Abstract
This study aims to critically analyse the main arguments of the two camps about the fabric of reality, which have come to the fore in the discussions of new metaphysics that have started to spread in the humanities since the 1990s. These two camps are speculative realism, of which Graham Harman and Manuel Delanda are prominent spokesmen, and relationalism, in which Karen Barad and Donna Haraway stand out. The main contention of this debate is whether the existence of individual entities can be fully explained by their relations. In other words, as a continuation of the debate between idealism and empiricism, are singular terms fully constituted and determined by their relations “internal to them”, or should we see relations as “external” to the terms they relate to and accept that there are properties in terms that cannot be explained by their relations? The distinction between “internal” and “external” relations is a distinction between the absence and existence of relative autonomy of terms from their relations. For the emergence of any whole, relations are organized in a “systematic” that gives the whole its compositional specificity. If these relations are considered “internal” to the individual entities that constitute the whole, as advocated by various variants of idealism, these individual entities have no autonomy and are wholly determined by the whole. Empiricism, by contrast, argues that the terms associated with relations have relative autonomy in terms of systematic determination. This discussion has dozens of effects, from field research practices in the humanities to ecology studies, from text analysis to art studies. Considering this wide scope, this presentation aims to analyse the recent arguments that emerged in the new metaphysics, measure the distance and closeness of the parties, and finally point out the possible solutions and deadlock points of the tension here.
Keywords: humanities, new metaphysics, posthumanism, realism, relationalism
1. INTRODUCTION
New metaphysics, which is composed of new materialisms, object-oriented philosophies, and speculative realisms, has been growing in humanities since the mid-90s. There are some common themes and problems in this field of philosophy, although there are significant differences and disagreements. The common themes can be formulated as two major claims:
- The world, in ontological or substantial terms, cannot separate into two major subworlds as humans and non-humans, as subjects and objects, as knowers and knowns, etc. There is no substantial difference between humans and non-humans, mind and world, thought and thing.
- The main concern of philosophy cannot be humans. Philosophy must account for all beings and relations between these beings, and treat them as equals on its ontology, without treating humans as if they are at the centre of the world, or presuming that we can never talk about the world without humans.
These two main claims are also two significant features that make new metaphysics both posthuman and, neither modern nor postmodern, but non-modern (Harman, 2018). Thereby, new metaphysics corresponds to a breakthrough of researches in humanities as well as of thought in philosophy. These researches both refocus the looks of researchers on the new fields and reconfigure them in the way that one can see new entities and relations in existing fields.
On the other hand, these claims expand the horizons of philosophy in directions that were never known before. Especially, the issues like an environmental or ecological crisis, emergence and emergent properties, the creation of the new, the mechanisms that produce reality on different levels, are, though they are not new concerns for neither philosophy nor more generally social sciences, the new central challenges and problems for new metaphysics.
Our main concern in this presentation is, however, not these common themes. We’re interested in the points of disagreement, especially in the tension between relationalism and realism. This tension could be articulated as follows: do the individual entities have relative autonomy with respect to their relations? Or, are all of them completely constituted and explained by their relations? In more traditional philosophical terms, are relations internal or intrinsic to the relata, or external or extrinsic to them? In this way, this problem is closely related to the idealism-empiricism tension in the history of philosophy (DeLanda & Harman, 2017), although we won’t examine these roots in this study. Instead, we’ll look at this tension in the context of new metaphysics by discussing the main relationalist arguments from Karen Barad (and partly Donna Haraway) and showing the speculative realist ontologies of Graham Harman and Manuel DeLanda as counter-examples. But we hope this restriction enables us to show how profound the problem is.
In the second chapter, we will show how Barad interprets quantum mechanics and builds her relational ontology. In this way, we can see to what degree this interpretation and her ontology are interrelated for Barad. In the third chapter, we will try to address criticisms regarding Barad’s interpretation of quantum mechanics and Bohr. This discussion will set us free to discuss the direct philosophical implications of relationalism, and especially to show that relationalism not so much cares about relations in the ontological terms, which are the main aims of the fourth chapter. For our understanding, relationalism doesn’t have a pedagogy of relations. By pedagogy, we mean a deep understanding of what a relation means and how it works from an ontological point of view. Finally, in the fifth chapter, we will try to demonstrate an appropriate way of building an ontology that has a genuine pedagogy of relations.
