Entropy and Self-Organization on the Table Top [Emergence]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue: 1) on general principle, and 2)  because I was going to include some of this material in a paper that goes up on 3 Quarks Daily, but then I decided not to use it. So here it goes. Moreover (3), it's a good antidote to the all too frequent and casual use of the concept of "emergence," which more often than not is used as a sophisticated synonym for "magic." We don't really know what's going on so we'll call it emergence. Well, in this case, the appearance of convection cells, we know what's happening:

The tumbler was sitting on a window sill during the morning and mid-day on a sunny day. Sunlight came through the window and heated the water, just a bit. But the black carbon particles in the ink absorbed energy faster than the water molecules, making them warmer than the water in which they were immersed. That’s what supported the formation of those convection cells, which began dissipating within an hour after they had formed. No violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can download this discussion as a PDF from this link.

With a Note on What to do When You are Fascinated by Technical Concepts but Lack the Math: Call the Plumber!

Matter is not given. In the present-day view it has to be constructed out of a more fundamental concept in terms of quantum fields. In this construction of matter, thermodynamic concepts (irreversibility, entropy) have a role to play. 

–Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 1984

I’ve been thinking a lot about entropy lately.

It is, of course, one of the foundational concepts of modern thought, haunting our dreams with the prospect of the universe grinding to a halt in heat death, but also animating our hope of understanding how life arose in the universe. In a Latourian context one might even speculate that entropy is the concept that, more than any other (except perhaps biological evolution, with which it has become richly intertwined), gives the lie to the Modern’s conceit that they are here and nature is somewhere over there, separated from one another by a sharp line of clear and distinct ideas. For the concept of entropy, unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, has arisen from deep within the world of classical physics.

According to the Wikipedia the term was coined in 1865 by Rudolf Clausius, but the work leading to the concept originated earlier in the century with the research of Lazare Carnot, a mathematician whose

1803 paper Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Movement proposed that in any machine the accelerations and shocks of the moving parts represent losses of moment of activity. In other words, in any natural process there exists an inherent tendency towards the dissipation of useful energy. Building on this work, in 1824 Lazare's son Sadi Carnot published Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire which posited that in all heat-engines whenever "caloric", or what is now known as heat, falls through a temperature difference, work or motive power can be produced from the actions of the "fall of caloric" between a hot and cold body.

There you have it, the machine, a mechanical device with moving parts. We have Newtonian mechanics with its three laws of motion and the grand suggestion that the universe works like a clock, a vast device of many parts all ticking away in perfect order, except when they don’t. And there’s La Mettrie’s 1748 treatise, Man a Machine.

Oh! how easy our intellectual life would have become if only the universe were nothing but a clock and we but little tick-tocks within it.

But it is not, nor are we. The mechanistic vision ground to a halt in the analysis of fire and we became but especially clever monkeys through Darwin’s elucidation of a pattern he traced though the geological, paleontological, botanical and zoological records.

Chasing Molecules

Though my interest in entropy is long-standing, my recent thoughts have been occasioned by various and numerous remarks the philosopher Levi Bryant has made at Larval Subjects, his blog. The post Entropy and Me is a representative example. Or, consider this passage from his book, The Democracy of Objects (pp. 227-228):

Entropy refers to the degree of disorder within a system. Suppose you have a tightly closed glass box and somehow introduce a gas into it. During the initial phases following the introduction of the gas into the system, the gas will be characterized by a high degree of order or a low degree of entropy. This is so because the particles of gas will be localized in one or the other region of the box. However, as time passes, the degree of disorder and entropy within the system will increase as the gas becomes evenly distributed throughout the box. In this respect, entropy is a measure of probability. If the earlier phases of the gas distribution indicate a lower degree of entropy than the later stages, then this is because in the earlier phases there is a lower degree of probability that the gas will be localized in any one place in the box. As time passes, the probability of finding gas particles located evenly throughout the box increases and we subsequently conclude that the degree of entropy has increased.

This seemed a bit, well, “off” to me. For one thing Bryant doesn’t say just how the gas gets introduced into the box. Surely he doesn’t mean that it gets magically whisked there through a Star Trekkian transporter. But what DOES he mean?

Well, he probably meant something like poking a small hole somewhere in the box and letting the air rush in. So that’s what I did. Not physically, of course, as I have no convenient source of high-vacuum boxes, but in my imagination.

I began imagining lots and lots of tiny tiny air molecules going in through the hole. Does that first cohort march in formation like a highly trained marching band or drill team, or do they twist and tumble every which way, pushed by the molecules behind them, and those behind them, and so forth? How fast do they move? Who’s the first to make it to the other side? And how do you measure their positions?

It seemed reasonable to think, as Bryant more or less stated (except, remember, he said nothing about a hole), that they’d be bunched up near the hole at the beginning and that, at the end, they’d be scattered evenly throughout the box. But how’d they get from one state to the other? Getting from New Jersey to New York is easy, there’s the Holland Tunnel, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and so forth. But the kind of states we’re talking about aren’t geographical regions and moving from one to the other is not like getting in a car, turning the key (or pushing the button) and driving away.

And, by the way, just what does “evenly” mean? It might mean that they’re at the vertices of a cubic lattice, or some other regular structure, but I suspect that that’s not what Bryant meant. If not THAT, though, then just what? Perhaps he was, in his imagination, dividing the box into lots of tiny cubes. We then count the number of molecules in each cube. It doesn’t matter just where they are in the cube, just so they’re inside it. Some place. And when we’ve done our count we find that there’s approximately the same number in each imaginary cube.

Now we’re getting somewhere, says I to myself, we’re making progress.

