, I decided that OOO was neither fish nor foul, tree nor grass, here nor there. Yes, Morton and Bogost were pursing aesthetic and ethical matters, and, yes, Bryant is against capitalism and in favor of emancipation, but so what? That doesn’t help me clarify the relationship between naturalist criticism and ethics and aesthetics. In the wake of that first blog-storm about OOO and ethics I decided I had little choice but to take a little of this and that from OOO and sketch out my own metaphysics, a pluralist one. Why pluralism? For one thing Latour often talked of the “pluriverse”—I’m thinking particularly of Politics of Nature—and referenced William James. While I’m certainly not a Jamesian, I’ve read a bit—big chunks of Varieties of Religious Experience and Principles of Psychology—and so Latour’s references resonated with talks I’d had with David Hays about Realms of Being and with thoughts I’d had in the wake of Charles Tart’s speculations on the epistemological implications of psychedelic experience. And soon after I started down this path Terrence Blake jumped in with observations about Feyerabend and his notion of abundance, an idea Hays and I had picked up some years ago from John Horgan’s The End of Science, and which Hays had termed fecundity. The universe is fecund, it is abundant. So, I replaced Harmanian withdrawal with Feyerabendian abundance and sketched out my own system: objects, Realms of Being, Life Ways, and Arenas of Abundance. I hit pay dirt in a post on Unity of Being and Ethical Criticism. While the phrase “unity of being” is an old and venerated one it hadn’t entered my discourse until I wrote that post. Ethical criticism—I have that from Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Booth’s an old school critic best-known for The Rhetoric of Fiction, which I’ve owned, but never read cover-to-cover. But I have read, and quite enjoyed, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, a personal book he wrote about the joys of amateur music-making. I learned about The Company We Keep from Rohan Maitzen (of Novel Readings1), one of my colleagues at the now-defunct literary blog, The Valve.2 Rohan’s main concern was reaching a non-academic audience. She had a blog of her own, which, I presume, is where one of the other Valvsters found her, where she had been writing about her teaching and about literary matters that interested her, including 19th Century literary criticism, which was ethnical in nature. At The Valve she initiated a group reading of Adam Bede in the summer of 2009.3 She published a weekly schedule of readings and, at the beginning of the week, post comments on that week’s reading. Then other members of the group—which were mostly readers of The Valve rather than authors—would comment on her post. I thought it was an interesting and successful event, just the sort of thing literary academics could and should be doing on the web. During these conversations she mentioned Wayne Booth’s concept of coduction, which was, roughly, that as various people read and discuss a text, they participate in one another’s experience of the text so that their judgments about the text are collective ones and not merely individual. That resonated with me as I had had some 1
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings/ http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/archive_author/rmaitzen/Rohan%20Maitzen 3 http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/summer_reading_project_adam_bede/ 2
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email correspondence with the late Mary Douglas about the shareability of cultural objects, such as literary texts, songs, dances, and so forth. I asked Rohan where Booth discusses that idea and she told me. So I bought the book, read around in it, and set it aside for possible later use. And it came roaring out as I discussed literary criticism within the context of a pluralist metaphysics. By this time I had imported an argument that the nervous system forces experience into various neurochemically-coded behavioral modes, an idea David Hays and I had found in Warren McCulloch, and that story-telling was a way of securing subjective continuity across those different bodies of experience. That is, stories help us attain Unity of Being. As there is more than one way to skin that particular cat, one must choose what stories to affirm and one ordinarily makes such choices in concert with one’s fellows. That choice is an ethical one in the largest sense of ethos, a way of life. I now had what I’d been searching for, a common framework in which I see the relationship between my own work in naturalist criticism and ethnical criticism. The naturalist critic is concerned only with what’s there in the text such that people can construct meanings. The ethical critic constructs meanings and gauges them in the context of a particular way of life. Thus put, the idea seems rather banal, rather obvious. The devil, they say, is in the details. And you will find some of those in subsequent posts. As for description, I don’t discuss that at all, as that’s deep in the interior of literary criticism and thus of no direct concern to philosophy. The crucial notion, though, is that the naturalist and the ethical critic can work from the same descriptive base. At THIS point in my metaphysical blogging I’d gotten what I’d set out to get when I started nosing around Tim Morton’s posts about object-oriented ontology at Arcade and then at his own blog, Ecology Without Nature. But, having started out to sketch a system, I had to complete the sketch, which I did. The problem was to deal with the fact that we humans have multiple cultures dictating often quite different ways of handling such matters and marriage and family. What do we do about THAT? We negotiate, in the manner Latour describes in the final chapter of Politics of Nature, which I recast within my own framework. Let’s return to object-oriented ontology.
Philosophy More Generally When I first began explicitly developing a pluralist metaphysics, in From Objects to Pluralism, I began by raising the question of philosophy’s relationship to other disciplines by quoting from Graham Harman’s interview in ASK/TELL.4 When I set out to summarize and conclude the series with Review: The Eightfold Way, I chose to start with the same passage. I want to round out this introductory exposition by once again taking up the relationship between philosophy and the other disciplines, though I’ll dispense with the passage from Harman, as you will twice find it in the main discussion. I have concluded two things: 1. Philosophy cannot provide the foundations for the naturalist study of literature or of anything else. 2. Philosophy can and indeed ought to provide the foundations for ethical discussions. As you will not find those assertions anywhere in the main argument, it is perhaps strange to include them in an introduction. But where else could I put them? Concerning naturalist inquiry, I note that, historically, inquiry of all kinds has preceded the philosophical examination of such inquiry and that, practically, investigators do with their work 4
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without attending to what philosophers have to say about their practice. Though Harman claims for philosophy a kind of knowledge of objects that the specialized disciplines lack, he does not claim that their work would improve if they knew what they philosopher knows. This is certainly true of the sciences, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, which have gone their own ways unhindered by what philosophers have had to say about them. If you want to understand how something works, you need to have a deep and intimate feel for the phenomena, often, but not always, obtained through the mediation of complex instrumentation. The philosopher of science must necessarily be at one or more removes from such phenomenal engagement. One might object that this is not the case for literary criticism and similar disciplines in recent decades, which have sought, and found, philosophical grounding. That is not, in my view, an objection at all. Rather literary criticism falls under the scope of my second statement. It is an ethnical discipline and so properly seeks philosophical foundations. As Booth argued in The Company We Keep, most literary criticism IS ethnical, broadly considered. While the profession has explicitly denied the evaluative activity required by ethical deliberation, the political concerns that have been so much an aspect of literary criticism ARE evaluative and ethnical. Such critics are using texts as a way of making statements about how life should be lived. Harman, of course, is not an ethicist nor an aesthetician, he is a metaphysician. Whatever claim he is making on behalf of philosophy vis-à-vis the other disciplines, he is not claiming that philosophers know something about quarks and gravity that physicists don’t, or that they know something about co-valent bonds that chemists don’t, or that they know something about mitosis and meiosis and that biologists don’t, and so forth, though he seems to talk that way. What Harman knows is that objects are always and always withdrawing. You can’t know everything about any one thing. Thus crudely put the often puzzling idea of withdrawal hardly seems controversial. What, then, is it that metaphysicians can know that others don’t? Levi Bryant is tracking that down under the aegis of onto-cartography, the mapping of being. I’ve got severe criticisms of his enterprise, which I’ve voiced in a series of posts.5 Briefly and colloquially put, he fails to see the forest for the threes. He cruises through dozens of disciplines by concocting summaries of key ideas that are often simply wrong, as in the case of entropy, complexity theory or networks, or are simply banal. His whole enterprise has the feel of an inept Theory of Everything, not a map of being, which is necessarily more abstract. Such a map, in effect, is what I have been sketching out in these posts on pluralism. I start with Harman’s conception of metaphysics as being about objects. But, as I’ve already indicated, I performed a gestalt switch on his concept of withdrawal.
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I talk, instead, of abundance. Objects are wells of abundance. As such they organize themselves into Realms of Being and Realms organize into Arenas of Abundance. That, in a nutshell, or, if you will, a grain of sand, is my argument. I leave you to judge its merits as you work your way through the rest of this document. Mapping those Realms and Arenas, that is necessarily the task of scholars who busy themselves, not with the affairs of one, two, or even three or four specialized disciplines, but of investigators who are interested in the Whole Shebang. Such investigators must necessarily negotiate the ongoing mapping with specialists in all the other disciplines. And we might as well call such scholars ontologists, metaphysicians, or even philosophers.
Order of things The main line of argument consists of a more or less copulative argument beginning with From Objects to Pluralism and ending with Pluralism in Review: The Eightfold Way. One might profitably read Unity of Being and Ethnical Criticism without the foregoing, provided ABC, but the last segments are likely to prove opaque without the preceding. I present these pieces as I originally posted them and have made no attempt to edit away gaps and inconsistencies. This is philosophy in the raw, take it or leave it. This main argument is bounded by a Prelude, The Living Cosmos, and a Coda, The Abundance Principle and the Fourth Arena. The prelude evokes the sense of the whole, that it is the cosmos itself that must be regarded as the seat of life (and of mind and culture) and so it must be considered to be a living being. The coda does the same, but from the perspective of one who has been through the whole argument as the Abundance Principle it discusses would be unintelligible without the preceding. If and when I revise and reconstruct the whole argument, that principle is likely to find its way into the main argument. The coda is followed by four supplementary posts. The first one, Something Big Thing This Way Comes, is the post in which I expressed doubts about object oriented ontology being the Next Big Thing, suggesting, instead, that it pluralism, though not in fact new, is a more likely candidate. Having said that, I had little choice but to elaborate. The second appendix, For the Historical Record: Cog Sci to Lit Crit, makes no argument at all. Rather, it supplements that first appendix, in which I invoked recent intellectual history about Big Things that Failed, namely, the so-called cognitive revolution and Theory. While these movements have both been intellectually productive, neither has been able to deliver the new and deeper understanding that promised. This second appendix charts the parallel courses of these two movements by listing major publications in each running from the 1950s into the mid 1980s. The third appendix, Eco-Psych, Pluralism, Schrödinger’s Cate quotes some passages of pluralist thinking from the psychologist Robert Shaw, who has followed in the footsteps of J. J. Gibson, whose work influenced me a great deal. In particular, he articulated an epistemology principle that tracks Harman’s notion of withdrawal fairly closely, but preceded it by several decades. The fourth appendix, Of Factish Gods and Modes of Existence, deals with Latour’s concept of a mode of existence, a concept that is similar to my concept of Realms of Being. Where Latour imagines a small fixed number of modes, fourteen, however, I imagine the Realms of Being already number in the 1000s, if not more, and may well multiple beyond that. The fifth and final appendix, The Eightfold Way, simply lists the cardinal points in the main argument without any supporting commentary. Those eight propositions are what this pluralism comes down to. Maybe it should only be five or six propositions; maybe it should be nine or ten. But that’s the neighborhood. And THAT’s the kind of construction it is, one that can be outlined in a small number of interlocked assertions.
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Prelude: The Living Cosmos
As I understand it the modern conception asserts that the cosmos is fundamentally inanimate. Dead. And then, somehow, life evolved. Miraculously. Except that we moderns don’t believe in miracles. So life isn’t a miracle. It’s merely a puzzle. One we have yet to solve. That non-miracle puzzle remains a mystery. Like consciousness. I have a suggestion: Let’s declare the cosmos to be fundamentally animate. Or at least fecund. Brimming with abundance. But not dead. No. Not dead. In urging such a declaration I do not intend, thereby, to dissolve the mystery, solve the puzzle, explain the miracle. As if by magic. Word magic. Spells. Incantation. Enchantment. Voodoo. Who do the voodoo that you do so well? Not at all. I just want to reframe the question, you know, the question that Chas. Ives was always asking. The unanswered one. It’s not an idle suggestion, nor unmotivated, nor even unreasonable. After all, that big bang, or whatever it was/is, was/is enormously productive. Wasn’t it? Well then, what sense does it make to say that it was/is dead? No. It’s alive. Animate. Fecund. Abundant. Which means that our story is no longer one of heroic struggle against and defiance of a dead universe. It is not a story of us against them. Of fragile conquest, belligerently maintained in the face of a hostile universe. Brrrrr! It is simply a story of us.
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All of us.
bosons quarks cathedrals atoms Sam Clemens molecules V2s RNA Buddha DNA cells slime molds yurts c. elegans mushrooms peacocks jelly fish Tezuka Osamu ants adding machines worms manga soup wheat Richard Pryor rabbits submarines buffalo fetishes ice bergs streams braids cocktail napkins Mt. Everest Joan of Arc Sun Yat-sen
and so forth etc. usw. ﻍغﯼیﺭرﻩه κτλ. 等等 osv. stb. 'וכו dll. итд. 기타 n.k.
∞ 7
From Objects to Pluralism . . . we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher, but to take example from our two recent speeches. The single general form which they postulated was irrationality; next on the analogy of a single natural body with its pairs of like-named members, right arm or leg, as we say, and left, they conceived of madness as a single objective form existing in human beings. Wherefore the first speech divided off a part on the left, and continued to make divisions . . . –Plato, Phaedrus (265e-266a)
Having hazarded that pluralism is the Next Big Thing6 I now feel some obligation to clarify what I mean by pluralism. As it’s object-oriented philosophy that brought me to this dance, I’ll use it as a vehicle for so doing. First, using a passage from a Graham Harman interview, I raise the question of the relationship between philosophy and the more specialized disciplines. I then continue with Harman in a section where, in effect, I ask: What can we build with objects and relations alone? By way of illustration I bring up the case of knowledge representation in the cognitive sciences, where complex conceptual systems are constructed from just that, objects and relations. Then I take an excursion into the work of Levi Bryant, whose concept of regimes of attraction indicates the existence of relatively stable patterns of relationships over large collections of objects. I then go into full tap dance mode, suggesting that we can construct Realms of Being from that notion plus Harman's conception of indirect causation. Realms of Being, that the world consists of many different ever evolving Realms, THAT’s what I mean by pluralism. Given that, the task of metaphysics is to figure out what those Realms are and how they’re interlinked. I conclude with some more general remarks.
A General Theory of Objects? As a way of setting the stage, consider the following passage from Graham Harman’s interview at ASK/TELL:7 . . . the reason to focus on objects rather than on “language, social change, sexuality or animals” is because philosophy is obliged to be global in scope. If philosophy were to give one of these other entities a starring role, it would have to reduce the rest of the universe to them. “Language is the root of everything.” Here, you are choosing one specific kind of entity to be the root of all others, and there is no basis for this. Sociology tends to view all reality in terms of its emergence from human societies and beliefsystems. Psychology treats all reality as made up primarily of mental phenomena. Physics deals with tiny physical objects and says that everything is made out of them, except that physics is useless when trying to explain things like metaphors, the Italian Renaissance, the meaning of dreams, and so forth. All these other disciplines focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world. Only philosophy can be a general theory of objects, describing Symbolist poetry and the interaction of cartoon characters just as easily as the slamming together of two comets in distant space.
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My immediate and quite spontaneous reaction to that was a less than charitable: And just what can philosophy tell me about cartoon characters? I asked that question in my capacity as someone who has a specialized interest in cartoons and so has spent hours upon hours going through cartoons scene by scene, shot by shot, and even frame by frame, trying to figure out how these things work. It would be too much to expect a philosopher to look at cartoons in such detail. But just what WOULD I expect of a philosopher? I don’t need a philosopher to tell me that Popeye is, in some sense, real. I know that already, that’s why I care about them and study them. Nor do I need a philosopher to tell me about the difference between the real object on paper or in celluloid and the image in someone’s mind. That’s been around for a long time. I don’t see that philosophy has anything new and interesting to say about that. But then, just what does philosophy have to offer the other specialized disciplines? Do they have need of Harman’s “general theory of objects”? I have my doubts. Does ANYONE, other than philosophers, have need of a general theory of objects? If the answer to that question is “no” does that mean that such a theory has no use? We are now in very dangerous territory. I want to make one not-so-digressive remark and then continue on by suggesting that perhaps what philosophy has on offer, even Harman himself, is not quite or not merely a general theory of objects, but something nearby. That not-so-digressive remark is that literary criticism has, in the past few decades, drawn on various philosophies as interpretive systems. I figure that any half-way interesting philosophy can serve in that capacity and serve, not only literary criticism, but cultural criticism and related humanistic pursuits. Indeed, these disciplines tend to shade into philosophy, at least philosophy of the Continental kind, if not the Anglo-American kind. But Harman’s claim, it seems to me, is wider. He’s claiming, if I read him rightly, all of knowledge and not just the hermeneutical humanities. Philosophy, once again, is going to cover the whole territory. I think the claim is a valid one. I also believe we need to think, not just about objects, but about what I’m provisionally calling Realms of Being. Specifically, what I propose is that we use a general theory of objects in explicitly constructing an account of Realms of Being where the Realms constitute an unfolding large-scale organization of objects.
Building Materials: Objects and Relations Let us continue with Harman, who has said that his philosophy has two basic principles:8 1. Individual entities of various different scales (not just tiny quarks and electrons) are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. These entities are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. Objects withdraw from relation.
Yes. And furthermore, in The Quadruple Object Harman asserts that “the basic rift in the cosmos lies between objects and relations in general: between their autonomous reality outside all relation, and their caricatured form in the sensual life of other objects” (pp. 119-120). What I propose is that that’s all we need to construct an account of the Realms of Being, that and a university’s worth of knowledge from the specialized disciplines to inform the construction. Philosophy cannot exist in a vacuum. What do I have in mind? Something a bit like mathematics. Mathematicians build rich conceptual structures using only a few foundational notions. But mathematics is not my immediate model. Knowledge representation is. Knowledge representation arose in the cognitive sciences in the 1970s and 1980s where methods were needed to represent human knowledge in computers. Some investigators were interested in solving practical problems, e.g. so-called expert systems for 8
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medical diagnosis or the configuration of large computer systems, while others were interested in simulating human reasoning. In all cases researchers needed a way of representing knowledge in a form that was tractable by computers but also rich, flexible, and robust. Many schemes made us of graph theory, a branch of topology. A graph is a network:
In artificial neural networks the nodes in the graph represent neurons while the links between the nodes represent connections between neurons. In cognitive or semantic networks the nodes typically represent concepts while the links between nodes represent relations between concepts. Here’s a simple example:
This network, while it has fewer elements than the first one—and both are just very small fragments of real networks—is nonetheless more complicated because it has more information. The nodes and links are all labeled and those labels are important. Notice that we have two kinds of nodes, square and round. The round nodes are entities while the square ones, of which there is only one, are actions. Person, Fred, hit, bat, ball, and thing are all concepts.
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Correlatively, ISA (is-a), AGT (agent), STR (instrument) and OBJ (object) are relations between concepts. ISA means, well, is a: Fred is a person: bat and ball are things. Fred is an agent (AGT) in an act of hitting where bat is an instrument (STR) and ball is the object (OBJ)— where object is understood in a cognitive or linguistic sense, not a metaphysical one. So, in this little fragment we’ve got two kinds of concepts, entities and actions, and four kinds of relations between them, agent, instrument, object and is-a. This, of course, is only the tiniest fragment of a real cognitive network. And real networks have more than two kinds of concepts and four relations. Maybe we’ve got a dozen or more kinds of relations and a similar number of conceptual kinds. But not much more, as the idea is to represent as much knowledge as you can using as few primitive elements (concepts and relations) as you can. I’m proposing something similar in metaphysics. Harman says that the world consists of objects, on the one hand, and relations among them on other. OK. So what can we build from that? I understand quite clearly that constructing a representation of how people think about the world is different from constructing an account of the world itself. One justifies a representation of thought by invoking evidence about how people actually think. One justifies a representation of the world by invoking evidence about how the world works, evidence that is the province of many specialized disciplines. Physicists, geologists, chemists, art historians, and so forth don’t operate as though each object under their purview is utterly unique in kind nor that each relationship between two or more objects is utterly unique. They group objects into classes of different kinds. That’s all we need. Let’s go back to the passage I’ve quoted from The Quadruple Object, this time continuing on (pp. 119-120): ...the basic rift in the cosmos lies between objects and relations in general: between their autonomous reality outside all relation, and their caricatured form in the sensual life of other objects. Whatever the special features of plants, fungi, animals, and humans may be, they are simply complex forms of the gap between objects and relations, just as heavier chemical elements arise from hydrogen and helium. By no means does this imply that mentality is reducible to neuroscience or string physics. For our principles forbid that any specific kind of entity could be the building block for everything else in the cosmos. Instead, everything plays out in the strife between concealed objects and the twisted of translated forms in which they appear to other objects.
I’m proposing only that those “complex forms of the gap between objects and relations” have a pattern and I’m calling that pattern Realms of Being. What is more I believe that both Levi Bryant and Harman have stepped along this path.
Patterns of Relations Among Objects Let’s start with Bryant. Here’s a passage Bryant posted on 27 October 2011 in Do Attractors do Anything?9 With Graham and Latour, objects have to go through all the translations and transformations to get from one object to another. In other words, for me acorns do not virtually contain oak trees. Rather all sorts of translations have to take place to get from acorns to oak trees, and the oak tree that evolves from the acorn is a genuine and novel creation in the universe. There’s nothing that is pulling the acorn to the oak tree. Potentiality or virtuality are important dimensions of objects for me (and here I guess Graham and I still diverge), but when I think of virtuality/potentiality, I don’t have something like the acorn containing an oak tree in mind, but rather something more like the potential energy contained within a tautly drawn spring or rubber band. The translations still need to take place. The translations still need to take place. Virtuality also just means that something must be susceptible to affecting and being affected by other things for interactions to take place. 9
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As Bryant well knows, acorns cannot become oaks all by themselves. There is no little oak inside the acorn (as the preformationists believed) that just gets bigger and bigger. The acorn requires certain causal forces, or opportunities, if you will, in order for an oak tree to sprout and grow. And that implies a problem. For the point of objects is that they are autonomous. But in what sense can an oak tree be autonomous if its very existence is dependent upon a proper environment? Bryant is aware of the issue, though I’m not quite sure that he resolves it. Here’s a passage from The Democracy of Ideas, Chapter 5 (p. 196): In this connection, we can ask ourselves how it is possible for objects to be constrained despite their autonomy, independence, and self-determination. In many respects, it is the distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestation, coupled with the concept of regimes of attraction that allows us to theorize these constraints. For while, in their virtual proper being, objects withdraw from any of their actualizations in local manifestations, while every object always contains a reserve excess over and above its local manifestations, nonetheless local manifestations are often highly constrained by the exo-relations an object enters into with other objects in a regime of attraction.
