I'll just post my earlier comment here for the sake of expediency:
I really enjoyed the speculative swerve of this one: allowing theory-fiction to strange-ify the historical juncture of extraterrestrial conflict.
However, I take a somewhat sideways view of the same landscape. Which is to say, I’m suspicious of speculative reason as a tool of analysis when it overindulges in it’s distortions of the real movement and life of materials. Such overindulgences can indeed open up new imaginaries, but they can also foreclose (or mask) significant and hard won understandings of the actual determining ecological relations in which human geopolitics operate.
For me this condenses into questions of ecoliteracy, and the lack thereof for the majority of citizen actors. The already high degree of ecological blindness can be easily increased by theory-fiction that posits agency and intentionality where none exists, facilitated by a warping and mutilating the notion on agency as such, and by suggesting geopolitical horizons that confuse the shape of real networks and consequential nodal relations.
Oil has no agental powers capable of self-organizing into machinations to escape the ground to shape civilizations into platforms — any more than capitalism is an ‘alien intelligence from the future’. Both of those speculations attempt to highlight very complex relations via corrective emphasize of the role of oil and capitalist systems, respectively, but fail to offer anything nearing strategic insight or ethical accounting. Oil’s materiality and affective character is already well-studied (quite the opposite of anonymous), and more accurately understand ontographically as a particular kind of material potency entangled in human affairs, rather than as an agential force with intentionality.
Reza’s misleading speculative reasoning re: the role of oil in the evolving assemblages that make up humans social systems leads to distorted political imaginaries where genuine agents (i.e., oligarchs, politicians, corporate campaigns) as nodal forces who actually drive contemporary systems and feedbacks receive less attention (and blame), which, then, in turn, weakens political strategy and tactical effectiveness.
To be clear, this is not a call for lazy or naïve realism, but, rather, a plea for a critical or radical or “wild” ontographic pragmatism that seeks more productive and adaptive unions of speculative thought and the empirical sciences — with novel admixtures of conceptual and practical concerns.
“Ecology is, simultaneously, a thing we know and a thing we do. It is science and action. Thought and movement. It must be both, not fully reducible into either category.” — ecologist Ben Lockwood.
I think i’m more interested in evolutionary praxis and mutant geopolitics that creatively synthesize speculative and empirical modes rather than in adding to the already prolific ontological confusions rampant within the general populous, and fetishized by non-grounded intellectuals such as CCRU, Land, some strains of accelerationism, and Reza’s early work (which he himself has now moved away from).
Perhaps we might see this as a type of Grand Bargain between speculative theory and empirical research that is always mindful in it's operations to always tether itself to the real, but in not-so-simple ways?
See also: "The Insistence of Possibles: Towards a Speculative Pragmatism" (2017), by Isabelle Stengers for adjacent thoughts: https://doi.org/10.70733/w8eviuefu210
Just to be clear: (1) I think you’re mistaking what Negarestani is doing in this text for an argument or speculative solution to a problem, but I don’t think that’s where its value lies. If the work of this text has anything to do with “ecoliteracy” (which I somewhat doubt), then it draws our attention (as geopolitical theorists) to the materiality and regimes of casual effect that a central substance involved in everything from political economy to regional conflict (to the domains in which conflicts unfold, which thereby become operative or relevant in strategic consideration and forecasting, etc.). Often, in the literatures and theaters I am thinking of here, a substance like oil will be treated as a kind of black box (no pun intended) resource that gets modeled entirely in terms of direct economic or strategic value (price per barrel, infrastructure investments, pipeline flows), as if it were a mute or passive substance. Whether he disavows this later or not (yes, I’m very aware), Negarestani in this text uses the fundamental weirdness of the substance (“anonymity”) to make the materials “pop out” of the background of assumptive passivity that so inflects and shapes exactly how actual stakeholders and strategic actors in these arenas navigate them. The point isn’t that “reading Negarestani will make [XYZ actor] care,” but also the metric of value for intellectual work isn’t (and shouldn’t be) the same metric of value as activism or institutional behavior, reform, etc.
