Interview Links

Thrown in random order:

• Ian Bogost
• Jane Bennett
• Graham Harman
• Levi Bryant
• Paul Ennis

Harman on Bennett

Here.

Ennis on Meillassoux

Here. It’s an audio-recording of a lecture he gave on him.

Bogost discussed Bryant

Here.

26 April, 2010 22:52

Interview with Bogost

Introduction:

This is a continuing series of interviews around course readings for a realism class this semester at the University of San Diego. The students have been suggesting questions on various authors, but more importantly, have gotten a tremendous amount out of reading these philosophers, especially their works very much in progress, as have readers following up on these readings via the internet.

Ian Bogost is associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at The Georgia Institute of Technology, where he’s better known as a video game designer and interpreter, pushing the limits of game design in socially constructive ways. A sought-after speaker and writer, Bogost not only designs games meant to ameliorate social disorders, but also works to draw attention to the ways in which video games have an “expressive power” that demands our full due in an era when most American households have video game devices; the way that we play them makes them not just games anymore (if ever they were).

He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, and co-author of Racing the Beam: the Atari Video Computer System. Among three books he is now working on, Bogost is writing a philosophical text, Alien Phenomenology, that extends his work in Unit Operations to think non-systemic conceptions of objects and their relations. The “flat ontology” he introduces in this new work, forthcoming later this year, offers an exciting approach to the movement of speculative realism. In Unit Operations (for those at the University of San Diego, this book is available for download through the USD library and is well worth your time), Bogost makes a startling argument against the dominance of the idea of video game “systems.” Where much discussion about video game programming discusses the structures of play that they set up, Bogost focuses on the way in which different objects behave in singular ways, and he uses the notion of “unit operation” to move beyond video game criticism to all manner of, well, matter, such as cellular replication and other entities about which we previously had focused on systemic change over particular objects and their singularity.

In philosophical terms, Bogost is confronting structuralist accounts of systems to argue for less global conceptions of meaning (that meaning is part of the rules of a given structure, in the same way that monopoly money is only of value within that game). This is, to be precise, a “unit operation.” What he offers is an attunement to discrete operations of meaning in poetry, games, movies, and more. The point is to show the promise of aspects of computational theory for other humanistic endeavors, while also showing that the human-centered conceptions of such unit operations have run their course.

This brings us to his work in progress, where Bogost calls for an “alien phenomenology” that recognize the strangeness of the reality around us, a reality found not just in computational systems, but also in the world around and in us. In the interview below, Bogost lays out the stakes of his work here, and it becomes clear the importance it will have for those thinking the road to be traveled over the next few years in philosophy.

Interview:

1. You write in your upcoming book, “As critics, our job is to amplify the black noise of objects to make the resonant frequencies of the systems of objects inside hum in credibly satisfying ways?” I guess I’ll begin by asking, why this satisfaction? In other words, what lead you to this project?

I’d been interested in Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy since I first found out about it, which was perhaps half a year before the publication of Tool-Being. I’d followed this work with interest (it gets a citation in-passing in my first book Unit Operations), as did I his subsequent books and then the work of the “speculative realists.” I’d always had a hankering to do something further with this interest, as well as to return to my philosophical roots and to the concept of the unit operation. In particular, I had questions about how Harman’s thinking could help me understandparticular objects, not just the nature of objects in general.

Then in 2007–2008, Nick Montfort and I were writing Racing the Beam, our book on the Atari Video Computer System. The book discusses the ways the hardware design of that machine directly influenced the games that were produced for it, and indirectly influenced conventions and genres of games even after different hardware affordances were common. We looked at the technical aspects of the machine in some detail, including its controllers and casing, its stock microprocessor and I/O bus, and its custom-designed graphics and sound chip. And by doing so, I think we were able to offer useful and surprising insights into the nature of the apparently simple videogames made for that system.

I’m proud of what Nick and I accomplished in Racing the Beam. But something bothered me: our treatment of the Atari focused only on the way the hardware influenced human creativity. An interesting topic to be sure, yet, one that didn’t give full credit to the strange experience of the system’s components.

I began learning to program the Atari around the same time we began research for the book. It’s a very strange computer, most notably because of the way it addresses the screen: the programmer must manually change settings on the graphics chip (it’s called the Television Interface Adapter, or TIA) in tandem with the rendering of every scan line of the television picture. It’s natural (or it was for me anyway) to begin wondering: what’s it like to be a TIA? Or a MOS Technologies 6502 microprocessor? How would one characterize such a thing? Would it even be possible?

The Atari was just one moment in a larger set of these recognitions. Here’s one more example: A year before I’d spent a consulting windfall on a Leica M8 and got back into rangefinder photography. I found myself thinking about the way different optics see a subject, the results of which photographers sometimes call “rendering” or “drawing.” For example, I have a 1935 50/f2 Summar lens that produces images with a very particular atmosphere, thanks to a combination of factors inherent in its design. I can see how the lens sees when it exposes on emulsion or sensor, but how does the lens see without me?

So, you could say that this project was borne from two parents, one a desire to concretize tool-being in some way, and  the other a deep personal curiosity about the secret lives of objects.

2.  Your “alien phenomenology” attempts to offer a “pragmatic” or “applied” “speculative realism.” As part of this project, you offer three “modes” for doing speculative realism: (1) the practice of ontography: the production of works that bears witness to objects; (2) metaphorism, which is the production of works that speak to the “centered,” inner lives of objects and the ways in which they reduce other things to their existence (just as humans do when we practice anthropomorphism, so cameras make the world in their own image); (3) and carpentry, which is expansive whereas the previous may be seen as reductive: constructing things that themselves speak to the perspective of objects. You offer these, I think, in order to talk about objects that are created by human beings (with all the caveats on “creation”), such as video games and back scratchers, without defining their being in terms of what human beings wanted them to be. Would that be correct? Is your “alien phenomenology” an alternative to classical, Aristotelian conceptions of the function of made goods?

It’s true that one of the motivations that lead me to Alien Phenomenology was a concern: how can one talk about man-made objects in the same way one discusses others, natural or abstract objects for example? Even if man-made things don’t pose an ontological problem (as indeed they don’t for Harman or for Latour), how do we contend with the constructed nature of such objects, the configured parts that make them whole? Indeed, we could say the same things about aggregate objects, whether you call them networks or assemblages or just plain objects. Here science is implicated as much as sociology or philosophy.

