Nick of the Accursed Share has posted a compelling discussion of the difference between speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy over at Speculative Heresy. Throughout the post Nick provides some valuable criticisms of the position I’ve been developing that lean heavily on the thought of Laruelle. Despite having read Brassier’s discussions of Laruelle in Alien Theory (warning pdf.) and Nihil Unbound, as well as Nick’s excellent (and dense!) forthcoming article in Pli, I am still unsure as to just what Laruelle is up to, so I will limit myself to commenting on what I understand of Nick’s criticisms with the hope that he’ll be able to clarify matters in the future with respect to Laruelle. Hopefully Nick will forgive me if my thoughts are a little disorganized and scattered in this post as I am completely exhausted from beginning to exercise once again today.
Nick begins by drawing a distinction between the speculative realists and object-oriented philosophy with respect to relation.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that one of the main dividing lines emerging in speculative realism is between those who argue for an object-oriented position (Graham, Levi, and Latour being the exemplars), and those who argue that relationality is entirely on the side of ideality (Brassier and Laruelle).
The first question that emerges for me is why relationality would be characterized in terms of ideality. How is it that relation is being conceived such that it is treated as falling on the side of ideality? It seems to me that the interaction between the sun and a tree is defined by relation. Here, according to the Ontic Principle, we would have an example where one entity makes a difference on another entity. Yet it is difficult for me to see just why this relation would be considered ideal, assuming that ideality refers to the domain of thought and the human.
read on!
Nick goes on to observe that,
One of the crucial questions falls on the notion of difference. As Levi has stated, he has purposefully left difference unarticulated so as to be as inclusive as possible. A minimal ontological principle. Yet, for Laruelle, the key distinction between an idealist materialism and a real materialism lies precisely on the notion of difference. He asks, “how can we attain a concept of difference that would be real and genetic as well as a priori and transcendental without re-inscribing it once more, if not within the sphere of signification, at least within that of ideal sense, in the pure typos and topos of the Idea.” (”The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter”, 36)
The problem lies in the fact that “we will be reintroducing ideality … if we continue to say, as structuralism does, that ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’ are differential positions that are relative to one another, or if we continue to conflate, along with structuralism, Nietzsche, and idealism in general, Difference with a relation of reciprocal determination between two positions.” (35)
I wonder if this characterization of materialisms and realisms as reciprocally determining and defining one another does not already presuppose too much at the level of ontology. That is, if I’ve understood Nick’s gloss on Laruelle correctly, this is a problem that emerges only if we adopt the structuralist thesis of language as composed of a set of interdependent differential relations, such that the “terms” composing a language can only be thought in terms of paired oppositions. However, as I’ve been at pains to show– or at least, as I’ve been trying to demonstrate –the issue changes markedly when we begin thinking in terms of assemblages or networks composed of actors that both enter into relation with one another and which are independent of one another. In other words, networks differ from structures insofar as the elements of a network are not reciprocally determined. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate this thesis nicely in terms of language in the “Postulates of Linguistics” in A Thousand Plateaus, where they give the linguist Labov pride of place in his articulation of linguistic change. Here language is not composed of reciprocal oppositional determinations, but is rather an assemblage of heterogeneous elements that can enter into a variety of different relations both within a single language and in relations with other languages.
Nick presents a more worrying concern when he notes that,
This criticism is perhaps most pertinent to Levi’s position (and likely Latour, although I’m not in a position to say with any certainty). In particular, Levi articulates his Ontic Principle as the idea that “There is no difference that does not make a difference”, which is to say that every being both is and makes a difference. But what is difference if not a relation of some kind? And it is precisely the priority of relationality that Laruelle and Brassier find problematic.
Granted, Levi has stated that he has “purposefully left the phrase “there is no difference that does not make a difference” vague and underdetermined to allow the greatest possible scope or plurality of differences. [He does] not wish to formulate an ontology that predelineates or predetermines what sort of entities there are.” Yet, some understanding of the notion of difference implicated here is required in order to at least escape from the possible Laruellean criticism. In fact, this requirement already stems from his Principle of Irreduction – if every entity is a difference, how is Levi escaping from reducing everything into Difference?