(2) re: Negarestani’s later changes in perspective, that’s fine, I’m not really treating his intellectual trajectory here, but this text as a provocative and useful reframing for geopolitical theory. While we’re on the subject, though, despite some significant affinities for Negarestani and Brassier, I confess I find the “Philosophy should strive for semantic transparency—no matter what the consequences” (Negarestani) and “in the conceptual element proper to theory, experiment at the level of form can mask conservativism at the level of content (…) while conservativism at the level of form may harbour extraordinary radicality at the level of content” (Brassier) pitches quite unconvincing and unmoving – for two reasons. First, the former statement seems to me to epitomize Negarestani’s shift (for whatever reason) to the classically analytic philosophical framework in which clarity, transparency, etc. are polemically positioned as themselves clear and transparent indices of cognitive, intellectual, philosophical value. The polemics do much of the work here, and they do their work as much through being disavowed as issued forth. As someone who comes to much of this stuff FROM analytic philosophy (instead of STARTING with what is sometimes called continental thought), it’s not just tired, but inaccurate. On the one hand, analytic philosophy itself has immense resources for demonstrating how and why the story doesn’t start and end with Carnap (to pick one of the new fetish objects as a concentration point). Sellars is great, of course, but the constant deprecation of Austin, Davidson, Grice, later Wittgenstein, etc. suggests to me there’s something off about the grand new discovery. On the other hand, it’s hard (for me) to avoid noticing the strong parallels between this new approach and, e.g., the “search for a perfect language” (https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/The+Search+for+the+Perfect+Language-p-9780631174653) tradition that actually characterizes many of the aims analytic philosophy best. Maybe Adamic, or angelic, or Edenic tongues exist; but I doubt it.
(3) (a) I don’t concede that it’s an “overindulgence;” that “citizen actors” (as opposed to groups, in stacks) are the principal actors at all, either in the ecological crisis or in geopolitics); that “ecoliteracy” is the goal (proximately or in principle); that agency and intentionality are the same things; that material dynamics, flows, and vectors lack agency (to the contrary, I think there is precisely something like agency without intentionality there); that new materialist perspectives on agency (as I am suggesting in the previous item) are “warping and mutilating the notion on agency as such;” that “real networks” and etc. somehow exclude material dynamics, flows, and vectors; or that “[o]il has no agental powers capable of” etc. (b) Of course, I don’t literally think oil is a distributed Lovecraftian monster with intentions (but neither did Negarestani and probably neither does Parsani!). It’s important to remember Cyclonopedia is, after all, a novel, if a very strange one. The question becomes less “IS THIS AN ACCURATE PICTURE-THEORY OF THE WORLD?” (if that is what theories are supposed to do, which I doubt) and more “WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FICTION OR SPECULATIVE GENERATION AND REALITY (especially given that fiction and speculative generation is a part of reality and not some specially inscribed ontological nothingness, banished to the outer darkness of the “unreal” [whatever that is]?” I have approximately zero confidence that geopolitics, much less the absolutism of reality (to borrow a turn of phrase from Blumenberg), is apprehensible, comprehensible, or tractable without such speculative generations and unsettlements (and resettlements, however temporary). (c) Finally, re: both “Reza’s misleading speculative reasoning re: the role of oil” etc. and “tether itself to the real” I think there’s probably a basic disagreement here about qualifies as “real.” The question “Is X real?” seems to me probably confused in the extreme; the question should always be “In what way is X real – and what can or does it DO?” That to me seems far more like pragmatism (in the robust sense I *strongly* identify with) than relying on frequently inarticulate or even indefensible forms of “micro”-realism that ultimately draw arbitrary lines of demarcation about the inventory of the real, in order to give the compliment of “reality” to those inventory items deemed most desirable or expedient. In any case, simply “being unreal” (again, whatever this is actually supposed to mean) never slowed down an agent, material or otherwise. =)
At base, I agree with you that the text is not trying to be accurate, but I do think it is trying to offer up a “cartography” of some sort. In his own words: “The cartography of oil as an omnipresent entity narrates the dynamics of planetary events.”
But, of course, it is, as you remind me, a novel. And in that there is a lot that can be done analytically to tease out the symbolism from the hyperbole, etc, etc. I too come at it from an orientation that seeks to see what can be done with it, both within the realm of authorial intention and readerly license. And there is certainly value in the book.
For example, we can agree on the value of drawing attention to the materiality of geopolitical situations. I’m a big advocate of doing that, but in very specific ways: as attunement to the causal dynamics of actual materials, in how their properties and affectivity contribute to situations.
