Scientism

Terence Blake and Mohan Matthen have had a bit of a to and fro on the subject of scientism.

Scientism, like any -ism, is no one thing - it's more complex than a list of properties - but here are some defining beliefs, from my experience:

Epistemically, there are only two categories: there's science and then there's everything else - everything else is homogeneous compared to science, which is sui generis.
Science is knowledge, everything else is belief.
Only scientific knowledge can be genuinely true.  Everything else is false, uncertain or epistemically meaningless.
Science can potentially solve all our problems.  Therefore, all other epistemic forms must defer to science whenever possible.
Where scientific knowledge is inconsistent with naive experience, that experience must be rejected as illusory.
Those with knowledge of science automatically have greater political and epistemological authority than those without.
Although there are disagreements in science, these are circumstantial and temporary - the result of not yet knowing.  Scientific truth speaks with one voice.

Not all of those statements are true of any given instance of 'scientism' and not all are made explicit in any iteration but I think they are all evident somewhere or other.

Scientism is also rooted in a deeply pre-sociological or pre-anthropological view of science (I temporalise by saying 'pre' because I think the anthropological and sociological literature on science produced since the late 1970s is strong enough to constitute such a periodisation - like pre-Socratic or pre-Newtonian).  Scientism believes in 'ready made science' as Latour put it, as opposed to 'science in action.'  Scientism tends to ignore or elide the social, collective characteristics of science; like the versions of history that deal exclusively with kings, castles and battles, it honours winners and ignores the everyday aspects; it fixates exclusively on end products and is disinterested in processes.  It uses 'science' as a trump card without really understanding it.  It's a reactionary view of science that's common sensical to those who've never asked difficult questions about it.

It's actually quite an un-scientific, non-empirical view of science that relies upon the highly politicised self-reflections of scientists.  It's like if you understood politics exclusively through the memoirs of retired politicians - you'd end up believing that politics was exclusively composed of boot strapping, hard nosed, selfless types who earnestly just try to do the best they can in the circumstances they are afforded.  The politicians may genuinely believe in that image of their lives but we'd be foolish to take such images at face value.  Yet in the case of science just such abstract, post hoc reflections are granted unquestioning authority.

The alternative view of science derives from this basic insight: scientists know how science works much better when they're doing it than when they're thinking about it.  So, scientists do know best how science works but only as long as you don't ask them 'how does science work?'  If you ask that then all you'll get is confirmation bias.  The root of scientism is just such misty-eyed mysticism.  That it parades itself as a celebration of the most unflinching, square-jawed rationalism imaginable only heightens the irony.

I should add, none of the above criticism takes anything away from the objectivity or brilliance of science.  It isn't that science isn't objective or true, it's just that the versions of objectivity and truth implicit or explicit in scientism are hopelessly misguided.

Lee Braver on Speculative Realism; The enduring allure of anti-realism (or subjective realism)

I've just been taking a look at the new issue of Speculations, particularly at Lee Braver's piece, which opens the issue.  As is typical of his prose the article is lyrical and beguiling but I do feel that he misses the point of many of the continental realisms and ends up hemming philosophy back into the traditional mind/world gap.

... [A]gainst the Speculative Realists, I still think that reality has to make some kind of contact with us for us to be able to talk about it. I don’t see how discussion of the ways that inanimate objects “experience” or “encounter” each other in the dark after we’ve all gone to bed could ever be more than mere speculation.

Instead he proposes a kind of "Transgressive Realism" which:

... emphasizes the way reality unsettles us. We can never settle down with a single way of understanding the world because it can always unexpectedly breach these. Such experiences do not get squeezed into our mental structures but instead violate them, cracking and reshaping our categories.

His Levinasian realism is interesting and well constructed, however he continues to locate the realist/anti-realist distinction in the gap between mind and world, reviving a mono-focal fixation on "mental structures," continuing to assume that we have a categorically more profound and privileged access to our own experiences such that we can describe these experiences without speculation; this in contrast to describing the experiences or beings of other things, which is a 'merely' speculative endeavour.  Braver is once again fixating on 'us' (whoever that is) -- 'we' are once again the benchmark of being.

What is so 'mere' about speculation?  It's only 'mere' if we contrast it to a kind of immanent certainty that could be spoken without any kind of risky inferential leap.  The accusation of 'mere speculation' suggests that our introspections aren't also speculative.  But when I describe my own experience, however transgressive or not, am I not also speculating somewhat?  Do I really know my own mind well enough to speak or act without speculating with regard to my own self (paging Dr Freud)?  If introspection is also intrinsically speculative then it makes no sense to take close hand experience as the benchmark of being in contrast to 'merely' speculating as to the experiences of other things, which we cannot possibly know.

Yes, it's true that "reality has to make some kind of contact with us for us to be able to talk about it".  No, we can't know the other in spite of or in abstraction from ourselves.  But nor can we know ourselves but imperfectly, speculatively.

Or, actually, to say that "reality has to make some kind of contact with us for us to be able to talk about it" is only partially true.  It's false insofar as it suggests that human beings are reality's passengers, passively awaiting perturbation.  On the contrary, it is through speculation we can bring hitherto untouched elements of reality into contact with ourselves!  Human beings aren't mute blocks of incomprehension randomly bumping around like un-piloted dodgem cars.  We're creative, manual, digital beings.  We can reach out and, yes, grasp things if only we speculate (and risk getting our fingers burnt).

What's more, what constitutes 'contact' differs by circumstance.  Things needn't be pressed hard against our noses in order for us to see them -- in fact distance aids focus.  Perhaps we can be 'in contact' with philosophical realities that broadly transcend us if only we rethink what we mean by contact.

Regardless, speculation isn't an epistemic or philosophical choice, it's a necessary condition of any persisting being.  Refusing to speculate as to the being of other beings apart from ourselves renders reality bifurcated: human mental structures -- mysteriously homogeneous -- and their attendant phenomenal apparitions on the one hand and every-bloody-thing-else 'out there' on the other.

Yes, discussing the being of other beings is speculative, abstract, imaginative even.  But so what?  So is everything else.  Of course, immanent self experiences are far richer, more immediate and more intensive than descriptions of the experiences of others can possibly be.  Perhaps we can thus say that describing the experience of an octopus is more speculative than describing my experience of an octopus.  But each is nevertheless speculative -- all translate.

