A very interesting discussion is shaping up between Harman and Shaviro concerning the ontological status of objects and relations in Whitehead. Shaviro’s latest post defending Whitehead can be found here. At the outset, it’s worth emphasizing that Whitehead is essential reading for OOO. Whitehead is perhaps the greatest realist and object-oriented philosopher of the last century. In many respects, Whitehead is the most resolutely anti-idealist thinker in the last two hundred years. Unlike those poor cowardly souls that advance arguments to the effect that the distinction between idealism and realism is meaningless (translation: they’ve sided with idealism), or that seek to escape idealism by deconstructing the self-transparency of the subject while still treating everything in terms of the signifier, power, signs, etc., Whitehead resolutely speaks of the objects themselves without conflating the ontological and the epistemological register, leaving the reader with no doubt that he’s perfectly happy to speak of the being of beings that have no relation to the human whatsoever. As Harman has recently noted, this is the litmus test of whether or not one is an idealist:
Stated differently, you can’t say: “I’m not an idealist. I believe the human subject is a passive recipient of the world, not its constitutor,” or “Human and world are co-produced,” or “world produces the human.”
Why does the human need to be involved all of these cases?
Even worse is when the game is played of replacing the human with falsely neutral-sounding terms such as “subject”, “thought”, “Ereignis,” or any equivalent thereof.
If people always have to be involved in any situation being discussed in your philosophy, then you’re an idealist. The problem is that it’s become such a reflexive assumption that the human must be one ingredient in any situation under discussion that people immediately scream “positivism!” as soon as you start talking about inanimate relations. So much contemporary continental philosophy has been built as nothing but a firewall against the natural sciences, and unfortunately Husserl (a truly great philosopher) is one of the worst violators on this front.
If you find yourself immediately talking about language, signs, subjects, co-constitution, power, the nature of inquiry, etc., then you are an idealist. There is no ambiguity here. The implicit thesis in all these moves that the being of being cannot be even entertained independent of the human. Whitehead passes this litmus test with flying colors. For Whitehead humans are one being among many others, one event among many others. All philosophical questions do not revolve around the human. Nor is there any conflation of questions of access in Whitehead with questions of ontology. The question of how we have access to such and such a being, say a rose, is irrelevant to the question of what constitutes the being of beings. I find myself utterly baffled as to why philosophers seem to have such a difficult time distinguishing these two issues. They should know better. Everyone who teaches ethics knows how to debunk the students claim that values are purely subjective and whatever beliefs a person possesses within minutes. In other words, everyone who teaches ethics knows that the question of what values are, how we deliberate about right and wrong, etc., is independent of the question of our access to values and norms. Yet oddly this same simple insight isn’t carried over into the realm of ontology.
read on!
Despite the problems with the many idealisms currently regnant in philosophy, perhaps these positions are excusable on the grounds that the motives behind these positions are in the right place. If we distinguish philosophies not by the claims they make or the positions they endorse, but in the Nietzschean fashion of distinguishing them by the desires that animate them, I think we might get a sense of why there is so often an uneasiness in relation to realism. Every philosophy, in addition to advocating a position, also seems to be animated by a desire or a set of desires. Perhaps it would be possible to write an entire history of philosophy from the perspective of desire and the desires that animate various shapes or forms of thought. And if realism seems to generate so much uneasiness, I suspect this is because one senses that the desire animating so many realisms is the desire to police and subjugate. Just as one might be uneasy with Kant as a result of his metaphors and analogies comparing reason to a tribunal and a judge, in his treatment of reason in terms of a court room (what desire is suggested by this?), there are a number of realisms that seem geared at policing the thought of others, correcting, mastering, and controlling. This would be especially the case with scientistic and reductive realisms that we find so often in philosophy. Here we should not look simply at the propositional content of these positions, with how well formed their arguments are, with whether or not the conclusions follow from the premises, and so on. We should also look at the general tone and character of the prose or rhetoric through which the philosophy is articulated, its voice, the preponderance of negations and negatives, the frequency of accusations, and so on. This rhetorical dimension, deeply connected to desire, is every bit as important in evaluating a philosophy, I would argue, and speaks to the presence of a surplus-jouissance animating the thought of a thinker that functions as the real aim of this thought.
This highly antagonistic and disciplinarian jouissance often bleeds through on every page of realist works by scientistic realists, eliminative realists, certain versions of atheistic materialism, and so on, such that one senses almost instinctively that something is deeply amiss in the text or thought of a particular philosopher, that there is a very dangerous desire at work in this thought, and that the position is to be rejected on general principle. In other words, argument is not the sole criteria by which a philosophy should be evaluated. Often a position will embody compelling arguments, but, like the persuasiveness of Freidmannian economics, these arguments will only be persuasive and compelling by virtue of gross simplifications, generalizations, caricatures, etc., that function as means to the satisfaction of another desire not directly stated in the text. Or maybe a better analogy would be that of the sadistic boss or teacher. The reason that it is so difficult to protest the injustice of a sadistic boss or teacher is that they are able to cite all sorts of compelling reasons for their behavior based on the policies of the company or their educational institution. All their actions are consistent with these policies and regulations. Nonetheless, it is more than evident that the way in which they execute these policies have very different motives than the policies themselves. If Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom is such an important moral treatise, then this is because, through its hyperbole, it discloses the manner in which the moral law can function for the sake of the most horrific jouissance while nonetheless being consistent with that law.