But no, we’re not, we’re just getting deeper and deeper into the quicksand. What’s the size of our imaginary cubes? Does it matter? And those molecules, they’re moving, right, always moving. Since we can’t possibly examine all these imaginary cubes at one time, but have to look at one after another, how do we keep those molecules inside their proper imaginary cubes? And, since the little critters are identical to one another, how can we be sure that some of them aren’t sneaking about from cube to cube just to mess up our count?

Now, you might say, this is all nonsense, this stuff about imaginary cubes and pesky molecules who are unwilling to sit still for the count. Well, yes, you’re right, it’s nonsense in a way. But, if Bryant’s talk about order and probability is to have any substantive meaning, then we really do have to have some way of locating and counting those molecules. We need some way of taking measurements and my imaginings, some of them anyhow, are aimed at the informal notion of evenness. If we're going to measure it, well, what does it mean? Without measurements we’re just talking gibberish.

Still, it’s clear that something isn’t working. My thinking was at an impasse, that’s clear. I’m in over my head. What to do?

Call the Plumber

My plumber is Tim Perper. Though he’s not a plumber, he’s not even a physicist. He was trained as a molecular biologist and geneticist, worked in industry for a bit, worked in academia for a bit, and then decided that he was really more interested in human courtship than in complex molecules. So he spent a couple years hanging out in bars, night clubs, church socials and such and wrote down what he saw people doing—all courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation. He wrote that work up in a book, Sex Signals (1985), that work and, of course, a lot more, including Ovid and Durkheim.

Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches

Bumping to the top to mark the profusion of creativity pouring out of machine learning and deep learning. We're heading into the 4th Arena!

 

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You can download a PDF of the main exposition of my pluralist metaphysics from my online  repositories:

• SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2197108
• Academia.edu:  https://www.academia.edu/4066568/Living_with_Abundance_in_a_Pluralist_Cosmos_Some_Metaphysical_Sketches

The PDF, of course, includes the introduction which I published here a few days ago: From Literary Criticism to Pluralist Metaphysics, an Introduction. You can also download PDF's of secondary documents. I've listed the currently available ones after the eight propositions in the main document.

Eight Propositions in a Pluralist Metaphysics

This main exposition sketchs a pluralist metaphysical system variously inspired by the ideas of Bruno Latour, Paul Feyerabend, Graham Harman, J. J. Gibson and William James.

1. Objects: Individual entities of many different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos.

2. Abundance: These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by the sum of all possible relations.

3. Realms of Being: In the large objects exist in patterns of relatively stable interactions among multiple objects. These are relations of indirect or vicarious causality. Analytically, we need to separate the roles from the entities that assume them. This is the core of what will become a distinction between culture and society.

4. Unity of Being: Humans desire the ability to access and reflect on memories of events in one’s life. The extent that that is achieved is called Unity of Being.

5. Life Way: A Latourian collective, with human and non-human members, is considered to participate in all the Realms in which any member of the collective plays a role. The ‘envelope’ of those Realms is called a Life Way.

6. Latourian Negotiation: Collectives having different Life Ways have been interacting through a process of negotiation in which differences among Life Ways are resolved and commonalities created or not depending on the desire to extend the boundaries of the larger more inclusive collective. The outcome cannot be predicted or foreseen.

7. Realms of Abundance: Realms of Being are organized into Realms of Abundance, of which three have appeared to far: Matter, Life, and Culture.

8. The Fourth Arena: The current global Latourian negotiation brings us to the edge of a fourth Arena of Abundance. If it goes well, that’s where our successors will dwell.

Pluralism Papers

Literary Criticism 21: Academic Literary Study in a Pluralist World

Abstract: At the most abstract philosophical level the cosmos is best conceptualized as containing various Realms of Being interacting with one another. Each Realm contains a broad class of objects sharing the same general body of processes and laws. In such a conception the human world consists of many different Realms of Being, with more emerging as human cultures become more sophisticated and internally differentiated. Common Sense knowledge forms one Realm while Literary experience is another. Being immersed in a literary work is not at all the same as going about one's daily life. Formal Literary Criticism is yet another Realm, distinct from both Common Sense and Literary Experience. Literary Criticism is in the process of differentiating into two different Realms, that of Ethical Criticism, concerned with matters of value, and that of Naturalist Criticism, concerned with the objective study of psychological, social, and historical processes. Note: Most, but not all, of the pieces in this document are in the main pluralist exposition. There is a introduction specific to this set of documents and a four-part 'program' for literary studies.

Harman’s Tables and Abundance

Abstract: By substituting Paul Feyerabend’s rhetoric of abundance for Graham Harman’s rhetoric of withdrawal one can establish the basis for pluralist ontology organized around Realms of Being. This paper traces the steps by which I made that substitution. The crucial step involved J.J. Gibson’s account of how one can determine whether or not one is perceiving real objects: Real objects yield more information upon further scrutiny; imaginary objects do not.

Reading Latour: Reassembling the Social

Abstract: Notes on Bruno Latour, Reassembling: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, with some consideration of compositionism. These ideas are developed with ideas and concepts from cognitive science, literary studies, music, and extensive examples from the world of contemporary graffiti.

Ontological Cognition

Ontological cognition is about the cognitive apparatus we use to organize the world into different kinds of things according to their powers and capacities: animal, vegetable, mineral; living, non-living; human, non-human; etc. As such it differs from the philosophical discipline of ontology, which is about the world itself, not our thoughts about the world. As ontological cognition snakes through many disciplines these reflections run from Wittgenstein through literature and the Great Chain of Being to computation and knowledge representation (KR).

