On Concepts and Objects: Can the Gem Destroy the Circle of Correlation?

On Concepts and Objects:

Can the Gem Destroy the Circle of Correlation?

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 Ray Brassier’s Concepts and Objects, his contribution to the forthcoming anthology The Speculative Turn (edited by  Nick Srnicek, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman), advances a programmatic overview of his forthcoming work. In addition to an acerbic assault on Latour and Object Oriented Philosophies which, in a surprising turn, he ends up accusing of being ‘correlationist’, the main thrust of the paper deals with the intricate juncture between metaphysics and epistemology. I will focus here on Brassier’s appropriation of Stove’s indictments against the idealist ‘gems’, which he extends against correlationism. Ray’s basic point of contention, against Meillassoux’s avowal of the strength of the correlationist circle, is that the latter suffers from an ambiguity which, once clarified, makes its purported inescapability seem all the less obvious. In order to show this, Brassier seeks to show how the disambiguation provides two possible claims about the relation between conditions for determination and objects determined by these conditions, one of them trivially true, and the other one speculatively dogmatic or at the very least questionable.

    Case in point, Brassier disambiguates between a) the tautological claim that one cannot posit something without positing it, from b) the less obvious claim which asserts that things cannot exist without being posited. The correlationist can  subscribe to the former without going beyond inanity, but fails to legitimately establish the latter. Now, Brassier stipulates that the correlationist may substitute ‘positing’ with another term, according to the specific brand of determination sought (language, perception, intentional consciousness, culture…). But the basic point is that the correlationist goes on to illegitimately extrapolate the ontological dependence of objects on concepts, of being on thought, from the trivial claim that objects are expressed or postulated through concepts, and that it is thought which gains traction on being.

      Brassier ultimately seeks to rehabilitate the distinction between concepts and objects, in order to reintroduce the epistemological filter on dogmatic metaphysical claims, Latour-inspired OOO included. In this occasion, I would just like to point out some points where I nevertheless think that Brassier’s attempt to extend Stove’s Gem to deflate the correlationist strength is complicated by some considerations about the precise distinction between correlationism and idealism, since it is against the latter which Stove’s reconstruction is ultimately designed to work. I have presented these observations to Ray recently, who seems to think that they are of some interest, and has said he will reply to me in detail at some point. In any case, I share these observations since I myself am a bit confused on the precise force of Stove’s gem. Anyway, on to the ‘things themselves’!

    The point of departure in Brassier’s paper concerns a presentation of Berkeley’s classical polemic against the possibility of pursuing a thought of things independently of their being thought. Let us follow the specifics in Ray’s presentation, in an schematic manner:

1)      After presenting the passage from Berkeley, paragraph (32) states the following:

“From the indubitable premise that ‘One cannot think or perceive something without thinking or perceiving it’, Berkeley goes on to draw the dubious conclusion that ‘Things cannot exist without being thought or perceived.’ Berkeley’s premise is a tautology, since the claim that one cannot think of something without thinking of it is one that no rational being would want to deny.”

     Moments later in the paper, however, Brassier asserts in paragraph (34) that the Berkeleyian Gem “does not assert that there is no mind-independent reality, it merely says it must remain inconceivable”. These two readings seem to be obviously in conflict, and I take it that it is the latter which is representative of Berkeley’s account. That is since he repeatedly emphasizes the absurdity of trying to conceive of a reality independent of us. But from this it certainly doesn’t follow, as Brassier rightly puts earlier, that mind independent reality cannot or does not exist, but simply that it is impossible to prove it does or doesn't, since what we know is relative to the possibilities and to the content given to and mediated by us.

2)           In paragraph (32) Brassier writes again against Berkeley that: “…the metaphysical claim that only minds and their ideata exist is supposed to be the consequence of Berkeley’s argument, not its presupposition”. We know, however, that for Berkeley, ideata are not just properly our concepts or propositional attitudes, but also our imaginings and perceptions. The entire point, I take it, following the basic Lockean/Cartesian problematic of our epistemic relation to quality, is that even pre-conceptual contact with the world is mediated through our faculties (of sense and thought), and so that conception is always anchored on appearances given in and as experience.

      But if this is right then, at least in the passage in question, Berkeley does not seem to be claiming only ideata and minds exist, but solely that there are no epistemic grounds to surmise the existence of beings outside how they are given to us, since everything we know are ideata and these are relative to our faculties. This indicates that to conceive of things independently of givenness implies either knowledge that things exist outside mediation, or knowledge of how they exist independently of the conditions of givenness. But this is precisely what the correlationist  contends we have no warrant in claiming. Meillassoux highlights how the correlationist must deny that knowledge of particular beings obtains in order to assert knowledge of the unreason for things to exist as they appear (Pete Wolfendale highlights this point in his Essay on Transcendental Realism). Since for Berkeley primary/secondary properties are anchored on sense-data, and these prove to be fallible / subject to distortion (thus being specific to our apparatus for mediation), conception as derived from experience cannot be transposed to an independent reality, at a loss for reasons.  At the very least, however, against Brassier’s stipulation of the dogmatist kernel of this move, there is an argument for the claim that all we know are ideata, based on the errancy and deceptiveness of perception, which grounds conception, and thus finally existential affirmation.

    We know that for Sellars (whose naturalism has inspired Brassier’s more recent work) it is precisely the relation between perception and ideation which becomes complicated; but here is where the transcendental realist needs to come in with more than the accusation against the Gem, since the correlationist draws from the empiricist/rationalist attack against the epistemic reliability of perceptual data to substantiate the constriction of our access to the content of phenomena. Thus, when Brassier writes that it “by no means follows that we cannot conceive of things existing independently of concepts, since there is no logical transitivity from the mind-dependence of concepts to that of conceivable objects”, the correlationist claims that it is not the mind-dependence of concepts which logically entails the absurdity of concept/mind independent reality, but the mind-dependence of concepts and perception which empirically puts the hypothesis of mind-independent reality at a loss for justification. The problem is that on the basis of the quoted passage, it seems that Berkeley is to be read as a correlationist rather than an idealist, since in the way of claiming the ‘absurdity’ of the in-itself he appears committed to the unreason of our limited perceptual-conceptual apparatuses (thereby playing a similar role to the one facticity does for the correlationist).

