Author: Steven Shaviro

A few days ago, Ben Woodard put up a provocative and interesting post on the intersections between, as well as the differences between, process philosophy and OOO (object-oriented ontology). Ben (rightly) questioned the dismissal of process by OOO folks as “lava-lamp materialism” or as “lump ontologies.” (He could have added, as well, Bogost’s describing process philosophy as “firehose metaphysics.”). But Ben also warned that “there’s a fuzziness” in process metaphysics “that there doesn’t seem to be an urge to qualify.” The danger is that simply calling on “process”  is supposed to answer everything; “this allows for becoming to be utilized as an escape hatch in argumentation.” Ben expressed the need for “a rigorous account of the breaks, the actualizations, the triads or whatever it may be, that show the work of becoming without a human agent making the call, without the human carving out the individuated bits of the world.” And he ended by asking the people on various process blogs (including me) to give comments.

So far there have been answers from Knowledge Ecology, from Immanence, from Footnotes2Plato, from After Nature, and from Immanent Transcendence. And Ben has responded in turn to all of them here. So I would seem to be the only one left, of the blogs from which Ben initially requested a response. So here goes.

First, I agree with Ben that the answer to lava lamp / lump / firehose criticisms needs to be better articulated. These criticisms all suggest that “becoming” or “process” is a one-size-fits-all generalization, used to answer any questions about particular objects or details. And I do think this may well be a sloppy habit that we have sometimes fallen into in the blogosphere. What needs to be emphasized, therefore, is that such over-generalization is NOT the case in the writings of Whitehead or Simondon. I am in entire sympathy with Harman’s interest in what he calls “the carpentry of things”; Bogost also speaks of the “carpentry” of objects in this sense — as when he explicitly prefers (algorithmic)  “procedure” to (Whiteheadian) “process.” But it seems to me that this (metaphorical sense of) carpentry is very much alive in Simondon, especially — as when he critiques Aristotle’s hylomorphism (figured in the imprintation of form, by means of a mold, upon a supposedly otherwise shapeless lump of clay). In no way is the process by which the clay becomes in-formed, as Simondon puts it, through a whole complex series of actions and procedures, merely an indistinct and continuous, firehose-y or lumpy, flow. (I am not sure whether or not this complex process can be described as “procedural” in Bogost’s terms; I’m inclined to think that all procedures are in fact processes, contra Bogost’s opposition between them; but that not all processes are procedures. I leave this aside for future consideration).

Whitehead writes on a much more abstract or “generic” level, of course but part of the reason for his seemingly scholastic multiplication of terms and distinctions is precisely in order to prevent the use of “becoming” or “process” as an undifferentiated, catch-all term. Whitehead is worried, I think, that Bergsonian duration can all too easily become such a term, a night in which all cows are black. And this is precisely why Whitehead adopts “event epochalism” (as George Lucas calls it), in which duration (or becoming) only applies to each individual occasion taken by itself, but not to the universe as a whole, nor even to the more-or-less-stable things (“societies” of occasions, extended in time and space) that populate the universe. (As mentioned in my previous posting — for Whitehead “there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming”). For Whitehead, becoming or duration is what characterizes each individual Jamesian “drop of experience” — there are also (for both James and Whitehead) the (largely non-conscious) transitions between these drops.

So, for Whitehead (as for Simondon in a different way) “process” really means composition, rather than duration or becoming. There are all these atoms of becoming, which do not change or endure, but which “are what they are,” or become what they are, and then perish. And these atoms (the “actual entities” or “actual occasions”) are not themselves in time and space; rather, they generate time and space, together with generating “the real actual things that endure” in space and time and that Whitehead calls “societies” (Adventures of Ideas, page 204). Again, the point of all this is not to deny the actuality of things (or of what OOO calls “objects”), but precisely to account for their actuality, to show how they come into being, and endure in being (or have a conatus). (Whitehead, the great enemy of all theories of substance. nonetheless says that his own “notion of ‘society’ has analogies to Descartes’ notion of ‘substance’ “).

