Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2003 20:49:30 +0100
From: Jan Straathof <janstr-AT-chan.nl>
Subject: BHA: [fyi] Interview with Manuel De Landa - part 2


II. Competing Ideologies & Social Alliances
CTHEORY (Protevi): A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) and your talk
"A New Ontology for the Social Sciences" (2002) propose a "nested set" of
individual entities in a "flat ontology." Like all your works, both pieces use
nonlinear dynamical concepts to discuss the morphogenesis of these individuals.
However, your social ontologies seem largely to begin with adults as their
lowest level, notwithstanding some mention of children in the section on
linguistics in A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (norm-learning and
creolization). Do you avoid discussing child development, about which a lot of
research has been done using nonlinear dynamics in studying brain development,
motor learning, and so forth, simply for space and time constraints, or is
there another reason? Would you agree that adding such discussions would be
useful in demonstrating several areas of interlocking top-down constraint by
family, institutional, civic, national, and perhaps even larger units?

De Landa: The key to the ontology I defend is the idea that the world is made
out of individual entities at different levels of scale, and that each entity
is the contingent result of an individuation process. Clearly, and despite the
fact that I have ignored it so far, the individuation of a social agent during
childhood, and even the biological individuation of an adult organism in that
same period, are two crucial processes. Without these social and biological
individuations we would not be able to account for adult individuals. If I
placed less emphasis on this is because through the work of Freud and Piaget
(and others) we have a few models of how these processes could be conceived,
but we have much less insight on how institutional organizations or cities
individuate (in fact, the very problem is ignored in these two cases since both
those entities are conceptualized as structures not as individuals). I will get
to the questions you raise in due time, when I finally tackle the question of
subjectivity. At this point in time, when everyone seems obsessed with the
question of subjective experience at the expense of everything else, it seems
the priorities must be reversed: account for the less familiar forms of
individuation first returning to our own psyches later.

CTHEORY (Selinger): In Chapter 4 of Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
you discuss the implications that acknowledging the notion of "quasi-cause"
brings with regard to the debates surrounding the D-N model of explanation. As
is well-known, in the context of "modifying" and "supplementing" Hempel and
Oppenheim's account, Mary Hesse argues that scientific explanation is
metaphoric. Specifically, by appropriating Max Black's Interaction account of
metaphor, Hesse claims that scientific explanation is a metaphoric
redescription of the domain of the explanandum. In this account, it is not only
metaphoric to say that "class struggle is the motor of history," but also to
say that "gases are collections of randomly moving massive particles." Using
the terms 'metaphor' and 'model' synonymously, one of Hesse's main points is
that although scientific (unlike, she claims, poetic) metaphors must resemble
what they refer to (which is why the history of science is filled with failed
metaphors e.g. heat fluid or the classical wave theory of light), they are not
strictly identical either. To this end, do you view the concepts you
appropriate from complexity theory to be metaphors? If so, what does this mean
to you?

De Landa: Well, although I do not question the idea that metaphors play a role
in scientific thought I certainly do not think this role is central. In the
book of mine you mention I make it very clear that a mathematical model is not
just a formal version of a linguistic metaphor. Not to approach mathematics in
its own right, reducing it to logic or to semiotics, seems to me the main error
in most accounts of physics. (Remember that I do not believe there is such a
thing as "science" in general, or a "scientific method" in general, so my
remarks now apply only to physics). The key ideas of complexity theory (the
ideas of "attractor" and of "symmetry-breaking bifurcation") come from real
properties of mathematical models. They are not just linguistic "concepts." And
more importantly, they have turned out to be properties of many different
models, that is, they are independent of the specific mechanisms in which they
are actualized. It is this "mechanism-independence" which makes it promising
they will be useful elsewhere (in social science, for example) since this
independence may be evidence of a deeper isomorphism underlying very different
processes. Deleuze's conception of the "virtual" is precisely an attempt to
think this underlying reality.

CTHEORY (Selinger): What, then, is your account of reference? How does it
relate to Deleuze's claim in the Logic of Sense that: "The genius of a
philosophy must first be measured by the new distribution which it imposes on
beings and concepts"?

