Latour does get beyond Whitehead with his all local causal mediators

(title unknown) from enowning by enowning

In-der-Blog-sein - dis|closure on enjoying your objects.

Levinas refutes the Heideggerian notion that the existents in our lives, whether they be bread, hammers, pens, etc. are simply tools, or “means of life.” Levinas claims that, though we might need such tools, they are actually enjoyed. This is the beginning of the concept he calls “living from…” Levinas claims, in opposition to the Heideggerian school of thought, that “existence is not exhausted by utilitarian schematism that delineates (existents) as having the existence of hammers, needles, or machines. They are always in a certain measure– and even the hammers, needles, and machines are objects of enjoyment…”

a disagreement with Gratton from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

In my opinion Latour spends too much time on science, not enough (or even any) on philosophical cosmology in the Whiteheadian manner. This does give Latour’s work a lot of nice empirical bulk, but it prevents him from getting entirely clear of correlationism. The way that Latour does get beyond Whitehead philosophically is that his causal mediators are all local, rather than through God as in Whitehead. It’s a big philosophical advance, and in fact it is quite unprecedented. Everyone else who saw the problem with direct relations either solved it by theological pistol shot (occasionalism) or empiricist pistol shot (Hume and, yes, even Kant). Latour tries to get us to focus on local/secular mediators.

And on the whole, Latour has the same sort of realist feel that one finds in Whitehead. And I don’t just mean realism in the very weak sense of “sure, there might be something beyond human access, but we can’t talk about it.” I mean realism in the sense that the relation between human and world is not smuggled back into all other kinds of relations as their necessary base.

The only way you could claim that correlationism doesn’t paint us into a corner is if you take an approach like Zizek’s, and claim that his position isn’t anti-realism, because there’s nothing real outside our access to it anyway. The real then becomes a traumatic kernel within our consciousness rather than something existing outside it. 

Jeff Meyerhoff has left a new comment on the post "Zizek and Rorty on the Real": Simon, Thanks for the informed comment.

My entry says that Rorty’s “reality” and Zizek’s “Real” are similar and then describes what they share and what they don’t share.

Yes, you’re right about the difference between Rorty’s “reality” and Zizek’s “Real. Rorty thinks it’s a useful concept for practical purposes: We say: “That makes sense but is that the reality of the situation?” But it isn’t useful to do metaphysics to nail down the nature of reality. For Zizek the Real cannot be nailed down, but it is a useful concept for constructing a social-psychanalytical understanding of our way of being human.

For both, “reality” is illusory, but Zizek (interpreting Lacan) adds something extra, which is “The Real”. But it’s not there in the way we like to think of reality as being there, i.e. as the bedrock to our knowledge or what we run up against whether we want to or not.

The concept “reality” for Zizek is the illusory world we construct in order to seek and avoid the Real. The scientist thinks reality is the material world. The idealist philosopher thinks reality is immaterial. The ordinary person thinks reality is what’s right there in front of you. The Communist thinks reality is History. The mystic thinks reality is Consciousness.

I never thought about it but isn’t it the case (I’m not just being rhetorical here but asking) that “the Real” in Zizek’s version of Lacan is a master-signifier? In Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (which I’m reading with a study group right now) a master signifier is a meaningless signifier that organizes other concepts into a coherent understanding. Examples of master-signifiers that Zizek gives are Communism, God, the Law. He says a master signifier is an empty signifier (i.e. no signified or meaning) yet in its transcendent place in an ideology it organizes all the other signifiers. For example, Communism has been a master signifier which, through its presence, creates a certain kind of sense for the concepts: class struggle, commodity, ideology, alienation, etc. Posted by Jeff Meyerhoff to philosophy autobiography at January 16, 2010

THE INTIMATE ENEMY: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism by Ashis Nandy from Posthuman Destinies by rcarlson

We mentioned Nandy in the previous post to which we felt Leela Gandhi had responded to his criticism of Mira Alfassa (the Mother) It was this work a now classic of post-colonial literature that she instances. This is the first part of the book in which Nandy theorizes resistance to colonialism in India. He does this in part through studies in the biographies and works of a number of interesting historical figures among these Kipling, Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo. We begin with the preface and first five chapters. Political, economic, and cultural domination under colonialism has repeatedly been studied during the last hundred years. Breaking with the tradition, Ashis Nandy explores the ways in which colonialism damaged the colonizing societies themselves, and how the likes of Gandhi resisted their rulers in British India by building on the lifestyle, values, and psychology of ordinary Indians and by heeding dissenting voices from the West. "Political, economic, and cultural domination under colonialism has repeatedly been studied during the last hundred years. Breaking with the tradition, Ashis Nandy explores the ways in which colonialism damaged the colonizing societies themselves, and how the likes of Gandhi resisted their rulers in British India by building on the lifestyle, values, and psychology of ordinary Indians and by heeding dissenting voices from the West. "