I suspect that this is what is sensed by many idealists. If there is one persistent theme I’ve noticed among the many anti-realists I’ve tussled with, it’s that there seems to be a strong desire to underline that we don’t know things or that we cannot know things a priori. Despite the fact that no contemporary realist any stripe has claimed that we can know things a priori, there seems to be this persistent belief that somehow the realist is claiming that we know things in this way. Again, this probably goes back to the adolescent, pathological tendency of anti-realists to conflate ontological and epistemological issues as if they were the same. The anti-realist will contest a claim about the nature of being on the grounds of phenomena like quantum entanglement, appearing to be oblivious to the fact that phenomena like quantum entanglement simply raise issues of individuation (i.e., whether the two particles are in fact one entity or whether they are two entities that communicate through some form of information exchange of which we are not aware). They seem to find something profound in this mystery and devastating to knowledge in a way that is equivalent to suggesting that somehow the fact that I do not know what my friend Graham is currently doing in Cairo but can only speculate about what he is doing undermines the real existence of Graham. The problem is that they throw out the baby with the bathwater. Rather than formulating more adequate, more interesting, more affirmative and joyous realisms they instead throw out realism altogether and fall into the murky domain of correlationism as a defense against this desire they sense but which they can’t quite put their finger on. Like vapid and cowardly United States democrats that allow the right to frame all the arguments, they allow scientistic realists to frame the nature of the argument, accept the terms in which they frame the argument, and then react to the scientistic realists position by conceding them everything.
At any rate, ranting aside, what makes the discussion between Harman and Shaviro so interesting, is that it revolves entirely around the realist question or ontological issue of the relation between relations and relata. Are objects composed entirely of their relations? Are objects entirely independent of their relations? Is there yet another position? This is the issue or the question being posed. Harman, of course, argues that objects are entirely independent of their relations. Thinkers like Hegel and some of the structuralists argue, by contrast, that all relations are internal relations such that every entity is a reflection of the totality of which it is a part and has no being apart from that totality. Shaviro, like myself, seems to argue for a middle position. Objects have an autonomy or independence from their relations, yet the relations an object enters into play a crucial role in the characteristics an object comes to exemplify. Note, this debate unfolds entirely within a realist framework and, arguably, an object-oriented framework. In other words, relationism is an available position within object-oriented ontology. Thus, for example, Graham has categorized Whitehead, Latour, and myself as relationist object-oriented ontologists in the past.
I very much appreciate Harman’s arguments against internal relationism and have subsequently used them myself in my own work. I am not, however, convinced by his reading of Whitehead. The issue here, however, is complex. And I am not sure that Whitehead’s work admits of a single interpretation of this issue. The whole question boils down to whether, for Whitehead, objects are external to their terms, or whether relations are internal to their terms. In other words, is Whitehead similar to Hegel in holding that objects are nothing independent of their relations, that their being is their relations, or is Whitehead closer to someone like James who holds that both objects and relations are external to their terms? What is the relation between relation and relata? This apparently abstract question has profound consequences at the level of our understanding of nature, our ethics, and our politics. In short, it is not an idle question.
Evidence for the Jamesian reading of Whitehead (that would place Whitehead’s ontology in much greater proximity to Harman’s ontology than he thinks) can be found in chapter 2 of Process and Reality. At the outset, Whitehead writes,
‘Actual entities’– also termed ‘actual occasions’ –are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space… The final facts are, all alike, actual entities… (18)
Here Whitehead seems to meet at least part of Harman’s requirements. Whitehead’s universe is composed entirely of actual entities or discrete objects. Unlike Spinozism or Deleuze’s one-all, actual occasions or objects are what make up the world. Thus, while we don’t find here a withdrawn object as in the case of Harman’s ontology, we nonetheless find a world composed of objects. The problem emerges in the remainder of the passage just cited. Whitehead goes on to say “…these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (ibid, my emphasis). It is this interdependency clause, I think, that raises red flags for Harman. Should we take this interdependency to be of the Hegelian sort, claiming, in effect, that an object is its relations or its interdependencies? Or, under a more charitable object-oriented reading, should we conclude that Whitehead is merely pointing out that objects or actual occasions draw on other objects or actual occasions to continue their ongoing autopoiesis. I, for example, am interdependent with the world in which I exist by virtue of the fact that I draw food from this world, oxygen, cannot exist at the bottom of the ocean where the water pressure is 2000 psi’s or in outer space, and so on, but nonetheless I cannot be reduced to these relations. While I would certainly die if I were to somehow dive to the hadalpelagic zone of the ocean, I would still remain this object that is now dead. My death would be a change in the qualities my being as this particular object actualizes, not a change in my being as this object. Is Whitehead making a claim like this? It is difficult to say as Whitehead also says that every actual occasion or object maintains a definite relation with every other entity in the entire universe. The issue is whether in maintaining this relation, the entity is these relations.
Harman objects to Whitehead on the grounds that he argues that actual occasions are “concrescences” of prehensions. “Concrescence” refers to the way in which prehensions are synthesized. “Prehension” refers to what is “concresced” in this process of synthesis. If, then, every object is the product of the way in which it prehends other objects, it would seem that indeed Harman is right to criticize Whitehead for reducing objects or actual occasions to their prehensions. However, when we read further in chapter 2 we find that the situation is more complicated than this. Whitehead writes:
…two descriptions are required for an actual entity: (a) one which is analytical of its potentiality for ‘objectification’ in the becoming of other actual entities, and (b) another which is analytical of the process which constitutes the process which constitutes its own becoming.