But when you suggest that the text helps elucidate “regimes of casual effect that a central substance involved in everything from political economy to regional conflict”, I have to disagree. That is exactly my critique of the text: it obscures more that it helps us track the real causal dynamics involved. In order to emphasize the centrality of hydrocarbons in human affairs it goes too far (“overindulges”), in my opinion. But, again, it’s a novel, and overindulging is kinda the point. So, “provocative” yes, “useful reframing for geopolitical theory”, not so much, in my opinion. It fails to provide a useful or insightful “cartography” of the role and life of hydrocarbons in the actual planetary arena. But I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
So, for me, the main contribution the text can have is more in prompting us to reground such a narrative in political ecology via the kinds of analytical rigour fiction is not beholden to (nor should it be).
But, yes, any text that can activate a better sense of the specific material character and potencies at work in a given milieu is welcome. Foregrounding the proto-agency of material assemblages is much needed. Jane Bennett’s “Vibrant Matter” is exemplar in this regard, and I liked your mention of DeLanda’s work, who is – along with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, without a doubt the single most influential thinker on my own views.
Again, I would suggest all such foregrounding of consequential materiality is more about attaining stronger or weaker attunement, in both an embodied and linguistic sense, and really only ever cashes out in terms of behavior, politics, and/or world-making projects.
With regard to semantic transparency, I don’t have much of substance to say, other than I do prefer clarity and theory work that makes things explicit, but certainly will acknowledge the value of other vocabularies (cf. Rorty) and modes of storytelling operating beyond the confines of stricter logics. The debate about the so-called between analytic and continental divide, as you reference, often seems to me more about genre-policing than offering up resources for new thinking and innovative theory.
Sellars is great, as is later Wittgenstein. Giants whose contributions will endure. I think they both fall nicely in the very very loose set of traditions that arrive at an understanding there can be no perfect language – or what Rorty sums as “no final vocabulary”.
On “citizen actors” I would never suggest that they are the principal actors. I think blocs and assemblages of inter-personalized agents are definitely more potent in the mix. What I was trying to suggest is that “cartographies” (ontographies) that overindulge in hyperbole and metaphor can be obscuring for people. In some sense, when doing political theory I believe better sense-making and more ecoliteracy should be the goal. Not necessarily in some mundane way, but political theory, in my opinion, as opposed (somewhat) to philosophy, should aim primarily to achieve two things: 1) useful analysis/interpretation of complex geopolitical dynamics, and 2) the enhancement of strategic thought and action. Speculative thought when not tethered to rigorous understandings of planetary complexity doesn’t advance that agenda much.
I do agree that agency and intentionality can be differentiated. I think there is a spectrum of material POTENCY that runs from, at least, atomic force relations to biological sensitivity, to cognition, and beyond. In that emergent stack of complexity some assembled potencies can be said to have a relative and primitive form of “agency” (which I would define as the ability to move and adjust one’s body in relation to an environment) and some have a more developed autopoietic agency of recursive self-direction. Which is to say, "intentionality" has proto-/primitive forms as it moves from base material potency to the kinds of dynamic agency and teleonomic capacity found in slime molds.
Which brings us to oil. Oil has powerful material potency (stored energy, combustability, etc) but is really low on agency and completely devoid of intentionality. Its materiality requires interaction with assemblages with higher agency, and infrastructures, and technologies, in order to achieve its relational import and status and effect in geopolitical spaces. So, again, important for political theory to foreground its causal potency and impacts and significance in more-than-human cosmopolitical affairs, but without obscuring its real movements and actual properties such that we our strategic engagements with it are rendered clumsy or awkward, or ineffective.
I think new materialism done well (in the way Grove does it, or Connolly to lesser extend, for example) can afford interesting insights and political theory, but I would caution any attempt to stretch the notion of agency too far lest our own understanding of causality and thus interventions become obscured.
So, let me be clear: I will never suggest excluding material dynamics, flows, and vectors from analysis, or that they do not have politically consequential POTENCY, relative agental-like efficacy (proto-agency). I’m as much of a materialist as one could respectable be. Or, better yet, I fancy myself as a genuine political ecologist who prioritizes BOTH the relational and the material.