         This is also why we should probably distinguish the Berkeleyian view from the Absolute Idealist, for whom ideation is thoroughly conceptual: the former does nevertheless admit the passive dependence of our phenomenal objective experience on intuition. Having said this, I’m not sure Stove’s attack on the Gem can safely target the weak correlationist agnosticism as well as it can the idealist assimilation of the in-itself. Since the former’s justification is unreason/facticity rather than the formal conflation of being/thought, it’s not clear to me that the circularity proceeds in both cases.

3) In paragraph (34) Brassier claims that proponents of the Gem confuse independence and inaccessibility. That is, they confuse the claim that we cannot access a mind-independent reality (since it must be given through conception) with the claim that there can be no mind-independent reality. But if the prior considerations are correct, it is not so much that the correlationist claims that mind-independence is logically inconceivable, but rather empirically vacuous. ‘Proof’ would then be impossible not because of a performative contradiction resulting from the Gem, but simply because the fallibility/perception-dependence of ideata constrain us to the phenomenal.

Again, it seems that under this reading the correlationist could perfectly admit that a mind-independent reality could exist, and that we can conceive of this possibility. This Meillassoux underlines as the peculiarity of correlationism’s avowal of facticity, against subjective / absolute idealisms. We trivially cannot conceive without an act of conceiving. But more crucially, since all the content of experience is also given within experience, and given that this content is of experience as mediated by our own cognitive-perceptual faculties, reflexivity cannot make this content/knowledge necessary for being outside such constrictions, lest we extend the constriction to things themselves (which Meillassoux does in his absolutizing of contingency).

     The ‘absurdity’ for Berkeley or the correlationist under this reading would thus be to think that what we know provides warrant for proof of the in-itself. Therefore, the conceptual inaccessibility of the in-itself would follow from its vacuity given the facticity of thought/perception. This is just to reassert the ‘correlationist agnosticism’ Meillassoux diagnoses, rather than the alleged logical fallacy of the idealist Gems attacked by Stove.

     In the end, we must not forget the import of the argument against the reliability of perception for knowledge in prefiguring the correlationist agnosticism about the in-itself. It is not just that perception is often deceptive, but that it is quite impossible to think what a reality outside the mediation given by perception and our concepts would be; let alone grounds to prove that such a reality   exists, or even more, that it does in a way that already corresponds to the content targeted by our concepts. This is the point of contention for the realist, who claims that our perceptual/cognitive mechanisms do provide resources to think robustly of the in-itself. More specifically, it is the contention of the scientific realist that science provides the best resources for thought to gain traction on being, while preserving their relative independence.

3)      In paragraphs (40)-(42) Brassier disambiguate between word, concept and referent. He writes:

“It might be objected that we need Saturn to say what Saturn is; that we cannot refer to Saturn or assert that it is without Saturn. But this is false: the first humans who pointed to Saturn did not need to know and were doubtless mistaken about what it is: but they did not need to know in order to point to it. To deny this is to imply that Saturn’s existence—that it is—is a function of what it is—that Saturn is indissociable from Saturn (or whatever else people have believed Saturn to be). But this is already to be a conceptual idealist. Even were the latter to demonstrate that the conditions of sense determine the conditions of reference, this would still not be enough to show that the existence of the referent depends upon the conditions of reference. To do that, one would have to show that ‘to be’ means ‘to be referred to’; an equation tantamount to Berkeley’s equation of ‘to be’ with ‘to be perceived’; yet it would require more than another Gem to dissolve such a fundamentally normative distinction in meaning.”

     Here there is an odd shift in the reading of Berkeley, which is now said to conflate being with being-perceived (whereas earlier it was stated he conflated being with being-conceived). But if the possibility of the in-itself is preserved outside conception or thought in B’s account, then neither reading really suffices, at least on the basis of the quoted paragraph.

        More importantly, however, is the suggestion that ostentation does not require conception. I’m left wondering if this really helps the case against correlationism, since it appears they’d be hostile to the assumption that they have already ‘smuggled in’ the equation between sense and reference. This is because the correlationist claims that even if Saturn is dissociable from Saturn insofar as what we intuit can be conceptualized in a variety of ways, the latter is not dissociable from perception, insofar as any conception is finally anchored on intuition (or the imagination’s reproduction of the same, to use Kant’s language). Since conceptual indices (even primary properties, which are conceptually specified) follow from perception, ostentation does little to move us beyond the domain of mediation. This complicates the following diagnosis of correlationism at large, provided in paragraph (44), characterizing the Gem as a…:

     “…Form of argumentation that slides from the true claim that we need a concept of mind-independent reality in order to make claims about the latter to the false claim that the very concept of mind-independent reality suffices to convert the latter into a concept, which is by definition mind-dependent”

The problem is that for the correlationist it is perception, not just conception, which is also relative to conditions of givenness. And whatever determines perception is said to exhaust the content of our concepts, since conception is anchored on sensing, or in imagining. Thus, for the skeptic/agnostic/idealist/weak correlationist/OOO Saturn would seem to be a function of our sensing, which in turn fails to guarantee knowledge or to provide indices for mind-independent realities, since it is fallible and relative to our very peculiar perceptual mechanisms. Strictly speaking, the correlationist could argue that when humans point at what we call Saturn, they are really pointing at mere sense-data which constitutes the content of the being relative to us. But it no more follows from this that a ‘real Saturn’ exists or doesn’t exist outside our minds than  an unspecified plurality of ‘Saturn-stages’ does, since individuation remains relative to conception, and the latter to sensing. In support of the last claim the correlationist just has to rehearse the usual diatribes about the seemingly endless plurality of meanings and arbitrary ‘partitions’ on the intuited solicited by conception, and thus to some form of primitive ontological indeterminacy. He can thus merrily revert into the agnostic quietism about the existence of the in-itself, since in any case knowledge remains restricted to the straightjacket of mediation. For the realist then, being-in-itself need not just be refractory from conception, but from perception.

