lukesimcoe replied to your post: Onticology,...

lukesimcoe:

dropouthangoutspaceout:

At this point Luke, I would invite you to read the introduction to Democracy of Objects, which discusses more in depth why questions of ontology matter. Here is a little bit…

I feel like the response to anything I say about this stuff is always “but ontology is important, man…” I get this. It’s deduction; the first principles you establish can totally affect the horizons of possibility which can de deduced from them. Thus, it’s important that we try and get our first principles right. I take no issue with this whatsoever. My beef is more with how I’m seeing OOO being articulated by those who are engaging with it (my friends, and those that I observe on twitter), as if it’s some radically new thing that opposes and potentially supplants other things. In particular, I’m irked by the suggestion that the work of others is somehow incomplete or inaccurate if it doesn’t acknowledge or — more accurately, engage with — OOO’s conception of materiality. Engels was attempting to create an ontology/epistemology of capitalism, a concept that depends on human cognition (it may also depend on other “forces”, but only after it is acknowledged by humans; capitalism can exist without rocks, but ideologies can’t exist without people. In your terms, the human-capitalism [as ideology] alliance is a priori to all other alliances). Thus, it seems really pointless to critique him for relying on human cognition to theorize an object whose existence relies upon human cognition. I completely agree that a materialist approach can enhance our understanding of how an idea, or “object” like capitalism functions. However, it is only a compliment; it is not a standpoint from which to critique the work of those who seek to understand things that are necessarily anthropocentric processes. Doing so is akin to rewriting the rules of the game and then complaining that others aren’t following your rules.

First, as to the idea that studying capitalism requires human cognition: of course it does! The idea is just to not privilege in a ontological hierarchy human access to objects, which historical materialism does when it says that objects under capitalism are only commodities, whose substance has been shaped through morphogenetic processes that humans initiated, thus they exist only historically through time from human access = the chair becomes unindividuated substance without us. This is not an argument for some kind of human-less capitalism, rather just one that accepts that ontology rises out of the substance of objects (human, non-human), rather than historical processes interacting with substance through time.

Also: nobody said it was some kind of strident fundamental, earth shattering take-down for everything. OOO and whatnot are a big fucking deal to a lot of philosophers because it goes against everything that has been established for the last three-hundred years, as far as research and knowledge is concerned. To be quite honest, I have to agree with them. The conclusions that I’m going to draw from my research are going to be heavily influenced by the philosophical character of it - and I think it’s perfectly valid to take a very critical position of other research whose philosophical and methodological underpinnings I think are flawed.

Latour critiqued scientists on their positivist methodology because their method purported that the scientists existed in some kind of social vacuum where the conclusions they reached had no relationship to politics - that’s why he became very well known for his work’s focus on bringing politics back into the laboratory. Latour might have agreed that the conclusions reached by the scientists were valuable and accurate, but he wanted to show that their entire network of human and non-human actors were playing just as big a role as the closed experiments they ran in the conclusions that they were drawing. This was an interventionist philosophical and methodological project that needed an entirely new ontology to fully grasp.

Similarly, if I take issue with the reductive character that Marx and Engels treat objects in their ontology, it doesn’t mean that I disagree with everything they arrive at in terms of economic conclusions. The difference between, say, historical materialism and what Bryant is arguing for, which is a materialist transcendental realism, doesn’t appear that huge, yet the ways in which we approach things as philosophers and researchers can change dramatically with both. We might arrive at similar conclusions, but I still think it would be more methodologically sound through the latter. It’s one step deeper, and I think that one step is important.

Finally, as to the idea about rewriting rules, Marx began to do completely different work when he shifted his ontology to historical materialism from Hegelian absolute idealism. Marx respected the work of Hegel, but ultimately Marx’s new conception of reality and history meant that he did go back and say that Hegel got it wrong. Marx rewrote the rules for what research was: historical materialism meant for Marx that research was about praxis and the material conditions of human life. Suddenly he went from working on a philosophical opus to a book about economics.

So, this was an interesting back and forth. I don’t really have a desire to keep the discussion going on the same track after it seems to have run its course. I also don’t have any insightful comments on OOO to add—I’ve read so little of the literature. What I have, mostly from Harman and Bryant, has been clever and, as Dan points out, innovative. Although Luke’s right about the self-righteous language it’s sometimes surrounded by.

What I’d like to do here is inject some clarity into the discussion of how Marx viewed the object. Dan’s quite right, Marx(ism) views the object as historically constituted. This does not, however, mean that the object is reduced to “only” the commodity form and the social relations occasioned by such in the work of Marx or HM. Marx doesn’t talk much about chairs—I haven’t read everything he’s written, granted—but he does focus on industrial technologies. His longest chapter in volume one of Capital, in fact, is devoted to the discussion. And in this, although Marx is concerned with the myriad social relations involved in industrial technology acting “as a power inimical to workers,” the object of industrial technology exceeds its status as commodity. Indeed, if this discussion occurs in that chapter, I can’t remember it. More on this below.

The discussion of industrial technology has roots in the 1844 Manuscripts. Here Marx develops the subject-object problem in a development/ extension of Hegel’s concept of alienation. For Marx, the object is the necessarily correlate of the embodied subject. Under capitalism the worker is estranged from the process/means of production, from other workers, from that which they produce, and from their species-being—parts of the Grundrisse would suggest that estrangement in production is not unique to capitalism. If the subject is alienated from their natural correlate under capitalistic social relations, the separation of subject from object, Marx believes that this state would be overcome in revolution (and, in his early work, the antinomies of philosophy overcome too!).

Understanding the object as a necessary correlate of the subject is problematic for reasons OOO point out and more. I’m thinking here of the critique based in Heidegger’s insight, that the tool will always exceed our ability to comprehend it, extended and further ontologized in OOO, that Dan gestured to.

It’s a relevant critique which has a history in the left. But the object is not reduced to the commodity form in Marxism. Indeed, what Marxism can do well, w/r/t technology, is provide a basis for design critique—See Noble (1984), Feenberg (anything), Braverman (1974), Marx (1867[obvs]). Yes, the human is centered by these theorists. But I’m not entirely sure what re-focusing on the object itself would have added to these. Industrial technology reflected interests seeking to diffuse the power of guilds and other collectives. These technologies exist outside of us, fair enough, but what does appreciating this fact add? Technology doesn’t come into being without us, and the process of creation (See here Feenberg’s excellent discussion of primary and secondary instrumentalization [building also from Heidegger]) reflects biases inherent in the lifeworld.

20 yards of linen

lukesimcoe replied to your post: Onticology,...