Mostly, as you suspect, it seems that these object live lives of their own, without us, even as we are in the middle of using them for our own ends. The TIA in the Atari lives in a different universe, of sorts, from the player who pilots Pitfall Harry. It behaves by a different logic, even as it operates by the very same logic (there’s a puzzler). This is where the metaphor of the alien becomes very productive.

Clearly the for-ness of Aristotelian final causation is troubled here. Is the TIA for human entertainment? For moving videogame sprites? Is it for modulating RF signals? Is it for latching circuits? All of the above? Do previously material causes become final, or are all causes in some sense final? All objects, not just man-made ones, are subject to this puzzle. When objects of different kind encounter one another, the problem becomes that of one making sense of the other. This is what I’m really after, and I want my approach to work for humans making sense of microprocessors as much as I do for sand dunes making sense of siroccos.

3. One means for thinking non-mechanistic conceptions of things has been vitalism, which is reinvigorated in work of someone like Jane Bennett, or others who are the heirs of Deleuze. How does your thinking of “undead” objects offer a counter to this approach?

I’ve read and enjoyed Bennett’s recent book, but I have the same problem with vitalism as I do with panpsychism: they are too human-centered to work as philosophical ground. I think Bennett does a very good job justifying anthropomorphism in Vital Matter, and indeed I offer my own position on the inevitability of anthropocentrism in Alien Phenomenology—all objects are thing-centric, and all must make sense of one another through metaphors of self… here I’m borrowing directly from Harman’s idea of metaphor in Guerilla Metaphysics.

Whiteheadian panexperientialism is somewhat less objectionable, although it’s really a term from Griffin’s reading of Whitehead, and maybe these matters of naming amount just to hair-splitting. But the problem with an umbrella-term for whatever it is that all things do is that it makes that very doing too homogeneous for my taste. This is where the idea of the alien comes in again—it’s a frame for object-withdrawl that accounts for the impenetrability of inter-object understanding. It insures that whatever it is that objects experience, other objects may never even recognize it as experience.

4.  Do think there’s a reason that there is a turn to realism now? Is there simply an exhaustion with the previous philosophical approaches, or is there something else underway?

I was certainly exhausted with philosophy. By the letter of my training (all my degrees are in philosophy and comparative literature), I’m really a philosopher rather than a media theorist, even though I’m really only known as the latter. Part of that exhaustion came from disgust: a sense that philosophy and theory didn’t really care about the world at all, but only exclusive clubs of academic esoterics. In that respect, I don’t think it’s an accident that the return to realism comes at a time when the academy (and particularly the humanities) are in crisis. I’ve written a much more extensive and pointed indictment of this problem elsewhere (http://www.bogost.com/blog/the_turtlenecked_hairshirt.shtml), but for our purposes here I can boil it down to this: in order for humanism to reenter the world that it has forsaken, isn’t a strong dose of realism a requirement?

There’s something else going on too: at the same time that the humanities are struggling with their survival, the sciences appear stronger than ever. We’re even seeing some humanists adopt scientific or social-scientific approaches wholesale in the hopes that they might offer succor or even rescue (cognitive science is the commonest balm). But despite their history, the sciences are becoming ever more correlationist, focused outward rather than inward, concerned with human application and innovation more than with nature. I made this point in much more detail at the recent OOO Symposium at Georgia Tech (it will appear in the book too), but it’s possible that the sciences are even more correlationist than are the humanities. Perhaps a latent sense of dread at this possibility is also at work.

I’m not suggesting that we must reject science, but that we may finally be forced to grapple with CP Snow’s two cultures problem for real. In the arts and humanities, “interdisciplinary” usually means inbreeding: “French and German.” What happens when it must instead mean, say, media ecology and electrical engineering, or gastronomy and physics?

5.  One worry that crops up time and again about “flat” ontologies such as yours is that it’s one thing to say that we need to describe relations outside of their correlation to human beings, but it’s another to say that those other relations are equally valuable in some way. This is a question you raise obliquely in your discussion of ecological movements as still taking human beings as the primary actors, to which ecologists may reply, no, at the level of ontology, we’re fully on board with non-correlationist thought. But of course, this does not preclude the fact that ecological concerns are being raised because of the effect ecological devastation will have human beings. What do you make of this repeated type of critique against flat ontologies?

For me it’s undeniable that positions adopting an extra-human perspective are plagued with a dilemma: how can a concern about that outside the human primarily service human interest? Ecological studies, animal studies, and other fields offer worthwhile perspectives, but they nevertheless assume the privilege of human existence. I’m not saying that we should gun the engines of our SUVs to more rapidly reach our slaughterhouses, but I do think flat ontology forces us to ask more sophisticated questions about the impacts of object actions on object logics. Is it even possible for humans to act in the interest of ferns?

One major philosophical difficulty for flat ontology is the risk of nihilism: if nothing is any more important than anything else, then it might seem that it doesn’t matter if anything does or doesn’t exist. But instead, I think object-oriented ontology is an existentially replete philosophy. A promiscuous ontology, as Levi Bryant and I sometimes call it. Still, that doesn’t address the problem of the quality of existence.

Nothing about adopting flat ontology precludes one from living according to a code of values, or from adopting a politics of action, or from evangelizing in favor of such codes and actions. But if metaphysics, rather than epistemology or ethics, is first philosophy, then we also cannot shy away from difficult questions about the implications of any object’s acts. Do objects themselves have values? Does the spanish moss or the waffle have its own ethics, and how would we know if it did? Ought we to force our human code onto all things, or ought we to withdraw into a sort of universal version of Star Trek’s Prime Directive? These questions are no longer ontological ones, and I don’t necessarily claim that flat ontology should be asked to answer them, no more than tugboats should be asked to conjugate verbs.

On the one hand, I see this as a valid and worthwhile future work (Alien Ethics, perhaps). But on the other hand, perhaps its time that positions grounded in ethics ought to be asked to reconcile their positions to ontology, rather than vice versa.

