No, not the computer whatsits, getting up to no good on the internet and all that, I mean Ian. Hacking that is. Ian Hacking. I’ve been reading his book Historical Ontology. It’s really, really good. I picked it up randomly because I got his Taming of Chance out of the library; that book is directly relevant to something I should be working on, so of course I’ve not started it yet. He’s got another book on the history of probability and a book on the reason processes involved in the use of statistics, I may read those as well.
Anyhow, Historical Ontology is quite good. Part of this is just style. Hacking writes in the neighborhood of Richard Rorty - chatty, down to earth, but also smart and knowledgeable - but seems to have less axes to grind than Rorty did, less polemical impulses. Again like Rorty, I like that Hacking doesn’t respect the Atlantic ocean (and the English Channel) very much as an intellectual division. Hacking is definitely and self-consciously rooted in Anglo-American philosophical tradition, particularly analytic philosophy, but he read canonically Continental figures closely and interestingly, placing them in dialog with analytic concerns about language (I can’t remember any off the top of my head but I know he does so) as well as following independent interest in these figures. That is, he neither treats Continental figures as misunderstood or potential analytical philosophers nor does he treat Continental philosophy as wholly incompatible with analytic philosophy. It’s an impressive balance.
Hacking’s main interest in Continental philosophy is in the work of Michel Foucault. I’ve repeatedly thrown up my hands over a fair amount of Foucault and his readership, and repeatedly come back to thinking Foucault and at least some of his readers are really interesting and important in general and particular for the stuff I’m interested in. I’ve pretty consistently had the impression that his early works sounded way less interesting and most of what I’d read of his that I really liked was from I think fairly late in his career and life, from Discipline and Punish onward mainly. It’s particularly striking to me, then, that Hacking makes the early Foucault seem really fascinating. In his treatment I find myself wanting to read The Order of Things, The Archaelogy of Knowledge, maybe The Birth of the Clinic or even Madness and Civilization.
Hacking draws on Foucault for inspiration and ideas about language and about history. I like the stuff on language as I’ve had an on-again-off-again hobby interest in the analytic philosophy of language (and linguistified aspects of other areas of anglo-american philosophy) since I took a course on it in college, and I’ve repeatedly bumped into claims in Continental inspired circles that seem either silly or perhaps valid but weirdly posed, and felt that the analytic stuff had a fair bit to offer if only it was taken seriously. That made me quite like Hacking’s stuff on language.
More than the langauge bits, though, it’s the bits on history that most struck me. I’m typing this from memory without the book in front of me and I’m quite tired…. as such (I’m embarassed to say) I can’t remember a lot of the details of what Hacking’s on about. I’ll come back later and take more detailed notes. I’m trying to get in the habit of writing based on general impressions without having book in hand then taking detailed notes, I think each has merits such that doing both will be the best way to go.
The main thing I recall being excited about is just that Hacking is an analytic oriented philosopher but who cares about history and the past, and not just history of philosophy. On a related note, he’s interested in social contexts and moments as complex objects of study, with an empirical bent. I like all of that.
I also recall Hacking making interesting distinctions between the natural and the social sciences. Hacking argues that the natural sciences differ from the social sciences due in part to their objects, specifically their objects’ relationship to history. The natural sciences are historical of course, they exist in time and are shaped by social contexts. On the other hand, they deal with objects which are not just historical.
Hacking uses the example of photoelectric cells to make his point. Someone at a particular moment in time discovered that under the right conditions light can generate electricity. That happened in time. But the discovery discovered something which is not just historical. That is, under the same circumstances at any point in time light will generate electricity. There is a real physical universe including properties such that photoelectricity works. The discovery of photoelectricity and the attendant inventions bound up with it did not create the aspects of the universe that make photoelectricity possible.
With the social sciences, on the other hand, Hacking holds that there is no real parallel to what I just called ‘the aspects of the universe.’ Hacking uses examples of mental illness. There was no multiple personality disorder our there in the universe prior to its discovery. That is, demon possession, for instance, was not a misdiagnosis by earlier humans of multiple personality disorder. Men who had sex with men have not always been homosexual and may not always be so (are not always so). Hacking insists on a plasticity of human being that is not there (would not really make sense to insist on) for the the nonhuman physical universe. Scientists don’t make up the physical universe as they discover and invent and (re)categorize. Social scientists do ‘make up people,’ as Hacking puts it, as social/social scientific categories change. (Not just social scientists, of course, other people participate as well.) I’m not sure Hacking would agree with these terms but he seems to be saying that social scientific (and analogous) categories bear a prescriptive power and/or a (social) world-making power within their descriptions (I’m tempted to say ‘ostensible descriptions’ but I’m not sure that would be right).