The language of constraint allows him to conceive of the object as autonomous. That is, the object, in its virtual proper being, really is free and independent it’s just that, um, err, well, in any actual context it is subject to constraints. I submit that the on the obverse of at least some of those constraints we find dependency, resources on which the object depends. The acorn will not become an oak without water, sunlight, nutrients of many kinds, who knows what microbes in the soil, soil of a proper consistency to hold the root system, and so forth. At the same time, the availability of these things will constrain the growth of the tree. So, there IS a problem, which I wish to set aside for a moment. What's important is simply the acknowledgement of all those necessary exo-relations. Bryant has a term for them in Democracy, Chapter 4 (pp. 169-170): I refer to networks of exo-relations like this as “regimes of attraction”. Regimes of attraction are networks of fairly stable exo-relations among objects that tend to produce stable and repetitive local manifestations among the objects within the regime of attraction. Within a regime of attraction, causal relations can be bi-directional or symmetrical or unidirectional or asymmetrical. Bi-directional causation is a circular relation in which two or more entities reciprocally perturb one another in response to each other.
That’s what I’m after: “networks of fairly stable exo-relations that tend to produce stable and repetitive local manifestations among ... objects.” A regime of attraction* is a pattern over objects and relations. All oak trees require pretty much the same regime. Details will vary, of course, but the general requirements are fixed. My proposal is that, when considered at a sufficiently high level of generality and ranging over a diverse collection of objects, a regime becomes, in effect, a Realm of Being. Living Things could thus be thought of as a Realm of Being. I note further that Bryant has recently outlined his next project in paper have gave this September at the University of Dundee, The Gravity of Things: An Introduction to OntoCartography (which you can download at the URL in the footnote10). This onto-cartography seems to be, at least in abstract conception, similar to what I am proposing as Realms of Being. Bryant opens the paper with a discussion of gravity, first in the classical case where it involves action at a distance then in general relativity where it is reconceived as a curvature of space-time. He proposes a metaphorical sense of “gravity” which he uses in outlining onto-cartography. Thus on pages 5 and 6: “In particular, a central thesis of onto-cartography is that spacetime arises from things and signs. Onto-cartography is thus the practice of mapping the spatiotemporal paths, the gravitational fields, that arise from interactions among things.” Then, he takes up Braudel on 15th Century Cologne: “The infrastructure in which the Cologne of the 15th century was embedded formed a massive gravitational field defining spatio-temporal paths along 10
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which becoming and movement was structured.” After giving some examples and going on to emphasize that “All of these things are differences contributed not by signs, not by signifying differences, but by the properties of things themselves.” And then he arrives at this passage on page 12: The practice of onto-cartography is simply the analysis or mapping of spatio-temporal gravitational paths produced by various things and signs in a given situation or world. If this practice must be empirical, then this is because nothing allows us to decide in advance what entities and semiotic beings inhabit a situation, how they interact, what paths they produce, how they behave in this particular context or environment, and so on. The project of onto-cartography is massive and likely not to be the work of any one person because it is profoundly multi-disciplinary, requiring knowledge of the natures of the things that inhabit the situation, their specific properties, literature, mythology, semiotics, political theory, history, various sciences, technologies, etc. The difficulty of this practice is further exacerbated by the fact that many things crucial to understanding the gravitational field of a situation never make it into texts or the archive; at least, the archive that people in the humanities tend to be familiar with.
From my point of view this passage confuses the analysis of what I’m calling Realms of Being, which is a philosophical task, with the analysis and discovery of causal mechanisms and laws, which belong to the many specialized empirical disciplines that have emerged over the last three millennia. How things interact, in an abstract sense I’ll discuss in the next section, that’s what I’m interested in. The philosophical project I’m proposing IS a large one, but it does not require that a philosopher be a physicist, a biochemist, a geologist, an archaeologist, a sociologist, and so forth. It only requires that the philosopher consult which with folks. It’s not at all clear to me that Bryant’s project entails.
Indirect Cause and Realms of Being What them, IS IT that I am proposing? First I’ll deal with the problem of object autonomy, which I’d pushed aside, and then move on to his notion of vicarious or indirect causality. In The Quadruple Object Harman says (p. 123): “An object is real when it forms an autonomous unit able to withstand certain changes in its pieces.” So, while all living things require and are dependent upon energy input and appropriate nutrients, each individual organism retains its identity as an object despite the replacement of all its atomic parts (that is, individual atoms) over time. Even replacement or modification of parts at large scales will not necessarily destroy or degrade the identity of individual living things. That is the sense in which these objects are autonomous. The existence of Realms of Being can be derived from Harman’s notion of causality, which he terms vicarious causation in a 2007 article and which became indirect causation in The Quadruple Object (Chapter 5). Here’s a passage from the 2007 essay, “On Vicarious Causation” (which you can find in Collapse, Vol. II: Speculative Realism, p. 19011): For several centuries, philosophy has been on the defensive against the natural sciences, and now occupies a point of lower social prestige and, surprisingly, narrower subject matter. A brief glance at history shows that this was not always the case. To resume the offensive, we need only reverse the longstanding trends of renouncing all speculation on objects and volunteering for curfew in an ever-tinier ghetto of solely human realities: language, texts, political power. Vicarious causation frees us from such imprisonment by returning us to the heart of the inanimate world, whether natural or artificial. The uniqueness of philosophy is secured, not by walling off a zone of precious human reality that science cannot touch, but by dealing with the same world as the various sciences but in a different manner. In classical terms, we must speculate once more on causation while forbidding its reduction to efficient causation. Vicarious causation, of which science so 11
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far knows nothing, is closer to what is called formal cause. To say that formal cause operates vicariously means that forms do not touch one another directly, but somehow melt, fuse, and decompress in a shared common space from which all are partly absent.
So, there we have it. Science is stuck with “reduction to efficient cause” while philosophy has this vicarious causality to map out. Though it took awhile for me to get used to it, I have no objection to vicarious or indirect cause. As far as I can tell it amounts to saying that objects do not exhaust their “resources” through interaction with one another. As Harman says, he’s dealing with the “same world as the various sciences but in a different manner.” Yes. In fact, it seems to me that what I’m up to is, in effect, looking at various typical and repeated patterns of vicarious causation and organizing them into Realms of Being (see, e.g., this post: Harman’s Ontology on a Single Level and Objects as Wells of Abundance12). Something that “is closer to what is called formal cause” strikes me as being just the tool for that job. Realms of Being are revealed in the formal structure of causal relationships in the cosmos (yes, I know, “formal structure of cause” is not quite the same as “formal cause” but then neither is vicarious or indirect causation). Working out the causal laws and mechanisms is a job for the specialized disciplines. Working out the overall structure of causal relations is a job for philosophy.
Basics Revisited With that in mind let me edit and amend Harman’s statement of the basic requirements of his metaphysics. The first two statements below are edited from Harman while I’ve added a third: 1. Individual entities of various different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. 3. Realms of Being consist of specific kinds of entities in specific relations with one another.
I will even hazard a fourth proposition: 4. Our cosmos has evolved from one Realm to the many evident today. It is possible that Realms exist of which we are unaware. There is no obvious limit to the emergence of new Realms from existing ones.
Notice that I have removed Harman’s language of withdrawal. I prefer a language of plenitude, abundance, or fecundity. It is because objects are inherently fecund that they can enter into an unbounded number and pattern of relations without exhaustion. Some of those patterns coalesce into new objects established upon new patterns of relations among themselves, thus yielding a new Realm with its own laws and relations. While the objects of this new Realm are constructed of objects and relations in pre-existing realms, they cannot be reduced to those objects and their relations.
So, What is the Scope of Metaphysics? The scope of metaphysics thus DOES range over all the disciplines, as Harman asserted. And a general theory of objects is critical to this endeavor. But we need to augment that theory with a conception of patterns over objects and relations that are so consistent and widespread as to constitute Realms of Being. It is the job of the metaphysician to identify those Realms. To do this the metaphysician must needs consult with in the many specialized disciplines, not to critique nor to reconstruct, but learn. What must the metaphysician learn? Whatever is necessary to get the job done. That will have to be negotiated, negotiated among metaphysicians and specialists, and among metaphysicians themselves. I see no way of setting guidelines before the fact. The only thing to do is to wade in and muddy yourselves with details.
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***** * The term itself, “regime of attraction,” is an unfortunate example of the scientism that infests Bryant’s thought, but I don’t want to argue that point here as I’ve already done so in two other posts, one on entropy13 and another on attractors and phase space.14 The important point is the Bryant’s insight, that we should examine “networks of fairly stable exo-relations among objects”, does not depend on his misconstrued notions of phase space and attractors.
13 14
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Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism
When I set out to investigate Object-Oriented Ontology a year and a half ago I had several things vaguely in mind: 1) the possibility that Continental philosophy was waking up from its dogmatic dreams of dalliance and devastation, 2) some help in conceptualizing graffiti as a manifestation of the spirit of the place, and 3) some help in framing some questions about literature and literary criticism. Let’s set the first two aside and take up the third. I take the following three propositions to be true: 1) The meaning of literary texts is indeterminate. 2) There is, however, something quite precise about texts; I take that to be form. 3) The form of texts can be effectively described in that, presupposing agreement on method, different can come to agreement about formal attributes of a text. As a practical matter, literary criticism has taken the first as a truism. Every critic gets to “roll their own” meaning for a text; all that one has to do is provide a reasonable justification within some accepted interpretive scheme. Beyond this tacit and informal practice, some critics have explicitly argued for indeterminate meaning while others have argued for determinate meaning, often making the author the source of that meaning.
OOO as Interpretive Scheme Object-oriented ontology can easily serve as an interpretive scheme, providing of course, that it can justify itself as a philosophical regime. That is, primary justification comes in basic philosophical terms, not in the application to literature. From my point of view, this is neither here nor there. The addition of one more interpretive engine to the critic’s tool kit is of relatively little consequence if, like me, you want to do something other than, beyond, reading texts. Harman, however, has made some remarks that point toward the possibility of nonreductive readings, readings that don’t bypass the “surface” of the text in haste to find the “hidden” meanings, which I’ve discussed in Explicating Literature in Light of Object-Oriented Ontology.15 But those remarks are only pointers. It’s not clear to me how they might open up into full-blown explications. And, in any event, an explication is, in the end, an explication is a reading, and I’m chasing different unicorns. Nor, it seems to me, does OOO have anything special to say about textual indeterminacy. Levi Bryant, to be sure, has declared that texts are factories,16 in a usage from Deleuze and Guattari. As far as I can tell, Bryant has nothing particularly interesting to say about how it is that texts do this, just that they obviously do so. All Bryant has to offer is old wine in new bottles or, as Terrence Blake puts is, tautological reformulation.17
Rationalizing Objectification and Description The fact is, what I was really looking for is a way to talk about my own ongoing critical practice, perhaps even a way to rationalize that practice as a method. As a practical matter I DO believe 15
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/10/explicating-literature-in-light-of.html http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/texts-are-a-factory-eileen-joy/ 17 http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/machines-sexuation-and-the-omnipresence-ofthe-signifier-levi-bryants-tautological-reformulations/ 16
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there is something quite precise (the second of my three proposition above) about literary texts, and that is their form (third proposition), as I argue in Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form.18 But how do I explain that to scholars whose training ignores form in favor of meaning and precision in favor of indeterminacy? I figured that, as OOO has roots in that same intellectual tradition, the one that did most of the heavy lifting in rationalizing indeterminacy and in suppressing interest in form, perhaps it might be the best place to look for resources for countering the critical moves engendered by French Theory. After all, OOO aims to supplant those philosophical schemes driving French Theory in the American academy, no? Alas, no. Yes, it aims to supplant deconstruction and its successors but, no, it does not seem to have any conceptual equipment for talking about literary form and descriptive method. At least it hasn’t yet developed any such equipment. Nor am I holding my breath. For the practice that I’d like to rationalize depends on objectifying the text.19 Description is, in effect, a way of objectifying the text. Or, rather more awkwardly, it is the way you identify those features of the text that can be objectified. Those are formal features, but not meanings. Alas, though OOO is about objects, objectification runs against its spirit. Though I don’t have citations immediately at hand, OOOists have explicitly asserted that, in talking about objects, they do not mean to objectify anything, rather the contrary. For objectification surely implies some kind of “fixing in place,” some kind of finitude. And that’s what OOOists want to deny or evade. They’re more interested in the fact of “withdrawal” than in whatever one can make contact with. Where I see literary form as a finite “boundary” on an infinite “landscape” of meaning, they see nothing at all. They simply want to wander in the landscape and extol its virtues. Thus they’ve adopted rhetorical strategies that treat all objects as subjects though, as I’ve suggested in a post on OOO rhetoric,20 at the expense of a profusion of utterly trivial subjects. In short, from my point of view, OOO would seem to be little more than another form of French theory. But it IS THAT, a little more. A that little is a “flat” ontology in which all objects are on an equal footing. To be sure, Harman has a two-level ontology, real and sensual objects, and Morton follows him in this. But that bit of stratification does not affect my argument.
A Note on Construction and Notation Or rather, my construction, that’s what it is, a construction. I am referring, of course, to the ontological pluralism I outlined in From Objects to Pluralism.21 In that post I suggested that one could take Harman’s ontology and, by observing recurrent and stable patterns of inter-object relations, construct Realms of Being. In such a construction one could, in effect, treat sensual objects as “labels” on relations between real objects. For a sensual object is but the “impression” (my term) of one real object on another. Sensual objects are thus utterly dependent on real objects and arise only when two or more real objects come into relationship with one another. So, let us take real objects A and B and indicate them in relation with one another: A--------B Let us then use lower case letters to designate sensual objects, thus: 18
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1503087 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/03/distant-reading-in-levi-strauss-and.html 20 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-note-on-triple-os-rhetoric-of-objects.html 21 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/07/from-objects-to-pluralism.html 19
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Ab--------aB The sensual object, b, OF B is of course located in A and vice versa. The nature of those sensual objects surely depends on the nature of the relationship between A and B. With that in mind, why not treat them as a label on or attribute of that relationship, thus: A----ba----B This is, of course, merely a matter of notation. But it shows how we can treat Harman’s sensual objects as aspects of the relations between real objects. That gives Harman a flat ontology of objects, plus their relations.
Plato, the Literary Text, and Distance Notational details aside, what does ontological pluralism do for the literary text? In particular, how does it help rationalize a critical practice grounded in analysis and description as opposed or in addition to one based on interpretation? That’s a tall order, more than I can handle in this or even a series of posts. What I want to do now is indicate a strategy. ***** Let’s begin with Plato, who famously regarded artists as a species of liars. Reality resided in the Ideal Forms. The phenomenal world consists of copies of the Forms. And that makes works of art but copies of copies. If literary texts are but copies of the Real, then that would seem to make criticism by a copy of a copy, and thus even further removed from reality that the texts themselves. This is not very promising. Literary critics tend not to take Plato’s view of the matter, believing that, in some way or another, literary texts contain some kind of truth, and that criticism can reveal that truth. Nonetheless, Plato did set up a rhetoric of distance, and that rhetoric is central to our thinking about criticism. The critic searches for “hidden” meanings by undertaking a “close” reading of the text. Thus when Geoffrey Hartman wanted to argue22 against the “modern ‘rithmatics’— semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism” he argued that “they widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing” (The Fate of Reading, p. 272). In contrast, Franco Moretti has argued for “distant” reading.23 In the sort of pluralism I’m advocating literary texts would exist in one Realm of Being (as I discussed in From Objects to Pluralism) while hermeneutic criticism would exist in a different Realm—call it the Hermeneutic Realm—perhaps to be subdivided into different realms for different interpretive systems, but that’s a secondary matter. Whatever the specific repertoire of interpretive tropes, hermeneutic criticism seeks to uncover hidden meanings by means of close reading. And those meanings are always projected onto some third Realm which we might call the Common Sense Realm. In the pluralist scheme I propose, the indeterminacy of textual meaning is primarily a function of the relationship between the Literary Realm, the Rhetorical Realm, and the Common Sense Realm, but secondarily a function of the various different hermeneutic regimes. It is inherent in the notion of Realms of Being that the terms of one Realm are incommensurate with
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those of another. It doesn’t make any different what scheme you use to crank out interpretations, they will be incommensurate with the text.
Naturalist Criticism But what else is there to do? Create a new Realm; call it Naturalist Criticism.24 How does one do that? First, drop the attempt to project the meaning of the text onto the Common Sense Realm. Which is to say, stop searching for hidden meaning. Second, replace the Common Sense Realm with what I will temporarily call the Realm of the Computational Psychologies—though I don’t intend that as a real term. Third, drop the rhetoric of distance and replace it with one of description and objectification. That is, one is describing the text as something that results from the operation of psychological mechanisms—which, to use the term favored by Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: A Psychology of Fiction (2011), simulate actions in the interpersonal world. What that means concretely can be seen in my analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129,25 and in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”26 and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”27 Two points: First, by replacing the Common Sense Realm with Computational Psychologies one abandons the attempt to figure out what texts mean. Though these psychologies have quite a bit to say about semantics and cognition, I’m not interested in using them to ascertain the meaning of the text. Semantics in these systems is a dumb as rocks. It is computational. It is objectified. Second, the purpose of replacing close reading with description is simply to treat the text as the product of or trace of a computational process. Description indexes the text, if you will, with respect to that underlying computational process rather than treating it as an assertion about the common sense world. At this point, my proposed naturalist criticism mostly tap-dancing and hand-waving. Mostly, but not entirely. The analytical and descriptive work I’ve done on those poems is quite real, speculative, but substantial. The really tricky point, however, is this: One can undertake the description without knowing, in any detail, the underlying mechanism. In fact, the process of description is necessary to gaining a deeper understanding of those mechanisms. Work in the newer psychologies over that past four or five decades has told us quite a bit mental processes. While this work certainly hasn’t gotten to the point where we can simply apply it to literary texts and crank out simulations one after the other is has reached the point where we can, with some confidence, posit this Realm of Computational Psychologies. That IS what much psychological investigation is about these days. Knowing that that Realm exists we can describe literary texts in terms that are commensurate with it. That is what I have been doing in much of my practical criticism and that is what I’ve set forth as a methodology in Literary Morphology.28 Thus, on the one hand, hermeneutic criticisms posit a Hermeneutic Realm which projects texts in the Literary Realm onto activities and processes in the Common Sense Realm. By contrast, I propose a Realm of Naturalist Criticism which indexes texts in the Literary Realm to processes in a Computational Psychologies Realm. Note that I do not propose that the Hermeneutic Realm isn’t really Real, nor do I propose that we abandon it. I am proposing a new Realm of critical activity.
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http://ssrn.com/abstract=1503087 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/08/pursuing-lust-in-web-of-language.html 26 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1588162 27 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1588165 28 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1503087 25
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***** Um, err, isn’t that just a bit complicated, all those Realms of Being? Yes, it’s a LOT complicated, not the least because the notion of Realms of Being is still a bit lean. But then, isn’t literature rather complicated? Yes it is. But how can you think with all those loose ends flapping about? Do I have any choice? You can just abandon all this and . . . And what? Return to the old ways, the ones that have either flat-out failed or that seem to be just cranking out reading after reading in an all-but mechanical way? OK, but do you really believe this will work? I neither believe nor disbelieve. I merely entertain.
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Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2: Diagrams
As the title indicates, this post is a follow-up to my previous post, Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism. This post has been prompted both by my own after thoughts and by remarks by Terence Blake.29 Caveat: This is quick and dirty. I’m more interested in sketching out a quick scheme than in working out details. Let’s start with a simple diagram depicting relationships between three Realms of Being:
The Common Sense Realm is the world of consensus reality; we hold it more or less in common with all (adult) inhabitants of our society. The Literary Realm is the world of literary texts of all kinds, high, low, and mid-cult, adults, children, young adults, whatever. The Realm of Literary Criticism is that of formal written commentary on those texts. An arrow between two realms indicates some relationship between the two. The Realm at the head end of the arrow has access to the Realm at the tail end. Thus LCR (Literary Criticism Realm) has access to both CSR (Common Sense Realm or Common Sense) and LR (Literary Realm). Note that the arrow between CSR and LR is doubleheaded, indicating that each has access to the other. The texts in LCR are largely about objects (informally understood), persons, and events in CSR while the texts in LR physically circulate in CSR and people comment informally on those texts in CSR. And then there’s that red arrow from LCR to CSR. Why didn’t I just use a double-headed arrow between the two, like I did for CSR and LR? I don’t quite know. And perhaps it isn’t necessary. My feeling is, though, that there’s a kind of asymmetry between LCR and CSR that doesn’t obtain between CSR and LR. The question is important, but not one I can hash out now.
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Let’s say that that diagram depicts Plain Old Literary criticism of the sort that’s existed since Whenever. It thus includes belletristic essays and journalistic reviews and commentary. One might even argue that it belongs fully in CSR. One might. But I’m not. In any event, in the Anglophone world (I don’t know about Continental Academia) it collided with philology in the middle of the previous century and became academic literary criticism. Consider this diagram, which depicts four Realms of Being:
This is academic literary criticism as it emerged after World War II. [I’m excluding straight literary history and biography and textual criticism (the editing of primary texts). Those obviously belong to the discipline, but they’re not at the messy controversial intellectual core.] We have CSR and LR as before, and have added a Realm for Hermeneutic Engines (RHE or Engines). All three of these are visible from the Realm of Academic Literary Criticism (RALC or Academic Criticism). RHE contains any and all of the psychologies, philosophies, political and social theories, etc. that have been used in literary criticism. It is the inclusion of these Engines in the critical process that has made Academic Criticism the specialized and often controversial activity it has become. In this case I can justify that red arrow from Academic Criticism to Common Sense by virtue of Academic Criticism’s specialized nature. Common Sense has access to only a simplified version of Academic Criticism, if that. The next diagram depicts the Realm of Naturalist Criticism as I conceive it:
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CSR is gone (but don’t worry, I’ll restore it in the last diagram). Computational Psychologies has taken its place in the diagram. Notice, though, that Comp Psych doesn’t have a relationship with the Literary Realm. Notice also the red arrow from Naturalist Criticism to Computational Psychologies. I’m imagining, in the first place, that the descriptive work of Naturalist Criticism will provide those psychologies with rich and complex examples for which they will have to build models. Beyond that I note that the psychological study of literary texts (and other forms of expressive culture) is one of the best ways to study the operation of the whole mind in a more or less naturalistic way. Thus where Academic Literary Criticism has had relatively little influence on the disciplines it has employed as Hermeneutic Engines, I expect that Naturalist Criticism will be of considerable interest to the Computational Psychologies. For it gives them a way of studying complex mental activities that are otherwise all but inaccessible. In fact, one can see the beginnings of such work in the psychology of Keith Oatley and the brain imaging of Uri Hasson. Finally, seven Realms:
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I’ve taken the diagram for Academic Literary Criticism and combined it with the diagram for Naturalist Criticism. In this new diagram the old Academic Lit Crit Realm has been renamed as the Realm of Hermeneutic Criticism, which is now parallel to the Realm of Naturalistic Criticism. Each has access to the Literary Realm, of course, and each is accessed by Academic Literary Criticism, which, as before, has its reflect (the red arrow) in the Common Sense Realm. The important point is that I do not conceive of Naturalist Criticism as either replacing or subsuming Hermeneutic Criticism. It is a separate activity for it, different in kind. And both are necessary to the academic study of literature in the 21st Century.