The term ‘objectification’ refers to the particular mode in which the potentiality of one actual entity is realized in another actual entity. (23)
Within the framework of my onticology, what Whitehead is here referring to falls under what I call “translation”. Translation is the process by which one entity draws on the differences of another entity to produce a new phase state within itself. Thus, for example, the plant translates sunlight into sugars. In Whitehead’s language, the plant “objectifies” sunlight in its own being by transforming it into sugars. My account of endo-consistency and attractors belongs to the process dimension of these sorts of relations. Whitehead goes on to remark that,
…how an entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is; so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ This is the principle of process. (ibid.)
Again, I am in agreement with Whitehead. My objects are processes or events, not static and fixed entities. They are to be conceived as something like an autopoietic system that maintains itself across time. Thus, if I am led to claim that objects are incorporeal or immaterial, then this is not because they are not embodied in matter, but because matter courses in and out of them without the object becoming another object.
Finally Whitehead goes on to remark that,
…the first analysis of an actual entity, into its most concrete elements, discloses it to be a concrescence of prehensions, which have originated in its process of becoming. All further analysis is an analysis of prehensions. Analysis in terms of prehensions is termed ‘division.’
…every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely the actual entity in which the prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the ‘subjective form’ which is how that subject prehends that datum. (ibid.)
The initial paragraph seems to support Harman’s reading insofar as prehensions are information-relations to other objects or actual occasions. However, when we read further it appears that the issue is far more complicated. We have to exercise care when Whitehead here refers to “subjects”. Whitehead is not talking about humans or animals. Humans and animals are subjects, but then so are rocks, atoms, quarks, stars, and, in the beautiful example Shaviro gives in Without Criteria, so is Cleopatra’s Needle. In other words, any object is, for Whitehead, a subject. Within the language of onticology, actual occasions or objects understood as subjects are objects viewed from the angle of their unity and endo-consistency as a system.
Here I find myself wondering whether Harman’s critique of Harman doesn’t revolve around an issue of naming. Whitehead makes the unfortunate move of describing objects as a concrescence of prehensions. But he also distinguishes between (a) the prehension as a datum (information), (b) the entity from which the prehension issues, (c) the object or actual occasion as a subject or unity, and (d) the manner in which the actual occasion processes this datum according to its own internal endo-consistency. Had Whitehead formulated distinct terms for all these dimensions of the process of concrescence, would there really be a debate between Harman and Whitehead. In evoking (c) and (d), Whitehead strikes me as carefully distinguishing the object qua object from its relations. Qua subject or autopoietic system, the object is distinct from any of the “data” that happens to come its way. In other words, there would be a dimension of all objects independent of their relations. Qua exo-relations or inter-ontic relations, the object would grasp other objects through a particular difference that the object transforms or translates as a result of its own endo-relational process. In this respect, Whitehead’s actual occasions would fulfill Harman’s independence criteria insofar as the object qua endo-relational autopoietic system would be irreducible to its relations to other entities. The real debate here would not be a debate between the externality of relations and the internality of relations insofar as both Harman and Whitehead would endorse the externality of relations. The real debate would perhaps be around the withdrawal of objects from one another or just how that withdrawal is to be conceived.
Larval Subjects . 
September 18, 2009 at 5:53 am
I assume “Harman’s critique of Harman” was a typo?
A quick response on this:
“The whole question boils down to whether, for Whitehead, objects are external to their terms, or whether relations are internal to their terms. In other words, is Whitehead similar to Hegel in holding that objects are nothing independent of their relations, that their being is their relations, or is Whitehead closer to someone like James who holds that both objects and relations are external to their terms?”
No, the whole question is whether there is any non-relation sense of “terms” in Whitehead. And I don’t see it. You don’t mention “vacuous actuality” in your post. The whole reason Whitehead abhors vacuous actuality is that it would be a non-relational reality. For me, however, vacuous actuality is a good thing.
I’m in complete agreement about the sadistic undertones of eliminativism. These are the first people to claim that arguments are all that count, yet they are also the first people to become as loud and aggressive as possible over and above the arguments themselves.
September 18, 2009 at 6:02 am
[…] on Trolls… Words and Things September 18, 2009 Larval Subjects has a great response to the ongoing discussion between Harman and Shaviro here. (Note to self: definitely part of the […]
September 18, 2009 at 6:10 am
[…] 18, 2009 A typically treatise-length POST BY LEVI weighs in on the Whitehead dispute (Levi sides with Shaviro on this issue). I can’t stop the […]
September 18, 2009 at 6:27 am
This is going to hit more than 50 comments – I’ll pay $1.00 if it doesn’t.
In fact, if we get to the bottome of this we’re laughing – all the way down.
The Whiteheadians – just check them out on their own lists – make scholastics look like kindergarten.
A great resource (apart from Stengers ‘Thinking with Whitehead’, in press with Harvard – Latour’s press) is
Ivor Leclerc ‘The Nature of Physical Existence,’ 1972.
