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Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology

The reading of Marx we really need today is not so much a direct reading of his texts as an imagined reading: the anachronistic practice of imagining how Marx would have answered to new theories proposed to replace the supposedly outdated Marxism. The latest in this series is a complex field whose different versions go under the names of object-oriented ontology (OOO), assemblage theory, and new materialism (NM). Although its main target is transcendental humanism, what lurks in the background is clearly the specter of Marxism. In defending Marxism against this latest onslaught, we will proceed via an unexpected detour: our reading of OOO will privilege Graham Harman who, although he may appear to offer its most static and undialectical version, paradoxically brings out some features which enable us to establish a link with Marxist dialectics.1

Mechanism, organism, structure, totality, assemblage - one should negotiate a proper position between the two extremes: the assertion of just one category (say, assemblage or totality) as the only appropriate one, with the denunciation of others as false; the simple acceptance of each category as an appropriate description of a particular level of reality (mechanism for inanimate matter, organism for life, etc.). Especially interesting are cases of the dialectical intermingling of categories - for example, does Stephen Jay Gould's thesis on exaptation not imply that organisms are structured like assemblages? Does Hegel's deployment of the rise of Spirit out of Life not imply a "regression" to mechanism at the level of how signs function? (It is this "regression" to mechanism that sustains the passage from organic-expressive Whole characteristic of organisms to differential structure characteristic of symbolic networks.) The crucial point is, then, that the five notions - mechanism, organism, (differential) structure, totality, assemblage - are not at the same level. Totality is not the same as differential structure, but only in the sense that totality is differential  structure thought to the end - that is, a differential structure that includes subjectivity and a constitutive antagonism. (Furthermore, mechanism of dead matter is not the same as the signifying mechanism.) Bearing all this in mind, we'll focus on the opposition between assemblage and totality. Let us begin with the basic determinations of assemblage:

1. Assemblages are relational: they are arrangements of different entities linked together to form a new whole. They consist of relations of exteriority, and this exteriority implies certain autonomy of the terms (people, objects, etc.) from the relations between them; the properties of the component parts also cannot explain the relations that constitute a whole.
2. Assemblages are productive: they produce new territorial organizations, new behaviors, new expressions, new actors, and new realities.
3. Assemblages are heterogeneous: there are no a priori limits as to what can be related - humans, animals, things, and ideas - nor is there a dominant entity in an assemblage. As such, assemblages are socio-material, i.e., they eschew the nature-culture divide.
4. Assemblages imply a dynamic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: they establish territories as they emerge and hold together but also constantly mutate, transform, and break up.
5. Assemblages are desired: desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented.

In this vision, the world is conceived as multiple and performative, that is, shaped through practices, as different from a single pre-existing reality. This is why, for Bruno Latour, politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around things and issues of concern, rather than around values and beliefs. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure, and new reproductive technologies bring concerned publics into being that create diverse forms of knowledge about these matters and diverse forms of action - beyond institutions, political interests, or ideologies that delimit the traditional domain of politics. Whether it is called ontological politics, Dingpolitik, or cosmopolitics, this form of politics recognizes the vital role of nonhumans, in concrete situations, co-creating diverse forms of knowledge that need to be acknowledged and incorporated rather than silenced. Particular attention has gone to that most central organization of all for political geographers: the state. Instead of conceiving the state as a unified actor, it should be approached as an assemblage that makes heterogeneous points of order - geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities - resonate together. As such, the state is an effect rather than the origin of power, and one should focus on reconstructing the socio-material basis of its functioning. The concept of assemblage questions the naturalization of hegemonic assemblages and renders them open to political challenge by exposing their contingency. "By insisting that phenomena do not have to be a particular way just because they are a particular way, assemblage thinking and ANT [actor-network theory] open up avenues for alternative orderings and thus for political action."2

The relative autonomy of the elements of an assemblage also enables the radical re-contextualization of a work of art; exemplary here, of course, is the case of Shakespeare's plays, which can be transposed into a contemporary setting and given a different twist without losing their effectiveness. But let us take another more surprising example. Of the three post-WWII big versions of the movie Quo Vadis (1951, USA, Melvyn le Roy; 1985, TV miniseries, Italy, Franco Rossi; 2001, Poland, Jerzy Kawalerowicz), the first and the last are exemplary cases of "high quality" religious kitsch, while Rossi's six-hour TV version with Klaus Maria Brandauer as Nero is much more unsettling in its dark mood. In this version, there is so much perverse darkness in the obscene power display of Nero and his court that the final redemption simply doesn't work - the surviving Christians are just left to depart after their lives were effectively ruined and their innocent joy of life destroyed. Rossi demonstrates how a model cinema version should proceed: even the lowest form of Christian propaganda (Henryk Sienkiewicz's unbearably pretentious novel, which got him the Nobel Prize) can be rendered in a way that counteracts its explicit message. Rossi does not introduce a foreign element into the novel - the narrative content is exactly the same; he merely takes the atmosphere of perverse tortures of the early Christians more seriously than the original novel did itself. So, to put it in the terms of ANT, Rossi's version is contained in the novel's diagram, as a virtual option. However, the conclusion that I draw from this example is not exactly the same as the one drawn by Harman. Rossi's version is not contained in the novel In-itself; it was added to the novel's diagram with the new trends in cinema. Furthermore, such a "change" is not the result of some mysterious In-itself of the novel that eludes its actual interactions; if we want to discern how such a different reading is rendered possible by the immanent structure of the novel, we should rather conceive the novel as in itself ontologically open, "unfinished," inconsistent, traversed by antagonisms. I am basically making here the traditional Hegelian point: change doesn't come just from outside. In order for a thing to (be able to) change, its identity already has to be "contradictory," inconsistent, full of immanent tensions, and in this sense ontologically "open." [In-itself? in-itself? in itself? Later on, the hyphenated version is always given with an initial capital letter: In-itself.]

In the domain of politics, it would be interesting to analyze the Trump movement as an assemblage - not as a consistent sui generis populist movement, but as a precarious assemblage of heterogeneous elements that enabled it to exert hegemony: populist anti-establishment protest rage, protection of the rich by lower taxes, fundamentalist Christian morality, racist patriotism, etc. These elements in no way belong together; they are heterogeneous and can as easily be combined into a totally different set (for example, anti-establishment protest rage was also exploited by Bernie Sanders; lower taxes for the rich are usually advocated on purely economic grounds by (economic) liberals who despise populism, etc.).

The logic of assemblage is also to be taken into account when we are dealing with big Leftist emancipatory slogans like "the struggle against Islamophobia and the struggle for women's rights are one and the same struggle" - yes, as a goal, but in the mess of actual politics these are two separate struggles that not only run independently of each other but also work against each other: Muslim women's struggle against their oppression; anticolonial struggle, which dismisses women's rights as a Western plot to destroy traditional Muslim communal life, etc.

The concept of assemblage also opens up a path to the key question of the communist reorganization of society: how could one put together in a different way large-scale organizations that regulate water supply,...