individualism in Circus Philosophicus

Levi has an interesting post up about the holism/individualism question in OOO. And I agree with most of it.

However, there’s also this part:

“Here, I think– and I sincerely hope Harman’s won’t be upset with me for raising this point and will take it in the spirit it’s written –there are occasions in which Graham doesn’t do himself any favors. In chapter two of Circus Philosophicus Harman recounts his political differences with his lost love Olympia. Olympia is of a Marxist bent, seeing things like crime as a product of social relations. Graham, by contrast, sees crime as arising out of the individual sans context. Graham concludes this discussion with the remark that “[o]ur debates on this point were always respectful [debates over Simondon, Deleuze, the great Greek philosophers, etc], unlike our running dispute on the origins of crime, which then– if not now –I ascribed to the inherent taint in the criminal soul” (15). As I read a remark like this I inwardly cringe, hearing in my head the holist declare

‘Ah ha! The gig is up! We now see what we suspected all along! We now see the political consequences we always believed followed from Harman’s ontological positions! It is the individual alone that is responsible for what he is and what the individual is has nothing to do with the circumstances in which the individual finds himself. Were we to confront Harman with the disproportionate levels of crime among impoverished people, he would respond that this is because they are bad people, not because of their circumstances!’

In other words, a remark like the quoted can be seen as a symptom of an entire ontology. This is a point that I believe must be addressed and taken seriously if OOO is to be taken seriously.”

Here my friend Levi is taking Circus Philosophicus too literally. It’s a fictional work. And though many of the philosophical ideas in the book are in fact my own, the “crime is due to inherent taint in the criminal soul” point is meant as sheer comic parody, a riff on the passage cited from Alexis de Tocqueville about the different attitudes toward crime among Americans and Europeans. It is no more an autobiographical fact than my supposed fascination in that chapter with the tortures of the damned in hell, about which I have never had the slightest interest in waking life.

The autobiographical elements in the book are, on the whole, heavily fictionalized. But I’ve received strange mail about some of it. One reader wrote in calling me a liar for saying that I was engaged to a Greek pharmaceutical heiress during my Annapolis years (of course I wasn’t), but this same person strangely accepted as literal truth the ludicrous descriptions of my F. Scott Fitzgerald-like existence among the yacht-owning rich of that city. Someone else wanted to know if I really ran across a weird steam calliope on the beach in Chennai. Absolutely not.

The “true” autobiographical parts of the book are limited to the place names (I’ve spent time in all of those places except for the offshore oil platform), and a few people. The rest of the people are either composites of several individuals or outright fabrications.

That said, Levi’s point about my post on the 8-Ball is a good one. And I do think some people resist OOO on the basis of political misunderstandings, forgetting that OOO can’t possibly accept Thatcher’s famous phrase “society doesn’t exist.” It would be the reductionists who would say that, not us. Society is as real for me as a neuron or a mathematical structure. But OOO also refuses the upside-down reductionism which holds that society is more real than neurons, mathematical structures, or individual people. The individual person is not totally constituted by society any more than by brain cells.

[ADDENDUM: Actually, since Bruno Latour sometimes reads this blog, I’d better clarify what I said about society so as not to give him a terrible shock. When I say society is real for OOO, I don’t mean some huge all-encompassing “Society” of the sort that Latour critiques in Durkheim and others. I simply mean something larger than individuals.]