This is why I take it Brassier finds special importance in not just a postural realism anchored in real but ultimately unobjectifiable ‘anonymous’ being. Rather, what is needed is the possibility of discrimination between statements which gain traction on being from those which don’t, given a robust conception of reality. This is, I assume, why Sellars’ attempt to draw the grounds for naturalism and realism at the crossroads of conception-perception is particularly significant.

          In any case, it seems that even if Berkeley did endorse a classical Gem, which incurs in the ambiguity in question, other alternative correlationist positions can resist the indictment of having denied the in-itself in the process of conflating the act of thinking with the physical object of thought. They can claim this by saying that although the physical constitution of the being is indeed relative to the act of thought, this doesn’t rule out the impossibility of the in-itself, but merely makes any such content inaccessible and so unknowable. The correlationist can preserve the in-itself in different forms this way, while insisting in that quiddity remains relative to conditions of disclosure. For example, in Heidegger’s account, the Vorhandenheit realm of concrete particulars targeted by scientific rationality remains relative to Dasein’s practical/cognitive comportments. Yet this doesn’t rule out the withdrawal of beings in concealment which is in excess to our comportments, albeit this way the in-itself becomes an increasingly anonymous and unthinkable Otherness, whose presumed givenness is quasi-religious and dubious for reasons Sellars has rightly pointed out.

       However predictable this correlationist strategy may have become, they can always go ahead and associate whatness to the disclosure of beings in ekstatic transcendence for temporal Dasein, eidetic constitution in intentional consciousness, conditions of perception in representation, etc. This finally constricts being-for-us within the factical ‘unreason’ of thought/perception. Considering that the content of thought remains constrained by mediation of sensing-thought, the thesis of the in-itself remains shrouded in darkness or veiled in religious mystery, but never in principle ruled out. This is why I take Meillassoux’s avowal of the force of the circle of correlation resists its wholesale deflation, as attempted by pointing at the fallaciousness of the Gem. Rather, for Meillassoux the way out of this circle is to force the correlationist to accept that the contingency of the being must already be a feature of things in themselves to avoid the idealist appropriation, i.e. in order to say things could be different than they are contingency cannot be merely relative to us, lest we reinstate the idealist coup. But this still means that the knowledge of particular beings gained within the circle of correlation is contingent and uncertain, i.e. what we know is the absolute necessity of the contingency of beings as such.

         The question is finally the obvious one: if we want to say that any conceptual determination does gain traction on the in-itself, and that conception/perception can furthermore already imply the stratification of being itself, then it falls to the realist to show how this is so. And this must be done without invoking a miraculous continuity between conception/description and being, such as in the descriptive metaphysics of OOO which simply solicit all kinds of claims about the in-itself, even incompatible ones. I take it this is also the limitation of a postural realism such as Laruelle’s as advanced by determination-in-the-last-instance; since it ultimately lacks the robustness to subtract from Decision or science anything but the real cause, utterly indifferently to the descriptive register in objectification:

     ”How can we acknowledge that scientific conception tracks the in-itself without resorting to the problematic metaphysical assumption that do so is to conceptually circumscribe the ‘essence’ (or formal reality) of the latter?”

     The stratification of being in relation to the phenomena described by natural science I take to be the decisive import of Sellar’s approach, while the normative criteria for rational deliberation and the withdrawal of authority required for objective truth is expounded in Brandom’s account (and, of course, in the prospective project initiated by Pete Wolfendale).

Correspondence with Graham Harman: On Object Oriented Ontology

Correspondence with Graham Harman:

- On Object Oriented Ontology -
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I recently had a rather interesting correspondence with Professor Graham Harman, after raising some elementary questions from my first reading of his brilliant Prince of Networks - where he advances a startling reading of Latour as a novel 'metaphysician' who provides valuable theoretical resources for an object-oriented-ontology.

I would like to thank Professor Harman for answering my muddled questions. Below is a transcript of our correspondence; first my original e-mail and then Prof Harman's response. Although the original e-mail is mostly reproduced in the response, I thought it would be useful to have the original set of questions presented in their entirety, since they can appear (even more) muddled in the midst of responses. Anyhow, here it goes!

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July 20th, 2010

Professor Harman,

I just finished reading, for the first time, your Prince of Networks. An impressive, imaginative piece of philosophy. I had some very naïve questions, however, which I hope you might be able to answer for me, since I’m trying to get into Guerrilla Metaphysics now.

1) 1)You accept the ontological univocity of all entities/objects: chairs, dreams, parties… and so on, and so on (to use Zizek’s catchy abbreviation).

Furthermore, you accept their non-relational subsistence and qualitative determination (not just sensual). This seems to raise two possible concerns:

a) Virulent idealism (a ceaseless multiplication of actual entities) – You grant ‘reality’ to Pinocchio and ideal situations, just as with physical bodies and intraworldly occurrences. Does this mean that every possible thought of a fictional entity has reality? If I imagine a stickman figure without further connection to anything else, does this entail its reality? Of course you might say it has some form of reality, albeit a weak and evanescent one. But it’s not clear to me the precise ontological status of this hypothetical entity: it’s not strictly sensual, but it’s obviously intentional insofar as it possesses eidetic unity (it’s not clear to me, like Husserl, that we can speak of partial adumbrations in these cases, or whether we have to accept ‘fulfilled’ intentional acts for them; i.e. there are no 'hidden angles' in my imagining).

Is the reality of these objects then coincident with their intentional configuration? Or can we nevertheless speak of a relationless reality of the object / what would this be?

To complicate things a bit: what would be the precise 'point of contact' between this stickman figure and a second imagined object (the stickwoman), i.e. inside which entity would they meet? Is it my intentional-subjective sphere (mind)? If I understand you correctly, real objects neither meet by themselves (without mediation), nor are their pieces conceivably eidetic. What would the reality of the pieces or qualities of these imagined objects be then; beyond their eidetic presentation? So I’m wondering how these imagined objects fit within the triad of objects: real, sensual and intentional.