Now, Harman is perfectly right to point out that this argument distinguishes Whitehead from Bergson (and from Deleuze), for whom there is such a thing as a universal duration, or continuity of becoming, within which all the smaller and more particular becomings are nested. I just think that Harman exaggerates, or overstates, the degree, or extent and importance, of this distinction. He says that it makes Whitehead absolutely on the other side from Bergson and Deleuze of a massive philosophical divide. But I think that Whitehead lines up with Bergson and Simondon and Deleuze, and against Harman and OOO, in that all these “process” thinkers seek to account for how things come into existence, and how they endure; whereas OOO just seems to me to assume that its objects are already there.

The question of occasionalism comes into this, too. Harman requires occasional or vicarious causes to explain how objects can ever interact. But classical occasionalism, to the (limited) extent that I understand it, required a specific occasion, not only for how one object would interact with another, but also for how any object could endure at all. For the classical occasionalists, no entity could perpetuate itslef unless God upheld it anew at every instant. If I think that Whitehead is not an occasionalist, this is precisely because he gives us, non-supernaturally, the “actual occasions” by means of which, and as a result of which, things are able to endure. (This also touches upon my disagreement with Harman as to the role of God in Whitehead’s system — I don’t have the time or space to go into this in greater depth here, but see my last post, and Harman’s response to it). (I should add that my understanding of Whitehead’s God also puts me at odds with most of the other process bloggers who have jumped into the debate — but this is also something that I will need to take up at another time).

In any case, all this is why I think that Harman’s critique of philosophies that “undermine” or “overmine” objects (see the opening chapter of The Quadruple Object) doesn’t rightly apply to Whitehead (and here Harman might partly agree with me), and also doesn’t apply to Simondon or to Iain Hamilton Grant (in The Quadruple Object, Harman explicitly lists Simondon as one of those thinkers who is guilty of undermining; he similarly calls Grant an underminer, and a philosopher of the One, in his article on Grant in The Speculative Turn.) In other words, I am largely in agreement with Ben, when he writes: “the critique seems to be there must be some underlying substance with forces and powers but I cannot see why this must be the case. In many ways it seems to be an obfuscation of the difference between the metaphysical and the non-metaphysical – why if metaphysically there are not individual things why can’t there be individual things at the physical level without needing a human mind to carve them up.”

I’m not sure I entirely grasp what Ben means here by metaphysical vs. non-metaphysical levels.  To a certain extent, I suppose that it roughly corresponds to Whitehead’s distinction between actual entities (the “really real things” that compose everything) and societies (the “real actual things” that can endure and that we experience). More immediately, though, I presume that Ben’s distinction has to do with Grant’s arguments about antecedence. The metaphysical level is antecedent both to a One that would be the Whole and to the plurality of actually existing objects. This is very different from claiming that the One alone is real, and that objects are mere epiphenomena or appearances. The same could be said, contra Harman, of the antecedence of Simondon’s pre-individual. For Simondon, a thing cannot just be given, it must have a genesis. But again, this doesn’t mean that the antecedent pre-individual is either unified, or more real than what emerges out of it. In any case, for Simondon, whenever an individual exists, there is a field of preindividuality that is both antecedent to it — since it is that out of which the individual emerges — and remains contemporary with it — because no individual ever exhausts the preindividuality out of which it arises. Now, there may well be a difference, as Harman maintains, between Whitehead’s atomism of actual occasions and Simondon’s and Grant’s sense of antecedence. But these thinkers are still in accord with one another, and with Deleuze as well, in demanding a genetic and dynamic account of everything that exists. It’s from a dynamic and genetic point of view that we can reject Harman’s claim, regarding Simondon’s preindividual “seeds of things,” that “these seeds are either distinct from one another or they are not” (The Quadruple Object, page 9). Antecedence trumps this exclusive-either-or binarism. On this level, the question is not one of substances, but — as Grant and Ben both say — of ungrounded powers. (I realize that I will need, at some point, to go far more deeply into powers metaphysics, and to consider how such a metaphysics relates to Whitehead’s cosmology — there are obvious differences here, although I take it that both positions are on the same side in opposing the claim for Aristotelian substances, as revived by OOO).

