The Democracy of Objects

Front matter

The Democracy of Objects

New Metaphysics

Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour

Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Towards a Finally Subjectless Object 13 Grounds For a Realist Ontology 34

The Paradox of Substance 67

Chapter 1 Grounds For a Realist Ontology

Things-in-themselves? But they're fine, thank you very much. And how are you? You complain about things that have not been honored by your vision? You feel that these things are lacking the illumination of your consciousness? But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry that you were not there, and in any case you would have tamed, killed, photographed, or studied them. Things in themselves lack nothing, just as Africa did not lack whites before their arrival.

— Bruno Latour’

1.1. The Death of Ontology and the Rise of Correlationism

Our historical moment is characterized by a general distrust, even disdain, for the category of objects, ontology, and above all any variant of realism. Moreover, it is characterized by a primacy of epistemology over ontology. While it is indeed true that Heidegger, in Being and Time, attempted to resurrect ontology, this only took place through a profound transformation of the very meaning of ontology.’ Ontology would no longer be the investigation of being qua being in all its variety and diversity regardless of whether humans exist, but rather would instead become an

Chapter 1: Grounds For a Realist Ontology 35 interrogation of Dasein's or human being's access to being. Ontology would become an investigation of being-for-Dasein, rather than an investigation of being as such. In conjunction with this transformation of ontology from an investigation of being as such into an investigation of being-for-humans, we have also everywhere witnessed a push to dissolve objects or primary substances in the acid of experience, intentionality, power, language, normativity, signs, events, relations, or processes. To defend the existence of objects is, within the framework of this line of thought, the height of naïveté for objects are held to be nothing more than surface-effects of something more fundamental such as the signifier, signs, power or activities of the mind. With Hume, for example, it is argued that objects are really nothing more than bundles of impressions or sensations linked together by associations and habits in the mind. Here there is no deeper fact of objects existing beyond these impressions and habits. Likewise, Lacan will tell us that “the universe is the flower of rhetoric”’, treating the beings that populate the world as an effect of the signifier.

We can thus discern a shift in how ontology is understood and accompanying this shift the deployment of a universal acid that has come to dissolve the being of objects. The new ontology argues that we can only ever speak of being as it is for us. Depending on the philosophy in question, this “us” can be minds, lived bodies, language, signs, power, social structures, and so on. There are dozens of variations. The key point here is that it is argued that being can only be thought in terms of what Graham Harman has called our access to being.'° As such, ontology becomes not an interrogation of being as such, but rather an interrogation of our access to being. The answer to the question, “what is being?” now, everywhere and always, carries a footnote, colophon, or bit of fine print such that the question must be read as “what is being for us?”

And if the question of ontology now becomes the question, “what is being for us?” it follows that there can be no question of what being might be as such, for we have resolved to treat being only in terms of our access to being such that what being might be apart from our access to being now becomes an entirely meaningless question. This for two reasons: First, were we capable of knowing being apart from our access to being, it is argued, it would follow that we therefore have access to this being, thereby converting this being alleged to be beyond its givenness to us back into being-for-us. Second, to know something, the argument runs, we must have access to that thing. Yet being beyond our access to it is precisely a form of being

to which we have no access. Therefore it follows that claims about such a being are, strictly speaking, meaningless. I hope to show later why there is good reason to doubt the soundness of both of these arguments, but for the Moment it is enough simply to tarry with them to understand their logic, for these arguments constitute the basic schema of nearly every reigning philosophical position today.

If, then, these arguments are granted, it follows that there can be no question of what being might be like apart from our access to being. For the condition under which it would be possible to speak of being apart from our access to being would require access to that being, yet we do not have such access. Consequently, it follows that philosophy must abandon the question of whether being as it is given to us is like being as it is in-itself because we are unable to “get out of ourselves” to compare being as it manifests itself to us with being as it is in-itself apart from us. The best we can hope for, the most we can know, is being as it manifests itself to us, and philosophy shifts from being a discourse concerned with the being of beings, with what substance, as Meillassoux has put it, constitutes true substance (objects, God, nature, particles, processes, and so on?)!!, to being a discourse about the mechanisms through which beings are manifested to us (mind, language, normativity, signs, power, for example). Ontology becomes transcendental anthropology and the world becomes a mirror in which we don't recognize our own reflection.