SR vs. OOO

For those who don’t know, that’s speculative realism versus object oriented philosophy. Graham Harman has a post up on the vibe at conferences dedicated to both. My thoughts would come from the classroom, since this semester I taught speculative realism moving into object oriented philosophy, and I would say that major difference (simplifying to the extreme) would be the difference between critical and productive modes: SR is about what has been wrong. What Bogost, Harman, Bryant, and I’ll throw Bennett in do is try to produce analyses now that that SR has cleared the field (if that is indeed the case).

But that’s the state of it now, since Meillassoux’s new book isn’t yet published. But certainly, at least for me, it’s been an exciting course to teach, not least because I really feel that I learned much more about their work having taught it. What this did mean, on the the plus side, is that the work this semester was tougher on the student since literally some of it was still to be written. On the negative, that may have meant it meant it was less predictable. But I hope that they found it a good class in seeing philosophy in the making.

Bonus material: Graham writes that what brings the SR and OOO folks together is an attack on correlationism. But I do wonder if there’s a connection between this type of work and the fact that they are all sharing something else: being really kind and responsive to helping students not their own and answering my questions. Of course, with my predictive skills, that likely means that as I type this, Bogost is wrestling Harman in Atlanta to the floor while Bryant hides behind the four foot stack of his next manuscript.

(No valuation there, by the way, about their relative skills in hand-to-hand combat, which itself is, of course, a relative term for philosophers.)

Vibrant Matters: An Interview with Jane Bennett

Overview

Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things has itself been a vibrant matter of attention since it’s publication earlier this year. Bennett is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, and her work in Vibrant Matter builds (though Vibrant Matter is a stand=alone work and one need not have read these previous works) on her earlier books, The Enchantment of Modernity: Crossings, Energetics, and Ethics (2001) and Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and The Wild Modernity and Political Thought (1994), tying together well recent work in ecology and new forms of materialism.

Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is an important work, linking critical movements in recent Continental philosophy, namely a vitalist tradition that runs from Bergson to Deleuze and even, on Bennett’s reading, Bruno Latour, with a “political ecology of things” that should speak to anyone conscious enough to be aware of the devastating changes underway in the world around us. There is good reason why Bennett’s book has, in short order, gained a wide following in disparate areas of political theory and philosophy. For those who have yet to read it, the interview below should offer reason enough to begin doing so.

The book is divided up into eight chapters, moving from descriptions of her philosophical approach in chapter one, “The Force of Things,” through to descriptive encounters with more-than-human assemblages that question human sovereignty over the world, such as chapter 3, “Edible Matter,” to concluding chapters on the “vitality and self-interest” of a new political ecology. Bennett’s conception of the “force of things” encompasses neither previous vitalisms nor naturalistic mechanisms, and Bennett’s book gains its vitality from her descriptions of the life of metal, the agency of food, and even the wrong way to read vitalism as she approaches recent debates over stem cell research.

What Bennett offers is a “vital materialism” that negotiates the difficult —some would say impossible —task of presenting a vitalism that comes unhinged from Spinozist teleologies of nature. She thus describes vibrant networks of change operating beyond and within human beings without providing a purposiveness to the separable matter of nature, either coming from human beings (anthropocentrism) or some divinity (ontotheology). Her aspiration, she writes, “is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (viii). Borrowing Bruno Latour’s term “actants,” Bennett hence sets out to describe the quasi-agency of non-human materials, which in turn are nothing but the stuff of what matters to humans.

The philosophical problem that Bennett confronts is a post-Cartesian description of nature in modernity as mechanistic and lifeless. The subject of modernity lives off the materials of the world and, in contradistinction to the inorganic materials around it, has a freedom and agency that transcends its natural environment. Once we question this opposition between subjects and things, a number of traditional “ontotheological binaries,” such as organic/inorganic, human/animal, will/determination, etc., begin to “dissipate” (x). In this way, Bennett is not just questioning subjective idealisms, but also supposed materialisms, such as one finds in variants of naturalism, that are mechanisms better belonging to the era of Newton than the enchanting, post-Freudian and post-Einsteinian universe to which we accede.

It is just this agency that is at work, Bennett claims, in our airfields, in the wild, in the rush of a blackout, and all around and within us (our bodies are nothing but organic and inorganic assemblages). What is crucial is that Bennett takes the deus ex machinaof our typical explanations of the world, namely the quasi-divine human being standing over mechanistic nature, and kills this last of the gods. As she argues well, human agency “remains something of a mystery” in the “face of every analysis” (34), and this mastery is a presupposition that grants us sovereignty over nature even as our material bodies tell us otherwise. To ascribe such agency, she notes, risks a “touch of anthropocentrism” (99) but she is strategically right that without this risk of exporting what was previously considered human to a supposedly mechanized nature, we can never pull off descriptions that render animals and things not merely as “behaving” but as acting (108).

This would seem to leave us bereft of any politics worthy of the name and the reader may worry Bennett has brought us either to the edge of some pan-psychic New Age philosophy, or worse, a nihilism that renders meaningless all human actions and common praxis. With each decentering of the human being, either in terms of structures or the play of language in the philosophies of the last century, there has been less a philosophical answer to these vital questions than a seeming normative disgust that human beings have been cast from their throne. That may well be, but merely decrying this result does nothing to question, for example, Bennett’s new materialism, with its focus on more-than-human assemblages. Such a reader is invited to follow Bennett’s discussions of political praxis, the molding and unmolding of more-than-human assemblages, and see how her much needed analyses bear fruit for rethinking crucial concepts of democracy and political change. Merely decrying the human loss of its supposed mastery is not enough.

Bennett suggests we cannot turn a philosophical blind eye to these assemblages, and certainly Bennett is right that in her narratives many such non-human agencies “chasten my fantasies of human mastery” (122). There is much work to be done in light of Bennett’s work: to find means for rethinking agency and the considerations of what counts as living without reenacting various forms of biopolitics. Wherever we go with this assemblage of questions, it’s vital that none of this take us away from the very matter at hand.

Interview

1. What I should note straight off is that your book has gained a following among people in Continental philosophy working on what’s called “speculative realism,” and Graham Harman himself has said he wishes he had written this book. One of my students, I think, hit on this by saying last week that reading you brought together all of the themes we were covering this semester on speculative realism, and I think that’s right, since you also helped me to bridge to later work in the seminar on the ecological import of these discussions. Of course, you are writing out of a different set of philosophers, or at least not directly responding to these recent works. What do you make of this historical moment where we have this (seemingly) wide return to the things themselves that your book marks?