2. THE RELATIONALIST ONTOLOGY OF BARAD
Karen Barad is the clearest and bravest voice in the defence of relationalism. She is a physicist as well as a philosopher. So, she takes her fundamental influence from physics, especially quantum mechanics. We don’t want to try to give a detailed account of the basics or history of quantum mechanics. But we should introduce a very fundamental notion, quantum indeterminacy or measurement problem.
In a very brief summary, to measure a subatomic particle one must set up an experimental apparatus. Say, we want to measure both the momentum and the position of an electron. But, we cannot do that. Because these two measurements require two distinct arrangements. One arrangement can only measure the momentum, the other one the position. But, never both in one measurement. Therefore, these two properties are said complementary to one another (Bohr, 1961), in other words, they exclude one another.
One can say that this case of measurement problem shows us there are no determinate beings before the interaction between measured beings and measuring experimental apparatus, whereas the opposite idea is the most basic belief of classical physics. Hence, this feature of quantum physics would be known as “the indeterminacy principle” (Barad, 2007).
This “indeterminacy” is the main point of departure for Karen Barad’s relationalism (Barad, 2007; Faye and Jacksland, 2021). Barad says that she’s “interested in understanding the epistemological and ontological issues that quantum physics forces us to confront, such as the conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the nature of measurement, the nature of nature and meaning-making, and the relationship between discursive practices and the material world” (Barad, 2007, p. 24). And in doing so, she avoids “using an analogical methodology” (Barad, 2007, p. 24). So, to achieve these aims, she builds a four-step argumentative ground regarding her quantum interpretation:
- Quantum mechanics must be thought of as “the correct theory” of nature;
- Quantum mechanics must be applied to every scale of nature, not just to small objects;
- Bohr’s interpretation of quantum indeterminacy and, in general, quantum physics is right;
- Her ontological interpretation of Bohr’s interpretation is consistent with Bohr’s.
We’ll come back to these claims. But first, we must see how Barad’s relational ontology emerges from her unique account of quantum physics.
Following the quantum indeterminacy, Barad argues that there is no particle, wave, or any kind of entity with determinate properties prior to the measurement (Barad, 2007). Hence, on the ground of this “fact”, we shouldn’t say that an experimental arrangement relates two distinct, self-contained, individual entities, but we should say that any entity or property of this nature comes into existence through this very experimental arrangement (Barad, 2007). Barad concludes as follows:
Since individually determinate entities do not exist, measurements do not entail an interaction between separate entities; rather, determinate entities emerge from their intra-action. I introduce the term ‘‘intra-action’’ in recognition of their ontological inseparability, in contrast to the usual ‘‘interaction,’’ which relies on a metaphysics of individualism (in particular, the prior existence of separately determinate entities). (Barad, 2007, p. 128)
Intra-action is the key concept for Barad. She draws this concept from her interpretation of quantum physics and implements it in her ontology to take into account the universe in all aspects (Harman, 2016). In this regard,these claims are derived from the initial arguments:
- There are no interacting autonomous, individual entities prior to their mutual intra-acting, but intra-action means that every single piece of beings comes into existence through their relations;
- Relations produce and explain their relatas throughout;
- Matter and meaning are always in an entanglement (which is another quantum term she employs), and we cannot talk about matter or meaning without the other half. This principle must apply to all other dualities in which one polar is a human property, such as subject-object, society-nature, and discourse-matter.
- Change must be understood as the emergence of new entities, distinctions, and properties from their intra-actions; not the other way around;
- Realism is not about asserting the reality of self-contained, autonomous entities. But, it is “about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within and as part of the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 93). This kind of realism is called “agential realism” by Barad.
With the first four, these nine claims or principles constitute Barad’s ontology. First,we should examine the criticisms regarding the first four claims.
3. THE CRITICISMS THAT BARAD’S INTERPRETATION OF THE QUANTUM MECHANICS RECEIVED
Regarding the first claim, the expression of “the correct theory of nature” is a very ambiguous one. Newtonian gravity theory, for instance, was the correct theory for centuries. We don’t want to resort to a relativist epistemological position. Quite the contrary, we want to indicate that, in physics, numerous scientists believe there must be a more fundamental theory to explain the nature of the universe. For example, Lee Smolin (2013), a prominent physicist, qualifies the quantum theory just as a theory that is “doing physics in a box” as Newtonian gravity theory. It means that theories we have so far are peculiar to just a part of the universe (especially to a laboratory arrangement) and nothing but an approximation to the truth. We’ll return Smolin’s idea in the end.