Here, I think, are a couple of points worth making. First, I am not convinced that difference is necessarily a relation. Clearly I have a lot of work left to do on this issue; however, as Nick notes, the Ontic Principle states that every entity both is a difference and makes a difference. Now, there is a certain plurality of senses in this principle that might spell significant problems for my position, but I will set these problems aside for the moment. What here needs to be distinguished are the three senses of this principle in terms difference in itself, difference between, and the production of difference in another. To say that every being is a difference is simply to say that in order to count as an entity something must differ in itself. Were this not the case, the entity would be swallowed up in an undifferentiated One-All where there was only one substance. To say that any entity contains difference in itself, that this is the condition for being an entity, is not yet to relate the being to any other being. Here we might think of Leibniz’s conception of the monad that continuously undergoes internal change produced by itself without this change issuing from anything else (however I hesitate with this characterization as it contains the seeds of vitalism). By contrast, the Ontic Principle also states that there is no entity that does not produce a difference in some other entity. I take it that beings are necessarily attached to the world and as such necessarily produces differences in other entities through their interactions with these entities. Here we would have difference as relation; yet, as I’ve already mentioned, I find it difficult to see why the relation between the sun and a tree should be characterized as an ideal relation. Finally, the signification of the Ontic Principle as “difference between”– the difference between two entities –might initially look like a comparative difference and therefore a difference that involves intellect or mind as distinguishing two entities; however, while I certainly agree that the intellect distinguishes things from one another, difference-between is an ontological rather than cognitive phenomenon.
It is not mind that distinguishes or makes entities– though mind is one entity among others –but rather entities differentiate themselves from one another. Entities resist one another, though sometimes unsuccessfully. The tree is not simply a vehicle of the sun, but rather transform the sun through photosynthesis, producing something all its own. This would be part of what is entailed by the Principle of Irreduction which states that nothing is either reducible or irreducible to anything else. Each entity, if it is an entity, resists in its relation to other entities and it is because of this resistance that we must think in terms of assemblages or networks rather than structures. A network is a story about entities acting on one another with all sorts of tensions, triumphs, submissions, etc. It is not a story of how entities are reciprocally determined such that they are only these reciprocal determinations. Here again I have a lot of work to do, for the dyad between relation and object forms something of an antinomy for object-oriented philosophy. This point can be illustrated by reference to a very generous response Bryan, over at the Velvet Howler, makes in response to my post entitled “Of Assembly“. Bryan writes,
I think your last paragraph really touches on something fascinating and it would be exciting to see it developed in more depth.
In regards to your remarks on signifiers, I’m not so clear you’re doing Lacan or Zizek enough justice here. I mean, for one, Lacan goes on and on about the “materiality” of signifiers, that they make up the “material” of the unconscious. Consequently, I’m not so sure if the symbolic can be equated with the kind of Idealism you’re hinting at. Would it not be possible to interpret the Symbolic as a kind of material?
Bryan is right. The signifier, for Lacan and Zizek, is material. However, my charge against Zizek and Lacan does not consist in the accusation that they are idealists, but rather pertains to the manner in which they commit the Hegemonic Fallacy by overdetermining all entities by the symbolic or the signifier. The problem with Zizek and Lacan is not idealism, but rather the manner in which all other entities fall under erasure in and through the symbolic or the signifier. If the Ontic Principle holds, then it follows that any entity involved in a network must make a difference. As a consequence, it would follow that no entity can merely be an effect, product, or result of the signifier. Rather, what we would instead have to think is assemblages of heterogeneous entities in a network all contributing their differences: assemblages of biological bodies, signifiers (for they make differences too), literal technology (i.e., machines like computers, telephone lines, etc), elements of nature, literal architecture (i.e., the way in which our homes and institutions are built and organized), etc., etc., etc. In other words, part of what I’m trying to think here is how all of these differences are woven together in networks, how they act and vie with one another, without reducing one to another. Whitehead observes that the cardinal failing of a philosophy is not so much errors in logic, a lack of argument, or mistaken facts– indeed, like Leibniz he holds that all philosophies and contain a grain of truth, such that no philosophy is ever refuted so much as it is abandoned –but rather exaggeration. For me the prime target is not so much Kant– though he’s a good example of what I’m targeting –so much as it is those contemporary forms of thought like Derrida’s, Baudrillard’s, or Zizek’s that tell me all is text, or forms of thought like Stiegler’s that tell me all is technology, or forms of thought like evolutionary sociology and psychology that tell me all is adaptation, or forms of thought like modern day materialism that tell me all is brain or atoms or whatever else, or those forms of thought that tell me all is economy, etc. When I read these orientations of thought I find myself saying “Yes! Yes! Yes!… But what about this?”
What I wish to avoid are these sorts of hegemonic operations that force me to choose, instead formulating a metaphysics robust enough to think how all of these differences are woven together, rather than reducing all other threads of a weaving to one another. One of the most important principles of my metaphysical project– a principle which sadly has gotten scant attention –is the Ontological Principle which states that being is said in a single and same sense for all that is. This principle is crucial for everything I’m trying to do, for what it affirms is an ontological pluralism that dictates that we must resist the urge to reduce one entity to another entity, but instead look at how differences are woven together, communicate, struggle with and resist one another, etc., in the formation of networks.
