lukesimcoe replied to your post: Onticology,...
At this point Luke, I would invite you to read the introduction to Democracy of Objects, which discusses more in depth why questions of ontology matter. Here is a little bit…
I feel like the response to anything I say about this stuff is always “but ontology is important, man…” I get this. It’s deduction; the first principles you establish can totally affect the horizons of possibility which can de deduced from them. Thus, it’s important that we try and get our first principles right. I take no issue with this whatsoever. My beef is more with how I’m seeing OOO being articulated by those who are engaging with it (my friends, and those that I observe on twitter), as if it’s some radically new thing that opposes and potentially supplants other things. In particular, I’m irked by the suggestion that the work of others is somehow incomplete or inaccurate if it doesn’t acknowledge or — more accurately, engage with — OOO’s conception of materiality. Engels was attempting to create an ontology/epistemology of capitalism, a concept that depends on human cognition (it may also depend on other “forces”, but only after it is acknowledged by humans; capitalism can exist without rocks, but ideologies can’t exist without people. In your terms, the human-capitalism [as ideology] alliance is a priori to all other alliances). Thus, it seems really pointless to critique him for relying on human cognition to theorize an object whose existence relies upon human cognition. I completely agree that a materialist approach can enhance our understanding of how an idea, or “object” like capitalism functions. However, it is only a compliment; it is not a standpoint from which to critique the work of those who seek to understand things that are necessarily anthropocentric processes. Doing so is akin to rewriting the rules of the game and then complaining that others aren’t following your rules.
First, as to the idea that studying capitalism requires human cognition: of course it does! The idea is just to not privilege in a ontological hierarchy human access to objects, which historical materialism does when it says that objects under capitalism are only commodities, whose substance has been shaped through morphogenetic processes that humans initiated, thus they exist only historically through time from human access = the chair becomes unindividuated substance without us. This is not an argument for some kind of human-less capitalism, rather just one that accepts that ontology rises out of the substance of objects (human, non-human), rather than historical processes interacting with substance through time.
Also: nobody said it was some kind of strident fundamental, earth shattering take-down for everything. OOO and whatnot are a big fucking deal to a lot of philosophers because it goes against everything that has been established for the last three-hundred years, as far as research and knowledge is concerned. To be quite honest, I have to agree with them. The conclusions that I’m going to draw from my research are going to be heavily influenced by the philosophical character of it - and I think it’s perfectly valid to take a very critical position of other research whose philosophical and methodological underpinnings I think are flawed.
Latour critiqued scientists on their positivist methodology because their method purported that the scientists existed in some kind of social vacuum where the conclusions they reached had no relationship to politics - that’s why he became very well known for his work’s focus on bringing politics back into the laboratory. Latour might have agreed that the conclusions reached by the scientists were valuable and accurate, but he wanted to show that their entire network of human and non-human actors were playing just as big a role as the closed experiments they ran in the conclusions that they were drawing. This was an interventionist philosophical and methodological project that needed an entirely new ontology to fully grasp.
Similarly, if I take issue with the reductive character that Marx and Engels treat objects in their ontology, it doesn’t mean that I disagree with everything they arrive at in terms of economic conclusions. The difference between, say, historical materialism and what Bryant is arguing for, which is a materialist transcendental realism, doesn’t appear that huge, yet the ways in which we approach things as philosophers and researchers can change dramatically with both. We might arrive at similar conclusions, but I still think it would be more methodologically sound through the latter. It’s one step deeper, and I think that one step is important.
Finally, as to the idea about rewriting rules, Marx began to do completely different work when he shifted his ontology to historical materialism from Hegelian absolute idealism. Marx respected the work of Hegel, but ultimately Marx’s new conception of reality and history meant that he did go back and say that Hegel got it wrong. Marx rewrote the rules for what research was: historical materialism meant for Marx that research was about praxis and the material conditions of human life. Suddenly he went from working on a philosophical opus to a book about economics.