Finally, I’m wondering whether this ontological univocity and virulent proliferation of entities might not potentially lead on a downward slope to pragmatism. Imagine obscurantist scientific sects manage to convince the majority of the world's population to adopt their doctrine, so that all our current sciences are forgotten. Evidently, our descriptive stock for entities changes (perhaps restrictively). I take it you would endorse the independent reality of the objects underlying scientific discourse, by what seems to be vaguely modeled in a Kripke-esque figure of ostentation. These real objects then would subsist in their reality as objects, as well as with their real qualities.

But I’m intrigued to ask what is an example of a real entity, then, if it is not merely correlative to any given descriptive register and yet is thinkable (for this is not the ephermal and ineffable Infinity of theologians)? Which is the real object and stock of real qualities underlying the Inti-God of the Incas and the astral phenomenon described by science? Don’t we risk in this manner an all too-violent dispersionism of the Real in which anything we say is ultimately adequate to the Real underlying objects, insofar as discourse never reaches its ‘real’ qualities or primal substance-hood, but merely mediates it / relates to it in some level? What is the principle of individuation for real entities, apart from acts of reference, without relapsing into some correlationist corner?

This can be also called 'Quinean virulence': if we can say purely imaginary objects have realities, and parts as well; what individuates them as objects? Is it my choice of nomination/term? Is there any sense to say the stickman is really a singular object, and not just a bundle of stick-parts? And why can I say there's one real object underlying the stickman, and not an infinity of stick-part objects?

Clearly if we move onto the physical register we don’t even have ontological unity, and we must say all there really is are subatomic forces or particles. But since you have renounced naturalism, then surely you must say that the imagined or conceived stickman is not really physical anymore than it is really eidetic. For to deny its physical reality in order to assert its purely eidetic existence (as imagined stickman) would seem to run with the imposition of a matter-independent ideality. But if we cannot eliminate the physical so as to avoid reductionism, then surely we would have to accept the same goes for every reality following from all possible descriptive registers, and we have once again something of a nomological virulence. On the other hand, if we say that the reality of none of these registers (even the ‘eidetic’) exhausts the ‘real object’ (since the latter is resolutely non-relational) we seem to return to the problem of anonymity, both at the level of substance and of quality. For none of the available descriptive registers seem to exhaust the object of my contemplation, even if many of them appear necessary (I couldn’t imagine anything if I had no body / if I had no thought / no language…).

How can we therefore isolate real qualities independently of all relations? What would these be? If all the lists of irreducible strata of reality, ranging from parties to neutrons, are novel for OOO then this must be in a sense that’s not merely equivalent to, again, Badiou’s pure multiple (which, after all, could without problem produce the same kinds of varied lists only to add in the end – ontologically it is a pure multiplicity, which does not constitute a reduction any more than saying all objects are actors does).

If everything is ontologically an actor, and real actors and qualities exist, what can we say of them?

Incidentally, I get the same worry of dispersionism in Laruelle’s determination-in-the-last-instance; which I wrote to Ray Brassier about (he didn’t respond, however). If real objects are independent of all relations, and plainly indifferent to them in the last-instance, then don’t we risk making of them anonymous atoms (the Leibnizean problem you are well aware of) or else require something like a duality between ontological pure inconsistent multiplicity (void of ontological unity) and transcendental (phenomenological) constitution (which gives us objects), like Badiou does? Zachary-Luke Fraser (2004) has clearly explained why Badiou's notion of the count is not one that is performed by humans necessarily (contrary to your assumption in PON), but is rather found in the split between the formal unity of the object and its extensional determination, i.e. an object is entirely determined by what it constitutes, and yet it differs purely formally by a pure differentiation from its extension.

I confess I feel like a lot of OOO, at the present stage, appears very close to what Badiou has already developed through the resources set-theoretical formalism.

2) 2) I’m a little confused by your repeated allusion to Meillassoux’s purported claim as to the inescapability from correlationism. You claim Meillassoux says we must oppose correlationism from within the circle. But isn’t the thinking of the absolute he proposes precisely escaping the circle, insofar as the necessity of contingency cannot be thought relatively? For Meillassoux is clearly not seeking to advance the empty tautology that everything we think about is necessarily thought about. That much is obvious. As yourself and Brassier emphasize, the real issue concerns the ontological status of the objects of thought: is the being of everything thought merely relative to thought? And in that respect, Meillassoux’s absolute answers in the negative: everything we think of must, on the contrary, be thought of as grounded on its absolute contingency, a contingency which by virtue of being absolutely necessary avoids the fideist claim by the correlationist, reducing the speculative scope to the ignorance of the in-itself.

Do Do you disagree with Meillassoux’s ascription of absolute contingency as necessary then? I know you’re working on a book on him now, so it might be smarter to wait and see.

3) 3) Finally, a Heideggerean question(s). You seem to lay a lot of emphasis on the status of withdrawn objects in Heidegger’s existential analytic. The withdrawal of the Zuhandenheit behind the veil of entities and relations seem to exhibit, in Heidegger, a space for real objects lurking in the background independent of such relations. But, I think Heidegger’s move from Vorhandenheit to Zuhandenheit is designed precisely to destroy the notion of the object; not only qua correlate of a subjective (or noetic) constitution, but from its unification into a singular entity/object. For one of the decisive formulations of the Zuhandenheit as a mode-of-being is that it not only grounds the background immersion of the world needed for reflexive reason but, more fundamentally, the primordial correlation between Sein and Dasein. Since being is not an entity, behind the level of Vorhandenheit objectivity we don’t get the subsistence of ‘real objects’; since objects are for Heidegger necessarily derivative abstractions which obtain upon malfunction. And Heidegger constantly insists on the dissolution of the subject-object distinction to the point where the Zeug is said to be never strictly speaking an equipment (Heidegger calls it ‘equipmental-whole’ and cannot by implication be a mere bundle of objects, not even relationless ones).