This brings me to Nick’s second criticism in the passage cited above. Nick wonders whether I do not end up reducing everything to difference. In other words, my Principle of Irreduction states that nothing is either reducible or irreducible to anything else, yet my metaphysics begins with the principle that there is no difference that does not make a difference. Between these two principles there seems to be a contradiction insofar as I seem to be reducing everything to difference. This is a serious charge and I hope that, in responding to it, I do not fall into a sort of sophistry or sound as if I’m making a bad joke. However, it seems to me that a philosophical starting point premised on difference is a strange and paradoxical beginning point because it denies the possibility of any sort of foundation. If there is no difference that does not make a difference, then there cannot be a first difference from which all other differences are derived. Difference differs. Just as the old woman scoffed at Bertrand Russell’s discussion of modern cosmology, responding that the earth is on the back of a turtle and, when asked what that turtle is on, replied that it’s turtles all the way down, my metaphysics dictates that it’s objects all the way down and all the way up without there being any first or most primitive type of object. The Ontic Principle is thus anathema to any reduction because if it is the case that there is no object that does not make a difference, there cannot be any question of one object being reduced to another object. Objects can certainly be composed of other objects. They can depend upon other objects. But they cannot be reduced to other objects. My body is an object. My DNA in each cell is an object. My body depends on my DNA. But it cannot be reduced to my DNA. What the Ontological Principle demands is an ontology robust enough to both discern the interaction of these two objects as actors in a variety of struggles with one another and to see these as independent objects that both make a difference.
Thus, when Nick writes,
And while Levi has articulated a concept of networks that avoids the problems of the typical structuralist, in one sense, it seems as though the crucial difference between the networks and structures – that the elements of networks are actors rather than empty placeholders or ‘vehicles’ – merely pushes the problem back. For while a network may no longer be defined solely in terms of its differential relations, the elements themselves are ‘act-ors’ that differ from themselves, something that again invokes a yet to be articulated concept of difference. Put simply, the risk here is that in treating every entity as difference-in-itself and differential in relation to others, matter becomes relative to ideality, and realism again gets cordoned off.
It seems to me that this criticism misses the crucial point that act-ors (objects) are not differential relations among elements, precisely because actors differ in themselves and are not intrinsic elements of a structure or a system. Act-ors act on one another, they are not differentially dependent on one another. On the one hand, we still have here the contentious issue of why relations are being characterized in terms of ideality. On the other hand, there is a vast difference between the structuralist claim that the phonemes /b/ and /p/ exist only as the reciprocally determined relation or opposition b/p, and the object-oriented claim that a flame acts on water bringing it to act as boiling. The former claim holds that /b/ and /p/ only are as their relation or that their being is dependent on this relation, while the latter asserts that two distinct actors act on one another while nonetheless being independent beings that enjoy their own adventures.
I’d like to conclude this scattered post with a remark on Nick’s worries about how being must necessarily be independent of thought. Nick writes,
The basic point to be made against Latourian readings is that by making nature and culture, or politics and ontology (or any other fundamental dualism) relative to each other, or co-extensive, one invariably makes the Real dependent on some humanistic conceit. A truly realist ontology must eschew all such conceits and strive for the absolute indifference of the Real. This necessarily entails the separation of politics and ontology (this, I also believe, is an implicit argument against xenoeconomics where capitalism is presented as an inhuman presence.)
Here, I think, we encounter a fundamental distinction between my object-oriented philosophy and, if I understand it correctly, speculative realism. First, it is not clear to me that Latour in any way makes nature and culture, politics and ontology, co-extensive or relative to one another. The whole point of Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern is to collapse these sorts of distinctions or oppositions that characterize modernity. This is different than claiming, after the fashion of say Hegel, that nature and culture become relative to one another. Latour’s point isn’t that these realms are co-extensive or relative to one another in the way that Laruelle alleges that materialism and idealism are reciprocally determined. Rather, Latour’s point is that all of these elements enter into an assemblage with one another as act-ors in a network. Thus in science we have not only natural entities, but political discourses, economics, technology, religion, etc., etc., etc. The one is not determining the other or “making” the other, but rather all of these different act-ors are struggling with one another. One is not being reduced to another, nor is the claim that one cannot exist without the other. Instead, Latour’s sociological project is to think these associations and how they vie with one another, resist one another in a variety of ways, collaborate with one another, and so on. Such a view follows directly from the Principle of Irreduction and the Ontological Principle.