Just to make life interesting W argues that an actual occas is internally related to its antecedents thru ‘prehension,’ but that its completed antecedent occasions are not internally related to it………
As Harman says:
The problem, of course, is that just as any important philosophy makes a brilliant initial exaggeration, it also wants to claim to be describing the world as it is,…
What then, would distinguish ‘philosophy’ from ‘science.’? I know there’s an answer, Deleuze and Guattari give one…???
September 18, 2009 at 12:08 pm
“In other words, argument is not the sole criteria by which a philosophy should be evaluated. Often a position will embody compelling arguments, but, like the persuasiveness of Freidmannian economics, these arguments will only be persuasive and compelling by virtue of gross simplifications, generalizations, caricatures, etc., that function as means to the satisfaction of another desire not directly stated in the text.”
But simplifications, genaralisations and caricatures are all present as part of the the argument in the form of premises – they aren’t separate from it. When some philosopher emphasise the importance of arguments we shouldn’t imagine they just mean the logical operations…
On the subject of ‘gross generalisations’, the idea that most, if not all, scientific and reductive realisms are animated by suspect desires is far too sweeping a statement by far. Often when a philosopher takes away with the left hand, he tries hard to give back with the right. This how we should view Churchland’s Neurophilosophy – not just as a negative taking away of philosophical toys but also as an opening of new philosophical possibilities.
The danger here is that we convince ourselves that it is safe to ignore hostile arguments because they come from people harbouring hostile desires. To take an exmaple from Prince Of Networks, if Karl Rove invents a brilliant argument against Kant’s position, though animated by the most down right mean attitude, the argument will still stand regardless – if it is good enough.
This isn’t to say that arguments are everything. It is just to say that you can’t dismiss an argument just because of what caused it (that is, if the premises and the conclusion seem sound). We wouldn’t endorse Karl Rove’s bitterness as a good way to live just because it created a brilliant argument.
September 18, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Rory,
I don’t disagree with any of your points. I have not made the claim that we should ignore arguments, nor have I made the claim that eliminative materialism is intrinsically animated by certain sorts of desires. You have to examine the actual texts of a thinker. For example, I don’t detect anything like what I describe in the rhetoric of Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy. Part of what I try to do in this post is diagnose where some of the uneasiness towards realism might come from.
September 18, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Very interesting stuff. Concerning the new realistic trend in continental philosophy, one cannot help feeling some malevolent resistance. I mean, when some analytic philosophers proposed their scientific materialism, people were unconvinced and turned towards continental philosophers that seemed better to account for the human dimensions of the world. Now from this continental horizon some begin to see that much of the resistance to scientism was just resistance to science and a conservative antropomorphism. But then, the new continental anti-anrtropomorphism retains the conceptuality and literary devices of the human-centered continental tradition; it´s a strange brew, to say the least. Meanwhile, analytic philosophers like Putnam or McDowell move into positions reminiscent of the anthropocentric continental side, though retaining their analytic lingo. So in at least this I agree completely with you: Whitehead is his own man, independent and object oriented. However, it seems to me you make a little of a strawman of the idealist. After all, the problem is not exactly analogous to your problems of knowing what your friend does in Cairo. The idealist points to the fact that what we can call an ontic unknowledge, e.g. what x does today in Cairo, can be replaced by later information thereabout, whilst what the universe is/is like from a nonhuman perspective can only be inferred from the human perspective, i.e. as part of human knowledge, i.e. idealism. Now of course, Whitehead or Harman or Meillasoux or whoever may claim things about ontology, but for the idealist whatever they find out – and it may be interesting in every way – is still just part of the human-centered knowledge. Of course this is not a cogent argument but I don´t see that the opposite claim is any more proven. Just because you say that something is ontological knowledge it ain´t easy to see how we can rely on that, which was one of Kant´s original challenges. And as for Whitehead, I´m afraid that some of his realism may be modified by God filling a role somewhat analogous to the subject in antropomorphic thougth…
September 18, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Auni,
Guilty as charged. I’m entirely unfair to idealist thought in this post and understand that it’s more sophisticated than I make it out to be. I should emphasize, however, that object-oriented realism is not the epistemological thesis that we can represent objects as they are in themselves. In Harman’s version, objects perpetually withdraw from one another. In my own version, objects always translate the differences of other objects. Where idealisms see this phenomenon as unique to the human-object relation, OOO generalizes this to all inter-object relations, regardless of whether the human is involved. And of course I don’t go all the way with Whitehead because of his positions on God, teleology, and eternal objects.
September 18, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Graham,
It could very well be that I’m projecting my own views into Whitehead’s ontology.
September 18, 2009 at 1:27 pm
If you find yourself immediately talking about language, signs, subjects, co-constitution, power, the nature of inquiry, etc., then you are an idealist. There is no ambiguity here.
Are you seriously suggesting that all philosophers of mind and/or language, etc. are idealists simply because they do not share your interest in
the being of being?
Somewhere, Rorty points out that the being of being wasn’t even a philosophical problematic before Heidegger. Does that mean that all philosophy pre-Heidegger is idealist?
To be slightly less flippant, the definition of idealism that you and Graham are utilizing seems to me to be something of a straw man in that it is is not one that I, or anybody I have discussed this with, recognize as being general philosophical currency. You seem to be collapsing anthropocentrism and idealism. I agree that there are problems with anthropocentrism, but I cannot understand why anyone would think that all anthropocentric philosophies are committed to an idealist ontology.
