レヴィ・ブライアント

科学的自然主義者と観念論者の近代的反省

OOO places all objects on equal ontological footing. ~ placing the two orders that characterize the discourse of modernity on a single ontological plane.

That is, as analyzed by Latour, the key move of modernity is a purification of the two domains of nature and culture, such that the two are to be rigorously separated and held apart at pains of social catastrophe, disaster, superstition, and horror. The great sin of pre-modernity, claims both the scientific naturalist and the idealist is to confuse the two domains of nature and culture, object and subject.

例えば、科学的自然主義者は下記のように、世界の漸進的自然化(progressive naturalization of the world)によって、あらゆる観念論的対象を「随伴現象的文化(cultural epiphenomena)」のような二次的なものに位置づけ、文化と厳格に区分する。

Thus, the scientific naturalist believes that social progress will result from the progressive naturalization of the world. “No longer”, she says, “will we confuse the appearance of a comet with cultural epiphenomena like superstition that see it as a bad omen or sign!

Likewise, the idealist sees the cardinal sin of pre-modernity as the confusion of properly cultural phenomena with “natural” phenomena. “No longer”, she says, “will we see laws and society as natural orders as in the case of the Great Chain of Being, but rather we must carefully keep nature and culture separate such that we see that it is we that produce nature, laws, and society.” As Deleuze puts it in his gorgeous little book on Kant, “the first thing we discover with Kant’s moral philosophy is that it is we who are calling the shots.” The moral law is no longer a natural artifact, but is rather something that the subject gives to itself in and through its autonomy.

フラットな存在論としてのOOO

ここで冒頭のブライアンとのテーゼに戻りたい

The key point not to be missed with OOO is that the realism of object-oriented ontology is not making a decision within the framework of this schema or partition between nature and culture. OOO is not preoccupied with the question of whether being falls on the side of nature or of culture. Rather, in drawing a transversal line across nature and culture, the issue is no longer whether being falls into the circle of nature and culture, but rather in establishing a flat ontology united around a third line in which both domains (and the OOO theorist need not even speak of incommensurable domains any longer) now equally are. This is an entirely different sorting of the world and of the question of ontology.

続けてブライアントは自らの理論における「存在論的原則としての横断線(transversal line is the ontic principle)」 を差異を生成するものとして重要視する。そしてこの「横断線(transversal line)」によって、「brains, atoms, quarks, black holes, hurricanes」に留まらず―科学的自然主義者と異なり―「fictional entities, works of art, signs, Sweden, the United States Constitution, norms, narratives, tables, subjects」をもオヴジェクトとして扱う。これは何故なのか。

If the object-oriented ontologist is committed to a thesis as strange as the idea that a phoneme is an object or that Norway is an object, then this is because the criteria for being an object is not whether or not an entity is physical, but whether or not it makes differences.

One might object that this is a tremendous abuse of the word object and what we mean when we refer to existence. “Harry Potter does not exist!” To be sure, there is no physical referent of the character of Harry Potter. However, the fictional character of Harry Potter certainly exists and makes all sorts of differences to all sorts of other objects. It will again be objected that this is an abuse of the term “existence”. At this point, it becomes necessary to press the defender of the thesis that existence is equivalent to being-physical. “What is this quality you refer to as existence? What is it for something to exist?” “Well Sir, to exist is to be physical!” “And”, the onticologist asks in good Platonic fashion seeking to get at the hidden presuppositions already implicit in the thesis, “what does it mean to be physical?” All sorts of answers will be given to this question, but ultimately at the end of the day, at the completion of the dialogue, it will be found that what the scientific naturalist was claiming all along is that to exist is to make differences. That which exists is that which is capable of producing differences. But if this is the case, then it follows that we should practice an egalitarianism of difference, thereby arriving at a flat ontology. If to exist is to be capable of making differences, then whatever makes a difference is. This egalitarianism or ontological difference is not the thesis that all beings equally make differences, that they are all equally important (a normative judgment), that all differences are desirable or valuable (another normative judgment), but simply that regardless of the degree to which something makes a difference, if a difference is made then that thing is. The smallest fluctuation in temperature is still a temperature and still a difference in temperature. Likewise, the smallest difference is still a difference and therefore something that is. The microscopic mite or demodex that dwells in my eyelash makes very little difference to that lash or my body, but nonetheless makes differences and therefore is.

個人主義と全体主義について

そこでまず右翼のイデオロギーとしての個人主義を紹介する。

This variant of rightwing ideology received it’s most precisely and memorable formulation from Margaret Thatcher. As Thatcher famously said, “society does not exist.” She then added that there are only individuals and families. When Thatcher said that society does not exist, she meant that people are not products of social forces and conditions, but are rather products of themselves through their own sovereign decisions, choices, skills, and so on.

(1) If people are products of their own sovereign choices and make themselves, then they are responsible for where they are in society, and (2) other individuals and government institutions have no responsibilities to individuals in dire circumstances such as poverty. Rather, the function of government would be to protect the rights of individuals, protect the state, and punish crime; nothing more, nothing less. If we have no obligations to individuals in unfortunate circumstances, then this is because these individuals are where they are as a result of the poor choices they made. The poor person is not a product of poverty, but rather their own bad decisions. The criminal is not a product of social circumstances, but is the result of a crack in their being that leads him to crime. Such is the core thesis of liberalism and neoliberalism.