As for the second claim, it is closely related to the first one, though there is a significant difference. The second claim is composed of two distinct suggestions: A) A theory of physics should account for all of, at least, physical phenomena; B) Quantum theory is a theory of this kind. But we’ve just seen there is significant doubt about B. Therefore, even if A is true, there is nothing necessary to make us say that the quantum theory is the last word of science.
Now, here comes the truly sharp and more direct criticism. When it comes to the third claim, Barad never mentions the other and self-consistent interpretations of quantum indeterminacy. Even, criticisms such as Faye and Jacksland’s (2021) and Jacksland’s (2021) accuse her of not being informative about theories which are not quite in line with hers. A lot of scientific and/or philosophical interpretations present a kind of entity realism, which is quite opposite to Barad’s, but she hardly mentions and never elaborates them (Jacksland, 2021; Faye & Jacksland, 2021). Regarding the fourth claim, Jacksland (2021) suggests that Bohr’s interpretation is not quite easily in line with Barad’s. The core suggestion of Barad’s interpretation of Bohr is that Bohr uses the word phenomenon in an ontological sense. To Barad, Bohr suggests that phenomenon is ontologically the first and composed of objects in question and apparatuses to observe them.This means, for her, “apparatuses provide the conditions for the possibility of determinate boundaries and properties of ‘objects’ within phenomena, where ‘phenomena’ are the ontological inseparability of objects and apparatuses” (Barad, 2007, p. 128). But Bohr’s writings themselves tell a different story: “the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear” (Bohr, 1961, p. 96). The problematic side of Barad’s interpretation is to inject the interaction into the phenomena, but quite the opposite, for Bohr, the interaction is external to the phenomena and, in this way, constitutes the condition for the phenomena. With this fundamental change, Barad twists the landscape entirely. Of course, we’re not discussing now whether one can claim “the conditions/relations are internal to the phenomena”, but we’re trying to show that Barad’s reading of Bohr’s claims is an example of misuse and misreading. She needs this slight misreading for her philosophical aims since her methodological decision requires using quantum mechanics not as a metaphor or an analogy but as a literal ground (Barad, 2007; Faye & Jaksland, 2021).
In a conclusion, to us, these criticisms indicate not an absolute failure of grounding agential realism but a specific strategic inadequacy regarding reading the results of quantum mechanics to build an ontology. To us, Barad’s implication that her peculiar interpretation is the only valid interpretation is the very source of this inadequacy.
4. AN ONTOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF RELATIONALISM
This presentation of the criticisms aiming at the “quantum foundations” of agential realism is, of course, insufficient for a comprehensive criticism. We hope, however, we could have shown that we should try to discuss relationalism on a more ontological, epistemological, and also practical level. By “more practical”, we mean taking ethical and political issues, and problems regarding field research in humanities into account.With this turn, we will discuss the rest of the claims.
We should handle first the ninth claim since it implies the philosophical/ethical aims of not just Barad’s ontology but the contemporary relationalisms in general.
The ninth claim tells us that the aim of agential realism is accountability, responsibility, and being aware that we’re a part of the reality which we would face consequences while configuring and reconfiguring (Barad, 2007). These are driving themes of agential realism. But also driving themes of, for example, Haraway’s (2016) way of thinking. So, we can regard this claim as a central theme of relationalism. There lie ethical concerns at the core of relationalism. Thus, we should check its claims on this ground, too.
This claim tries to convince us realism is not about asserting the reality of individual entities. It’s kind of a base claim of relationalism. Almost every single relationalist doesn’t believe a self-contained, autonomous and individual entities. But, Barad’s move is a bit different from any other relationalist. Barad names her relationalism realism. As Harman (2016) points out, this sense of realism is the opposite of its traditional sense. At the most fundamental level, realism is about asserting the reality of the world outside the human mind. But notions such as entanglement, and intra-action, just like Haraway’s ‘natureculture’, are not capable of thinking of mind-independent reality (DeLanda and Harman, 2017). Once the mind in a discursive, semiotic, cultural, or whatever form comes into the world, everything existing has to be dependent on the mind, or they should be interdependent with each other. Of course, from the posthumanist point of view, both Barad and Haraway want to affirm the importance and forces of non-humans. But, in their relationalist ontology, emergent humanity begins to play a black hole role no sooner than it emerges. Attributing ontological firstness and constructivity to relations makes everything mixed up with culture, discourse, or language as soon as they’re related to humans. One pole once is a human property, it’s whether or not an emergent property, we cannot affirm any reality that doesn’t have any human component, whereas we should be able to think of non-human realities without any human component for realism. This means that the seventh claim must be wrong or misleading as well. There are parts of realities in which matter and meaning are related. But also, there are meaningless parts or meaningful but incorporeal parts in the semiotic sense of meaning.
