Matter and Object-Oriented Philosophy

It’s becoming increasingly clear that one of the main dividing lines emerging in speculative realism is between those who argue for an object-oriented position (Graham, Levi, and Latour being the exemplars), and those who argue that relationality is entirely on the side of ideality (Brassier and Laruelle). (Although, as I will show, this simple division is complicated by Graham’s own position.) Since the blog world has been on fire with object-oriented discussion lately, it’s perhaps worthwhile to approach things from the other side, if only to highlight some points of contention. (My own thoughts are murky on these issues; I’m not tied to any particular position, and in fact find myself intuitively dissatisfied by each in some significant way. While this is a great incentive to develop my own original contribution, I feel woefully inadequate to the task for now!) So what I want to offer instead is a Laruellean reading of recent object-oriented philosophy.

One of the crucial questions falls on the notion of difference. As Levi has stated, he has purposefully left difference unarticulated so as to be as inclusive as possible. A minimal ontological principle. Yet, for Laruelle, the key distinction between an idealist materialism and a real materialism lies precisely on the notion of difference. He asks, “how can we attain a concept of difference that would be real and genetic as well as a priori and transcendental without re-inscribing it once more, if not within the sphere of signification, at least within that of ideal sense, in the pure typos and topos of the Idea.” (“The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter”, 36)

The problem lies in the fact that “we will be reintroducing ideality … if we continue to say, as structuralism does, that ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’ are differential positions that are relative to one another, or if we continue to conflate, along with structuralism, Nietzsche, and idealism in general, Difference with a relation of reciprocal determination between two positions.” (35)

In becoming relative to each other, they refuse the absolute indifference of materiality to ideality. They refuse the ancestral separation of the absolute from the phenomenal. While object-oriented philosophy, to be sure, argues that it can account for object-object relations, the problem is that it may unwittingly be extending an idealist sense of relation into the properly objectal or materialist realm. Thus, “in the primacy of ‘relations’ (of production, of forces, of texts, of power) which we took to be materialism, […] there is only ever a transfer of difference in and as the Idea, a generalized meta-phor of multiplicity folded back onto the continuous, a radical modalization of thought, an ultimate primacy of ideality over the real, of Being over the entity.” (36)

This criticism is perhaps most pertinent to Levi’s position (and likely Latour, although I’m not in a position to say with any certainty). In particular, Levi articulates his Ontic Principle as the idea that “There is no difference that does not make a difference”, which is to say that every being both is and makes a difference. But what is difference if not a relation of some kind? And it is precisely the priority of relationality that Laruelle and Brassier find problematic.

Granted, Levi has stated that he has “purposefully left the phrase “there is no difference that does not make a difference” vague and underdetermined to allow the greatest possible scope or plurality of differences. [He does] not wish to formulate an ontology that predelineates or predetermines what sort of entities there are.” Yet, some understanding of the notion of difference implicated here is required in order to at least escape from the possible Laruellean criticism. In fact, this requirement already stems from his Principle of Irreduction – if every entity is a difference, how is Levi escaping from reducing everything into Difference?

And while Levi has articulated a concept of networks that avoids the problems of the typical structuralist, in one sense, it seems as though the crucial difference between the networks and structures – that the elements of networks are actors rather than empty placeholders or ‘vehicles’ – merely pushes the problem back. For while a network may no longer be defined solely in terms of its differential relations, the elements themselves are ‘act-ors’ that differ from themselves, something that again invokes a yet to be articulated concept of difference. Put simply, the risk here is that in treating every entity as difference-in-itself and differential in relation to others, matter becomes relative to ideality, and realism again gets cordoned off.

We can phrase the problem in another way, highlighting an agreement between Graham and Brassier. As Graham argues in a recent post, there are perhaps 3 primary ways to view the in-itself: as a monism where all is one (which brings in the problem of differentiation), as a world populated by independent objects (which brings in the problem of communication), or as a world populated by pre-individuals (which brings in a problem of how it avoids the other 2 positions). What Graham and Brassier perhaps both agree upon is the need to reject any form of relationalist monism (for different reasons, however).

What Laruelle offers in response is straightforward enough: “perhaps we should proceed otherwise and place the totality of relations, of their relations, on one side, that of ideality, and formulate the central thesis we wish to oppose to Marxism and well as Nietzscheanism thus: idealism and materialism are reciprocally relative, and both relative to or identical with the real – whilst the real is not relative to them or distinguishes itself absolutely from them.” (37) The parallel between Laruelle’s indifferent real and Graham’s subterranean objects seems clear – both recede from any relational system.