But I didn’t start this blog entry intending for it to be another screed against OOO. Rather, I wanted to talk about a way in which Graham and I — or more broadly, OOO and process thought — are actually on the same side with one another: since this is also part of the point that Ben was making, despite expressing criticisms of both. (This is also why I am not here any further pursuing the differences – which Harman has helped to point out — between Whitehead on the one hand, and thinkers like Schelling, Simondon, and Grant on the other).

what I am starting to think about now — and which Ben’s posting gives me a new angle on — is the following. It has to do with “speculative realism” more broadly considered, rather than just with OOO. If one accepts, as I do, the general critique of correlationism (Meillassoux) or of the “philosophy of human access” (Harman), then it seems to me that one is left with a stark alternative. One must say either 1)that all entities, or things, or objects, are in their own right to some degree active, intentional, vital, possessed of powers, possessed of their own “alien phenomenology,” etc; or else 2)that being is radically divorced from thought, that things or objects must be radically divested of their alleged anthropomorphic qualities. In other words, if you push it far enough, you are driven either to panpsychism or to eliminativism. I think that this is the biggest division among the four initlal speculative realists. Both Harman and Grant approach panpsychism without entirely endorsing it (see their articles in David Skrbina’s Mind That Abides anthology); whereas both Meillassoux and Brassier reject any such ascription of mindfulness to the world (or to the entities in the world), and opt instead for some sort of mathematical (Meillassoux via Badiou) or scientistic (Brassier via Sellars) reduction. Once we abandon the notion that mind and (things in the) world must be primordially correlated, then we must either see mind everywhere or nowhere. Panpsychism sees mind as intrinsic to being, existing apart from any question of what it might be correlated with (for panpsychism, everything has a mind, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is apprehended by a mind) (and also, although the not-quite panpsychism of Grant and Harman does not see mind as originary, it regards mind as necessarily arising from the antecedence of productive powers, in Grant’s case, or as necessarily arising from any encounter or relation, in Harman’s case). At the other extreme, eliminativism sees nothing left but brute matter, or primary substance without qualities (hence Meillassoux’s revival of the separation between primary and secondary qualities), or mathematical structure, once the correlation of mind to world has been rejected.

So here we have Harman and OOO lining up on the same side with Grant, with Whitehead, and with any powers metphysics (I also need to say something here about “physical intentionality” in Molnar). Whereas Meillassoux and Brassier are on the other, “mathematical” side (together with “structural realists” like Ladyman and Ross, whom Harman has criticized for their ultra-relationalism).

Of course, this cannot be all of it, since I need to respect my own stricture above against ultimate metaphysical exclusive-either-ors. So I am tempted to describe Ben Woodard’s own “dark vitalist” position, and perhaps those of Reza Negarestani and Eugene Thacker as well, as combining the extremest tendencies of both the panpsychist pole and the eliminativist pole. Would it be possible to construct a fourth speculative realist position, one that rejects both panpsychist and eliminativist tendencies? So far, I cannot see how one could do this — since I am arguing that the two tendencies are potentials, or consequences, that inevitably arise from the critique of correlationism, it would have to be a position that explicitly rejected them both, rather than merely ignoring them.

I have two public presentations coming up in September, at which I hope to develop these ideas further. At the OOO symposium at the New School in New York City, I plan to talk more about the contrasting panpsychist and eliminativist poles of speculative realism. And at the SLSA conference in Kitchener, Ontario, I plan to talk about the absence of consciousness, and what it might mean to have mindedness without consciousness, as well as without correlation (see the abstract here).

I think that the differend between Kant and Hegel is still crucial, even from the point of view of speculative realism.Basically, Kant posits a limit beyond which thought cannot go — we cannot know things in themselves. Hegel’s critique of Kant is that, since thought is positing the limit, thought must always already be able to see beyond the iimit; for Hegel, the idea of inaccessible things-in-themselves is bogus, because it is our thought that has first posited them *as* inaccessible. This is what Hegel says, and it is repeated time and time again by later Hegelians, e.g. by Zizek.