I will say, however, that the Real “speaks” for itself, as "fanged noumena", in non-human ways. We exist on an immanent plane of ontic vulnerability where various potencies do what they do regardless of our linguistic whims. So while everything actual is real, not everything actual (like a book of theory-fiction) is real in the same way. A book about unicorns is expressing real semantic meanings but it is not narrating real events. Unicorns are real linguistic ideas but not real material entities. "Unreality" is a measure of more of less *adequate description* within the imaginal realm rather than directly picturing. Fantasy is real but it can be much less attuned to reality than non-fantasy. Language is imaginal and projective (cf. constructivism) so it can be more or less *adequately describing*, and thus more or less *attuned* to non-linguistic contexts in ways that are very consequential.
As you have written, "concepts and theoretical descriptions function as cognitive and strategic tools that help or hinder us in navigating the decisional and material environments in which politics (for example) takes place." That's my view too. And this discussion is about the degree to which the text offers an cartiography/ontography (explicit or otherwise) that helps or hinder us in navigating.
Hence my interest in the import of “reality-calibration” – as the process of organizing certain vocabularies and descriptions in ways that adequately track, take stock of, gesture at, and informationally include more or less understanding of non-linguistic realities. Science as methodology remains crucial in this regard, sorting out (to some extent) the shape and character of various material potencies, forces, flows, and assemblages.
But that’s not to say the value of a text is measured by how much it is calibrated to non-linguistic reality. Some speculative fiction that is far removed from calibration is interesting and can offer valuable resources for thinking. Lord of the Rings, for example. It’s what we do with the material that matters (literally).
On a personal note, I much prefer “hard sci-fi” more adequately calibrated to what is known about non-linguistic reality than any other speculative fiction, and find fantasy as a genre almost unbearable.
And I agree that speculation (in thought, fiction, theory, etc) is essential. It’s how we sense-make and probe for possibilities at the edges of the known.
When does speculative creativity become bad ontography? Does concept-creation and imagination engineering ever need to avail itself of reality-calibration? If so, in what ways? And what, if any, are the practical and political consequences when it does not? Just questions in my thoughts as I read this piece...
1: Yes, of course, although I don't think the measure of "bad ontography" (if I understand what you mean by that correctly) is going to be the same thing as "misrepresentation," etc. It's not just that POSIWID (and POSIWID has its own issues...), but nonetheless. 2: Of course. Concepts are tools for navigation. That being said, I think it's important not to excessively constrain our sense of concept engineering to some kind of raw consequentialism. No one's suggesting that concepts drive everything; but they have more effects re: what and how we perceive what is desirable, possible, etc. than is often acknowledged (especially in circles where abstract, "academic," scholarly approaches are too readily disparaged. 3: That always depends; I don't think there's a general answer to that question. Even for specific use-cases, the answer will often be "it depends," I think, given that concepts (strong or weak) often get repurposed to crosswise ends (so, e.g., Kathi Weeks writing about the work ethic is a fantastic, historically grounded example of how what looks like an ideological instrument crafted or evolved to compel and control workers becomes a site of contestation, a weapon put to other uses, and etc.).
Bad ontography (as distinct from ontology) is, for me, under-calibrated theorizing of our immanent contexts (as cosmoecological arena). "Bad" not in the sense of a failed representational accounting (but that too to some extent), but in the sense of unhelpful to the priority tasks before us, or low resolution such that strong and, yes, "good" evolutionary moves become harder.
Which is to say, its about more than just misrepresentation, in a naive sense - it's about *diminished navigation.* Because truth is participatory rather than representational, better ontography is that which enables us to be better wayfinders and project-makers with more adaptive or health-conduce outcomes.
I definitely agree "it's important not to excessively constrain our sense of concept engineering to some kind of raw consequentialism." I would advocate for an expansive kind of consequentialism, with wider-boundary considerations and relational assessments -- a (cosmo)ecological contextualism that prioritize immanent relationality and cumulative impacts. That's where my own evolutionary praxis is anchored.
For me it's more about sufficiently creative compositions of concepts and discourse to attain 'sweet spot' applicability that balances speculation and empiricism, and thus operationalizes a novel logic of syncretic reason inseparable from openness (revisability) and strategic acumen (in both the tactical/logistical and semantic/memetic registers). Neither raw consequentialism nor ideational whimsy, but a more adaptive middle ways (always plural).
I think my other comments above speak to the stakes of all that.