This equipmental-whole is clearly structured in a state of projection in which Dasein finds itself undistinguished from its world within the ‘for-the-sake-of-whiches’ of activity; and at that point it seems like Heidegger wants to uphold something quite opposite to what you propose: not a stock of real relationless entities, but a stock of objectless relations. My position on this matter is that this prefigures the symptomatic point where the ontological difference struggles to overcome the noetico-noematic distinction (as we know in the particular juncture of ekstasis-ekstema later developed in Basic Problems of Phenomenology; and in which Heidegger finds himself at pains to even approach the independence of temporal being). For Heidegger can never seem to quite tell us what this totally non-objective commerce between Man and Being is quite apart from his somewhat evasive use of metaphors; gradually to the point where the embrace of the poetic word becomes unavoidable and fundamental ontology becomes impossible.

In these lines I read the famous ‘shepherd of being’ figure: the shepherd is undistinguished from the herd of sheep irreflexively moving towards a singular purpose, in a pure projective continuum. Only when a sheep deviates from the flock does anything like an object appear in this transaction, the sheep as ontic object is only derivative from the primordial ontological indistinction where Dasein, delivered to the care of being, finds itself carrying out the purposeful act. Since being is not an entity, and since Dasein is its caretaker, it is only in the severance of abstraction that objects as isolated substances appear. So objects seem to be on the contrary, for Heidegger, features of abstraction rather than the background phantasms you conceive. Perhaps I’ve missed something crucial?

I know you have plenty to work on, so forgive me for my obtuseness and the short-sightedness of my questions.

Best,

Daniel

Graham's response

July 24, 2010

Cairo

Dear Daniel:

Thanks for your letter. Though I’m too busy to engage in lengthy ongoing correspondence about matters of such detail, I do have time to answer one such letter, and of course I’m happy to answer brief follow-up emails as well.

Here is my response to your questions. You numbered them 1-3, but I think there are actually four questions. (The first question pertains both to virulent idealism and to Badiou, so I have split it in half.) I’m also going to put your first question at the end, since it’s the most complicated.

So, the new order of themes treated will be:

1. Badiou

2. Meillassoux

3. Heidegger

4. virulence

1. Badiou. You write: “I confess I feel like a lot of OOO, at the present stage, appears very close to what Badiou has already developed through the resources set-theoretical formalism.”

It’s strange to me that you think this, because it seems to me instead that OOO holds the opposite of Badiou’s view on almost every key point. But let’s go slowly.

First, there seems to be some ambiguity in your claim above. At times you seem to hold that OOO is already saying the same things as Badiou, while at times you seem only to say that we ought to be driven to saying what Badiou is saying. And I disagree on both counts. For starters, it may well be that Laruelle runs into the problem of an indeterminate Real that resembles an inconsistent multiplicity in need of a transcendental constitution for individual objects to be present (this is my impression of Laruelle too, so I agree with you there). But that is not at all the case for OOO.

For instance, you write: “If real objects are independent of all relations, and plainly indifferent to them in the last-instance, then don’t we risk making of them anonymous atoms…” But why does this follow? Why would things become “anonymous atoms” simply because they are indifferent to relations?

What I suspect is that you aren’t seeing the distinction between what I now playfully call “domestic” and “foreign” relations. The domestic relations of a thing concern its pieces, and of course no object can do without those. If the arrangement of my heart, liver, kidneys, and lungs were shifted just slightly, then I could not exist. (It does not follow that I am reducible to those pieces and their arrangements, but that’s a separate issue.) So in that sense I am the product of subpersonal relations. But it does not follow that I am therefore equally constitued by my “foreign” relations, such as my relations to various people or my exact physical position on the globe. Such relations can retroactively change who I am, but this is a special case that needs to be explained, not an automatic change that happens every time a hair falls from my head or my chair is moved 10 cm across the floor.

The reason I oppose Badiou’s pure multiplicity is that it falls into the familiar trap of an indeterminate world that is carved into pieces by humans. You answer me in advance by saying: “Zachary-Luke Fraser (2004) has clearly explained why Badiou's notion of the count is not one that is performed by humans necessarily (contrary to your assumption in PON), but is rather found in the split between the formal unity of the object and its extensional determination, i.e. an object is entirely determined by what it constitutes, and yet it differs purely formally by a pure differentiation from its extension.”

I haven’t read the Fraser piece in question. But though he sounds like a smart guy, consider me suspicious as to whether he actually accomplished in that essay what you say he did. For even if it made sense at all to say that an object “differs purely formally by a pure differentiation from its extension” (and it sounds like sophisticated evasiveness to me) this still doesn’t answer the question of whether that object existed prior to the count. If it did, then there would be no point in Badiou saying “the one is not” and also no point in his distinguishing between the inconsistent and the consistent. In my philosophy, by contrast, there is no such thing as an inconsistent multiple, and neither is it true that the consistent is consistent only insofar as it is counted. Rather, the real is consistent in its own right before any count (though I don’t use the term “consistent” in my own writings, of course).

My suspicion about about Badiou is that he is not nearly as original as people have credited him with being. Yes, he is a refreshing new voice in French philosophy. But is he really the author of “one of the great works of philosophy that will be read across the centuries?” I don’t see that at all. Badiou seems to me like just another smart guy who hasn’t escaped Kant’s shadow enough to lead us to a new era. That’s how I see it. I can tell you’re a fan, so my apologies if this comes off as brash or offensive; I’m just trying to orient you as to how I see the situation of contemporary philosophy. (And furthermore, your letter was fairly assertive in its own right, so I assume you don’t mind the same in return.)

Finally, how can you say that OOO resembles Badiouian set theory? For Badiou there is a distinction between inconsistent and consistent, with the “count” being that which distinguishes them; for OOO none of this is true. For Badiou sets are extensional; for OOO nothing is real if it’s merely extensional. For Badiou there is something very special about humans in an ontological sense; for OOO this is not the case. For Badiou mathematical formalization plays a major role for philosophy; for OOO it does not. For Badiou there can be no talk of already determinate hidden depths of the world; for OOO, that’s the whole point of philosophy. In fact, are there any issues on which Badiou and OOO agree? Maybe a few. One that I can think of is that OOO also agrees with the notion of events that rupture the state of the situation, though for me they are called “allure” and they are much more common than Badiouian truth-events. In my system they also come in four kinds, just like for Badiou, but they are different kinds from his. (Moreover, they derive from my reading of Heidegger, not from Badiou, who has never been among my favorite authors.)