There is definitely something afoot, something about everyday (euro-american) life that is warning us to pay more attention to what we’re doing.  There is the call from our garbage: our private and public spaces — houses, apartments, streets, landfills, waterways — are filling up with junk, with vast quantities of disposables, plastic artifacts, old tv’s and devices, clothes, bags, papers, bottles, bottles, bottles.  The American television shows “Clean House” and “Hoarders” expose the more extreme versions of this mounting mountain of matter, but it’s everywhere you look, including in the middle of the oceans: “SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Researchers [have discovered] … a swirl of confetti-like plastic debris stretching over a remote expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. The floating garbage [is]… similar to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a phenomenon discovered a decade ago between Hawaii and California…” (Mike Melia, “A 2nd garbage patch, plastic soup seen in Atlantic,” Associated Press, April 15, 2010).

A second kind of call is coming from the weather, from volcanos that stop flight traffic across Northern Europe and from hurricanes like Katrina that take down neighborhoods and maybe even George W. Bush.   And 24 hour weather reporting and its disaster porn intensifies this call of the wild.  (Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought and his discussion of “hyperobjects” at contemporarycondition.blogspot.com are relevant here.)

For those of us who are philosophically-inclined, the response to such calls has been a renewed focus on objects, on an object-oriented ontology, or a renewed interest in materialisms — there have been in the last decade materialist turns in literary studies, anthropology, political theory, history.   Part of this may be a pendulum swing in scholarship: a reaction to the good but overstated insights of social constructivist approaches.

2. What my students and I liked best about your work is its sustained critique of “mechanism,” which treats the things of the world as inert and determined. There’s a danger to writing about this, since apparently it’s okay to have a rather antiquated view of nature (circa Newton, or even before) but it’s not okay to risk trying to describe the unruly world in all its messiness. Your book calls for a “strategic anthropomorphism” as means for thinking a non-determined materiality in and around human beings.  Could you say more about the limits of this strategy and what it risks?

A perhaps unnecessary caveat: while I think it’s a mistake to allow “mechanism” to serve as a generalizable or all-purpose model for natural systems (a model that continues to linger in popular and social scientific imaginations), it would be foolish to deny that many assemblages function with a degree of regularity and repetition characteristic of machines.  So, while Bergson and other philosophers of Becoming are right to draw attention to the creative element in evolution or to the capacity of physical systems to self-arrange in ways that defy prediction, I don’t want to overstate the freedom, mobility, or fragility of the working groups that form in nature and culture.

One of the projects I’m working on now is to explore theorizations of the strange kind of structuration at work in what Michel Serres has described (inThe Birth of Physics and Genesis) as “turbulent” systems.  Here Graham Harman’s critique (in Prince of Networks) of “lump ontology” (which he, perhaps too hastily, associates with Deleuze) highlights for me the relatively undertheorized quality of the question of formativity within philosophies of immanence, including the version at work in my Vibrant Matter book.  Harman makes me want to focus more carefully on the question of how it is that actants form and hold themselves together, both as individuals and as members of an assemblage.  I want to get better at discerning the topography of Becoming, better at theorizing the “structural” quality of agentic assemblages.   For the question of “structure” — or maybe that is the wrong word, and the phrase you suggest below is better, i.e., “linkages” between and within “open relations” –  does seem to fall in the shadow of the alluring image of an ever-free becoming — the seductive appeal of Nietzsche’s world of energetic flows, of Deleuze and Guattari’s vibratory cosmos, of Bergson’s creative evolution, of Michel Serres’s “pandemonium of the gray sea.”  Inside a process of unending change, bodies and forces with duration are somehow emitted or excreted.  But how?   How, Serres asks, “is Venus born from the sea, how is time born from the noisy heavens?” (Genesis 26)  What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming?  What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself?  Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation?  If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence?  Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time?  I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question.  I’m working on it!

With regard to the liabilities of the strategy of anthropomorphizing or allowing yourself to relax into resemblances between your-body-and-its-operations and the bodies-of-things-outside, I can think of at least three: it is easy to get carried away and 1) forget that analogies are slippery and often misleading because they can highlight (what turn out to be) insignificant or non-salient-to-the-task-at-hand resemblances, 2) forget that your body-and-its-operations is not an ideal or pinnacle of evolution, but just the body you have; 3) forget that the human body is itself a composite of many different it-bodies, including bacteria, viruses, metals, etc. and that when we recognize a resemblance between a human form and a nonhuman one, sometimes the connecting link is a shared inorganicism.  I think that anthropomorphizing can be a valuable technique for building an ecological sensibility in oneself, but of course it is insufficient to the task.

3. One could see a fear that by returning to the matter in and around us, even in a “new materialism,” this could return us to pinning down human being in some sort of nature to be found through some form of analysis. This is a view that has been critiqued for a long time now in the works of feminists and in critical race theory, and rightly so. How do you respond to those that may worry, after fighting so long for how certain human are not simply their materiality, that this is what is ecologically necessary to think?

I think that we are in fact constrained by some sort of nature, that we are free to operate but within iterated structures.  Though of course a lot turns on how one understands the constraint and the freedom: are we “pinned down” once and for all in the same spot?  This is highly unlikely, given a (Nietzschean) view of nature as flux or a (Serresean) view of nature as a viscous, clotting flow.  It is important to specify the ontological imagery one endorses:  nature or materiality constrains human (and nonhuman) activities but because nature or materiality is not a perfect machine, it and we are never fully analyzable.  There is always something that escapes — some dimension of objects, bodies, events, and processes that withdraws (Harman); there are always lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari).  It doesn’t make sense to me to say we are “simply” our materiality — there is nothing simple about materiality, and neither are material forces and flows best figured as determinate and deterministic.  The need to be kind and respectful to other bodies will remain, regardless of whether one understands human individuals and groups as embodied minds/souls or as complex materialities.