The fifth and the eighth claims are deeply connected. New metaphysics has been built around the problem of emergence. When it comes to the issue of how we should understand the phenomenon of emergence, relationalism and realism go their separate ways. In a relationalist argumentation, there are several presumptions embedded between the lines: relations are instant, reciprocal, symmetrical, and effortless which constitute the base principles of accounting for the emergence.
The instantaneity is a deep assumption of relationalism. We can formulate it as follows: A cause produces its effects right away, and there is no latency. This notion comes from the lack of entities prior to their relations. If there is no entity before its being related, then there is nothing receiving. To receive an effect of a cause, in a relationalist ontology, takes no time. Ultimately, there is no receiving in this kind of world. But for receiving, there must be something prior to the relation, because to be related is to affect and to be affected (DeLanda, 2019). In principle, the more something is complex the more time is needed to receive an effect and produce a reaction, even in the tiniest physical systems such as an electron-photon system.
The reciprocity presumption says that every relation must mutually relate its terms. It may look like making sense. Everyday relations usually share approximate space and time sections like a house or a city in a definite moment. Thus, the objects that occupy these space-time sections seem like having reciprocal relations. But not every relation has this approximation. Let’s think of a historical event, like the Gezi Parkı events. The Gezi has a relation with us. It has a lot of effects on today and will have on the future. We can study it in numerous ways, we can use different conceptual frameworks to some extent. But we cannot affect what happened during the event. What happened had happened. The arrow of time allows only one-way relation to the past events. When it comes to spatial huge distances, the same is also true. We can observe a distant galaxy, but our observation doesn’t change anything about it. But this kind of non-reciprocity doesn’t peculiar to temporal or spatial distances. In most cases, what we perceive as reciprocity isn’t real reciprocity. Because, even if they are in the same species class, beings may have different kinds of capacities to affect and to be affected.
We can say the exact same thing about symmetry. For relationalism, since both or multiple terms of a relation are born out of the relation and are nothing more, symmetry means that a relation equally affects its terms (Harman, 2018). Symmetry becomes a question only when a relation has reciprocity. For instance, two celestial bodies have a reciprocal relation in terms of gravity. But the relation is rarely symmetrical. In this situation, the matter is not the kind but the force of capacities. The force of celestial bodies’ capacities to affect and to be affected are proportional to their masses. A light body receives a larger gravity effect than a heavy body.
The effortlessness is a side effect of the relational worldview. Since there is nothing prior to its relations, nothing is resisting. Every kind of relation produces effects without any struggle, whereas we know that there is every kind of resistance in reality. Things resist any effect of any cause as far as they can. Therefore relations require making an effort and spending time and energy.
These embedded presumptions are not just wrong but also dangerous. Because, even just from a field research point of view, conducting research means discovering resistances, thresholds for change, asymmetries of power, and so on. Demonstrating entities as being constituted totally by their relations forbids us to see these resistances, thresholds, asymmetries, and especially, to understand change. Despite the fifth and the eighth claims, in the world of relationalism, there is no change, since there is no individual, self-containing entity that could change. Because neither of the emergent entities has any stable properties and self-consistency more than their constituent relations. Everything, in this kind of world, is created and recreated by the way of constituting and reconstituting relations.
As a result, in our opinion, relationalism doesn’t care about relations in themselves so much. Therefore, we need a pedagogy of relations in our ontologies based on our objections to the embedded claims of relationalism.
5. A WORKABLE REALIST ALTERNATIVE TO THE RELATIONALISM
The true main drives for relationalism are anti-representationalism, posthumanism, and anti-essentialism (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016). But they are also real concerns for speculative realism (DeLanda, 2013, 2019; Harman, 2018). But realism solves and goes beyond these concerns in a very different way.