Now, it has long seemed to me that any modern philosophy needs to begin with a counter-defense of Kant against Hegel. In the terms of SR, evidently, Kant is a weak correlationist while Hegel is a strong correlationist. Hegel’s argument against Kant is very much a form of correlationist argument — it is basically Stove’s Gem — to affirm something is to posit it and thence to know it. Hegel is simply saying that, by thinking that there are things outside of our thought, we are thereby bringing them into our thought. This is precisely the argument that SR most strongly rejects. 

In this sense, even though Kant’s transcendental argument, his Copernican turn, is the locus classicus and foundational statement of correlationism, I think that returning to Kant can give us a way out of correlationism. This is partly what I was trying to do in my Whitehead book (even though I wrote most of that book before I became aware of speculative realism). Once we have made this return, several moves are possible. We may argue that the correlation, as Kant establishes it, is itself contingent rather than necessary (this is what Meillassoux does). Or, we may make a new version of the transcendental argument, asking not what our minds must be like in order for the world to appear the way it does, but what the world itself must be like in order for it to be able to appear to us the way it does (this is what Roy Bhaskar does). Or, we may extend the Kantian argument to all entities: it isn’t just human beings or rational beings that encounter appearances which are different from things in themselves, but every entity encounters all other entities phenomenally only, without being able to reach those entities in themselves (this is basically Harman’s argument that all objects withdraw, and that there is an unbridgeable distinction between sensual objects and real objects). Or, we may rework the transcendental argument as a principle of productivity rather than of essences (this, as far as I can understand it, is what Schelling does, at least in Iain Hamilton Grant’s reading of Schelling). Or else, as I prefer — following Whitehead as I understand him — we can invert the order of the Critiques so that the 3rd critique comes first — becoming, as Whitehead put it, a critique of feeling, which makes the other critiques unnecessary — that is to say, aesthetics precedes cognition — we affect and are affected by other things aesthetically before we cognize those other things, and even (or especially) when we cannot cognize them adequately. We cannot *know* things in themselves, or things apart from their correlation with us; but we can, as Harman rightly suggests, allude to them, i.e. refer to them metaphorically or indirectly. And we can, as well, be aesthetically *moved* by them — indeed, this is the primordial mode ofactual  contact among entities (and in saying this, I am espousing a Whiteheadian version of SR which differs from Harman’s object-oriented ontology). 

This is something of a followup to what I wrote here, and also here. It is abstracted from an email interview currently in progress. It is pretty rough and undeveloped, but I hope it makes a certain amount of sense.

I both agree and disagree with Hardt and Negri in profound ways. I find their account of the predominance of “affective labor” in the current globalized economy to be incredibly useful. It’s not that such labor didn’t exist before, or that older forms of labor (like industrial labor) have somehow disappeared; but rather that our current social and economic formation is characterized by the hegemony of affective labor processes (together with the hegemony of finance capital over industrial capital, and the importance of continued “primitive accumulation,” or expropriation of formerly public resources, alongside the appropriation and accumulation of surplus value). I think that Hardt and Negri are correct in their observations about “empire” replacing the older forms of imperialism, now that capitalism has truly become global; under this regime, nation-states do not cease to exist, but they play a different role (vis-a-vis an international “market” that they cannot control) than they did formerly. And Hardt and Negri are also right to assert that the extraction of a surplus — which is to say, ultimately, of profit — has now extended well beyond the factory, to encompass all areas of social life, and that this means an increasing appropriation, not only of surplus labor-power, but also of what Marx called “general intellect,” or the accumulated knowledges and capacities of human life as a whole —  including things like habits, everyday practices, forms of know-how, and other potentialities of human (and not just human) “life” in general.

