This week and next, Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities are running a series on speculative realism and ethics, responses addressing the following question:
â??While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other important insights, the question to be asked is, what is the relation between ethics and ontology? Does a realist ontology require the suspension of any ethical imperatives? Can ethics and norms be grounded in something real? Are nonhuman actors capable of ethical relations?â?
Nick Srnicek has just published my contribution, which I also reprint here. If you’d like to comment, I invite you to do so over at Speculative Heresy to keep the discussion all in one place.
Large, white letters on black, the bumper sticker reads: “Soy is Murder.”
It’s a riff off the “Meat is Murder” adage popular among some animal rights proponents, a slogan itself borrowed from the pro-vegetarian title track of The Smiths second album. It’s tempting to read the bumper sticker as a send-up, a caustic imputation of moral vegetarianism through backhanded reductio ad absurdum. But further reflection might dampen an initial scoff. Is wrestling a tuber from the ground or ripping a pea from its pod a sort of violence?
The criticism of selective indignance has long plagued veganism, whose proponents have developed a number of responses to the accusation. One downplays the suffering of plants by arguing that they have no central nervous system and thus cannot experience pain like animals can. Another points out that some plants must be eaten in order to spread their seed and reproduceâ??fruits, for example. There’s even a name for the practice of eating only fallen seeds, frutarianism. Such a diet is sometimes correlated with ahimsa, a tenet to “do no harm” central to Buddhism, Hinduism, and particularly Jainism.
To the first response, opponents respond that such an argument assumes that feeling-by-nervous-system is only one kind of sensation. Others clearly exist, even if they remain unfamiliar. Plants clearly sense the world too, whether to seek out light or water, or to react chemically to external threats. To the second response, they make enjoinders to logic: even the strictest Jainist ahimsa risks its own violation, since to eat the seed is also to disrupt its final cause, the new tree. Does the wanton destruction of a new plant qualify as harm?
No matter what we may feel about eating or abstaining from meat, appeals to feeling and suffering exemplify the correlationist conceit: the assumption that the rights any thing should have are the same ones we believe we should have; that living things more like us are more important than those less like us; and that life itself is an existence of greater worth than inanimacy. These are understandable biases for we humans. We are mortal and fragile in specific ways, and we worry about them.
Things become more difficult when we move beyond the animate, and into the great outdoors, toward an ethics of objects.
When I turn the ignition of my car, a mixture of air and gasoline are drawn through the engine intake valve into the cylinder. The piston rises, compressing the the mix. Once it reaches the top of its stroke, the spark plug ignites the fuel, detonating the flammable aliphatic compounds within it. The explosion drives down the piston, which in turn rotates the driveshaft. The cylinder’s exhaust port opens, and the fume of exploded fuel exits toward the tailpipe.
When we talk about the ethics of internal combustion engines, we usually talk only about the first and last steps, the social and cultural practices that encourage driving in the first place, or the plume of combustion gases that exit the vehicle and enter the environment. In the first case, matters of ritual, exercise, or safety might be mustered: driving is a kind of sloth that loosens the physical and the social body alike. In the second, matters of environment take the stage: exhaust contains carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and particulate matter that can be harmful to living creatures.
By contrast, we don’t consider the ethics of the spark plug, the piston, the fuel injector, or the gasoline. Does the engine have a moral imperative to explode distilled petroleums? Does it do violence upon them? Does it instead express ardor, the loving heat of friendship or passion? Such questions must be asked quite separately from any ethical inquiry into the processes sourcing and extracting crude oil in order to produce fuels and other products: they are questions not about the human imperatives for or against conservation, consumption, militarism, and related matters, but instead questions about the moral relation between non-human, non-living objects.
Take another, weirder case: theories, concepts, and memes. Is there an ethics of ideas? Not an ethics for their application, as by human hands advancing a political cause, but an ethics for the interactions of ideas as such? When I utter a phrase, do I owe it more than its utterance? When it enters into relations with other utterancesâ??whether as inscription on surface, as charge on magnetic storage devices, as disruption in the fluid dynamics of a cold morningâ??what responsibility do I have to them through my having uttered them? Likewise, what rights do they have relative to one another? When I encounter a catchy chorus on the radio or a clever edition of a web comic, does its desire to propagate create duty?
Let’s exemplify. The microblogging service Twitter allows me to publish 140 character updates as often as I wish. My “followers” receive notice of these quips, which might include links, complaints, aphorisms, or self-promotion. Like everything these days, it’s a challenge to keep up with the pace of Twitter. Filled with mild malaise at this nuisance, I might lament, as I did recently, Why must there be something clever to say one or more times per day?. It was a selfish outburst meant to lament the tenacity of public life today.
When I don’t tweet, I might lose face; my social or professional credibility could suffer. But, what does such an attitude reveal if not my disregard for the ideas themselves? The most charmingly inscrutable of my followers, @metacomedy, responded incisively: because your actions’ continued existence might depend on it. What a thought! Why is it that one’s neglect for laundry, blogs, or elliptical trainers entails only metaphorical neglect, while one’s neglect of cats, vagrants, or herb gardens is allowed the full burden of genuine disregard?
