Levi on OOO

LEVI WITH A GOOD ONE defending my position against Mike Watson (and by the way, I correspond with Watson sometimes and we get along just fine).

There are numerous striking formulations in this post, and I’m in agreement with nearly all of it. I especially like his point that OOO gets it from all sides: both from the social constructionists and from the science-lovers. As I’ve said before, the point is not that “if you’re attacked you must be doing something right,” because plenty of positions deserve to be attacked for reasons of low merit. The point is that “if you’re attacked simultaneously for opposite reasons” then you must be doing something right. Though here I can’t claim to be in an original position, because the double simultaneous attacks I receive are really just the same ones that Bruno Latour always receives: “he’s another vapid French relativist!”; “no, he’s a reactionary realist!”

There is only one point in Levi’s post that I see differently myself. He writes:

“Given that the history of philosophy has been dominated, since modernity, by the nature/culture divide, the divide between subjectivity and objectivity, the divide between facts and values, the divide between the physical world and the subjective world, etc., all it seems to me that the positions of Meillassoux, Brassier, and Grant are doing is choosing the nature side of these binaries.”

In other words, according to my undermining/overmining schema for classifying various rejections of objects as the root of all philosophy, Levi reads the other three Speculative Realists as underminers. And I would disagree with that reading. My view instead is this (never tried to classify it this way until now, but this really is what I mean):

*Grant is the “underminer,” as expressed in my Bristol talk. You’ll be able to read Grant’s interesting response to my claims in The Speculative Turn. As I recall, he contests my identification of his problem with Bruno’s but he does admit that “productive power” in his position is different from the “substantial forms” (I.e., individual things) in my position.

*Meillassoux is the “overminer.” What many people still aren’t getting, and I myself didn’t quite grasp initially, is that Meillassoux is in a sense pro-correlationist, unlike the rest of us. For Meillassoux, the argument that “if you try to think a tree outside thought, you are thinking it, and it is thereby a tree inside thought” is a compelling fact for all philosophy. The attempt to get outside this circle is, for him, merely a dazzling rhetorical move or appeal to a “rich elsewhere” (he finds Latour guilty of this, and by implication me too). Read his Goldsmiths piece in Collapse, and you will find him defending Fichte. Now, Iain Grant would rather eat moon-rock than defend Fichte, while neither Brassier nor I would defend Fichte’s position either. Meillassoux really stands in the Badiou/Zizek/Lacan cluster, admires Hegel more than anyone else, and is not really a classic “realist.” Meillassoux simply wants to radicalize the human/world correlate into a form of absolute knowledge.

*Brassier is the one who both undermines and overmines simultaneously. (This is generally true of positions of a materialist inclination, and though Brassier would now deny being a materialist, his instincts are those of a materialist.) In other words, Brassier expends much energy mocking the sorts of fictional objects that are allowed a place in the sun in positions such as Latour’s, mine, and Levi’s. But once you get down to the non-fictional realities that cannot be mocked in his view, what are they? There’s nothing independently real about them at all. They are perfectly graspable by scientific knowledge. His recent sympathies with so-called “structural realism” indicate that he thinks mathematical structures are the bona fide reality, and with this we return to an “overmining” position more of Meillassoux’s or Badiou’s sort.

In other words, I wouldn’t say that Meillassoux returns to the “nature” side of the nature/culture divide any more than Badiou does, and in Brassier’s case the situation is slightly more complicated.

OOO could be simplified to the formula “Husserl + Heidegger + Latour”, and it is clear that none of the other original Speculative Realists are especially interested in any of those three figures. And neither is present-day continental philosophy as a whole. Much of the self-image of present avant-garde trends comes from their violent rejection of phenomenological currents, and Latour still really isn’t on many people’s philosophical radars (hence the need for Prince of Networks).

What Levi’s posts of recent days have allowed me to conceptualize fully for the first time is the extent to which my position really is the oddball of the four original Speculative Realist positions. It’s certainly the most out of step with what is going on philosophically in 2009, and it’s true that I tend to keep a polite distance from discussions that are so dominated by Deleuze, Badiou, Lacan, and the themes of pre-eminent interest to them and their followers. (I was in much the same position during the earlier Derrida/Foucault hegemony, though I was a student then and my own position was not as developed as it is now.)