To be clear, Hacking’s distinction between the natural and social sciences does not appear to be a criticism of the social sciences, other than perhaps that some social scientists aren’t conscious of the specifics of what they do. If anything, those qualities seem to be what make Hacking particularly interested in the social sciences.
Hi Nate,
Thanx for the nice post on Hacking — I’ve had this book on my ‘to read’ shelf for a long time, and you’re post inspires me to pick it up. I used to be really into his _The Social Construction of What?_. In that, he makes a similar distinction between the natural and social sciences, but using a pretty useful conceptual innovation: a distinction between two different types of categories or ‘kinds.’ On the one hand, the natural sciences study “indifferent kinds,” objects that are indifferent to their categories that people use to describe them (e.g., the properties of a rock will not change if scientists give it a new name). On the other hand, the social sciences study “interactive kinds,” objects that interact with the categories that people use to describe them (e.g., Hacking gives the example of ADD - when scientists used the category “ADD” to describe kids with a particular type of behavior disorder, the kids understood this category as describing them and they changed their behavior accordingly - which then led scientists, through a “looping effect,” to change their description of these kids, to “ADHD,” and so on).
I used to think that this was a pretty cool distinction. However, after reading Bruno Latour’s critique of the concepts of ‘nature’ and ’society’ (in his _Politics of Nature_ and _Reassembling the Social_, respectively), I’ve found it to be less useful for guiding critical political-scientific research. Hacking’s distinction is complicit with an anthropocentic view of agency and action — it hinders thinking about the ’social’ action of nonhuman entities. Instead, I prefer Latour’s view of society as not a thing but a “movement of association” (following Tarde and against Durkheim).
Yet, Hacking’s theory is still really good, and Latour himself draws on Hacking in his critique of ’social constructionists.’ I’m writing this off the top of my head, and will have to dive back into Hacking to give him a fair reading.
BTW, it was great to party with you at my wedding. You rocked the Ramones karaoke!
word,
Eli M.
Comment by Eli M. — July 21, 2009 @ 9:54 pm
Sounds really interesting Nate. I’ve never read the guy but it sounds rather a lot like Bhaskar and so-called critical realism, which I like quite a lot. Do you know this stuff, and if so, do you think they’re on the same lines?
Also looking forward to your promised posts on Badiou. I’ve been reading a bit of his stuff lately because of a reading group. And to be honest the appeal completely escapes me, to the point that a lot of it seems plain preposterous, but people I respect seem to get a lot out of him so I wonder if I’m missing the point.
Comment by Mike Beggs — July 22, 2009 @ 1:01 am
Haha, I just now had lunch with a guy I’m co-writing a paper with, and he put this book down on the table and asked if I’d read it, because it was really in line with the critical realism stuff we’d been using… and it was Hacking.
Comment by Mike Beggs — July 22, 2009 @ 10:08 pm
hi Mike, Eli,
Thanks for the comments, great to hear from you.
Mike, I’ve got internet at home again, so I’ll be posting my stuff on Badiou soon-ish, and will also stop accomplishing much else.
What have you been reading by Badiou? I should say, I’m interested in Badiou as a philosopher mainly for resources to make negative/deflationary arguments. I like his argument “ontology is mathematics” for that reason. The claim as I understand is that, to the degree that ontology is about being qua being then what ontology can express is basically what mathematics can express. (There’s a bit of Hegel that’s got a somewhat similar claim, I think it’s around paragraph 88 in the Science of Logic, he doesn’t talk math as far as I recall but talks about being qua being as a basically contentless category, almost indistinguishable form the category ‘nothing’.) I like this to use against folk who insist on Deleuze and Negri in a prescriptive way, the ontology of this and that and the other, some strong link between ontology and politics, and so on. I like the Badiou as a way to say basically “you want to do ontology? go do some math then; any X qua being is the subject of mathematical study - X qua riot or strike or mass organization, that’s another story entirely, we don’t need the being part to understand that.” That’s most of the appeal for me. The other bits I like are some of the maoist political bits, that’s actually what I’ve been reading lately. I’m not at all convinced that the two strands of his work have a meaningful relationship to each other, and I find his occasional implication that they do to be deeply annoying.