I'll just post my earlier comment here for the sake of expediency:
I really enjoyed the speculative swerve of this one: allowing theory-fiction to strange-ify the historical juncture of extraterrestrial conflict.
However, I take a somewhat sideways view of the same landscape. Which is to say, I’m suspicious of speculative reason as a tool of analysis when it overindulges in it’s distortions of the real movement and life of materials. Such overindulgences can indeed open up new imaginaries, but they can also foreclose (or mask) significant and hard won understandings of the actual determining ecological relations in which human geopolitics operate.
For me this condenses into questions of ecoliteracy, and the lack thereof for the majority of citizen actors. The already high degree of ecological blindness can be easily increased by theory-fiction that posits agency and intentionality where none exists, facilitated by a warping and mutilating the notion on agency as such, and by suggesting geopolitical horizons that confuse the shape of real networks and consequential nodal relations.
Oil has no agental powers capable of self-organizing into machinations to escape the ground to shape civilizations into platforms — any more than capitalism is an ‘alien intelligence from the future’. Both of those speculations attempt to highlight very complex relations via corrective emphasize of the role of oil and capitalist systems, respectively, but fail to offer anything nearing strategic insight or ethical accounting. Oil’s materiality and affective character is already well-studied (quite the opposite of anonymous), and more accurately understand ontographically as a particular kind of material potency entangled in human affairs, rather than as an agential force with intentionality.
Reza’s misleading speculative reasoning re: the role of oil in the evolving assemblages that make up humans social systems leads to distorted political imaginaries where genuine agents (i.e., oligarchs, politicians, corporate campaigns) as nodal forces who actually drive contemporary systems and feedbacks receive less attention (and blame), which, then, in turn, weakens political strategy and tactical effectiveness.
To be clear, this is not a call for lazy or naïve realism, but, rather, a plea for a critical or radical or “wild” ontographic pragmatism that seeks more productive and adaptive unions of speculative thought and the empirical sciences — with novel admixtures of conceptual and practical concerns.
“Ecology is, simultaneously, a thing we know and a thing we do. It is science and action. Thought and movement. It must be both, not fully reducible into either category.” — ecologist Ben Lockwood.
I think i’m more interested in evolutionary praxis and mutant geopolitics that creatively synthesize speculative and empirical modes rather than in adding to the already prolific ontological confusions rampant within the general populous, and fetishized by non-grounded intellectuals such as CCRU, Land, some strains of accelerationism, and Reza’s early work (which he himself has now moved away from).
Perhaps we might see this as a type of Grand Bargain between speculative theory and empirical research that is always mindful in it's operations to always tether itself to the real, but in not-so-simple ways?
See also: "The Insistence of Possibles: Towards a Speculative Pragmatism" (2017), by Isabelle Stengers for adjacent thoughts: https://doi.org/10.70733/w8eviuefu210
Just to be clear: (1) I think you’re mistaking what Negarestani is doing in this text for an argument or speculative solution to a problem, but I don’t think that’s where its value lies. If the work of this text has anything to do with “ecoliteracy” (which I somewhat doubt), then it draws our attention (as geopolitical theorists) to the materiality and regimes of casual effect that a central substance involved in everything from political economy to regional conflict (to the domains in which conflicts unfold, which thereby become operative or relevant in strategic consideration and forecasting, etc.). Often, in the literatures and theaters I am thinking of here, a substance like oil will be treated as a kind of black box (no pun intended) resource that gets modeled entirely in terms of direct economic or strategic value (price per barrel, infrastructure investments, pipeline flows), as if it were a mute or passive substance. Whether he disavows this later or not (yes, I’m very aware), Negarestani in this text uses the fundamental weirdness of the substance (“anonymity”) to make the materials “pop out” of the background of assumptive passivity that so inflects and shapes exactly how actual stakeholders and strategic actors in these arenas navigate them. The point isn’t that “reading Negarestani will make [XYZ actor] care,” but also the metric of value for intellectual work isn’t (and shouldn’t be) the same metric of value as activism or institutional behavior, reform, etc.
