Author: Steven Shaviro

Objects?

Levi Bryant, in a recent blog entry, argues against the reductionist critique that would see only subatomic particles as “real,” since they are the building blocks of everything on a larger scale. Reductionism argues, in effect, that larger entities (such as “trees”) are not actual objects, but only our own way of constructing or organizing a quantum reality that we cannot perceive directly.

In opposition to this, Levi rightly says that, if quarks and leptons are actual objects independent of our own perceptual projections, then things like trees are actual objects independent of our own perceptua projections as well.

However, I am not sure I agree with Levi’s reasons for defending the independence of objects of all scales. Or rather, I do agree, more or less, with his first argument:

The point that a rock contains atoms, electrons, and other particles besides, does not undermine the thesis that the rock itself is an object, nor does it make the rock less real than the particles it contains. While it is indeed true that the rock cannot exist without these particles, the pattern or structure or system that characterizes the rock is nonetheless what characterizes the rock as a distinct object.

This is one way of understanding Whitehead’s insistence that philosophy must not “explain away” anything, but must accept the reality of the beautiful sunset as well as the reality of photons of different energy levels. (The point of Whitehead’s example is precisely that the beautiful sunset is part of “nature” just as much as the photons are, and that it cannot be “explained away” as being merely a subjective human interpretation, or as involving “secondary qualities” instead of primary ones, etc. The sunset, every bit as much as the photon, is itself a real object, irreducible to the way that human consciousness posits and grasps it).

But I disagree with his second argument:

All objects are independent of one another. This is where the mereological thesis gets really strange. The particles that the rock contains are themselves independent objects and the rock itself an object independent of the particles that it contains. Thus, while the rock cannot exist without these particles, the rockness of the rock is nonetheless independent of the particles that contain it.

This is the defining thesis of object-oriented metaphysics, held by Graham Harman as well as Levi, that I cannot make sense of. I do not see how it is possible, or conceivable, for anything to exist independently of everything else. For it is only due to other things that any particular thing can exist in the first place. I am not reducible to the particles and atoms that compose my body,  just as I am not reducible to the oxygen I breathe, the food I eat, the language I speak, the clothes I wear, and the money that sustains my existence in this society; just as the tree is not reducible, either to the atoms that compose it, or to the sunlight and atmosphere that sustain it, the animals that help to fertilize its seeds, etc. But it seems to me to be incoherent to essentialize this “not reducible to” by equating it with some sort of absolute existence, in and of itself. A dependent being is not reducible to what it is dependent upon (or to what, in turn, is dependent upon it); but neither can it be posited as a self-contained being altogether apart from the other beings upon which it depends

To even propose such a thesis of substance, or object-independence — as Harman and Bryant do — is to freeze objects in time, and to rule out the reality of genesis, becoming, and transformation. It is to posit an endurance that is somehow independent of time, i.e. that time only affects secondarily, contingently, from the outside as it were.

This is where (as usual) I prefer Whitehead’s account to the more recent “object-oriented” one. Whitehead fully recognizes how a thing, or an object, is independent of, and irreducible to, its causes, components, and supports or preconditions or milieu. But he goes to great lengths to prevent this independence from being hypostasized as an enduring substance. A Whiteheadian “actual occasion” (or “actual entity”) is in fact independent of everything contemporaneous with it (just as Bryant and Harman claim);No entity is merely a passive result of what precedes it, because every entity makes a “decision” with regard to the “data” that it “prehends” (perceives, touches, is affected by, etc.). Indeed, the independence of an entity/occasion in the present is precisely the consequence of its “decision” with regard to its past. Contemporaneous decisions made by different entites do not influence one another, which is why things can be different, and the new can be produced, even within a common environment or a common set of antecedents.

However — such an “actual entity” is not a substance (in Harman’s sense) or a subsisting object (in Bryant’s sense), because it precisely does not endure. That is to say, it is a process rather than a substance. Once it happens, it is done; it is now dead, or (as Whitehead likes to put it), “objectively immortal” — it is now a mere datum for other processes to come. In this way, the entity is not independent of its antecedents and consequences. It comes out of those things that it makes a decision about, and it influences the rest of reality as something about which other entities must make a decision. It cannot be completely prehended or apprehended by any following entity — it is always grasped only partially and incompletely, just as Harman requires of objects in relation to other objects. And yet it is in its essence relational, because it arises out of already-given data and donates itself to the future as data.

In other words, the punctuality of Whitehead’s actual occasions, the fact that they are “perpetually perishing,” is what gives them over to temporality — in contrast to the way that time remains necessarily secondary and external for the “object-oriented” thinkers. Or, Whitehead’s doctrine of actual occasions does in fact meet all the criteria of Harman’s and Bryant’s object-oriented thought, while at the same time being essential temporal and relational in a way that their notion of object-independence is unable to compass. Harman and Bryant are right in what they require of objects; but there is more to it than they are willing to compass. Whitehead doesn’t contradict the “object-oriented” argument, so much as he places it within a wider context of relations. What Harman and Bryant see as an opposition, is for Whitehead rather a contrast.