2. Meillassoux. You write: “I’m a little confused by your repeated allusion to Meillassoux’s purported claim as to the inescapability from correlationism. You claim Meillassoux says we must oppose correlationism from within the circle. But isn’t the thinking of the absolute he proposes precisely escaping the circle, insofar as the necessity of contingency cannot be thought relatively? For Meillassoux is clearly not seeking to advance the empty tautology that everything we think about is necessarily thought about.”

I’m afraid you’re wrong here. What you call an “empty tautology” is one that Meillassoux esteems most highly. There is no going back on it for him: the correlationist is right that we can’t think something outside of thought without falling into a performative contradiction. See his portion of the Speculative Realism transcript in Collapse III, with its praise of Fichte and ridicule of anyone who tries to escape the correlational circle in the realist manner. His words there actually shock me a bit.

Now, consider an alternative escape from the correlational circle: Whitehead’s. Whitehead would simply say, as I do, that the human world relation is just one sort of prehension among others, and that the wider problem involves any relation between any two realities you can think of. For Meillassoux this claim would merely be cheating, because after all Whitehead is thinking of such a situation, and it is therefore a thought, and hence it is recuperated by the correlational circle. Meillassoux is by no means a realist in the old sense, and this is why he eventually disliked the name Speculative Realism.

You also write: “As yourself and Brassier emphasize, the real issue concerns the ontological status of the objects of thought: is the being of everything thought merely relative to thought?”

And here I’m afraid I disagree again. For me, if something is relative to thought, then its being is also relative to thought. My worry about the whole Meillassoux/Badiou/Zizek current (which you seem much more convinced by than I am, though I also admire them, especially Meillassoux) is that it adopts an idealist standpoint while also insisting: “We are not idealists!” But I do not accept the correlational circle in the first place, and I think any attempt to evade the good old fashioned realist question with subtleties such as “thoughts are relative to thought, but the being of what is thought is not” is a kind of unintentional sophistry: a way of swallowing idealism whole and trying to pretend that it hasn’t happened. And this is why Badiou always disappoints me in the end, and Zizek too.

You also write: “Do you disagree with Meillassoux’s ascription of absolute contingency as necessary then?” Yes. I disagree with almost all of Meillassoux’s philosophy, but its brilliance is so striking that I can’t help but watch in admiration.

3. Heidegger. This is simpler to answer, because you seem to think that my reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis is supposed to be a reading of what Heidegger personally meant to say, and that’s not the case at all.

You write: “You seem to lay a lot of emphasis on the status of withdrawn objects in Heidegger’s existential analytic. The withdrawal of the Zuhandenheit behind the veil of entities and relations seem to exhibit, in Heidegger, a space for real objects lurking in the background independent of such relations. But, I think Heidegger’s move from Vorhandenheit to Zuhandenheit is designed precisely to destroy the notion of the object; not only qua correlate of a subjective (or noetic) constitution, but from its unification into a singular entity/object.”

Yes, that’s what Heidegger says. But it’s irrelevant to me, because my claim in Tool-Being is not that I understood Heidegger’s own personal secret meaning, but that I understand his great thought experiment (the tool-analysis) better than he does.

It is absolutely true that there is no such thing as “an” equipment in Heidegger’s opinion. There is really only one global piece of equipment, with everything assigned to everything else, and ultimately for-the-sake-of human Dasein. What I have shown is that there could never be any malfunctioning equipment in that case, and we have a reductio ad absurdum. Everything would be totally exhausted by its current usefulness, without excess. And this is why I think that Zuhandenheit cannot be read either as usefulness or as referential assignment. The real meaning of Vorhandenheit is not independence from relation as Heidegger seems to think, but the opposite: the Vorhanden is that which exists only in relation. Consider Heidegger’s several kinds of Vorhandenheit: Husserlian phenomena, broken equipment, physical matter as conceived by the natural sciences. All of these exist only as the correlates of someone perceiving, calculating, or measuring them. Hence, useful “tools” in the everyday sense are actually just another example of Vorhanden. The difference between unconsciously used and consciously observed turns out to be a meaningless distinction. The only way to read Zuhandenheit meaningfully is as the non-relational reality that withdraws from all purposes. I’m not sure if you’ve read my first book Tool-Being, but it’s all explained there.

You write further: “This equipmental-whole is clearly structured in a state of projection in which Dasein finds itself indistinguished from its world within the ‘for-the-sake-of-whiches’ of the activity; and at that point it seems like Heidegger wants to uphold something quite opposite to what you propose: not a stock of real relationless entities, but a stock of objectless relations.”

Yes, I agree that this is what Heidegger wants, but that doesn’t mean that it’s what truly follows from his analysis. I don’t think Heidegger would be a fan of my interpretation, but who cares? Husserl was not a fan of Heidegger’s interpretation of phenomenology either. That’s how progress is made in philosophy. I would add that Heidegger eventually reaches the point when he shifts to “the thing” and “the fourfold,” which serve as the basis for his more celebrated reflections on language. Individual things finally do come into the center of his philosophy.

You write further: “My position on this matter is that this prefigures the symptomatic point where the ontological difference struggles to overcome the noetico-noematic distinction (as we know in the particular juncture of ekstasis-ekstema later developed in Basic Problems of Phenomenology; and in which Heidegger finds himself at pains to even approach the independence of temporal being). For Heidegger can never seem to quite tell us what this totally nonobjective commerce between Man and Being is quite apart from his somewhat evasive use of metaphors…”

Yes, and I think we should avoid the pious Heideggerian assumption that Heidegger must have come up with something orgasmically new and unheard of on this point. He really didn’t. He’s just doing the correlationist dance of saying that he’s “beyond realism and idealism,” but then just giving us a form of idealism—or rather, correlationism. In this respect he’s just another phenomenologist. Phenomenology has never been very strong at dealing with the realism/anti-realism question. My view is that this is because phenomenology was born in an era when realism could only mean scientific realism, which is precisely what phenomenology needed to shut out of the picture in order to be born.

