Progressive Geographies

Graham has kindly responded to my previous post on this in some comments here.

I should say right up front – and Graham seems to realise this – that I’m trying to understand the positions in relation to own concerns, rather than offer these thoughts as a critique. It’s an attempt to get some things straight in my head.

I’m prepared to retract the previous comment that the spectrum was a kind of compartmentalism, and probably the ‘1.8’ position should have better indicated to me that it is more of a continuum. Although it does still appear rather linear.

I said that the position I’d feel closest to was 3B. I more boldly said that I “find that to be the only plausible position for someone who takes the history of ideas seriously; not to mention geography”.

Graham comments

 I’m not entirely sure why Stuart thinks 3B (very strong correlationism) is the only plausible position for someone who takes the history of ideas seriously. But I would guess that his thinking is that the history of ideas would be rendered less serious by a full-blown realist ontology, since that history would reduced to a series of blunders falling short of the truth in comparison with more recent true discoveries.

But at most, this would only be true of realism interpreted in conjunction with the correspondence theory of truth. For obvious reasons the two are often linked (even Lee Braver’s excellent book pretty much just assumes that correspondence is the “realist” model of truth). But that’s not the OOO version of realism. For us (and it’s truly plural now), the fact that reality is only accessible by way of translation opens up a rich field for the history of ideas without reading those ideas as the dusty prehistoric period of today’s more rigorous truth.

Graham’s ‘guess’ is pretty much what I meant. And yes, I think I too easily saw the position of realism as working alongside a correspondence theory of truth. The difficulty of such an approach to the history of ideas is indeed that it tends to see truth as being discovered where previous ages lived in various kinds of falsehoods. It’s not good at recognising how previous, different, geographically-divergent ways of thinking actually operated, with a sense of internal consistency, and it obviously works from a privileged position of the present.

But Graham is saying that OOO generally, and not just his work (a fair point worth underlining), doesn’t work that way, since it works with this principle of translation, which can presumably be understood to have been different in different times and places, without a privileged point from which things are measured. Unless it is the position of reality itself. Then my previous comment on there being “some understanding of how our knowledge of anything at a historical (or I suppose geographical) distance is mediated through texts, of various kinds, meaning that there is some mediation before we have any means of addressing them” doesn’t seem to apply in quite the same way. Indeed mediation may not be far from what is meant by translation. (I began to realise where I was going wrong through the post here at Larval Subjects). Graham continues…

In fact, it tends to imply the more “continental” of the two versions of truth cited in Brentano’s essay on the phases of philosophy: truth as successive phases of flourishing and decadence (but in a realist sense, not a relativist one) rather than truth as the cumulative piecemeal amassing of correct propositions about the world. Unfortunately, it is often assumed that relativism is the only alternative to the latter model of truth. See for instance Rorty, who thinks that anti-realism is the only position that will save paradigm-shifting genius from the tedious work of the underlaborers (that’s Rorty’s language, not mine). But you need not be a relativist or a strong correlationist to think that the history of ideas is worth studying. But it’s possible that I misunderstood Stuart’s point anyway.

This is really interesting, because the idea of a realist reading of truth along those lines is certainly a very intriguing alternative. My point about ‘taking the history of ideas seriously’ wasn’t meant to imply that people weren’t thinking it was worth studying, but that studying it forced certain considerations in the way we thought about any relation from the past in the present.

This has left me a little clearer on OOO, and a little less clear on the distinctiveness of 3B option of the spectrum. In a sense it means that the spectrum is more complicated if the object-object relation isn’t the key issue (it isn’t for me). What Graham calls there OOO’s ‘wild variation’ on Kant is the human-world couple becomes ‘any couple whatever’. But for me the break Heidegger makes with Kant is historical, at least the later Heidegger, which is why I think that moves the position above 2, and towards 3. Whereas for Graham it moves him below 2, to his ‘1.8’. This brings me to the other questions I asked in the previous post, and came up with in response to Jane Bennett’s book, about how we can gain any insight into such relations at a historical distance. I think this has helped clarified the stakes, even if not all the answers, and I may remain confused. But I’m genuinely intrigued by such a possibility of how OOO would actually undertake the history of ideas.

