Ethics, Mediation, Relation

There has been a marvelous discussion going on currently between Paul Ennis at anotherheideggerblog, Levi Bryant at Larval Subjects, Adrian Ivakhiv at Immanence, Graham Harman at Object-Oriented Philosophy, James Stanescu at Critical Animal, and elsewhere, regarding the articulation of an ethics within Speculative Realism, what Bryant calls a "flat" ethics because it puts all entities on the same ontological level. A good deal of this hangs upon the way that we construe relations and objects, which of these we consider to be ontologically prior, and so on. The whole debate is fraught with ramifications for ecology and ethics beyond the all-too-human. I hope Alf will have a look--I imagine he might be able to really sink his teeth into some of this.

The commentary online about the status of relations in Harman's ontology, and Bryant's also, is quite extensive. I am a relation-guy myself, quite sympathetic to an ontology that holds that relations go "all the way down," and that it is very difficult to elaborate a coherent account of saying what a thing is without reference to its relations. I count myself among those who have struggled to understand Harman’s account of how relations are even possible. (He seems to get this a lot; but sooner or later he will hit upon the right formulation. I also suspect that some of the resistance to his ideas may be of a less-than-philosophical nature; but then, this suspicion of mine is also less-than-philosophical). The clash tends to be between the readers of Deleuze or Whitehead who see relation as being fundamental (Ivakhiv seems to be holding out for this appraoch), and those like Harman who want to return pride-of-place to objects, which is another way of saying they want to re-establish substance as a central philosophical term. This camp would argue that you can't have relationship without relata, and that if you foreground relations too much, relata just melt into undifferentiation.

I don’t want to reiterate the whole discussion, even the recent one that has transpired over the past two or three days. But the entire debate is pertinent to the discussion we are having about authenticity and media or mediation. In this post I’m mainly going to think through a couple of examples.

Consider a couple dining before a night at the opera. She and he are sitting together at a bar in a noisy restaurant, in a certain upscale neighborhood, before heading to see and hear a performance of a piece of art from the 19th century. There are sex- and gender-roles, socially mediated; they are dressed up in evening clothes (socio-economic playacting); there's a complex dynamic of friendship. There is alcohol being consumed. All of this (and more) does more than impact or shape the encounter between them as they sit talking at the bar. This complex array of social mores and historical contingencies and gustatory processes is what mediates the encounter, is in fact how the encounter happens. To imagine that there could be some encounter without these mediations, an encounter one might abstract from them, or have instead if one could only screen out the noise, is nonsense. There would not be an authentic encounter, but rather no encounter whatsoever, without mediation. There can be other encounters (in other settings, on other occasions, with different menus and different outfits), but no "pure" encounter.

I take it that this is what Alf is getting in at the paper (I discussed & linked to in my last post), in asking about tents and tennis shoes in the desert or mountains; it's not as if running naked through the desert is more "authentic," or will better tell you what the desert is "really like," than hiking along sanely protected from the elements. It will tell you what it's like to run naked through the desert--more specifically, what it's like to run naked on this particular stretch of desert on this particular occasion. But follow this line of thought too far, pile on these qualifiers too deep, and you'll find that in deciding that you can't run naked through the same desert twice, you've bled dry the notion of "what it's like;" there's only what happens, only the experience itself. Sure, every experience is what it is, and not another experience, but how do we talk about experience-- i.e., generate experiences about other experiences? Either abstraction is possible, or thought falls dumb. This is the question of media.

Media are tremendous powers—I want to say that in one sense, they're the only power that is; that "power" or "capacity" is media. It is the power of construal. Any medium allows us to construe experience. But, the catch is, it also forces us to construe experience this way. No such constraint is absolute; the thrill of reading poetry is often the thrill of the frisson generated when language suddenly does something new, something we never thought it could do, and so lets us see—mediates—the world in a way never before open to us. But the question, "Is there a relationship that is not a construal?" seems simply another way of asking: "Is there an unmediated experience?"

To say what an experience "is like," as in our example of walking in the desert, is not to construe it any more than it is construed in the experience "itself." To speak of what it is like to feel the warmth of the sun with the first moments of sunrise may involve all manner of poetic license on my part, or may be scrupulously scientific; both accounts involve construing an uncapturable-in-words experience. But that experience is already a construal. The warmth is to me a pleasant shift from the night chill, and the growing light is welcome, bringing to mind certain half-thought kitschy associations of rebirth and hope in which I take a kind of guilty pleasure. This is already mediation enough; but to the burglar who wanted to finish the job before daybreak, the dawn is a serious glitch; to the lovers in a troubadour's aubade, it is the harbinger of bittersweet parting; to the owl or the bat, it is bedtime; to the ice crystals frosting the grass, it is dispersion.