Philosophy, of whatever stripe, thus comes to be characterized by what Meillassoux has aptly named correlationism. As Meillassoux puts it, “[b]y ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never either term considered apart from the other”.'* While I have reason to disagree with Meillassoux's proposal for escaping the correlationist circle (and with his ontology), I believe that his concept of correlationism nicely summarizes the episteme, in the Foucauldian sense, that governs contemporary philosophy. When, in The Order of Things? and The Archeology of Knowledge'*

, Foucault introduces the concept of epistemes, he intends epistemes not as

Chapter 1: Grounds For a Realist Ontology 37 determinate positions in some discipline that might be opposed to another position, but rather as a set of statements functioning as the historical a priori of a particular discursive space. An episteme would be precisely that set of statements that allow opposed theories of, for example, language, to be opposed. It is the common framework these opposed positions share that allows them to enter into antagonistic relations with one another.

The claim that correlationism constitutes the episteme of contemporary philosophy is thus not a claim about any specific philosophical position, but rather about the common framework regulating philosophical discourse in our contemporary moment. This episteme is shared by thinkers as diverse and opposed, for example, as the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the Merleau-Ponty of The Phenomenology of Perception, and the Derrida of Of Grammatology. Despite the vast differences and disagreements among these positions, their thought and disagreements nonetheless unfold within the horizon of the unspoken premise of a necessary correlation between being and thought. The object of these disputes is not whether correlationism is true, but rather how the primordial or most fundamental correlation is to be articulated.

With correlationism we thus discover the root of contemporary theory's suspicion of both objects and realism. Realism must necessarily be anathema to all variants of correlationism by virtue of the fact that it claims knowledge of beings independent of the correlation between thinking and being. All realisms are committed to the thesis that it is possible to know something of beings independent of their being-for-thought, yet this is precisely what is precluded by the correlationist gesture. Here it is important to be precise. Correlationism is not the thesis of subjective idealisms whereby esse est percipi or where to be is to be perceived. Subjective and absolute idealism are only two variations of correlationism. The correlationist need not be committed to the thesis that there is no being apart from thought. Indeed, most correlationists are committed to the thesis that there is something other than thought. Kant, for example, held that in addition to phenomena (beings for-us) things-in-themselves exist. The correlationist merely argues that we have no access to these beings that are apart from thought and can therefore only speak of being as it is for-us. And here we find the categorical dividing line between realisms and anti-realisms or correlationisms: for the anti-realist or correlationist, claims about beings are never claims about beings-in-themselves or

beings apart from us, but are always and only claims about beings as they manifest themselves to us. For the realist, by contrast, claims about objects really are claims about objects and not objects as they are for-us or only in relation to us.

As a consequence, it becomes clear that, for the correlationist, objects take on the status of fictions. Because objects can no longer be equated with things-in-themselves, because objects are only ever objects for-us and never things as they are independent of us, objects become phenomena or are reduced to actual or possible manifestations to us. Philosophy now shifts from being a debate about the nature of things-in-themselves or substance, to a debate about the mechanisms by which phenomena are produced or structured. Is it mind that structures phenomena? Language? Power? Intentionality? Embodied experience? Such are but a handful of the options that have been entertained by contemporary theory.

At the heart of correlationism it is thus clear that there is a profound anthropocentrism, for where it is held that being can never be thought in its existence apart from thought, it becomes clear that any claims about being ultimately harbor the implicit colophon that claims about being are claims about being for humans. Moreover, despite declarations of anti-humanism on the part of both Heidegger and the structuralists and post-structuralists, it is clear that these anti-humanisms bring us no closer to realism. For, to put it crudely, what the anti-humanisms object to is not the correlationist thesis of a necessary relation between being and thought such that the two can never be thought apart from one another, but rather the manner in which humanisms situate the primordial correlation in the minds of individual knowers. Thus, for example, structuralist and post-structuralist anti-humanisms emphasize the autonomy and independence of language and social relations. Here the argument runs that it is not sovereign subjects that are calling the shots, but rather language and/or social relations. What the structuralist and post-structuralist anti-humanists wish to examine is the manner in which language and social relations are determinative of the actions of individuals and how, if Althusser is to be followed, the individual itself is an effect of these more primordial agencies. It now

Chapter 1: Grounds For a Realist Ontology 39 follows that these impersonal and anonymous agencies are the condition for manifestation, not individual human minds. World, the story goes, is not a construction of the mind of human individuals or transcendental subjectivity, but of impersonal and anonymous social structures.