Reading with Graham

Abstract: Graham Harman has proposed a counter-factual literary criticism based on his object-oriented ontology. I argue: 1) that this proposed practical criticism collapses into the existing process of literary culture and is therefore empty, 2) that it implies a Platonic conception of the literary text, 3) that it follows from a rejection of Lévi-Strauss’s empirical work on myth that dates back to the mid-1970s and 4) that that rejection defended an intentionalist conception of the text, rather than a mechanistic one. As a counter-proposal I examine Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale using a method inspired by Lévi-Strauss, arguing that the differences between the plots of these two texts can be attributed to different cultural constructions of the family.

Vitalism

Abstract: The contemporary conception of mere matter that we have from quantum mechanics is so very different from that available to Descartes and so many others that the distinction between living and non-living that they in part founded on the distinction must be re-thought. The purpose of such a rethinking is not to assert that difference between a rock and an acorn, for example, is not so great as it once was. In this new dispensation they are still very different kinds of things, but the whole conceptual world in which that difference is inscribed and traced is itself a new and by no means complete one.

I plan to issue three more sets of supporting documents, one on the explicit construction of spirits (directed at Jane Bennett), a miscellaneous set of posts, and one collecting some of my criticisms of Levi Bryant.

Ontology in Play

Levi Bryant has a recent post in which he acknowledges two senses of “ontology.” Thus “On the one hand, an ontology is a group or persons set of beliefs as to what is.” Yes. In this sense ontology is a category of thinking. However, as Bryant notes, that is not what philosophers mean by ontology: “On the other hand, an ontology is a theory about what is. It is making a claim that something exists. This is where the rubber hits the road.”

Ontology in the first sense, ontological thinking, has been under investigation in the cognitive sciences for the last three or four decades. I have a good many posts on that subject under the heading “ontological cognition.” But what about ontological thoughts AS thoughts? What kind of reality are we going to admit for those thoughts as thoughts? Do those thoughts not have some kind of real existences?

THAT’s the kind of thing I was grappling with in talking about realms of being in my own pluralist speculations. At this point, though, keeping track of what’s going on is very difficult. Something’s got to collapse.

It’s clear to me, however, that Bryant hasn’t caught up to cognitive science in his conceptualization of mental processes. It’s one thing to point out that we have ontological thoughts; it’s quite something else to objectify those thoughts and study how they work.

What Bryant Knows about Mary, Sorta: More on Color and Consciousness

The Bryant I have in mind is, of course, Levi Bryant, who has come in for severe criticism on this blog. And Mary, of course, is the fictional Mary invented by the philosopher Frank Jackson and much beloved by philosophers of mind (discussed, for example, HERE). As you may recall, she's an expert in the neuroscience and physics of color but is, alas, herself colorblind. Being an expert she knows everything there is to know about color. Then she gets an operation and is able to see the redness of the rose and the greenness of grass for the very first time. Now, so the story goes, she knows something she didn't know before.

Since she knew all the physical facts back in her color-blind days, it follows that whatever it is that her new-found consciousness has supplied cannot be physical. Hence consciousness is not physical, not even in the rarified way of electrochemical processes in nervous systems.

Something like that.

Bryant is doubtful:

Jackson’s thought experiment has generated a tremendous amount of controversy (and a huge literature), and it seems to me, at least, that it is deeply problematic and almost sophistical.  Whenever I reflect on the thought experiment, I feel as if a trick has been played on me, that there is some sort of fundamental confusion at work here.

I understand the feeling. I felt the same way, and still do. And, as far as I can tell, something like that seems to be the general feeling among philosophers, as most of them are interested in figuring out just what it is that went wrong (see this review article by Martine Nida-Rümelin).

On the Matter of Vitalism

This brief working paper is available for download on my SSRN page.

Introduction: The Old Dead Matter Ain’t What It Used to Be

These three short posts take as their starting point some observations that Levi Bryant made about Jane Bennett’s vitalism as set forth in Vibrant Matter. At the time I wrote them I was not at all anticipating the work that has occupied me in the last half year, elaborating a pluralist metaphysics on a skeletal core of ideas from object-oriented ontology. But the key position in that elaboration is evident in these three pieces.

That key notion, as I’ve now stated many times, is that, where Harman employs a rhetoric of privation and thinks of objects as withdrawing, I use a rhetoric of plenitude and think of objects as wells of abundance. THAT’s what was driving me in this passage from the third of these pieces:

I note as well that the terms of this discussion have now moved away from the terms in which Levi Bryant posed his original criticism of Bennett. Instead of self-organization [Bryant] vs. vitalism [Bennett] I’m talking about: 1) “weird” matter, and 2) various kinds of properties of objects, specifically, classically mechanical, chaotically mechanical, and 3) possibly unspecified others. My bias in this is that there ARE other classes of properties and that, with careful analysis, it should be possible to identify some of those classes.

That objects not only have many properties, but many classes of properties, that is what I mean by objects as wells of abundance. I made the distinction between classical properties and chaotic properties in the second of these pieces, and made it in computational terms.

In the first piece I made a point that I take from Bennett, namely that the contemporary conception of mere matter that we have from quantum mechanics is so very different from that available to Descartes and so many others that the distinction between living and non-living that they in part founded on the distinction must be re-thought. The purpose of such a rethinking is not to assert that difference between a rock and an acorn, for example, is not so great as it once was. In this new dispensation they are still very different kinds of things, but the whole conceptual world in which that difference is inscribed and traced is itself a new and by no means complete one.

It’s all in play and up for grabs. It’s a new world, one of which we have yet to take the measure.

Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos

With my old machine dead and the data not yet transferred to my new machine, I’ve been having to make do without my files. So I can’t yet produce the promised PDF of the main argument in my pluralist series. Since I want to get that out there I’ve decided to post the introduction to the blog, as I normally do, and simply link the component posts at the end. I’ll produce the PDF when I can.