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Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects
Once I began investigating Object-Oriented Ontology it didn’t take long to bump up against that claim that fictions too are real. At first I found that claim disconcerting, but then I got used to it. I had been reading OOOist thought through the standard notion that the real world is one thing, and fiction is quite different. Against THAT claim the OOO notion IS disconcerting. But only superficially so. For the belief that fictions are different from ‘reality’ does not entail a belief that fictions do not have consequences in the ‘real world.’ Not at all. That fiction has real consequences is not in doubt, and that’s all the OOOists are claiming. More or less. That fictional objects have real consequences. That is to say, they are real objects, good and proper. But is that so? Are they philosophically proper objects?
Is Popeye Autonomous? Consider Popeye, who seems to have become OOO’s paradigmatic example of a fictional object that is real. There’s nothing particularly problematic about any of the physical images of him, whether in print media or movie. They’re all real objects. And, while the psychological and neural processes that take place in the minds of people reading Popeye comics or watching Popeye cartoons are not well understood, they are not, as processes, any more obscure than those involving reading about George W. Bush or watching film and video clips of him. What’s tricky is the fictional being that is conjured out of all those still and moving images through all those mental and neural processes in all those individual heads. As I understand them, the objects under investigation in OOO must be autonomous objects. The physical images, yes, they are autonomous objects. And the neurochemical brain processes, they too are autonomous—or are they? But that fictional being, that Popeye, is not autonomous in that sense. He is utterly dependent on all those people being aware of him. And so we arrive at a problem that arose in From Objects to Pluralism, that of object autonomy. Popeye, is however, autonomous in the sense that matters to Harman, forming “an autonomous unit able to withstand certain changes in its pieces” (The Quadruple Object, p. 123). In the revised version of that post (which is the version in this document) I suggested this: What matters about (real) objects is that they be sources of abundance.30 That a given object may depend on some substrate is no problem if the object absorbs and reconfigures the substrate in a new and open-ended way. And so, I submit, is the case with at least some fictional objects, the Real ones. But I want to take a look at some remarks by Harman before outlining an argument on that. He seems to have an other notion.
Harman on the Reality of Fictional Objects Now, it’s not at all clear to me that Harman has any use for that imaginary Popeye, that one that’s an autonomous real object. Consider this remark from a recent interview:31 30
For further discussion of this point, see Harman’s Ontology on a Single Level and Objects as Wells of Abundance later in this document. 31
http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/marginalia-on-radical-thinking-an-interview-with-graham-harman/
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A sensual object is anything that we regard as a sensual object. We ourselves are the judge of this, because there is no reality principle at work in the sensual sphere apart from what we regard it as being. As soon as I acknowledge Popeye walking around on screen, a unified character enduring through various motions and changes of posture, then Popeye exists as a sensual object. There is nothing “inflationary” about this, because I am simply saying that Popeye must be taken into account, not that there is a real man named Popeye.
All Harman seems to have is Popeye as a sensual object in a person’s mind. We could, of course, consider one person after another after another after another, and so on, one by one, but, as I will show later, that doesn’t quite give us a collective Popeye. It just gives us a bunch of sensual Popeyes, each in the mind of a different person. The Popeye that I’m positing is, on the othe hand, the creation of a group, a collective, but it is completely imaginary. You won’t find him out and about in the world where he might encounter, for example, George Bush, or even you. And I suspect that Bryant is with Harman on this. In a discussion of this post, Texts are a Factory: Eileen Joy,32 Bryant says, in comment no. 20: ... there is no referent of the fiction Popeye as a being in the world that exists like Barack Obama. However, as a fiction qua fiction, Popeye exists (the fictional character that we find in comics, movies, cartoons, etc.). This is the material reality of Popeye, not the reference.
That’s not entirely clear to me, but I’ll take it as denying a collective imaginary Popeye.
Possible Objects? Why, then, would I want to posit the existence of a genuinely collective Popeye? For one thing, people do talk about imaginary creatures as though they were real, and make up new stories about them, just as they relate new incidents about real people. And not just ordinary people, literary critics also talk about imaginary characters as though they’re real. If nothing else, it’s easy and convenient to do so. This common practice, this convenience, of course doesn’t in it self make it philosophically prudent to grant reality to such beings, yet . . . Consider this passage that Tristan Haze (in the discussion of Bryant’s Factory post) quoted from article on Possible Objects33 in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: We make various assertions about fictional objects outside the stories in which they occur and some of them are true: for example, that Sherlock Holmes is admired by many readers of the Holmes stories. The simplest and most systematic explanation appears to be to postulate Holmes as an actual object possessing the properties such true assertions ascribe to him. Fictional objects may then be said to be theoretical objects of literary criticism as much as electrons are theoretical objects of physics. This type of view enjoys surprisingly wide acceptance. (Searle 1974, van Inwagen 1977, 1983, Fine 1982, Salmon 1998, Thomasson 1999). The theorists in this camp, except van Inwagen (van Inwagen 2003: 153–55), also think that fictional objects are brought into existence by their authors as actual objects.
I do find that view quite attractive and I’m certainly glad that others agree on this matter. Yes, I want to posit fictions as existing a separate Realm of Being and treat them as real in that Realm. And I can offer an argument for doing so, one grounded in a subtlety in social life.
Mutual Knowledge in a Collective Game theorists like to distinguish between shared knowledge and mutual or common knowledge (see this post for a bit more than I have here34). Consider the old story about the Emperor’s New 32
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/texts-are-a-factory-eileen-joy/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-objects/ 34 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/06/cultural-evolution-9-language-games-2.html 33
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Clothes. As you may recall, the suit was to be woven of special cloth that is “is invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent.”35 When the Emperor steps out in public for the first time people see that he is naked. That is shared knowledge. The Emperor is in fact naked and everyone sees this. But they say nothing, for they know the valuing of indulging the Emperor in his beliefs. Alas, some cheeky child who didn’t know how to behave blurts out that the Emperor is naked. Everyone hears him and notes, of course, that his observation accords with their own perception. As they take up the child’s cry knowledge that had merely been shared now becomes common or mutual. Not only does each person know that the Emperor is naked, but they know that the others know that as well. I propose that fictional beings that are the basis of mutual knowledge in some collective (Latour’s term) are real objects, not just sensual objects. It’s their mutual existence among people in the group that constitutes the felicity condition (to use Latour’s phrase) for their real existence. Such mutual knowledge cannot be construed as the “sum” of individual sensual objects. All that gets you is shared knowledge. It’s when everyone knows that everyone knows, that’s when the fictional object becomes real in the Fictional Realm. Popeye is real in that way. He exists in the Fictional Realm along with Perdita, Baba Yaga, The Green Knight, Luke Skywalker, Heathcliff, Dumbo, Chihiro, Anansi and hundreds of thousands of others. These characters are, in fact, the collective product of many people reading and thinking and viewing many physical texts. These characters are thus productive, they are sources of abundance.
Naturalist Criticism Augmented To accommodate this insight I have to augment the account of naturalist criticism I gave in my two previous posts in this series (Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism, and Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2), where I talked of the Literary Realm rather than the Fictional Realm. In those discussions I talked only of computational psychologies and they, like almost all psychologies (with the exception of social psychology) are implicitly or explicitly about individual minds. They are not about collective process. But that’s precisely what I’m claiming about the reality of fictional characters, that they are real through a collective, a social process. Without going into a detailed explanation of why I’m doing so, I will call that process by a standard term: cultural evolution.36 Cultural evolution deals with the circulation of ideas, attitudes, norms, practices, and so forth in groups and how that circulation behaves over time; things may change or they may be stable. In either case, the process is collective. So we have a revised diagram for naturalist criticism, one in which both computational psychologies and cultural evolution provide conceptual support:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes http://ssrn.com/abstract=1631428 27
The Realm of Computational Psychologies deals with processes in individual minds and brains while that of Cultural Evolution deals with collective processes. The Realm of Naturalist Criticism must have access to both. And it will provide problems and phenomena to be considered by each.
Where Are We? We are deep on a preliminary exploration of ontological pluralism, the idea that the universe unfolds into multiple Realms of Being, each with its own felicity conditions. In From Objects to Pluralism I argued that, in the striped-down version offered by Graham Harman, object oriented ontology provides the basis for constructing Realms of Being from objects and the relations among them. Where some large population of objects display a consistent and stable pattern of interrelationships we can say that they exist in a particular Realm of Being. Over time our cosmos has evolved from one Realm to many and may well further evolve. In the next two posts—Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism, and Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2—I argued in the first place that ‘ordinary’ Literary Criticism draws on the realms of Literature and Common Sense while Academic Literary Criticism also draws on various specialized disciplines for Hermeneutic Engines. A new Realm of literary study is now emerging that I’m calling Naturalist Criticism. It draws on the Literary Realm (as do Academic and ordinary Literary Criticism) and on the Realm of Computational Psychologies. In this post I’ve added a Realm of Cultural Evolution to that. At the moment the profession is trying to figure out whether the would-be critics are just offering new interpretive engines or whether or not they’re up to Something Different. Many of them are wondering the same thing. As Naturalist Criticism matures, however, I predict (Ha!) that Academic Criticism will come to recognize two parallel branches, one of Hermeneutic Criticism, which emerged over the last half century or so, and one of Naturalist Criticism, which is still trying to figure itself out.
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Unity of Being and Ethical Criticism
I wish to offer another adjustment to my ongoing discussion of literature, criticism, and pluralism. I begin by discussing unity of being in two senses. In one sense it is a psychological concept; it is about how one feels when giving oneself over to the Literary Realm. In another sense it is broadly about one’s way of life, about the world at large. From there I go on to discuss ethical criticism, offer some touchstone passages from Kenneth Burke, Wayne Booth, and Keith Oatley, and conclude by revising the diagram with which I ended Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects.
Unity of Being In real time, unity of being is, well, unity of being. I don’t mean to be perverse, but I don’t know of any general term, though perhaps Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow37 will do, or the phrase “being in the moment.” As far as I know flow always happens spontaneously in that we cannot flip the mind’s flow switch at will—I rather doubt there’s such a thing as a flow-switch, rather it’s a matter of balance. But we can do things that will increase the likelihood that the mind will flip into flow. One of those things is to read, in the basic ordinary sense of the word, a literary text. Or listen to a story, watch a play or movie. Whatever. In this sense, unity of being is psychological, it happens in the mind/brain in real time. But unity of being, I believe, is also a reasonable way to talk about how individuals and peoples live their lives in the large, from years to decades to centuries. One wants everything one does, 24/7/365, to fall into a coherent pattern. A pattern more or less attributed to the nature of the world. To the extent that one cannot achieve unity of being one feels, well, perhaps alienated is the most general concept for it. In that literary texts are (always) about the world, they point toward unity of being in the large. As far as I know there is no one way of life that yields unity of being in the large nor is there one way of organizing texts that yields it in the small. In the large it is a matter of how one chooses to live, where that one can be an individual or a group. In the small it is a matter of craft and one’s knowledge of its ways and means. Individuals may have to learn to read a text so that things flow, and learning requires change. Whether or not things flow depends on how well the text is suited to existing mental structures and processes, which are the joint products of the mind’s innate capacities of cultural shaping to date. On the matter of cultural shaping I favor the analogy of a game, such as chess. Biology provides the board, the pieces, and the basic rules. But it is culture that provides the tactics and strategies for playing the game. Biology constrains what culture can do, but there is no reason to believe that the constraints are so tight as to permit only one “ideal” way of life. Human history has yielded many ways of life, some no doubt more satisfying than others, but there is no a priori or transcendental reason to declare one of them to be the best, much less the ideal. Each of us lives the lifeway into which we were born and which we can shape or abandon as opportunity presents and as we choose.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) 30
None of it is set in stone. The genome, after all, is not made of stone. Nor is the synaptic net. All is fluid, albeit at different time scales. The genes flow on a time scale of generations while the synapses on a timescale of hours and days.
Ethical Criticism The object of an ethical criticism is to guide individuals and groups in using literary texts to negotiate their ways towards unity of being. In the small, individuals can choose texts suited to them and they can change themselves so that they can more readily flow though this or that text. In the large, groups adopt texts as canonical according to their lifeway preferences. Is this way one we can and want to live? In complex societies groups can form around texts which individuals cherish. Individuals who see one another cherishing the same texts realize they have THAT in common and may choose to identify themselves with that, whatever it is, and to act in the large society from that position. And so we have identity politics. In small more homogeneous societies, such choices may not be available, and the illusion of cultural universality will be stronger. Large complex societies have been around for 1000s of years but in the contemporary world almost all societies have access to a wide range of cultural materials. Individuals can see other lifeways, and even try them on through various cultural texts, literary, musical, visual, kinesthetic, or otherwise. The ethical critic, whether formally trained or not—are we not all ethical critics in some measure?—thinks and feels her way through the available possibilities and seeks out more as needed.
Touchstones In the large these ideas about ethical criticism are not new. I leave it to others to trace them back to The Venerable Ancients. I’ll have to make do with relatively contemporary thinkers. Consider Kenneth Burke’s essay on “Literature as Equipment for Living” from The Philosophy of Literary Form (1973, but originally collected in 1941 and published in the 30s). Using words and phrases from several definitions of the term “strategy” (in quotes in the following passage), he asserts that (p. 298): . . . surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements and operations” in one's campaign of living. One “maneuvers,” and the maneuvering is an “art.”
Through the symbols and strategies of shared stories, members of a culture articulate their desires and feelings to one another thereby making themselves mutually at home in the world. Burke wasn’t necessarily talking about formal criticism. But Wayne Booth certainly is in The Company We Keep (1988). Near the end, after discussing the Chekov story, ”Home,” Booth says (p. 484): ... we all are equipped, by a nature (a “second nature”) that has created us out of story, with a rich experience in choosing which life stories, fictional or “real,” we will embrace wholeheartedly. Who we are, who we will be tomorrow depends thus on some act of criticism, whether by ourselves or by those who determine what stories will come our way—criticism wise or foolish, deliberate or spontaneous, conscious or unconscious.
A bit later (p. 485): If you try out a given mode of life in itself, you may, like Eve in the garden, discover too late that the one who offered it to you was Old Nick himself. Though tryings-out in narrative present all the dangers of we have stressed throughout, they offer both a relative
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freedom from consequence and, in their sheer multiplicity, a rich supply of anecdotes. In a month of reading, I can try out more “lives” than I can test in a lifetime.
Still more recently, Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist, has made trying-out (considered as simulation) the center of Such Stuff as Dreams (2011) his review and synthesis of experimental work on the psychology of fiction. His final chapter is entitled “Talking About Fiction: Interpretation in Conversation,” conversation that may or may not be informed by academic literary criticism depending on the backgrounds of the conversationalists. In an especially suggestive paragraph he observes (p. 178) that even books we have read and films we have see are retained only as fragments. Therefore we tend to discuss—can only discuss—small parts...When we discuss those parts of books and films that we noticed and remember, they can be augmented by the different parts noticed and remembered by people with whom we have the discussion. Thereby we can put fragments together, to make the books and films more whole...And when we discuss books of fiction, not only do we exchange our impressions of fragments we have read with the impressions of fragments in the inner libraries of other people, but we re-introduce this material—fiction—about what people are up to in the social world, back into the social world of conversation and relationship.
I like that, the notion that discussions can help us reassemble texts, but surely in reassembling texts we also reassemble ourselves. As we make the texts more whole, so ourselves as well—a matter I discuss within a different framework in my post Emotion Recollected in Tranquility38 (see entry in Appendix 2, Selected Blog Posts). Oatley devotes part of the chapter to reading groups, noting that “the whole activity of interpretation has moved from departments of literature to reading groups” (p. 185). To this I would add online discussions of (mostly) popular culture at thousands of fan sites, among them tvtropes,39 an informal encyclopedia of “the tricks of the trade for writing fiction,” though the part about writing fiction should be taken lightly. As should the “tv” part. As the site explains: The wiki is called "TV Tropes" because TV is where we started. Over the course of a few years, our scope has crept out to include other media. Tropes transcend television. They reflect life. Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, does its best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show up everywhere.
While tvtropes is not a scholarly reference source, nor is it intended to be, it’s hard to imagine it existing without lots of people having gone through college literature course and learning about, well, tropes. I assume that people have been discussing fictions as long as they have been telling them. The discussion is part of the social process in which fictions assume their ethical lives. But it is only recently that scholars have began studying this process, whether through historical research on reading or the ethnographic work that Oatley reports. Our fictions are inseparable from our lives.
In Pluralist Context With the preceding discussion in mind I want to suggest that, as naturalist criticism begins to take root in the academy and expands and becomes more sophisticated, hermeneutic criticism will evolve into ethical criticism. Back in the days when interpretation, more often than not, was considered to be the aim of criticism, it was also assumed that determinate meanings were available through interpretation, providing, of course, the proper methods were followed. Interpretations stood on the authority of the texts themselves, not merely that of the critic, who was but a voice for the text. It was also assumed that academic criticism was to be confined to a small group of canonical texts deemed to 38 39
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/11/emotion-recollected-in-tranquility.html http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage 32
embody universal truths. Those assumptions have fallen through. Determinate meaning is gone and popular culture has worked its way into the academy. In the emerging academic context mere interpretation is no longer a credible focal point of academic criticism. Critics can no longer pretend to be conduits for the meaning of canonical texts. That’s gone. Of course, canonical authority never resided in the texts anyhow. Not directly. The authority always resided in the groups which made various texts canonical. The Ancient Regime of 50 years ago kept that process hidden. We cannot. We have no choice but to openly admit that we are mere mortals seeking ways to live better lives in one another’s company. In this contexts critics become more like coaches and interpretations can openly serve the ethical purpose they’ve always in fact served. I thus suggest a simple revision to the final diagram from Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects. The Realm of Hermeneutic Criticism becomes The Realm of Ethical Criticism.
The ethical critic has the full resources of naturalist criticism available to her. And the naturalist critic can, among other things, study the process by which people come use texts to negotiate their lives with one another. But the actual work of moving ahead must reside, as always, with the people who do the moving.
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Harman’s Ontology on a Single Level and Objects as Wells of Abundance
In From Objects to Pluralism I argued, almost as an aside, that Harman’s 2-level ontology, real and sensual objects, could be interpreted as a single level. In this post I wish to restate that interpretation and explore it just a little bit.
Harman’s Core Assertions Let us start with Harman’s elegant encapsulation of his philosophy40 in two propositions: 1. Individual entities of various different scales (not just tiny quarks and electrons) are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. These entities are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. Objects withdraw from relation. My initial reaction to that was: What happened to sensual objects? In my current interpretation of his thought they are unnecessary because they can be derived from the existence of relations. After all, an object that exists utterly without relation to any other object cannot have any sensual objects in its ‘interior’—I believe that’s a term Harman uses in this context. If two objects exist in relation to one another, than each will have a sensual object of the other in its interior. Further, the nature of that sensual object depends strictly on the nature of the relationship, no? It follows from that that positing the existence of these sensual objects adds nothing to our understanding of the ontological situation. They are redundant.
Abundance and Autonomy It is thus apparent that, in an imagery of abundance rather than of withdrawal, real objects are sources or wells of abundance, while sensual objects are not. As real objects enter into relationships with one another, abundance is drawn forth in those relationships. And it is this abundance that is most important in understanding the autonomy of real objects. They are autonomous, not in the sense that they are not dependent on other objects—they may or may not be—but in that they are endless sources of abundance within their own Realm. Thus the acorn depends on its immediate environment for the nutrients it needs to sprout, take root, and become an oak tree. It is not autonomous from that environment. But it is abundant in the world in that it persists through a wide variety changes, shocks, and insults, and continues to convert its inputs into, ultimately, more acorns and hence more oaks. Each Realm is characterized by its own form of abundance, abundance which may or may not depend on other Realms. Just how that works in detail, well, that’s obviously the major conceptual task for ontological pluralism and far beyond the scope of a blog post.
A Visual Notation Let’s restate this idea with a simple visual notation. Consider the following three diagrams:
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http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/brief-srooo-tutorial/ 34
In 1 we have two real objects, A and B, in some undefined relationship. In 2 I’ve added the appropriate sensual objects in lower case letters in the interior of the real objects, b inside A, and a inside B. In diagram 3 I’ve moved b and a onto the relationship, treating it as a label or name for that relationship. So, 3 shows real objects A and B in relationship ba with one another. Think of relation ba as drawing abundance from objects A and B. Now, in fact, if we wish to continue with this style of thought, we probably need something more to label that relationship. We want to develop a typology of relationship types, though just what that typology consists of is not obvious to me. For example, consider the earth and its moon. We could call that a gravitational relationship, but that’s not quite what I’m after. I’m thinking more along the lines of symmetrical. The earth may exert a greater gravitational pull on the moon, than vice versa, but the two objects relate to one another in the same way. By contrast, consider the relationship between a migratory bird and some star, one of those that this particular species uses as a guide post in its migrations—for we know that birds, like humans, do navigate by the stars. That star plays an important role in that bird’s life, but the contrary is unlikely. In fact, it’s unlikely whether the star registers the bird in any distinct way at all. That relationship, then is quite unlike that between the earth and the moon. Not only is this relationship not at all symmetrical, it’s so lopsided that calling it asymmetrical doesn’t seem quite right. Perhaps it’s simple a one-sided relationship. With that in mind, let’s revisit the relationship between the sun and the earth. Why not call that two-sided, to indicate that both objects influence the other, but asymmetrical, indicating that one objects exerts more influence than the other? The relationship ship between the two stars in a double-star could then, following the same convention, be called two-sided and symmetrical. And so on, for I assume that other relationship possibilities would emerge with further exploration. And, we have to consider relationships between more than two objects. It’s not at all obvious to me, for example, that the gravitational relationship between the sun, the earth, and the moon, may be ontologically considered to be the conjunction between three two-sided asymmetrical relationships (sun-earth, earth-moon, sun-moon). Perhaps it can, perhaps it can’t. I’ve not even attempted to think it through. And, of course, once we’ve added the sun to our little ontological play, it becomes obvious that gravity isn’t the only kind of relationship involved. There’s also light, light from the sun to the earth and to the moon, and reflected from both earth and moon to each. Those
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relationships change as relative positions change. What’s the core ontological ‘upshot’ of that and what’s physics? Off hand, I don’t know. In any event, however that goes, the nature of the relationship would have to be indicated on the label for the line connecting the objects in a relationship.