De Landa: Unlike Hesse, I'm interested in the question of how reference is
established non-discursively. So instead of metaphor, topological isomorphism
is more important for a Deleuzian realist. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze
starts with Foucault's analysis of the Cartesian episteme as having four
dimensions -- similarity, identity, analogy and contradiction (opposition).
Deleuze sets out to create a philosophy that does not use any of these four
dimensions, except as derivative concepts. He uses the concept of intensity to
develop a new way of theory of difference. Deleuze is moving away from
similarity -- resemblance is the enemy for him. For Deleuze, there is a virtual
entity that is topological and as realists we have a commitment to it. To
return to the soap bubble example -- it is an example of a single equilibrium
obtained by minimizing surface tension. A salt crystal is another example
obtained by the minimizing of bonding energy. Both are actualizations of the
same topological point even though they have no resemblance to one another: one
is a cube and the other a sphere. Topological isomorphisms are fine when we
talk about soap bubbles and salt crystals, but what about society? Deleuze's
book on Foucault is in my opinion the best application of these ideas to
society.

CTHEORY (Mallavarapu): To ask a related question... In your introduction to War
in the Age of Intelligent Machines, you take care to point out that your use of
the idea of self-organization is "more analogical than mathematical." What are
the problems and possibilities that arise from the use of analogies from chaos
science to describe social phenomena?

De Landa: That remark is a disclaimer to draw attention to the fact that one
does not have the legitimate right to postulate an "attractor" until one has
some mathematical evidence one may be lurking there. (This, by the way, does
not imply possession of a formal model. One can infer the presence of an
attractor from an analysis of time series, such as those we have for production
prices in economics, or voting patterns in political science). The remark in
that book was to the effect that I did not model warfare either directly or
through time series. That's the only way one can use these ideas
non-metaphorically. (Then, of course, one has to show evidence that the actual
physical or social system has an attractor by giving it a push, for example,
injecting some energy or spending some money, and checking whether the system
returns to its previous state after a while).

CTHEORY (Ihde): I would like to raise two questions that are organized around a
single theme. (1) While it is fashionable these days to be "posthuman" or
anti-anthropological, I remain curious about what would motivate such moves? If
the problem is that all positions imply some sort of "metaphysics" and
"humanism" in a postmodern era shows its implicit humanist bias as linked to
early modern epistemology, isn't a counter-move just as likely to have similar
"metaphysical" tones? (2) Similarly, is a post-human position possible? and if
so, what would its advantages be? It seems to me, in spite of efforts to the
contrary, that even the most rigorous scientific claims imply the human since
they have to be made in language and/or shown in perceivable images. (3) And,
finally, while I deeply appreciate your moves to show that wholes and
non-linear processes are more complex and richer than older notions of totality
and linearity, isn't a move to notions of "self-organization" also just as
metaphysical as earlier notions?

De Landa: First of all, the questions here are not so much "metaphysical" (a
word which seems to have become an insult losing all its real content) as
ontological. When one is not a realist, when one operates within an ontology of
appearances, for instance, any claim about a mind-independent reality is
labeled as "metaphysical" (as an insult). But of course, one can turn the
insult around and call all Continental philosophy "metaphysical" as the logical
positivists did. Either way it's all a waste of time. The real question is
whether it is legitimate to have an "anthropocentric ontology", that is, to
draw the line between the real and the non-real by what we humans can directly
observe. What makes our scale of observation, in space or time, so privileged?
Why should we believe in the Mississippi river (as Andrew Pickering does) but
not in oxygen or carbon (as he does not)?. Why should we study things in "real
time" (that is, at our temporal scale) instead of at longer periods (to capture
the effect of "long durations")? I have always thought the word "post-human" is
very silly and never used it. It is not a matter of a "post" here, but a matter
of getting rid of all the non-realist baggage that is slowing us down, such as
the Humean view of causality (as observed constant conjunction) instead of
thinking of causes as real relations in which one event produces another event.
The fact that in order to communicate these ideas one must use language is not
an excuse to retreat to an idealist ontology. At the end of the day, Pickering
is not a "post-humanist." It takes guts to say that oxygen does not exist, as
someone coming from the constructivist tradition like Pickering does. But then
I want to know: What happens then to the table of elements and the surrounding
theories that allow us to predict how oxygen behaves and manipulate it? I'm
willing to concede that quarks might have a questionable epistemological
status, but what about electrons? As Ian Hacking says, if we can spray them,
they are real. We have proof o . Both the positivists and the constructivists
who are traditionally seen as having nothing in common with one another end up
somehow assuming that only the observable is the real: the Mississippi is real,
while oxygen is seen as having a problematic epistemological status. The
underlying problem with these positions is that they are anthropocentric; they
are limited to what we can see as human observers. What about telescopes and
microscopes? They open up realms to us that we cannot verify through unmediated
observation.