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From Literary Criticism to Pluralist Metaphysics, an Introduction

To the extent that I’ve got a home discipline, it is literary criticism. Consequently, though I DO know better, I tend to think of philosophy as a hand-maiden to literary criticism. That’s where this introduction begins, with literary criticism, which has provided the problems that, once again, led me to philosophy. After indicating how philosophy has pointed a way out of those problems I turn to philosophy itself. I conclude by discussing the order of posts in this document as a whole.

The Road to Xanadu, as it were

The posts I’ve collected at the end of this post resulted from a decision I made some time in the first half of 2011: Let’s look into this object-oriented ontology business. But why had I made THAT wacky decision? After all, as I’ve explained in a series of posts about Lévi-Strauss, I’d abandoned that intellectual tradition early in my career when I’d decided that this new-fangled cognitive science seemed more promising for my particular critical interests. Why return to Continental philosophy, the tradition I’d abandoned?

It certainly WASN’T because I’d decided that I’d made a mistake. Oh careerwise, yes, a mistake. Intellectually, not at all. 

The problem I was tracking was a rhetorical one. My work on literature, and now film, differed from 1) traditional humanist work, 2) post-structuralist, new historical, and various identity theories, all of which rolls up into capital-Tee Theory, and 3) from the work that more recent literary scholars, working independently of me, have done in cognitive criticism. That’s a lot of difference!

The chief differences are two: 1) to practice what I now call naturalist criticism one must abandon, or at least bracket, the search for textual meaning, and 2) while naturalist criticism aspires to, well, everything! the single most important task on the critical horizon is description, we’ve got to get much better descriptive control of our texts. Given that the post-philological discipline of academic criticism is built on the search for textual meaning that first difference would seem to be something of a showstopper, no? But in truth, my goal was not so much to convince literary critics to follow me, but simply to assure them that I am not the enemy. Still even for that more limited purpose, that I’m willing to forgo meaning seems a bit, well, dangerous. Who knows what craziness might follow from that?

As for description, no one objects to it, everyone does it, but it’s not glamorous. There’s an old formula that says aesthetic criticism begins with description, and then moves to analysis, interpretation, and, finally, evaluation. Academic critics have tossed evaluation out the door, though we have smuggled it in through the basement in the guise of ideological and political critique, while concentrating our attention on interpretation. Description is simply taken for granted. How could I possibly be doing anything at all worthwhile if I regard description as something that is rigorous, demanding, and deserving of our most serious attention.

So, in bracketing meaning I mark myself as an enemy, more or less. And in championing description I mark myself as simple-minded and unimaginative. Those are rather considerable rhetorical hurdles to jump.

Now I suppose that in some vague way I was hoping that I could cloak the appearance of being a simple-minded wolf with the razzle-dazzle of an object-oriented sheepskin. But there’s no direct way one can pursue such a disguise. Directly, what I was after was 1) an ethical and aesthetic complement to my work and 2) a somewhat different way of rationalizing that work.

By the time the great ethics scandal broke in the middle of 2012 I’d pretty much decided that object-oriented ontology (OOO) was a bust on both counts. On the second matter, rationalization, object-oriented ontology fails me because it’s not about objects in a sense useful to me, which is akin to what Franco Moretti is pursuing in distant reading. The purpose of “distance” is to allow the critic to treat the text as an object, “out there.” That’s what I do. And I do it because such objectification allows one to see fascinating and, yes, even beautiful and elegant patterns that are rendered invisible through the pursuit of meaning. Describing those patterns is a task worthy of any serious intellectual. Latour understands the importance of description, but these, his fellow-traveling disciples seem oblivious to that side of his work.

Bryant Watch: Serres on Science and Philosophy

Levi Bryant quotes from Michael Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (p. 14)

Either science must develop its own intrinsic epistemology, in which case it is a question of science and not of epistemology, or else it’s a matter of external annotation– at best redundant and useless, at worst a commentary or even publicity.  

And (p. 29):

Epistemology requires one to learn science in order to commentate it badly, or worse, in order to recopy it.  Scientists themselves are better able to reflect on their material than the best epistemologists in the world– or at least more inventively.  

He further notes that "All these things are still seen everywhere today." OK. So why does he so  consistently "commentate it badly, or worse, in order to recopy it"? Is it because he summarizes science in the name of ontology and he feels he can get it wrong and it won't matter?

Bryant Watch: Digging Out, But We Need New Tools

Levi Bryant's singing another variation on the tune "Critique is Over." Sounds like he's digging himself out of a hole, perhaps one of those holes of perpetual withdrawal.

This, of course, is good.

The point is that today we need to find the will to believe a little, to affirm a little, and to commit a little.

One object at a time?

Only where we abandon our foundationalist, obsessional assumptions, our desire to have the truth before we pursue the truth, our intoxication with epistemology, will we be able to move beyond this paralysis.

How about abandoning the idea that the interpretive mode is the only mode of thought a humanist needs? It's all well and good to abandon critique, but without a richer and more robust conceputal tool kit, the affirmative conceptual structures will become tangled in their own verbal complexities. And that will lead to calls for another round of critique to clean up the mess.

No, critique isn't the problem. It's a sympton of the problem. The problem is trying to get too much conceptual mileage out of nothing more than verbal constructs. As I argue in this report on undergraduate education in the human sciences, we need to learn the USE of structural tools from linguists, mathematicians and software engineers and the USE of statistical tools from social and behavioral scientists.

Pluralism in Review: The Eightfold Way

While this is not the last post in my pluralism series—for I have to write an introduction to the collected series—it’s the last substantive post. While I do not introduce any new conceptions, I do make some adjustments here and there. First I take a look at the relationship between philosophy and the other disciplines: What’s philosophy doing that they are not and cannot?