I am not really saying anything different from what I say in my formal article critiquing Harman, which I will be delivering tomorrow as a talk at the SLSA conference in Atlanta; and which will appear, together with Harman’s own spirited  rejoinder, in the forthcoming volume The Speculative Turn. But I think that Bryant’s formulations in his latest blog posting have allowed me, or spurred me, to make one aspect of the argument clearer than it was before.

[Note to self: this is still incomplete. I need to write also about how Whitehead conceives “societies”, which can be objects that more or less endure through time, like myself or a tree. Societies are composed of actual entites, but not in the way that physical objects are composed of subatomic particles; there is a crucial “mereological” argument here, one that I still need to work out better — but that differs from Bryant’s account of parts and wholes. Also, I need to broaden the sense in which Whitehead’s approach bridges the gap between object-orientation on the one hand, and the emphasis on becoming and transformation and crystallizations of the actual out of the virtual that one finds in Bergson, Deleuze, and Iain Hamilton Grant. Harman regards this as an irreconcilable opposition — for him, there is no middle ground between the object-orientation of his own thought, Bryant’s, and Latour’s, and the process orientation of the above-mentioned thinkers. But Whitehead precisely undoes this dichotomy — and that is something else that I still need to work out more fully and cogently].

Daphne Brooks Lecture

The DeRoy Lecture Series 2009-2010 Presents:

Daphne Brooks (Princeton University)
“Bring the Pain”: Post-Soul Memory, Neo-Soul Affect and Lauryn Hill in the Black Public Sphere
3:30pm, Friday, October 23
Welcome Center Auditorium
Wayne State University
42 West Warren
Detroit, Michigan

Daphne A. Brooks is an associate professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture.  She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent:  Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), winner of the The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR. and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005).  She is the editor of The Great Escapes:  The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft, and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series.  Brooks is also a contributing writer to The Nation Magazine where she has published articles on Beyonce and Amy Winehouse.  She is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Feminist Musical Subcultures from the Minstrelsy to the Post-Hip Hop Era (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). 

Kant and Speculative Realism

I need more time to work through Graham Harman’s critique of certain aspects of my Whitehead book. But I think I can give a quick answer to his PS about Kant.

Graham quotes, against my reading of Whitehead as a kind of post-Kantian, Whitehead’s own assertion that Process and Reality involves “a recurrence to pre-Kantian modes of thought” (page xi). Throughout my book I am referring, instead, to a passage where Whitehead instead credits Kant as “the great philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into philosophy the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning” (page 156). This particular way of relating to Kant is crucial to my whole reading of Whitehead; it is why I position Whitehead as a kind of (radical) post-Kantian. Ultimately, which of these two sides of Whitehead’s attitude towards Kant one wishes to cite is a tactical decision. But in any case, I think that my Kant/Whitehead juxtaposition is more than what Harman dismisses as a “bats and birds both fly” argument.

I certainly do take Graham’s point when he says: “So, why do I choose to portray Kant as an enemy rather than an ally? Largely because of how Kant has been appropriated.” From an anti-correlationist position, Kant is indeed the source of the problem diagnosed by both Harman and Meillassoux, and it makes sense for them to move against him.

My own positioning of Kant as an ally has a different genealogy. It really comes out of the implicit “Kant vs Hegel” faultline in French philosophy. My very first book was on Blanchot and Bataille, and a big part of my argument (inherited from my initial advisor, Joseph Libertson) was that they were reacting against Hegel (whom they encountered via Kojeve) by disassembling the whole (Kojevian more than actually Hegelian, perhaps) “labor of the negative” — hence Bataille emphasizes “negativité sans emploi,” and Blanchot “desoeuvrement” — both of which mean that negativity cannot be put to work, cannot perform a labor. Negativity is weak, and not productive. I saw a link here between the Bataille/Blanchot critique of negativity and Kant’s emphasis on limits: even though Bataille and Blanchot never themselves say anything about Kant. But Foucault definitely positions Bataille in relation to Kant (rather than to Hegel) for this reason in his crucial early article on Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression.”

Subsequently, thisconfiguration seemed to me to be the key to Deleuze’s hatred of the dialectic, and to his presentation of Nietzsche as the thinker who “stood Kant on his feet” in a manner analogous to how Marx stood Hegel on his feet. Deleuze separates productivity entirely from negativity. Similar anti-dialectical stances in Foucault and even in Derrida are grounded in this sort of argument, as well. From there I came to a sense that one could read the second half of the First Critique (the Transcendental Dialectic) as, in effect, Kant’s rejoinder-in-advance to Hegel’s critique of him in the Encyclopedia Logic. And this, in turn, takes on considerable relevance today, since Hegel’s critique of Kant is such a centerpiece of everything that Zizek does. I never managed to work this out in a form that I was satisfied enough with to publish — but it definitely stands behind why I found Kant of such importance in talking about Whitehead and Deleuze.