Fire and Cotton Let’s just set that aside for the moment and continue playing around with the above notation, limited though it may be. Let’s consider one of Harman’s favorite examples, that of fire and a piece of cotton. Here’s three simple diagrams:
Diagram 4 shows object F (fire) in relation cf to object C (cotton). We know that as that relationship continues the cotton will become ash and heat will be given off. In diagram 5 we treat FcfC as another object by enclosing it with a rectangle. That other object then becomes (the arrow) a third object, A (ash). The diagram says nothing about heat given off nor, for that matter, of the other combustion products. I don’t know whether or should do so or not, but I note here that we are doing ontology, not physical chemistry. The complexity of the chemical reaction is not and should not show up in an ontological analysis, not of the ontology in question is that of the Common Sense Realm. These ontological diagrams are meant to be quite general. Diagram 5 might, for example, be or a war between Freedonia and Cashmania resulting in the constitution of a new state, Allyoopia. Finally, in the continuing spirit of play, diagram 6 shows how the process depicted in 5 can itself be treated as an object. It’s simple; enclose it with a diagram. But then the verbal process is a simple one as well: Two objects in relation to one another constitute a third object.
Why Would One Want to Develop Such a Notation? Recall that this issue arose in the context of developing a philosophical pluralism, as I outlined in From Objects to Pluralism. In that post I suggested that one could take Harman’s ontology and, by observing recurrent and stable patterns of inter-object relations, construct Realms of Being. If I were to set out to investigate those patterns of inter-object relations I would probably want to use some visual notation.
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In such an investigation a Realm of Being would be more than a box with a label, as it is in the posts Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2, and Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects. Rather, a Realm would be a collection of such simple diagrams, each indicating one of the patterns of inter-object relations characteristic of that domain. Let the unresolved notational issues I mentioned in the previous section serve as an indicator of the sorts of issues that would be taken up through developing a visual notation.
Conceptual Style (Notation) Um, err, aren’t you just playing around with those diagrams and stuff? Sure, I’m playing around. You have a problem with that? Well, that’s not serious and philosophy’s serious stuff, no? Yes and no. Yes and no? That’s right, yes and no. I don’t get it. There’s serious and there’s serious. Do you want to put on a Stern Face and look like you’re Hard at Work doing Serious Stuff. That’s one thing. And, frankly, it’s not a very good way of working. So you’re saying that kind of serious isn’t, well, really serious? More or less. Real thought, exploratory thought, that requires playing around. That’s the only way we’ll arrive at something new. Are diagrams necessary to such playing around? That depends. On what? On the nature of the problems being investigated and on one’s intellectual style. I like diagrams, I find them useful. I think with them and through them. They aren’t simply illustrations of ideas I’ve otherwise worked out in verbal terms.
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What’s an Object, Anything, Everything?
One of the many avatars of Anonymous posted a bunch of questions about my recent post41, Harman’s Ontology on a Single Level and Objects as Wells of Abundance. While the questions had a certain wise-guy attitude about them, they nonetheless collectively raise an important issue: What’s the distinction between philosophy and the many specialized intellectual disciplines? So, I’ve decided to answer those questions as a way of exploring that issue just a bit. I do not expect to answer them definitively nor do I expect to define the distinction between philosophical questions and questions in the specialized disciplines. All I want to do is indicate how I’d begin approaching the issue, and that’s to consider many examples. Anonymous’s list is a useful set of examples. Some are nonsense and some seem deep and beyond any answer I can give; most are somewhere in-between.
Caveats The questions end up being framed as questions about Human’s thought, which makes sense, of course. But I am not Harman and do not speak for him. I do, however, find his ideas useful, though I suspect that the use I make of them is not something that Harman himself would do. More importantly, I have never considered any of my posts about Harmon’s ideas as ‘ground-level’ posts suitable for those unfamiliar with Harman’s own writing. I assume some knowledge of his work. That doesn’t change in this post, not at all. The fact is that the idea of a metaphysical object is a subtle one. And while Harman does give definitional statements, in The Quadruple Object and elsewhere, it would be a mistake to think that, once you’ve read those statements you know what he’s talking about. You don’t. Think of those statements as guide posts at the beginning of a path. You still need to walk the path by reading what he says at some length so as to get a feel for the kind of intellectual work he’s doing with the idea. The remarks I make here aren’t going to change that.
The Questions Let’s begin by numbering the questions. I’ve taken Anonymous’s comment and simply placed numbers in it for purposes of identification: 1) a. What's the relationship between some water and the same water ten minutes later when it's turned to ice? b. And is that one object, or two? 2) a. What's the difference between some ice, and my memory of some ice? b. Are they the same object? c. Is my memory even an object? 3) a. What's the relationship between 3 and 4? b. What's 4? c. What's a square? d. What's the object that consists of the set of all of sets that are not members of themselves? 4) What if it turned out that fire is not an object? 5) What if it turned out that being an "object" is not a property of non-human reality, but rather an organizing principle of human knowledge? 6) What's the relationship between all objects and all objects? 7) What's the difference between gravity and addition (or composition)? 41
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8) Not to be a total drag, but in this "ontological" scheme, an object seems to be anything you can think of, and 9) a "relationship" is what you're calling the act of thinking about any two or more "objects" at the same time, 10) i.e. this scheme doesn't move the ball down the field even one inch. If I know what Harmon is talking about, what do I now know that I wouldn't know without having read Harmon? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
Some Answers: Framing Metaphysics These answers aren’t intended to be complete. They’re shoot-from-the-hip indications of how I’d go about threading my way through this mess. Let’s start at the end. On eight, an object seems to be anything. And to a first approximation it seems that way, doesn’t it? If so, what of it? I suspect, however, that it isn’t so, but I’m nowhere near having thought it through. Here you really need to read Harman to get a feel for the kind of conceptual work he wants of the object concept. On nine, no. Thinking has nothing to do with relationships between objects unless, that is, you’re thinking about thought itself. Now the thing us, unlike Harman, I’m quite interested in thinking about thought. As I’ve indicated in a number of posts, including Ontology in Perception and Thought42 and The Great Chain of Being as Conceptual Structure43, I’ve done quite a bit of work on this. But that’s quite different from what Harman’s up to, and what I’m up to when I use his ideas. Figuring out the basic categories of the world is different from figuring out the basic categories of the mind. On ten, about moving the ball down the field, what ball and what field? Metaphysics is not about providing explanations that supercede or replace those provided by specialized disciplines. Just what it IS up to, that’s a tough question. I don’t have a clear sense of what Harman thinks he’s up to. What I’m up to is figuring out Realms of Being, which is my concept, not Harman’s. And that is distinct from specialized disciplines. But getting a beginning grip on that has taken me several posts, with at least one more planned: 1) From Objects to Pluralism. 2) Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3) Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2 4) Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects I’m planning to do a post on Life as a Realm of Being. In my view it is the task of metaphysics to sort the world into these Realms of Being, but not to propose answers for questions within those Realms. That’s the province of specialized disciplines.
More Answers: Objects Here’s some quick, shoot from the hip, answers: ONE: 1a. In physics the transition from water to ice is a phase change. I haven’t thought about it metaphysically and so don’t have an answer. 2b. One object or two? I haven’t thought about it metaphysically and so don’t have an answer. If it’s just a puddle of water at 10:00 AM and again at 10:10 AM, it’s one object at two different times. Same with a chunk of ice at two times. What’s at issue is the phase change. Does 42 43
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common sense recognize the identity of the water and the ice in a way that authorizes asserting that they are the same object? I suspect not, but haven’t really thought about it. And then we have the problem of the caterpillar and the butterfly, or the acorn and the oak. TWO: 2a. For one thing, one’s a physical object (the ice), the other’s a mental object (memory of ice). 2b. No, they’re not the same objects. 2c. Yes, your memory is an object. THREE: It’s not entirely clear to me that any of these are metaphysical questions rather than mathematical questions. 3a. On the relationship between 3 and 4, are you considering them as cardinals or ordinals? 3b. Are you asking about 4 as a cardinal, an ordinal, or perhaps just as sign? 3c. You tell me about your square. Do you want a Euclidean answer or a topographical answer, for example. But in any event, that seems like a mathematical question, not a metaphysical one. 3d. As for that pesky Russellian set, that’s the same as the barber who doesn’t shave himself. It’s not clear to me that this is a metaphysical question. Seems to me it’s a garden variety paradox from the early 20th century. FOUR: How would it turn out that fire is not an object? From a philosophical point of view the fact that fire moves and flickers doesn’t mean it can’t be an object. For what it’s worth, Harman on fire and cotton (The Quadruple Object, p. 44): When fire burns cotton, it makes contact only with the flammability of this material. Presumably fire does not interact at all with the cotton’s odor or color, which are relevant only to creatures equipped with the organs of sense. Though it is true that the fire can change or destroy those properties that lie outside its grasp, it does so indirectly: though the detour of some additional feature of the cotton that color, odor, and fire are all able to touch. The being of the cotton withdraws from the flames, even if it is consumed and destroyed.
FIVE: On five, whether or not objecthood is a property of non-human reality or a principle of human knowledge; it’s both. But that’s my answer, not necessarily Harman’s. The notion of object as an organizing principle of human knowledge needs further consideration (see the posts I’ve listed above concerning the Great Chain and ontological cognition). There is the notion of object as category inherent in the human, most likely mammalian if not vertebrate, nervous system. But then there are abstract extensions, e.g. the notion of a mathematical object. SIX and SEVEN: These are nonsense questions and not worth much comment. Language allows you to form all sorts of propositions, but there’s no guarantee that well-formed propositions are either sensible or interesting. Those two questions are neither sensible or interesting and the world is under no obligation to provide situations to which such questions might plausibly refer.
ADDENDUM: Shadows as Objects In December I posed the question of whether or not a shadow is a metaphysical object.44 It’s not autonomous for it depends on the source of light, the occlusion, and some projective surface. If any one of them is missing, then there is no shadow. Nor do shadows seem to be productive in any interesting sense. They are not, as far as I can tell—though I’ve not thought much about it—sources of abundance. So, for the moment I conclude that shadows are not metaphysical objects. They are things that exist only in relationships among metaphysical objects. When we see a shadow, our perception adds another dimension to that relationship.
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Matter, Life, and Culture (so far)
Having devoted several posts to developing concepts of literary criticism within a pluralist framework, it’s time to have a distinctly different discussion, one about the distinction between the Realms of Matter and of Life. We must be careful here, however, not to think of matter as the inert substance of Descartes’ res extensa. In talking of vibrant matter it seems to me that Jane Bennett has it about right. Rocks, clouds and star dust may not be alive, but in view of quantum mechanics and complex dynamics we cannot say that matter is as dead as Descartes and, of course many others, believed it to be. Further, I don’t assume that either of these Realms is a single Realm. For the moment, however, I’m going to proceed as though that were the case. What I’m after is the distinction between mere matter, if you will, and life.
Conceptual Machinery: A Review First, let’s reprise the basic propositions that I stated in From Objects to Pluralism. We have two propositions taken over and modified from Harman: 1. Individual entities of various different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. To these I’ve added two more: 3. Realms of Being consist of specific kinds of entities in specific relations with one another. 4. Our cosmos has evolved from one Realm to the many evident today. It is possible that Realms exist of which we are unaware. There is no obvious limit to the emergence of new Realms from existing ones. That’s the basic framework we’re working with.
Matter and Life, Rocks and Acorns Consider the difference between a rock and an acorn. A rock is pretty much a hard dense lump of stuff regardless of its local environment. Whether it’s on the ground in a woods in Western Pennsylvania, or miles under the Pacific in the Marianas Trench, in specimen case in a museum somewhere, or floating somewhere between Jupiter and Mars, it is what it is, a rock. If you nudge it toward the Sun, however, when it gets close enough it will melt, then vaporize, and its atoms will break down into plasma (of the physical kind, not the Latourian). No more rock. What happens to the acorn in those same contexts? To be honest, I don’t really know. But, shove it toward the Sun and it will vaporize to plasma just like that rock did. Floating in space between Mars and Jupiter it’s just stuff; not as hard and dense as the rock, but pretty mucb dead like the rock. Put it in a specimen case and it’ll just lay there, though it might require some
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preparation to prevent decay. I don’t know what’ll happen to it in the Marianas Trench— probably, but I’m quite sure that, whatever it is, it’s not going to be what happens in the forest in Western Pennsylvania. In that forest the acorn might get eaten by an animal, it might rot and decay to dust, but it might also germinate and, in time, grow into an oak tree. For both rocks and acorns there are contexts where they just lay there, doing nothing. There are also contexts in which they’re vaporized. But there is no context for the rock where it catalyzes a local process comparable to that which the acorn can catalyze in the appropriate environment. In the appropriate environment a seedling will sprout from the acorn and then, perhaps, a tree. And that tree will drop more acorns. The acorn can participate in a causal process that is distinctly different from any causal process in which the rock can participate. That’s the difference I’m after in distinguishing between the Realm of Matter and the Realm of Life. The acorn can replicate itself in a way that’s unlike anything that happens in the Realm of Matter alone, and yet, at every point in its life cycle, the acorn-oak is constituted by matter and so participates in the Realm of Matter. Objects in the Realm of Life necessarily participate in the Realm of Matter. The converse is not necessarily true. There are many objects in the Realm of Matter that do not participate in Life. Beyond that, of course, there is the question of how life came from inanimate matter. That is a scientific rather than a philosophical one. But philosophers have to be cognizant of it. And, if I’m to proceed with pluralism I certainly must deal with it because it is, in effect, “in the boundary” between the inanimate and animate realms. I have little to say about that here, but I’ll quote two paragraphs from a paper David Hays and I published some years ago, A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity45: Prigogine has noted that the twentieth century introduction of physical constants such as the speed of light and Planck's constant has given an absolute magnitude to physical events (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 217-218). If the world were entirely Newtonian, then a velocity of 400,000 meters per second would be essentially the same as a velocity of 200,000 meters per second. That is not the universe in which we live. Similarly, a Newtonian atom would be a miniature solar system; but a real atom is quite different from a miniature solar system. Physical scale makes a difference. The physical laws which apply at the atomic scale, and smaller, are not the same as those which apply to relatively large objects. That the pattern of physical law should change with scale, that is a complexity inherent in the fabric of the universe, that is a complexity which does not exist in a Newtonian universe. At the molecular level life is subject to the quantum mechanical laws of the microuniverse. But multi-celled organisms are large enough that, considered as homogeneous physical bodies, they exist in the macroscopic world of Newtonian mechanics. Life thus straddles a complexity which inheres in the very structure of the universe.
Evolutionary Leaps and Realms of Life Is there only one Realm of Life, or are there several? I don’t know, but I suspect there are several. Whether they’re all sub-realms or exist in parallel, that’s a more subtle question than I’m prepared to address here and now. Over the last two decades biologists have been talking about major transitions in evolution. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry wrote a 1995 book on the subject, The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995). Does each transition introduce a new Realm of Life? I don’t know, but that is the kind of question an ontological pluralist should consider—in consultation, of course, with biologists. I’ve not read Smith and Szathmáry, but the Wikipedia has an entry on it46 and that entry has a chart listing eight transitions. I’ll simplify things and do a bit of interpreting of the 45
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Wikipedia chart. The chart begins with an initial transition from no chemical replication to a world that contains replicating molecules [major transition 1: MT 1]. Are we now in the Realm of Life? Beats me, but possibly so. Let’s go on. By compressing the next two chart transitions into one we have a transition from replicating molecules to prokaryotic cells [MT 3 on the chart]. Then we have a transition from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells having a differentiated nucleus and organelles [MT 4]. Compressing two more transitions yields a transition from protists to multicellular organisms: animals, plants, fungi [MT 6]. Then we have the transition from solitary individuals to colonies with non-reproductive castes, such as we have in the eusocial insects [Mt 7] and finally the emergence of human society [MT 8]. These last two strike me as being logically parallel, though MT 7 happened long before MT 8 rather than MT 8 building on MT 7. What strikes me is that there is no distinction between plants and animals on this chart. Both are forms of multi-celled organism, along with fungi, but transition theory, at least as outlined in the Wikipedia, makes no particular distinction between plants and animals. Should ontology recognize plants and animals as being in different Realms? I suspect so, most likely fungi too, but I’ve not attempted to think it through. Again, that’s the kind of issue we must consider. My point, then, is just that we cannot a priori consider the Realm of Life to be only one Realm. That’s an issue to be argued on the basis of the stable patterns of causal relationships—in Harman’s sense of vicarious or indirect cause—that different objects have with one another. In a similar fashion, we cannot consider the Realm of Matter to be unitary. It may or may not be. That’s something that needs to be investigated.
Corresponding Realms of Cultural Practice Now things get trickier. In talking about the Realms of Life and Matter we’re talking about objects such as quarks, leaves, DNA molecules, galaxies, ecosystems, tectonic plates and so forth, the stuff studied by the biological and physical sciences. But what of those sciences themselves, are they not Realms of Being like Naturalistic Literary Criticism and Ethical Literary Criticism? Yes, they are. If so, just what do those realms consist of? Radio telescopes, synchrotrons, microscopes, pipettes, Bunsen burners, cameras, laboratory benches, experimental procedures, observational protocols, notebooks, and so forth, the whole material apparatus of scientific practice that Latour and others emphasize. But also the concepts and cognitive strategies employed in those disciplines and studied in the cognitive sciences. This is where the study of ontological cognition comes into play. How is it that meter readings and photographs are interpreted to be evidence of bosons, gravitational lensing, mitosis, or distant galaxies? Yes, there is the physical apparatus but there is also the mental apparatus, the concepts and methods of inference, conscious and implicit. All these things make up Realms of cultural practice. The trick, of course, is to be clear about the difference between a Realm of cultural practice, such as molecular biology, and the objects studied by and posited by that discipline, such as DNA. X-ray diffraction radiography is a technique in the Disciplinary Realm of molecular biology; the double-helix DNA molecule is an object in the Realm of Life. Two different Realms, two set of objects. But, obviously, closely connected. Now we’re in a position to answer questions such as: Which physics? Which biology? Aristotle and Newton proposed somewhat different physics. Aristotle and Darwin proposed somewhat different biologies. Which will we admit to our ontology? All of them, of course. 46
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With the provision that for each different account of the biological world or the physical world, we have, in parallel, an account of the disciplinary matrix (to borrow a term of Thomas Kuhn) in which the account is constructed. We can accommodate alchemy and astrology in the same way, not to mention creationist biology. Each posits a different set of objects in the world and each consists of a different set of experimental, observational, and cognitive objects. But if we’re going to admit all this hocus pocus into our ontology, well aren’t we stuck in hopeless relativism? No. We’re not stuck. For the purpose of living one’s life, one can, one must, pick and choose among the Realms according to suitable criteria. But that’s different from the pluralist study of ontology. The pluralist studies what is without prejudice. How one lives once one leaves the study, that’s different. There prejudice and choice are unavoidable. But one should strive to leaven prejudice with an explicit politics, ethics, and aesthetics. That is, whether one adheres, say, to a biology grounded in contemporary evolutionary theory or to one compatible with young-earth creationism is an ethical matter, where ethics is broadly conceived as pertaining to how one lives one’s life. It is a political matter in the sense, I believe, that Latour articulates in Politics of Nature. The choice is not inscribed in some ‘Nature’ that is ‘out there.’ It is a matter of one’s values, of how one interprets and balances a broad range of experiences, influences, knowledge, and insights and determines THIS is how I will live my life. Such matters have not always and everywhere been presented as explicit choices, as though they’re arrayed on the surface of a table where one can examine them one after another, compare them, and so on and, in time, make one’s choice. For many people at many times, the earth was flat by default and the difference between humans and animals was absolute and categorical. We, some of us, live in a different world. We are aware of different ways of considering the world, different cultural Realms in which one may live,. But we rarely, more likely never, consider the full range of such alternatives. And rarely choose dispassionately when choose we must. But such choices are beyond ontology. The early Wittgenstein famously said of such matters that we must pass over them in silence. He was wrong about that. He was not however wrong in his judgment that such issues are different from those of ontology. But they are within the broader scope of philosophy, of the love of and search for wisdom.
The Structure of Being, so far So, we have objects. Objects are organized into Realms of Being according to stable patterns of relations among them. I’m now wondering whether or not there is an even higher level of organization among Realms. Let us provisionally—and here I’m just making things up—call them Arenas of Abundance. Each Arena is constituted by several, perhaps many, Realms of Being. If I am going to do this, then I’m going to posit three Arena: Matter, Life, and Culture. So far as we know, the Arena of Culture consists almost entirely of Realms constructed by humans. Yes, I understand that animals do have culture—I’m thinking particularly of bird song and of chimpanzee cultures. None of those, however, have been elaborated to the extent and sophistication of human culture. I have no opinion on whether or not there are Beings elsewhere in the universe who have elaborated cultural Realms of their own. Each of these Arenas has within it many Realms of Being. This higher level structure of Arenas must, of course, be explicitly justified by stable and persisting patterns of relationships among Realms of Being. For example, in the previous section I discussed certain kinds of relationships between intellectual disciplines in the Cultural Arena and objects in the Arenas of Life and of Matter.
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Is there an Arena of Abundance beyond these three (Matter, Life, Culture)? I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t exclude the possibility. In fact, I rather suspect that there is. The universe, after all, is abundant. Why should it ever stop evolving Realms? Alas, I have almost no way to talk about this fourth Arena. I will note, however, an interview I conducted with computer scientist Alan Kay47 some years ago. Richard Friedhoff and I were interviewing him in connection with our book, Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution (1989). Kay made a remark to the effect that the 20th Century had routinized the business of of creating paradigms. He was using “paradigm” as a generalization over Thomas Kuhn’s notion. Kuhn coined the word for science, and only science; but it had become generalized to all of culture by the mid-1970s, well-before the interview (which took place in the late 1980s). If THAT sense of paradigm is more or less equivalent to the notion of a Realm of Being in the Cultural Arena—and I’m not sure that it is—then Kay’s remark would seem to imply that we’re already operating in some other Arena, one that can take Realms of Culture as explicit objects of investigation. Either that, or Realms in the Cultural Arena are recursive and so can posit themselves as objects, though perhaps not without paradox and vertigo. How do we figure out whether or not we are (moving) beyond Culture? What could that possibly mean? ***** If we accept, even provisionally, the notion that Realms are, in turn, organized into Arenas of Abundance, then our system is based on five propositions: 1. Individual entities of various different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. 3. Realms of Being consist of specific kinds of entities in specific relations with one another. 4. Arenas of Abundance, in turn, consist of consistent patterns of relationships among Realms of Being and their constituent entities. 5. Our cosmos has evolved from one Realm to the many evident today. It is possible that Realms exist of which we are unaware. There is no obvious limit to the emergence of new Realms from existing ones.