This is more than mere perspectivism. The claim here is that the experience of shifting light and the temperature is always mediated (by physical process, by nervous systems, by social, cultural and private narratives). And, I would add, this means that Harman is exactly right to insist that construal happens between objects all the time. While we can't say what happens when the sunlight strikes the frost-covered lawn from the lights' or lawn's point of view, if I may riff on Harman's perspective, we can say that in acting on each other they construe each other in a sense, and this construal always gets it wrong, is always scandalously partial.

This may seem to take an unwarranted step. Perhaps one is willing to grant that the owl construes the dawn, and does so differently than do the lovers or the burglar. But one might balk at saying that the frost construes the sunlight, or vice-versa. Harman does not (as far as I recall) use the word "construe," so I may be mis-presenting his approach. But his point, I think, would be that the heat acts upon only a single quality of the ice crystals, and does not reach them "in themselves," and so too vice-versa. My suggestion is that if we take Harman seriously, we are bound to think not just in terms of causality but in terms of mediation. According to Harman, the sunlight’s encounter with the frost (and vice-versa) is just like the human subject’s encounter with the hammer that breaks in the opening sections of Being and Time: the "frost-in-itself" recedes into the vorhanden, from the sunlight’s point of view. The light and the frost each encounter the other in a kind of intentionality that is perfectly isomorphic with the intentionality Husserl describes. Harman calls his account of causality "vicarious causation" because "real objects never touch;" a real object only meets another via (and inside) a phenomenal object. And this means (so I claim): mediation.

I hardly know where to begin in enumerating the ways some of this play out in ethics, but in reading the discussions between Ennis, Bryant, Harman, Stanescu, Ivakhiv and others, I am quite struck by how it dovetails with considerations of media and authenticity, albeit a "problematized" authenticity.

I hope there will be some comments here to keep the conversation going, but in any case I will try in my next post I may to get to some ethical "implications," or rather, to asking in what sense this is the right question. For now I'll end with just two points.

First: the logic above that isolates every experience from every other (such that every instant is unrepeatable, e.g. "there is no running across the same desert twice"), does so by making every instant infinitely qualified. There is a radical over-determination of every entity and every event: nothing can be viewed in isolation. This follows a kind of ecological logic: just as a species cannot exist by itself, but only in an (endlessly ramified) ecological niche, so any entity whatsoever is regarded as endlessly qualified by its relations. The paradox, however, is that this ecology actually cuts off the branch it sits on, because ecology, like every science, depends upon abstraction and being able to marshall organized pronouncements of general statements, not just litanies of specifics. If this were not possible, it would also be impossible to conclude that it was impossible. Hence, abstraction is possible.

Second (and relatedly): I hasten to add that I believe one can meaningfully ask "what is it like to...?" and that it is a very good and profitable question, capable of a great deal of unpacking (as Thomas Nagel demonstrated). It's also the central question of empathy ("What is it like to be...?"); thus so asking it lands us in the heart of ethics. But the question still remains (here), how is it possible for us to ask it? There are some obvious connections to virtuality here, but that may not be the most interesting thing about it.

Living Questions

In response to Alf’s suggestion—a post on some philosophical problems that interest me currently—I will make a characteristically evasive response, but I hope not out of sheer perversity. The philosophical problems that interest me are the ones that are most contentious! “What sorts of disagreement cause hatred and wrath?” And of course, how can one skirt this danger and transmute them into occasions of understanding?

I have more than one motive here. Obviously, the contentious subjects are “hotter”—more “current”—and this generates a certain energy which can be put to use for philosophy. Intelligent Design? Globalization? Ecological stewardship? Multiculturalism meets Fundamentalism? The ethics of abortion? Nothing like an intervention in one of these to get the blood flowing.

For similar reasons, I am also interested in “new” movements. I’ve already mentioned Speculative Realism. I am also interested in the so-called Philosophy Cafés, though like Roger-Pol Droit, I suspect they are often more café than philosophy. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”) There is Radical Orthodoxy, a theological approach with which I am much in sympathy, founded by the work of John Milbank, which is (to risk overstatement for the sake of brevity) an attempt to outflank philosophy with theology by insisting on faith over against nihilism. And of course, there’s the converse movement—a recent spate of critique of religion, with the inevitable rejoinders by believers. At worst, of course, this is not very deep belief or disbelief, but happily not all critics or defenders are shallow. While I don’t have much good to say about Dawkins’ or Dennett’s acumen on the subject (aside from the trivial observation that the “meme” meme is a promising avenue of approach on any subject at all), AC Grayling’s and Michel Onfray’s seem a little more worth responding to qua philosopher, and André Comte-Sponville’s work is positively pleasant to read in its civility. As for the defenders, I won’t go into them right now, but the literature is at least as uneven.