I’ve not read Bhaskar, what do you recommend starting with? And let me know if you end up reading the Hacking. I’m currently reading his book The Taming of Chance and will probably read his book on the creation of probability as well (related to stuff for my work, on labor statistics).
Eli, the wedding was great, really fun and a cool personal ceremony. (I’ve got an email to you drafted offline on my laptop that’ll be coming soon.) Give me a call when your schedule opens up enough that you can go climbing, I’ve started back to Vertical Endeavors again.
Re: Latour and non-humans and all, I’m not moved by that. I think the categories you describe - indifferent/interactive - sound really great, I’ll have to check out that book.
I’ve not read Latour, I’ll take a look at those books you mention. To be totally honest I’ve never seen a version of the ‘things have agency too’ stuff that didn’t seem to me prima facie wrongheaded - in political terms I mean, it’s always sounded to me at best like a warmed over version of something I’d seen before (like deep ecology, for instance) and at worst as having a liquidationist/quietist effect. With regard to non-human animals, I’m a firm believer in animal consciousness but I think with animals it’s humans that’ll be changing their treatment, not animals themselves. I think that makes for, at least potentially, a serious problem in terms of animal rights in relation to other politics, as I think animal rights - or whatever cognate term folk want - can only be a substitutionist project (I think the same is true of any non-human centered politics) whereas the type of politics I think humans need - communist politics - should not be substitutionist.
That said, it’s clear that humans exist in interaction with other animals as well as minerals and vegetables and so forth. I could imagine someone saying “we can’t understand humans fully without taking into account that larger context,” that’d be sensible enough but I’m not sure that that has a specifically political force - insofar as politics is concerned with human liberation - as opposed to aiming at scientific understandings of humans.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 24, 2009 @ 9:08 am
Hey Nate,
Verso republished Bhaskar’s “A Realist Theory of Science” in the third Radical Thinkers series, so you can get it cheap. It’s the place to start, even though its about physical/natural science rather than social science. It’s also the only one I’ve read so far, though I’m planning to move on to the sequel soon because I liked it so much. The sequel being ‘The Possibility of Naturalism’, which is about social science. I’ve read a few secondary things about his view of social science though, as it’s become really big in the social sciences themselves, especially in my economicsy corner of them.
Going by some other things you’ve liked, I think you’d like him because he is pragmatist in approach and has that blend of analytic and continental. He says at the outset that he’s going to just ignore skepticism, and instead of inquiring ‘is science possible?’, he asks, ‘what must the world be like if science is possible?’ But from what I hear about ‘the Possibility of Naturalism’ he doesn’t make the same assumption for social science.
His third book is ‘Dialectics’, where he apparently takes a Marxist/Hegelian turn (although he apparently always identified as marxian, and was connected to the new left review people, which is why Verso published him back in the 1970s). I’d like to read it too, but I don’t know much about it. Of people who liked his first two books, some love it and some hate it. His books after Dialectics apparently take a spiritualist/New Age turn and are pretty much universally panned.
I got Hacking’s ‘the Social Construction of What?’ and so far it’s great. He’s a really good and witty writer. Historical Ontology looks good too.
I haven’t really read too much Badiou, just a few interviews and short articles that were prescribed for a reading group. I haven’t read the major metaphysical stuff at all, I know he’s into set theory but I don’t really know what he does with it. So I should probably shut up about him!
I read a couple of recent articles about ‘the subject’ and ‘the event’. He uses post-Schoenberg classical music (after the ‘Schoenberg event’) to illustrate what he means. It’s pretty well written and interesting, and made me understand what I had found difficult - this idea of the subject which is not a human being but not an objective thing. But applied to politics, I find it idealist and not very helpful. After all, in music all it takes for someone to break all the rules and start something new is for them to write some music and get it played, a solitary thing. I guess it’s kind of social, in that he had to be big in Vienna already for his break to mean anything, he had to attract disciples, etc., but in politics it is not enough to just pitch a tent in the wilderness and keep it up, surely it is a very different social context.
Comment by Mike Beggs — July 24, 2009 @ 8:42 pm
Hi Nate,
Re: non-humans and agency, I’m not so interested in bringing animals into politics either. Rather, I find Latour’s actor-network-theory useful for talking about the materiality of subjectivity, dispositions, knowledge, ideas, and other concepts that liberal-capitalist imaginaries frame as non-material or transcendental. His concepts are helpful for fleshing out what Deleuze calls “machinic assemblages.” You’re right that the politics of “bringing the non-human into politics” is sketchy, but I think it’s pretty important to try to grapple with it. A big part of my dissertation is going to bring together that post-humanist, science studies stuff with autonomist marxist and anarchist stuff. To give you a better idea of how I’m doing this, I’ll send you my first chapter when I write it within a few weeks.