However, while anti-humanisms rescue philosophy from its focus on individual minds, allowing us to discern the sway of far more impersonal and anonymous patterns and structures at work in the heart of thought and social relations, it by no means follows that anti-humanism has escaped anthropocentrism. For social relations, economic relations, and language are nonetheless human phenomena, even where the human is discursively constructed, and it therefore follows that we remain within the orbit of anthropocentrism; for just as we began humanistically with the premise that we cannot know what being might be independent of our thinking of being, we now conclude that our claims about being are claims about being in relation to or correlation with language, power, or social relations. The question of what the world might be like apart from humans is, for both the humanists and the anti-humanists, entirely foreclosed.

1.2. Breaking the Correlationist Circle

With correlationism, the question of ontology is no longer, “what is being qua being?” but rather, “what is being gua Dasein?” or, “what is being qua language?” or, “what is being gua power?” or, “what is being gua history?” or, “what is being qua the lived body?” and many other avatars besides. While disputes among these various formulations of the correlation

are heated, we are nonetheless faced with a series of anthropomorphic determinations such that being is always to be thought in relation to

some aspect of the human. Protagoras, in one form or another, rules the day. What we thus get is not a democracy of objects or actants where all objects are on equal ontological footing and the philosopher can be just as interested in questions of how, to evoke Harman's favorite example, cotton relates to fire as she is in questions of how humans relate to mangoes, but instead a monarchy of the human in relation to all other beings where some instance of the human is treated as that which overdetermines all other beings and where the primary order of the day is always to determine how individual minds relate to other objects or how the social and cultural relates to being. If, as Zizek contends, metaphysics, in the pejorative sense of ontotheology, consists in elevating a part to the ground of the whole, then the anthropocentrism of correlationism is metaphysical through and through despite its protestations to the contrary or its characterizations of itself as a critique of metaphysics." Correlationism is ontotheology with the human in the place of God.

Our question is two-fold: on the one hand, what are the philosophical premises that led correlationism to become such a persuasive position in contemporary philosophy? On the other hand, is there a way to twist free from the correlationist deadlock so as to convincingly defend a genuinely post-humanist, realist ontology? A post-humanist, realist ontology is not an anti-human ontology, but is rather, as we will later see, an ontology where humans are no longer monarchs of being but are instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings. In this section, I will address the second of these questions through a foray into the early thought of the philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar. This discussion will also set the stage for my later discussion of the ontology of objects. Ironically, it turns out that the way out of correlationism is to be found through transcendental argumentation. But here I am getting ahead of myself.

Before outlining Bhaskar's defense of ontological realism, it is first necessary to express a note of caution. In his early work, and especially A Realist Theory of Science on which I will lean heavily here, Bhaskar is primarily interested in the ontology of science. Within the context of the present book, this poses special dangers as readers might arrive at the mistaken impression that I am arguing that the objects of the natural sciences are exhaustive of being as such. In short, one might conclude that I advocate the thesis that being and the objects of the natural world are synonymous. As I develop Bhaskar's argument for a realist theory of science, my aim is not to defend naturalism as the one true ontology, but rather to unfold the argument by which he arrives at a realist ontology. And here I am only interested in the ontological dimension of his argument. As

Bhaskar writes,

Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in

Chapter 1: Grounds For a Realist Ontology 41 their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skills and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity. This is one side of 'knowledge'. The other is that knowledge is 'of things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propagation. None of these ‘objects of knowledge' depend on human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex hypothesi there would be no one to know it.'°

Bhaskar refers to these two dimensions of knowledge as the transitive and the intransitive respectively. The transitive refers to the dimension of the social in the production of knowledge, such as inherited discourses, scientific training, institutions, and so on. By contrast, the intransitive refers to the domain of being that would exist regardless of whether or not humans know of them. We can thus say that Bhaskar, in his philosophy of science, wishes to reconcile something like the insights of Kuhn's Szructure of Scientific Revolutions’ or Foucault's Order of Things (the transitive or social dimension of knowledge production), with a realist ontology of science (the intransitive dimension). In the present context, my focus is on Bhaskar's arguments on behalf of realist ontology and therefore the intransitive, though readers should not conclude from this that the social dimension through which knowledge is produced is ignored.

As subsequent chapters of this book will hopefully demonstrate, the domain of real being advocated by onticology is far broader than the domain of beings belonging to the natural world. Put differently, natural beings constitute a subset of the category of real beings. In addition to natural beings, onticology also counts technologies, symbolic entities, fictional entities, groups, nations, works of art, possible beings, artificial entities, and many other entities besides as belonging to the domain of real being. Bhaskar's arguments for the reality of natural entities thus functions as a launching point for ontology, but is by no means exhaustive of the domain of real beings.