Where then, does object-oriented philosophy and non-philosophy differ?

The main difference, I believe, is between the considerations of individuation (and this also touches upon recent discussions of ‘counting’ in Badiou). Whereas Graham can still speak of unified objects at the level of tool-being, Brassier refuses all philosophical individuation, instead arguing for a pre-individual foreclosed to all manner of definition or predication. This is why, as the title of the post implies, one must recognize a fault line in speculative realism between those arguing for an object-oriented philosophy and those arguing for the privileging of matter (as opposed to ‘materialism’, as a philosophical concept of matter).

The reason for this primacy of matter is that “philosophy [requires a precondition] that is real without being empirically determinate [e.g. like an existent body of empirical science] and capable of assuming a transcendental function without becoming ideally transcendent [e.g. like Kant’s transcendental apperception].” (Alien Theory, 179) Matter here forms a real, immanent and materialist presupposition for the very possibility of thought and philosophy. But, crucially, we can state nothing about the Real – it resists predication or definition, which would always be to reincorporate the Real into a philosophical system. We can see this occurring with Latour and Levi, where the difference between the Real and philosophy becomes merely relative – the Real suddenly becomes dependent (even if not explicitly articulated as so) on philosophy, thereby reintroducing idealism. What is required is to accept the absolute indifference of the Real as the only way of securing a real transcendental foundation for philosophy.

The Real for Brassier, however, is not simply some undifferentiated monism. Rather, philosophy and objects provide us with the opportunity to think non-philosophically, and uncover the condition for any given object (in object-oriented philosophy’s expanded sense of objects). When we are given a particular object individuated by a particular conceptual schema, we can then use this instance as an ‘occasional cause’ for non-philosophical thought. This involves uncovering what Brassier will call a ‘non-rabbit’, or more generally, a xenotype – that is to say, an entity-without-unity. If all unity and individuation comes from some sort of conceptual schema (and I think this is debatable), then non-philosophical thought is what uncovers the pre-individual conditions for that singular object. Non-philosophy thinks “the indivisible immanence of the phenomenon ‘itself’ [which] remains commensurate with a radically heterogeneous and phenomenologically unencompassable manifold of potential modes of individuation” (Alien Theory, 188). Any particular manifestation of a xenotype is merely a single ‘fractalization’ (Laruelle’s phrase) of the ‘same-without-identity’ non-object. Thus, unlike Graham and his proliferation of withdrawn objects that require some means of communication between each other, Brassier will argue that the Real consists of entities-without-unity – xenotypes that ultimately are Identical-in-the-last-instance with the Real as inconsistent Identity. The difference, therefore, between object-oriented philosophy and non-philosophy lies in their approaches to individuation: whereas Graham argues for independent objects withdrawn from all relations, Brassier argues for a differentiated pre-individual real that is indifferent to any particular individuation.

Lastly, I want to relate these considerations to a recent post of mine on The Accursed Share, where I argued for the necessary separation of ontology and politics (contra much of continental philosophy). The basic point to be made against Latourian readings is that by making nature and culture, or politics and ontology (or any other fundamental dualism) relative to each other, or co-extensive, one invariably makes the Real dependent on some humanistic conceit. A truly realist ontology must eschew all such conceits and strive for the absolute indifference of the Real. This necessarily entails the separation of politics and ontology (this, I also believe, is an implicit argument against xenoeconomics where capitalism is presented as an inhuman presence.)

Now, as sdv comments on my other post, “The references in your note do appear to assume that the political is exhausted by quite traditional concepts of the political, the existence of states, parliamentary democracies and questions of human emancipation. But the political should not be restricted to these temporal concerns – because if we are as Serres suggest: responsible for everything, then our relations with everything and anything are by definition – always to be political. Equally if it is to be as Harman suggest “objects all the way down” then equally it must be “politics all the way down” – with the default assumption being that the political is immanent and not restricted to the human, just as being cannot be restricted to the human.”

My main problem with such a reading of ‘politics’ is that it seems to reduce the concept down so much as to be meaningless – what would politics be without humans? Why even call such a thing politics? Moreover, the risk is that, even on a inhuman level, we reintroduce teleological notions of what to work towards (e.g. vitalism’s claim that we should expand ‘life’) that are foreign to realism. In that vein, one of the great benefits of Nihil Unbound is to show the pure indifference of reality to both life in general and humans in particular. To be clear, I am not stating that we, as humans, can’t take up some political relation to a realist ontology – merely that the study of ontology is necessarily independent of any political concerns. Our relations can always be political, but they need not be reciprocated by ontology. Realism is indifferent to the relations we take up to it.