CTHEORY (Ihde): I agree with you here that we have to take technologically
mediated ways of seeing into account. In my version of instrumental realism,
experience is mediated through technology. This is why I differ from my
phenomenological predecessors. I am critical of the subjectivist position that
limits itself to individual experience.

De Landa: I don't want to say that human experience is not real, but you cannot
make it the entire context of your ontology. This is what I find happening,
often implicitly, in a wide variety of theoretical positions. The question of
time that Pickering raises is also significant here. Pickering advocates a
"real-time" approach to studying emergence that is limited precisely because it
is anthropocentric.

CTHEORY (Ihde): This formulation makes Pickering seem like Bas van Fraassen,
the analytic philosopher of science whose views on "constructive empiricism"
limited his commitment to truth to that which is observable.

De Landa: Of course he wouldn't like to be characterized that way, but there is
some truth to it. My point is that every filmmaker knows that there are
non-real time phenomena. For example, shoot one frame every hour in front of a
budding flower and play it back faster the next day. Or shoot hundred frames
per second of a bullet hitting a target and slowing it down. A broader time
scale is required which is not limited to the human time scale of observation.

CTHEORY (Ihde): But doesn't the film example essentially show how time can be
translated into what we can see, what is visible for us?

De Landa: Again, the point that I am trying to make is that we should not
privilege the viewpoint of the human observer. We need to acknowledge that
realism is about what is out there, irrespective of whether we see it or not.
Deleuze is interested in exteriority and assemblages, the relationship between
bodies, not individual subjectivity. Deleuze is such a daring philosopher
because he creates a non-essentialist realism. Once you divorce ontology from
epistemology, you cannot be an essentialist.

CTHEORY (Mallavarapu): To return to the epistemological status of oxygen, could
we not tell a Latourian story of competing networks (oxygen and phlogiston),
with one network (oxygen) winning over the other because it is able to mobilize
a larger set of allies in a complex network including human and non-human
actants? It then makes sense to say that oxygen exists on the basis of the
strength of the network.

De Landa: The story of competing networks seems much more fruitful when one
looks at controversial science, science which is emerging. I'm also concerned
about how network theories often amount to stories of competing ideologies and
social alliances, even though I'm aware that Latour does include a lot of
non-human elements in his actor-network theory. Latour acknowledges Deleuzian
influences on his work, but it is hard to pin down where exactly he stands with
regard to Deleuzian realism. In any event, a realist would certainly not be
comfortable attributing the existence of oxygen to the outcome of network
interactions.

CTHEORY (Jorgensen): In light of this answer, I would like to pose two
questions that bring your work further into dialogue with Latour. One of your
main claims associated with this call for a new ontology is that there are no
essences -- at least as traditional philosophy defines them. Rather, you insist
that ontological analysis should focus on historically constituted, individual
entities that operate on different scales, but yet still interact to form
wholes. To account for these emerging wholes, you argue that the interaction
between the groups of individual entities has to be accounted for. To some
extent, this approach resembles Latour's style of investigation, according to
which the analyst is required to give an account of the different actants being
studied, and their relations, in order to give an account of the network they
constitute. Can you elaborate on this connection?

De Landa: The claim I make (similar to the one Roy Bhaskar makes) is that to be
ontologically committed to emergent wholes is to assert that these wholes have
causal powers of their own. (And these cannot be Humean causes but real
causes). It is not just a matter of examining a network of interacting causal
agents, but of also showing the emergent whole is a causal agent on its own. I
do not know what Latour's position relative to causal relations is, but without
a realist account of causality his work and mine can only be superficially
related.