Then I review the entire system by hanging it on eight key propositions. I started that with the two propositions I adopted from Harman, to which I subsequently added two more. I’ve now thought through the entire discussion and decided that it boils down to eight propositions, including those initial two.

That analysis and reduction, that’s serious work, but at this stage it is also provisional. Asserting that these eight (or five or ten) ideas are the ones that matter, that’s a good way to focus one’s thinking. And an enterprise like this needs focus or it will fall apart. But it is also provisional, for the work has just begun.

Finally, I offer a few concluding remarks on what I see the next steps to be, next steps which I will not, however, be taking any time soon.

Philosophy Among the Disciplines

Let’s go back to where I began in From Objects to Pluralism, with a passage from Harman’s interview at ASK/TELL:

...the reason to focus on objects rather than on “language, social change, sexuality or animals” is because philosophy is obliged to be global in scope. If philosophy were to give one of these other entities a starring role, it would have to reduce the rest of the universe to them. “Language is the root of everything.” Here, you are choosing one specific kind of entity to be the root of all others, and there is no basis for this. Sociology tends to view all reality in terms of its emergence from human societies and belief-systems. Psychology treats all reality as made up primarily of mental phenomena. Physics deals with tiny physical objects and says that everything is made out of them, except that physics is useless when trying to explain things like metaphors, the Italian Renaissance, the meaning of dreams, and so forth.

All these other disciplines focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world. Only philosophy can be a general theory of objects, describing Symbolist poetry and the interaction of cartoon characters just as easily as the slamming together of two comets in distant space.

As I said in that post I had two reactions to this post, and they are related.

My immediate reaction was to be skeptical of the claim that Harmon and his intellectual companions had anything particularly interesting to say about cartoon characters. Why’d I think that? Because I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking a writing about cartoon characters over the last several years and that work included descriptive work of a kind that’s not at all characteristic of these object-oriented philosophers. That is, I was in my mind claiming specialized expertise on the topic of cartoon characters and it wasn’t at all obvious that these philosophers had anything particularly interesting to say about them. It the very least, I’d not then read them as saying interesting about cartoon characters and that hasn’t changed since then, though I now know, as I didn’t then, that Latour seems to have been the one to put Popeye into the repertoire of standard examples.

And THAT perhaps ungenerous little quibble is but an instance of the larger issue, which is that of the relationship between philosophy and “all these other disciplines,” the ones that “focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world.” Of course, in the last half of that statement Harman is doing a bit of careless editorializing—this is, after all, an interview, not a formal publication. Not all those other disciplines claim their particular objects of interest to be the root of all else in the world. Some may—physicists likely—but most do not.

The Galloway Affair 2: None left standing and kudos to Bryant

Galloway has posted something of a rejoinder to his critics: The Secondary Correlation — Further Thoughts on the Realism Kerfuffle. At the very end he offers an olive branch:

Let me add, and I think I speak for everyone involved, that this debate has gone on for too long. It’s lead to a lot of bad blood. I’m friends with some of the SR/OOO cohort, and I’d like to keep it that way. This article only appeared now due to the slow timeline of academic publishing. I’m on the record and I’m willing to defend my position. But I’m also interested in moving on to think about other things.

The comments did not, alas, go well for him. Even Adam Kotsko, no friend of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism (Galloway’s targets, remember?) though perhaps not quite an enemy, admitted after having read Galloway’s article and much of the criticism:

I have to say that his claim that math has “entered history” in some totally new way in post-Fordism such that it “no longer” can be ahistorical is simply baffling... Overall, I think people were right to react negatively.

John Holbo, no friend of contemporary Continental thought, weighed in from the analytic tradition:

This argument puns on ‘correlation’. Anti-correlationists are against correlation in a narrow, technical sense. (Quoting M. from the paper itself: “By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” For better or worse, and setting aside any differences amongst anti-correlationists, that’s a narrow-bore technical sense.) It clearly does not follow, then, that anti-correlationisms are conceptually committed to the preclusion or prevention of any and all correlations, even in the loosest (‘looks like’) sense. They don’t have to be opposed to things ‘looking like’ other things. Anti-correlation isn’t omni-anti-analogism. So, specifically, a realist anti-correlationism isn’t committed to the result that there shall be nothing analogous to realist anti-correlationism besides it itself. So the objection fails, I think.

In short, argument by correlation (argument by analogy) is not automatically appropriate, merely because the topic is correlation.

To which Galloway himself agreed: “point taken.”

Bryant Watch: A NEW Levi, a NEW Theory, I Say Piffle!

With a first draft due in January, Bryant’s just posted an update on his onto-cartography project.

He tells us this is going to be “a very different conceptual universe than the one found [in Democracy of Objects] (though building on that universe).” This is, of course, one of his characteristic rhetorical gestures, one he generally deploys with respect to Marxism, Lacan, critique, semiotics, the kitchen sink, and all the rest. He’s an all-inclusive theorist, always advancing, but never leaving anything behind. Why, he’s so all-inclusive he even includes his own past work.

Can’t beat that with a stick!

Then he tells us how his mind works—and, BTW, just what other contemporary philosopher is so generous as to give us a glimpse into the workings of his mind? “I draw things together that are disparate, working by a method of ‘pastiche’ and ‘collage’, because this is how I think and also because I believe that this is how being itself unfolds.” So, he’s got a mind like Being, which means that whatever comes out of it must be true because it’s from Being Itself.

