Morton’s The Ecological Thought is truly a marvelous little book. In the second chapter, Morton begins to take apart the concept of the environment, which could likewise be thought as a deconstruction of the concept of the world. A while back, when I gave my Georgia Tech presentation on flat ontology, someone asked me why I deny the existence of the world or universe as an object. I’ve struggled with this question ever since.
On the one hand, I think there’s the formalist way of demonstrating the non-existence of the world. In many respects I began this blog with a formalist demonstration of the non-existence of the world. The formalist demonstration comes largely out of Lacan and Badiou, and relies heavily on set theory. There are a couple of different ways in which the thesis that the world does not exist, can be argued. On the one hand, we can evoke Cantor’s paradox. Here the argument would run that a set of all sets cannot exist because the power set of a set is always larger than the set from which it is derived. As a consequence, we cannot form a totality out of the world. Another way of making this argument– which Lacan implicitly employs in his graphs of sexuation –would be to deploy Russell’s paradox pertaining to the set of all sets that do not include themselves as members.
While I am deeply fond of these arguments, I think they’re problematic from a metaphysical point of view. As philosophers like Hallward have noted, it’s not clear that we can jump directly from the properties of mathematics to the properties of existence. Let’s take the argument for the non-existence of the world from Cantor’s paradox to illustrate this point. What is the power set of a set? The power set of a set is the set of all subsets that can be constructed out of an initial set. Suppose, then, you have the following set: {x, y, z}. The power set of this set would be as follows: {{x}, {y}, {z}, {x, y}, {x, z}, {y,z}, {x, y, z}}. This works fine mathematically, however what the power set is implicitly saying is that all of these different sub-sets can exist. However, when we talk about the world, it is not clear that entities can enter into all possible relations with one another. Because, as Harman puts it, entities are behind firewalls, or as I put it, entities only maintain selective relations with other entities in the world, it seems possible that a totality could exist.
In The Ecological Thought Morton proposes another way to reach this conclusion. As Morton writes, “[t]here is no environment as such. It’s all ‘distinct organic beings.’ Existence is coexistence or, as Darwin puts it, ‘adaptation'” (60). A moment later, Morton goes on to draw out the implication of this thesis: “There is no static background. What we call Nature is monstrous and mutating, strangely strange all the way down and all the way through” (61). How, then, does Morton’s thesis challenge the existence of the world? Ordinarily, when we think of the environment or the world, we think of it as a container, not unlike the way Kant thinks about time and space. However, if the environment does not exist as such, but is rather consists of organic (and I would add non-organic) beings, then we can no longer speak of an environment or a world as such. For each change that takes place in an organism, the environment itself has also changed. All other organisms must now adapt to this organism and the original organisms, in turn must now adapt to these new adaptations. A rather striking example of this is the manner in which early microorganisms transformed the atmosphere from a toxic brew of noxious gasses (to critters like us) into an atmosphere saturated with oxygen. Indeed, they were so successful at this that during the precambrian period there was so much oxygen in the atmosphere that there were giant dragonflies (critters you definitely wouldn’t want to encounter on a dark night), six foot long centipedes, and lightning storms would create raging forest fires. Of course, it’s also for this reason that evolution is not teleological and can’t be described in terms of progress.
A third way of making this argument would be through onticology. As I argued in an earlier post drawing on systems theory, every object is a system organized around a distinction between itself and its environment. While I do indeed retain Maturana and Varela’s distinction between allopoietic machines (non-living objects) and autopoietic machines (living objects), I nonetheless argue that every object exists in a state of closure such that it only maintains selective relations to its environment. The paradox, then, is that the distinction between system and environment is a distinction made by each object itself. As such, every system or object constitutes its own environment. If this is the case, then we cannot talk about an environment as such. This would be a consequence of the withdrawal of objects.