(2) re: Negarestani’s later changes in perspective, that’s fine, I’m not really treating his intellectual trajectory here, but this text as a provocative and useful reframing for geopolitical theory. While we’re on the subject, though, despite some significant affinities for Negarestani and Brassier, I confess I find the “Philosophy should strive for semantic transparency—no matter what the consequences” (Negarestani) and “in the conceptual element proper to theory, experiment at the level of form can mask conservativism at the level of content (…) while conservativism at the level of form may harbour extraordinary radicality at the level of content” (Brassier) pitches quite unconvincing and unmoving – for two reasons. First, the former statement seems to me to epitomize Negarestani’s shift (for whatever reason) to the classically analytic philosophical framework in which clarity, transparency, etc. are polemically positioned as themselves clear and transparent indices of cognitive, intellectual, philosophical value. The polemics do much of the work here, and they do their work as much through being disavowed as issued forth. As someone who comes to much of this stuff FROM analytic philosophy (instead of STARTING with what is sometimes called continental thought), it’s not just tired, but inaccurate. On the one hand, analytic philosophy itself has immense resources for demonstrating how and why the story doesn’t start and end with Carnap (to pick one of the new fetish objects as a concentration point). Sellars is great, of course, but the constant deprecation of Austin, Davidson, Grice, later Wittgenstein, etc. suggests to me there’s something off about the grand new discovery. On the other hand, it’s hard (for me) to avoid noticing the strong parallels between this new approach and, e.g., the “search for a perfect language” (https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/The+Search+for+the+Perfect+Language-p-9780631174653) tradition that actually characterizes many of the aims analytic philosophy best. Maybe Adamic, or angelic, or Edenic tongues exist; but I doubt it.
(3) (a) I don’t concede that it’s an “overindulgence;” that “citizen actors” (as opposed to groups, in stacks) are the principal actors at all, either in the ecological crisis or in geopolitics); that “ecoliteracy” is the goal (proximately or in principle); that agency and intentionality are the same things; that material dynamics, flows, and vectors lack agency (to the contrary, I think there is precisely something like agency without intentionality there); that new materialist perspectives on agency (as I am suggesting in the previous item) are “warping and mutilating the notion on agency as such;” that “real networks” and etc. somehow exclude material dynamics, flows, and vectors; or that “[o]il has no agental powers capable of” etc. (b) Of course, I don’t literally think oil is a distributed Lovecraftian monster with intentions (but neither did Negarestani and probably neither does Parsani!). It’s important to remember Cyclonopedia is, after all, a novel, if a very strange one. The question becomes less “IS THIS AN ACCURATE PICTURE-THEORY OF THE WORLD?” (if that is what theories are supposed to do, which I doubt) and more “WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FICTION OR SPECULATIVE GENERATION AND REALITY (especially given that fiction and speculative generation is a part of reality and not some specially inscribed ontological nothingness, banished to the outer darkness of the “unreal” [whatever that is]?” I have approximately zero confidence that geopolitics, much less the absolutism of reality (to borrow a turn of phrase from Blumenberg), is apprehensible, comprehensible, or tractable without such speculative generations and unsettlements (and resettlements, however temporary). (c) Finally, re: both “Reza’s misleading speculative reasoning re: the role of oil” etc. and “tether itself to the real” I think there’s probably a basic disagreement here about qualifies as “real.” The question “Is X real?” seems to me probably confused in the extreme; the question should always be “In what way is X real – and what can or does it DO?” That to me seems far more like pragmatism (in the robust sense I *strongly* identify with) than relying on frequently inarticulate or even indefensible forms of “micro”-realism that ultimately draw arbitrary lines of demarcation about the inventory of the real, in order to give the compliment of “reality” to those inventory items deemed most desirable or expedient. In any case, simply “being unreal” (again, whatever this is actually supposed to mean) never slowed down an agent, material or otherwise. =)
At base, I agree with you that the text is not trying to be accurate, but I do think it is trying to offer up a “cartography” of some sort. In his own words: “The cartography of oil as an omnipresent entity narrates the dynamics of planetary events.”
But, of course, it is, as you remind me, a novel. And in that there is a lot that can be done analytically to tease out the symbolism from the hyperbole, etc, etc. I too come at it from an orientation that seeks to see what can be done with it, both within the realm of authorial intention and readerly license. And there is certainly value in the book.
For example, we can agree on the value of drawing attention to the materiality of geopolitical situations. I’m a big advocate of doing that, but in very specific ways: as attunement to the causal dynamics of actual materials, in how their properties and affectivity contribute to situations.