Our real choice is not between speculation and something else.  We can either speculate on our own being as though it were somehow special, distinct and abstracted from the rest of existence or we can speculate more widely, ambitiously, inclusively and without the dead weight of the traditional bifurcations on our backs.  Such universal speculativeness makes true, foundational, untranslated, untranslatable, ahistorical knowledge impossible, sure.  But I know Braver doesn't mourn this loss with regard to knowledge of things so why does he seem to cling to it with regard to knowledge of selves?

Braver, for all his excellence, continues to judge philosophy according to the age old yard-sticks of certainty and human consciousness.  Just because we cannot know other things without speculating he judges that we should just stick to the disruptions of our own experiences.  But we cannot know these without speculation either!  The whole edifice falls in on itself no sooner than it has been lashed together.

Perhaps the problem is the 'speculative' element of speculative realism.  The likes of Brassier and Meillassoux aren't really speculative realists, they're realists.  Speculation has nothing to do with it (except for the fact that 'speculative philosophy' implies pre-Critical metaphysics, which is relevant for Meillassoux at least).  They really think that, via science and/or maths, they can discern the really real, the absolute, etc.  The only realists I'd describe as speculative in a substantial sense are those that follow Whitehead insofar as they recognise the inherent speculativeness of every entity, every actual occasion or object, in persisting in spite of unknowability.  If existence itself is speculative then there's nothing 'mere' about it.

Speculative philosophy is really just one variety of speculation.  The goal of describing the absolute or the being of other beings may well be so speculative as to be like reconstructing the Parthenon from a couple of shards of marble; but this wager is nevertheless necessary in order to avoid the many, assorted absurdities of a bifurcating philosophy fixated on only one side of an entirely false divide.  However comically it may teeter on the brink of impossibility the alternative is incomparably worse.

Transgressive Realism is just the same old anti-realism (aka subjective realism), differently nuanced.  It still puts humans and their bizarrely immanent, self-contained experiences at the centre of the universe; it still puts the anthropos at both the beginning and the end of philosophy.

The emptiness of philosophy, a pragmatic rendering

Levi Bryant argues that philosophy is empty and has no distinct subject matter.

The funny thing is that no one ever listens.  Scientists, for example, do just fine defining the epistemological and methodological requirements of their work and their eyes grow glassy whenever they are lectured by the philosopher about knowledge.

It's true that scientists don't need philosophers to put their abstractions in order.  However, it's also true that when scientists attempt to 'do' philosophy they often do so very badly.  Just because they don't need philosophers doesn't mean that their own implicit (or explicit) philosophies aren't dreadful and misguided, only that they function well enough for their purposes.

Actually, when thinking about what philosophy is I find it useful to start with what Geertz said of anthropology's relation to philosophy, which was that the role of anthropology is not to provide answers to the 'big questions' but to provide a record of the answers that various peoples have given to such questions.  If it is also true that, as Whitehead put it, the philosopher is the 'critic of abstractions' then it seems that we can anthropologise and pragmatise the practice of philosophy.

Not only scientists but even the denizens of remote, non-modern villages (i.e. the stereotypical subjects of anthropology) are perfectly capable of developing complex and sophisticated systems of abstractions.  Anyone capable of submitting such abstractions to some form of critique could be said to be philosophising.  What we call Philosophy is, then, simply the institutionalisation, formalisation and professionalisation of this function.  Which isn't to say that it is 'universal' but nor is it necessarily all that particular.  Perhaps some people are without a socio-linguistic capacity we could call 'critical' in this sense but wherever there *are* people with this capacity we can say that there is philosophy as an anthropological phenomenon.

So, in this sense scientists are already philosophers of their own life worlds.  As Latour has said so often, scientists are constantly doing metaphysics, constantly re-imagining how reality is stitched together.  If they lacked this capacity then they couldn't do their jobs.

But, then, how do I reconcile this with my previous point about scientists often making very bad philosophers?  Well, we could say that philosophy as a formalised, institutionalised phenomenon -- capital P Philosophy, if you like -- represents a canon of thought against which present philosophers are judged and through which an ongoing assemblage of competing and overlapping systems of rules, preferences and traditions are impressed upon present philosophers.

Or, in short, maybe everyone does philosophy but only a few do Philosophy -- only a few raise that basic anthropological function to a level of formality and deliberation that can be recognised as a distinct epistemic institution.  Scientists, for their part, are expert philosophers -- they have to be -- but they don't always make very good Philosophers -- because that requires a whole other set of experiences and competencies.

More on Religion and Reference

A commenter, Alonzo, pokes some valid holes in my last post:

In Latourian fashion let me propose a symmetry: 1)Latour's ideas about science are not shared by most scientists; 2)Latour's ideas about religion are not shared by most religious people. Both of these are true enough. I assume you have no problem with 1. You are not a Sokalist. So why is 2 any different? Why is it a defect in Latour's thinking about religion that his ideas are not commonplace? 

People, religious or not, do often think about religion as essentially concerned with subjective beliefs about objective realities. This is quite antithetical to Latour's philosophy. It is not that he does not know that people speak of themselves as holding "fairly straightforwardly literal beliefs" but that there is no place for that sort of thing in his own thinking. Where others see literal beliefs he sees things far richer, more complicated, tangled, active; not to be confined to subjectivity. He finds a simplicity at the heart of religion, but it is not something to be found in belief.

It's not that the rarity or non-descriptive character of Latour's version of religion is a defect as such -- at least not so simply.  My objection is more complicated than that.  I take your point though; I've given the impression of a double standard.  I'll try to restate my argument differently.

Latour attempts to describe both science and religion (and law, etc.) as they are practiced -- as practical complexes of gradual, fragile, incremental network building with their own, specific modes of existence, extension, connection, relation, endurance, etc.  His findings lead him to substantially contradict the abstract, generalised, conventional self-understandings of both scientists and the religious.  And this, of course, is exactly the right way to work.  Far from invalidating his arguments, the rarity and unexpectedness of what he describes is what makes his work worth reading.

What I find implausible, however, is the claim that references to God as an actually, necessarily existing, powerful deity and references to religious dogma as items of guaranteed existential fact are extrinsic to religious practice.  Of course, Latour does not and cannot claim that the nominally religious never engage in such acts of reference; clearly they do.  His claim is, instead, that when the apparently religious are doing so they are not being religious -- that the 'religious' are not acting religiously.

I take the view, on the contrary, that acts of reference to God's existence or to religious dogma are intrinsic to religion as practised.

Imagine a Christian leader standing proudly before his congregation, one arm raised upwards, finger thrusting towards the heavens, the other hand tensed into a fist, crashing down on an altar, eyes aflame, lips snarling, tongue proclaiming 'God has willed it, thus it is so' -- to Latour this kind of thing, regardless of how often it occurs under the guise of religion, is not truly religious; to me this caricature is the religious act par excellence.