September 18, 2009 at 1:29 pm
John,
I speak a bit sloppily in this passage. The point isn’t that we shouldn’t speak about language and signs, the point is that you’re an idealist if you hold that it is impossible to speak of a being that isn’t related to a human phenomenon in some way or another. I’ll write more about this later today, but for now I gotta scoot!
September 18, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Levi:
Sorry if I’ve misunderstood your purpose here, the sentence which gave me the impression that I had was this one:
“…one senses almost instinctively that something is deeply amiss in the text or thought of a particular philosopher, that there is a very dangerous desire at work in this thought, and that the position is to be rejected on general principle.”
This seemed to suggest that the presence of the dangerous desire would, on general principle, invalidate the argument. But perhaps your point was more that, once someone is driven by such bad feeling it is better not to engage with them. If you’ve got a moment, could you perhaps clarify the ‘general principle’?
I suppose the best way to get clear on this would be to ‘name and shame’, but doing that might involve you in the kind of negative feeling you are exactly avoiding, so probably best if you don’t!
September 18, 2009 at 1:36 pm
In my reading of Whitehead, the important thing is what Whitehead calls the “subjective aim,” defined in the passage Levi Bryant quotes here as “how that subject prehends that datum”, i.e. the manner in which an entity receives (relates to) “data” from other entities. This is roughly equivalent to what Levi here calls “the manner in which the actual occasion processes this datum according to its own internal endo-consistency.”
But I do not think that this can rightly be understood, as Bryant takes it, in terms of entities “continu[ing] their ongoing autopoiesis.” Because, for Whitehead, entities do not persist. They perish, giving way to other entities that inherit from them. What both Bryant and Harman see as an “object” is, for Whitehead, merely an “historic route of occasions.” There is a sharp difference between what Whitehead calls “subjective harmony,” or the way that an entity constitutes itself by maintaining some sort of coherence among its prehensions, and this continuity through time of a “route of occasions” that maintains a continuity of form over time — and the problem is that Bryant conflates these two very different things under the rubric of “endo-consistency.”
I also don’t think that autopoiesis is the right conceptual framework for Whitehead, because he insists that the fundamental process is one of novelty or creativity, that is to say, self-transformation rather than self-maintenance. In particular, Whitehead defines “life” as “the origination of conceptual novelty — novelty of appetition” (PR 102). This is very different either from Varela’s autopoeisis, or from Spinoza’s conatus.
This is why “subjective aim” is so important. I think that Harman is right, and Bryant wrong, in taking Whitehead’s insistence that what an entity is, is the result of its prehensions of other entities, as radically as possible. I don’t think that Whitehead conceives of objects independent of their relations in the way Bryant says.
However, my disagreement with Harman is that I do not think the either/or of his opposition (substances vs relations) is as exclusive as he claims. Whitehead does not give us entities outside of their relations. But he does make a claim for an entity’s “privacy” inside of its web of relations. This is precisely the dimension of subjective aim, or of the entity’s decision and selection.
For Whitehead, there is nothing to an entity outside of its relations; but neither is an entity entirely determined by its relations. Rather, it constitutes itself by making a decision with regard to its relations, by choosing and selecting among them, by altering the manner in which it receives that which it receives from elsewhere.
This is sort of an “excluded middle” between Harman’s alternatives of independent substances (which as he notes, Whitehead always denounces as “vacuous actuality”) and the reduction of an entity to nothing but the sum of its relations. Harman doesn’t admit this third possibility, and as a result he puts Whitehead in the same “relationist” category as Hegel and Saussure. My argument is that Whitehead’s project is viable, and that he does provide an alternative to both the camp of internal relations, and the camp of Harman’s independent objects.
September 18, 2009 at 2:12 pm
It seems to me that Whitehead was just arguing against a more extreme position — “mere” materialism.
September 18, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Rory,
If by “invalidate the argument” you mean that the argument somehow becomes weak (in the case of inductive arguments) or invalid (in deductive arguments), then no I am not suggesting that. The strength or validity of an argument is a logical affair. If we distinguish between manifestation (the subject of enunciation), signification (the logical order of relations among proposition), and denotation, then the issue of desire belongs to the order of manifestation, whereas strength and validity belong to the order of signification. They are two different domains. Clearly my background in psychoanalysis is playing a role in what I’m claiming here. In the clinical setting the patient can make all sorts of compelling arguments for why they reacted to a certain thing in the way that they did at the level of signification. This doesn’t undermine the fact that something else is going on at the level of manifestation. I hold that manifestation is every bit as important in evaluating a philosophical position as signification. Habermas makes all sorts of compelling arguments for his theory of discourse, but what sort of desire haunts this philosophy? This desire can function as grounds for rejecting the philosophy or ignoring it in my view. In this respect, it is not a question of whether or not to engage with the other person, but the very frame of thought itself. Personally I tend to think that arguments, while they certainly can’t be ignored, play a rather small role in philosophy over all. Here I side with Deleuze, seeing philosophy more as a creation of concepts than as something that gets at the ultimate truth or something that makes arguments. There are lots of extremely bad arguments to be found among our greatest philosophers, but we do not reject these philosophies on those grounds and adherents to a particular philosopher set about constructing better arguments in support of the philosophy.