So in this sense I appreciate many aspects of what Hardt and Negri mean by biopolitical power, or the appropriation of the laboring activity of bodies and affects, not just in places of work, but in the overall compass of “life” as a whole. Yet this is also the point at which Hardt and Negri become disturbingly unsatisfactory to me. For what they are describing, under the rubric of biopolitics, affective labor, and the “real subsumption” of all aspects of social existence — and indeed of “life itself” — under capital, is a living nightmare, or a situation of unmitigated horror. For what it means is that we (meaning, by this “we”, everybody who works, whether in an office, a school, a factory, or some other institution, as well as everybody who is unemployed or underemployed, i.e. who does not even get the opportunity to work) — that we, so described, are not just being exploited nine-to-five, but rather all the time, 24/7: in our leisure as well as our work, when we are not being paid as well as when we are being paid, indeed even when we are asleep. This is what it means for capital to appropriate general intellect, and to capture, commodify, and sell not only quantifiable goods and services, but also such impalpable things as atmospheres, feelings, ways of being, or forms of life.

What I find inexplicable in Hardt and Negri is that they describe this situation of hyper-oppression and hyper-exploitation as one in which we are closer than ever to liberation, so that the self-determination of the multitude, as an active, affirmative, constitutive power, is somehow just around the corner — or is even, somehow, already in effect. This sounds suspiciously to me like the old-fashioned Marxist belief (never held, as far as I can tell, by Marx and Engels themselves) that “objective” economic conditions will somehow produce a transition from capitalism to socialism all by themselves, without the need for any sort of political action.

The view that economic processes will lead to revolutionary change all by themselves is precisely what used to be criticized, in many Marxist circles, as “economism.” And yet, I think that the problem with Hardt and Negri’s position is actually the result of their taking “biopolitics” too seriously, instead of subordinating it to economics. The reason for their unearned optimism is because they think that what capital is today exploiting can be designated, all too simply and holistically, as “life.” Where Marx saw labor being expropriated in the commodified form of labor-power, they see “life” as being expropriated directly. But I think this is wrong. There has been no shift from labor to life as a whole. Rather, leisure activities, and even mere sleeping, have been themselves transformed into new particular forms of labor. This allows them to be purchased in the form of labor-power, so that a surplus may be extracted from them.

To appeal to “life” beyond such specific forms of labor is an empty gesture. Indeed, the very idea of “life” in Western thought and culture is an exceedingly problematic one, as Eugene Thacker demonstrates in his brilliant recent book After Life. I am inclined to suggest that “life,” as posited in various discourses (not only those of Hardt and Negri) on biopolitics and biopower, does not exist. It is just an empty hypostatization, a transformation of forces and processes into a supposed essence. If we posit that such an essence has been alienated by practices of governmentality embodied in biopolitics, then it becomes all too easy to fantasize a disalienation that will return “life” to its essence. But this obscures the various forms of production and expropriation that are actually taking place, and puts the focus on tactics of “governmentality,” instead of examining the more basic processes of surplus value extraction and  capital accumulation.

I do not want to sound too harsh here. In fact, Hardt and Negri pay considerably more attention to economic expropriation and exploitation than most other contemporary theorists do. (It is important to note that they do focus on these processes, whereas other radical thinkers — Alain Badiou is the most notable example — programatically bracket and ignore them). But I still think that there is a certain imbalance that comes from their overvaluation of what they call biopolitics.

Also, I’m aware that what has today come to be called “neo-vitalism,” in various configurations, is concerned precisely to emphasize force and affect, rather than essence, in its understanding of how the world works. Evidently, I am largely in accord with this impulse. But I still think that it is dangerously confusing to hypostasize “life” per se in any way. The nineteenth century vitalists wrongly claimed that there was some sort of basic distinction between life and nonlife. They imagined some special process that drove living things, in contrast to the merely mechanistic forces that were supposedly all there was to the inanimate world. Today, this dualism is inadmissible. We should rather say, following Whitehead — and also Latour, Bennett, and the speculative realist philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant — that all materiality, or all of existence, nonliving as well as living, is intrinsically active and agential. It might be better to say, not that everything is alive, but that everything thinks in one way or another. This is the thesis, not of vitalism, but of panpsychism.