We both agree that science and religion should be described as they are practised, not as they are commonly thought to be practised  where we disagree is in our interpretations of what makes religion tick, what stokes its fires and puts fuel in its belly.  Latour thinks that religion is nourished by kindly, liberal, pacific proselytisation and that acts of 'religious reference' are at best irrelevant and at worst poisonous to truly religious modes of action.  Contrariwise, I take the view that both the apoplectic preacher, screaming about fire and brimstone, and the velvet-voiced vicar, kindly extending the hand of kinship through the tale of Good News, are both equally religious; that both do the work of extending and translating religious networks and both do so religiously.

So, the problem is not that Latour's description of religion doesn't resemble other religious peoples' descriptions of religion, it's that he cordons off and partitions the majority of religious life in order to retain a purified, pacified inner kernel of religiosity that he finds agreeable.  I don't accept that this inner kernel really exists in isolation from the rest and am therefore compelled to view religious practice more holistically.

To demonstrate the point let's go back to the article I linked to before, which claims that millions of Americans think that tackling climate change is futile because the world will only end with God's Apocalypse, which humans are powerless to prevent -- either climate change predictions are a sham or they're the will of God; either way, human intervention is pointless.  For Latour, these only nominally 'religious' climate sceptics (or climate apologists, perhaps more accurately) have confused the modes of Religion and Reference -- they have taken religious dogma to be a fixed mono-semantic truth that must be obeyed rather than a dynamic spiritual heritage that must be translated.  What they should do, instead, is interpret religious texts more flexibly, interpretively, religiously; they should translate religious texts instead of taking them to be literal-minded guidebooks telling us what was, what is and what will be; they shouldn't take religion to be in competition with science but should "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" and put each mode in its place, avoiding category errors, by taking scientific, referential truths as seriously as religious, communal ones and making the two programmatically and politically compatible, even complimentary.

I think we can all agree that it would be overwhelmingly preferable if more religious people followed this particular mode of religion -- but it is, in my view, a mode of religion, not religion per se; it is a kind of religion, not religion itself as a kind of existence.  And it's quite a weak and rarely observed kind of religion at that -- and this is what presents the greatest problem for Latour's Religion: If pacified, translational proselytisation , shorn of claims to eternal truths, is what feeds religion and makes it strong why are so many actually existing religious practices so deeply and unapologetically referential?  If claims to reference don't feed but instead poison proper religious practice then shouldn't religion-without-reference be more easily observed than it is?  Indeed, why would anyone follow religious dogma if they didn't believe that it referred to something 'beyond'?  What is the point of (Christian) religion without transcendence?  What's the point of a god who is so weak that he requires his followers to construct incarnation for him?

Though raised in a Christian family I am not religious, so it isn't really for me to answer these questions; however I really can't see why anyone would practice a religion that was completely removed from any kind of reference to a reality beyond human existence.  Indeed, without these things why even call it 'religion' at all?  Perhaps my incomprehension speaks to the limitations of my imagination -- but, then again, given that people flock to harshly and unquestioningly 'referential' religions in their millions maybe it's not just me.

In my view religion is a human cultural practice -- that is, a practice that cultivates human existence -- like any other.  Of course it has its own dynamics, its own history, its own specificities -- but I don't think it has its own mode of existence.  And this is all coming from an atheist who sees no need to grant religion ontological foundations or to make it sui generis, abstracted from other similar practices.  I just think that although religious groups are wildly different in scale, intensity and temperament from, say, pop culture fan clubs they're not different in kind.

Followers of Jesus and fans of Doctor Who certainly realise their passions in different ways but both are passionately, textually and ritualistically devoted to their cherished cultural artefacts and to the cultivation of life that their practices incarnate.  That may seem offensive to those who believe religion to be inequivalent to any other institution but that isn't my problem.  Religious pretensions offend the irreligious too.  Life is full of offence.  Agreement is nice, it isn't necessary; disagreement needn't and ultimately can't be avoided.

What we must avoid is a situation where our modes of existence and/or our cultural practices put us at each others throats when there are far, far bigger fish to fry.  What we must avoid is becoming unnecessary enemies when we are, together, facing far greater dangers than mere theological disagreement.

And this brings me, by an oddly circular route, back to wanting to endorse Latour's religious mode -- and the political mode it adjoins -- as an ideal.  It would be wonderful if his model of spirituality were more widely realised instead of the stubborn, jealous and reactionary forms we so commonly encounter.  It'd also be fine with me if more people gave up on god entirely and found other ways of cultivating life.  But, either way, the priority has to be forming alliances to tackle larger problems, not pettily feuding over who's right and who's wrong in some grand, theological sense.

However the assemblage is to be constituted it must be constituted.  Latour imagines a religion that is at once more religious and more secular than religion as it commonly exists -- a religion that could stand not ahead or behind but alongside science and other institutional forms in facing common enemies: violence, poverty, inequality, injustice, pollution, climate catastrophe, etc.  He thus imagines a way to constitute the political assemblages, or the 'collectives,' that we so desperately need.  This is all good stuff.

So, if you'll permit me the contorted, over-extended and somewhat tortured chain of reasoning, I think Latour's Religion is descriptively misleading but prescriptively honourable.  I do not believe that religion has a sui generis essence -- a particular mode of existence -- in the manner Latour describes.  However, the world would be a much better place if his version of religion came to prosper over what religion has existed historically; it doesn't really exist, but the world would be better off if it did.  Then again, given the unanswered questions I raised above I fail to see much growth potential in it.

The epic stories, grounded certainties and grand, terrifying, godly power of referential religion are intoxicating in a way that is hard to give up.  Humans are hooked -- and, imbibing from this teat, they become stubbornly insensitive to the inconvenient facts that are generated by irreverent institutions.  And the deeper this opiate dream, the closer we all come to suffocation.

Atheists such as myself should celebrate any mutation within religion that makes it more readily assemblable with science and politics as this will be to the betterment of the world.  However, we should be neither shy or embarrassed in suggesting that religion is not a mode that must endure but a phase that can be superseded -- that it is just one kind of culture, one form practice that cultivates human existence and, consequently, that it is dispensible and can be improved upon.