To try to put this more concisely: Kant’s importance is in saying that there are limits to the pretensions of thought to determine the cosmos. Hegel and Zizek argue that any limit to thought is illusory, since it is turns out to be thought itself that is positing such a limit. I think that Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic is best read as a rejoinder in advance to this sort of argument. It is in this particular sense that I argue for reading Kant as (surprisingly, perhaps) an ally of some of the speculative realist arguments against unlimited correlationism; rather than seeing this part of Kant’s philosophy as being — as Deleuze sometimes implies — a policing action against speculation. Of course it is both, but my reading of Kant in Without Criteria is designed to bring out some of the often overlooked “minor” aspects of Kant — which is something that gets me in trouble with more orthodox Kantians,and more generally with normativists, as much as it does with speculative realists who see Kant as the enemy.

Economism

I think that Hardt/Negri are right when they suggest that a contemporary analysis of “the organic composition of capital” will involve great attention, not just to what capitalist corporations do internally, but to the “externalities” that greatly affect “the increase and decrease of value” (Commonwealth 141). But there is rather a too easy slide from this to the claim that “capital is increasingly external to the productive process and the generation of wealth. In other words, biopolitical labor is increasingly autonomous” (141). These two statements are not equivalent. The first one means that what is being expropriated from workers is not just their eight hours a day of labor power, but their entire body and soul, with all the knowledges and practices that are parts of the common lifeworld that informs them, and that they inherit. In this sense, it is perfectly true that predatory capital is extorting wealth today to an enormous extent through continuing “primitive accumulation”, and through what might be considered a sort of “ground-rent” on what was up till recently the commons,or general culture, until it was appropriated in the form of “intellectual property.” But — where Hardt/Negri say that “the exploitation of labor-power should be understood in terms of not profit but capitalist rent” (141), they really should have said “as well as” rather than “not… but.”

Hardt/Negri then make a sort of rhetorical slide when they move from the (correct) claim that capital is increasingly exploiting the entire life-world of the multitude, to the (highly dubious) claim that, therefore: “rather than an organ functioning within the capitalist body, biopolitical labor-power is becoming more and more autonomous, with capital simply hovering over it parasitically with its disciplinary regimes, apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial networks, and the like” (142). The problem here is that capital has always been “parasitic” in this sense. Industrial production was/is no more “organic” than the current regime of immaterial production. (That is, unless you get rid of the old-fashioned, idealistic notion of what is “organic”, and understand that the relationship of parasite to host is itself entirely something “organic”). It is not as if workers in call centers and workers hired through temp agencies somehow have more autonomous control over what they are doing than workers on a factory assembly line. What we are still seeing is the expropriation of relative surplus-value.

The ambiguity here relates especially to the idea of the “real subsumption” of labor under capital. I think that Hardt/Negri are right to see the intensifying movement from merely formal subsumption to real subsumption as a characteristic of the current order. I agree entirely with them that today “capital might be said to subsume not just labor but society as a whole or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced” (142). But I cannot for the life of me see how this can be inverted into the assertion that, therefore, “capital is increasingly external and has an ever less functional role in the production process” (142). (“Functional” is a strange word here. Capital is always dysfunctional in the sense that, as Marx often says, it introduces faux frais into the process of social reproduction. But it is highly functional in the sense that it coercively organizes production to the end of more intensive expropriation — I am inclined to agree with Max Weber that the whole point of capitalism, in contrast to earlier modes of expropriation, is that it “rationally” organizes its extortion). With real subsumption, the coercive organization of all life by capital for the purpose of increased expropriation is, if anything, intensifed beyond what it ever was in the time of merely formal subsumption.

Hardt/Negri can thus be denounced as guilty of the old Marxist sin of  “economism”, to the extent that they seem to argue that the advance of capitalist exploitation, in itself, somehow objectively leads to a situation in which the multitude (proletariat) becomes autonomous and is able to take the production and reproduction of life into its own hands. They even say that “the exercise of capitalist control is increasingly becoming a fetter to the productivity of biopolitical labor” (143); this is just a new formulation of the old idea, from the earlier Marx, that capitalism is doomed to collapse because the relations of production turn into fetters on the development of the forces of production. This is a position that Marx himself later nuances and problematizes greatly, and perhaps rejects entirely.