4. This an elegant book and it really gives itself over to descriptions of how matter moves us as much as anything else. Your description of democracy, I think, gives us up to thinking of the “masses” or dêmos in an innovative way, since how the masses act, seemingly out of the blue (e.g., storming the Bastille), has thrown thinkers of individual free will and so on into fits for centuries. Could you talk about more the way this thinking could inform a look not just at the politics of matter (the way in which objects relate to one another) but also what we normally take politics to be?

You ask another important and difficult question.  Let me begin by saying something “Machiavellian,” i.e., that political effectiveness requires choosing the right action and the right style of action at the right time, and to do this one must be alert to the role of impersonal (fortuna) as well as personal (human intentional) forces at work in “real time.”   The political strategy I pursue in order to enhance the prospects for “greener” modes of consumption and production is an indirect one:  the story of vibrant matter I tell seeks to induce a greater attentiveness to the active power of things — a power that can impede, collaborate with, or compete with our desire to live better, healthier, even happier lives.  Perhaps this new attentiveness will translate into more thoughtful and sustainable public policies.  I am not sure that it will, but it is, I think, a possibility worth pursuing for a while.   My political strategy is indirect because its target is not the macro-level politics of laws, policy, institutional change but the micro-politics of sensibility-formation.

In the book, I also suggest that a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages could translate into a national politics that was not so focused around a juridical model of moral responsibility, blame, and punishment.  The hope is that the desire for scapegoats would be lessened as public recognition of the distributed nature of agency increased, and that politics would take on a less moralistic and a more pragmatic (in Dewey’s sense of problem-solving) cast.

Interview with Graham Harman

[The links provided below are by me for helpful posts on Harman’s blog that relate to our discussion.]

Graham Harman is one of the most exciting philosophers writing today. If you don’t love or hate his work, you’re not reading it, since he tempts you to take one side or another, and his style, as he writes about well in Prince of Networks, his work is “hyperbolic”–all to provoke thought and not, as in the cynical hyperbole of other writers (metaphysics is dead, all politics is fascist, etc.), to bring it to its end. He is professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt and has written numerous books and articles arguing for an “object oriented ontology.” His modus operandi, which we discuss below, is to offer a counter-revolution to the linguistic turn in all manner of contemporary philosophy. In the course we studied this in terms of Michael Dummett’s work, but suffice it to say that Harman’s work looks to side with the oppressed objects said to be held under the thumb of our conceptual schemes, linguistic schemes, or subjective stances. For those not in the course, we have studied two of Harman’s essays relating to art and beauty (which my students found extremely helpful and interesting), which, while not yet published, offer greater depth to Harman’s claim that “aesthetics is first philosophy.”

1. Graham, just to bring you up to speed, in the course we’ve read some of your most widely available works on the web: your book Prince of Networks, your essay “Vicarious Causation,” your essay on “Intentional Objects,” and several other works. In addition, my students have peeked into your work on your blog. Thus, I thought I’d start with a self-referential question, one that has interested me greatly in doing the Speculative Realism course: what do you make of this online environment for doing philosophy?

It’s changed everything, and that’s the main reason I’ve stuck with it. Anyone doing continental philosophy who isn’t currently involved in the blogsophere (whether as blogger or simply as reader) is inevitably falling behind. A new community has been building over the past two years, primarily through the blog medium, and Dundee in late March was perhaps the first time that many of the key blog players assembled together in person.

The philosophy blogosophere has its upside and its downside. The upside is that international philosophical discussion has become a daily event rather than just an occasional one. I’ve often been prompted to rethink things based on blog exchanges, and in the most famous example I actually co-edited a book with two people I had never met in person! (Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek.)

The blogosphere is also democratizing, since all blogs are in principle equal. In my graduate student days there was no way I’d have been able to make open challenges to articles by continental kingpins such as John Sallis and Charles Scott, but in the blogosophere students are empowered to do just that. 23-year-old students are calling me confused and mistaken all the time. Sometimes it’s pretty annoying, in fact, but on the whole I think it’s healthy. Some of them have already become blog celebrities and a few even have book deals as a result of it.

The downside is that it can be very emotionally draining to maintain a blog. There are certainly days when I wish I had never started mine, because once you have it, it feels like a garden that can’t be left unattended for long. There’s also an obvious dark underside to the “democratization” part, which is that you have a certain number of rude people lipping off beyond the limits of civility (some of them shielded by pseudonyms), including people who have never completed a significant piece of philosophical work in their lives. At times it’s unavoidable that you want to punch back at those people, but while momentairly satisfying, it just becomes another energy drain in the end.

Furthermore, the problem is not just the trolls, but also the useful comments. In the days when I was allowing comments on my blog, along with the worthless trolling remarks there were also many very good points. But then you feel expected to answer those quickly, and if it’s 3 or 4 per day, it already starts cutting into your own work. And your own work is probably going to need a certain degree of privacy, distance, and slow-paced reflection. So, I’ve not considered re-opening comments, and probably never will reopen them.

At the moment the blogosophere is still a supplement, with “real” work still appearing in traditional brick-and-mortar publishing formats. But soon that will change as well, in ways difficult to foresee, and everyone is going to need an online presence. That’s why I don’t quit (I did quit once, for less than a day, but too many people asked me to rstart it). If I did, I know I’d just be back online again a few years later. The medium has so many advantages that it’s inevitable. However, we’re all still figuring out the rules in this new world. For instance, what’s the best way to handle the town drunks? How to punish the vandals? It’s being done piecemeal at the moment, but over time I think certain behavioral standards, and the enforcement thereof, will start to become established.

2. We have studied Meillassoux’s work as well as your 2008 review of After Finitude from Philosophy Today. Obviously, you take much away from his critique of correlationism. My students agree with your recent formulation, described often on your blog (http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/), that Meillassoux is a “correlationist” himself. Yet, despite your great respect for him, nothing seems farther from your work than his idea of a “chaotic in-itself” behind the phenomena of our world. Another way to think this is that many philosophers who argue for a form of realism seem to leave us without objects, but with a chaotic form of the real that bedevils our descriptions.

I’m in agreement that you can’t have realism without objects. Otherwise, you’re just left with a vague notion of “resistance” or “trauma” or “obstruction” at the limit of the experienced world, and if it isn’t allowed to be articulated into individuals, then you have to explain how the magical leap is made from a unified Real to a pluralized Experience, which in my view is clearly an incoherent jump.