Bruno Latour would describe the relations among engine parts or memes as forces between actors in a network. Quasi-objects, he sometimes calls them, which are neither human nor non-human. The forces between these objects exert transformations, Latour’s replacement for relations of power. Latour helps us see the many conflicting stakeholders in a situation, all grasping for differently shaped handles to pull a network in one or another direction. As Latour says, “none of the actants mobilized to secure an alliance stops acting on its own behalf. They each carry on fermenting their own plots, forming their own groups, and serving other masters, wills, and functions.”
Latour invites us to see that there is no rightful owner to whom relations return, “one form of know-how is no more â??true’ than another.” One way to interpret such a move is to cast ethics as contextual, relative. This helps, to a point. One can imagine positioning oneself in the context of the chickadee or the window washer, but things get murky quickly, as we move from human and animal actors to object actors: the snowblower, the persimmon, the asphalt.
When we speak of things, are we prepared to equate their forces with their ethics? Is what a thing tends to do the same as what it considers noble or right? We might observe in an individual what Aristotle calls á¼?ξιÏ?, or what Pierre Bourdieu dubs habitus. But a disposition is quite different from a code. Here a further problem arises, as the fact of relations shouldn’t be sufficient to affirm that the actors involved in those relations act according to an ethics, or in violation of one.
When faced with pistons and soybeans, where would we look for morality? In Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, things recede into inaccessible, private depths. When objects interact, they do so not from these depths, but across their surfaces, in their sensual qualities. When fire burns cotton, it takes part only in the cotton’s flammability, not in its other properties, or in its real essence, which withdraws interminably.
When we ask after the ethics of objects, we are really asking if moral qualities exist as sensual qualities. I’ll float a categorical response: no. When the vegan eats the tofu, she bathes in its moisture, its blandness, its suppleness, its vegetality. Yet, the soy does not bathe in her veganism. Through its sensual properties, she construct a caricature of the soy, which does more than render it nutritive or gratifying; it also renders it moral. It is what Emmanuel Levinas calls enjoyment, an egoistic process for which he favors the metaphor of eating: we eat the other in order to make it the same.
But what of the things themselves? Does the tofu muster moral practice when slithering gently in the water of its plastic container? Does the piston when compressing air and petrol against the walls of its cylinder? Does the snowblower when its auger pulls snow from the ground and discharges it out a chute? Perhaps, although if any do, they do so by means of a code irrevocably decoupled from the material acts they commit. The ethics of the spark plug are no more clear to us than would be those of the vegan to the soybean plant, even as the former strips and devours its salted, boiled babies in a tasty appetizer of edamame. Worse yet, there might be multiple, conflicting theories of soybean ethics, lest one assume that the noble legume is any less capable of philosophical intricacy than are bearded men.
An object enters an ethical relation when it attempts to reconcile the sensual qualities of another object vis-à-vis the former’s withdrawn reality. Perhaps counterintuitively, ethics is a self-centered practice, a means of sense-making necessitated by the inherent withdrawal of objects. It is a filing system for the sensual qualities of objects that maps those qualities to internal methods of caricature, a process often full of struggle.
Can we imagine a speculative ethics? Could an object characterize the internal struggles and codes of another, simply by tracing and reconstructing evidence for such a code by the interactions of its neighbors?
It is much harder than imagining an applied speculative phenomenology (a practice I call alien phenomenology), and it’s easy to understand why: we can find evidence for our speculations on perception, even if we are only ever able to characterize the resulting experiences as metaphors bound to human correlates. The same goes for the piston, the tweet, and the soybean, which can only ever grasp the outside as an analogous struggle. The answer to correlationism is not the rejection of any correlate, but the acknowledgement of endless ones, all self-obsessed by givenness rather than by turpitude. The violence or ardor of piston and fuel is the human metaphorization of a phenomenon, not the ethics of an object. It is not the relationship between piston and fuel that we frame by ethics, but our relationship to the relationship between piston and fuel.
Unless we wish to adopt a strictly Aristotelian account of causality and ethics, in which patterns of behavior for a certain type can be tested externally for compliance, access to the ethics of objects will always remain out of reach. It is not the problem of objectification that must worry us, the opinion both Heidegger and Levinas both hold, albeit in different ways. Despite the fact that Levinas claims ethics as first philosophy, what he gives us is not really ethics, but a metaphysics of intersubjectivity that he gives the name “ethics.” And even then, Levinas’s other is always another person, not another thing, like a soybean or an engine cylinder (to say nothing of the engine cylinder’s other!). Before it could be singled out amidst the gaze of the other, the object-I would have to have some idea what it meant to be gazed upon in the first place. Levinas approaches this position himself when he observes, “if one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other.” That is, so long as we don’t mind only eating one flavor of otherness.
What we might imagine instead are scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission: to characterize the internal, withdrawn subjectivities of various objects, by speculating on the ways object-object caricatures reflect possible codes of value and response. Object ethics, it would seem, can only ever be theorized once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour, caress, or murder one another.