CTHEORY (Jorgensen): You continually stress the need to conceptualize wholes
without appealing to traditional notions of totality. Indeed, you argue that
the historical processes that give rise to the wholes has to be laid out by
analysts who are interested in the problem of becoming. My question concerns
stabilization, the moment when something becomes a whole. When something
becomes a whole, such as an institution or a city, you might then say it
becomes a "black box." Can you elaborate on the relation between individual
entities, interaction, and emergent wholes in relation to Latour's theory of
blackboxing?

De Landa: Blackboxing is something we humans do when we do not understand the
mechanism through which an effect was produced, but do not wish to be bothered
by that. For many purposes it is enough to understand that if something comes
in as input, then we will always get this output (regardless of whether we know
exactly how). Most claims in social science (to the extent that they do not
specify concrete mechanisms) are of the blackbox type. So are many in the
physical sciences (Newton basically blackboxed the mechanism through which
gravity acts at a distance). Many scientists in their laboratories have no idea
how exactly their tools work (they know the inputs and outputs only) so these
tools are blackboxes. To the extent that we do not know the mechanisms through
which organizations or cities operate, they are blackboxes. But as a realist,
since I refuse to remain at the level of description and demand explanations, I
have to open as many blackboxes as I can. I have to give accounts in terms of
mechanisms. I believe that Deleuze "machinic" philosophy is partly about that:
opening black boxes and understanding their inner machinery.

CTHEORY (Selinger): Getting off the topic of Latour... A few weeks ago I heard
Stephen Wolfram give a lecture based on his book A New Kind of Science. There
was a performative element to this talk which I found striking. Unlike the
recent STS work on distributed cognition and distributed expertise, Wolfram
reveled in depicting himself as essentially an isolated researcher who spent
more time contacting historians of science and technology than current
practitioners. This narrative served as the rhetorical basis for his claim to
be a renegade scientist who inaugurated a paradigm shift. Have you read this
recent book or any of his published material? If so, do you find his claims
about cellular automata and complexity theory to correlate with unique insights
on his part, or is it more the case that he is synthesizing ideas that have
been well-known to researchers in the field of complexity theory for some
time?

De Landa: Though I have not read his recent book, I think his claims have to be
wildly exaggerated. In fact, it would seem that each famous scientists in this
field would want his own theory or model to be the center of it all. Ilya
Prigogine wants everything to be "order through fluctuations"; Roy Bhaskar
wants it all to be about self-organized criticality (his sand piles with
fractal avalanches); Stuart Kauffmann wants it all to be about "the edge of
chaos", and now of course Wofram wants it all to be about this one CA rule. To
me this denies the basic insight of nonlinearity, its plurality of effects.
Enrico Fermi once said that to speak of "nonlinear mathematics" made as much
sense as to speak of "non-elephant zoology." In other words, the dichotomy
linear-nonlinear is a false one: there are many nonlinear effects and linear
ones are one special case of it (so the word nonlinear should eventually
disappear). Whenever one opposes chaos and linearity one is bringing back the
dichotomy. And so one does when one favors one particular phenomenon at the
expense of the large variety of others. Wolfram has done very good work
(classifying cellular automata, for example) and his claim to have discovered a
special rule is probably serious. But so are the claims by the other scientists
I just mentioned.

CTHEORY (Mix): Considering how much of your work focuses on computers, it seems
appropriate to end this section by bringing up an Internet oriented question.
In your essay "Markets and Anti-Markets in the World Economy" you follow
Fernand Braudel in analyzing the flow of capital towards and away from
"universal warehouses," defined as dominant commercial centers where one can
purchase "any product from anywhere in the world." You not only note that
historically cities such Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New York have served
this function, but you further suggest that we may be: (1) "witnessing the end
of American supremacy" and (2) that Tokyo may be the next "core." In this age
of advanced Internet use, when one can now shop for global goods and services
from almost any city of origin, how important is it to think in "warehouse"
terms?

De Landa: The preeminence of the cities you mention was always contingent on
the speed of transport: for as long as sea transport was faster than by land,
not only goods but people and ideas flowed faster and accumulated more
frequently in maritime metropolises. But the advent of steam motors (and the
locomotive) changed that relation, allowing landlocked capitals (such as
Chicago) to become universal warehouses. Hence, any technology that changes the
speed of the circulation of goods and information (the internet plus Federal
Express) will have an effect like this, maybe even making cities irrelevant as
accumulation centers.






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