September 18, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Hi Steven,
Many thanks for the lengthy comment!
Right, this is a major difference between my own position and Whitehead’s. If I understand him correctly, for Whitehead actual occasions are instantaneous and only exist for that moment. Consequently, you get prehensions taking place along axes that could be called the vertical and the horizontal. On the one hand, a succeeding actual occasion prehends a prior actualization in a historical route of occasions. On the other hand, routes of actual occasions can prehend one another. To be clear, there is vertical the manner in which I prehend past actual occasions of myself, and then the horizontal way in which I prehend you or this computer screen.
I always find the motives for this move in Whitehead to be perplexing. In other words, it seems to me to be a difference that makes no difference. My objects are ongoing processes that reproduce themselves from moment to moment. Nonetheless, I hold that there is a pattern of relations that persists across these moments (allowing also, of course, that processes can hit bifurcation points or dissolve). The proper being of the object is not any of these states, but rather this pattern. Or at least that’s where I’m at right now.
You seem to suggest here that the only way we can get novelty or creativity is through this sorts of instantaneous existence of actual occasions. Why? First, nothing prevents events of self-transformation from taking place within a system. Second, creativity can be a result of inter-object relations and encounters.
I think the first paragraph gets to the crux of the matter. You can’t have it both ways. If an entity is making a decision there must be something to this entity that is not simply its relations. This would undermine the instantaneity thesis. That “something else” would be the proper being of the object, not the manner in which it prehends other actual occasions at any particular point in time. Barring this, I think Harman is absolutely right to point out that Whitehead falls back into the primacy of internal relations where we cannot account for how relations shift in the manner you want to make them shift. Instead we get a frozen, block universe where nothing can change, move, or be mobile precisely because there is nothing in addition to these relations.
September 18, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Hi, Levi —
This very much helps to clarify what is at stake here. I think there is a point where, following Whitehead, I do disagree with both you and Harman. For Whitehead, the ultimate entities out of which the universe is composed are not objects (as either you or Graham define them) — rather they are “drops of experience”, or “acts of experience.” [I would say this makes them quanta, rather than instantaneous, but that is not so important in this context]. There is no experiencer behind the act of experience, because the experiencer is co-created with the experience, and perishes along with it as soon as it is done. So, where you and Graham are saying that everything (from human beings to clods of dirt to subatomic particles) is an object, Whitehead is saying rather that everything is a subject. (Well, not exactly, but this formulation will do as an approximation).
In any case, the “pattern of relations that persists across these moments” is for Whitehead a consequence of the succession of occasions, rather than an object (or a subject) that would subsist behind them or beyond them in order to constitute “a dimension of all objects independent of their relations.
At this point, all I am offering you is commentary and the making of distinctions. I haven’t reached the stage of figuring out how to rework, revise, and make use of Whitehead’s arguments in order to stake out a new position of my own. I do think, however, that — within the general “speculative realist” tent — the Whiteheadian position does differ in a significant way from the “object oriented ontology” that you and Graham are developing. (Though I would still agree that, because of its atomism and “event epochalism,” it is also substantially different from the more “continuist” position one finds in Bergson, Deleuze, and Iain Hamilton Grant).
My main point is that Whitehead’s position is viable, in its rejection of both sides of the dichotomy between independent objects on the one hand, and “the primacy of internal relations where we cannot account for how relations shift”, on the other. For Whitehead, everything is relations, but these relations are not “internal” in the way that you and Graham are assuming.
September 19, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Well the problem in account to anticorrelationism when establishing a relationalism such as Whitehead’s account is that it lacks the perturbation of the livelyness and depth of some of the aspects of correlationism such as power, trancendentality, ego, consciousness, etc. They are left at phenomenological reductions such as “subjective aim” that kind of has its toes in correlationism if followed through with any kind of taste other than empty shells.
September 20, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Steve, I think you’ve hit on something critical here that I’d really like to see Levi address. You said, “For Whitehead, the ultimate entities out of which the universe is composed are not objects (as either you or Graham define them) — rather they are ‘drops of experience’, or ‘acts of experience.'” And, then you say, “the ‘pattern of relations that persists across these moments’ is for Whitehead a consequence of the succession of occasions, rather than an object (or a subject) that would subsist behind them or beyond them in order to constitute a dimension of all objects independent of their relations.” This is crucial for several reasons, but I’m not sure that you’ve stated the difference between Whitead and OOO quite strongly enough.
1) You’ve rightly noted that for Whitehead actual entities are the final real things of which the world is made up, and further that these entities are are individual occasions of experience. What you didn’t note is that this entails a form of panexperientialism or panpsychism. You did mention the ‘subjective aim,’ but you didn’t point out that this is God’s lure for or call to actual occasions to maximize their creative potential. I mention it because I’m not so sure how compatible Whitehead’s theory of ‘feelings,’ and the corresponding capacity of decision-making and self-determination that this entails, are with Harman’s or Bryan’t theory of objects. Indeed, it seems very strange to think about a self-determining football.
2) On the other hand, you also didn’t note Whitehead’s conception that a subject should always be understand as a “subject-superject,” and when that is taken into account, I think there is more of an objective component than your comments suggest — i.e., a subject is always a subject and an object (once it’s obtained satisfaction).