Of Religion and Reference

Levi's latest diatribes against religion reminded me of this: "Belief in the Second Coming means many Americans see efforts to tackle climate change as futile"

I'm not sure I agree with him entirely but the above would seem to bear out the general point Levi is making.  Indeed, I had a similar reaction when reading through Latour's Gifford lectures.  He insists that the religious mode has nothing to do with the mode of reference -- he says that religion is only really about spreading 'Good News' and thus converting strangers to kin within a religious community.  But that simply isn't true for the vast majority of Christians that I've ever met (friends, family, acquaintances, etc.).  Many and perhaps even most of them really and truly believe that God exists ‘out there’ and that various items of religious dogma are literally and straightforwardly true -- creation, the apocalypse, morality, etc.  Their faith may waver -- they may harbour uncertainties -- but that is more of a quantitative distinction than a qualitative one.  (In other words, I may be uncertain whether I have any milk left in the fridge but my uncertainty doesn't change the referential character of the truth; likewise, just because someone isn't sure whether or not God exists doesn't necessarily change what they mean by 'exists.')

Of course, Latour is arguing against mainstream Christianity as much as he is against scientism or atheism but the fact remains that his ‘religious mode’ doesn’t describe religious practice as it exists, it rather identifies an essence to Christian religion that is allegedly obscured by the intrusion of other modes, chiefly reference.

But the simple fact is that most Believers don’t hold intellectualised, philosophised, hermeneuticised religious beliefs but fairly straightforwardly literal beliefs about the actual structure of the world.  In my experience, most people operate within a single mode for the most part; the multiple modes idea is more of a partially realised ideal than an accurate description.

An objection that any atheist always runs up against when arguing positively for atheism (and thus against religion) is: 'oh but that's just a caricature of religion, we don't really believe that'.  And to an extent that's a valid objection because religion is an enormously varied and complex phenomenon.  But at the same time it gives non-atheists unlimited leeway to shift the goalposts -- they can never be pinned down to any particular position; they can always shift the ground of conversation; from existence to meaning to belief, and so on.

So, yes I think Levi is probably arguing against a caricature but (a) that's unavoidable and (b) that caricature does apply quite well to an awful lot of people, as the above article concerning climate change demonstrates.

You can't spell irreduction without reduction

Levi Bryant writes a mixed piece on irreduction as a concept.  At first he regrets previously adopting the concept in is 'Ontic Principle' it but then he goes on to defend irreduction anyway.

It's shocking how often people misunderstand this (to my mind) quite simple principle.  As I read it, Latour's principle of irreduction actually has four parts - well, three plus a clarification.  People tend to fixate on the first part and miss the rest.  Here it is in full:

"1.1.1 Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else.
• I will call this the "principle of irreducibility", but it is a prince that does not govern since that would be a self-contradiction"

1. Nothing is reducible to anything else.
To exist is to differ.  If A is entirely reducible to B then A and B cannot meaningfully be said to be separate entities, they are one and the same.  If any thing were to be reduced to any other thing then only the other thing would exist, by definition.  That's the ontology.  Epistemologically this also means that no matter how much you study a thing that thing is always, necessarily beyond you.  Reality exceeds knowledge not just in fact ('alas we are merely flawed humans') but in principle.  Indeed, this principle of 'excess' applies to any form of relation, not just knowledge.

2. Nothing is irreducible to anything else.
Nothing is beyond relation, there are no hermetically sealed spheres separating things that cannot possibly touch.  Anything can be brought to bear on anything else.  No two things are sufficiently enemies that they cannot become allied.  Reality is promiscuous.  There are no dualities, no lines that cannot be crossed; there are only pluralities, many lines that can be crossed if you can summon strong enough allies.  Furthermore, to ally, to join, to relate is to reduce.  For X to form an alliance with Y each must reduce the other to some degree; they must simplify each other.  But they must do this because they are irreducible to each other!  It is because that one is irreducible to the other that, in order to relate, they must translate and simplify one another.  The irreducible/reducible dyad is not so much a contradiction as a self-reinforcing circle.  For things to relate and exist they must be both reducible and irreducible.

3. Nothing is reducible or irreducible by itself.
And things must be brought to bear.  Nothing can persist by itself; it's only through complex tangles of (vicarious) relations that anything can happen.  Every thing is a swarm, every event is a cascade.  Reality is a chaotic, raucous, poly-dimensional game of dominoes.

4. This is a prince(iple) that does not govern.
This is principle 1.1.1 of Latour's thesis.  It kick-starts the discourse but the axioms that follow from it do not 'follow from it' in the sense that they can be deduced from it or that they already exist in it 'in potentia'.  This contrasts to classical metaphysics, e.g. Spinoza, Descartes, where everything is supposed to be deducible from the first principle.  Furthermore, however, I think this also means that this thesis doesn't reproduce, replicate or represent the 'heart of reality'; this axiom isn't the source code from which the universe is pieced together.  That would be a contradiction since it would reduce reality to words.  No, what this axiom does is put something new out into the world, a new semantic creature that can form new alliances, perform new assemblages, etc.  Thus it demonstrates its metaphysical truth by performative alliance building, not by summing up in words something that exists 'out there' behind appearances.

That's my interpretation anyway.  Later theses in Irreductions clarify and add to the principle but most of it is there in some form.

Latour is never saying that we must stop 'reducing' things altogether.  That's the criticism that's usually levelled at this principle and it's nonsensical.  Ray Brassier's 'critique' of Irreductions in the Speculative Turn is based almost entirely upon this elementary misunderstanding.

Reduction is more or less a synonym for relation - but you can only relate two things that are irreducible to each other (since otherwise there would not be two things at all).

The argument that science can only work by reduction fits with Latour's axiom perfectly well.  To reduce is to form a network.  There's no issue.  But while science may 'reduce to explain' it doesn't 'reduce away' as in 'explain away' - there's always a remainder.

What we must be wary of is the claim that science captures what it studies completely, that knowledge of a thing is equivalent to the thing itself.  What we must resist is the claim that you can reduce a thing completely without destroying it.  Essentially it's all an argument against the ideal of pure mastery - it's all Nietzschean.  Yes, we must resist the idea that things can be reduced without remainder but to resist reduction as such is an impossibility.  In fact, to cease to reduce is to submit to unrelation: death.

Latour today distances himself from Irreductions, calling it a 'naive' book that he has 'fondness' for (off the top of my head, I think he uses these words).  Certainly, he has moved on from much of it but the principle of irreduction is evident throughout his work, right up to the present.  It's one of the few unbroken threads running throughout his work.

When Latour talks about things being 'irreduced and set free' he's releasing them from reduction*ism*, but not from reduction per se.  Each flap of the seagull's wings is a simplification and a reduction of the air around it, but it is irreduced insofar as it is set free from the notion that it is 'nothing more' than the diagram in the textbook or the DNA sequence digitised by the computer or the phenomenon apperceived by the thinking subject.