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Unity of Being
In the process of formulating a pluralist approach to literary criticism I introduced the notion of unity of being (Unity of Being and Ethical Criticism) and said a few things about it with regard to literature. Now I want to generalize the idea. The term itself is not at all new, though I have no idea when and where I first encountered it much less how old it is. Nor, of course, is the idea, though just what THAT idea is in THIS context, that’s not obvious. That’s what I want to explore. In context of literary criticism I had two things in mind: the direct experience of literature and the world as constructed in a given text. The first concerns what it feels like to experience a given text, moment by moment, from beginning to end. The second is how one lives one’s life outside and beyond the text, but in its shadow. That is, the world view embodied in the text. In doing so I simply indicated that those things are what I meant by unity of being. And that’s how I’m going to proceed, inductively rather than deductively. I could, abstractly considered, proceed by defining being and consequent to that defining unity and disunity of being. Maybe I’ll eventually end up there, but not now. In particular, I may figure out the relationship between “being” in this context and “being” in the general context of pluralist ontology: Are they the same thing or not?
Another Case: Music So, unity of being and the literary text. What about, not a verbal text, but instrumental music, or dance? There we have the moment by moment experience, but there is no reference to, construction of, the world? Here unity of being can exist only in the expressive act, for there is no expression of nor reference to a world outside the expressive act. The case is an important one because I believe it to be fundamental to the evolutionary, psychological, social, and psychological transition from clever ape to proto-human. In making that argument, as I did at some length in Beethoven’s Anvil, I argued that rhythm, not melody much less harmony, is the foundation. And synchronization to a simple beat is the most basic form of rhythmic organization in a group. Fireflies have been observed to synchronize their blinking, certain audiences will synchronize their clapping. And almost all forms of music require that the players synchronize around a single repetitive beat. Now, following an illustrious line of predecessors including Darwin and Rousseau, what I actually argue in Beethoven’s Anvil (2001) is not that music, as we know it, made us human, but that proto-music, if you will, made us human. This proto-music preceded the differentiation of vocal activity into singing and speaking and, for that matter, it preceded the differentiation between music and dance. It is ancient stuff. It might have happened like this (Beethoven’s Anvil, pp. 177-178): So now we have bands of proto-humans using their animal calls, and their animal moves as well. Group musicking would surely be common. I can imagine it starting more or less spontaneously around significant events. A lion is beaten off, a female comes back from the bush with a new infant, a death, a fresh kill, a water hole is found after a two-day search, a quarrel breaks out and is resolved. I'm imagining a group of folks going about their business and then something dramatic happens that captures the attention of more and more individuals; they begin milling around while chattering and gesturing. Then gestures, footfalls, and cries begin intersecting one another, creating ever denser patterns
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of sonic and gestural coincidence—the dynamics might have been a bit like those of the clapping we examined at the end of chapter 3.48 That, I believe, is how group musicking emerged. For generations upon generations, this musicking may have been opportunistic and haphazard. But the particular patterns of group interaction became easier and easier to trigger, the catalytic requirements less and less, and somehow the activity began happening without any particular catalyst at all. It just happened that on this or that occasion enough individuals gathered together in a small space, one of them began a rhythmic stomp and the joined in, for the fun of it. In this context, every once in awhile— and, over time, more and more frequently—magic could happen. People would have fun and, perhaps, anxiety would be dissipated as well.
I will now assert, if only provisionally, that it is in this context that humans began to seek unity of being. The experience of synchronized group activity felt good and that feeling became the goal and end of the action. Individuals lost in the dancing and music-making group, that’s one face of unity of being, the subjective experience of flow. There is another face. In Beethoven’s Anvil I go on to argue that proto-music brought about a uniquely human social space (Chapter 9, “Musicking the World,” pp. 195 ff.). As language emerged the emerging humans inscribed the world within this space through ritual and story-telling, through myth. And that reveals the other face of unity of being.
Neural Coherence and Trickster Let us step back from music and myth for a moment and think about memory, autobiography, and the self. We assume, without giving it much thought, that we can recall most of the important events in our life, at least those that happened after four or five years of age. While recognizing that memory is not complete or infallible, we assume that we more or less have our life history at our command, that we can recall the past at will. I don’t wish to question that assumption. Rather, I want to point out that such recall as we do have is, given the biochemical nature of the nervous system, rather remarkable. Consider this passage from an old post, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility,49 in which I lay the ground for an account of the adaptive value of story-telling: I now have another proposal to offer, one based in a line of thinking I began entertaining in the mid-1970s when I learned about state-dependent memory. I first learned about state dependence when I read a review of the literature on altered states of consciousness in which Roland Fischer reported an experiment originally performed by D. Goodwin (“The Cartography of Inner Space” in Hallucinations, Siegel and West, eds. 1975, p. 199). Subjects were first made drunk and then asked to memorize nonsense syllables. When their recall was tested while sober they performed poorly. Their recall dramatically improved, however, if they once again became drunk. More recently, Daniel L. Schacter has written of mood-congruent memory retrieval: “Experiments have shown that sad moods make it easier to remember negative experiences, like failure and rejection, whereas happy moods make it easier to remember pleasant experiences, like success and acceptance” (Searching for Memory, 1996, p. 211). Recall of experience is best when the one’s brain is in the same state it was in when one had that experience. That is what is meant by state dependence. Given that motivation and emotion are mediated by over a hundred neurotransmitters and neuromodulators (Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 1998), the state dependent nature of memory has profound implications for our ability to recall our personal experience. As I have previously argued [The Evolution of Narrative and the Self50]: 48
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If records of personal experience are [biochemically biased], especially in the case of strongly emotionally charged experience, then how can we get a coherent view of ourselves and of our world? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn't part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person's [biochemical state], it is still the same apple. If this is how the nervous system works, then how does one achieve a state of mind in which one can as easily remember an apple as a sexual object? That is to say, how does the brain achieve a biochemically “neutral” state of mind from which one can recall or imagine any kind of experience?
Think about that for awhile. To use a crude metaphor, each memory is in a box that’s biochemically locked. To open the box and retrieve the memory you need the right biochemical key. When you were chased by that bear, you were afraid. That memory is locked by fear. When you first met your new-born niece, that memory is locked by affection. When, a year later, she bit your finger and drew blood, that memory is locked by anger. And when the sun came out after the story, that memory is locked by joy. Where do you keep the keys to these locks so you can open any lock at any time? For without such a key chain your own memory is, at best, only sporadically accessible for reflection. Here’s what I said in the Tranquility post: I suggest that story-telling is a way of accomplishing this. Parents tell stories to children in a setting that is comfortable and safe and those stories are generally calibrated with a sense of what interests and pleases the child, but is not too frightening. Children hear stories in which characters are hungry or thirsty, but eventually find food and water, in which characters are lost and frightened, but then found, in which important relationships are imperiled, but restored, in which new relationships are formed and, in time, in which important relationships may be lost forever. They are allowed to experience a wide range of emotional behavior in a context where they are safe.
With this is mind, let’s consider the figure of the Trickster, which is known in a wide variety of the world’s mythologies and is perhaps best known through the Winnebago Trickster stories as collected by Paul Radin (The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, Schocken 1972). The tales form a mythical encyclopedia of Winnebago culture. Radin remarks in his introductory essay (p. xxiii) that Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet though his actions all values come into being.
That is to say, Trickster is dominated by those biochemically coded behavioral modes, as I have called them51 in many posts. They are all in display in the stories of the cycle. That cycle is thus the chain on which hang the keys to all the biochemical locks to our memory boxes. Here’s a brief characterization of the cycle from my essay on narrative evolution:52
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http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/behavioral%20mode http://ssrn.com/abstract=1516054
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The basic action of the story is simple. Trickster, the tribal chief, is preparing for war. This preparation violates tribal tradition, for the tribal chief is not permitted to go to war. While there is no explicit retribution for this, no character who says something like, "Because you have failed to observe the proper rituals, you are going to be punished," the preparations fail and Trickster ends up in the wilderness, completely stripped of culture. He then undergoes a series of adventures in which, in effect, he learns how to operate his body and his culture. These episodes are a catalog of behavioral modes, with hunger and sexuality being prominent. For example, there is one incident (Episodes 12, 13, and 14) where Trickster learns that his anus is part of his body. He had killed some ducks and started roasting them overnight. When he went to sleep, he instructed his anus to ward off any intruders. Some foxes came and his anus did the best it could, but the foxes ignored the flatulence and ate the ducks anyhow. So, to punish his anus he burns it with a piece of burning wood. Naturally he feels pain. Only then does he realize that his anus is a part of himself.
As that particular example indicates, there is nothing polite or sanitized about these tales, and that’s just one instance. The Trickster cycle knows no shame. Which is the point. No Winnebago would talk about such things in polite society, nor would a Victorian matron, but the telling of the Trickster stories is a public occasion in which all in the band are present. Everyone feels Trickster’s pain, and knows that everyone feels it. And everyone laughs, in the presence of everyone else. That’s how the keychain of memory locks is formed, in public, and so it has public approval. Given this keychain, individuals can master their own stories, remember and reflect on events in their own lives. That is to say, they can create for themselves a unified life history and, for the group, a unified history as well. That, I believe, is the biological function of these fictions that so enthrall us, whether in the form of myths and folktales, epic cycles, triple-decker novels, or movies and cartoons. They forge the biosocial links that support chains and nets of individual and collective narrative.
Religious Ritual & Hurricane Sandy Let us consider one more example, this from my own immediate personal history. I live in Jersey City, New Jersey, which is on the West bank of the Hudson River, across from lower Manhattan and at the head of New York Bay. When hurricane Sandy blew through two weeks ago Jersey City was hit hard. I was without electrical power for four-and-a-half days; that, in turn, meant no heat, no hot water, no television, and no internet. Some of my neighbors were flooded out and a near-by dry dock for small boats was trashed.
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On the Sunday after Sandy, which hit on a Monday evening, I went to church. Though I hold no conventional religious belief I wanted to be with my neighbors on this day. The church is Christian and so is based on stories going back three-thousand years. I won’t attempt to recount the entire service, which had many parts in addition to the sermon, which was the second half of the almost two-hour service. The service is clearly designed to support maximum participation from a wide variety of church members, deacons, ushers, choir members, and ordinary congregants in addition to the pastor, his wife, and assistant ministers. Thus at one point early in the service one woman in the congregation spoke up and asked to testify. A hymn had touched her heart and she wanted to talk about what had happened when she was gravely ill and some had given her up for dead. And thus was that particular experience made the common property of those in attendance. As I said in an earlier post, the general tenor of the service was that God has shown His power, that He is in control, that He has given us a wake-up call. From a logical point of view that implies the God is responsible for all that damage and all the misery. But there was no attempt to blame God for Sandy’s destruction nor, despite the repeated assertion that He has given us a wake-up call, was there any attempt to make us feel guilty for our sins. A wake-up call is NOT a punishment, not in the logic of liturgical practice in this particular Christian tradition. Rather, we should be grateful for this opportunity to experience God’s majesty and to show Him our love and devotion. We should be kind to one another and help one another. Clearly the aim of this service was to bring peace of mind to the congregants and energize us to face the days ahead. The Biblical passages quoted throughout the service situate our current experience and aspirations in the context of an account of how the world is, assuring us that, despite the destruction we’ve just been through, and which we will have to face once we leave the church, the world is still the world. And we are still loved by God.
Unity of Being in Many Forms The goal of that church service, then, was unity of being. That is to say, I am proposing that as another example of unity of being, along with the tellings of the Trickster tales and the original proto-music through which clever apes made themselves into human beings. I could offer many more examples, and I suppose I should consider an example from among the many meditation traditions. But I won’t. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. What does one do during meditation? Of what do you become aware? How does it give you control over your mind? That is to say, how does it contribute to unity of being? In terms of the pluralist metaphysics I have been proposing and exploring, we each live our lives in various Realms of Being. Each society affords its members various Realms of Being,
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various ways of acting in the world, whether alone or through interacting with others. Unity of Being is the capacity to move fluidly among these realms. One the one hand we have those Realms of ritual, play, and performance that are designed to move us through simulacra of other realms, and though facilitate the development of unity among them. The pleasurable and fluid experience of these Realms is one face of Unity of Being. The other face is the content of the stories themselves, and the beliefs elaborated upon those stories. Those are the stories of what we are as human beings. In this sense Unity of Being is NOT that all Realms are one and the same, but rather that we can move among them and ourselves remain one and the same. Do I believe this? How should I know, I just made it up. Maybe I’ll understand these things better tomorrow, or the next day, or a week from now. Until then I have to say something in order to get there.
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Unity of Being 2: Choosing Life Ways
I ended my previous post on unity of being by suggesting: In terms of the pluralist metaphysics I have been proposing and exploring, we each live our lives in various Realms of Being. Each society affords its members various Realms of Being, various ways of acting in the world, whether alone or through interacting with others. Unity of Being is the capacity to move fluidly among these realms...In this sense Unity of Being is NOT that all Realms are one and the same, but rather that we can move among them and ourselves remain one and the same.
I now want to elaborate on that suggestion. I want to start with human biology, thus setting foot into the den of evolutionary psychology. My standard analogy is that of a game such as chess. Biology provides the pieces, the game board, and the rules. Human culture dictates the larger strategy of playing the game. The constraints of biology are as real as those of chess. Bishops can’t move rectilinearly, rooks can’t move diagonally, and pawns can only move one or two spaces at a time. Similarly, reproduction requires two, death is inevitable, and oxygen is a requirement of life. Unyielding though these constraints are, there is much freedom in playing chess and there is much freedom in organizing human society. At the end of this post I will offer, in a provisional and somewhat parabolic mode, the suggestion that, while none of us can choose the culture into which we are born and in which we are raised, at some point in our lives we are free to choose the culture in which we will live out our lives and in the context of which we will die. Such a choice, while it is not new, it has been rare in most times and places. In the so-called post-modern world it is becoming almost routine. Indeed, in the face of global warming we may not be able to avoid such a choice. And THAT is the ethical edge of the pluralism I have been sketching, the capacity, the imperative, to choose, in a non-trivial way, the fundamental armature of our lives. We must choose how we would seek unity of being.
Behavioral Modes and Inner Speech As I have argued in many posts on this blog53 (some of which I’ve collected in this working paper54), vertebrate life ways are structured by a set of fundamental behavioral modes. These modes are biochemically regulated in the most primitive structures of the brain. At any given moment an animal will be in one of these modes: eating, exploring, care giving, courting, fighting, etc. The mode “configures” the animal’s coupling with the environment. For an animal that is hungry, the environment becomes a source of food; foodstuffs become salient while everything else recedes into the background. For an animal that’s exploring novelty becomes salient and the familiar is avoided. And so forth. Each behavioral mode thus configures the world as a different realm of being (notice the lower case). But, just as, in Derrida’s formulation (which we’ll get to in a bit), the animal does not know it is naked, so it does not know it is IN this or that behavioral mode or that it WAS in
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http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/behavioral%20mode http://ssrn.com/abstract=2121559
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this or that mode just a moment ago. It moves from one mode to another, from one realm of being to another, living its life. Humans are different; during the long transition from clever ape to proto-human we became so. And we became so through language. As I noted in an earlier post, there is a line of thinking that goes back through Vygotsky that regards language as the tool through which we manipulate and explore our own mind.55 Just as others talk to us and thereby direct our attention and even command, or at least cajole, our will, so we can, and sometimes do, talk aloud to ourselves. But we can also simply drop physical speech and roam in our minds using inner speech. It is inner speech that we use to summon and assemble memories of past events. It is inner speech that we use to plan for an anticipate the future, and to think and reason explicitly about whatever. And it is inner speech that presents us with the recalcitrance of our own body. If I may quote St. Augustine (The City of God, Book 14, Chapter 17): Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called "shameful." Their condition was different before sin. . . . because not yet did lust move those members without the will's consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man. For they were not created blind, as the unenlightened vulgar fancy; . . . Their eyes, therefore were open, but were not open to this, that is to say, were not observant so as to recognize what was conferred upon them by the garment of grace, for they had no consciousness of their members warring against their will. But when they were stripped of this grace, that their disobedience might be punished by fit retribution, there began in the movement of their bodily members a shameless novelty which made nakedness indecent.
Those shameless “members,” parts of our body and thus inextricably yoked to us, go about their way without consulting us. Now we have a problem. We can use language to direct the movements of our skeletal muscles, but it is impotent in directing the sex organs, or more generally, in directing emotion and desire. Language presents us with the problem of the animal within. We can now explicate that problem, as I have done, in neural terms. The modal system is the most primitive part of the brain. It affects everything, including language and the will, but it is not directly subject to them. We can manipulate the modal system indirectly through stories, pictures, music, ritual and so forth but we do not have direct control over it. It is thus language that presents us with the problem of unity of being, of personal coherence and continuity. It is language that forces on us the realization that we live in multiple Realms of Being and thereby forces us to understand and rationalize that multiplicity. Let us continue where Augustine left us, but in a more contemporary vein.
Shame, Death, and Dreams There is a passage early in The Animal That Therefore I Am where Derrida notes the he has “trouble repressing a reflex of shame” while standing “naked, one’s sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just so see” (p. 4). A bit later he observes (trans. David Wills 2008, p. 5): There is no nudity “in nature.” There is only the sentiment, the affect, the (conscious or unconscious) experience of existing in nakedness. Because it is naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked. And therefore it isn’t naked. At least that is what is thought. For man it would be the opposite, and clothing derives from technics. We would therefore have to think shame and technicity together, as the same “subject.” And evil and history, and work, and so many other things that go along with it. Man would be the only one to have invented a garment to cover his sex. 55
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That we humans feel shame and cover our nakedness, that is so. But why? And is it our sex that we cover, as Derrida says, following in a long tradition? I note that, in males, the sexual organ is also the organ of urination; the same channel carries both urine and sperm. In women the organ of urination is only in proximity to that of urination. In both, of course, the organ of defecation is right behind. So in covering the organ of sex we also cover the organs of elimination. Perhaps they are the REAL target? Or are the all the real targets, taken together in their complicity and their ambiguity. Is it that we cannot comprehend or tolerate that reproduction and elimination, life and death, use the same channels and it is that commingling of vital opposites that we seek to cover? Is that confusion our shame? And then there is death. We now know, as if there was every any doubt, that animals (chimpanzees for example56) mourn the deaths of their fellows. How could they not? When a companion dies no longer can you turn to them for comfort and companionship. You turn but are greeted only with an emptiness. It is in that emptiness that you mourn. That is one thing. But does an animal know the it will dies. When mourning the death of a companion—a friend, or for that matter, an enemy, a child, a parent—does the animal know that it too will die? How could it? How could it construct that knowledge? With what tools? Humans construct such knowledge through the tools given by inner speech. It is inner speech that allows one to assemble the narrative of one’s life and it is inner speech that confronts the fact that there are no memories of one’s earliest days. Inner speech, however, can do more than thread the beads of one’s own past experience in order. It allows one to do so with events in the lives of others, even the events of birth and death. For one can witness those things as they happen to others. Finally, language allows one to explicitly note that one is like those others and therefore to infer that, as they were once born, so too oneself, though one lacks a memory of that birth. And so with death as well. One day you will die. That body that you cannot control will cease to function. It will die. And you with it. Just when emerging humans first were able, individually, to conceive of their own death, of that we do not know, for we cannot ask them. But grave goods appear in the archeological record over 100,000 years ago.57 I am willing to take these signs of intentional burial as evidence the people know that they too would die. And death has consumed the human imagination. We conduct rituals around and about it, we structure stories by it. It is a cardinal point of human culture. And then we have dreams. Consider an observation that Weston La Barre made in The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion (p. 60): ... the Australian Bushman themselves equate dream-time with the myth-time that is mysteriously brought back in ritual; myth is as timeless as the unconscious mind. It is the delectability of dreams that makes them desirable, and it is their desirability that (along with lowered critical threshold) that gives them their intense “reality” and conviction. The fact that he dreams first force on man the need to epistemology.
Though I don’t have a citation at hand, I believe there is evidence that animals dream; that is, they exhibit REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which marks dreaming in humans. But, without language, how can they recall their dreams? And without recall, dreams cannot pose a problem: Where was I when THAT happened? Dreams self-evidently ARE another Realm of Being. Yes, our bodies do not obey our will. Yes, we know that we will die. But dreams, is there really this other world in which we live,
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or even other worlds? And when dreams become myth and ritual they are shared in a group and so become the matrix of cultural forms.
The Self in the Group We’re now in the realm of the Trickster, whose mythology I discussed in Unity of Being. People set around in a group and listen to the Trickster grapple with all the behavioral modes—sleep, eating, defecation, sex, foraging—and thereby affirm that diversity they all share and, as I argued in that post, forge the neurocognitive tools which language needs in order to weave narratives of their lives, their real lives and not just mythological culture heroes. Before moving forward, however, let us step back. So far I have, for the most part, been posing these issues as if they are issues of and for individuals. But we do not live alone. We live among others. These issues all extend through society, hence shared myths and rituals. Let us recall our evolutionary precursors, the animals. Animals live among their fellows. In particular, primates are very social creatures. Many of our behavioral modes link us with our fellows, among them those concerned with courtship and child-rearing and those concerned with group defense. Emotional expression communicates our inner state to others, with facial expression and vocalization being particularly important (cf. this interview with neuroscientist Steven Porges58). The Cartesian self may well be a lone individual in search of a world and of other minds. But that Cartesian self is a philosophical myth, a myth that has run long past its expiration date. The selves that are constructed are always selves in society, face to expressive face. While individuals must forge their individual identities as they live their lives in various Realms of Being, they do so with the help of the larger society, which authorizes those various Realms of Being. If I may leap from human prehistory to the recent past, the counter cultures of the 1960s in the United States and Europe reflected a desire for social authorization of new Realms of Being, Realms revealed through drugs and meditation. Even as those struggles continue we have questions about whether cyberspace is/can be/will be the site of new Realms. But these cultural evolutionary struggles are hardly new in kind. There was a time when science and the novel had to establish themselves. And before that Plato cast doubt on written text even as he was a virtuoso within that Realm. That’s what culture does. In the large and over the long haul it throw up realms for consideration and consolidation into Realms of Cultural Being. Today’s digital media simply multiply the possibilities even as environmental distress forces decisions that will restructure life ways from top to bottom around the globe.
Ethics: Choosing Among Patterns of Unity And so we are back to the point in my introduction where I suggested that “while none of us can choose the culture into which we are born and in which we are raised, at some point in our lives we are free to choose the culture in which we will live out our lives and in the context of which we will die. Such a choice, while it is not new, it has been rare in most times and places. In the so-called post-modern world it is becoming almost routine.” The so-called culture wars in American politics have been about that kind of choice. Human societies can be and have been organized in many different ways. Biology places constraints, but they are loose, just as the rules of chess, while hard-edged, can accommodate many different styles of play.