そこでまず次に左翼のイデオロギーとしての個人主義を紹介する。

From this vantage, we can see why holism becomes attractive. The holist rejoins that no, individuals are products of their relations or circumstances. Poverty produces poverty. Wealth produces wealth. Horrific living circumstances tend to produce horrific circumstances. Individuals do not choose these circumstances, but find themselves entangled in these circumstances. If this is the case, then individuals are not responsible for where they are because, to use a Heideggerian turn of phrase, they were thrown into a set of circumstances not of their own making that channel and form them in a particular way.

The holist recognizes that there are all sorts of negative feedback mechanisms at work in social relations. If the children of poor people themselves tend to grow up to be poor, then this is because there are all sorts of negative feedback relations that tend to draw that person back into the state of poverty even if they heroically push against it. These negative feedback relations include everything from malnutrition, to grueling work schedules required to survive (leaving little time for personal development), to the way employers react when they note that you don’t have the right sort of clothing, mannerisms, or speech (all the things that Bourdieu lists under habitus in texts like Homo Academicus and Distinction), to underfunded schools, to an absence of contacts in networks of wealth and power, etc. And likewise with wealth. Like rats in a maze with only one path, human bodies tend to be channeled into particular basins of attraction that reproduce the organization of the social order along certain hierarchical lines. These hierarchical lines involve economic class, symbolic capital or position, race, gender, religion, etc.

Third dimension―OOO politics

まずブライアントは下記にあるように「OOO politics」の次元が、一見すると右翼イデオロギーに近しいかのように感じる、とする。

In its focus on individual objects, OOO sounds as if it defends, at the level of ontology, the foundations of the rightwing ideology outlined above. In defending a conception of being premised on discrete and unrelated objects it sounds as if OOO is providing ontological ammunition for a rightwing account of the world.

〜Deleuze and Guattari, of course, distinguishes between “smooth space” and “striated space”. Putting matters very crudely, a smooth space is a space of freedom like the steppes or the ocean, where there is not yet a grid dividing up space and where movement is possible in all directions. They argue (and I won’t get into this now) that it is a space populated by intensities and events. A striated space, by contrast, is highly structured and constraining. Here, for example, we should think about the game of chess. The striated nature of the game of chess lies not so much in the fact that the board is composed of squares, but rather because each piece has a fixed identity defining the movements of which it is capable (bishops can only move diagonally, rooks only horizontally and vertically, etc).Neither the concept of smooth space, nor the concept of striated space quite gets at the onto-spatial underpinnings of neoliberal thought. What we need is something like vacuum space.

we are probably more defined not by the choices we make, but the choices we face.

右翼は「Neoliberal thought reduces everything down to choices we make」であるし、左翼は―後に述べられるように―「the problem with holism is that it undermines the possibility of agency.」である。つまり右翼の絶対的個人主権はホリスティックな影響を抑圧し、左翼はあらゆる問題をホリスティックなものとして個人の「possibility」を抑圧(undermines)してしまうのだ。だからこそ「choices we face」によって定義されるわたしたち、という直面するまでの全体主義性とそこから選択する個人主義性を接合するOOO politicsを、第三の次元として提唱する。そしてそこで「rat in a maze」の例を用いて「OOO politics」の空間を説明する

In the maze depicted to the rat, the rat doesn’t simply make choices, but faces choices as a result of how the walls and paths of the maze are constructed. Let’s suppose that the entrance to the maze is birth and the exit to the maze is death (our maze is not merely spatial, but is spatio-temporal). The rat can make choices, it can wander around in the maze, but the paths the rat can take are more or less predelineated in a way that constrains the choices that the rat can make. “Will I go left or right? Forward or backward? Will I stand still and wait?”

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One of the major projects of social and political variants of OOO, I believe, is to map these negative feedback systems, these choices agents face, and the basins of attraction they generate. This entails a situated form of analysis that refuses our tendency towards thinking in terms of vacuum space. It requires the mapping of institutions, geographies, technologies, networks of communication and contact, etc., etc., etc. ～The point of an OOO politics is not simply to map negative feedback systems or regimes of attraction. No, diagrammatology or speculative cartography is only a first step.

ブライアントの転向

Here, then, I’m in a position to revise my position on fictions and symbolic entities. With Graham I’m able to agree that fictions and symbolic entities are not real entities, but rather are sensual objects. They are entities that only exist on the interior of a real object analogous to the manner in which Graham’s monster only exists in the interior of his mind. A fictional text such as Harry Potter cannot exist independently of the social assemblage (larger scale object) in which it occurs. A meme cannot exist as a substance in its own right. The value of money cannot exist as a substance or real object. All of these entities are sensual objects belonging to real objects– the social assemblage in which they exist. Nonetheless, through the mereological claims of OOO I am able to make a place for the objectivity and transcendence of these entities with respect to individual persons. These are sensual objects belonging to larger scale objects such as institutions and social assemblages, not individual persons. Because we are entangled with these larger scale objects, these sensual objects become constraints on our existence that we must navigate, just as we must walk around large boulders when taking a leisurely stroll in the forest.

In the past, I have argued that fictions are real entities. My motive for this has had less to do with any particular fascination with fictions, but rather with peculiar properties of symbolic entities. Take the example of money. The value of money is, alas, not dependent on my mind. It has a value that transcends my will and intentionality, and which is therefore objective. I can’t make it have whatever value I wish it to have. Likewise with linguistic meaning and structure, as well as a host of social categories. ~ If I understand Glenn correctly, his point is that criminality is not in the so-called criminal. “Criminal” is not a quality of a substance (the person), but is rather a category within which the person finds himself situated as if a fish in a net.

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