Thanks Graham – this has been very helpful.

Graham Harman has a fascinating post here on what he calls Meillassoux’s spectrum, which runs “from ‘most classically realist’ to ‘least classically realist'”.

1. naive realists/dogmatists: the people Kant destroyed, even in Meillassoux’s view

2. weak correlationists: Kant; “we can’t know the in itself, but we can at least think it”

3. strong correlationists, a.k.a. fideists or skeptics (Heidegger is named as the typical continental version, Wittgenstein as the typical analytic one): “we can’t even think the in-itself”; we are trapped in the human-world correlate, and can only describe its conditions, not deduce them. Strong correlationists come in two kinds for Meillassoux, which I will call 3A and 3B.

3A. strong correlationists type-A: we can at least describe the universal conditions of all subjectivity, even if we can’t deduce why they must be the case (Meillassoux describes these as the present-day lions of the Kantian tradition; he gives no names, but maybe Habermas would fit)

3B. strong correlationists type-B: we can’t even describe the universal conditions of all subjectivity, because these are historically contingent and valid only for specific cultures (Meillassoux names postmodernism)

4. absolute idealists: we can deduce the necessary conditions of all subjectivity rather than merely describing them as brute givens; moreover, it is meaningless even to suggest the possibility of an in-itself that would not be accessible to thought (Hegel is a good guess, and Berkeley is mentioned twice, though the second half of the definition fits him better than the first).

I confess I’m troubled by this compartmentalisation, and even more so when Graham starts to situate himself and Meillassoux on this spectrum. He puts his own OOO around 1.8; and says that 3B is the starting point for Meillassoux’s own work. But I’d see my own position as closest to 3B, and find that to be the only plausible position for someone who takes the history of ideas seriously; not to mention geography.

Of course there are problems with any such linearity (even if called a ‘spectrum’), and one of Meillassoux’s points seems to be to try to show another axis, or a branch off this main line. This is recognised here, as are other significant problems. Then there’s the boiling down of ‘correlationism’ to two significant issues…

1. Finitude. We can’t get outside the correlate.

2. The correlate is always between human and world.

Harman suggests that he is most bothered by 2; Meillassoux by 1. I’m sure that’s right.

My problem with this is historical. In a sense it’s the same concerns I had with the Jane Bennett book. How can be it used to examine figures from the history of the discipline, without the criteria being used to do so being ones stacked in favour of the present. Much more serious to my mind is how some of these positions can be held without thinking that the way we encounter the world, how objects in the world relate, etc. is the same at all times and places. That’s why 3B seems the only plausible one to me – I suspect there are many varying degrees within that category. And finally, some understanding of how our knowledge of anything at a historical (or I suppose geographical) distance is mediated through texts, of various kinds, meaning that there is some mediation before we have any means of addressing them.

One way of responding to the moon and fingers example is to say that the question is not so much what the moon is, but what is it taken to be. Now that question, which would have very different answers at different times and places, seems to me one that is worth asking. What the moon was taken to be had implications in all sorts of areas, beliefs, superstitions, science, etc. So the question is not without merit if we seek to understand other modes of thought.

The relation here is similar to something Foucault said (or someone said about Foucault) concerning human nature. It’s not so much what ‘human nature’ should be defined as, but about interogating how it has been defined in different ways, and the implications – political, legal, social, religious, etc. – that this has had.

Has anything been written about how object-orientated philosophy or speculative realism might relate to, criticise, contribute to, the history of ideas?

[update 5.20pm – to a blatant error in the above representation of Graham’s position. Apologies for that. There may be other errors of course too, but I’ll let those stand]