I think that Hardt/Negri’s claims that the current form of capitalist control interfere with productivity needs to be modified. They identify three trends that are needed in order for capitalism to control production, but that in fact limit production (145ff): destroying and appropriating the common fetters or reduces production, as does “precarization” of labor, and as does the enforcement of borders and the limitation of labor mobility. I am not convinced that these trends really cripple productivity in the way that Hardt/Negri say; rather, they all work to insure profits by transforming abundance into scarcity. Such measures do indeed lead to crises, as has been the case for the entire history of capitalism; but do such crises actually herald the end of capitalism?

I think not. Indeed, Hardt/Negri themselves quite accurately note that the inevitable, and repeated, economic crises of capitalism do not lead to collapse, but rather offer opportunities for capital to reorganize itself on a more intensive basis: “capital works by breaking down, or, rather, through creative destruction achieved by crises. In contemporary neoliberal economic regimes, in fact, crisis and disaster have become ever more important as levers to privatize public goods and put in place new mechanisms for capitalist accumulation” (143). It is extremely odd, therefore, that in the same paragraph where they observe this, they also argue that “subjective” crises, as opposed to “objective” ones, do indeed threaten the survival of capitalism by means of the contradiction between relations and forces of production. In Hardt/Negri’s own context, this distinction makes no sense. For all that they proclaim their allegiance to a Deleuzian affirmationism rather than to the old Hegelian vision of “the negation of the negation,” Hardt/Negri are in fact relying on a facile dialectical reversal in the bad old Hegelian manner.

“Economism”, in the Marxist tradition, has generally meant a belief in the inevitability of the fall of capitalism, and the birth of socialism, through objective economic laws alone. And I do think that Hardt/Negri can be charged with this, for all their claims to be radically rewriting Marx in accordance with the changed configuration of capitalism we face today. At the same time, I think that Hardt/Negri are right in their attention to economic processes, or to the accumulation of capital; in contrast to the way that Badiou, for instance, entirely dismisses such concerns, and turns instead to a romantic and mystical hyper-voluntarism. I think that Hardt/Negri are in fact at their best and most helpful when they discuss the “metamorphoses of the composition of capital” (Commonwealth 131-149); if only we leave out that twist of dialectical reversal at the end by which they endeavor to rescue things.

What I propose, therefore, is indeed a renewed “economism” — only without the sense of historical inevitability tacked on at the end. I haven’t really seen any arguments about agency, or about organization, that are more than futile compensatory fantasies. I think economism is of value, to the extent that at least it lets us see clearly what is going on, what the situation is, in which we are enmeshed. Economism would correspond, therefore, to Jameson’s famous call for a “cognitive mapping” of the world system of capital. It is necessary in order to account for the ascendency of finance capital in the present moment. It would let us better understand what has happened as the latest crisis has once again allowed for the reorganization and further consolidation of capital, rather than leading to even minimal changes in its oppressive functioning.

The positive functioning of “economism” is all rather vague for the moment — let’s just say it is something I am starting to explore and work on. I think that the whole subjective/objective opposition, which Hardt/Negri retain as a legacy of Hegelianism, needs to be questioned in the light of speculative realism’s attack on correlationism. The point would not be to get rid of the strong sense that economic arrangements are matters of concern for human beings in particular, but to understand the workings of such arrangements in a different way. I do not think that Marxist capital logic needs to be confined to the Hegelian framework, even if this framework is where he started out from. (Apologies for the vagueness of these final propositions; I am only at the beginning of thinking about them. Stay tuned).

Infinte Regress

A few days ago, Graham Harman gave a hint of his (soon-to-be-published) response to my (soon-to-be-published) Whiteheadian critique of him:

Shaviro is wrong to say that I am inconsistent in allowing this sort of infinite regress while being horrified it in the case of Latour’s mediators, where Joliot mediates between politics and neutrons, but further mediators will be needed between Joliot and neutrons, and so on infinitely. Using the phrase “infinite regress” for both is an equivocation, as I will explain in my response to Shaviro in The Speculative Turn. The first of the two is merely strange, but contradicts no obvious facts. Latour’s infinite mediators, however, contradict themselves: if there is a problem with politics touching neutrons directly, then there will be just as big a problem with Joliot touching either of these, and so on to infinity, with the result that no contact between any two things will ever occur. But this is absurd, while the infinite regress of objects is merely strange, not illogical.

Now, I don’t feel I understand Latour well enough to comment on the problem Harman raises as to the supposed infinite regress of mediators between mediators in Latour’s account of networks. Harman is claiming, in effect, that Latour falls victim to a Zeno’s Paradox kind of situaiton. I cannot judge whether this is right or not.