You also write: “Since being is not an entity, and since Dasein is its caretaker, it is only in the severance of abstraction that objects as isolated substances appear. So objects seem to be on the contrary, for Heidegger, features of abstraction and the background phantasms you conceive. Perhaps i've missed something crucial?”

No, I think you have Heidegger right. And in this sense he’s a lot like Bergson, though for different reasons: the individual object is just an abstraction. But that doesn’t mean Heidegger is right, and it doesn’t even mean that he interpreted his own discoveries correctly.

4. Virulence. In this part you ask lots of different questions and I will try to answer them one by one.

You write: “You accept the ontological univocity of all entities/objects: chairs, dreams, parties… and so on, and so on (to use Zizek’s catchy abbreviation). Furthermore, you accept their non-relational subsistence and qualitative determination (not just sensual).”

This is a common misunderstanding of my position, and I’ve had trouble changing it. It is not true that I support the ontological univocity of all objects. In fact, I am a very frank dualist when it comes to objects. There are real objects and sensual objects, and they are very different from one another. Real objects exist apart from all relation. They hide from us and from all other objects, because they are untranslatable into any model.

Sensual objects, by contrast, exist only for another object, and vanish as soon as that entity stops paying attention, sleeps, or dies. Nor do they hide. They are always there in front of us, but are simply encrusted with too many superfluous qualities to be recognized. This is why Husserl thinks we need the eidetic reduction, to rotate objects at different angles to try to separate the essential qualities from the inessential ones.

If you keep this distinction in mind, then most of your worries about virulence disappear.

For example, you write: “You grant ‘reality’ to Pinocchio and ideal situations, just as with physical bodies and intraworldly occurrences. Does this mean that every possible thought of a fictional entity has reality?”

Only in the sensual sense. Everything I dream up obviously has at least a dreamlike reality. But does it have autonomy from my thought of it? No. There’s no reality in that sense.

You write further: “If I imagine a stickman figure without further connection to anything else, does this entail its reality? Of course you might say it has some form of reality, albeit a weak and evanescent one. But it’s not clear to me the precise ontological status of this hypothetical entity: it’s not strictly sensual, but it’s obviously intentional insofar as it possesses eidetic unity…”

Actually, I think the stickman figure is purely sensual.

You write: “it’s not clear to me, like Husserl, that we can speak of partial adumbrations in these cases, or whether we have to accept ‘fulfilled’ intentional acts for them; i.e. there are no 'hidden angles' in my imagining).”

Here I would only disagree that adumbrations have anything to do with hiddeness. I don’t think a mailbox is “hidden” behind its adumbrations at all. I think the intention of a mailbox is automatically “fulfilled” as soon as I have it. The problem is that a lot of extraneous extra qualities of the mailbox are also there, mixed up with the eidos of the mailbox itself. For me, the eidetic reduction is not about achieving a hidden fulfillment, but about clearing away the cobwebs from a fulfillment that has always already occurred. I realize that this is not the orthodox way of reading Husserl, but the usual attempts to see “hiddenness” at work in both Husserl and Heidegger seemed like such a bizarre mix of apples and oranges that I was finally led to see the difference.

You write: “Is the reality of these objects then coincident with their intentional configuration? Or can we nevertheless speak of a relationless reality of the object / what would this be?”

No, there is no relationless reality to sensual objects, because they always exist in relation to us. This is similar to the reason for why I am never impressed by Badiou’s claim to have spoken of objects without subjects. He doesn’t deliver on this claim.

Further, you ask: “To complicate things a bit: what would be the

precise 'point of contact' between this stickman figure and a second imagined object (the stickwoman), i.e. inside which entity would they meet? Is it my intentional-subjective sphere (mind)?”

No, they can’t meet at all, because they are not real objects. They can only exist contiguously in the experience of a real object (namely, me).

More: “If I understand you correctly, real objects neither meet by themselves (without mediation), nor are their pieces conceivably eidetic. What would the reality of the pieces or qualities of these imagined objects be then; beyond their eidetic presentation? So I’m wondering how these imagined objects fit within the triad of objects: real, sensual and intentional.”

Imagined objects are sensual. And there’s no triad of objects, there are just two: real and sensual.

I replaced the term “intentional object” with “sensual object,” and at first my motive was purely one of euphony. (I hate the sterile technical flavor of the phrase “intentional object.”) But recently I’ve come to see a second reason to make the change, which is that people wrongly use “intentional object” to mean an object outside the mind, which is not at all what it means in Brentano and Husserl. For them it means immanent objectivity, but people have hijacked their term.

As for the first part of your question, it is true that real objects for me cannot meet without mediation. I don’t understand “nor are their pieces conceivably eidetic.”

Next: “Finally, I’m wondering whether this ontological univocity and virulent proliferation of entities might not potentially lead on a downward slope to pragmatism.”

Yes, it could. But I do not uphold univocity, nor is my position vulnerable to virulent proliferation, for reasons described above.

Next: “I take it you would endorse the independent reality of the objects underlying scientific discourse, by what seems to be vaguely modelled in a Kripke-esque figure of ostentation. These real objects then would subsist in their reality as objects, as well as with their real qualities.”

I’m not sure what’s so “vague” about it. I agree with Kripke.

Next: “But i'm intrigued to ask what is an example of a real entity, then, if it is not merely correlative to any given descriptive register and yet are thinkable (for these is not the ephermal and ineffable Infinity of theologians)?”

Here you are setting a bit of a trap for me, because you want me to describe a real object that underlies shifting theories, but obviously as soon as I describe it, it will no longer be the same thing as the real object being described.