Then comes the biggie:

Second, there is an ontological point being made here. Following on Harman’s point that all objects are withdrawn from one another such that every object “distorts” and “caricatures” other objects, it follows that every theoretical articulation– itself a machine or object –caricatures beings. As Harman argues in Guerrilla Metaphysics, the best we can do is allude to objects. This needs to be reflected in the style of theory. Theory must perpetually change its style, it’s mode of articulation, to underline the point that no theory– as is the case with all thought, discourse, perception, and relations between objects –ever manages to represent being. Shifts in styles and vocabulary mark the withdrawn nature of objects or machines and perpetually remind us that machines are “operationally closed and selectively open” to other objects.

So after reminding us that he moves forward by including everything from the past, he informs us, that, nonetheless, he’s always changing because that’s how Being is. Always withdrawing, can’t keep up.

Breathless.

Bryant Watch: Egocentric R’ We, Repressive Desublimation, Toil and Trouble

Before I get to egocentricity—which I use in Piaget’s sense of the term—I want to look at Bryant’s post on his current comment policy:

Some of you have been complaining about your comments not being posted. My comment policy is simple: if your comments are rude, sarcastic, snarky, accusational, or insulting they don’t get posted. It has nothing to do with not tolerating disagreement. If you poke around the blog you’ll find plenty of disagreements, often very heated. It has everything to do with incivility.

Bollocks!—which, of course, is the kind of rude incivility Bryant forbids at his site.

He’s right about disagreement, there’s lots of it in his comments. But it’s disagreement within a carefully circumscribed orbit. While Bryant has a right, as does any thinker, to insist that criticism be informed and germane, so much of what he says is sloppy, incoherent, and flat out wrong that his post is self-serving nonsense, especially where Bryant accuses his critics of being boys and “masculinist, ape-like, asshole[s].”

Now to the interesting stuff.

Egocentricity in the Piagetian Sense

Yesterday Bryant had a post on networks, a subject I know something about. It’s incoherent and incompetent. But it’s also egocentric, and that’s what interests me.

When Piaget talks of the child being egocentric he isn’t asserting that the child is selfish, not at all. He’s saying that the child is a prisoner of his her own point of view. She can’t see the world as others do and so, in communicating with others, fails to take their viewpoint into account.

In this sense egocentricity is not an all or nothing affair. It comes in layers and varieties. As the child matures she sheds egocentricity after egocentricity. But even as adults most of us are egocentric in the sense of being ethnocentric; we look at the world from the standpoint of our own culture but are (relatively) blind to other cultures. Moving beyond egocentricity is not a matter of will or good intentions. It’s a matter of learning.

Bryant Watch: Narcissists ‘R Us

He’s got it bad, self-pitying Weltschmerz, and that’s not good, not good at all. He comes out fighting, after all, it’s not HIS problem, ‘cause Levi’s seen the light! Levi’s seen the light. It’s those damned Continentals:

The central failure of Continental philosophy has been the rejection of naturalism. With few exceptions, Continental thought, since the 19th century, disavowed the naturalistic revolution that began in the 16th century. Rather than choosing nature– which is to say materiality and efficient causation –as the ground of being, again and again it has made obscurantist gestures based on a recoil to the naturalist revolution: subject or lived experience as the ground of being (phenomenology), spirit as ground of being (Hegel), economics as ground of being (Marx), signifier as ground of being (structuralism and post-structuralism), power as a ground of being (Foucault), history as a ground of being (Gadamer), text as a ground of being, ect. We even get romantic visions of nature evoking the will to power and élan vital.

In Freudian terms, these are so many responses to the narcisstic wound of nature and materiality. It is not the subject, lived experience, history, intentionality, the signifier, text, or power that explains nature, that explains nature, it is nature and materiality that explains all of these things.

Nonsense. Utter Rubbish.

Where he says “Continental philosophy” read “Levi Bryant.” Why? No one held a gun to Bryant’s head when he decided to get a degree in Continental philosophy. He chose to do so of his own free will. If Continental philosophy is indeed guilty of worshipping those false intellectual idols—and I’m by no means convinced it is, not all of them, not so simply—then those are the idols Bryant chose to worship when he signed up for the program.

Bryant Watch: Philosophy meets the Borg

Bryant’s recent post, Ethico-Politico Weariness, has been getting raves. I can see why. Yet it’s oh so very personal: “I find myself . . . I reflect . . . I grow so tired . . . I’m divided . . .” So forget yourself and walk away already. Get outa the damn bottle! Just do it.

All this talk is just a way of flying around in the bottle and showing off your latest moves. Still, after milking this cri de cœur for all he can, Bryant does get down to business:

One wonders who these things are all for as they never seem to enter the broader social world and it is rare to encounter an academic who has a real political engagement beyond attending the occasional protest or writing the occasional open letter. In these dark and cynical moments, I find myself thinking that politics is what came to fill the void opened by the collapse of theology. Where the humanities used to be organized around theology and knowledge of God and advancement of his glory, the humanities encountered a void in the movement towards secularization.

Maybe Bryant should continue exploring that territory rather than making up a metaphysics that won’t fly, which alas, is my real topic for this post.

What do you mean “alas”?

Well, I keep asking myself why I bother to critique his thinking. Why don’t I just let him alone—‘cause he’s certainly not going to pay any attention to me—and go on about my business.

Good questions, what about it?

Well, I’ve been thinking on that, every time I post one of these. And I’m beginning to see why I do it. And it’s not primarily in the vain hope that I’ll have some influence on Bryant. He’s going to do what he’s going to do and that’s that. But someone’s got to point out that His Imperial Majesty is dancing around on the head of a pin without any clothes, nor any angels either.

Bryant Watch: Relations, Oy!

Bryant’s taken up the topic of relations:

The real issue is not whether or not whether or not it is possible to move beyond correlationism or whether being can only ever be thought in relation to thought and whether thought can only ever be thought in relation to being, but rather whether or not relations are internal or external.