However, this wasn’t quite the point I was making when I compared Harman’s acceptance of the infinite regress of objects or substances with his rejection of the infinite regress of relations. Harman’s complaint about Whitehead is that, in Whitehead’s brand of relationalism , an entity is

nothing more than its perception of other entities. These entities, in turn, are made up of still other perceptions. The hot potato is passed on down the line, and we never reach any reality that would be able to anchor the various perceptions of it. (Guerrilla Metaphysics, p. 82)

This sort of infinite regress has nothing to do with the Zeno’s Paradox-like regress of which Harman accuses Latour. It is rather a regress of the same “merely strange, not illogical” sort that Harman himself so cheerfully accepts when it comes to substances. Therefore, I still don’t accept Harman’s distinction between the bad infinite regress of relations, and the good infinite regress of substances.

Harman’s objection to Whitehead’s relationalism comes down to his sense that, given this regress of relations, an entity is nothing but its prehension (or, what Harman calls “perception”) of other entities. However, this is wrong. Whitehead explicitly rejects the “nothing but” that is unspoken, but seems to be taken for granted, in Harman’s account. The “nothing but” is what Whitehead calls the “sensationalist principle” of Locke, Hume, and Kant: the assumption that perception is purely passive and receptive, the “bare entertainment” of data. This assumption is wrong, for several reasons. First, because prehension or perception has much more to do with affectivity, or with “obscure feelings,” than it does with the “clear and distinct” ideas of “presentational immediacy” (which is the only form of perception recognized by Hume, and, responding to him, by Kant); and second, because prehension is active as well as passive (or, better perhaps, because it resists being described in terms of an active/passive dichotomy). When what Whitehead calls an “actual entity” constructs itself by prehending or perceiving other entities, it is in fact engaged in elaborate processes of revaluing the prehended data: processes of choosing, adding, subtracting, relating, juxtaposing, tweaking, and recombining: ultimately of deciding and selecting. Decision and selection are left out of Harman’s account of relationalism.

I think that the big problem with Harman’s attack on relationalism is that he doesn’t distinguish between different notions or senses of relation. His complaint that relationalism destroys the integrity of individual entites, and does not allow for novelty to emerge, might well be correct if applied to Hegelian, dialectical relationalism, in which the “labor of the negative” allows everything to be swallowed up within a self-reflecting totality, as well as if applied to Saussurean or “structuralist” relationism, where there are no positive terms, but only negative determinations of the differential elements within a closed order by one another. But this is not the way that relations work in William James, or Whitehead, or (to the extent that I understand him) in Latour. Relations proliferate wildly in these thinkers; there is no overarching totality or system in accordance with which they are deployed. This difference is somewhat akin, I think, to Delanda’s distinction between the “relations of interiority” that we find in Hegel and Saussure and the “exteriority of relations” that Delanda himself, following Deleuze, favors (I have written about Delanda’s logic here). Where Harman gives us a vision of independent substances wrapped in vacuums and only communicating vicariously, James and Whitehead and Latour and Delanda give us a world in which things are continually jostling up against one another, touching and affecting one another (but this does not mean that they are totally interpenetrating one another, or “determining” one another through some sort of ironclad causality).

It may well be that an ungrounded infinite regress is not such a bad thing (as Harman says, for instance, here). There are, however, other ways to nuance the question of infinite regress. Kvond suggests as much here, raising the point that what stops the regress from being infinite might be of another nature than the entities among which the regress takes place. (This could be seen in a number of ways; I am inclined to think of it in terms of Schelling’s notion of a ground, as opposed to Hegel’s totalizing closure). But I need to think about this some more, so I will postpone further discussion until another time. For now, I will just conclude by saying that the great thing about Harman’s philosophy is the way it makes us so aware of the multiplicity and diversity of things:

Atoms and molecules are actants, as are children, raindrops, bullet trains, politicians, and numerals. All entities are on exactly the same ontological footing. (Prince of Networks, p. 14)

But I agree with William James that relations, both “conjunctive” and “disjunctive,” are every bit as real as the terms they place into relation:

The relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 42).

A “system,” in this sense, is an open one, rather than a closed Hegelian or Structuralist totality; these “relations” are ones of exteriority rather than internal determination; and the “experience” that encounters them is not exclusively that of human beings, but applies to all the elements (terms and relations) involved. I am looking for a “speculative realism” that does justice to the multifariousness of relations, as well as to the multifariousness of things or substances.

Fair Use

An author of my acquaintance, who has published a number of well-regarded works of both fiction and non-fiction, has a new book coming out next year. It’s a sort of “nonfiction novel” or extended essay, giving his very personal take on what it means to live in our current high-tech-mediated, pop-culture-dominated world. Since the book is about the here and now, the author weaves in quotations from multiple sources, all recognizable parts of the mediascape we live in.

The author has fought with his publishers for months about “sourcing” these quotations. He regards them as being covered under “fair use,” but the publisher demands that he get explicit permission to use them. The publisher will not budge. And so, the other day I received a form to sign. It requested explicit permission to quote some 90 words of mine, and also required me to certify that I did indeed “own” the copyright on these 90 words. I agreed to sign the document, just to make things easily for the author who wants to quote me; but I added an addendum, stating that his use of my words is covered by fair use, and therefore does not require my explicit permission.