Second, I have strong reservations about the thesis that a truly realist ontology entails that we must strive for the absolute indifference of the real. This strikes me as a return to the old two world models where culture and nature are two entirely distinct realms such that the realm of nature is characterized by complete indifference whereas the realm of culture is the realm of spirit and values. In other words, what I implicitly hear in this characterization of realist ontology is the thesis that the really real is something like Lucretius’ domain of atoms independent of all cultural illusions. Here my rejoinder is subtle and nuanced. In my view, a genuinely realist ontology would be an ontology that acknowledges all of those differences that make a difference. And this is precisely where the problem emerges. For there are differences that make a difference that aren’t characterized by the indifference of the real to all things human. Insofar as humans too are objects or act-ors within being, it follows that we must recognize these differences as well. In my view, what we must seek in a realist ontology is an ontology robust enough to simultaneously think things like strings or atoms as real and indifferent to us, as not dependent on us in any way, and to think the differences produced by act-ors such as ourselves through our economics, our politics, our religion, our culture, our texts, our technology, and all the rest. For these things too are real insofar as they too make differences. In this regard, my shift is slight. My move is not to reduce culture to some indifferent real functioning as substratum of everything else such that culture is merely an epiphenomenon. Nor is it to reduce entities to effects of cultural differences. Rather, what I require is a flat ontology that thinks these heterogeneous differences weaving their relations with one another without any being reducible to the others. The real is not some elsewhere characterized by indifference whereas we are characterized by “concern”. Rather the real is in all manner of differences whether they’re indifferent to us or not.
Larval Subjects . 
January 20, 2009 at 7:13 pm
hi Levi,
Still catching up on your recent flurry of posts. Another series of questions for you.
What would non-relational difference look like? It seems to me that in saying an entity differs from itself you’re saying in a way that the self-differing thing is composed of more than one component, and that its components differ from each other, so that even if you’re talking about difference as internal to/a quality of one and only one entity, you’re still talking about relations between two beings (that those beings are contained within another larger being does not disqualify them from being called beings – the internet contains your blog but your blog is still an entity, the earth contains the internet but the internet is still an entity, the solar system contains the earth but the earth is still an entity, etc). I guess I’m only really saying that I don’t know what difference could look like as a one-place term, I only understand difference as involving at least two of whatever is said to differ. This discussion also reminds me a lot of stuff in Hegel and Schelling, or at least things I remember Andrew Bowie saying in classes on Hegel and Schelling. If you’ve not read it, you might find his book on Schelling and contemporary philosophy useful or at least enjoyable.
Terminology question – you wrote, “in order to count as an entity something must differ in itself” you then speak of an “entity [which] contains difference in itself.” Is there a difference between being difference – an entity is different – vs differing – an entity differs – vs containing difference? Or are these synonyms? (not a loaded question, I’ve got no agenda in asking, just trying to follow along.)
On difference-between being ontological rather than cognitive/comparative, respectfully, I think you overstate this. I think it’s fair to say that there is ontological difference-between (there are differences which are differences even if no one perceived them), but there are also cognitive differences which also have some level of reality, cognitive differences that have some ontological (or maybe ontic, I’m tripping over the terms) staus. I think this is actually implied in your principle “there is no entity that does not produce a difference in some other entity.” Think of racist doctrines about blood purity, which resulted among other things in the segretation of blood donations in blood banks in the early 20th century. Now, the racist claims about the differences between the blood of different races were wrong claims – assertions of difference which involved false claims about biology – but they had a level of reality to them by their sheer existence and assertion. They were part of important social differences, differences which some people sometimes defended with false biological claims. These social differences seem to me to have had an ontological (or, maybe ontic, again I’m confused on the terms) status within the series of postulates you’re laying out – that is, I think this example of racist ideas about blood are also described by what you’ve said here. I think this entails that you overstate things when you say “it is not mind that distinguishes or makes entities.” It seems to me that there are cases (I think the example I just raised about ideas of blood is one) where mind *does* distinguish and/or make entities. What I think you’re right about, though, is that not all differences and entities are mind-made. Your argument works against reduction of difference to being only cognitive, but your remarks seem to imply the removal of cognitive difference (barring the mind as one source of difference) altogether, which I think would be a mistake. I think other parts of your argument imply an ontological/ontic status for cognitive differences.
On all entities having an effect (a causal power?), like I think I said before, I think this needs to be fleshed out with some kind of degree of having an effect, and I think you’ll likely end up with two main options – relative liquidation of causality tied to relative leveling of causal power (everything effects everything such that causal claims go away) or qualified but still relative restatement of the sorts of causal claims you seem to dislike (where some things do effect others but only to such a limited degree that they can be discounted in some contexts). Question for you – are you familiar with Resnick and Wolff’s collaborative work on Althusser and the category of overdetermination? Elements of what your doing remind me a lot of what little I’ve read of that work (and I have similar reservations).
On the ontological principle, reformulated as “being is said in a single and same sense for all that is,” I like that and I just re-read the post of yours you linked to about that principle. I got the impression reading that other post that the ontological principle largely had a negative force. I like that, in the way that I like Badiou’s claims about mathematics and/as ontology – I like this pretty much exclusively for its deflationary power, saying “if you want to do ontology, if you want to talk about books and music and riots qua being, then go do math. If you want to talk about them qua beings, qua books and music and riots, then that’s another issue, and is not a matter of ontology per se.” That said, I think that this quote from your other post is problematc:
“there is no sovereign form of being (forms, categories, subject, signifier, God, etc) that coordinates the rest without itself being coordinated in terms. All beings are equal in the sense that all beings are and insofar as all are differences.”