But when you suggest that the text helps elucidate “regimes of casual effect that a central substance involved in everything from political economy to regional conflict”, I have to disagree. That is exactly my critique of the text: it obscures more that it helps us track the real causal dynamics involved. In order to emphasize the centrality of hydrocarbons in human affairs it goes too far (“overindulges”), in my opinion. But, again, it’s a novel, and overindulging is kinda the point. So, “provocative” yes, “useful reframing for geopolitical theory”, not so much, in my opinion. It fails to provide a useful or insightful “cartography” of the role and life of hydrocarbons in the actual planetary arena. But I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.
So, for me, the main contribution the text can have is more in prompting us to reground such a narrative in political ecology via the kinds of analytical rigour fiction is not beholden to (nor should it be).
But, yes, any text that can activate a better sense of the specific material character and potencies at work in a given milieu is welcome. Foregrounding the proto-agency of material assemblages is much needed. Jane Bennett’s “Vibrant Matter” is exemplar in this regard, and I liked your mention of DeLanda’s work, who is – along with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, without a doubt the single most influential thinker on my own views.
Again, I would suggest all such foregrounding of consequential materiality is more about attaining stronger or weaker attunement, in both an embodied and linguistic sense, and really only ever cashes out in terms of behavior, politics, and/or world-making projects.
With regard to semantic transparency, I don’t have much of substance to say, other than I do prefer clarity and theory work that makes things explicit, but certainly will acknowledge the value of other vocabularies (cf. Rorty) and modes of storytelling operating beyond the confines of stricter logics. The debate about the so-called between analytic and continental divide, as you reference, often seems to me more about genre-policing than offering up resources for new thinking and innovative theory.
Sellars is great, as is later Wittgenstein. Giants whose contributions will endure. I think they both fall nicely in the very very loose set of traditions that arrive at an understanding there can be no perfect language – or what Rorty sums as “no final vocabulary”.
On “citizen actors” I would never suggest that they are the principal actors. I think blocs and assemblages of inter-personalized agents are definitely more potent in the mix. What I was trying to suggest is that “cartographies” (ontographies) that overindulge in hyperbole and metaphor can be obscuring for people. In some sense, when doing political theory I believe better sense-making and more ecoliteracy should be the goal. Not necessarily in some mundane way, but political theory, in my opinion, as opposed (somewhat) to philosophy, should aim primarily to achieve two things: 1) useful analysis/interpretation of complex geopolitical dynamics, and 2) the enhancement of strategic thought and action. Speculative thought when not tethered to rigorous understandings of planetary complexity doesn’t advance that agenda much.
I do agree that agency and intentionality can be differentiated. I think there is a spectrum of material POTENCY that runs from, at least, atomic force relations to biological sensitivity, to cognition, and beyond. In that emergent stack of complexity some assembled potencies can be said to have a relative and primitive form of “agency” (which I would define as the ability to move and adjust one’s body in relation to an environment) and some have a more developed autopoietic agency of recursive self-direction. Which is to say, "intentionality" has proto-/primitive forms as it moves from base material potency to the kinds of dynamic agency and teleonomic capacity found in slime molds.
Which brings us to oil. Oil has powerful material potency (stored energy, combustability, etc) but is really low on agency and completely devoid of intentionality. Its materiality requires interaction with assemblages with higher agency, and infrastructures, and technologies, in order to achieve its relational import and status and effect in geopolitical spaces. So, again, important for political theory to foreground its causal potency and impacts and significance in more-than-human cosmopolitical affairs, but without obscuring its real movements and actual properties such that we our strategic engagements with it are rendered clumsy or awkward, or ineffective.
I think new materialism done well (in the way Grove does it, or Connolly to lesser extend, for example) can afford interesting insights and political theory, but I would caution any attempt to stretch the notion of agency too far lest our own understanding of causality and thus interventions become obscured.
So, let me be clear: I will never suggest excluding material dynamics, flows, and vectors from analysis, or that they do not have politically consequential POTENCY, relative agental-like efficacy (proto-agency). I’m as much of a materialist as one could respectable be. Or, better yet, I fancy myself as a genuine political ecologist who prioritizes BOTH the relational and the material.