Take a micro-organism like the fascinating tardigrade. The tardigrade, depicted to the left above, is a multicellular, microscopic organism that has eyes and fully formed legs. Among its more amazing characteristics is that it can be exposed to extreme heat such that it entirely dehydrates. When this occurs, it withdraws its legs into its body and turns into a little pellet that appears to be dead. However, add some water to its dish and it puffs back up and resumes movement. It is similarly able to endure extreme cold. A strange stranger indeed! However, my point here is that for all intents and purposes, frogs, persons, rocks, etc., do not belong to the environment of tardigrades. The point, then, is that we cannot talk about an environment but only, rather, a multiplex or mesh of environments that perhaps enter into relations of structural coupling with one another without possessing any overarching unity.
June 17, 2010 at 12:50 am
Very nice. Those tardigrades are…quite frightening. There are monsters, only they are very, very small.
June 17, 2010 at 1:20 am
One thing that I have noticed since I started reading your thoughts way back at the Lacan group on Yahoo was that you treat arguments and theories as alliances and fellow teammates on the field, but not simply as ends in themselves — there is always a sense of a greater game in your work. For instance, here you kick the ball to the better player for the strategic move you are trying to make, without diminishing your previous alliances necessarily. While you treat arguments fairly on their own terms, you never lose sight of the game in play and your ultimate goal. Perhaps my sports analogy is poor, here, but I think it gets at something I’ve always admired about your writings (and why I have continued to read your work for years). More directly, I always come away from your thoughts with both a better understanding of the arguments and theories themselves (Cantor, Kant, etc) but also a sense of how they may strengthen or weaken your ontological project. I think either accomplishments in themselves would be considerable, so your work is at least twice as good, here.
June 17, 2010 at 6:14 am
Here’s the thing.
Harman has total withdrawal. Someone like Deely: ‘No one standpoint “makes full sense” of the individual existing” hence its opacity.’ –
still retains a partial knowledge.(The Human use of Signs. p.3)
This tension comes from GH’s claims that an object is not the sum of its sensible qualities. It is ‘a whole’ that is totally withdrawn. Punto. An infinte number of standpoints would not even scratch the thing in itself?
I rememeber Stengers once asking if Varela’s ‘bringing forth a world’ would make a difference if we believed it.
What difference do any of these ontological statements make to dealing with an oil spill or whatever?
I would argue nothing. This remains a scholasticism.
The fact that an object maintains ‘selective’ relations with its env. does not entail that it is totally withdrawn?
And if one day we accepted this ontology of total withdrawal (which you have yet to swallow?) what diff would it make?
Serioulsy, I’m really interested to know what difference?
June 17, 2010 at 7:49 am
I now see the scope of onticology, Levi. I can’t wait to see your book.
There are traces of some passages I cut from ET about the ontic vs the ontological, along the lines you develop here. It’s great to read your version—better than mine I think. But also nice that the ideas remain implicated in ET, somehow, as you unfolded them so well.
June 17, 2010 at 4:16 pm
[…] The Existence of the Tardigrade Or rather, more Levi on Morton’s mesh. […]
June 17, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Levi, et.al.,
I don’t suppose you germs would care to hop over to 3QD and meet some of the ladies over there. The current topic is not all that interesting, frankly. It concerns the relative airheadedness of Steven Pinker, in all of its various coiffures, and some sly inferences about his main squeeze’s possible recent vacation in Silicon Valley if I’m picking up on some of the encrypted grammatical and syntactical codes. I’m not 100% sure about that; they have their own sometimes impenetrable argot.
I only ask because it’s starting to feel like a Clare Booth Luce play over there—a regular laugh riot in 1939 but a tad tired right about now—and I was hoping (not pushing) to pick up the pace, if possible —and you boyz have got wit (and virtual dinner jackets) to spare—and do something about the girl-boy ratio in one fell swoop, so to speak. Anyway, I know you philosophers can be a particularly horny bunch and I think some of the gals might be easy lays (no guarantees and not namin’ any names). Here’s the link, if any part of your evening is free.