I think this is true in an ontological register. Qua being, there is no coordination etc, because being had a single and same sense, as you said. But qua beings (which I take is what the ontic means, but I may have the wrong), I don’t think this is true. Or, at least as importantly for the sake of this conversation, I don’t think “there is no sovereign form of beings”, an ontological claim, actually supports “there are no sovereign beings”, an ontic claim.
take care,
Nate
January 20, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Hi Nate,
Thanks for the comment.
One of the strange results of my thesis is, as you suggest, that entities can contain other entities such that these entities are distinct but one of the entities is nonetheless dependent on the other entity. Thus, for example, I’m inclined to claim that a state is an entity but is also dependent on a host of other entities that are also distinct from the state. There would be no state without citizens, but citizens cannot be reduced to elements of the state. Likewise, the state would not be reducible to the citizens that make it up even though it couldn’t exist without these people. I agree that I have a lot of work to do on these complicated part/whole relations as they pertain to entities, but that’s one of my working hypotheses at this moment.
A non-relational difference would be a difference within a thing itself that refers to nothing else beyond that entity. At present I am inclined to think non-relational difference as temporal difference. As Whitehead argues in his discussion of the fallacy of simple location in Science and the Modern World, temporal properties as they pertain to entities have the peculiar quality of being such that the entity is what it is equally at all points in time in its temporal existence. I am no less what I am at the time that I’m a child than I am now as a [sadly] graying adult. The point here is that my being as this entity differs in itself– there are all sorts of changes I have undergone –while still remaining that entity.
In certain contexts I use these terms as synonyms, whereas in other contexts I don’t. “Difference in itself”, “containing difference”, and “differing” are all synonymous when referring to the temporal dimension of objects unfolding. However, “differing” can also refer to relational difference between two entities, and “containing difference” can, in certain contexts, refer to the way in which objects always contain other objects. I’m still pinning down my language as my thoughts develop.
Actually I don’t disagree with this at all and tried to make that qualification in this post. The point isn’t that the mind doesn’t distinguish things (after all, minds are beings too), but that the mind isn’t the ultimate origin or all differences among beings. Here I’m referring to a common tradition of thought that sees being in itself as a sort of formless chaos or noise requiring supplementation by mind in order for distinct objects to emerge. You’ll often find this in certain phenomological texts, for examples. My thesis is both that minds distinguish things and that there are real distinctions among beings completely independent of mind and in no need of mind for their distinction to exist as real.
Sure, social differences are real differences as well and are differences that make differences. A false text is nonetheless an object that has real effects in the world. Thus, for example, the Bible might be referentially false (i.e., the events and entities it posits might not exist) but that text can nonetheless produce all sorts of differences that are very real as in the case of the Bible being used in defense of slavery.
This is a much better way of putting my point. Thanks!
I think the first option has to be false and this would be one place where I disagree with thinkers like Leibniz and Whitehead, where the former claims that every entity mirrors every other entity in the universe, and where the latter claims that every entity shares some definite and processual relation with every other entity in the universe. This leaves the second option, where I need to argue that entities share selective relations with other objects in the world.
It seems to me that my Principle of Reality already responds to your criticism in certain ways. The Principle of Reality states that the degree of reality or power of a being is a ratio of the difference it produces in other entities. Now clearly a grain of dust produces very little difference with respect to my body. In this regard, we are entirely justified in excluding discussions of that single grain of dust from the functioning of my body. But note, this is an epistemic point relating to inquiry into the world, and, as such, is distinct from the ontological issue of how entities relate to one another. Clearly for investigations of the world we have to carefully specify contexts and environments of investigation. This is one of the main things scientists do in seeking to understand the properties of objects: the construct artificial environments or contexts so that they can discover those relations that elicit mechanisms in a particular type of object. These environments don’t generally exist naturally. They then infer the functioning of these mechanisms in non-closed environments.
My main target with all of this are forms of social and political theory that ignore important and appreciable differences because they privilege one type of difference over all the others. Thus, when you write over at your blog that,
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2009/01/20/are-speculative-realism-and-object-oriented-philosophy/
I think you kind of miss the point. I’m not anti-theory at all. I also recognize that any theory is going to limit the scope of variables it investigates. However, I do think there are forms of theory that create all sorts of false problems for themselves by virtue of defining relevant variables too narrowly. Take Zizek, for example. In focusing almost exclusively on cultural productions and the signifier (despite his talk of the real), he’s led on the one hand to wonder how it is possible to produce any change since we’re constantly adrift in these cultural formations that everywhere reproduce ideology (and since the subject is an effect of these relations to the signifier it appears as if the subject is trapped in these formations), and, on the other hand, change thus comes to be seen as only possible in relation to an Act (primarily in the cultural register). I think these forms of theory– while making very valuable contributions –ignore other highly important sources of difference such as technology, economy, assemblages formed among groups of people, etc. With that said, I’m not at all opposed to the simple point that no one person can (or should) try to capture and discuss all differences.