Consequently, second, the ontology defended in these pages will expand significantly on the ontology Bhaskar proposes in A Realist Theory of Science, going, I believe, well beyond what he proposes in his own ontology. Thus, while I am deeply indebted to the ontology Bhaskar proposes in A Realist Theory of Science, it should not be assumed that the ontology presupposed by onticology is identical to the ontology proposed by Bhaskar's transcendental realism. In what follows, there will be many points of overlap between these ontologies, and many points of divergence as well. My aim in this book is not to provide a commentary on Bhaskar's ontology, nor to remain true to his ontology, but rather to develop a post-humanist, realist theory of being capable of breaking with correlationism, that is nonetheless capable of integrating the most important and significant findings of the correlationists.

Bhaskar's defense of ontological realism begins with a very simple transcendental question: “...what must the world be like for science to be possible?” '’ In asking what the world must be like for science to be possible, Bhaskar is asking a transcendental question and deploying a transcendental mode of argumentation. The question here is not, “how do we have access to the world?” or, “how do we know the world?” but rather what must be presupposed about the nature of the world in order for our scientific practices to be possible. As Deleuze reminds us, the transcendental is not to be confused with the transcendent.'° The transcendent refers to that which is above or beyond something else. For example, God, if it exists, is perhaps transcendent to the world. The transcendental, by contrast, refers to that which is a condition for some other practice, form of cognition, or activity.

Thus, for example, perhaps speech requires language as its transcendental condition. Jf this is the case, then it would be because the condition under which it is possible for two people to communicate requires the existence of a shared code in the form of language. The conditions under which it is possible for me to speak to you would here lie in both of us sharing the same language, whether language be something minimal like gestures or something very complex like chains of signifiers capable of self-reflexively commenting on themselves. By contrast, the referent of speech would,

Chapter 1: Grounds For a Realist Ontology 43 perhaps, be transcendent to both language and speech. If the referent of speech is transcendent to speech, then this is because 1) we can speak about fictional entities that have no physical referent or, 2) we can speak of entities in their absence, and 3) we can speak of speech itself, transforming speech into an object. Too often questions of the transcendental have been confused with questions of the transcendent. The point, however, is that transcendental questions are questions about what renders a particular practice or activity possible. Transcendental questions are questions of what a particular practice requires to take place and refer to what is immanent to these practices.

Additionally it should be noted that transcendental questions are not foundationalist in character. Transcendental questions do not seek an absolutely secure and unassailable foundation for knowledge or practice, but merely ask, “given such and such a practice, what must be the case in order for this practice to be possible?” As such, transcendental inquiry sidesteps the epistemological project inaugurated by Descartes and so compellingly critiqued by Hume, by disavowing the project of seeking for an absolute foundation for knowledge.

Yet already, with Bhaskar's question, we sense that the air or atmosphere is very different. Bhaskar does not ask what the mind must be like for science to be possible, but rather what the world must be like for science to be possible. In framing the question of science in this way, Bhaskar shifts the transcendental question from the domain of epistemology to the domain of ontology. The world itself must be a particular way for science to be possible, not the mind. And if Bhaskar's deployment of transcendental argument is ironic as a defense of realism, it is for precisely this reason. For beginning with Kant, who first explicitly invented the transcendental model of argument, all subsequent models of transcendental argument have either traced the conditions of certain forms of practice back to mind or some variant of the social. Yet with Bhaskar we here have a thorough inversion of this mode of argumentation. The question is no longer, “what must the mind be like for X to be possible?” nor, “what must the social be like for X to be possible?” but rather, “what must the world be like for X to be possible?” And in this way Bhaskar already shifts transcendental philosophy out of its constraint to some form of transcendental idealism or anti-realism, and shifts it to the framework of transcendental realism. For in asking what the world must be like for science to be possible, we begin with the premise of a world apart from and independent of human beings.

Thus, elsewhere, in a gloss on the nature of transcendental argumentation, Bhaskar will write,

If philosophy is to be possible (and I want to contend

that it is in practice indispensable) then it must follow

the Kantian road. But in doing so it must both avoid any commitment to the content of specific theories and recognize the conditional nature of all its results. Moreover, it must reject two presuppositions which were central to Kant's own philosophical project, viz. that in any inquiry of the form ‘what must be the case for ¢ to be possible?’ the conclusion, X, would be a fact about us and that ọ must invariably stand for some universal operation of mind. That is to say, it must reject the idealist and individualist cast into which Kant pressed his own inquiries.”°

To this I would add that we must avoid the conclusion that any answer to the question, “what must be the case for @ to be possible?” must refer to society, language, or power. In effect, Bhaskar thus proposes a de-suturation of transcendental modes of argumentation from mind and the social. To suture is to tie, and in this respect all correlationism is a suture. The mark of any and every correlationism is a suture of being to the human in some form or another. Thus, a de-suturing would amount to an untying and systematic separation of the domains of being and thought, thereby undermining the reign of Protagoras in the modern era. Yet, nonetheless, as promising as this strategy of de-suturation sounds, we require compelling reasons to follow Bhaskar in this de-suturation of being and thought, or in this move directly from mind to world.

