Levi jumps in

Levi has now jumped in IN RESPONSE TO ADRIAN IVAKHIV.

Not surprisingly, I agree with Levi’s views here… we tend to see eye to eye on these issues. Adrian will probably have an interesting response, but much as I always enjoy his thoughts, I stick to my view that the blogosphere is still not a good place for ongoing debates, and that’s why I suggested a “ceasefire.” Debates ought to take place in chunks, in my opinion, giving both parties space to sift out the points that are most essential to them and to refine and edit the points they wish to make. In the blogosphere, by contrast, there is a lot of pressure toward speed, and it’s also easy for people to lose their tempers (or to falsely appear as though they have, through an unfortunate stray word here and there). So, I’d rather argue this stuff out with Adrian in some other format.

But since Levi posted on the topic, I may as well link to it. He offers one especially intriguing thought experiment, though I should add one qualification to my acceptance of it. Levi:

“‘Is it possible for all objects in the universe to be somehow destroyed, such that only one object remains?’ If you hold that this final object would immediately puff out of existence with the destruction of all other objects, then you are an ontological relationist. If, by contrast, you hold that this Last Object would remain, even if very poor in qualities, then you have sided with the subtractive-object oriented ontologists.”

I’d design my own thought experiment somewhat differently. The reason is that I think every object is made of other objects, so by definition if you removed every other object from the universe than the “Last Object” also could not exist, and hence would disappear as well. I don’t allow for atomic objects in my model.

In other words, in this post Levi expresses my difference between domestic and foreign relations better than I’ve done so far, but his thought experiment wipes out both foreign and domestic relations, and I don’t think objects can exist without the latter. (For an explanation of how foreign/domestic differs from internal/external relations, see Levi’s post.)

What I need, in other words, is a thought experiment that keeps the domestic relations while annihilating all of the foreign ones. And I think that can be done simply by imagining an object that is composed of relations but not involved in any further ones in its own right. In fact, I hold that the world is riddled with millions of these, and I call them sleeping or (better yet) dormant objects. Adrian’s position obviously does not allow for dormant objects, and neither does Latour’s. But not only are they necessary, they are also highly interesting. I hold that the task of thinking is, in fact, to discover dormant objects in any area thought about.

Levi also discusses counterfactuals, and I am becoming more and more committed to a thesis that was initially tentative in my mind several years ago. When asked how OOO is different from Actor-Network-Theory, I am becoming increasingly convinced that the answer is this: ANT is not very strong in dealing with counterfactuals. The reason for this should be clear. Latour’s ontology allows for only a week sense of the difference between failures and nonentities. If Pasteur had messed up and not convinced people, for example, Latour’s ontology treats him almost the same as someone with no medical ideas at all. There is no room for “failed genius” in Latour’s ontology, because success in building networks is what counts. “Successful charlatan” is also not a category his ontology can deal with very well without adding lots of ad hoc corollaries.

My mastery of ANT literature in the social sciences is not especially great, and it’s possible that I’m unaware of some examples of counterfactuals in that literature. But I’ve always found over the years that ANT gravitates toward explaining faits accompli. It is a useful method for opening black boxes and showing how they came to be, but less useful (from what I’ve seen) in testing objects through various imaginary scenarios to consider what might happen. But of course, this is the closest thing philosophy has to the particle accelerator (analytic philosophers already use it quite well: better than we continentals do) and to adopt a method that closes off use of it has a destructive effect.