Maybe you could flesh this out a bit more:
What would the sovereign forms of being be?
No, I’m not familiar with their work, but I’m certainly hip to what I understand of Althusser’s notion of overdetermination.
January 20, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Sorry to parachute into an ongoing discussion, but Levi’s post touched on some things I am thinking about at the moment, so I thought I’d jot down some thoughts.
I have been reading James Williams book on how to read the logic of sense and it is very good. I am not sure if I agree entirely with his description of the relationbetween ‘sense’, ‘incorporeal’ and the ‘virtual’, specifically because Deleuze writes in the fold that “the virtual (=incorporeal).” Willliams’s book has helped me focus my thinking. It is worth checking out.
Deleuze argues (in LoS) that reciprocal determination between the virtual and the actual is asymmetric and that the static genesis of things is an individuating reduction or convergence of singularities into a perceptible thing. It is not reciprocal determination between actualised things even discursive statements rendered as abstract metaphysical concepts such as nature and culture.
‘Difference in itself’ is certainly one of the most confusing parts of Deleuze’s philosophy for me. Is it simply a singularity (turning point or whatever) that *is* difference? I have always found this very confusing in D&R and LoS.
January 20, 2009 at 10:23 pm
LS,
I too am having trouble with the difference “in itself”.Your comments to Nate on the “in itself” were helpful, but I am still having problems with this concept in relation to the other two parts of your Ontic-Principle.
The explicit example that sprang to my mind was the “Horse of Many Colors” from the Wizard of Oz. For it seems that here we have an object that produces internal change (the regulation of skin pigment I’m guessing) without interacting with an external stimulus (unlike, say, a chameleon). Yet, it is only different with regards to the previous color of its coat and the previous, and so on. It seems, then, that the referential color (or whatever is changed in other objects) is an important part of the “in itself”, for it allows the difference to appear.
And given the above example, would any interaction (with an external object) that causes differences then have to be relegated to a specific referential site, a moment, say, when the horse’s coat was red and not yellow or blue?
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.
January 21, 2009 at 1:06 am
Hi Glen,
Thanks for the tip on James Williams’ book. I haven’t read it yet, so I’ll have to check it out.
I think one of the major differences between my position and Deleuze’s position is that I do not posit a distinction between the virtual and the actual, asymmetrical or otherwise. Put a bit more clearly, I do not posit a domain of the virtual… At least not as Deleuze describes. Rather, for me, there are only objects and the assemblages into which these objects enter.
My book, Difference and Givenness devotes a good deal of time to difference in itself as Deleuze understands it. In the next few days I hope to begin fleshing out difference in itself as I understand it. At present all I can say is that something like difference in itself or non-relational difference is required for my metaphysics. Just what such a type of difference is is something that I’m still working through.
January 21, 2009 at 1:20 am
Hey NrG,
As I said, I’m still trying to figure out just what this difference in itself would be. I love your example of horse of many colors! Is that from the books or from the movie? I think I see what you’re getting at with regard to the changing colors. Would the worry be that there’s a difference between the two colors, therefore rendering difference in itself relational? Here I’m tempted to appeal to Deleuze’s use of differential relations in calculus. The calculus allows us to think instant rates of change in entities undergoing continuous variation. Thus, for example, it allows you to think a continuous increase in velocity for an accelerating object. We can also think these rates of change in terms of a curve on a graph. Now, the key point– and I’m still working through all of this –would be that the plotted graph of the curve is a single entity. It is that curve. Nonetheless, the curve varies or differs from itself at every point. This, then, would be an example of a difference in itself, a difference that pertains to a single being, rather than a difference between two beings. The requirement then would be that we think objects as I’m describing them as temporally elongated or unfolding in time, undergoing continuous variation (I’ll have more to say about this later).
Deleuze drew heavily on the mathematician Riemann in the development of his understanding of beings or entities. Riemann’s differential geometry is important in this context in that it allows us to think the intrinsic properties of a surface without having to think of that surface as embedded in a higher order space to which it would be relative. You can get a better sense of the importance of this idea if you read Manuel DeLanda’s wonderful Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. I also wrote a post on this sort of geometry back in 2006 in terms of the mathematician Gauss:
It’s been a long time since I’ve read that post– and I can’t reread it just now –so I’m not sure if I would stand by everything stated there today. However, the cash value of this understanding of manifolds is that it allows us to think manifolds and variations that are intrinsic to the thing itself without measuring those rates of change relative to some other object or space. As such it would be the beginning of a thought of internal difference.