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Do we permit abortion or not? That single issue is a thread connecting many issues. Societies can be organized to accommodate different configurations and patterns on these issues, but not all configurations will be mutually tolerable. What of animal rights? ***** I note that three-quarters of a century ago Ruth Benedict wrote Patterns of Culture. It now seems to me that to have described and named the phenomenon in THAT is is to have begun the process of dismantling it in one sense and reconstructing it in another. It becomes an object of thought, of contemplation, and thereby ceases to be the unconscious shaper of thought. Benedict hadn’t gotten that far in 1934, but we deconstructive post-moderns have. And so we must face the choices with which our intellectual adventuring has confronted us. We’re now in the territory Latour explored in Politics of Nature. These are matters of values and they do not have resolutions in matters of fact. They are about how we choose to live our lives. For we CAN and we MUST choose. Our choices have consequences, though we cannot foresee all of them. Let us for a moment imitate the logicians. Let us define a Life Way as consisting of a plurality of beings, of Realms of Being, and of patterns over those beings and those Realms. Given a specific Life Way that pattern will have an ethics inherent in it. But the choice OF a pattern, that is a different kind of choice. It is not a matter of deciding whether or this or that course of action is ethically justified, but a matter of choosing the principles of ethical justification. What kinds of beings will we admit into our life ways? What rights, obligations, and powers inhere in those beings? In figuring out what those questions mean and how one goes about answering, there’s where you will find a pluralistic ethics. ***** And once again, as I have done at various times in this project, I must ask: Do I actually believe this? And I must give the ritual response: How would I know, I just made it up?
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Facing up to Relativism: Negotiating the Commons
In my earlier post, Unity of Being 2: Choosing Life Ways, I brought this discussion of pluralism to the edge of ethics. I now wish to look over that edge, and not just with respect to ethics, but revisit aesthetics as well, this time looking beyont literature. It is the fact strong suspicion that the possibilities for human Life Ways far exceed the capacities of any individual and any one collective, to use a term from Latour, it is this fact that forces ethics and aesthetics upon our pluralist enterprise. That, and the practical ongoing business of life.
Remix Culture For it has been the practical business of history that peoples of different beliefs—beliefs about what exists in the world (ontology), beliefs about the beautiful (aesthetics), beliefs about the good (ethics)—have been mixing and clashing and negotiating their mutual affairs from day to week to month to year and beyond. Until relatively recently, however, the parties to these interactions have assumed, if only by default, the one of them is right, or at least more right than the others, and so in the end must, or at least should, win out. For the last two or three decades “multiculturalism” has been a reference point in American cultural and political life. Often enough it is a code word for race, with cultural matters being secondary. For the politics of identity and the so-called culture wars have conflated race and culture along with culture and society. America’s national mythology proclaims the nation to be a “melting pot,” a metaphor implying that the various inflowing cultures become one. The historical reality in America is far more complex, and interesting than that. And that reality extends beyond America. Differing peoples have been mixing and mingling since whenever and the result, so far, has been a continual regeneration and remixing of differences. Immigration across widely different cultural boundaries is a fact of contemporary life. In 2010, for example, 9.4% of the population of European Union countries consisted of people born outside of their resident country, with most of them being born outside the EU.59 And then we have the internal conflict in nation states created by Western colonialism where people of different cultures find themselves co-existing within the same state. And so on. I do not, however, intend to preface these reflections with even the most cursory review of cultural flow in human history, for that would amount of a précis of that history. My point, rather, has been simply to say enough to remind us that interaction between peoples of differing cultures is a fact of human life, and one that is becoming more pressing as the globe “shrinks” through the multiple interacting forces of economic globalization, population growth, and global climate change. We are in this together and so must figure out how to live with one another. This existing pluralism, this pluralism on the ground if you will, has received scant philosophical attention, the expansive and open-ended nature of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on relativism not withstanding.60 This is, I presume, because all philosophers are necessarily partisans of some cultural formation—I know I certainly am—and so work as advocates of that formation, if only by default. Bruno Latour is a significant exception though he, like Lévi-Strauss in an earlier generation, writes as an anthropologist pursuing philosophical matters. Thus the fourth chapter of 59 60
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Europe#2010_data_for_European_Union http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/ 57
We Have Never Been Modern is a subtle examination of relativism, rather mostly with respect to ontology and epistemology rather than the ethical and aesthetic issues I’m concerned with here. However, it is his more recent Politics of Nature that I wish to examine, if only briefly. Like the earlier discussion, this one focuses on epistemology and ontology, but the apparatus Latour creates in the process can, it seems to me, be extended into ethics and aesthetics, into politics.
Some Definition: Culture, Society, Realms, Life Ways But first we must address some matters of definition. For, as I’ve argued at some length in my working paper, Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century61, conceptual confusion is rife. Let us begin with a simple distinction, that between culture and society. Bhikhu Parekh puts it clearly in Rethinking Multicultralism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Harvard UP 2000, p. 146): Although culture and society are inseparable in the sense that there is neither a society without a culture nor a culture which is not associated with some society, the two have different focus and orientation. Broadly speaking, society refers to a group of human beings and the structure of their relations, culture to the content and organizing and legitimizing principles of these relations.
Terms such as “French culture,” “Japanese culture,” or “African culture” are generally used as though they indicated kinds of culture rather than simply the geo-political locus of cultural practices. And when one is talking about such things as cuisine, music, and cinema, that conflation seems reasonable. But what do we make of the fact that there is a Disneyland in France and one in Japan? Are they outposts of French culture and Japanese culture, respectively, or American culture, for America is the home of the original Disneyland? Or perhaps they’re all outposts of Disney culture, along with Hong Kong Disneyland. Does this mean that there IS such a thing as Disney culture and that it’s not a national culture? And what of, say, physics? Is French physics conceptually and operationally different from Japanese physics? Do they recognize different laws of motion, have different rosters of subatomic particles, use different mathematics, different experimental protocols, different instrumentation? Those questions are just some of the many questions posed by the too easy conflation of culture with the geo-political nation state. If French culture were indeed a product of French soil then Muslim immigrants, for example, would lose interest in seeing their women and girls wear headscarves upon setting foot on French soil. But that has not happened and girls wearing headscarves in school has been controversial. Nation states, like France, have myths about national culture and identity, but we cannot take any of those myths at face value. And certainly not the myth of Western culture, a myth the moderns created even as they drew a sharp line between nature and culture, a line Latour has shown to be fractal in form, like the line between the light and dark portions of marble cake. Culture is one thing, society is another. The relationship between social groups and the cultural forms enacted by their members is a complex one. And then we have the terminology I’ve been developing in this investigation, Realms of Being and Life Ways, which, alas, presents subtleties of its own. You will recall that in my post, From Objects to Pluralism I defined the concept of a Realm of Being. I took Levi Bryant’s notion of a regime of attraction as “networks of fairly stable exo-relations that tend to produce stable and repetitive local manifestations among ... objects” (The Democracy of Objects, p. 169) and crossed it with Harman’s notion of indirect or vicarious causation so that: Realms of Being are revealed in the formal structure of causal relationships in the cosmos... Working out the causal laws and mechanisms is a job for the specialized disciplines. Working out the overall structure of causal relations is a job for philosophy. 61
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In subsequent posts on literature and literary study I paid particular attention to Realms of Cultural Being, which are specifically human Realms. Of course, in proper Latourian fashion, these Realms must necessarily include non-humans. The Realm of Automobile Mechanics, to pick a non-literary example, would include tools and materials as well as mechanics and their technical knowledge. Likewise the Realm of Roman Catholic liturgy includes a panoply of ritual objects, including the place of worship, along with the ritual celebrants and appropriate texts and activities. And so it goes for all these Cultural Realms, of which there are obviously very many. Let me now add a refinement: each Cultural Realm may be conceived of as a structure of social roles, some of which will be played by humans and others by nonhumans. In this way we can analytically separate the notion of a Cultural Realm from any given concrete embodiment and thus conform to the standard distinction between culture and society. Likewise we must recognize, again in conformity with that distinction, that really existing Realms are always embodied in specific collections (assemblages?) of human and nonhuman actors or actants, to use Latour’s term. I then defined a Life Way as a pattern over Realms (see the previous post in this series, Unity of Being 2: Choosing Life Ways). For an individual it is the set of Realms in which they play some role at one time or another. For a group, the Life Way is the set of Realms required by all members of the group. For any but the simplest more or less autonomous society, the group’s Life Way will contain more Cultural Realms than the Life Ways of any individual members.
Negotiating Collectives: Latour’s Republic In his Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Harvard UP 2004) Latour is concerned about how properly to negotiate the common world to be shared by all beings. Quarks, goblins, galaxies, zombies, Newton’s Laws of Motion, curses and spells, giant squids, dragons, global warming, and Valhalla, which of these are real and so belong in the cosmos, that is, the common world, and which are to be banished? Latour doesn’t set out to answer the question, to give us his outline of the common world. Rather, observing that the moderns have botched the job of creating a common world (We Have Never Been Modern), Latour sets out to examine what we must do to get it right. Latour’s exposition is very abstract and somewhat in the spirit of Plato’s Republic. It is not simply that the allegory of the cave recurs throughout the book, but that the argument itself presents an ideal social formation—I avoid the world “society” as it has a particular meaning in Latour’s lexicon and it is exactly what he wants to overcome—with its organs and procedures for renegotiating the relations between facts and values in determining which beings will enter into the common world. Latour calls that ideal formation simply the collective (p. 238): it accumulates the old powers of nature and society in a single enclosure before it is differentiated once again into distinct powers...In spite of its use in the singular, the term refers not to an already-established unit but to a procedure for collecting associations of humans and nonhumans.
In sketching out this collective Latour asks us to imagine an upper house and a lower house, along with various skills and powers accorded to the actants in this drama, all operating in due process as set out in a new constitution. For the purposes of this essay we can leave those and many other details aside. What I need, what I’m after, is something that comes late in the argument, the concept of the diplomat and the need for negotiations. Latour asks us to imagine an idealized process in which the common world is negotiated among diplomats representing the interests of the various extant “associations of humans and nonhumans” seeking to form a common world. Of the diplomat, Latour notes that he or she (p. 212) “always belongs to one of the parties of the conflict” and has one peculiar and decisive advantage over the anthropologist: a potential traitor to all camps, he does not know in advance in what form those whom he is addressing are going to formulate the requirements that may lead to war or to peace.
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And he goes on to elaborate this notion of the diplomat. The point of Latour’s formulations is to make it clear that the diplomat does not occupy a standpoint that is transcendental to those of any of the parties in the conflict. The diplomat has no special vantage point that allows him or her to see all and no special knowledge or principles that would allow him or her to adjudicate the matters under dispute. On the contrary, the diplomat’s job is to engage in negotiations with other diplomats and to create, over time, the essential requirements of common world in which the parties to the conflict will agree to live, one with the other. As he points out, in the old world, that of the moderns, “what was essential was always already known; with the new, what is essential is still to come” (from the diagram at the top of p. 213). And now we have an astonishing and brilliant passage, one in which the term “collective” is applied to the individual parties in common world negotiations (p. 214): Apart from a diplomatic trial, no collective can differentiate between what is essential and what is superfluous; it will go to war over anything, because it sees everything as equally necessary. Only slowly, through preliminary negotiations, pourparlers, will a collective agree to reconsider its own constitution, by differentiating what is essential from what is superfluous according to other principles. It will undertake this exhausting task only on condition that the other will agree to subject itself to the same triage.
Thus, over time as negotiations evolve, those matters essential to the larger collective, the common world, will emerge and be separated from “what can be given up as the price for an extension of the collective.” The hinterlands. And beyond them, I suppose, is the mysterious Latourian plasma. As I said before, Latour is concerned with ontology, not with ethics or aesthetics. But the idealized mechanisms and processes he has invented for that purposes can, it seems to me, be applied to matters of ethics and aesthetics as well. As a practical matter, peoples, whether tribes, city-states, or nation states, do have multiple differing Life Ways. Some differences are mere differences and, as such, present no significant obstacles to living among people with other Life Ways, that is, other cultures. Other matters are more consequential. But there is, as far as I can tell, no a priori way of running up a list of beliefs and practices and dividing them into the consequential and the minor. That’s the point of Latour’s subtle exercise in philosophical state craft: How do we proceed in the absence of being able to draw up such a list and then divide it in two? I will also say that, in some ways Latour’s account of an idealized procedure to be implemented at some future time also seems to characterize, albeit very abstractly, what has actually happened (and is happening) in interactions among different peoples and nations. Yes, the rich and the strong have imposed their ways on others. But those impositions have rarely been as thoroughgoing as the strong have wished and, in any event, it is not as though the strong are or ever have been of a single party. And that is certainly not the case in the world today. Such Latourian negotiations, if you will, have always been a part of the historical process. And they will continue for the foreseeable future and, I warrant, well beyond. Marx asked us to imagine a future in which class conflict ceased to exist. Latour is asking us to imagine a world in which the commons is negotiated in a more expeditious and transparent fashion. He makes no representations of ultimate success, whatever would that be? much less of stasis. Nor do I. The world is too rich, too abundant, for that to happen.
Politics: Some Example Issues Rather than continue on in this abstract vein, let us consider some example issues. My purpose here is certainly not to attempt to adjudicate them—which is the most that I, as a single individual, could do, for negotiations must take place between independent parties—nor even to express my own opinions on them. I wish only to put them before you as examples of issues that have in fact arisen in the contemporary world and that are of the kind that a pluralist must take
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seriously. And by that I mean that, while any individual pluralist will have a preference on these issues, that the fact that they are in dispute means that they must be entered into the kind of negotiations Latour has elaborated. Rather than present my own list I offer you one compiled by Bhikhu Parekh in Rethinking Multicultralism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Harvard UP 2000). He characterizes the list as a number of “practices that have aroused different degrees of public concern in recent years” (pp. 264-265): 1. Female circumcision. 2. Polygamy. 3. Muslim and Jewish methods of slaughtering animals. 4. Arranged marriages, practised mainly, but not only by Asians. The practice ranges from largely formal parental approval of their offspring’s choice to foisting ones on them. 5. Marriages within prohibited degrees of relationships, for example, Muslims can marry their first cousins, and Jews their nieces, both of which are viewed with disfavour in some western societies. 6. The practice, common among some African communities, of scaring their children’s cheeks of other parts of the body as part of the initiation ceremony. 7. The Muslim practice of withdrawing their school-going girls from such activities as sports, athletics and swimming lessons that involve wearing shorts and exposing parts of their body. 8. Muslim girls wearing the hijab or headscarf in schools. Although it is allowed in most western countries, it continues to arouse varying degrees of opposition in some of them. 9. Sikh refusal to wear helmets rather than their traditional turbans when driving motor cycles or doing dangerous work on building sites, to take off their turbans when taking oaths in court or bowing before the speaker in the House of Commons, and to shave off their beards when workingin places that involved the handling of food. 10. Refusal by gypsies and the Amish community to send their children to schools either altogether or after reaching a certain age on the grounds that modern education is useless form them and alienates them from their community. 11. Requests by Hindus to be allowed to cremate their deceased on a funeral pyre, scatter the ashes in rivers and, in rare cases, to drown rather than cremate their corpses. 12. Subordinate status of women and all it entails including denial of opportunities for their personal development in some minority communities. The list is certainly not exhaustive; it is merely indicative. What issues must be decided for all polities, one way or another, and what can be allowed to vary from one polity to another? On what issues can members of a given polity have different beliefs and still respect and tolerate the beliefs of all citizens in the nation? Before going on to a somewhat shorter and rather different list of aesthetic issues, let me add one more example to Parekh’s list, one that Latour has taken up at various times: Global Warming: Here we have a cascade of issues. The basic question is whether or not global warming is real. If it is, so what? Do we conserve? What, and how? Do we hope that technology will get us out of any difficulties? And so forth. Only on thing seems certain: The world WILL undergo a radical change over the next century or so, one that cannot be reversed to the way things were 20, 30, much less 100 years ago. The Anthropocene will not disappear from the historical record.
Aesthetics: Toons, Grooves, and Graffiti, for example As examples, of arenas of aesthetic negotiations, consider cartoons, musical grooves, and graffiti.
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Rather than looking at cartoons in general (I’ve glossed that in this post, along with grooves and graffiti62) recent feature film, Sita Sings the Blues, by American film-maker Nina Paley. The title itself indicates some of the dimensions of cultural commitments therein being negotiated. The blues is a musical form that arose sometime around the transition from the 19th to the 20th Century somewhere in America, just when and where are not at all clear. Sita is one of the central figures in the Hindu epic, The Ramayana. The film has attracted the outrage of some Hindus, who regard it as sacrilege. And some well-meaning academics have criticized Paley for, in effect, an offense against relativism: an American Jewish woman has no business retelling one of the sacred stories of another culture. The film has also won a slew of awards from all over the world. The film’s Wikipedia entry63 is a reasonable place to start tracking it, the response to which is scattered all over the web. Or you can simply google the title. I’ve written a number of mostly analytic essays which I’ve listed HERE, along with two interviews.64 The fact of the matter is that film culture is and has been deeply transnational from its early days. Yes, most films have been made by studios and crews anchored in some one nation or another and have been intended, first of all for the home audience. But film-makers have been aware and influenced by work in other countries, and many films have circulated outside, often far outside, their nations of origin. Sita Sings the Blues must thus be considered but a single example of an expressive form that has always be working against the national labels imposed on it by journalists, critics, historians and, yes, the film-makers and their audiences. Film itself, if there is such a thing, simply doesn’t hew to the categories placed upon it by the world in which it circulates. And so it is with music as well, with the blues and its progeny as a case in point. America’s popular music has been a centuries long negotiation among the musics of differing peoples, with the West African/European axis being the single most potent source of cultural remixing, as I’ve outlined in Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues65 and in the final chapter of Beethoven’s Anvil, “Through Jazz and Beyond.” As one last example, I offer graffiti66, by which I mean, not just any markings on walls, but the particular style of name-based markings that began appearing in Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which has since traveled around the world. While it has been adopted as the graphic style of hip hop and of such relatively new sports and skate boarding and BMX bicycling it has at best a fitful relationship with the legitimate art world and, as vandalism, it is in a running battle with the legal system. It is thus art that still exist outside society, art that has not yet been institutionalized, which is why I used it as a running example in my reading of Latour’s Reassembling the Social.67 Graffiti’s place in the world is still under intense negotiation. Will this process ever end? Will there come a time when we all speak the same language, all dance the same dances, tell the same stories, commit the same crimes, and submit to the same punishments?
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http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/04/grooves-grafs-and-toons-transnational.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues#Controversy 64 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/p/sita-chronicles.html 65 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1678064 66 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/p/graffitiphotos.html 67 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1943125 63
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The Longue Durée: Living in a Pluralist World I don’t for a minute believe so. Cultural homogeneity is not in our future, no matter what the Walt Disney Company may wish. Over the long run, and precisely because we live in a highly interconnected world, cultural formations, Realms of Being, Life Ways, will continue to mix, remix, transmogrify, and multiple. I think heterogeneity will keep on reconstituting and transforming itself. The common world will, of course, continue to evolve—witness, for example, the spread of certain graffiti styles from Philadelphia and New York City and across the globe in the last forty years. But this ever-evolving commons will never absorb everything. That’s neither necessary, desirable, or even possible. We’re too slippery for that. But, where’s the philosophy? you ask. You’re just dumping us in the muck of everyday affairs. Blues, headscarfs, what has philosophy to do with them? But what’s wrong with THAT? Shouldn’t philosophy be up to its knees in the muck and mire of life as it is lived? Doesn’t it belong there? Yes, keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, not exemption from living.
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Pluralism in Review: The Eightfold Way
While I do not introduce any new conceptions in this review, I do make some adjustments here and there. First I take a look at the relationship between philosophy and the other disciplines: What’s philosophy doing that they are not and cannot? Then I review the entire system by hanging it on eight key propositions. I started that with the two propositions I adopted from Harman, to which I subsequently added two more. I’ve now thought through the entire discussion and decided that it boils down to eight propositions, including those initial two. That analysis and reduction, that’s serious work, but at this stage it is also provisional. Asserting that these eight (or five or ten) ideas are the ones that matter, that’s a good way to focus one’s thinking. And an enterprise like this needs focus or it will fall apart. But it is also provisional, for the work has just begun. Finally, I offer a few concluding remarks on what I see the next steps to be, next steps which I will not, however, be taking any time soon.
Philosophy Among the Disciplines Let’s go back to where I began in From Objects to Pluralism, with a passage from Harman’s interview at ASK/TELL:68 ...the reason to focus on objects rather than on “language, social change, sexuality or animals” is because philosophy is obliged to be global in scope. If philosophy were to give one of these other entities a starring role, it would have to reduce the rest of the universe to them. “Language is the root of everything.” Here, you are choosing one specific kind of entity to be the root of all others, and there is no basis for this. Sociology tends to view all reality in terms of its emergence from human societies and beliefsystems. Psychology treats all reality as made up primarily of mental phenomena. Physics deals with tiny physical objects and says that everything is made out of them, except that physics is useless when trying to explain things like metaphors, the Italian Renaissance, the meaning of dreams, and so forth. All these other disciplines focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world. Only philosophy can be a general theory of objects, describing Symbolist poetry and the interaction of cartoon characters just as easily as the slamming together of two comets in distant space.