Bhaskar argues that the condition under which science is possible is the existence of what he calls “intransitive objects” which are real structures that exist independently of our minds and that are often “out of phase” with actual patterns of events.*! As Bhaskar articulates it,

Chapter 1: Grounds For a Realist Ontology 45

...the intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of them: they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are quite independent of us. They are not unknowable, because as a matter of fact quite a bit is known about them... But neither are they in any way dependent upon our knowledge, let alone perception, of them.?”

The claim that intransitive objects are invariant to our knowledge of them is not equivalent to the claim that intransitive objects are invariant. Rather, the point is that these objects would do what they do regardless of whether anyone knew about them or perceived them. The claim that intransitive objects can be “out of phase” with actual patterns of events is the claim that these intransitive objects can act or be dormant, thereby not producing certain events that they would produce in other settings or contexts.

So far we know what Bhaskar claims are the transcendental conditions of scientific practice, but we do not know why Bhaskar claims these are the transcendental conditions of science. Indeed, as it stands, it sounds as if he is dogmatically affirming the existence of mind-independent objects without providing any grounds as to why these objects must be presupposed by scientific practice. Here everything turns on Bhaskar's thesis that intransitive objects can be “out of phase” with actual patterns of events and the nature of experiment in scientific practice. “The intelligibility of experimental activity presupposes not just the intransitivity but the structured character of the objects investigated under experimental conditions”.?? But why is this so? According to Bhaskar,

...an experiment is necessary precisely to the extent that the pattern of events forthcoming under experimental conditions would not be forthcoming without it. Thus in an experiment we are a causal agent of the sequence of events, but not of the causal law which the sequence of events, because it has been produced under experimental conditions, enables us

to identify.”

To understand Bhaskar's point, it is necessary to compare his thesis here to that advocated by sense-data empiricism. “A causal law is analysed in empiricist ontology as a constant conjunction of events perceived (or perceptions)”.”? Borne out of foundationalist aspirations, the empiricist attempts to eradicate all unfounded ontological presuppositions by resolving to tarry with what is given in sensations alone. For example, for the empiricist there is no deeper fact independent of the sensations. I now regard a clementine with relish. This clementine just zs, for the sense-data empiricist, the sheen of orange and roundness I see before me, the fragrant citrus scent that fills my nostrils, the refreshing coolness I feel as I now touch it, and so on. What we call a clementine, for the empiricist, is a bundle of sensations that my mind has unified together through the operations of association. If, according to the empiricist, there is more to the clementine than these sensations afford me, if it has independent existence in its own right, then I can know nothing about it for I only ever have access to the object through these sensations. Therefore the empiricist, practicing a sort of critical vigilance, decides to cut the real independent object out of the discussion altogether as an unjustified metaphysical residue, restricting philosophical discussion to what is given in sensation alone.

When the empiricist arrives at discussions of causality, she thus has no recourse but to discuss claims about causality as claims about constant conjunctions of events or impressions. For the empiricist, a causal claim is no more nor less than a constant conjunction of sensations in experience. Above all, causal claims are not claims about powers that reside in objects, precisely because we have no access to these hidden powers. As Hume puts it, “[t]he bread which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities, was, at that time, endowed with such secret powers: But does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers?”*° What we are given is not the powers of the object—in this case bread—but rather a constant connection of sensations: the visual appearance of the bread followed by the sensations of our painful hunger being satiated. The causal relation is nothing but the mental association of these sensations in the order of time.

Chapter 1: Grounds For a Realist Ontology 47

We are now in a position to better appreciate Bhaskar's point. Were the empiricist thesis correct, there would be no point to the activity of experiment, for causal knowledge would be nothing but constant conjunctions of events presented in sensations. For the empiricist experiment must be unintelligible precisely because the idea of hidden or disguised powers of objects is banished by the empiricist reduction that resolves to treat being only in terms of what is present or given in sensations. Accordingly, elsewhere, in a moment of humor, Bhaskar will write that