First of all, we should never equalise affirming the reality of individual entities with affirming a kind of essentialism. Quite the contrary, speculative realism asserts that individual entities cannot be reduced to either their relations or their constituent parts. An entity, as a whole, has emergent properties which its components don’t have. For instance, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, even affirms the existence of a kind of essence, this essence is never known and was withdrawn from any contact with any object including humans (Harman, 2016). On the other hand, DeLanda’s assemblage theory even doesn’t use the notion and explains an individual whole by way of assembled individual components producing emergent properties by their interactions (Delanda, 2013 and 2019). In these ontologies every entity has a twofold disposition toward stability and change, hence has its resistances, thresholds for change, and capacities to affect and to be affected (DeLanda, 2019; DeLanda & Harman, 2017; Harman, 2016, 2018). Also, our theories, in this kind of realism, are thought of as a translation and production with respect to the world, not as some kind of representation. So our theories change while the world and our approaches change, and we change the world based upon our theories, not in a symmetrical or reciprocal way but in a problematic way. The world continuously throws us new phenomena which become new problems, and, in turn, our approaches and eventually theories will have to change. As Smolin (2013) said, we are not at the end of even the scientific knowledge, and probably will never be. This is not because our technical possibilities and scientific methodologies are inadequate, but because we’re not able to reach the world entirely, and the world itself changes constantly (DeLanda, 2013; Harman, 2018).
These are the fundamental ideas of speculative realism. These ideas establish a kind of entity realism in which entity means an emergent whole or object. But, unlike agential realism, this emergent whole is not a totality in which the relations completely determine its constituent parts and the whole, but an autonomous whole in which emergence doesn’t mean that there is nothing beyond the relations that render the emergence possible. Quite the contrary, the emergence is the very beyond of the relations, and also of the constituent parts. Thus, every single part is relatively autonomous from the whole, and the whole is relatively autonomous from its parts. In this context, “relatively” means a kind of compositional consistency which endures a degree of loss of its parts or of adding new parts. Hence, this is the meaning of the exteriority of relations, as DeLanda (2019) suggests:
In other words, the exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy for the terms they relate, or as Deleuze puts it, it implies that ‘a relation may change without the terms changing’. Relations of exteriority also imply that the properties of the component parts can never explain the relations which constitute a whole, that is, ‘relations do not have as their causes the properties of the [component parts] between which they are established…’ although they may be caused by the exercise of a component’s capacities. (p. 11)
Capacities have an ontological role in this line of argumentation. The relative identity of any entity is composed of actual and virtual capacities that it has. The relations between various entities actualise their capacities of them so that they make a whole emergent (DeLanda, 2019). But also, they can leave the relation and protect their identity to some degree. Thus, non-human entities have autonomy and cannot be reduced to their relations with either humans or each other.
6. CONCLUSION
We have tried to present two distinct ways of getting rid of anthropocentrism, humanism, representationalism and essentialism on which modern philosophy has relied. These ways of seeing the world are composed of two distinct final decisions: 1) Individual entities have a relative autonomy and independency from their relations, or 2) they are derivative to the relations and hence there are no autonomous, self-subsistent entities. Speculative realism, in line with the first decision, explains the processes of emergence as processes in which everything, whether is corporeal or not, has a degree and a kind of power to affect and to be affected autonomous from relations. The change results from gaining new kinds and degrees of power and rendering a new whole possible/real. Agential realism, as opposite, and in line with the second decision, recognises no genuine change in this world, and change means for it a kind of creation and recreation of entities. An entity does not change, but a new entity is created by intra-actions.
We think, behind this distinctness, there is a difference between the ethical approaches of the two theories. Barad (2007, p. 392) says, “Before all reciprocity in the face of the other, I am responsible.” The motivation behind her ontology is responsibility ethics. This very pursuit of responsibility makes the ontology far more focused on relations than any usual ontology, but in a wrong way. Following what we said about reciprocity, we will suggest that, on the contrary, the non-reciprocity between entities, asymmetry of forces of beings, the latency between an effect and a reaction, all those processes under which an entity change their states and properties, transform them, make us responsible in and for reality. Since our words and acts change the realities that contain no words, and our words and bodies are changed under the influence of the other humans and non-humans, we can take responsibility for our actions, and the real relations with human and non-human entities. And we should be in search of building a more equal, stable, respectful, and watchful wholes such as new ecosystems other than our existing ones. In this search, we cannot assume that relation is costless and easy, immediate and instant. Quite the contrary, a relationship means making effort and spending energy, labour, and time; understanding the very thresholds for change of the others, their resistances and opennesses. With this kind of pedagogy of relations, we think a speculative realist approach is the right way we can go beyond anthropocentrism, humanism, representationalism, and essentialism.
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