Followed by over eighteen-hundred words of philosophical weaving and unweaving, plus some pictures. Look at the pictures.

His commenters are variously skeptical. thodgman:

Why must relations be either internal or external – in either case, *where* do they exist? This seems to imply they are material, but I’m not sure what matter they would be made of, or why this would not mean relations are not also objects. At the same time speaking of relations in this way feels very abstract to me. How would we have a concept of relations without having observed a variety of associations of objects, and having built through induction a variety of types of relations?

Yes, very abstract. And, yes, we have no choice but to observe “a variety of associations of objects.” Is that the job of philosophy, or of many specialized disciplines? Is Bryant unwittingly committed to a Theory of Everything? Perhaps a division of intellectual labor is called for.

From Objects to Pluralism

This is a somewhat revised version of the essay which I originally posted on July 18, 2012. I have revised it to take account of Levi Bryant's recent work on onto-cartography and to incorporate Graham Harman's notion of vicarious or indirect causality. To do this I expanded the section, Patterns of Relations Among Objects, and added a new section, Indirect Cause and Realms of Being. The rest of the essay remains the same.

* * * * *

. . . we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher, but to take example from our two recent speeches. The single general form which they postulated was irrationality; next on the analogy of a single natural body with its pairs of like-named members, right arm or leg, as we say, and left, they conceived of madness as a single objective form existing in human beings. Wherefore the first speech divided off a part on the left, and continued to make divisions . . .  

–Plato, Phaedrus (265e-266a)

Having hazarded that pluralism is the Next Big Thing I now feel some obligation to clarify what I mean by pluralism. As it’s object-oriented philosophy that brought me to this dance, I’ll use it as a vehicle for so doing.

First, using a passage from a Graham Harman interview, I raise the question of the relationship between philosophy and the more specialized disciplines. I then continue with Harman in a section where, in effect, I ask: What can we build with objects and relations alone? By way of illustration I bring up the case of knowledge representation in the cognitive sciences, where complex conceptual systems are constructed from just that, objects and relations.

Then I take an excursion into the work of Levi Bryant, whose concept of regimes of attraction indicates the existence of relatively stable patterns of relationships over large collections of objects. I then go into full tap dance mode, suggesting that we can construct Realms of Being from that notion plus Harman's conception of indirect causation. Realms of Being, that the world consists of many different ever evolving Realms, THAT’s what I mean by pluralism. Given that, the task of metaphysics is to figure out what those Realms are and how they’re interlinked.

I conclude with some more general remarks.

A General Theory of Objects?

As a way of setting the stage, consider the following passage from Graham Harman’s interview at ASK/TELL:

. . . the reason to focus on objects rather than on “language, social change, sexuality or animals” is because philosophy is obliged to be global in scope. If philosophy were to give one of these other entities a starring role, it would have to reduce the rest of the universe to them. “Language is the root of everything.” Here, you are choosing one specific kind of entity to be the root of all others, and there is no basis for this. Sociology tends to view all reality in terms of its emergence from human societies and belief-systems. Psychology treats all reality as made up primarily of mental phenomena. Physics deals with tiny physical objects and says that everything is made out of them, except that physics is useless when trying to explain things like metaphors, the Italian Renaissance, the meaning of dreams, and so forth.

All these other disciplines focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world. Only philosophy can be a general theory of objects, describing Symbolist poetry and the interaction of cartoon characters just as easily as the slamming together of two comets in distant space.

My immediate and quite spontaneous reaction to that was a less than charitable: And just what can philosophy tell me about cartoon characters? I asked that question in my capacity as someone who has a specialized interest in cartoons and so has spent hours upon hours going through cartoons scene by scene, shot by shot, and even frame by frame, trying to figure out how these things work. It would be too much to expect a philosopher to look at cartoons in such detail.

But just what WOULD I expect of a philosopher? I don’t need a philosopher to tell me that Popeye is, in some sense, real. I know that already, that’s why I care about them and study them. Nor do I need a philosopher to tell me about the difference between the real object on paper or in celluloid and the image in someone’s mind. That’s been around for a long time. I don’t see that philosophy has anything new and interesting to say about that.

But then, just what does philosophy have to offer the other specialized disciplines? Do they have need of Harman’s “general theory of objects”? I have my doubts. Does ANYONE, other than philosophers, have need of a general theory of objects? If the answer to that question is “no” does that mean that such a theory has no use?

Bryant Watch: Art as Making

A poem should not mean

But be. 

—Archibald McLeish

Someone, please, tell Bryant the Philosopher King Manqué that he needs to read Ernst Gombrich.

NOW!

He’s about to deliver a paper, "Towards a Machine-Oriented Aesthetics: On the Power of Art," in which he argues against the idea that art works express something and thus demand a criticism in search of meaning. Rather, art works ARE something and so demand a criticism that “is not so much about the work, as about activating the work as a machine with reference to the present.” I can live with that, sorta’. What bothers me is that he seems to think this conception of art is new or, if not new—for nothing’s ever completely new, is it?—at least it’s such an underappreciated and underdeveloped idea that he need not cite any precedent.

Bollocks!

The idea is old, and has been developed with considerable sophistication by Ernst Gombrich in his magisterial study, Art and Illusion (1960). Bryant’s ignorance of this work would be one thing if Gombrich had been an obscurantist provincial scholar laboring in, say, a community college in the Texas hinterlands. Alas, that is not the case. He labored in London, was arguably the most prominent art historian of the 20th Century, was certainly one of the most important theorists, and was noted for the clarity of his writing. A scholar who writes on this topic without mentioning Gombrich might as well write about phenomenology without mentioning Husserl or  Heidegger.