2) Now, and this is the crux of what I’m trying to get at, you’ve rightly noted the importance of the pattern of relations that persists across individual moments, but what you failed to mention is Whitehead’s theory of societies and nexus. In other words, to the extent that I understand OOO (and I should mention that I’m new, but becoming more and more sympathetic the more I read), what is referred to as an object by OOO is actually what Whitehead refers to as a society in his philosophy of organism. For Whitehead, atoms, cats, trees, houses, hammers, cities, and (to the extent that he would be open to them) fictional characters, are not actual entities, but rather societies of actual entities, or societies of societies. Thus, OOO’s object and Whitehead’s society are much more closer in ontological type than are actual entities and objects.
4) If my intuition about objects/societies is right, this could significantly change the parameters of the debate, because the question of relations/relata that is at the heart of the disagreement between Bryant and Harman regarding Whitehead’s theory should be focussed much more Whitehead’s notions of society and nexus and much less on his notion of individual concrescing and prehending occasions. Of course, you can’t cleanly separate Whitehead’s society from the actual occasions which comprise them, but all I mean suggest is that it might make more sense to talk of the similarities between Bryantian objects and Whiteheadian socities than it does to talk about Bryantian objects and Whiteheadian occasions. Notwithstaning Joseph Bracken’s “field theory,” which seeks to raise autonomy to the level of societies, a feeling and self-determining hammer sounds remarkably odd.
Levi, I’ve only been following your blog for the past several months (always enjoy and appreciate your reflections), so maybe you’ve addressed this before, but I’ve been wondering about it for a while now. And, since this is the first time I’ve seen you directly engage Whitehead’s theory of actual occasions by offering a reading of specific texts, and since it seems to have confirmed my suspicions (i.e., that your and Grant’s objects are Whitehead’s societies), I’d really like to know if you think this basic assessment seems reasonable. And, if it does, I’d love to see a post sometime that tries to show how your object squares (or doesn’t) with Whitehead’s society, and how you see this impacting the debate about relationality.
September 20, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Richard, thanks for your comment. Everything that you say here is crucial — there is a lot of Whitehead that I left out, for reasons of space and to make a particular point.
The fact that Whitehead’s ontology is not quite flat, because it distinguishes between entities and societies, is a crucial matter that I don’t feel I have worked out sufficiently. But I think you are right in seeing it as a way to account for the qualities of “objects” that Harman and Bryant both point to as being beyond relation, without giving up on Whitehead’s fundamental relationism.
It is because entities persist (in “objective immortality”) as superjects, and then objects — i.e. that they become dead data when they are being prehended by later objects — is why I said that to say that Whitehead saw everything as a subject, rather than everything as an object, is only “approximately” correct.
And yes, my insistence upon subjective aim or decision does imply a kind of panpsychism: I have written about this here and plan to work on it more in the near future.
I would not be so quick to reject “a feeling and self-determining hammer,” however; I find this a more useful way of accounting for the intricacies of the hammer, beyond my mere use of it, than is Harman’s claim that the hammer is a substance with unplumbed depths.
More generally, your intuition about how societies rather than entities might be the proper Whiteheadian correlate for Bryant’s and Harman’s objects seems to me to be largely on target. But I presume that both Bryant and Harman would reject the notion that an object has ultimate micro-constituents — this would seem to them to be too reductionist a way of explaining the infinite regress whereby objects always contain other objects. And indeed, I don’t think Whitehead means the entities/societies distinction in that reductionistic a way: what he says about “life” in PR and MT suggests otherwise: but this is something I am still trying to work through.
September 20, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Steven, I’m a little confused. You write:
Why does the distinction between entities and societies undermine the flatness of an ontology? The fact that we have entities and networks does not strike me as undermining anything like the flatness of an ontology because it is not being suggested that one of these constitutes the real and the other is something other than the real. Rather, I take it that we fall into a vertical ontology whenever we treat one domain as the real and some other domain as unreal or merely epiphenomenal. Thus, for example, if we hold that only physical existence is real while claiming that signs are not real or that we have to give a reductive explanation of signs, then we’ve fallen into a vertical ontology. Likewise, if we give subjects or minds a special place in our ontology such that all other beings are subordinated to the activity of the subject as in, for example, the case of Husserl, our ontology is not flat. Claiming that entities form networks or societies wouldn’t be an instance of this, to my thinking.
September 20, 2009 at 6:52 pm
A brief addendum to my comment. I should have noted that Whitehead specifically referred to societies as “enduring objects” throughout Process and Reality, and although I’d be quite happy to be corrected, I’m unaware of any objects among all the lists of objects provided by Latour, Harman, or Bryant that would be a precise correlate with actual occasions. So, my observation could be reformulated as follows: because OOO’s ‘objects’ more accurately correspond with Whitehead’s ‘enduring objects’ (which are part of his larger theory of societies and nexus), the comparisons with and critiques of Whitehead should include that as an explicit and central point of consideration. To the extent that this has been missing from the debate (if indeed it has), it seems to me that there is quite a bit that remains to be worked out as OOO continues its critical conversation with Whitehead.
September 20, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Levi, I am of two minds about this. Whitehead says that “actual entities” are the basic constituents of which the universe is composed. Objects as we encounter them, however, are generally “societies” rather than “actual entities,” (and we ourselves, as individuals, are also societies). So, the question is whether this constitutes a kind of reductionism, analogous to the claim that all of reality is ultimately reducible to, and constructed entirely out of, subatomic particles. Now, evidently Whitehead is not “eliminativist” or “reductionist” in the way, say, analytic philosophers of science are; and societies are all equally real and on the same level ontologically, however they differ in organization and complexity.