As I said in that post I had two reactions to this post, and they are related. My immediate reaction was to be skeptical of the claim that Harmon and his intellectual companions had anything particularly interesting to say about cartoon characters. Why’d I think that? Because I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking a writing about cartoon characters over the last several years and that work included descriptive work of a kind that’s not at all characteristic of these object-oriented philosophers. That is, I was in my mind claiming specialized expertise on the topic of cartoon characters and it wasn’t at all obvious that these philosophers had anything particularly interesting to say about them. It the very least, I’d not then read them as saying interesting about cartoon characters and that hasn’t changed since then, though I now know, as I didn’t then, that Latour seems to have been the one to put Popeye into the repertoire of standard examples. 68
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And THAT perhaps ungenerous little quibble is but an instance of the larger issue, which is that of the relationship between philosophy and “all these other disciplines,” the ones that “focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world.” Of course, in the last half of that statement Harman is doing a bit of careless editorializing—this is, after all, an interview, not a formal publication. Not all those other disciplines claim their particular objects of interest to be the root of all else in the world. Some may—physicists likely—but most do not. But that issue, of the relationship between philosophy on the one hand the specialized disciplines on other, has been with me ever since reading that interview and it certainly has been on my mind while elaborating my preliminary views on a pluralism. What is it that I have been doing? Sure, there’s a sense in which, having done it, I must know what I’ve been doing. But it’s a preliminary investigation, not a completing synthesis. Is it a prolegomena to a reasonable intellectual project or is it the ante room to another intellectual purgatory? There is, of course, no way to tell, except to take a few more steps. But in which direction, toward what end? ***** An old cliché has it that back in the ancient times there were the various practical arts—basket weaving, hunting, metal working, cooking, farming, wine-making, potting, and so forth—and there was philosophy. Philosophy covered the intellectual waterfront. I mean, Aristotle was one man, but look at his intellectual range (see the note at the end of this chapter, Aristotle and Now). Over time various disciplines split off from philosophy and established themselves as autonomous disciplines. It wasn’t so long ago, for example, that much biology was done in the name of natural history or simply nature. Biologists were badged as naturalists. And psychology only started breaking off in the later 19th Century. What’s THAT historical sequence about? Is it about the world, the mind, or both? In the abstract one could imagine that, with sufficient time and mental capacity, a single mind could know everything. Would that then mean that everything was just one unified discipline? I suspect not. The pluralist ideas I’ve been elaborating are not simply an accommodation to the limits of the human mind. The world really is various, so I believe, and so is resistant to being gathered up in a single conceptual system. That is, if you read these various posts you won’t find anything about DNA or natural selection, though I talk about the Realm of Life. Why not? Because those are topics for specialized disciplines, not pluralists philosophy. Similarly, though I talk of the Realm of Matter I say nothing about atoms, quarks and Higgs Bosons, or even gravity and motion. Why not? Because those are topics for specialized disciplines, not pluralist philosophy. Further, though I do mention Popeye, I use him only as an example of a fictional creature. I say nothing about how he moves, how he acts, what sounds like, what he looks like, much less how audiences react to him and talk about him among themselves. Why not? You got it: Because those are topics for the discipline of cartoon studies, not pluralist philosophy. However much cartoon studies may interest me, I don’t want to get it mixed in with my philosophy. Similarly, though Harman talks about fire and cotton (e.g. in The Quadruple Object, pp. 44-45) he says nothing about carbon, oxygen, oxidation, atoms, atomic bonds, and so forth, because, I assume, they belong to the language of chemistry, not philosophy. He probably knows something about such things, but he’s not a chemist and the details are irrelevant. By contrast, Levi Bryant does talk about entropy, and introduces it into his system; but what he says about it is wrong69 (though a recent post, Social Ecology and Entropy,70 is an improvement over his older work). Similarly, he talks about complex dynamics, attractors, and phase spaces, and gets them 69 70
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wrong as well.71 More recently he’s introduced a post on networks by using what appears to be an illustration from a technical source; but, alas, much of what he actually says about networks is wrong.72 You can’t build a useful philosophical system, or any other conceptual system, on fundamental misconceptions of concepts in successful use in other disciplines. But no one can possibly understand the technical details of a multiplicity of other disciplines. This is a limitation of the human mind and has no bearing on the nature of the world being described, though, of course, the human mind and its biopsychological substrate and social infrastructure can itself be an object of inquiry. How can discourse be constructed so that individual minds can operate effectively and that different individuals can collaborate effectively in arriving at a mutual understanding of the world? Alas, I don’t know. What I do know is that, over time, as collective thought about the world becomes more elaborate and diverse, the social structure of knowledge has become differentiated and different regions in that structure have become the responsibility of different groups. That requires a process of Latourian negotiation (as I discussed in Facing up to Relativism: Negotiating the Commons and will discuss below) among thinkers. Such negotiations are typically long, complex, and painful to all involved. This process is a difficult and often contentious one, and as knowledge has become parceled out, making connections between the different parcels becomes difficult, as does maintaining the coherence and integrity of the whole. Such is the process and cost of intellectual advance. We all know that. I believe we are deep into such a negotiation now, and have been for some time. The object-oriented ontologists have offered a family of proposals about metaphysics. Harman’s contribution includes explicit statements about intellectual responsibilities among various disciplines. Bryant, too, has made such statements. But he has also ranged farther among a variety of disciplines and ventured more deeply into their territories than Harman has. While I have expressed considerable reservation about the results he has achieved in such scouting expeditions, I don’t doubt that philosophy must undertake such expeditions. If I have followed his writing with some care over the past year that is because his expeditions afford me an opportunity to look over his shoulder on those expeditions and conduct my own reconnaissance. These posts on metaphysical pluralism are my contribution to that ongoing negotiation. What I have done, in effect, is take some ideas from Harman and Bryant, and Latour as well, run them through my own intellectual experience and come up with a proposal on how to conduct the business of metaphysics.
Objects, Realms, and Arenas without End Let’s review the basic building blocks of the system I’ve been exploring. We start with two propositions taken over and modified from Harman: 1. Objects: Individual entities of many different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. Abundance: These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. That’s where I start; that much I’ve gotten from object-oriented ontology. I’ve gotten two other ideas as well. From Levi Bryant I have the idea that objects tend to occur more or less stable 71 72
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configurations of other objects, which he calls regimes of attraction. From Harman I have the idea of vicarious or indirect causation. Taken together we have: 3. Realms of Being: In the large objects exist in patterns of relatively stable interactions among multiple objects. These are relations of indirect or vicarious causality. Analytically, we need to separate the roles from the entities that assume them. This is the core of what will become a distinction between culture and society. As a matter of observation, human beings organize their activities through a complex structure of beliefs, attitudes, practices, customs, and artifacts that collective make up culture. Even the simplest society will have multiple Realms of Cultural Being. Let us further understand that Realms of Cultural Being, by definition, include all the nonhumans participating in the Realm, whether they be animal, vegetable or mineral, terrestrial, subterranean, marine, or even extraterrestrial—we steer by the stars, no? In some respects the idea of Realms of Being is comparable to Latour’s notion of modes of existence, each with its own felicity conditions. But I don’t know how far the parallelism holds. For example, he recognizes religion as a mode of existence. I would recognize each specific religion as a Realm of (Cultural) Being. This may be a trivial difference, it may not. He doesn’t recognize science as a mode, while I would assign each scientific disciplie to a Realm of (Cultural) Being. However he does recognize Reference as a mode, and the various sciences would likely be found there. But just how this would work out in detail is up in the air at the moment. For some more remarks on Latour’s modes of existence, see my post, Of Factish Gods and Modes of Existence73. Then there is the concept of a Life Way, which I’ve introduced at the level of the individual and also at the level of the group. Here things get, alas, tricky. At the level of the individual I developed the Life Way concept in terms of behavioral mode and unity of being (see Unity of Being). But what, pray tell, is unity of being, which I introduced in discussing ethical criticism? Rather than reprise that earlier discussion, which I DO like, let me repeat and emphasize that this series of posts IS provisional. I’m making it up as I go along and, though I’m doing the best I can, some things are going to be messy. The relationship between behavioral mode, Realms of Being, and unity of being is one of those messy areas. So the definition of unity of being which I am about to offer is a bit different from my earlier formulation, but it is, I believe, consistent with it. This definition depends on the fact that behavioral modes are neurochemically coded in the brain so that recall of one’s activities is biased by one’s current neurochemical state; that I’ve said in the earlier discussion. Consequently there is a need for a neurochemically neutral state of mind in which one can recall and reflect on the events of one’s life. That earlier discussion didn’t talk about a need. That need, in this formulation, is what unity of being is about, thus: 4. Unity of Being: Humans desire the ability to access and reflect on memories of events in one’s life. The extent that that is achieved is called Unity of Being. One of the central projects of specifically human culture is to create the symbolic and ritual means through which group members can achieve Unity of Being. This process gives rise to 73
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morality and expressive culture as cultural practices and to ethics and aesthetics as intellectual disciplines. I’m almost tempted to assert that THAT’s what culture is for: Unity of Being. Boy would it ever be elegant to assert that! But I won’t. Not now. Maybe later, way later, and after considerable reflection. With that in mind, let’s return to Life Way, which, as I’ve indicated, I’ve defined both with respect to individuals and groups (Unity of Being 2: Choosing Life Ways). Any given individual is going to live in various Realms of Cultural Being. That collection of Realms is a Life Way. But that’s not sufficient. Perhaps for a simple-hunter gatherer group all individuals share the same Realms of Cultural Being, though I’m not sure about young children. But that won’t do for more complex collectives (to use Latour’s term) where we have division of labor among the humans and considerable specialization of activities of all sorts. Many, if not all, specializations will have their own Realm, which means that no one human individual will operate in all Realms. So the Life Way for the collective must necessarily contain more Realms that those for any individual human members of the group. Thus: 5. Life Way: A Latourian collective, with human and non-human members, is considered to participate in all the Realms in which any member of the collective plays a role. The ‘envelope’ of those Realms is called a Life Way. As another matter of observation I take it that human collectives have Life Ways that differ from one another. Some of these differences are minor, some are not. This gives rise to a bunch of problems generally discussed under the rubrics of multiculturalism and cultural relativism. To the extent that different collectives must live with one another, those differences must either be eliminated or somehow “encapsulated” so they cease to be problematic. Thus: 6. Latourian Negotiation: Collectives having different Life Ways have been interacting through a process of negotiation in which differences among Life Ways are resolved and commonalities created or not depending on the desire to extend the boundaries of the larger more inclusive collective. The outcome cannot be predicted or foreseen. I discussed Latourian negotiation in Facing Up To Relativism: Negotiating the Commons. The essential point is that such negotiations take place without a judge and without regulative goals beyond that of negotiating in good faith. All is up for grabs, nothing is certain. Human groups summon and are subject to a wide range of nonhuman beings and, as Latour has observed in We Have Never Been Modern (p. 108, there are similar passages in Politics of Nature): The collectives are all similar, except for their size, like the successive helixes of a single spiral. The fact that one of the collective[s] needs ancestors and fixed stars while another one, more eccentric, needs genes and quasars, is explained by the dimensions of the collective to be held together. A much larger number of objects requires a much larger number of subjects. A much greater degree of subjectivity requires a much greater degree of objectivity.
So, over time, larger and more diverse collectives have emerged in history. More objects and more different kinds of objects have been brought into commerce with one another. At this point
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in history we are facing the need for all the objects on earth to self-organize into a single collective. The outcome of that project is, of course, not foreseeable. The prospect brings me to our last two propositions. I note that we began with objects (propositions 1 and 2), and organized them into Realms of Being (3). Propositions 4, 5, and 6 are concerned the organization and evolution of Realms of Being in which human actors take leading roles. Let us now consider a most speculative matter, one I took up at the end of Matter, Life, and Culture (so far). We have objects. Objects are organized into Realms of Being according to stable patterns of relations among them. I’m now wondering whether or not there is an even higher level of organization among Realms. Let us provisionally—and here I’m just making things up—call them Arenas. Each Arena is constituted by several, perhaps many, Realms of Being.
Let’s make this a seventh proposition: 7. Realms of Abundance: Realms of Being are organized into Realms of Abundance, of which three have appeared to far: Matter, Life, and Culture. Propositions 4, 5, and 6 are about the Arena of Culture. Let me offer an eighth and last proposition: 8. The Fourth Arena: The current global Latourian negotiation brings us to the edge of a fourth Arena of Abundance. If it goes well, that’s where our successors will dwell. As for the nature of this Fourth Arena, I cannot say. If you want to observe that, gee, that Fourth Arena seems a bit like Marx’s dissolution of the state in the achievement of communist egalitarianism, well, yes, it’s like that, if not in terms of internal mechanism and causal forces, then in the role it plays in a certain (my) system of thought. If you want to observe that gee, that Fourth Arena seems a bit like the Singularity of which the transhumanists dream, well, yes, it’s like that, if not in terms of internal mechanism and causal forces, then in the role it plays in a certain (my) system of thought. If you want to observe that gee, that Fourth Arena seems a bit like the Rapture... well, you get the drill. I will note, however, that I’m not making any predication about what kind of governmental formations will exist at that time. I don’t see much prospect for a miraculous emergent computer that will outthink humans seven way from infinity. Nor does it seem likely that the good will rise up into the heavens. Just what WILL happen, how could I possibly know? As a convenience I have listed the eight propositions in a single appendix at the end of main text and omitted the intervening discussion.
Next Steps That then is the system as I currently see it, eight propositions. Perhaps its really only six or seven, maybe it’s nine or ten. It’s in that region, a half dozen to a dozen, no more, no less. I see a few obvious points of entry for further development. I sketched a quick graphic notation for representing relations between objects in the post, Harman’s Ontology on a Single Level and Objects as Wells of Abundance. A notation is just a notation, but that notation is about understanding Realms of Being, a central concept in this system. I think having a perspecuous visual representation will be important. In particular, I think it will be crucial in understanding the structure of Cultural Realms, where we have a great variety of human and non-human actors. I think a fair amount of work has
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yet to be done in sorting through behavioral mode, Realms of Cultural Being, Unity of Being, and Life Ways. That’s where we’re likely to lose or gain a major proposition. And that’s where we’re going to see whether the concept of Arenas of Abundance is useful or just extraneous decoration. I think it will prove useful, that is, I think it will help us to understand the structures and processes of Being, as opposed to the structures and processes operating within the various Realms of Being, the processes and structures being investigated by the other specialized disciplines—for metaphysics is a specialization, no? In particular one would like to know whether these Arenas are just a descriptive generalization or convenience or whether or not they are, well, you know, real. That’s going to depend on whether or not patterns of relations between objects originating within a single Arena are different from patterns of relations among objects in that originate in different Arenas. Is the relationship between the North Star and the Moon different in kind from that between the North Star and a bird on long distance migration or that between a farmer and the Moon? I would think so, but I’d also like to run through hundreds of such examples. That’s what this business of Arenas is about, sorta’. And then we have that sixth proposition, about Latourian negotiation. What I’m wondering here is whether or not that’s sui generis or whether it’s a special case of a wide classes of processes operating in heterogeneous collectives. It might, for example, be a case of what theoretical biologists and mathematicians call evolutionary game theory, but I don’t know. As for that last proposition, the emergence of a Fourth Arena, we shall see, or our grandchildren will, won’t we?
Note: Aristotle and Now As an exercise, let’s take a crude look at what’s happened to philosophy in the centuries since Aristotle. Let’s take a look at Introduction to Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon, which consists of selections from a range of Aristotle's works. They’re arranged under various headings as follows: Logic, Physics, Psychology, Biology, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, Poetics, Rhetoric. Most of these Aristotelian topics have now become separate disciplines. That’s certainly the case with physics and biology, also psychology and politics (political science) and arguably poetics and rhetoric as well. We’ve now got various specialized logics that are more like mathematics than philosophy. And that leaves ethics and metaphysics remaining for philosophy.
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Coda: The Abundance Principle and The Fourth Arena
In casually thinking over the pluralist work, as I’ve been doing this past week, I’ve realized that I can push the exploration one more step without too much work. This post should be brief. Let’s start with the commonsense distinction between living things and non-living things. By the kinds of arguments Jane Bennett has advanced in Vibrant Matter that distinction seems questionable as given. Considering the strange world of quantum mechanics and the selforganizing turbulence of complex dynamics and other such things, plain old stuff seems more dynamic, more vibrant, than is seemed to, say, Descartes. What I did when, using more poetry than reason, I declared the universe to be alive (The Living Cosmos), I simply invested life in the whole universe, not simply in the earth’s biosphere. In that formulation, the universe was alive even before life, as we think about it, appeared on earth, or anywhere else (if life has indeed arisen elsewhere). The universe was, and is, abundant. It thus evolves. Yet, if the life/non-life distinction isn’t quite what common sense makes it out to be, still, there is a distinction of some sort to be made. There is a difference between the biosphere and, say, the Moon or the Sun. What I want to say is that, when life as we call it arose on earth, the abundance that had made the cosmos as a whole a living thing, had now become invested in (incarnated in?) the biosphere considered as a small component of the universe as a whole. Thus the Arena of Life became a compact region within the cosmos and is to be differentiated from the Arena of Matter, though the two Arenas are physically intermingled. Let’s call this focusing, this distillation, this compaction, the Abundance Principle. That’s what makes abundance so abundant. Over time abundance can evolve its full capacities into but an aspect, a facet, a region, of the totality. Through another working of the Abundance Principle, the Arena of (Human) Culture has become differentiated from that of Life, though they are physically intermixed. Now we have three Arenas:
Matter Life Culture I have conjectured that we are on the cusp of a Fourth Arena. I have no special term for it nor do I see any urgent need for one. For now, let be
The Fourth Arena But what’s it like, what’s it’s substrate, how’s it differ from, beyond, Matter, Life, and Culture? That’s what I think all the chatter about the internet, the singularity, artificial life, nanotechnology, cyborgs, and so forth is about. I don’t see “intelligent” computers in either the near or mid term. Long-term, who knows? But even without exotic brain computer interfaces and such, computing is allowing us to do amazing stuff, amazing in all three existing Arenas: Matter, Life, and Culture.
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That’s what the Fourth Arena is about, the intermingling of Matter, Life, and Culture though advanced digital and analog electronics and through nanotechnology. That’s where the Abundance Principle is focusing, compacting, distilling, and recombining.
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Appendix 1: Something Big this Way Comes—Do We Live in a Pluriverse?
In the course of the recent discursive eruption over the relationship between speculative realism and objected-oriented ontology on the one hand, and ethics on the other, Ian Bogost posted a plea for “less blogging, and more working.” He worked his way around to this74: Sometimes I regret having gotten back into the "traditional humanities" after spending the last ten years in a weird hybrid of liberal arts and engineering at a technical institute. For it deals with the greatest irony of conservatism: a conservatism whose hallowed tradition is a purported progressive radicalism. Things are changing in philosophy, and that change is terrifying to some and liberating to others—perhaps it should be both. This conflict, if that's really what it is, is evidence of something big.
“Something big”—yes, that’s what got me interested in object-oriented ontology last year, the scent of something big. Perhaps it was OOO itself, or a close conceptual kin, or perhaps they were/are but a symptom of something else. In some sense, surely the latter. That is, to the extent that SR/OOO are types of academic philosophy, and they are that, an eruption in academic philosophy that is confined to academic philosophy, that doesn’t interest me. But if these forms of academic philosophy are symptoms of something larger than that philosophy, well then, I’m curious. And these philosophical movements do seem to resonate outside philosophy departments. So I’ve been curious. But, though my knowledge of SR/OOO is sketchy, I’ve seen enough that I must gather my thoughts, if only as a way of plotting out my next moves. This post sets out the terms in which I’m thinking these matters through. First, by way of calibrating bigness, I introduce some metaphors of geographical exploration. Then I look back at two movements that launched in the 1960s and 1970s as points of comparison. I conclude by taking a WAG on The Next Big Thing.
Explorers, Miners, Merchants, and Astronauts In a recent post Levi Bryant75 likened himself and his colleagues to Lewis and Clark76, who crossed North America from what is now Illinois to what is now Oregon in the early 18th Century. They were not, of course, the first people of European descent to lead an ambitious exploratory mission in the (so-called) New World. There had been others. But their expedition is a useful one for purposes of conceptual calibration. As another case I suggest Christopher Columbus’s first voyage two centuries before. We can argue about which was the more daring expedition, but there can be no doubt that the Lewis and Clark expedition would not have been possible without the discoveries Columbus made. If Columbus hadn’t shown the Europeans that there was a new continent to the West, the Europeans wouldn’t have undertaken the program of colonization that put Lewis and Clark in a position to walk from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. What is at least as interesting as the question of magnitude, of bigness, is the fact that Columbus didn’t know what he was doing. He set out to discover a Western route to the Indies, not to discover a new continent. How do we factor THAT into our calibration? 74
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As a third case, consider the California Gold Rush77 that kicked off with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. That brought 300,000 people to California from the United States and elsewhere, a human stampede of considerable magnitude. Money was made hand over fist, though likely more reliably by the merchants who supplied the miners than by the prospectors and miners themselves. Lots of people combed the hills looking for gold. But it’s hard to think of this as an event of exploration and discovery. It was something more mundane. Where do we place SR/OOO? To which of these cases is it most comparable? As between Columbus and Lewis and Clark, the interesting point of comparison is Columbus’s mistaken sense of what was out there. Do these SR/OOO folks know where they’re going? And if they do know, are they looking for a water route to the Pacific and hence to Asia (where Columbus had been headed) or are they only looking for gold, a scarce and hard-to find substance of considerable, if peculiar, value? I’ll end with a fourth case: the Apollo program.78 Between 1969 and December 1972 six huge rockets landed twelve men on the moon. And then, nothing more. No colonies on the moon, no trips to Mars, much less to Alpha Centauri and other stars. Enormous resources where expended, intricate and often useful technology was created, political points were scored by the United States against the Soviet Union, and dreams, what of the dreams? What does it mean the real live human beings walked on the Moon, a quarter million miles from Earth? I’d say it’s bigger than all of that other Apollo stuff. Calibrating THAT bigness against the California Gold Rush is, of course, easy. Way bigger. Bigger than Lewis and Clark? Sure, why not? Than Columbus? Hmmmm. How big, then, is SR/OOO? Of course we don’t know, not yet. But when? That cannot be predicted.
Big Things Past The present moment is not, of course, the first time thinkers have sensed the coming of something big. It happens all the time. Well, not ALL the time, but it’s a recurring apprehension in intellectual history. I was an undergraduate at The Johns Hopkins University when the French landed in 1966 for the structuralism conference, aka “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” I didn’t attend any of the sessions, but I quickly fell into the orbit of one of the organizers, Richard A. Macksey. THAT clearly was the Big Thing in the “sciences of man”—a French phrase that cuts across the division between the humanities and social sciences. And it WAS the big thing for several decades, though I note that, when J. Hillis Miller—one of the Hopkins pioneers—gave his 1985 Presidential Address before the MLA, he lamented the demise of interest in deconstruction. Miller’s favored mode was on the wane. But other modes were coming into view. These events, of course, were American, but parallel if somewhat different developments were taking place in Europe. [For a brief all too selective chronology and setting developments in Theory in parallel with developments in cognitive science, see Cog Sci and Literary Theory, A Chronology, which I’ve appended to this document.] At roughly the same time, the cognitive sciences came of age. Artificial intelligence and transformational generative grammar were born in the mid-late 1950s and began intersecting with psychology and philosophy in the 1960s. Christopher Longuet-Higgins coined the term 77 78
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“cognitive science” in 1973. By the mid-1980s AI was in eclipse and generative grammar had splintered and become surrounded by rivals. Cognitive science had formed its conferences, journals, and interdisciplinary degree programs, but few university departments. I took my Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo where I did a dissertation on “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory.” The degree was awarded in 1978 by the English Department, but my work was effectively under the supervision of David Hays, a computational linguist in the Linguistics Department. Thus I started my education under the aegis of one big thing and completed it under the aegis of another. How would I calibrate these two big things against the ventures I mentioned in the previous section? I’d say that, at inception, both appeared to be Lewis and Clark or even Columbus class adventures, but, in retrospect they appear more like the California Gold Rush.