Some try a subtler solution in which the Real isn’t just one, but it’s also not quite many. Examples of such solutions include Simondon’s “pre-individual,” DeLanda’s “heterogeneous yet continuous” realm, and in my opinion Deleuze’s virtual never escapes this predicament either. We see it on the analytic side in thinkers such as Ladyman and Ross, the targets of my critique in Dundee. The real for them is “structure,” which supposedly avoids being a monolithic lump while also avoiding a realm of genuine individuals. All of these proposed solutions are, to my mind, the simple unearned positing of a wish. There is a serious philosophical problem in how to balance the individuality of things with their need to relate, and these positions solve it merely by saying “reality itself is already sort of individualized and sort of in relation.” You can’t do it that way. You have to grant that the two extreme poles exist and then show how to unify them. That’s what I’m up to with vicarious causation: trying to show how links are possible despite the inherent separation of things. You can’t start out by calling it a “pseudo-problem,” because then you’re left to solve it by fiat.

As for Meillassoux (I respect him greatly and he has become a personal friend as well) he rejets the principle of sufficient reason whereas I support it. In other words, he has a sort of occasionalist position in which everything is cut off from everything else, which I also start with, but the difference is that I think it’s a crucial problem to be solved and he doesn’t think there’s any solution. Nothing is conencted to anything else; their connection remains purely contingent. But I would note the following point. Meillassoux’s argument, if true, would not only apply to the causal relation between separate things, but also to the part-whole relation within things. It’s strange enough to say that a flower could disappear at any moment and be replaced by a moose. But it’s even weirder to think that a flower in any given moment could be made of moose-pieces and still be a flower. If we look at sufficient reason inside a given moment rather than between two moments, it seems a lot harder to give up than Meillassoux thinks.

Incidentally, I should say to your students that the study of parts and wholes is called “mereology.” It was founded in analytic philosophy by a Polish thinker called Lesniewski, and those who want a good introduction to it should read the book Parts by Peter Simons, which still seems to be the best introduction to mereology more than 20 years later. Mereology has always been something of a rival to set theory, which is of course what dominates in Badiou and his followers. But one problem is that Badiou’s set theory is an extensional set theory, meaning that there is no internal organizing principle of the sets. You can randomly stipulate 17 assorted objects as members of a set, and then by fiat they become a set; it is the one who counts who determines membership, not some internal principle. Perhaps it is obvious why that’s an anti-realist gesture, and indeed very close to British Empiricism with its “bundle of qualities” theory of what makes a thing be one. I have a realist take on parts and wholes myself. Levi Bryant will be speaking on the topic at our first object-oriented ontology conference in Atlanta in April.

3. I want to take head on the question of language. A number of my students (and not just them of course) have really appreciated your clear expositions of Latour. But the problem they had, which is similar to what you describe as a problem as well, is the endurance of what Latour calls a “black box” or “plasma.” This is an old philosophical problem about the relation between identity and change, and Latour’s gamble is to say that there is nothing but relations. How then can the White House, etc., be seen to endure? Your route is to discuss an “alluring” interiority of things that can’t be related to anything, which is, thus also “nothing” (that can be described) but yet is the attractor for relations to other things.  Would this be correct?

First, I would say that the black box and the plasma in Latour are two different things. Black boxes are any indivual things (technical devices, animals, societies) insofar as they are viewed as obvious units without internal structure. Much of Latour’s method involvesopening black boxes thatused to be closed. For example, instead of saying: “Pasteur was a genius and a great man who brought light to the darkness of medicine,” Latour retraces the whole history of how Pasteur got there, and it’s very interesting. My favorite part of The Pasteurization of France is the story of Pasteur’s shifting alliances. His first allies were the hygienists, who were very concerned with public health but had assembled a chaotic list of factors that might be making people sick, and Pasteur’s microbe gave them just the theoretical unifier they needed. Why was spitting in the street making people sick, and chicken left to thaw too long before it was cooked, and dark rooms without ventilation? Pasteur allowed them to say: microbes are promoted by all of these cases. But at the time Pasteur’s supporters thought wrongly that vaccinations would eliminate all diseases in advance, and hence doctors were viewed as useless relics who would soon be eliminated, and so of course doctors started out as angry anti-Pasteurians. The alliances shifted once serums were invented, because those were administered in doctor’s offices. Empowered in this way, the doctors now became Pasteurians. It’s a wonderful story that is hidden by the understandably over-simplistic view of Pasteur as the isolated truth-seeker bringing a lantern into the darkness.

By contrast with black boxes, Latour’s plasma is never an individual thing, and that’s my objection to it. Latour defines everything in terms ot its relations with other things, and there’s a philosophical problem with this. For example, if I myself am nothing more than all of my relations with everything else right now, then why would I ever change? Why would anythingever change, if it were nothing more than what it already is? To solve this problem, the recent Latour has posited a hidden plasma that is the source of change, even of very sudden ones such as the collapse of empires. He says that the individual networks are to the plasma as the London Underground is to the rest of London! In other words, the plasma is massive, and this is a major concession in his philosophy, which otheriwse insistst that there is nothing outside networks. However, it seems like for Latour the plasma is a single unified plasma. We’ve seen this move in the history of philosophy before, and it never succeeds. Why should my plasma be the same as your plasma, a dog’ s plasma, or the plasma of a cigarette factory? All of us are capable of changing in different ways, and hence I see little point in explaining all change through a unified plasma shared by all things. This is simply the heir of the ancient Greek apeiron. There’s no way to explain why a unified rumbling lump would ever break up into individual parts. This is why I think the world is already built of individual objects, they’re just a lot more weird than the everyday physical objects we know.

Ironically, the source of my anti-relational views is Heidegger’s tool-analysis; It’s ironic because usually people draw the opposite conclusion from Heidegger. He seems to say that the hammer in isolation is a bad, vulgar, present-at-hand object, while the hammer at work is defined by its relations to all oher things in some work-related context. The hammer is defined by what it is used to build, the way I grasp it and relate to it, and so forth. As you know, I have long argued that this is a misreading. The key point about the hammer is that it can break. And if it can break, this means that it is not fully exhausted by any of its current uses or even any of its possible uses. The hammer is partly withdrawn from every network.