The reason why objects are not the “ineffable infinity of the theologians” is that they are not infinite, and they are also not entirely ineffable. We can perform certain operations with them that increase our knowledge of the universe, just as imaginary numbers in mathematics can be used in equations. To say that withdrawn objects are useless because we can’t say anything about them is sort of like saying that black holes are useless in physics because we can’t see the inside of them. Direct seeing is not the only kind of knowledge, after all!

Next: “Which is the real object and stock of real qualities underlying the Inti-God of the Incas and the astral phenomenon described by science? Don’t we risk in this manner an all too-violent dispersionism of the Real in which anything we say is ultimately adequate to the Real underlying objects, insofar as discourse never reaches its ‘real’ qualities or primal substance-hood, but merely mediates it / relates to it in some level?”

I would have to be God to know what the real object is that lies beneath Incan religious beliefs. You seem to think that the up-to-date science of the year 2010 should be allowed to serve as the privileged judge of that question. I don’t see why. Our science of today will perhaps look as antiquated in a thousand years as Incan beliefs do today.

Your worry seems to be: if no direct access with objects is possible, then anything goes. I can claim that my worship of fairies is just as good as quantum theory. But why does this follow? Who says that there can’t be standards of better and worse even in a world where direct access to the things is impossible?

Next: “What is the principle of individuation for real entities, apart from acts of reference, without relapsing into some correlationist corner?” Real entities are individualized by their qualities, and qualities for me are not universals. But let’s leave that question for another time.

Next: “This can be also called 'Quinean virulence': if we can say purely imaginary objects have realities, and parts as well; what individuates them as objects? Is it my choice of nomination/term? Is there any sense to say the stickman is really a singular object, and not just a bundle of stick-parts? And why can I say there's one real object underlying the stickman, and not an infinity of stick-part objects?”

In the sensual realm it is we ourselves who decide that the stickman is one sensual object. It is simply a matter of descriptive phenomenology to decide whether I’m encountering one stick figure or many isolated parts (I doubt that an “infinity” is possible for perception; that’s an exaggeration).

In the realm of real objects, the stickman is one if the stickman is a unified reality that has properties not found in its pieces taken in isolation. But I don’t believe in real stickmen, of course.

Next: “Clearly if we move onto the physical register we don’t even have ontological unity, and we must say all there really is are subatomic forces or particles.” This is not clear at all. And even if it were, then you’re still speaking of individuals: individual forces, individual subatomic particles. These are objects, and demand an object-oriented analysis.

Next: “But since you have renounced naturalism, then surely you must say that the imagined or conceived stickman is not really physical anymore than it is really eidetic. For to deny its physical reality in order to assert its purely eidetic existence (as imagined stickman) would seem to run with the imposition of a matter independent ideality.”

I’ve only “renounced naturalism” in the sense that I don’t think physical explanations and entities should be privileged over other kinds. You seem to think I am taking a kind of Platonic position and saying that eidos is more real than physical. That’s not true at all.

Next: “But if we cannot eliminate the physical so as to avoid reductionism, then surely we would have to accept the same goes for every reality following from all possible descriptive registers, and we have once again something of a nomological virulence.”

I don’t understand this part.

Next: “On the other hand, if we say that the reality of none of these registers (even the ‘eidetic’) exhausts the ‘real object’ (since the latter is resolutely non-relational) we seem to return to the problem of anonymity, both at the level of substance and of quality. For none of the available descriptive registers seem to exhaust the object of my contemplation, even if many of them appear necessary (I couldn’t imagine anything if I had no body / if I had no thought / no language…).”

Here you seem to be mixing the reality of a thing with its epistemic exhaustability. Why would we even want to exhaust anything with some specific discursive register? Not only is it impossible in my philosophy, it’s undesirable to me as a person.

Next:”How can we therefore isolate real qualities independently of all relations? What would these be?”

This is similar to the trap I described above. You want me to give an example of a real quality outside relation, but obviously as soon as I give an example it will be in relation to me, will merely be a translation into discourse of a hidden real quality, etc. We cannot “isolate real qualities outside of all relations,” because what you’re asking for there is “to have a relation to real qualities outside all relations,” and of course that’s impossible. But this doesn’t mean that it’s useless to know that there are real objects with real qualities. As I said in the case of the black hole, direct observation is not the only kind of knowledge.

And consider metaphor. As Max Black showed so nicely, you can’t rephrase a metaphor in literal terms. This doesn’t mean that a metaphor gives no knowledge. Of course it does. You just have to abandon the narrow sense of knowledge as “correct propositions about the properties of things.”

Next: “If all the lists of irreducible strata of reality, ranging from parties to neutrons, are novel for OOO then this must be in a sense that’s not merely equivalent to, again, Badiou’s pure multiple (which, after all, could without problem produce the same kinds of varied lists only to add in the end – ontologically it is a pure multiplicity, which does not constitute a reduction any more than saying all objects are actors does).”

Badiou’s pure multiple can produce my lists of entities “without problem” only once they are counted and made part of the consistent mutiple. Badiou’s inconsistent multiple does not contain banks, snakes, icebergs, and forests: that’s the whole point of the inconsistency! For me, by contrast, the real world does consist of such things, and they are already in a duel with one another from the start.

There is no such thing as the “pure multiple” for me. There are only many different objects. Badiou is too much like the pre-Socratics with their apeiron for my taste.

Finally: “If everything is ontologically an actor, and real actors and qualities exist, what can we say of them?”

What’s the problem here? My books say all kinds of things about real objects. You can’t set the trap of demanding that withdrawn objects be spoken of in the same way as non-withdrawn sensual objects. The whole point is that they cannot be. But that doesn’t mean that we are left helpless before the ineffable, any more than astrophysicists are left to call the interior of black holes ineffable. You just have to find new, oblique methods of knowledge.

Thanks for the thought-provoking questions. I wonder, however, if you are willing to turn the same critical arsenal against Badiou himself? He seems to be getting too much of a free ride from his admirers these days! Best wishes, and keep me posted about your adventures in Lima and Los Angeles.

Graham Harman