In short, you were right to defend the principle of irreduction, Levi!  Irreduction isn't the antonym of reduction, it's a broader concept that contains it.

You can't spell irreduction without reduction!

'Prince of Modes', Latour's 'phases'

From the blurb for the Graham Harman's prospective 'Prince of Modes' book, due in 2014:

While it is not unusual to speak of “early” and “late” phases in a philosopher’s career, Bruno Latour is perhaps unique in having gone through both phases simultaneously.

Harman has written words along these lines several times before.  It's becoming something of a catchphrase for his commentary on Latour.  The problem with this remark, however pithy (and I like pith), is that Latour is very clear in pretty much everything he's published on the subject in the last few years* that he was always working on his 'modes' project, he just happened to concentrate on the 'network' element for a long time.  So, the only 'phases' are the phase when he was writing about one mode and not speaking openly about the rest and the present phase when he's speaking about all of them together.

Harman's quip (and I like quips) gives the impression that Latour has produced notably distinct and different philosophies at different times.  I don't think this is at all accurate.  If we take what Latour himself says seriously then the former work was simply one element of a larger project that is now coming to fruition.  It's a subtle distinction but it matters.

I like Harman's first book on Latour, the 'Prince of Networks,' but it does prove that the author is dead.  Harman's Latour doesn't always bear that much resemblance to the Latour I find in the his own books.  There's nothing wrong with this as such -- I've written in the past about how Latour's own public persona is a fiction -- so it's not about authenticity, it's about being candid and clear about just what's going on.

Harman's Latour is a translation, a continuation-with-deformation that Harman fabricates largely for his own purposes.  Harman's Latour, as presented in Prince of Networks, is a stepping stone, a foil for Harman's own philosophy.  He says 'this is what Bruno said, this is what he got right, this is what he got wrong, this is how I'd improve on it...'  But his reading isn't ever neutral, it's always oriented towards the latter part of the book, the 'how I'd improve on it' part, which is the real end -- the earlier parts are the means.  He has to present Latour in a certain light in order to present his own thought as an improvement on his precursor's.  In order to do this he gets bends some concepts, leaves some stuff out and gets some other things just plain wrong.  Again, nothing wrong with that but it is what it is.

I look forward to reading the Prince of Modes and I don't object to Harman's simplifications as such, it just concerns me that many people will read Harman's Latour and think that this is Latour's Latour.  Both are equally 'fictions,' conscious and specifically stylised presentations, but they do differ significantly and this isn't as widely recognised as it should be.

Going back to the original point, the whole idea of 'phases' is rather inadequate to describe Latour's many trajectories.  I think the concept of a tree captures it better.  There's a largely continuous if somewhat twisted trunk, a distinctive signature, running through everything, even back to Laboratory Life and beyond.  However, there are many divergent branches and branches of branches of varying thickness and convolution.  Many of them represent tangents have been abandoned or that have changed beyond recognition.  (Okay, it's not a perfect metaphor but I think it makes my point.)

So, his thought has changed, certainly.  But does it form anything like a pair of 'phases'?  I don't see it at all.  Nor, according to what he's written, does Latour himself.  He's never been self-consistent enough to corral into two of anything and yet, at the same time, his key concepts haven't changed enough to warrant any kind of temporal demarcation.  No befores and afters, even if they're happening at the same time.

It seems to me that the before and after myth that Harman is crafting lets him keep his critiques of Latour1 while bracketing off any exceptions or remainders that don't seem to apply to that figure by giving them a home in Latour2.  By setting up two relatively purified figures he then has a duo of fixed targets, each of which perform different purposes in his own narrative.  If he was forced to acknowledge that there's both more and fewer than 2 Latours his narrative of promotion, critique and succession wouldn't work.  What if, for instance, he was forced to abandon the idea that Latour 'reduces things to relations' when the counterarguments to this are legion?  He'd have nothing to succeed.  Cutting up Latour into two phases means he can put discordant ideas wherever they don't inconvenience the narrative.**

This argument is partially speculative and perhaps a little premature because, of course, I don't know what Prince of Modes will say, but based on his commentary to date I think I'm on the right track.



* e.g. 'Coming out as a philosopher', his Gifford lectures, to name but two.
**  See the example of 'plasma' for an example of where a concept is comprehensively redefined in order to suit the narrative.

The limitations of being 'post'-epistemological; The inevitability of judgement

There's a lot of talk lately about being 'post-epistemological' or about displacing epistemology with ontology -- or even with ethics.  While I agree that the flaws and limitations of epistemology (and epistemologists) are many and sundry that doesn't mean that we can do without it (or them) -- quite the contrary.

Without epistemology, research is impossible.  Imagine two (admittedly cartoonish) characters that you might meet in the course of fieldwork:

Person 1: *hands clenched and trembling, voice quaking* 'I was there, I saw it with my own two eyes, the image is burned into my mind; it was like this: ...'

Person 2: *hands casually flopping about, voice carefree* 'Oh, I met some bloke down the pub who said that his sister's husband's, cousin was there; he said that she said he said that he was too drunk to stand up at the time but apparently it was like this: ...'

If you don't accord the first of these greater evidential significance then your fieldwork is plainly little more than a bad joke.  And to accord differential significance is to make an epistemological decision about preferred modes of evidence collection and inference from that evidence.  Such a decision not only judges the veritability of a given account, it also draws a line around the research project, delimiting it; without such a line there is no way of ending a project since it must include everything.  The line makes the research possible.

One might object thus: 'Of course I prioritise 1 over 2 but not because of any judgement of any veridical judgement but for ethical reasons; person 1 is clearly deeply affected by the experience and, thus, deserves to be taken seriously for moral reasons; person 2 is clearly unaffected and so has no real claim to the situation.'  This is a perfectly acceptable and even admirable criterion for deciding who to believe but, frankly, I think that to say that this is the only criterion one is employing in such a situation is a lie.  Ethics may reinforce and justify or even primarily motivate the decision to take 1 seriously and 2 not but to pretend that there has been no judgement vis-a-vis the cogency and reliability of the evidence in these two accounts is absurd.  I simply don't believe anyone who could say that they prefer 1 over 2 entirely on ethical and not at all on epistemological grounds.

For all the sins it is associated with, epistemology is not a dirty word.  Not talking about criteria of validity doesn't mean you've transcended epistemology, only that you've failed to declare it; that you're hiding it, denying it, repressing it.  Cognition itself is inconceivable without constant judgements with regard to the conditions of valid knowledge.  Epistemology, as a knowledge practice, merely raises such judgements to an abstract, formal level -- as does ontology with questions of existence.

