More On Object-Oriented Philosophy

The other day I said I keep finding myself frustrated in my attempts to engage Object-Oriented Philosophy as a philosophy, rather than as an interesting blogsopheric phenomenon. In explaining why, I linked to a post by Levi Bryant titled "Mereological Considerations in Object-Oriented Ontology." In this post, Levi makes what I consider to be a very strange argument. He starts it off with this:

Now one of the criticisms that commonly emerges in response to object-oriented ontology is the critical question of why claims such as these are not dogmatic. What is it that authorizes these claims? Here my response to this challenge is not to adopt the hat of realist epistemology and make the case that we can represent the black boxes of other objects besides humans, but to show that arguments based on human black boxes are themselves speculative. First, the very fact that we have a debate as to what human black boxes contain (categories and forms of intuition, difference, power, etc), shows that we have no direct access to our own black boxes, but rather only arrive at claims about the black boxes presiding over the production of our outputs through indirect inferences. The sadly departed Levi-Strauss will claim that our black boxes contain structures of mind, Lacan will claim they contain the symbolic, Derrida the trace and differance, Foucault structures of power and discourse, Kant a priori categories and forms of intuition, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that our own black boxes are every bit as “withdrawn” as objects themselves. Second, by way of analogy we can make the point that speculation about what our black boxes contain are, as speculations, deeply prone to error. Take the example of computer black boxes. If I examine the output of a computer alone I might be led to make all sorts of erroneous influences. For example, when I notice that a blog contains italic and bold faced fonts I might be led to think there is a category in the programming that produces this output. However, the actual computer code that produces italics shares very little resemblance to a category or the font. The point here is that we can’t hit on accurate inferences about what black boxes contain, but that these black boxes are themselves objects of speculation and indirect inference that are not immanently or immediately accessible.

I'm sympathetic to much of this. Or at least, I'm sympathetic to the "anti-realist epistemology" part of it, and the talk of "black boxes." His computer example is a good one, because it demonstrates why introspection is problematic as a science of the mind or a science at all. All we have access to, introspectively, is output data, and even with some knowledge of the input data (though that knowledge is actually in the form of output data), there are an infinite number of ways that the black box could be configured to get from a particular input to a particular output. Or if not an infinite number, at least a whole lot, too many to place any confidence in introspective inference.

In this sense, then, I suppose it makes sense to say that our black boxes are "withdrawn." Of course, this makes for a very strange relationship: our black boxes are what we're using to understand/interpret black boxes, and therefore our black boxes withdraw from themselves. I don't know about you, but this would make me consider our black boxes as poor starting points for an analogy to other black boxes, but Levi does just that in the previous paragraph:

Apart from the thesis that the world is composed of objects– a thesis common to Harman, myself, Whitehead, and Latour –this anti-realist thesis about black boxes is at the heart of all genuinely object-oriented ontologies. Where object-oriented ontologies differ from anti-realist epistemologies is that where anti-realist epistemologies sees this input/output structure as unique to the human-world gap, object-oriented ontologies hold that this input/output relation is true of any and all relations between objects. The relation between a leaf and photons of sunlight is not structurally different than the relationship between humans and objects. Just as humans translate the world around them through their various black boxes, the leaf translates photons of sunlight, turning them into complex sugars.

If this input-output relationship is the same throughout the universe of objects, and not exclusive to human-world relations, whether the leaf's black box withdraws from itself too. And what would it mean to say that it does? Is not this difference between the black boxes of humans (and other animals) a difference that makes a difference, as Levi might say? And what about the "black boxes" that are involved in the relationship between heat energy and a compressed gas? Does the gas's black box withdraw from itself?

There seems to be something very different about the black boxes of humans and the black boxes of leaves and compressed gases, one that might actually underlie the withdrawing of our own black boxes and the other things that withdraw from us (which is to say, everything). Our black boxes reach out to other objects, and even, in a sense, to itself as an object, and it is in this reaching out that objects withdraw from us. It seems pretty clear that the black boxes of all animals reach out to some extent. Does the plants? It may be arguable, though I'm certainly not convinced. The same goes for single-celled organisms. But it seems well nigh nonsensical to say that the gas reaches out to the heat, and that the heat withdraws from the gas, or the gas's black box, or whatever it is that it withdraws from. What would this mean? I have no idea.

Which brings me to Levi's next paragraph:

So what is my argument here? My argument is that all things being equal, if we are speculating about our black boxes, if our claims about our black boxes are not “critical” claims but speculative claims, then there is no reason not to open the door to a generalized speculation that allows us to freely hypothesize about objects independent of humans and how their black boxes function. Notice the strategy of argument here. My move is not to argue, contra the last 200+ years of sophisticated anti-realist epistemology that somehow we have a mysterious immediate access to objects, but rather to show how the anti-realist position contains a speculative core at the heart of its thought.

Here is a leap from epistemology to metaphysics, and one that is difficult (in this case) to justify on its own, but is even more difficult to justify when the leap begins from an obviously flawed analogy. In addition to the problems above, the analogy seems to make all inquiry (save perhaps strictly analytic, in the "relation of ideas" sense, inquiry). It certainly makes science a "speculative" sort of inquiry. My initial reaction to Levi's reference to only Continental scholars was to point out that there is actually a science of our black box, one that uses a lot of different tools to open the black box up. Naturally, it doesn't get the whole black box, but it does illustrate a very fruitful reaction to withdrawn objects: science. That's how we understand what we understand about the leaf's "black box," the "black boxes" of compressed gases, and much of what we know about our own black box. Because our black boxes are withdrawn, we take a third-person perspective much as we would with the objects of the natural sciences. But with Levi's analogy, the sciences are now speculative in a way that is usually used precisely to contrast with empirical science.

I don't mean to imply that science is the only possible or only justified reaction to withdrawal. I'm merely suggesting that if science is speculative, what isn't? And if everything is speculative, is anything? What would non-speculative inquiry look like? And what's more, if we can actually access our black boxes by taking a third-person perspective, doesn't this again call the analogy, and therefore the argument and the leap, into question? A leaf can't pull back from a photon and take a third person perspective to see other aspects of it (and what would those aspects be, anyway? what about a photon is withdrawn from the leaf?). Again, this is because our black boxes reach out, whereas a leaf's probably doesn't.

As an aside, it might be productive in certain contexts to say that the leaf interprets the photon (though it's stretching the definition of interpretation to say so), but at that point, one has to ask what isn't interpretation, and if, as it seems this implies, everything is interpretation, why talk of objects at all?

Anyway, back to the analogy, and the argument: unless Levi can show that the black boxes of leaves and the black boxes of humans are qualitatively the same in a way that causes or invites withdrawal, his analogy fails completely. And I obviously think it does, because I think it is the qualitative difference between our black boxes and those of leaves, or at least gases --namely, the fact that our black boxes are projected into the world -- that underlies withdrawal.