Annotations ¶
Although Barad calls her philosophy “agential realism,” there is nothing realist about it, since she grants reality no autonomy from the human mind, or at least not from human practices.
Therealism: there is a reality outside of our perceptiomns
My definition of “materialism” is as a form of realism that rejects any entity that transcends the material world. The
The only thing that matters is matter itself
Giordano Bruno was probably the last philosopher as funny as Žižek, and before that maybe Diogenes the Cynic
Materialism has become a terme d’art which has little to do with anything material. Materialism has come to mean simply that something is historical, socially constructed, involves cultural practices, and is contingent … We wonder where the materialism in materialism is” (Bryant 2014: 2).
The substantial forms were exterminated by Descartes, of course, since he wanted to treat physical realities solely in terms of tangible properties such as position and movement. But they have taken on new life in the work of later thinkers who treat the background conditions of things as more important than their explicitly visible content. Heidegger is an obvious example, though the media theory of Marshall McLuhan would be another (McLuhan & McLuhan 1988; Harman 2013b).
This stems from Braver’s recognition of the numerous variants of realist and anti-realist doctrines that one might defend. He lists these as six pairs, abbreviated from R1 through R6 for the realist theses and A1 through A6 for the anti-realist ones. They go roughly as follows:
R1/A1The world is not/is dependent on the mind.
R2/A2Truth is/is not correspondence.
R3/A3There is/is not one true, complete description of how the world is.
R4/A4Any statement is/is not necessarily either true or untrue.
R5/A5Knowledge is/is not passive with respect to what it knows.
R6/A6The human subject does/does not have a fixed character.
For ease of reference let’s present the original list again, together with the extra theses we appended to it:
R1/A1The world is not/is dependent on the mind.
R2/A2Truth is/is not correspondence.
R3/A3There is/is not one true, complete description of how the world is.
R4/A4Any statement is/is not necessarily either true or untrue.
R5/A5Knowledge is/is not passive with respect to what it knows.
R6/A6The human subject does/does not have a fixed character.
R7/A7The relation of the human subject with the world is not/is a privileged relation for philosophy.
R8/A8The world is not/is a holistic entity in which everything is inextricably related.
R9/A9Subjective experience is not/is linguistically structured.
I agree that objects cannot be reduced to a bundle of properties but I do not think that the extra ingredient needed to ensure “objecthood” is a singular essence. Rather, it is the genealogical links of the present object with the past object (all the way to its historical birth) as well as the current interactions between its component parts, interactions that act as maintenance mechanisms for its identity. In other words, we need mechanisms (or processes) not just to explain the first emergence of this cat (the embryological processes that unfolded a fertilized cat egg into a baby cat) but also homeostatic mechanisms to explain the fact that Whiskers here is not reducible to disembodied properties. Both of these mechanisms must be discovered a posteriori (neither will yield its secrets to thought alone.)
Yet, I must admit that getting rid of general essences is harder than it seems: it does not involve only the adoption of an ontological stance, but a detailed case-by-case replacement, involving the specification of both genetic and maintenance processes, and there is no general recipe to perform this substitution. All reified generalities (not just the Cat in general, but also the State, the Market, Power, Resistance, Labor, Capital) must be replaced, but this must be laboriously done one case at a time.
There are two basic ways to get rid of objects in philosophy: reducing them downward to their pieces, or reducing them upward to their effects. This isn’t so surprising, since these are also the two basic forms of knowledge: if someone asks us what something is, we will answer by telling them either what it’s made of, what it does, or both.
The pre-Socratics are the great underminers in Western philosophy: everything is water, everything is air, everything is atoms, everything is apeiron. Mid- and large-sized things are just aggregates of these more basic elements. Overmining is more of a modern and contemporary gesture: there are no objects, but only events, language, power, relations, effects. “Why be a naive realist and posit real objects hidden behind these events, language, power, relations, or effects?” Since both these positions are so extreme, they usually come in a mutually parasitic pair. For example, one version of scientific materialism would say that everything can be explained by its constituent particles (undermining) and also that these particles can be exhaustively known in mathematical terms (overmining)
It’s a great way to annihilate individual objects in two directions at once. A few years ago I stole the term “duomining” to describe this operation, which is practically ubiquitous in Western philosophy and science. It comes from the credit card industry, where it refers to the practice of data-mining and text-mining a person simultaneously to exhaust all possible consumer information about them (Harman 2013a).
To use an expression favored by the realist philosopher Mario Bunge (1979), explaining emergence does not explain emergence away.
Nancy Cartwright, one of my favorite philosophers of science, wrote a book called How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983) to make this point: math models are strictly speaking true only of ideal phenomena, as well as of laboratory phenomena that have been specifically designed to approximate the idealizations, such as a real gas that has been deliberately rarefied so that its density approaches the infinitely low density of an ideal gas. Now, while there is nothing wrong with idealization, there is something very wrong with reifying the properties of ideal phenomena. Hence the need for realist philosophers to determine the ontological implications of mathematics.
My way of combating macro-reductionism in social studies is to show that between the micro-level of persons and the macro-level of a country as a whole, there is an entire meso-level of social entities of intermediate scale: just above persons (and composed of them) are communities and institutional organizations (hospitals, universities, bureaucracies, prisons, corporations). Several of these can form even larger entities, as when several working-class communities form a coalition and become a social justice movement, or when several organizations (some executive, some judicial, some legislative) form a government. Several more levels can be added to the meso-scale before we reach the level of a country: cities, urban regions, provinces. Each of these intermediate entities has a certain autonomy and all are independent of the content of our minds. We may have wrong conceptions of what communities, organizations, or cities are, but that has no bearing on their ontological status.
In my ontology, it is crucial that there is only a single level for all actual objects. All of them are historically individuated entities: individual atoms, individual bacteria, individual animals and plants, individual persons, individual communities, individual organizations, individual cities. The only difference between them is at what scale they exist. The part-to-whole relation generates differently scaled individual objects, but they all belong to one and the same ontological level
accept Michel Serres’s point that jargon has a healthier function in science (where it uses fewer words to say more) than in the humanities and the social sciences (where it uses more words to say less) (Serres & Latour 1995).
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