January 21, 2009 at 5:01 am
hi Levi,
Respectfully, I’d like to suggest that your non-relational difference is a variant of relational difference. If the component parts of entities can be called entitites (and they can, right? otherwise you’d be fixing the scope of your argument in an odd way), then the differences your talking about as non-relational are, I think, differences (and relations) between entities contained in other entities. That said, I think your point here, the distinction between differences which cross entities’ borders and those contained in their borders, so to speak, is important. I just think the terminology is confusing, as I think there is still a relationship involved here, just different relationship than the other that you don’t want reduce difference to.
Thanks for clarifying re: the status of cognitive differences, I didn’t get that before but your positoon as clarified (both… and…) makes a good deal of sense to me.
I’ll think more about the ratio aspect of principle of reality and the epistemology/ontology stuff. I share some of what I think are your motivating intuitions (including opposing theories that ignore important differences), I want to think a bit more on the details.
Re: the Horwitz quote, I wasn’t trying to impute anything to you and I know you’re not anti-theory. (If anything, that’s addressed to my own concerns, I often feel pulled between two unacceptable positions – a rejection of claims altogethero or at least the eternal incantation of “it’s more complicated than that” vs very, very reductive arguments (usually marxist but not always). I’m sorry I came off as implying anything about your positions.
re: sovereign beings (as opposed to sovereign being), I’m not sure really, I was just riffing on your terminology. Maybe this is a better way to make the point I was trying to make… It struck me that you had distinguished two registers which while related remain somewhat distinct, ontic and ontological, beings and being (is that right?). You argued, I think convincingly, that at the ontological register there was no hierarchies of forms of being (as usual, let me know if I misunderstand) because being is single- and same-sensed. It’s not clear to me what this implies at the level of beings and claims about beings, though. Being is said in a single and same sense, but beings (qua themselves, qua beings, not qua being) are said in many and differing senses. (Right?) In that case, I’m not sure about the legitimacy of the move from the ontological to the ontic register, from the democracy of being to the democracy of beings.
Is that clearer? If not, let me know and I’ll try again.
take care,
Nate
ps- this is fun!
pps- another thought just struck me and I’m too tired to edit the above to work it in… I don’t get a lot of Badiou and it’s been a while since I’ve cracked any of those books, but I remember him saying something about multiples, maybe inconsistent multiples. That seems to me something along the lines of what you’re saying about difference in itself and/or entities differing from themselves. Is that a fair comparison? (If you can make out what I’m grasping for, sorry to be so unclear.) One more question on this – is part of the stake here the inexhaustibility of predication? I get the sense that you don’t want to reduce things to being for some subject, fair enough. It seems to me that difference in itself would include the quality that more could always be said of it (and that this would not only be a quality of the practices of speech but tied to a quality of things themselves as well).
January 22, 2009 at 3:33 pm
A non-relational difference would be a difference within a thing itself that refers to nothing else beyond that entity.
Cf. Roy Wagner, Symbols that Stand for Themselves but also Goethe’s morphological definition of plants.
January 23, 2009 at 6:17 pm
hi Jerry,
That definition doesn’t help because I’m not sure any such thing could exist, because I’mnot convinced that difference can be understood as anything other than a relationship between two entities. I suspect non-relational difference may be one of those things where we can say stuff that sounds reasonable because grammatical but it isn’t actually reasonable. For instance – a round square. A round square would be a regular polygon with four equal sides and four equal angles where all points on the outline of the square are the same distance from a center point. That’s a grammatical sentence. But no such figure exists, and I don’t think we could actually even imagine one – while we could imagine unicorns even though unicorns don’t exist. Non-relational difference sounds to me something like round squares. That’s not to say that Levi isn’t on to something important here re: differences inside entities, I think he is, but I think that difference will only make sense by positing as a corollary that intra-entity difference entails intra-entity entities.
Now, an example of non-relational difference would prove me wrong, if it can be shown to actually involve non-relational difference.
take care,
Nate
January 23, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Hi Nate,
Great comment. I’m committed to the thesis that there is no bottom or top of the universe. As a result, it follows that objects contain other objects, somewhat like Russian dolls. Put differently, an object is an assemblage of objects. On the one hand, this requires me to give an account of how objects enlist other objects in the formation of their objecthood. Here I’m somewhat committed to the thesis that objects are more than the objects of which they’re composed. I think this follows from the Principle of Irreduction which states that nothing is either reducible or irreducible to anything else. On the other hand, this suggests that the idea of an internal difference or a non-relational difference is something of a rhetorical sleight of hand.