On Death

It's spiteful, nasty and quite shortsighted to ever celebrate the lonely flickering out of a human being.  Anyone 'of the left' who celebrates a human death demonstrates a lack of compassion that makes a mockery of their politics.

Then again, roughly 150,000 people die every day.  Why do we give a shit about this single death in 150,000 or so?  Fuck her.  Mourn someone who deserves it.  Don't cheer, that's sick.  But anyone mourning her passing this evening is either a fool or an arsehole.  Death is always sad but some deaths are less so.  Tonight I am entirely unmoved.

Latour's Religion, more like Culture?

I'm just working my way through the text of Latour's Gifford lectures.  Not got a lot of time for this so it may take me a while.  Only part way through the second one right now so there's a long way to go but here are some initial thoughts (it'll be interesting to see if these still stand up when I get to the end!).

In the second lecture Latour takes Hume for his thought-he-was-Modern-ist punching bag:

For [Hume], it seems, there is just one regime of speech that he may use exactly in the same fashion to ask his butler if he should carry an umbrella to visit his friend Adam Smith; if his mistress loves him for good; if Cromwell was born the 25th of April 1599; or if God is a spider, an architect, or a giant vegetable. One size fits all. And yet rational discourse is not to treat everything in the same dispassionate tone, but to learn how to detect the different tones adjusted to the different situations so as to be able to sing all of them in the right tune.

So far so straightforward -- science and religion are different regimes of truth, modes of existence, felicity conditions, etc. and treating one in terms of the other is a category error.  A familiar argument.  Instead of taking a singular, referential mode to be germane to all instances Latour insists that we instead become sensitive to differences and learn to both hear and speak the several tongues, become modally plural, make our 'mother tongue,' whatever it may be, one tongue among many rather than the one that speaks the others.  To put both information transfer (science) and incarnation (religion) in their proper places.

[Religious] talk is not about carrying information (Is there an ultimate cause? Is it a deity, a giant spider, a benevolent Providence or a ‘blind watchmaker’?), but about transforming, converting, resuscitating those who are talked to.

Hume fails to even understand what religion is.  'Do not speak about religion,' proclaims Latour, 'but speak religiously -- passionately, compulsively, obsessively -- spread the Word!'  Ventriloquising Pamphilus, speaking against Hume's Philo, Latour says:

You have transformed the only speech act able to generate proximity into a vain quest for accessing far away regions — a quest which will never have the efficacy of the natural sciences.

When science and religion get mixed up "religion is transmogrified into an unfathomable mystery".  Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and all that.

I'm puzzled by how Latour associates science with the transcendent (or the 'far away' as he puts it) and religion with the immanent (or 'close at hand').  The "far away" is "accessed ... beautifully by the sciences" while the "near at hand" is "accessed ... efficaciously by Religion Two".  What he ends up suggesting is the confirmation or disconfirmation of the existence of religious entities in a referential sense is something beyond religious practice (and presumably scientific practice too, for all its "efficacy" in that area) -- and that reference is therefore irrelevant to religion.  The religious may speak referentially but in so doing they are ceasing to speak religiously, they are only aping science.

What, then, is religion without reference, without transcendence?  It's about "transforming, converting, resuscitating" the hitherto untransformed, unconverted and asphyxiated -- a (in every sense) religious outward projection of the Word of the Faithful -- a performance that creates 'persons', i.e. a process of evangelical subjectivation.  At root this is all pretty standard stuff: religion is about joining people together, creating community, establishing a network of faiths and values and, above all, proselytising like it's going out of fashion.  It's a liberal religion that's all about building a People in an ever changing, dynamic constructive process rather than submitting anybody to an absolute, unchanging authority.

[T]he entity around which the Church [of Religion Two] assembles bears no relation to the others [of Religion One], since it shares none of its characters of unity, universality, indisputability and immutability. On the contrary, it’s best characterized, as far as we can tell, by a chain of successive and radical metamorphoses, mutations, and conversions, of reprises, in the very definition of what any entity is. Even when this chain is artificially segmented in successive events — God, Son, Holy Spirit, Church, none of them may be defined as a stable substance. The label ‘Trinity’ does not help much at this point, except that it underlines how far it is from the already unified ‘God’ implied by Religion One. Most importantly, grasping each of its sequences requires a highly specific movement of appropriation and of retelling, so that the whole narrative of incarnation can be carried one step forward in time and space in a new refreshing way. While Religion Two is defined by a succession of events taken up one after the other, Religion One strives to define a distant and stable object. And it has no other way to define it except by choosing words that have to be as independent as possible from the distant target. By contrast, in Religion Two, the realisation of the event — in all the meanings of ‘realization’ — depends on a logos, that is, on how to retell the narrative, how to address and more exactly to convert the faithful, how to spread the Good News of the Gospel. Here again the discrepancies between the two meanings of religion are baffling. The thing told and the word telling it are one and the same — that is, ‘the Word’ with a capital W, this Word that stands ‘at the Beginning’ of John’s scripture.

Continuing the translations and transformations faithfully -- not attempting to fix dogma as though there were some pure point of origin followed by misinterpretation but taking the translational process to be the very point of it all.  All familiar Latourian themes.

At the root of his critique of Religion One is the contradictory nature of this religion being split between immance and transcendence -- between an absolutely existing, indisputable, universal and all powerful deity 'out there' and contingent, dynamic, ritualistic performances of faith 'in here'.  But is this really a contradiction?  Don't the two halves actually rely on each other in religious practice?  Doesn't the one side fuel the other?  Is 'information transfer' really irrelevant to religion?  By abandoning reference and information to the scientific mode hasn't he actually abandoned religion to a plane of meek, pious and unpresuming but also unquestioning performativity?  In fact, what's the point of a deity that isn't 'outside'?  What's the point of religion without transcendence?

In Latour's religion God (as a being that is existentially verifiable in any way, shape or form) is dead but his shadow lives on, borne by the performative practices of his worshippers.  It's as though he turned to Nietzsche and said 'sure, God is dead -- but he's alive in our hearts!' -- our songs, sermons, ceremonies, etc.  'Dead but alive in our hearts' -- this is one of the ways that people rationalise death in lieu of god and an afterlife!  An odd admixture -- a secular, religious mourning and resurrection of God -- all at once.

So, the practice of religion does not require the verification of God's existence both because this is impossible and because referential verification is a completely different mode of speech to the religious mode.  Through such a settlement, Latour seems to hope that the imperia of science and religion can draw their lines in the sand and find peace.

