#onticology

[chaosloon]

Graham Harman’s universe is a universe populated by circuses and clowns, vampires, unnamed monsters, fire and cotton, and a host of other frightening and delightful carnivalesque entities that erupt across his pages like so many apparitions that simultaneously withdraw and capture us with their inherent fascination and allure.

Levi R. Bryant in The Democracy of Objects (2011), referring primarily to Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus (2010).

[chaosloon]

Humans are among beings and are beings among being, they aren’t at the center of being, nor are they the necessary condition for being.

Levi R. Bryant in The Democracy of Objects (2011: 130)

[whentherewerebicycles]

just another example of how amazingly weird and awesome ooo is

"Viewed through this lens, it is equally valid to say that cows exploited human desires for fat, compelling us to clear forests and protect them from predators, enhancing their reproductive possibilities. But domestication doesn’t end here. It is not simply that cows domesticated us in the sense of leading us to develop a set of practices such as raising cows and clearing forests so they would have more grazing land. No, the conspiracy of cows against humanity go far deeper. It is likely that cows also introduced extreme selective pressure on human populations dependent on cows for food, weeding out those members of our species that couldn’t tolerate high-beef diets and selecting for those that could. It’s likely that in many human populations cows changed our very genetics. As Scu has argued, we are addicted to meat. This addiction, in part, was carefully cultivated by cows themselves. Note well, I am not saying this is good or that this morally justifies our ugly and ecological destructive treatment of livestock. I am saying that there are a variety of different teleologies involved in the evolution of cows. Some involved human aims. Others involved nonhumans such as chickens, cows, pigs, lamb, etc. The same could equally be argued for various grasses such as wheat, as well as a variety of other plants upon which we’re deeply dependent. And, I would argue, the same would be true of technologies, social groups, and texts [...]  There will never be a society composed just of humans because humans always dwell among a variety of different agencies including humans but also including all sorts of nonhumans. These nonhumans are never just wax for human intentions, but introduce all sorts of differences of their own that are irreducible to human intentions."

-Levi Bryant, "The Materialism of Onticology"

[sterwood-blog]

I’ve been away from this blog for a while because basically I’m sick of all of you, a bit disgusted with humanity and academics at the moment, and have been busy as hell (more the third thing than the other two).

Levi Bryant really gets me.

[dropouthangoutspaceout]

As I argued in an earlier post, all my materialism commits me to is the thesis that if something exists, it is material.  That’s it.  It doesn’t commit me to the thesis of reductionism or that the smallest units of matter are the really real things of the world.  H2O is a real entity in the world and while it cannot exist without hydrogen and oxygen, we have to observe H2O itself to discover what it’s powers are.  Signifying systems are, for me, real material beings in the world that have to be studied in their own terms.  While signifying systems can’t exist without electro-neural-chemical systems, we would learn next to nothing about a particular signifying system by studying neurology.  At most, we would learn about certain constraints on signifying systems by studying neurology, not how a particular signifying system is itself structured.  This is because neurological systems exist at a different level of scale and are composed of different types of elements.  Someone will say “but signifying systems are not like rocks!”, and they would be right.  But hurricanes aren’t like rocks either and no one doubts that they’re material phenomena.  Or maybe they do.  It would be peculiar if they did.

[dropouthangoutspaceout]

I want to have my social constructivism and have my realism too. In fact, I want to go so far in my realism that I even count social constructions as real. They are all too real for those who live with their negative effects and like an ecosystem they regulate the possibilities of lives, our ability to respond to pressing problems like climate change, and the lives of countless nonhuman beings. However, recognizing that a theoretical framework is limited and that more theoretical work needs to be done broaching different domains of analysis does not leave the original theory unchanged.

Levi Bryant - Social Constructivism Again: What SR Means to Me

[dropouthangoutspaceout]

Deeply indebted to Hume, no doubt, and his theory of the body as a system of habits, the point was that far from being unchanging, are “natures” are “built” or “formed” by the socio-historical milieu in which we develop.  They are “constructed”.  Of course, the moment that these immanently sensible demonstrations– and they were demonstrations –were made, the phallusophers came along and mucked everything up.  Suddenly a debate about whether or not human “natures” are eternal and unchanging or whether they’re formed through a social milieu became a debate about whether beings are “real” or whether beings are “unreal”.  To say something is or that it is “natural” was treated as saying that it is “real”, while to say that something is “constructed” was treated as saying that it was “unreal”.  In the meantime, the phallusophers completely divorced the debate from the concreteness of the issues out of which it arose– gender identities, “racial” identities, practices and ways of doing things –and instead made it a thoroughly abstract debate about whether or not one is a “realist” (i.e., someone who thinks there are real things “out there”) or an “anti-realist” (someone who thinks that everything is just an invention of the imagination out of mind, language, power, etc).  Things were thoroughly muddled from the get-go as the concrete sociological, ethnographic, and political issues were abandoned for a nice Fox News for/against debate.  And here, I cannot but hasten to add, that I’ve been extremely disappointed to see some of my speculative realist comrades advancing debate in precisely these terms…  As if points about development were entirely irrelevant.  Way to go White Male Philosophers!  I can hear the cries now, because I’ve heard them over the last few years, “fuck you very much, new realists!”  Like Dawkins in last year’s dust-up about the treatment of women in the secular-atheist community, too many speculative realists have completely managed to miss the point of the realist/constructivism debate, turning it into an abstract issue that ignores the genesis of forms of life.  What’s worse, is that rather than integrating these critiques and learning from them, too many SR’s have dug in their heels, insisted on keeping the debate abstract (ignoring points about the reality of development and context), and have been haughtily dismissive of these issues.  Hmmmm, what a wonderful realist perspective (one would imagine that realism would imply empiricism and a desire “to go to the things themselves”).

[dropouthangoutspaceout]

The point of this broader orientation– which I share –that includes nonhumans is not to reject the methodologies of the humanists and their concerns (laws, norms, beliefs, ideology, signifiers, contracts, etc.) but to broaden the field of political engagement, intervention, and analysis. The thesis is that not all social and political problems are problems of beliefs, law, ideology, etc. If we’re trying, for example, to understand the shift from Catholicism as the only reigning form of Christianity during the Middle Ages (and the Orthodox church as well!), to the Protestant Reformation and explosion of Christianities, we’ll find many interesting things at the level of belief that might have motivated this transformation, but would nonetheless be remiss in ignoring the role of the black plague in eroding confidence in the Church. These microbes were agencies in the formation of subsequent assemblages. If we ignore the fact that people living in northern Alaska have limited access to technologies such as the internet, markets, etc., we’ll give a highly distorted analysis of why they live as they do, presenting the rather uncharitable account of why their social assemblages have developed as they have (e.g., suggesting that such people are primitives). Once we include nonhumans in our social and political thought we both arrive at more nuanced understandings of why social assemblages are as they are (cartography), but also broaden our means of political intervention. Just as it makes little sense to debunk an alcoholics beliefs to get them to stop drinking when they are addicted, it makes little sense to solely rely on debunking people’s beliefs about the environment to get them to live more sustainably when material alternatives are not available to these people. Recognizing that people might be entangled in “sticky material networks” or regimes of attraction gives us the opportunity to set about undoing these networks (deconstruction) and providing other material alternatives (composition).

Levi Bryant - Musings on Onticology and Politics II

THIS. Thisthisthisthisthisthis