An additional irony of the whole situation is that, of the 90-word passage of mine that the author is quoting, 50 of these words are not “mine” at all, but rather the words of somebody else, who I happen to be quoting (with full attribution). I regarded, and still regard, my own quotation as being an instance of fair use, and so I never asked the author of those 50 words for explicit permission to quote them. I got away with this, I suppose, because I published the text in question online, so I didn’t have a professional publisher to hassle me.

All this is idiotic in the extreme (not to mention that it must be a real pain for the author to collect all the permissions his publisher has required him to get). But we shouldn’t dismiss it as just idiocy; for it shows the real dangers of the current draconian interpretations of copyright and “intellectual property.” Lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, and overzealous self-censorship by publishers in order to cover themselves against the mere possibility of lawsuits: all this adds up to a much greater danger to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of thought, than anything the government could come up with. All thought is inspired by, and comes out of, previous thought; all writing is inspired by, and based upon, earlier writing. Without the freedom to quote, to cite, to remix and recompile, etc., there is simply no freedom of speech, expression, or thought at all.

(Note: in fairness to the author, in order to respect his privacy and to spare him unnecessary hassles, I have omitted his name, and that of his publisher, from the above).

Whitehead/Levinas

(Excerpt from a work in progress)

Levinas’ Totality and Infinity contains an extended analysis of enjoyment, or of what Levinas calls “living from…” Levinas equates enjoyment with a primordial sensibility, and with an openness to the world. He describes it as a process of nourishment: “the transmutation of the other into the same… an energy that is other… becomes, in enjoyment, my own energy, my strength, me.” Despite the vast differences in vocabulary and rhetoric, this analysis has much in common with Whitehead’s description of self-enjoyment arising out of a process of appropriation, which transforms “the many data” encountered in the world “into a unity of existence.” Both thinkers insist that our experience is in the first instance physical, corporeal, and embodied. They both emphasize the satisfaction that comes with the sheer fact of being alive. “Life loved is the very enjoyment of life, contentment… The primordial positivity of enjoyment, perfectly innocent, is opposed to nothing, and in this sense suffices to itself from the first.” And Levinas and Whitehead both find, in this experience of sufficiency and satisfaction, a pre-cognitive, pre-reflexive mode of subjectivity: an “I” that does not take the form of the Cartesian cogito.

But everything changes once Levinas moves on to the encounter with radical exteriority, with the Other, or with the Face. The appearance of the Other “introduces a dimension of transcendence, and leads us to a relation totally different from experience in the sensible sense of the term.” The face of the Other, confronting me, “puts the I in question”; for it absolutely “resists possession, resists my grasp.” It is an otherness that I cannot transmute into more of myself, more of the same. It “speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.” In this way, the encounter with the Other makes an ethical demand upon me, one that marks me even if I refuse it. This encounter is a kind of primordial trauma; it suspends and overwhelms the innocence of “living from…”, the economy of sensibility, enjoyment, and satisfaction. The naive self-presence of primordial sensibility is dissolved, and replaced with a new sort of subjectivity: one that is always already obligated to the Other, to an “idea of infinity”‘ that necessarily “exceeds my powers.”

The call of the Other in Levinas’ philosophy is its own authority; once I have heard this call, I cannot escape it or ignore it. Even to reject it is still to acknowledge it, in a backhanded sort of way. This is why, for Levinas, ethics precedes ontology, and absolutely overrides aesthetics. I am always already responsible to, and guilty before, the Other — even when I deny, or have no cognizance of, being in such state. There is no counterpart or equivalent in Whitehead’s thought for such an overwhelming, unidirectional transcendence. For Levinas, something like What Whitehead calls “concern in the Quaker sense” — the situation in which something weighs upon my spirit, so that I cannot ignore it or walk away from it — is irreducible. It unequivocally trumps self-enjoyment. The imperious demands of ethical transcendence interrupt, exceed, and cancel the simple pleasures of aesthetic immanence. The passage from enjoyment to concern and responsibility is an irreversible one; and for this reason, it cannot be described, or aestheticized, as Whitehead would urge us to do, in the form of a patterned contrast.

Is it possible to resist such a movement of transcendence? What’s at stake here is not refutation and argument, but a basic orientation of thought. Everything in Whitehead cries out against the unilateral thrust of Levinas’ vision. Levinas conceives a single grand transition: something that does not happen in time, so much as it determines and instantiates a new sort of time. The apotheosis of the Other ruptures linear, homogeneous clockwork time, and installs instead an “infinite” or “messianic” time: a “discontinuous” time of “death and resurrection.” For Levinas, in striking contrast to Bergson, “there is no continuity in being.” Continuity is false, because it has been ruptured once and for all. The epiphany of the face points to a radical anteriority: an instance that precedes, and that can never be contained within, the extended present time of lived duration.