I will say, however, that the Real “speaks” for itself, as "fanged noumena", in non-human ways. We exist on an immanent plane of ontic vulnerability where various potencies do what they do regardless of our linguistic whims. So while everything actual is real, not everything actual (like a book of theory-fiction) is real in the same way. A book about unicorns is expressing real semantic meanings but it is not narrating real events. Unicorns are real linguistic ideas but not real material entities. "Unreality" is a measure of more of less *adequate description* within the imaginal realm rather than directly picturing. Fantasy is real but it can be much less attuned to reality than non-fantasy. Language is imaginal and projective (cf. constructivism) so it can be more or less *adequately describing*, and thus more or less *attuned* to non-linguistic contexts in ways that are very consequential.
As you have written, "concepts and theoretical descriptions function as cognitive and strategic tools that help or hinder us in navigating the decisional and material environments in which politics (for example) takes place." That's my view too. And this discussion is about the degree to which the text offers an cartiography/ontography (explicit or otherwise) that helps or hinder us in navigating.
Hence my interest in the import of “reality-calibration” – as the process of organizing certain vocabularies and descriptions in ways that adequately track, take stock of, gesture at, and informationally include more or less understanding of non-linguistic realities. Science as methodology remains crucial in this regard, sorting out (to some extent) the shape and character of various material potencies, forces, flows, and assemblages.
But that’s not to say the value of a text is measured by how much it is calibrated to non-linguistic reality. Some speculative fiction that is far removed from calibration is interesting and can offer valuable resources for thinking. Lord of the Rings, for example. It’s what we do with the material that matters (literally).
On a personal note, I much prefer “hard sci-fi” more adequately calibrated to what is known about non-linguistic reality than any other speculative fiction, and find fantasy as a genre almost unbearable.
And I agree that speculation (in thought, fiction, theory, etc) is essential. It’s how we sense-make and probe for possibilities at the edges of the known.
When does speculative creativity become bad ontography? Does concept-creation and imagination engineering ever need to avail itself of reality-calibration? If so, in what ways? And what, if any, are the practical and political consequences when it does not? Just questions in my thoughts as I read this piece...
1: Yes, of course, although I don't think the measure of "bad ontography" (if I understand what you mean by that correctly) is going to be the same thing as "misrepresentation," etc. It's not just that POSIWID (and POSIWID has its own issues...), but nonetheless. 2: Of course. Concepts are tools for navigation. That being said, I think it's important not to excessively constrain our sense of concept engineering to some kind of raw consequentialism. No one's suggesting that concepts drive everything; but they have more effects re: what and how we perceive what is desirable, possible, etc. than is often acknowledged (especially in circles where abstract, "academic," scholarly approaches are too readily disparaged. 3: That always depends; I don't think there's a general answer to that question. Even for specific use-cases, the answer will often be "it depends," I think, given that concepts (strong or weak) often get repurposed to crosswise ends (so, e.g., Kathi Weeks writing about the work ethic is a fantastic, historically grounded example of how what looks like an ideological instrument crafted or evolved to compel and control workers becomes a site of contestation, a weapon put to other uses, and etc.).
Bad ontography (as distinct from ontology) is, for me, under-calibrated theorizing of our immanent contexts (as cosmoecological arena). "Bad" not in the sense of a failed representational accounting (but that too to some extent), but in the sense of unhelpful to the priority tasks before us, or low resolution such that strong and, yes, "good" evolutionary moves become harder.
Which is to say, its about more than just misrepresentation, in a naive sense - it's about *diminished navigation.* Because truth is participatory rather than representational, better ontography is that which enables us to be better wayfinders and project-makers with more adaptive or health-conduce outcomes.
I definitely agree "it's important not to excessively constrain our sense of concept engineering to some kind of raw consequentialism." I would advocate for an expansive kind of consequentialism, with wider-boundary considerations and relational assessments -- a (cosmo)ecological contextualism that prioritize immanent relationality and cumulative impacts. That's where my own evolutionary praxis is anchored.
For me it's more about sufficiently creative compositions of concepts and discourse to attain 'sweet spot' applicability that balances speculation and empiricism, and thus operationalizes a novel logic of syncretic reason inseparable from openness (revisability) and strategic acumen (in both the tactical/logistical and semantic/memetic registers). Neither raw consequentialism nor ideational whimsy, but a more adaptive middle ways (always plural).
I think my other comments above speak to the stakes of all that.