Thanks for the props on the wedding! I’m glad you had fun. Hell yeah, let’s go rockclimbing soon.
word,
Eli
Comment by Eli M. — July 24, 2009 @ 9:01 pm
hi Mike, Eli,
Mike, I’m going to get the Social Construction of What out of the library pretty soon, maybe we can blogdiscuss it. Likewise with Historical Ontology.
Eli, you too of course, though I’d rather talk about that stuff in person! And do send me your chapter, please, I love reading other people’s stuff. Call me when you want to go climbing.
Mike, I’ll check out Bhaskar when I get a chance. I wrote this before then deleted it, one reason I’ve not looked at his stuff before is that I associated it (based on little evidence) with attempts to ground marxism and politics philosophically. I’m strongly opposed to that, despite my interests in both marxism/politics and philosophy. I half remember some Wittgenstein quote, that philosophy is a sign that something has gone wrong. I basically agree with that, am attracted to deflationary/’therapeutic’ arguments following on from that, trying to cure a need for or overinflated claims about philosophy, at the same time that I still maintain a hobby interest in the stuff.
Eli, I’ll definitely give that Latour a look. I’m of two minds with regard to your comment. On the one hand, I am a pretty convinced physicalist and materialist and monist (I go back and forth about the degree to which those terms are similar or different from each other). On the other hand, two hands really (three hands, I know, I guess I could use a hand with my metaphors …. and my jokes… three hands and two minds, clearly something’s gone wrong), I’m not sure what use assertions of materiality really are or how requisite they really are. I have a gut level feeling or intuition that proper/thoroughgoing materialism would be something like how Richard Rorty describes thoroughgoing atheism. He says something like if some society/culture managed to achieve full on atheism we wouldn’t say “god does not exist,” rather that whole question or debate would simply fall by the wayside and people would go forward with no mention of god at all. Similarly, I have an impulse to say that a full on materialism would not need to assert materialism as a doctrine, having climbed that ladder we’d not need it anymore. (Lurking in the background are concerns tied to some of what Althusser talks about the Philosophy of the Encounter, that materialism can be a form or can contain elements of idealism. I think Graeber says something similar someplace.)
The third hand is that I’m unsure about the point that there are some things “that liberal-capitalist imaginaries frame as non-material or transcendental.” I’m sympathetic but I’m also unsure, for two reasons. (Five hands now? Or maybe just fingers. I’ve lost count.) One, I think it’s easy to slide from a criticism of capitalism which includes criticizing certain views that exist under and/or are tied to capitalism to criticize those views as such. Religion is one example, there’s a parallel with ideas of materiality and immateriality, moving to criticizing the idea as such can imply that debunking those ideas is a sort of theoretical work that has an anti-capitalist content because those ideas are important to capitalism. That may be the case but it may not. Second, relatedly, it seems to me that versions of interpretations that are similar to elements of capitalist ideas/ideas that exist under capitalism can have other forces or vectors, including framing some things are non-material or transcendental. Again I’m thinking of religion among other things. I’m a devout, petty, and often assholish atheist and I think religion is pernicious. At the same time, I think there’s a fair bit of evidence that in some context religion can mean things other than the negative things I associate it with. Our mutual friend Mike K told me a story recently about his work organizing low waged workers in the Twin Cities, he said that he was at a big meeting and a woman from the campaign spoke inspiringly to the room in way that presented a strong take against the employer framed within her devoutly christian viewpoint. She said, “I name our employer Pharaoh! The union is my Moses!” as part of her talk. Along similar lines I’ve never found criticisms of rights talk - against human rights and so on - convincing when they relied on an analogy (often posited as a deeper connection, but I’ve never bought that argument) between rights or rights-talk and some aspect of capitalism or some necessary statism implied every time someone says “I/we have a right to…” My point is that a framing of things very similar - or perhaps identical at the level of sentences - to those under capitalism can have very different meanings in some contexts.
None of this is really an *objection* to anything you said. I know I probably sound like I’m unfairly imputing to you views that you’ve not stated, not my intent. Rather I’m sort of thinking out my views on this stuff as a way to get clearer on my negative gut reactions. Sorry if this isn;t clear, it’s late.
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 24, 2009 @ 11:39 pm