Now, Whitehead also rejects Bergsonian continuity; but he does so in a very different way: “there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming.” That is to say, continuity (or Bergsonian duration) is never given in advance; but it is nevertheless something to be constructed. “In the present cosmic epoch, there is a creation of continuity,” approximated through a series of discrete, punctual “becomings” and “transitions.” This means that transformation is not unique, but common; it is not an epiphany, but an everyday occurrence, something that happens again and again. “There is no nature apart from transition,” because transition is everywhere and everywhen. For Whitehead, death and resurrection are banal occurrences; and concern is not an epochal encounter, but an everyday experience. Everything is subject to the rule of “perpetual perishing”: “no thinker thinks twice; and, to put the matter more generally, no subject experiences twice.” If this is so, then there can be no single, specially privileged moment of transition, no radical alterity such as Levinas demands. Time is irreversible, and irreparable; but there is no traumatic moment in which my sensibility is breached, and my primordial enjoyment definitively interrupted.

Whitehead therefore rejects any grand narrative of a passage from self-enjoyment to concern, or from the aesthetic to the ethical. Just as every actual occasion has both a physical pole and a mental (or conceptual) pole, so too every actual occasion evinces both self-enjoyment and concern. Indeed, this is precisely why these terms form a patterned aesthetic contrast, and not an irremediable ethical opposition. Whitehead refuses to choose between concern and self-enjoyment, just as he refuses to “pick and choose”‘ between “the red glow of the sunset” and “the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.” If Whitehead is on the side of aesthetics as opposed to ethics, and on the side of immanence as opposed to transcendence, this is not because he would reject either ethics or transcendence. Rather, he finds an immanent place for transcendence, and an aesthetic place for ethics. He insists that every occasion is already, by its very nature, a “conjunction of transcendence and immanence.” Indeed, “every actual entity, in virtue of its novelty, transcends its universe, God included.” But this transcendence is itself an immanent, actual fact. Similarly, Whitehead never mounts a Nietzschean attack on conventional morals. Instead, he insists that “everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole.” Ethics is therefore affirmed, but not granted primacy. Ethics is not the ground or basis of value, but its consequence. It is only out of the actual process of valuation, as performed by every actual occasion, that “the conception of morals arises” in the first place.

From a Whiteheadian point of view, then, Levinas’ subordination of immanence to transcendence, and of self-enjoyment to concern, is one-sided and reductive — just as a philosophy of pure immanence and positivity would also be one-sided and reductive. (We might see Whitehead’s criticism of Spinoza as tending in this direction; and imagine, along similar lines, a Whiteheadian criticism of Deleuze). Levinas’ claim for the priority of ethics is one more example of the “overstatement” that Whitehead sees as the “chief error”‘ of so much Western philosophy: “the aim at generalization is sound, but the estimate of success is exaggerated.” Concern is important, but it cannot be separated from self-enjoyment, much less elevated above it. For it is only insofar as “each occasion”‘ is “engaged in its own immediate self-realization,” that it can thereby also be “concerned with the universe.”

“Totalizing” Marxism?

Some weeks ago, Nick at Speculative Heresy raised some interesting questions about the possible relations (or not) between Marxism and Actor Network Theory: “Across speculative realism, Marxism, non-philosophy and actor-network theory, one of the constant tensions is between a totalizing theory and what we might call an assemblage theory.” Now, this is something I have been trying to grapple with for quite some time.

Thirty years ago, in graduate school, I engaged, as a Deleuzian/Blanchotian, in endless arguments with my Adorno- and Jameson-influenced friends about the possibility and necessity of “totalization” — which they saw as a crucial imperative for Marxist thought, and which I denounced as a pernicious cognitive imperialism. They insisted that any attempt to historicize, or to mobilize critical negativity, necessarily implied an endeavor to totalize — even if this goal of totalization could never actually be reached. I supported assemblages and open systems, and saw the drive to totalize as an attempt to foreclose alternatives; I thought that the affirmation of difference would get us further than critical negativity.

Today, in my grim middle age, it seems to me that the whole debate was irrelevant and beside the point. But it is obviously a debate that is far from dead, since it keeps on coming back, and seems central to contemporary disputes between Zizek/Badiou and Hardt/Negri, as well as between theorists who retain a Marxist orientation and those who adopt the anti-Marxism of Latour and DeLanda.