The Next Big Thing I do not, of course, know where Bogost’s big thing will go. I do note that I’ve been through this drill before. And, with that experience under my belt, I nonetheless decided to take a look at Triple-O. Given that I really really thought cognitive science was going to be THE big one, however, my power of prophesy is much to be doubted. But, if you were to put a gun to my head and insist that I take a WAG (wild-ass guess) on The Next Big Thing, I’d wag for pluralism, for something to be born out of the late thoughts of Paul Feyerabend on abundance, out of recent Latour (e.g. Politics of Nature, Reassembling the Social) and his forthcoming An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and, of course, other things. No doubt many other things. Are all things to be considered on an equal ontological footing? Sure, why not? We can start from there. But only start. We objects have many way of living among one another. THAT’s what we must begin sorting out: modes of existence, realms of being, abundance, pluralism.
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Appendix 2: Cog Sci and Lit Theory, A Chronology
Back in the ancient days of the Theory’s Empire symposium at The Valve79 I contributed a comment paralleling the rise of Theory with that of cognitive science. That parallel seems – at least to me – of general interest. So I decided to dig it out from that conversation and present it here, in lightly edited form. The parallel I present does not reflect extensive scholarship on my part, no digging in the historical archives, etc. Rather, it is an off-the-top-of-my-head account of the intellectual milieu at the periphery of which I have lived my intellectual life. I take 1957 as a basic reference point. That’s when Frye published his Anatomy; that’s when Chomsky published Syntactic Structures. 1957 is also when the Russians launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to circle the globe. The Cold War was in full swing at that time Sputnik trigged off a deep wave of tech anxiety and tech envy. One consequence was more federal money going into the university system and a move to get more high school students into college. So we see an expansion of college and university enrollments through the 60s and an expansion of the professorate to accommodate. Cognitive science (especially its AI side) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Theory rode in on this wave. By the time the federal money began contracting in the early 70s an initial generation of cognitivists and Theorists was becoming tenured in, and others were in the graduate school & junior faculty pipe-line. Of course, the colleges and universities couldn’t simply halt the expansion once the money began to dry up. These things have inertia. We may take cognitive science for granted now, but the fact is that there are precious few cognitive science departments. There are some, but mostly we’ve got interdisciplinary programs pulling faculty from various departments. These programs grant PhDs by proxy; you get your degree in a traditional department but are entitled to wear a cog sci gold seal on your forehead. As Jerry Fodor remarked somewhere (I forget where) in the last year or three, most cognitive psychologists don’t practice cognitive science. They do something else, something that most likely was in place before cognitive science came on the scene. ***** Let’s look at the 1950s: 1948: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics 1949: Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Information 1953: Double helix model of DNA published in Nature (Watson and Crick) 1956: The Dartmouth Summer Program on Artificial Intelligence (coined the term “artificial intelligence”), The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two (George Miller) 1957: Syntactic Structures (Chomsky), Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), Mythologies (Barthes) 1958: Anthropologie Structurale (Levi-Strauss), The Computer and the Brain (von Neumann) 1959: Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior 1961: Histoire de la Folie (Foucault)
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We can conveniently mark the coming-to-visibility of high theory with the 1966 structuralism conference at Hopkins and the subsequent publishing of its proceedings (my modest contribution is on 243-244): Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds. (1970). The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. The following two volumes can serve to mark the unveiling of cognitive science as a specific, if diffuse, interdisciplinary activity: Marvin Minsky, ed. (1968) Semantic Information Processing, Cambridge, Mass. Endel Tulving and Wayne Donaldson, eds. (1972) Organization of Memory. This is when things, in both arenas, really started to take hold and move out. Note that there was a real, though failed, attempt on the part of literature to hook up with cognitive science through Chomsky (stylistics and Culler’s early structuralism). Terms such as “competence” and “deep structure” gained some purchase but, for better or worse, the substance of Chomsky’s (often obscure) thought remained safely in linguistics. There is also a story grammar literature that developed mostly in the 1970s and 1980s and is beholden to both strands of thinking. For that matter, it strikes me that one Sheldon Kline did a computer simulation of Levi-Strauss’s myth theory that, in fact, looked more like Propp. I read a tech report on this sometime in the mid1970s. [As for viciousness, the inter-school arguments by and around Chomsky are as bitter as anything in and around Theory. The rancor continues to this day.] It seems to me that by the late 70s and early 80s the main ideas were on the table in both camps. Consolidation was setting in. The early 80s also saw an attempt to commercialize AI technology, but that went bust by 1985 or so and Roger Schank, among others, began talking about AI winter. Two benchmarks: Stanley Fish (1980) Is There a Text in this Class? George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Fish is a well-known phenomenon at The Valve, so I’ll leave him alone. But Lakoff deserves a remark or two. He was an early student of Chomsky’s who, along with James McCawley, Haj Ross, and others, developed something called generative semantics and thereby precipitated a nasty war within Chomskydom (see The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris). While generative semantics is still mostly syntax, the metaphor book is deep in semantic territory, which had pretty much been forbidden to linguists by Leonard Bloomfield, a ban Chomsky was happy to reinforce. Lakoff and Johnson see Metaphors (and associated work) as marking a second generation cognitive science, one that emphasizes embodied cognition. From my (biased) POV this 2nd gen looks a lot like New Criticism with a new set of tropes and a modest interest in laboratory experimentation. ***** Two more reference points: In 1986 J. Hillis Miller was president of the MLA and thus delivered the presidential address. He complained at that time about the decline of interest in deconstruction; the address was published in the May 1987 issue of PMLA.
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Meanwhile, the 1984 meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence had a panel discussion on “The Dark Ages of AI.” This appeared in AI Magazine for the fall on 1985. The field was running low on new ideas and the business community was getting stale about AI’s commercial promise. I don’t know what Chomsky & Co. were up to at that time. ***** As far as I know there really isn’t anything in cognitive science that’s parallel to Theory’s Empire. That is in part because these two intellectual areas are organized along different lines, with different publication habits and pedagogical needs. But I’ll list three anthology volumes: R. Núñez and W. J. Freeman,eds. (1999). Reclaiming Cognition. Port, R. F. and T. van Gelder, Eds. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition. J. Petitot, F. J. Varela, B. Pachoud and J.-M. Roy, eds. (1999) Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. These volumes all argue that the “classical” cognitive science has failed and we need a more dynamic approach, one that’s more realistic about the nervous system and, incidentally, one that’s more friendly with the continental tradition in philosophy. Walter Freeman, in particular, has been pursuing a rapprochement with Derrida. My quick and dirty reading of this intellectual history is that it has been driven by ideas that began crystallizing during the 1950s. Those ideas have now given up their vitality. There’s nothing new to be gained from them. We stand in need of fundamentally new starting points. Just what they might be . . .
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Appendix 3: R. E. Shaw, Eco-Psych, Pluralism, Schrödinger’s Cat
I have known of Robert E. Shaw for a number of years. Though he started his career as a standard issue cognitivist (Chomsky and Piaget) he became converted to the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson relatively early in his career. Alas, providing a characterization of Gibson’s conception that is both succinct (under 25 words) and intelligible to those who do not already know seems impossible. Suffice it say, Gibson believed that perception is direct and not mediated by a raft of representational machinery (take THAT! Immanuel, though Gibson was thinking as a psychologist, not a philosopher), and that the environment is replete with ‘information’ that an animal’s sensory systems can ‘grab on to’ (my phrase). I believe that ecological psychology is compatible both with some version of objectoriented ontology (OOO) and with some version of pluralism. In fact, Shaw himself has explicitly formulated pluralist ideas in Ecological Foundations of Cognition: II. Degrees of Freedom and Conserved Quantities in Animal -- Environment Systems (co-authored with M. T. Turvey), which is available for download from his website.80 That paper is reprinted in Núñez and Freeman, eds. Reclaiming Cognition (pp. 111-123), which is where I was re-reading it last night when I decided to go out on the web to see if I could find more of Shaw’s work. What set me off was Shaw’s statement of the plenitude hypothesis, which asserts that nature is a plenum, or superabundance, of real possibilities—a view consistent with ecological psychology ... This idea is of a plenum that sits behind observed reality is also fundamental to modern physics, and sums up its weakened view of determinism: If laws of nature do not disallow something, then it exists.
Looks like pluralism to me! I may say more about his development of plenitude in a later post—I’m still digesting— but I thought some of you might appreciate his (Bogostian?) treatment of Schrödinger’s experimental cat: By Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, if a cat can be potentially killed by a random quantum event, the outcome remains in limbo, with the cat being neither living nor dead, or both, if you prefer, until observed or measured. Observing the situation is an occasion on which the wave function of the cat-and-apparatus collapses into one of the two possible, superposed states. Observation is supposed to cascade sufficient constraints to make the cat’s indefinite possible state (both alive and dead), into a potential state (either alive or dead), to being a unique value of a bound variable—a constant (say, alive). . . . The issue is not whether we observe the cat and find it either living or dead, but whether the cat observes us as well. If it does, then neither it nor we can be dead, indefinite, or nonexistent, in the usual meaning of these words. If the observer and the cat can have mutual and reciprocal perspectives, then they are dual observers, a social dyad, sharing an environment (laboratory). Hence an ecosystem exists.
Assuming that you’re intrigued, where should you begin reading his stuff? That’s hard for me to say because I’ve not read most of the papers available at his site. The “Schrödinger’s cat” paper is a very good one, but it is also rather tough sledding. Here’s the abstract: Cognition means different things to different psychologists depending on the position held on the mind-matter problem. Ecological psychologists reject the implied mindmatter dualism as an ill-posed theoretic problem because the assumed mind-matter 80
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incommensurability precludes a solution to the degrees of freedom problem. This fundamental problem was posed by both Nicolai Bernstein and James J. Gibson independently. It replaces mind-matter dualism with animal-environment duality (isomorphism)—a better posed scientific problem because commensurability is assured. Furthermore, when properly posed this way, a conservation law is suggested that encompasses a psychology of transactional systems, a biology of self-actional systems, and a physics of interactional systems. For such a solution, a theory of cognition for goal-directed behavior (e.g., choosing goals, authoring intentions, using information, and controlling actions) is needed. A sketch is supplied for how such a theory might be pursued in the spirit of the new physics of evolving complex systems.
Note especially this formulation, and that it talks of animal, not human: “It replaces mind-matter dualism with animal-environment duality (isomorphism)...” However, if you’re not already worked a bit with and are comfortable with the concept of degrees of freedom, you should probably pass on this paper for now. Though I’ve only dipped into them here and there, I suggest two relatively recent and informal papers. Theoretical Hubris and the Willingness to be Radical: An Open Letter to James J. Gibson (2002) states, informally and with citations to a variety of philosophers, how Shaw came to ecological psychology from orthodox cognitivism. The Agent-Environment Interface: Simon's Indirect or Gibson's Direct Coupling? (2003) juxtaposes Gibsonian thinking with the thinking of Herbert Simon, one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. Literary critics may appreciate the discussion of the Tristram Shandy paradox: Given that it takes a year to describe the events of a day, will Shandy ever be able to complete his autobiography? [OOOers: The ghost of Cantor lurks behind the curtain.]
Both are available for download here, toward the bottom: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/ecopsyc/shaw/
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Appendix 4: Of Factish Gods and Modes of Existence Including a brief excursion into the Black Church and a closing wave to the nonhuman bearing the sign of the old nature/culture riff
Bruno Latour (2010) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Duke University Press. A short book in three chapters. From the back cover: “In this concise work, Latour delves into the ‘belief in naïve belief,’ the suggestion that fetishes, objects invested with mythical powers, are fabricated, and that ‘facts’ are not. . . While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons.” In the first chapter Latour discusses an animist ceremony and so forth and so on, but I want to skip over all that and look at some passages in the third chapter, for that leads us to the modes of existence Latour promises in his next book. They’re what I’m interested in. What does Latour have in mind here?
Felicity and Truth p. 100: Truth production in science, religion, law, politics, technology, economics, etc. is what I have been studying, over the years . . . Systematic comparisons of what I call “regimes of enunciation” or “modes of existence” are what I am after, and if there is any technical argument in what follows, it is from this rather idiosyncratic comparative anthropology that they will come from. In a sort of weak analogy with speech-act theory, I’ve devoted myself to mapping out the “conditions of felicity” of the various activities that in our cultures are able to elicit truth. . .my problem concerns how to become attuned to the right conditions of felicity of those different types of “truth-generators.”
I take it that truth here does not (necessarily) mean a Tarskian correspondence between some proposition(s) and some state in the world, though it may mean that for this or that mode of existence. The point is that there is no ONE mode of existence with one TRUE DISCOURSE devoted to it (along with many untrue ones). There are many modes of existence, each with its own discourse (or perhaps no discourse at all?). Each mode has its own felicity conditions, its own indices of validity. This is a PLURALIST view of the world. It would, presumably, be a mistake to attempt to interrogate or inhabit one mode using the rhetorical forms crafted for a different one. Would this be a category mistake, or an error even deeper? Are these modes ontologically different, without any, however, having privilege over others? Or is talk of ontology beside the point? Latour talks of religion in this chapter and tells us that he is writing as though delivering a sermon. I’m glad he told us for otherwise I wouldn’t have guessed. His point, though, is that in thus writing he is DOING something rather than POINTING AT something.
Religious Sentences Of religious talk Latour says (p. 102): . . . such sentences are judged, not by their content—their number of bytes—but by their performative abilities. These are mainly evaluated only by this question: do they produce the thing they talk about, namely lovers? I am not so much interested here in love as eros, which often requires little talk, but in love as agapè to use the traditional distinction. In love’s injunction, attention is redirected not to the content of the message, but to the
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container itself, the person-making. One does not attempt to decrypt the sentence as if it transported a message, but as if it transformed the messengers themselves.
And so the felicity conditions of such language are not those of science, nor history, nor journalism, each of which aims to transport a message that corresponds to the world, a world somewhere over or out there, or perhaps just around the corner. [For extra credit, compare this to Jakobson’s discussion of the six functions of language. Does it align with any of the six? Why or why not?] p. 103: ...what happens to you, would you say, when you are addressed by love-talk? Very simply put: you were far away, and now you are closer...This radical change concerns not only space but also time: you just had the feeling of inflexible and fateful destiny...and suddenly, a word, an attitude, a query, a posture, a je ne sais quoi, and time flows again, as if it were starting from the present, with the capacity to open the future and reinterpret the past...
So religious talk aims at transforming the listener and, I presume, the speaker as well. It is not about informing, but about changing. And it warps both time and space—a Wordsworthian spot in time, perhaps? Next, some words of clarification, explaining why he uses this love talk (remember, he’s performing his argument) that seems so strange in talk of religion (though it is well to remind ourselves that the medieval poets of courtly love drew upon religious rhetoric for their secular ends), pp. 104-105: I use the template of lovers’ speech in order that we may rehabituate ourselves to a form of religious talk that has been lost, unable to represent itself again—to repeat itself— because of the shift from religion to belief.
Thus reminded, we may continue on.
Double-Click, Modal Degree Zero Now Latour introduces the notion of double-click communication (p. 106): ...it wants us to believe that it is feasible to transport, without any deformation whatsoever, some accurate information about states of affairs that are not present to us. In most ordinary cases, what people have in mind when they ask “is this true,” or “does this correspond to a state of affairs,” is just such a double-click gesture, allowing immediate access to information: tough luck, because this is also what undermines ways of talking that are dearest to out heart.
This would seem to be something of a mode of communication degree zero, “the benchmark by comparison with which all the other modes are shown to lie” (see below). The name itself derives, I believe, from mouse-clicking and perhaps connotes the off-hand and direct apparently nature of the action. You click and SHAZAM! it happens.
The Word Incarnate p. 110: Religion does not even try, if you have followed me until now, to reach anything beyond, but to represent the presence of that which is called, in a certain technical and ritual idiom, the “Word incarnate,” which is to say again that is here—alive—and not dead over there, far away. It does not try to designate something, but to speak from a new state that it generates by its ways of talking, its manner of speech.
And so religion is about presence, making it quite different from double-click and, as we’ll see in a minute, from science, which is, if anything, even further away.
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As a point of comparison, recall my account of a local church service.81 That service was very much about presence, about the Word incarnate, though I’m guessing it was somewhat different from the services Latour’s used to in his neck of the woods. And, like Latour, that preacher used a bit of computer imagery. Here’s a bit from my notes that didn’t make it into the blog post: Toward the end the minister worked computer imagery into the sermon. Remember, he’d been saying “select” time and again, “bold” as well. So he talked about how, in a word processing program you have to SELECT something if you want to work with it. Well, “when Christ selects you, you gotta’ be careful because the Devil’s right beside you trying to delete you.” That’s not an exact quote, but he DID say something like that several times. And then he talked of hitting Control-B as a way of bolding text. And he worked Control-B, say, a dozen times—by now he’d been moving 15 or 20 feet down the aisle on his excursions from the pulpit. And then comes the topper, Control-C for Christ.
As I write it out is sounds corny and trivial. But, in context, it did work. Latour’s remarks on the performative nature of religious discourse bear comparison with some observations by Henry Mitchell, Black Preaching: The Recovery of a Powerful Art (Abingdon 1990). For example (p. 58): The Black Bible is a living epistle, and the elaborations never take the form of coldly abstract formulations The Black preacher is more apt to think of the Bible as an inexhaustible source of good preaching material than as an inert doctrinal and ethical authority...It provides the basis for unlimited creativity in the telling of rich and interesting stories, and these narrations command rapt attention while the eternal truth is brought to bear on the struggle to survive and to find a measure of dignity and freedom.
Scientific Distance, Waaaay Over There Now we arrive at science, p. 111: Science in action, science as it is done practically, is even further from double-click communication than religion. Distortion; transformation; recoding; modeling; translating: each of these radical mediations is necessary to produce reliable and accurate information. If science were information without transformation, as good common sense would like to have it, we would still be in complete obscurity about states of affairs distant from the here and now. Double-click communication does even less justice to the transformation of information in scientific networks than it does to the strange ability of some speech-acts to transform the interlocutors in religion.
The point about science is simply that there is a great deal of mediation between the raw stuff, whether direct unaided observation or sensor outputs, and the final account, expressed in verbal and mathematical form. Let us conclude with a text from Rev. Mitchell which has as its theme the difference between modes of existence (p. 59): At the best of the tradition, the Black preacher is not as concerned with historical or scientific truth as with what might be called affirmations of faith. There is no intention of making the Bible a science textbook. For one thing, during a stirring sermon, there is little or no interest in science. Rather, the interest is in the Bible as a reliable index to God’s word and will.
I would only add that a stirring sermon so transports the congregation that people are called to reply by shouting of “Amen,” by shaking a tambourine, by arm waving, even a little dancing. [Extra credit #2: Compare Latour’s notion of science’s distance with Franco Moretti’s notion of distant reading. More generally, think about the use of spatial distance as an epistemological metaphor.]
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More Modes There was a brief characterization of each of 15 modes at a website for the project, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. But that has been replaced by one that gives access to the full text, in French only at this point, but does not list the 15 modes. Both double-click and religion were listed on that old site as specific modes, thus: Double Clic/Double Click (DC) I am your enemy, your nightmare, I am the power that transports truth and information without needing transformation, translation, mediation, I speak straight, I am transparent, I am the gauge, the template, the benchmark by comparison with which all the other modes are shown to lie. Religion/Religion (REL) The mode of existence of religious beings has always puzzled theologians, philosophers, believers and unbelievers alike. It is clear that they have to be understood with their own template. This is especially difficult because religious beings are confused with what science, morality, law or politics has to say about them. To detect these beings, one has to focus attention on the very specific speech form that is able to generate the very person it addresses. Science does not appear as a mode of its own, but the Reference mode answers to the sense of distance and transformation that Latour associates with science in the passage I’ve quoted from page 111 of the book. So: Références/Reference (REF) This mode captures the original chain of inscriptions that give access to the far away by multiplying the intermediary steps transforming objects into documents in a cascade of data recording. When the chain is backgrounded, it gives the impression of a free floating “knowledge” about an independent state of affair. But when the chain is foregrounded, it offers a great occasion to observe the practice of knowledge making and to redescribe the institution of science. Philosophy perhaps? Préposition/Preposition (PRE) Since each mode gauges all the others according to its own template, no inquiry is possible without one mode that guarantees the pluralism of all the modes. It is through this mode that one learns to be especially attentive to the keys necessary for interpreting the other modes. This mode allows the detection of category mistakes when one mode misinterprets another. The guardian of all the modes.
Conceptual Background Radiation from the Moderns Let’s list one more, a strange one: Reproduction/Reproduction (REP)
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This mode explores the capacity of an entity to subsist by running the risk of continuing its existence through the gap that separates two instants of time. It is often confused with the world of objects and even nature. Since it has been hard to recognize in our tradition, we are looking for examples where it emerges by itself without being gauged by another mode. All of the other modes I’ve listed, and the one’s I’ve not listed, necessarily involve human participation though, of course, not only human participation. This mode of existence does not, that is, not necessarily. Humans have to persist from moment to moment just like any other entity. But all those nonhumans have being doing this for hundreds of thousands of billions of years without benefit of human observation nor without having to cope with human action and interference in their worlds. Is this really one mode of existence? A traditional ontology that recognizes at least a distinction between the merely physical world and the animate world says no, it’s not a single mode of existence. And I believe that traditional view is correct, though I’m not going to argue the point here (for part of such an argument see the paper David Hays and I wrote on the complexity inherent in the universe, A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity82). Assuming that is so, then Latour is missing some modes. He’s flattened a bunch of them into this single mode, Reproduction. Thus he’s giving us a scheme that bears an echo of that old nature/culture distinction he’s worked so hard to replace. His scheme has 14 modes which center on human activity and this one mode that, while humans as physical beings must participate in it, seems to be a single mode only in contrast to, by comparison with, the other fourteen.
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Appendix 5: An Eightfold Metaphysics
Here are the eight propositions as set out in the main argument, but without surrounding discussion. 1. Objects: Individual entities of many different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. Abundance: These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. 3. Realms of Being: In the large objects exist in patterns of relatively stable interactions among multiple objects. These are relations of indirect or vicarious causality. Analytically, we need to separate the roles from the entities that assume them. This is the core of what will become a distinction between culture and society. 4. Unity of Being: Humans desire the ability to access and reflect on memories of events in one’s life. The extent that that is achieved is called Unity of Being. 5. Life Way: A Latourian collective, with human and non-human members, is considered to participate in all the Realms in which any member of the collective plays a role. The ‘envelope’ of those Realms is called a Life Way. 6. Latourian Negotiation: Collectives having different Life Ways have been interacting through a process of negotiation in which differences among Life Ways are resolved and commonalities created or not depending on the desire to extend the boundaries of the larger more inclusive collective. The outcome cannot be predicted or foreseen. 7. Realms of Abundance: Realms of Being are organized into Realms of Abundance, of which three have appeared to far: Matter, Life, and Culture. 8. The Fourth Arena: The current global Latourian negotiation brings us to the edge of a fourth Arena of Abundance. If it goes well, that’s where our successors will dwell.
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