Relating to Objects

= an introduction to some recent philosophies that are taking 'objects' very seriously

Discussion

By Andre Ling:

'One of the key philosophers whose work I have been engaging with for some time now is Bruno Latour. His work went a long way to collapse the nature culture divide, to give non-human entities an agential role in 'society', to point out the dangers of taking 'wholes' as givens (e.g. society as a 'whole' that is somehow prior to that which composes it rather than attending to the details of how society is composed), proposed a symmetrical anthropology for engaging with both moderns and non-moderns, developed the notion of the 'factish' to describe those 'things' created/discovered/invented by humans but then unleashed into the cosmos where they have their own autonomous existence (e.g. DNA, bacteria, GM crops, private property, etc.). One of his particularly interesting and relevant shorter pieces is the 'compositionist manifesto' (linkhere) in which he proposes the word composition to describe the process of constructing a common world and the word decompose for the taking apart of whatever structures exist. Latour's current project on modes of being is concerned primarily with questions of ontology; more specifically, recognising that there are multiple modes of being each with their own particular ontological characteristics.

Another great philosopher of society and the social is Manuel DeLanda. His work is profoundly Deleuzian and he uses his very deep knowledge of Deleuze's work to produce highly accessible stuff like 'A New Philosophy of Society' where he focuses in particular on the relationship between individuals and 'wholes' using assemblage theory to examine the various human and non-human structures that deserve the ontological designation of 'real entity'.

Most of the philosophers I have been reading can be called realists, which often operates as a source of tension with those firmly in the critical theory/post-modern schools of thought. The accusation they level is that, for the latter, too much of reality has been reduced to words, language, meaning, ideology, symbols, etc. and attention to the non-human, to the reality that exists independent of human thought, has been neglected. One particular group of philosophers, who are all very active in the blogosphere, is called Object Oriented Ontology. This school of thought posits that reality is composed of objects: objects or things are the fundamental unit of reality. Now this can be a bit frustrating for those who have struggled hard to point out that we need to get beyond some kind of atomistic vision of reality and instead recognise that everything is interconnected... But the OOO-ers have a number of valid points. Their objects are not simple: they all withdraw from access in some form or the other, they are not static things but are agential, have molten cores, are split along various dimensions, are processual, are like little machines, etc. They enter into relationships with each other, are composed of yet other objects... They cannot be reduced to some fundamental substrate object (this is called undermining) that is the basis for all others (the real ground of being) and they are not somehow merely a display put on by some transcendent other object (this is called overmining), what these authors often call onto-theology. There is probably too much for me to share in detail here, but the names of the best known ones are: Graham Harman, Timothy Morton and Levi Bryant. They all have radically different blogging styles, are all committed to open access publishing (see the Open Humanities Press, see Levi's book Democracy of Objectsthere in particular) and all recognise that the Internet has played a vital role in permitting the growth and development of their philosophical work. You can get an overview of OOO over here (newly put up).

The final philosopher whose work I wanted to mention in this context is Isabelle Stengers, a Belgian philosopher (of science, amongst other things) whose work encompasses (in my view) much of the work of the others I have mentioned above. She is concerned with the politics of human practices in the cosmos, crossing human and non-human boundaries, modern and non-modern. She is ardently anti-capitalist but takes a profoundly nuanced path to the question of how we might best respond to the challenges with which we are confronted. Her concept of 'cosomopolitics' provides a way of taking stock of politics at work as groups of humans and other entities enter into relationships with each other that can have profoundly disturbing effects for one group or the other. Every group has its own conditions of existence, the things (human or not) that permit them to reproduce themselves as that group (e.g. a particular tribe, a profession, etc.) and the actions of one group can threaten to undermine the conditions of existence of another. Cosmopolitics then is about groups entering into relationships with each other in a manner that recognises their own vulnerability, and in which the forging of an agreement between them is founded on both groups putting their own conditions of existence on the debating table, rather that the more unilateral form of 'negotiation' or 'participation' that we witness under contemporary liberal capitalism. Her most recent books (Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell and Au Temps des Catastrophes: Resister a la Barbarie qui Vient) are specifically about resisting capitalism and responding to the imminent (if not already present) ecological disaster and, even more specifically, about avoiding falling into the traps that will plague those seeking to construct/compose another reality.

All of the above take a radically de-centred approach to grappling with reality and the questions of praxis. They are inspired by past philosophers including the phenomenologists (Heidigger, Husserl amongst others), Deleuze, Leibniz, Alfred North Whitehead and other lesser known philosophers such as Gabriel Tarde and Etienne Souriau. At the same time, they are all profoundly reluctant to talk about 'wholes' that quite literally subsume their parts (as suggested by the popular phrase 'the whole is greater than the sum of their parts').'