When I say the debate is pointless, what I really mean is that I have come to occupy both of the supposedly opposing extremes, without seeing any contradiction between them. (I hope this means that I have performed the Whiteheadian operation of producing “a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast”). On the one hand, I have become more cheerfully pluralist than ever; I no longer worry about the danger of totalization because I know that it is impossible, that there are always multiple perspectives, multiple links among things, potentialities that cannot possible be exhausted and encompassed by any sort of dialectic. Likewise, critical negativity can never be effective — there are too many things and relations that evade its grasp — so it is not even worth fighting against it. On the other hand, and at the same time, I think that the events of the last several decades have justified and validated Marx’s insights concerning the nature and tendencies of capitalism, to a degree that I couldn’t have imagined thirty years ago, no matter how “Marxist” I considered myself at the time. The accumulation of capital, the extraction of surplus value, the plundering that is equivalent to an ever-expanding “primitive accumulation”, the relentless commodification of all aspects of human life: all these processes are everywhere you look, working systematically — to the extent that I am perpetually dumbfounded, both by discourses that deny the systematicity or problematicness of capitalism, and to those that analyze power and domination and “the State” without taking them into consideration.

I am claiming, therefore, both that capitalism (or, if you prefer, the relentless process of capital accumulation) is indeed systematic, and that this has nothing to do with any arguments about totalization, or base and superstructure, or determination in the last instance, or any of those old categories of “dialectical materialism” and of a “thought of the negative.” Or, to put it in a slightly different way, I am sympathetic to Latour’s insistence that networked social processes cannot be explained in terms of global categories like “capital,” or “the social” – because these categories themselves are what most urgently need to be explained. And the only way to explain these categories is precisely by working through the network, and mapping the many ways in which these categories function, the processes through which they get constructed, and the encounters in the course of which they transform, and are in turn transformed by, the other forces that they come into contact with. But — and this is an extremely crucial “but” — explaining how categories like “capital” and “society” are constructed (and in many cases, auto-constructed) is not the same thing as denying the very validity of these categories – as Latour and his disciples are often wont to do. It is simply disingenuous when (as Nick describes it) ” Latour and the main ANT economist, Michel Callon, argue that capitalism does not exist.” I would add the same for Manuel DeLanda’s anti-Marxism, and for Gibson-Graham’s argument — much discussed in the responses to Nick’s post — that lots of inventive practices already exist, so that we have already somehow reached “the end of capitalism as we know it” (to re-quote my own comments from here). All of these denials that we have to do with anything that could be called “capitalism” seem to me to do violence to the evidences of daily experience

Of course,”capitalism” is a process, or a collection of processes, rather than a thing or an entity. We might substitute for “capitalism” the wordier formulations of capital accumulation, exploitation, “primitive accumulation,” and commodification — since all these are nouns that more clearly indicate process than “capitalism” on its own does. But in any case, the systematicity of these processes is itself something that is largely empirical, rather than somehow a priori. Capitalism is a grouping of mutually-reinforcing processes and relations that insinuate themselves into more and more areas of human existence — and not just “human” existence, if we are thinking, for instance, of ecological effects. A “radical empiricism,” like that of William James, insists upon the experiential actuality — which is to say the reality — of all sorts of relations and processes (in contrast to the way that classical empiricism restricts itself to static entities or isolated sense-impressions). Alternatively, we might think of the way that the line between what is empirically given, and what is necessary a priori, is itself rather blurry and changeable (this is an anti-Kantian argument that nonetheless acknowledges the significance of Kant — it has been made most explicitly in recent years by Paolo Virno via Wittgenstein; but it is also implicitly behind Foucault’s claim for historically variable epistemes or a prioris; it is also consistend with Kojin Karatani’s Kantian Marxism).

Therefore, I agree with Nick’s double claim that “there are some sort of systemic tendencies, but there can be no totalizing system”; but I don’t find it as insuperably difficult as he does “to square the circle and incorporate Marxism, non-philosophy and ANT together.” (I leave aside “non-philosophy” here, because I simply do not have an adequate grasp of Laruelle’s thought). When ANT-oriented people deny the existence of systematic categories, or historically produced and historically variable (relative) a prioris, this is simply because they aren’t empiricist enough — they fail to extend themselves to the point of James’ “radical empiricism,” or of Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism.”

I will let this stand for now, although I regard it as unfinished — there is a lot more to say. In particular, I would like to work out how all this relates to “speculative realism” (and especially to Harman’s brilliant reading of Latour). I think that Harman’s greatest weakness (I am less sure about Latour) has to do with his exclusive focus on entities (objects) rather than on processes, and, in consequence of this, of his underestimation or excessive rigidity in how to understand relations. [I cannot justify this comment at present; it is part of what I am currently trying to work out. Whitehead sees the world as being composed of processes rather than substances; on this basis, he gives an account of “enduring objects” that is irreducible either to Bergsonian total flux, or to Harmanian substance ontology. I think that Whitehead’s understanding of processes and relations is compatible with a sense of the long-term systematicity of something like “capitalism,” in a way that Harman’s and Latour’s formulations are not. But this is all something To Be Continued].