I later learned to appreciate this even more by reading Xavier Zubiri, Heidegger’s best little-known heir. Zubiri has even more classical realist sympathies than Heidegger, and for Zubiri the key point is that the essence of a thing cannot be defined in respect of its relations to anything else. This even leads him to go a bit too far, in my opinion… Zubiri claims that a farm and a knife are not real, because they have to be a farm or a knife for someone. All that’s real in its own right is what he calls the “atomic-cortical structure” of reality, which verges alarmingly on saying that only small physical things are real. Personally I do hold that there is a farm-in-itself and knife-in-itself that are not only constituted by the people who use them. But the wider agreement is more important. Though it took me some months to agree with him, I eventually saw that Zubiri is right: reality must be non-relational.

The summer of 1997 was the most important intellectual time for me. That’s when I studied Zubiri seriously at the same time as studying Whitehead seriously, and those two were the authors who allowed me to break free from Heidegger to some extent. (I had not yet read Latour; that was half a year later.) Zubiri showed me that reality must be non-relational. Whitehead showed me that the human-world relation is no different in kind from the relations between fire and cotton, dogs and pavement, or raindrops and milkweed. Those two thinkers combined lie at the root of my current position.

4. The analogy I’ve used to describe your argument is to suggest that, just as in physics, you can’t get bouncing relations without some X to hit off of, so too, it would seem that Latour needs “something more” to discuss as the pivot of relations. Yet, my students wonder if this something more isn’t really enduring because we simply talk about it that way. We might discuss the White House, as you do, and say “we know it changes constantly, but it’s an important term and while it always changes in its relations, the word for it doesn’t and this, not some strange interiority is what endures.” You are clear about language not being the filter of the world of things back to itself, but what role does it have in your work?

Endurance is a separate problem. There can be withdrawn realities that last for just a flash and others that last for billions of years or even eternity. Sure, it’s quite possible to be duped by an identical word into thinking that identical things are being described. While reading Gibbon recently, I really started to wonder about the ontology of whether the final decadent stages of Byzantium are really “Rome” in the same sense as the Rome of the Roman Republic more than 1,000 years earlier. And there are lots of puzzles there for philosophers to work on. Let me just say, as an inadequate placeholder rather than as a full response, that I don’t think the unity of things is reducible ot the unity of the words that describes them.

Language is an important topic for any philosophy. The problem is that took on a vastly inflated role for quite awhile as the sole topic of philosophy, and indeed my work is part of a reaction against that tendency. Language was being used in an anti-realist way to reduce things to their accessibility to us. By contrast, what interests me most about language is its power to make present without making present. The most masterful speakers and writers we know are those who do not make their subject directly present, but indirectly. One example is metaphor. If you take Max Black’s example of a (rather mediocre) metaphor, “man is a wolf,” there is no way to parse that metaphor in prose. You cannot exhaust the metaphor with a set of discursive statements such as “man is savage, moonstruck, and travels in violent hierarchical packs,” because none of these statements ever get at what the metaphor communicates indirectly. The same goes for rhetoric. Aristotle thinks they key to rhetoric is the enthymeme, which is when you say something without saying it. A trivial example: if I say “the Third Army then marched on Baghdad,” I don’t have to say “the Third Army then marched on Baghdad, which is the capital of Iraq, and during this war their goal was to capture the capital.” The latter part of this is unnecessary and boring, because it is already known to the listener without being stated. Language is riddled with enthymemes, because we are never able or willling to spell out exactly everything that we are trying to communicate. What metaphor and rhetoric teach us is that clear, plain language are not only impossible, but also self-defeating. Reality itself is not the kind of thing that can be parsed in a set of clear discursive statements. Something shadowy remains in the background of every topic, and we have to allude to it rather than bluntly stating it sometimes.

As you know, this is one of my most serious objections to analytic philosophy. It is a culture that prides itself on clear writing, avoiding pseudo-poetic gibberish, etc. And yet, almost nobody in analytic philosophy is a truly good writer. They never have produced and never will produce a Nietzsche, a Plato, a Giordano Bruno, or a Bergson in analytic philosophy. The reason has to do with what I said in the previous paragraph. Clarity in writing is better than unclarity, but it does not yet imply lucidity and suggestive power. Analytic philosophers seems to think that garble and fuzziness and fog are the only problems with bad writing. They’re not. One of the main problems with mediocre writing, in fact, is that it prematurely clarifies a topic. Not all aspects of a topic are ever clear, and you have to be able to allude to that unclarity in a way that is both vague and compelling at the same time.

In a sense, then, my philosophy of language is less visible in my theories of language to date than in my practice of writing. No one has ever called my writing unclear, so in that sense I think I meet the rigorous prose standards of analytic philosophy. (The first reviewer ofTool-Being assumed I was an analytic philosopher, in fact.) But I also try to be not only clear. I try to write in good vivid English, not just good plain English. The latter is merely a negative goal.

5. I want to turn to art. One question a student asked about your essay on beauty is how beauty is different than what you call “allure.” My students, one of whom is an artist herself, thought that your descriptions of sincerity were helpful in talking about how objects are always related in meaningful ways to one another, and it’s only in this set of relations, that one could ever have cynicism or irony or what-have-you. But then it would seem that it gets hard to describe art objects as different from other objects, especially if aesthetics is first philosophy. Perhaps I can simply ask if you still take this to be the case and how you describe this in such a way that doesn’t get caught in the idea that “being is appearance.”

Your student is right; I haven’t addressed that topic yet. My aim in Guerrilla Metaphysics was to show that beauty is part of a larger class of phenomena that I called “allure.” When writing it I had not yet read Dewey’s Art as Experience, which tries something similar, and also fails to demarcate beauty from all the other surprising departures from the everyday that count as aesthetic for him. Dewey and I are equally guilty on this point. But I do plan to write an aesthetics someday, and that’s where I’ll be trying to answer your student’s very accurate objection.

6. You have made this clear by now in some ways, but is there anything you’re moving away from in the earlier works of yours, some of which many of us have read?