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/mind-over-mass-media.html
I’d better get back. I left my good beaded pocketbook on the vanity and I just know one of those bitches is going to rifle through it. I especially don’t want that Louise woman getting a hold of my pepper spray. As is, she’s itching to go for my jugular, or something…
I’ll take my share of the blame. As I type this I’m stifling an Abelard and Heloise quip. So you see it’s something of an emergency. Hurry if you can (but no pressure)!
June 17, 2010 at 10:55 pm
I hope that nothing in my previous comment will be interpreted to mean that I don’t also think anthropologists are a particularly horny bunch. I don’t wish to have another tawdry misunderstanding with You-Know-Who The Anthropologist.
Thanks, gotta dash.
June 17, 2010 at 11:31 pm
Paul Bains:
Your questions are significant, and a great opportunity for me to think out these ideas a bit more.
I had the thought, too, that qualities of an object get at “some” of the object, but came to the conclusion that this just doesn’t work out. Why? For my understanding, the idea of “some,” or part, of the object to be understood in qualities (and that means in relation, as knowledge is a kind of relation) means that, at any one time, you are identifying the object with the sum total (even if that total is limitless) of qualities themselves. That seems to be the implicit assumption when we say that we do relate to “part” or “some” of an object. What it really says is that, in relating to this or that quality, I am relating to part of an object which is really a bunch of qualities. Now, empirically, this may happen at times — where, say, an object doesn’t exist and there is only a haphazard collection of other objects such that, when confronting this collection, a real object doesn’t withdraw at all. I don’t see why that isn’t possible. But for the purposes of ontology which tries to get a very general idea of the object, I think you have to have some concept of withdrawal, or of the gap between an object’s various relations and qualities and itself. For instance, you can amass quality after quality, detailing and describing an object from every possible angle, every possible dimension and so on, and what happens? Does the object become transparent once all of this is done? Do you and the object then dissolve into a mystical One? What happens to that knowledge? I think that, not only from experience in a general sense, but from the work of the sciences, of the investigations of art and so on, that knowledge is a kind of Latourian labyrinth of translation and transformation, but never identity. So, I am forced — well, not forced, but say, I feel obliged — to agree with Graham and Levi here when they say that for every piece of knowledge attained that isn’t the object, and it never can be, not because the object is quantitatively infinite (though it may be) but because the object is a unity over and above the relations it enters into. I don’t want to say this is commonsensical, but when looking at it it is almost self-evident (at least in this simplified version, which may or may not be correct).
This can also be approached from another way. It follows, I think, from the idea of the object as a unit, as a unity, which is more than the sum of its parts. We have to talk about a unity there because, without it, we again lapse into some kind of primal ontological chaos or extreme monism. Also, as Levi has demonstrated following Bhaskar, time and again, that without an idea of a unified entity or object which at any one moment transcends its provoked qualities, the sciences don’t really make any sense. We are at a loss to explain how they are able to rip unities out of a context and artificially create Frankenstein-like surprises with them unless there is a gap between those qualities and the unity itself.
Again, I may be really off in my understanding of Graham and Levi here, but I think if you follow through with the argument that an object is directly, but still partially, to be sure, accessed or related to, you are committing implicitly to the idea that an object is nothing but a bundle or collection of qualities and nothing else.
So, why does it matter? Ah, this is a deeper question. If something is the case, why does it matter? What difference does it make? Firstly, I find it hard to believe that someone who regularly reads Levi’s blog would seriously ask that question. What difference does it make? Philosophically, it makes the difference of a philosophy itself, which surely is a response to the world, or worlds. Isn’t that a task worth pursuing? I think it is. Secondly, and I have said this before here and there, and Levi’s blog is a testament to this fact, that philosophy an ideas also have a performative dimension: what does the philosophy allow one to do? What is the philosopher, in fact, doing with the philosophy? In my impression of OOO, what the philosophy is doing — besides what it is saying — is cutting the chains of correlationism and giving objects and worlds the dignity and respect that they deserve as fellow beings. We have dignified language, we have respected the dimension of social power and the frailty and grandeur of human constructs — OOO extends that dignity to, if you want, the proletariat of the nonhuman worlds which for the most part are completely anonymous to us (but which, of course, still work and sweat and toil just as surely). But this also means finally a renunciation of all sovereignty, and surely sovereignty of the human over this planet. How can this not make a difference?