In both of these interests—the contentious and the current—there’s an admitted danger of opportunism. One can be fairly sure that the currency will pass before the contention is resolved. What happens usually is that some sort of practical compromise is jerry-rigged. This is of course a matter of politics, and philosophy just has to stand back and shake its head. We might provisionally decide that home-schoolers can teach their kids that the world was made in six days or that it floats on the back of an infinite stack of turtles, but public schoolers must put up with the latest news from the Biology department. If they don’t like it, well, there are private schools, and if they can’t afford those, we’re still discussing charter schools and vouchers, none too politely. All of this dumps the conversation into the churning bin of opinion. So if our motive is to philosophize, our interest cannot be in currency or controversy for their own sakes.

But my interest here is not in straining to construe philosophy as “relevant.” Nor is it in seeking in philosophy for guidance in resolving the dilemma de jour. In a certain sense you will see that I dispute whether philosophy ever offers us “practical” guidance. It is rather that wherever the dispute is, is the opening for realization. That’s where the itch is. “Where the danger is, grows what can save” Hölderlin writes (Patmos). These are the Living Questions of the moment; the place where you can find the pulse.

This is one reason I value Vehemence (in the sense I used it before) so highly: Strongly-put positions tend to raise the stakes. Within certain parameters, this means that participants’ investment in the dialogue is higher. Those parameters are important: outside of them, investment can fall off quickly.

Example: three people are talking about the 9/11 attacks. Dan claims that 9/11 was an “inside job,” a false flag operation carried out by parts of the U.S. government; foreign operatives may or may not have been involved. Walt holds that it was a case of “roosting chickens;” legitimate grievances against the U.S. were bound sooner or later to result in just such an act, and the U.S. can hardly be justified in complaining when its own violence is turned against it. Ted maintains 9/11 was more or less what the official Commission Report says it was: an unwarranted terrorist attack, planned and executed by members of Al Quaeda.

But, you may say, the nature of 9/11 is a historical, not a philosophical question. Likewise, one could say that the question of “whether (or why) global warming is happening,” is a climatological question; that the question of what will be the likely fallout of government intervention (or lack thereof) on behalf of teetering banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms is an economic question; or that the question of whether to buy from a grocery store or a farmers’ market is a nutritional question, perhaps informed by your own private budgetary considerations.

But follow the inquiry far enough--and it's really not so very far--and you find that all of these questions also come down to philosophical premises, and have philosophical ramifications. And, most importantly, the act of asking them and disputing them contains in that moment the opening to philosophical comportment. In fact, the conversation won’t even start to make any progress beyond “that’s-what-you-think,” until we do get to the philosophy—either by backing up or moving forward. "Who do you trust?" is an example of the sort of philosophy I mean. (It is exactly the sort of question Socrates asked; if you go to a specialist for shipbuilding or carpentry or cooking, why not for moral advice? But what makes a specialist and how do you know one?) If I am shown two different accounts of how and a building falls “into its own footprint,” then unless I am myself an engineering expert in demolition, I have to make a choice: do I believe expert A., upon whom Ted relies and who says that a building could well collapse straight down after being hit by a plane; or expert B., whom Dan cites to the effect that the only buildings that fall that way are those that are brought down by controlled explosives? What is it that disposes me to believe one or the other? And can I evaluate that disposition from outside?

The conversation between Dan, Walt and Ted is likely to get very heated, but it is perfectly possible for it to remain civil, and even for it to issue in one or more participants being persuaded. Even over so volatile a topic, manners and reason can inform our discourse. But there are limits. If Walt puts his case so strongly that Ted begins to suspect that Walt would happily see or sponsor a further attack if he could; or if Dan begins to suspect Ted not only of having “bought” the “official version” but of having participated in the “cover-up,” then a threshold has been crossed beyond which reactiveness is likely to swamp reflection.

Similar difficulties attend other debates—say, over the “life of the unborn,” or the “right to choose” (even the shorthand betrays a subtext of pre-commitment), or of the status of “fringe science,” or the competing claims of “civil liberties” and “security.” Up to a point, the debate can proceed more or less openly, but there comes a moment when one has to choose to stay engaged, or else to regard the other as enemy.

Now what I’m interested in is: How do we decide? Why are the parameters such as they are? How can we expand them (and should we)? What happens if we stay engaged and don’t run away? What is engagement? What are its limits? And what is the nature of the realization it brings?

I hope it is clear that here we begin to move from the mainly meta-philosophical considerations with which my postings began, towards ethics, in a way which I mean to be consistent with Levinas’ claim that ethics is first philosophy.