* * * * *

Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects

Once I began investigating Object-Oriented Ontology it didn’t take long to bump up against that claim that fictions too are real. At first I found that claim disconcerting, but then I got used to it. I had been reading OOOist thought through the standard notion that the real world is one thing, and fiction is quite different. Against THAT claim the OOO notion IS disconcerting.

But only superficially so. For the belief that fictions are different from ‘reality’ does not entail a belief that fictions do not have consequences in the ‘real world.’ Not at all. That fiction has real consequences is not in doubt, and that’s all the OOOists are claiming. More or less.

That fictional objects have real consequences. That is to say, they are real objects, good and proper.

But is that so? Are they philosophically proper objects?

Is Popeye Autonomous?

Consider Popeye, who seems to have become OOO’s paradigmatic example of a fictional object that is real. There’s nothing particularly problematic about any of the physical images of him, whether in print media or movie. They’re all real objects. And, while the psychological and neural processes that take place in the minds of people reading Popeye comics or watching Popeye cartoons are not well understood, they are not, as processes, any more obscure than those involving reading about George W. Bush or watching film and video clips of him.

What’s tricky is the fictional being that is conjured out of all those still and moving images through all those mental and neural processes in all those individual heads. As I understand them, the objects under investigation in OOO must be autonomous objects. The physical images, yes, they are autonomous objects. And the neurochemical brain processes, they too are autonomous—or are they? But that fictional being, that Popeye, is not autonomous in that sense. He is utterly dependent on all those people being aware of him.

And so we arrive at a problem I stated in From Objects to Pluralism and simply set aside, that of object autonomy. In that post I was worried about acorns and oaks: “…in what sense can an oak tree be autonomous if its very existence is dependent upon a proper environment?” Now I’m worried about fictional beings and their dependence on minds that construct them out of promptings from some material substrate.

This time I have a suggestion to make, but only a suggestion, one which I’ll elaborate in a later post. My suggestion is this: What matters about (real) objects is that they be sources of abundance. That a given object may depend on some substrate is no problem if the object absorbs and reconfigures the substrate in a new and open-ended way, as acorns and oaks do with the nutrition on which they depend.

And so, I submit, is the case with at least some fictional objects, the Real ones. But I want to take a look at some remarks by Harman before outlining an argument on that. He seems to have an other notion.

Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism

When I set out to investigate Object-Oriented Ontology a year and a half ago I had several things vaguely in mind: 1) the possibility that Continental philosophy was waking up from its dogmatic dreams of dalliance and devastation, 2) some help in conceptualizing graffiti as a manifestation of the spirit of the place, and 3) some help in framing some questions about literature and literary criticism. Let’s set the first two aside and take up the third.

I take the following three propositions to be true:

1) The meaning of literary texts is indeterminate.

2) There is, however, something quite precise about texts; I take that to be form.

3) The form of texts can be effectively described in that, presupposing agreement on method, different can come to agreement about formal attributes of a text.

As a practical matter, literary criticism has taken the first as a truism. Every critic gets to “roll their own” meaning for a text; all that one has to do is provide a reasonable justification within some accepted interpretive scheme. Beyond this tacit and informal practice, some critics have explicitly argued for indeterminate meaning while others have argued for determinate meaning, often making the author the source of that meaning.

OOO as Interpretive Scheme

Object-oriented ontology can easily serve as an interpretive scheme, providing of course, that it can justify itself as a philosophical regime. That is, primary justification comes in basic philosophical terms, not in the application to literature. From my point of view, this is neither here nor there. The addition of one more interpretive engine to the critic’s tool kit is of relatively little consequence if, like me, you want to do something other than, beyond, reading texts.

Harman, however, has made some remarks that point toward the possibility of non-reductive readings, readings that don’t bypass the “surface” of the text in haste to find the “hidden” meanings, which I’ve discussed in Explicating Literature in Light of Object-Oriented Ontology. But those remarks are only pointers. It’s not clear to me how they might open up into full-blown explications. And, in any event, an explication is, in the end, an explication is a reading, and I’m chasing different unicorns.

Nor, it seems to me, does OOO have anything special to say about textual indeterminacy. Levi Bryant, to be sure, has declared that texts are factories, in a usage from Deleuze and Guattari. As far as I can tell, Bryant has nothing particularly interesting to say about how it is that texts do this, just that they obviously do so. All Bryant has to offer is old wine in new bottles or, as Terrence Blake puts is, tautological reformulation.

Bryant Watch: Throw Him a Fish

Critiquing Levi Bryant is like shooting fish in a barrel, a very large barrel with an unbounded supply of fish. One could become addicted and so be lost to an endless, and ultimately fruitless, Sisyphean task. Still, I can't resist his most recent post, McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction? (4 Aug 2012).

While the whole post clocks in at well over 2000 words I've decided to limit my observations to the final sentence, more or less. Here it is: "I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me." In case you didn't believe it the first time, here it is again: "I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me."

What the Fuck!%&@!!#!

As you know the United States Department of Homeland Security was formed in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and is charged "with the primary responsibilities of protecting the United States of America and U.S. Territories (including Protectorates) from and responding to terrorist attacks, man-made accidents, and natural disasters."

So Levi Bryant, Official Jester to the Court of Philosopher Queens–no sexist he, philosopher kings are so old school–is telling us that there is something in that post that merits the attention of the government agency charged with protecting the United States from terrorist attack. If Bryant has any serious intention to commit an act or acts of terrorism it would be self-destructively stupid to 1) post it on the internet in a public blog, and 2) to double-dog dare DHS to come get him. On the other hand, if he has no such intention, then his statement is pure self-pleasuring bluster, bombast, and bloviation.

You be the judge.