However, one could also ask: if the practice of religion does not require verification of its entities then does it require a belief or faith in a god at all?  If the verity of a god is irrelevant to the religious practice, properly and modally conceived, then why is a god even needed?

In a nutshell, Latour's 'religion' is a performative practice of cultivating the common; fabricating a people or a Church and earnestly, eagerly spreading that way (or form) of life to the unconverted -- who are not presumed to be always already subject to a universal God but must be actively woven into the fabric of His religion.

I think that a better word for Latour's 'religion' would be culture -- not as in movies, TV, celebrities (or, rather, these are but a few forms of culture) but as in horticulture, agriculture, cultivation.  Latour is arguing for religion as a cultural phenomenon.  If it's absurd to speak of an atheist religion we can easily speak of an atheist culture that does most if not all of what 'religion' does.  So why keep speaking of 'religion' at all if the verity of its referential assumptions are no longer of any importance?

These are really just a jumbled series of thoughts but they leave me with some questions as I press onwards.

Since it's not at all difficult to point to utterly godless cultural practices that perform most of the same operations as Religion Two will Latour allow godless cultures to participate in the religious mode?  If so then he really should drop religion as a term and take up culture instead; if not then I think this will sunder his schema since it's absurd.  If religion is "the only speech act able to generate proximity" then either there are a lot of godless religions around or us godless folk are radically estranged and alienated from one another (which may be true but only incidentally so since godful folks also seem to struggle with such existential cruelties!).

At some points Latour makes it seem as though his God depends upon his worshippers for existence -- what is the point of such a pathetic deity?  It's one thing making Him 'inside' insofar as he can only be thought through the practices and processes of interpretation and worship (and insofar as he is transformed as his Word is translated) and quite another to reduce him to his own worshippers (or, more accurately, to bracket out questions of his existence in excess of his manifestation in practice).

By bracketing off reference absolutely from the practice of religion isn't Latour making his cherished faith little more than a fan club for a pop star that may or may not exist -- his fans preferring not to raise the question?  If the universe is not 'unified' enough to speak of a Godly creator but the god of each religion must rely on his followers to unify the universe and bring a more godly existence into being then what's the point of having a god at all?  These gods are so weak as to be laughable.  What's the point of a god who presides over a disunity so chronic that he relies on a few billion bags of flesh on one miniscule rock in an obscure corner of an unremarkable galaxy in a nearly infinite universe to piece things together for him?

What's the point of a god in thrall to humanity?

Finally, how will Gaia (who is yet to make much of an appearance in the second lecture, unlike the first) map on to this not secularised but 'culturalised' religious mode?

Temperance, intemperance and the fevers of conversation

Temperance, oh temperance.  I am not emotionally invested in philosophy.  I've never studied it properly; I'm an amateur enthusiast at best – like one of those half-witted nineteenth-century gentlemen who netted and dissected butterflies to no particular end.  If I'm 'trained' in anything then it's social science, political science more particularly.  Within that hazy constellation of epistemic practices I've always gravitated towards the theoretical and philosophical.  But, nevertheless, I am not emotionally invested in philosophy – I am simply not competent enough to suffer from such an attachment

The tagline to this blog is "In which I form strong opinions about things I don't know enough about" – strong but not especially gut-felt; polemical, wry but, I hope, never rude or aggressive – these are the low standards to which I aspire.  I say this not to cast aspersions against those who are emotionally invested in philosophy and who get correspondingly fiery and confrontational when discussing it.  This is not judgemental, just confessional.

I frequently write things that I later regret because I realise them to have been stupid and ill-informed, though I don't regret writing in general.  There's a pleasure that comes from looking back over old posts and realising 'hey, that's not bad.'  Occasional cringe-worthy stupidity is the negative externality of that positive process.

I'm congenitally shy but I've always found a way to speak up in classrooms, seminars, conference fora, etc.  These situations invariably induce a profound degree of nervous excitement in me; raised heart-rate, dry throat, clammy palms – on edge.  This tension at once pulls me out of the conversation – since the thought of having an entire room's eyes and ears trained on me makes me dizzy – but also draws me in – the fight-or-flight infusion of heat, purpose and adrenaline makes every word and thought stand out as if outlined with a sharp, black marker pen.

This contradiction, this critical disposition can go either of two ways: frantic silence or eager loquation.  The trick is to break the fever early on – jump in head first, say whatever is on your mind.  There's always a good chance that these initial rat-a-tat-tatting bursts of first impressions will, like so many blog posts, later be regretted for their inchoate pretension – but they set the conversation, the dialogue, the dialectic into chuttering, whirring motion – they set aflame the fuel that fear and anxiety provide.  Stupidity, it seems, is the practical precondition of wisdom.

But it's not just social anxiety – disagreement too, even when imagined, is fecund for thought.  Bickering, however, is not.

The things we love enfever us.  Our nervous energies draw us in, sharpening our wits, forcing us to think; but they also pull us apart, closing our throats and raising our hackles.

All too often we choke.

Revolutionary conservatism

We do indeed live in an era of revolutionary conservatism.

Generally, conservatives are characterised by wanting to keep things like they are at present.
More often than not, conservatives are also traditionalist: they want to maintain the present's continuity with the past.
Not infrequently, conservatives are also regressive: they want to turn the clock back to a lost, glorious bygone era.

However, our conservatives, the ones who dominate our politics at present, are revolutionary: they want the future to be like the present, only more so.

More prosaically, our conservatives identify the prevailing power structures and inequalities of the present, find them to be pleasing and seek to entrench them even deeper, extend them even further, build them even taller.

It's a particularly fearsome kind of revolution that is driven from above, by the most powerful.

The question of correlation; Becoming sensitive to barbarians

Distancing himself from the concept of 'correlationism,' Levi Bryant muses on how his OOO is, in a sense, the most 'correlational' of philosophies:

Can I ever experience the world the way a mantis shrimp experiences the world?  Of course not.  However, through my knowledge of optics, electro-magnetic waves, its reactions to the environment about it, and so on, I can make all sorts of fallible inferences about what mantis shrimp have access to.

Sometimes I think my position is better described as “pan-correlationism” rather than as “realism”.  “Pan-correlationism” is the thesis that everything is an “observer” or that all things have access to the world in particular ways.  Put in Deleuzo-Spinozist terms, it would be the thesis that every entity is affected and affects other entities in its own way.  The way in which rocks have access to the world about them and act upon the world around them is different than how trees affect and are affected by the world, as well as from how corporations, governments, octopi, persons, and tiger sharks are affected by and affect the world.  Leibniz said that every monad is a point of view on the entire universe from a particular perspective.  Leibniz was saying that monads are observers.  Observing how observers observe is what really interests me.

