another interesting Levi post

Here he is, with A NEW POST RESPONDING TO THE COMMENTERS on his previous post.

I really liked Levi’s earlier post (the one that was citing Jared Diamond), and hope no one will be offended if I say that I found the discussion in the comments section a bit disappointing. A number of people wrote in to say essentially: “Diamond is a pop historian who has been unmasked by experts who know more than he does.”

But the point of Levi’s post was not to valorize Jared Diamond (whose book is a good read anyway). Remember, Levi’s real history hero (like DeLanda’s) is Fernand Braudel. Levi was citing Diamond simply because he happened to be reading Guns, Germs, and Steel these days as bedtime reading. And the passages he cited were relevant (naturally, I have no objection to specialists finding fault with them, because that’s their job).

The real point of Levi’s earlier post was twofold:

1. There are thinkers who take inanimate actors seriously and thinkers who don’t. I thought his lists of the two different types were pretty good.

2. Even if you take this approach to history, it’s not yet an OOO approach, but only “one third” of an OOO approach. The withdrawal of objects outside their networks is a primary OOO tenet that has to be incorporated as well. (Levi also adds that signs need to be taken seriously as objects, and they certainly do, but I’m not sure if that really needs to be a separate third category. I can imagine Latour in principle pulling off an adequate analysis of signs even if no one is satisfied so far. But I can’t possibly imagine him doing justice to withdrawn objects, since that notion is forbidden from the outset in his thinking.)

In his new post, Levi quotes from someone named Yant, who says this:

“One way of approaching the, I think, quite legitimate reservations that Johan raises is to recognise (and this should be quite obvious really) that just because we’ve got a noun for something doesn’t mean we should take it to be an object!”

I’m not sure if that remark is aimed at OOO or at claims that Jared Diamond is an object-oriented author. If it’s aimed at OOO, then it’s a false charge. The whole point of OOO is that it’s not language or any other sort of human feature that decides what is an object and what is not. At most, nouns would match up with sensual objects, not with real ones. But again, it’s hard to tell where Yant was aiming with that remark. Not all objects are equally real in OOO, or at least not in my variant of it. There are two kinds: real objects and sensual objects (the latter are not real; they do not exist outside of encounters with real objects).

One other point by Yant, whoever (s)he may be:

“I study international relations and it is of the utmost importance to the theory of this discipline whether one accepts the state and thus the international system to be closed, black-boxed ‘objects’ (as the dominant, mainstream neo-positivist theories hold) or whether it is actually necessary to insist on opening up this black-box and actually denying it closure (both for ontological and ethical reasons). Similar concerns are routinely raised about Diamond’s histories and I think an OOO driven social science needs to address these problems as problems head on not just accuse critics of correlationism.”

I think that depends on what the critics are saying. If they’re trying to say that the world is just a neutral stuff shaped by humans (whether explicitly or implicitly) or if they claim human and world shape each other but never talk about world-world relations (the latter is still the case with Foucault) then I do think they can be accused of correlationism. Naturally, social science is concerned with humans and so is unlikely to have to face “head on” what OOO already does face head on: the fact that human-world relations need to be treated as just a subspecies of any sort of relations at all.

But if, as Yant seems to be saying, the critics are simply asking: “is the entity you’re talking about truly a unified entity, or is it just the artifact of a specific noun that you are using?” then sure, that’s always a good question on a case-by-case basis. I would accuse the critic of correlationism only if they say that unified objects are always nothing but artifacts of human-created nouns. Plenty of ink has already been spilled in the OOO camp on this issue.

The less explored issue, if this is what Yant means, is the methodological one of how to distinguish “in the field,” so to speak, between real and merely nominal objects for the practical purposes of specific sciences. That’s a fairly open question.

But I do want to object to the increasing frequency of the straw man that “you can’t just dismiss your opponents by calling them correlationists.” If indeed someone is a correlationist (and many, many people are; it’s the dominant standpoint of our time) then it’s usually a pretty gigantic problem with their whole position that infects much else of what they say. Hence, assuming that the charge of “correlationism” is justified in a particular case, then it’s usually more than enough to do accurate and devastating critical work.

That principle can be abused, of course. For instance, one could say “Husserl is just another correlationist.” And he’s a correlationst all right, but not just one. There’s a lot more going on in Husserl than that.

I guess I wish the reaction to Levi’s Diamond post had been less about Jared Diamond and more about the provocative claim that even these sorts of histories are only “one third right.” That was the really exciting aspect of his post, I thought.