In the “Scheme of Translation” I introduced the thesis that internal difference is disequilibrium within an object, functioning as a ground for the acts of an actuality. Yet from whence do these inequalities or disequibriums arise if not clashes between the objects that make up an object? This, then, would seem to return the notion of internal difference or non-relational difference to the domain of relational difference. However, I think the characterization of these differences as internal or non-relational difference lies in the fact that they are intra-assemblic differences rather than inter-assemblic differences. In other words, non-relational difference tries to do the work of accounting for why an object cannot be reduced to its milieu or external conditions, such that the object becomes a mere vehicle of this milieu (for example, the thesis that as humans we are only products of our environment, contributing no difference of our own).
January 24, 2009 at 4:23 am
Hi Levi,
I read the Translation post but I had a hard time following it as Lacan and such is really rough going for me. As such, I’ll reply here. (Oh and I also read your post, linked to in the translation post, on what you called objectiles, which helped me understand some of this better, and which I quite liked.) I guess I’m having trouble seeing how to square difference in itself with all objects being assemblages of objects. It seems to me that to say the latter means that really what we think of as objects are assemblages of assemblages of assemblages of …. and so on, and as your post on objectiles suggests, all of these assemblages are in motion at various speeds along various vectors. That’s not necessarily a problem (I think I beleive that this is true, actually, in the sense that I think your point speaks in a satisfying way to an intuition I have, so definitely not a problem).
But if that’s the case, then it seem to raise problems for the first – difference in itself defined as difference internal to an assemblage. You characterized “internal difference [as] disequilibrium within an object”, then as “intra-assemblic differences rather than inter-assemblic differences.” I think all of these formulations have a use, but I think the point I discussed a moment ago – objects as assemblages all the way down, so to speak, and all the way up (the universe having no top or bottom) – makes it hard to maintain these characterizations. It seems to me that the assemblages of assemblages of assemblages point means that internal/external or intra/inter become terms that do little work. It seems to me that these terms become, to use the terms you used in your post on objectiles, largely a matter of differing speeds. As such, I don’t know that the distinction between intra- and inter- can withstand the assemblages of assemblages point, such that I don’t know that intra- assemblage difference can serve as a philosophical hook to hold much weight. Because whether or not any giving trait or point is within or without an assemblage is largely a matter of perspective or, in your terms again, of speed. It seems to me that what the assemblages of assemblages of … point suggests is that any claim to something being external to an assemblage, any case of inter-assemblage difference can be translated into a case of difference internal to some assemblage (the difference between my heart and lungs, say, understood as separate systems, can be translated into a difference within my body), and vice versa.
I don’t know that the breakdown (if I’m right, I may not be) of the non-relational or intra difference here really poses that much of a problem, though. I think your point about multiplicities/assemblages of assemblages/multiplicities (etc) may already do most of the work that you want from the idea of non-relational difference. You stated the goal, and I agree that it’s an important one, of “accounting for why an object cannot be reduced to its milieu or external conditions, such that the object becomes a mere vehicle of this milieu.” It seems to me that the multiplicity of assemblages etc point already rules out the sort of reduction you oppose. If I’m right, then difference here is still relational but the relational character of difference does not mean that there is any one final or overdetermining difference – thinking difference as relation doesn’t commit anyone to reductivism, as far as I can tell.
take care,
Nate
January 24, 2009 at 4:31 am
hi again Levi,
Sorry to post twice in a row, I forgot to say this before – your post on objectiles reminded me of some short stories by Italo Calvino. Do you know his stuff at all? I’m thinking specifically of the stories in Cosmicomics and T Zero. There’s on that’s a love story among entities (maybe people, not sure) falling through infinite space along parallel lines, wondering whether or not at some point parallel lines converge. I’m not doing it justice, it’s more readable and fun than I make it sound. I think pieces of those stories might be useful for illustrating some of the points you’re making, and even if not they’re a fun read.
take care,
Nate
January 24, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[…] responding to Nate’s queries about the notion of non-relational difference or difference in itself, I wrote: I’m committed to […]
May 15, 2009 at 8:17 pm
[…] like in very schematic forms in my post Principles of Onticology (and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). In developing this ontology it should be noted that I proceed […]
January 4, 2011 at 6:45 am
[…] objects. Humans, fish, plastic bags, trees, snow tires and bongos all live and work within the same flat ontology. At every scale, we’re all in this together, human being isn’t privileged, rather it […]
June 21, 2011 at 9:28 am
Hello,
Thanks so much for including my Turtles All The Way Down artwork in your blog post. I did notice, however, that the image isn’t linked to anything in particular. Would it be at all possible to change it so that the artwork links directly to my online shop? In this manner, anyone who might want to could find and perhaps purchase the artwork for themselves. It would mean a great deal to me. The address to my shop is http://krougeau.artfire.com
Thanks & have a wonderful day!
– Kenneth Rougeau