So I would like to claim “flat ontology” for Whitehead; but I am still not sure how his two-level account — entities and societies — fits into flat ontology either in Delanda’s sense or yours. There is a sense in which entities themselves, although not particular sorts of entities, do have a special place vis-a-vis the societies (or networks) into which they enter.
Now, Whitehead often makes claims that are equally valid for entities and for societies: e.g., in his account of perception, and of why Hume and Kant have an overly reductive sense of how perception works, because they only recognize presentational immediacy and fail to acknowledge causal efficacy.
BUT: there are other cases where I think the distinction between actual entities and societies is quite important. And I think that Richard Livingston was picking up on this, in his comment to which I was in turn responding.
Entities are punctual; they are “drops of becoming” that perish in the very movement by which they fully constitute themselves. In contrast, Whitehead says that anything that we recognize as an “enduring object” is a society.
So, when you say that
I have to disagree somewhat. This might make sense in relation to societies or enduring objects (I have to think about this a bit more), but that it is not correct in relation to actual entities themselves.
I hope this doesn’t sound like mere pedantic scholasticism (to use the common term, though it may be unjust to the actual Scholastics) — but it is crucial precisely in relation to Graham’s argument about acutualism (in his Latour book, but I think he would apply the same criticism to Whitehead as well). For Graham, entities have to have hidden reserves (substance) because this is the only way to explain that they might do something in the future that they are not doing right now. Graham wants to reject any sense of potentiality or virtuality, but he also wants to claim that a relationalist actualism, like Latour’s or Whitehead’s:
However, I think that this criticism only works if you assume that entities are indeed persistent through time — that is to say, if they are “enduring objects” or societies, rather than actual entities in Whitehead’s sense. In the case of entities, which are becomings that “never change” but do “perpetually perish,” there is change because no entity ever exactly repeats the entities-turned-data that it prehends. For Whitehead, potentiality is a matter of the open future; this means that Whitehead would reject both the way that Bergson and Deleuze inflate the virtual beyond what is ontologically sustainable, and also the way that Harman gets rid of potentiality only by claiming actuality for qualities that are unexperiencable and hidden. Oddly enough, Harman accounts for change and futurity by making entities entirely static — his “substances” are not themselves capable of change, it is only a matter of their revealing new, but already-existent, facets of themselves.
I don’t know how you stand on this dispute between Harman and Latour (and thereby also between Harman and Whitehead) — but I do think that the way I am using Whitehead is somewhat divergent from what you have called “object-oriented ontology” — though it is closer to you and to Graham than it is to, say, Meillassoux or Brassier.
September 21, 2009 at 12:05 am
Richard/Steven,
This is great stuff and I don’t think it is pedantic at all. I think there’s a difference between how I use the term “flat ontology” and how DeLanda uses it. DeLanda’s flat ontological thesis, as you know, is that being is composed of nothing but individuals. By contrast, my thesis is that if something makes a difference then it is. Consequently, in my ontology wherever there is a production of difference, there is something real. I don’t know whether this ultimately brings me in line with DeLanda or not. It seems to me that my conception of objects is closer to Whitehead’s conception of societies in two respects: First, I’m of the view that objects are always composed of other objects. For me, objects are unities, but they are not atomic unities. Second, I’m of the view that these objects or societies are dynamic processes consisting of events from moment to moment. In other words, at each moment a system constitutes itself and is thus a process across time. Unlike Harman, my objects are capable of change and are perpetually changing (like Leibniz’s monads), while this change has limits between birth and destruction. I have found DeLanda’s concept of attractors and phase space extremely helpful in this connection. I don’t feel that I need something like a purely withdrawn object that is completely unchanging to account for the possibility of change, because I can get robust change out of my account of objects or societies in three ways: 1) through the actualization of new attractor states when either a shift in the internal equilibrium of a system produces new qualities as in the case of certain developmental processes in biology, or through an interaction with another object or society, 2) through linkages formed with other objects that generate new objects or societies, and 3) through reaching bifurcation points in the organization of a system where the object, society, or system emerges a new organization such that it is a new object. For me, the term “object” is more a rhetorical strategy than anything else. If one prefers to refer to the entities I call “objects” as systems, processes, societies, events, etc., that’s fine by me. The term “object” is selected to shift focus away from subject oriented philosophies. I think another major difference between my position and Graham’s, is that whereas Graham’s position is deeply actualist, my objects always have a virtual or a potential dimension within them. This is the reason that my objects are split. Thus, while I agree that objects are “withdrawn”, for me this is not because objects can never touch one another– I think they’re constantly rustling against one another –but rather because they always have a potential reserve that is never fully actualized.
September 21, 2009 at 2:33 am
Levi,
just very briefly — all this you say, both in your latest and throughout your blog, makes considerable sense to me. And I am very interested in the way you are using complexity theory (via Deleuze/Delanda) to think about change.
In terms of my own direction: I am still working through ideas about “subjective aim”/decision/selection in Whitehead. I have the suspicion that this gives somewhat a different focus than the use of complexity theory and/or emergence does to the question of change. But I need to think a lot more about this before I can say anything intelligible.