This reminds me of a passage from Latour's eminently Leibnizian 'Irreductions':

The seagull, far from its name, far from its species, in its own world of air, sea, and favored fish; the fish far from its shoals, far from the gull and its beak, innocent in the icy water; the water that gathers together and shapes itself, mixed by the winds, knotted by the currents, heaving and breaking itself onto the beach ... The bird, far from its name, flies from the name that I give it, but continues to fly in treatises on zoology and the poems of St. John Perse. The gull is in its sky, irreducible to ours, but the language of the taxonomist is in the books, itself irreducible to any gull ever dreamed of, living or dead.

Oddly, perhaps, it also reminds me of a passage from Plato's 'Statesman.'  In this dialogue the Stranger is in conversation with Young Socrates; the topic of conversation is discovering the essence of the statesman; the method of discovering essences is that of dividing reality into classes, starting with the most general distinctions and working towards specifics.  After a while the Stranger invites Young Socrates to have a stab at it himself:

STRANGER: Very good, [Young] Socrates ...
And now, as you say, leaving the discussion of the
name,--can you see a way in which a person, by showing the art of
herding to be of two kinds, may cause that which is now sought amongst
twice the number of things, to be then sought amongst half that number?

YOUNG SOCRATES: I will try;--there appears to me to be one management of
men and another of beasts.

STRANGER: You have certainly divided them in a most straightforward and
manly style; but you have fallen into an error which hereafter I think
that we had better avoid.

YOUNG SOCRATES: What is the error?

STRANGER: I think that we had better not cut off a single small portion
which is not a species, from many larger portions; the part should be a
species. To separate off at once the subject of investigation, is a most
excellent plan, if only the separation be rightly made; and you were
under the impression that you were right, because you saw that you would
come to man; and this led you to hasten the steps. But you should not
chip off too small a piece, my friend; the safer way is to cut through
the middle; which is also the more likely way of finding classes.
Attention to this principle makes all the difference in a process of
enquiry.

YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean, Stranger?

STRANGER: I will endeavour to speak more plainly out of love to your
good parts, Socrates; and, although I cannot at present entirely explain
myself, I will try, as we proceed, to make my meaning a little clearer.

YOUNG SOCRATES: What was the error of which, as you say, we were guilty
in our recent division?

STRANGER: The error was just as if some one who wanted to divide the
human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this
part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and
all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, and have
no ties or common language, they include under the single name of
'barbarians,' and because they have one name they are supposed to be of
one species also. Or suppose that in dividing numbers you were to
cut off ten thousand from all the rest, and make of it one species,
comprehending the rest under another separate name, you might say that
here too was a single class, because you had given it a single name.

...

STRANGER: Suppose now, O most courageous of dialecticians, that some
wise and understanding creature, such as a crane is reputed to be,
were, in imitation of you, to make a similar division, and set up cranes
against all other animals to their own special glorification, at the
same time jumbling together all the others, including man, under the
appellation of brutes,--here would be the sort of error which we must
try to avoid.

...

Plato's crane, Latour's seagull, Levi's mantis shrimp.  In different ways and for different reasons all these unassuming creatures represent the conclusion that the world of things is a plurality, not a duality.  There are real classes and real things but each of these things exist on their own and in their own right – any distinction that sets one kind of thing apart from all others is arbitrary and false so long as one fails to recognise that it is a distinction within a world of distinctions.

'Barbarians' are imagined by the same process that dualist philosophies are: by hiving off one tiny corner of reality and taking that fragment to be sui generis and exceptional, while everything left unmarked by that distinction is homogeneous, indistinguishable – a babbling mass of incoherence – barbarian.  Instead of performing the necessary labour of making distinction after distinction, whittling wholes into groups, sub-groups and sub-sub-groups, the dualist hives off one group alone and declares everything else to be of one kind in relation to it.  The real 'barbarism' is this demarcation itself.

It is interesting that Plato has the Stranger make this argument.  Xenophobia – irrational fear of strangers or foreigners – comes from the Greek xenos meaning "a guest, stranger, foreigner".  A 'barbarian' is thought to 'babble' because she speaks in a tongue that one cannot understand.  The xenophobe, in arrogance, takes an other's babbling to be 'what the other does' -- thinks that the other is a babbler, a fool; a blank, blinking vessel of incoherence.  And yet it is the xenophobe who is the fool – babbling is only manifest to the untrained ear of a monoglot.  To a polyglot the world is a rich, fully differentiated sea of differences – every language existing in and of itself, defined by its own characteristics, in a relationship of plurality to every other tongue.  The monoglot is unaware of any regime of expression or articulation besides his own – every other tongue is 'just noise.'  A monoglotic xenophobe takes the experience one step further and fearfully imagines the apparently undifferentiated mass to be of a single kind because they are undifferentiated to him.

There are two morals to this story:

First, take the correlate seriously.  The monoglotic xenophobe is a naive realist – he believes that because he experiences all the others of the world as an undifferentiated mass that they are; that there exist his people, on the one hand, and all the other barbarians of the world, on the other.  His demarcation, it turns out, is born out of ignorance rather than knowledge – by a correlational insensitivity; a perceptive poverty.

Second, being a pluralist rather than a dualist is a matter not of refusing or ignoring correlatedness but of working on becoming more correlationally sensitive – becoming more sensitive to the differences among things as they are representationally, correlationally manifest – by correlational sensitivity; by perspicacity.

If one looks out into the world and sees 'barbarians' – babbling, terrifyingly indistinguishable hoardes – this says nothing of those bodies and everything of one's own insensitivity towards difference.  The dualism of 'Hellene/barbarian' is an expression not of knowledge but of ignorance; not of sensitivity or intelligence but of the contrary.  The dualism of 'human/nature' is scarcely any different.

Plato's Stranger knew that.  He knew that differences must be worked out and distinguished carefully, gradually, without shortsighted shortcuts that would render any one group exceptional relative to a jumbled remainder that had no identity themselves – that A must be distinguished from B, C, D, E, etc. not from not-A.

Ignorance of correlate-dependence leads to dualism because it makes the perceiver insensitive to pluralities of difference.  It is only in recognising the profound existential significance of correlatedness (or whatever you want to call it) that real ontological pluralism is possible at all.  Far from ' the correlate' being the enemy, it is an indispensible component of any conceivable pluralist reality.