Ironically, others may be able to answer the question better than I can, since I almost never reread my own works. Roland Barthes once said that he avoided reading his own books too, but then at one point late in life he sat down and read them all again. That sounds like something I’ll want to do too. Of course I read my books at page proof stage, and usually hate them then. I like them much better when they appear in print, and I immediately read them once at that point, but even that experience can be strangely depressing. So then I don’t read them again for a long time after that, if ever. But sometimes I come across someone quoting one of my books, and in those cases I tend to think: “wow, that’s pretty good.”

But to get to your question… Recently I was reviewing my list of publications for administrative reasons, and was shocked to notice that pretty much all of my work has been on 20th and 21st century philosophical topics. It’s a shock because, as a St. John’s College graduate, I have the most classical education one can still obtain. And I “think like a Johnnie” as well, in the sense that I’m not easily impressed by passing fads, try to size up books by whether they are likely to be readable two or three centuries from now, am unimpressed by recent jargon, and so forth. So I’m really a classically minded person who happens to like innovation, rather than an inherently modern-minded person like many in continental philosophy are. And that’s why it’s a bit of a surprise that I’ve worked so exclusively on recent philosophy. Because of that shock, I realized that I ought to start doing work that’s a bit more in keeping with my classical temperament— so you’re likely to see me publishing on Greek philosophy before too long, and maybe some Medieval as well. Plato and Aristotle still have much to teach us, and by that I mean they have much power to help us innovate. I have no interest in the crusty old notion of a perennial philosophy, that the Greeks already knew it all, that modern philosophy is a waste of time. I have much sympathy for classicism, but none at all for conservatism. The past is dead unless we continually revive it in our own thinking. For some people, classicism seems to mean “let us simply appreciate the great works of the past, and ignore these trendy innovations from France.” For me, by contrast, classicism means: “come one, let’s produce some new classics!”

But to get to that, point I do think that we should focus our attention on the best thinkers who have ever lived at various times, not just on who happens to be hot at a given moment. And Plato and Aristotle remain the gold standard for me. The attacks on Plato in recent philosophy are often outrageously shallow, even coming from people of the stature of Nietzsche and Heidegger (let alone Popper). But I’m increasingly sure that Plato is the best there’s ever been in philosophy, and that we need a new Platonist phase in continental thought more than anything else.

But in a way I’m dodging your question, which I take to mean: “are there any ideas you’re moving away from in your recent work?” I’m dodging it because I’m not sure I can answer it. I would have to go back and read Tool-Being carefully to look for signs of things in which I no longer believe.

On Harman and the Sense of Beauty

Megan McCredie

In the article, “A Larger Sense of Beauty,” Harman demonstrates how beauty is an aspect that we take for granted.  The meaning of “awareness” is attributed in this piece because Harman states that, “beauty plays an almost overwhelming role in everyday life.”  Subjects such as science and politics are heavily studied and these concrete facts are what people tend to gravitate towards more than intangible theories.  These factual subjects relate to providing us with a firmer grasp on how to run our lives.  One the other hand, the aspect which becomes overlooked is crucial component that makes us want to run our lives.   This is essential quality is beauty.  We are unconsciously striving to attain features which will provide happiness and give us a new meaning.

The word “beauty” has several different types of meanings and all of them are correct.  First, there is the beauty in everyday life.  Harman delineates this notion of daily decisions when choosing our homes, clothing, mates and music etc.  Society is in the constant state of choosing what they think is beautiful.  The statement, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is depicted through the latter because all beings have different tastes when it comes to perpetual daily decisions.  Harman notes that the difficult aspect of beauty is that nothing is concrete and true, because “aesthetic standards seem to be personal and arbitrary” and they vary according to the individual.

A second part of understanding beauty is that it deals with how beauty conveys the depths of reality and provides the doorway to another dimension.  Essentially, beauty requires the ability to try to understand the different depths of reality while ridding the conventional ideals of beauty.  Harmon mentions that art consists of various “pleasing and displeasing forms.”  Artists no longer focus on the mathematically proportionate art (Mona Lisa), as well as, the art that displays “pretty objects.”  Prettiness is a temporarily concept and does not last as beauty does.  What Harmon is trying to convey, is sometimes beauty can be ugly.  He uses the example of how an artist made a film of clowns using the toilet, to demonstrates his claim that art does not have to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye in order to be characterized as beautiful.  One is able to take this perspective and apply it to all forms of art.  For instance, the classic contemporary musician, Bob Dylan is an example of this notion.  His twangy voice was not something that was initially appealing to the senses.   His music is defined as pieces of beauty from the way he unveils and magnifies certain aspects of society and displays truth through his lyrics and melodies.  Information from intellects regarding the eternity, reality and truth are all aspects that society grasps on to.  Society grasps on to them because there is not a right answer and people spend their lives trying to figure out the meaning of life.  Truth is a characteristic of beauty, and people are attracted to art because it is one way to convey truth.

Harmon goes on to describe the beauty in single objects and focuses on each characteristic and qualities and then unifies the object as a whole.  This notion he addresses focuses on awareness and what it means to be aware.  His goals were to shed new light on objects because society is known to take the objects and strip them of their individual reality.  He uses the word “allure,” to “describe what happens when an object is split from its qualities and seems to hover outside of them.”  Allure is the root of beauty because the internal life and hidden spirit are unveiled and set apart from its practical function.  This idea is displayed in the social realist art movement.  Social realists depict peasants in the midst of the their work, or farmers tending to their crops.  This depiction of everyday life is an example of trying to find beauty in the ordinary.  Another example that forces one to “look closer” is in the film, American Beauty.  There was a famous scene where the teen, Ricky, demonstrated his passion for the delicacies of life.  In the scene, he showed his friend Jane the most “beautiful thing he had ever filmed,” a plastic bag blowing in the wind.  This symbolized that he was able to capture objects in the moment and take true pleasure in seeing the beauty of the world. Harman uses salt as an example of an object that is generally reduced to their usefulness of us.  Unfortunately, many people in our society fall into being “creatures of habit” and live their life without noticing the true beauty of it.  Many beautiful details of life are left unnoticed.  I believe that for some artists, their ultimate goal is to present the delicate and minute aspects of life that are overlooked.

Harmon’s view helps us separates one from the conventional way of thinking and helps us realize that there is more to life than just consumption and material possessions. The world is our art piece and as an individual, it is our job to notice, acknowledge, and appreciate every facet that this “piece of art” offers us.