June 17, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Paul:
I realized my last paragraph was kind of too wide and romantic to really get at your question of why it matters that an object withdraws beyond or behind its relations and qualities. Obviously you don’t doubt the value of philosophy, or you wouldn’t be here at all. I still think it matters if we are to give an account of change, relationship and stability in the worlds and environments that we investigate. And, I still think that there are other effects which go beyond the purely philosophical one, such as dignity, respect, etc, which make a difference (though I am not a person who thinks that ideas necessarily make the world go round — philosophy can’t overestimate her power in that regard. I think she can suggest and allude to the changes necessary, but won’t be the single engine of that change). Or something like that. I just wanted to make it clear I wasn’t attacking your philosophical intentions. Apologies if it did come out that way.
June 18, 2010 at 4:33 am
Thanks for your blog posts. I have been enjoying them immensely over the last year or so.
I agree with you that you about the abuse of set theory. Making inferences to ontology from results in set theory is an unconvincing sleight of hand not the least because ‘set theory’ is far from being an unambiguous science. For one there are many competing theories and a lack of consensus amongst mathematicians and mathematical philosophers as to the ontological status of of sets, numbers, functions and so on. While it is true that theories have been developed over the years that give mathematicians a base language with which to talk about divergent areas such as topology and groups, it is far from being a perfected language that can be used to resolve metaphysical questions let alone one whose results can be used to invalidate empirical notions like ‘the environment’.
I do detect a residual correlationism in your argument though at least to the extent you posit that beings constitute their own environments. Shouldn’t we caution that beings only constitute their environment partially, that their ability to select their own relations is ultimately circumscribed by the relative charity of natural forces which surround and dominate them? That sense of Nature which highlights its objective brute separation from us, its being above and beyond any subject’s powers of manipulation, as something that bites back, that imposes itself on bodies and senses, that only tolerates beings and their behaviours to a certain degree and within certain limits, is surely one that ecology needs to stress against that biblical and capitalist sense of Nature as something ‘for us’, as an inexhaustible garden ripe for exploitation.
Regarding internalism, it’s central thesis seems to me to be that change occurs if and only if there has been a change in the totality of relations. Internalism is therefore perhaps better labelled ‘Totalism’ because it subscribes to a paradoxical ‘All or Nothing’ viewpoint. On the other hand the notion that substances are absolutely independent and autonomous of eachother flatly contradicts the ecological truth that biologic beings are (to varying degrees and in complex ways) interdependent. How does inferring a surplus-being, a hidden dimension or virtuality to objects rescue substantialism from the above contradiction? Either beings are interdependent or they are not. It seems that your Onticology really is an attempt to “square the circle”.
An event or process ontology seems to me the only way to avoid both the paradox of Totalism and the contradiction between a substance based ontology and the facts of ecology. Whereas Totalism dissolves substances into static relational totalities , Rheology (from the Greek “Rhea” meaning flow) dissolves substances into repeating patterns within wider and deeper ontological flows. As Norbert Wiener said “We are not stuff that abides but patterns that perpetuate, whirlpools in an ever-flowing stream” – what I call “rheamorphs”. On this view beings depend on influxes of energy and nutrients from their environment but themselves emit causally efficacious outfluxes too, they are point sources of positive and negative outflows that impact other beings (e.g. oxygen from plants or pollution from factories).
Take your cane toad example. Fluxes of change reverberate through the Queensland ecosystem from a single species ‘epicentre’ displacing say native frogs from their ecological niche but also causing adaptive behavioural changes in some bird species (some native birds have learned to flip the cane toad on its back to peck at is its poison-free belly). These changes may then ricochet back causing evolutionary adaptations in the cane toad lineage itself. This to-ing and fro-ing within interdependent ecological networks is something it would seem that is incompatible with an ontology of autonomous objects.
thanks again for your great blog!!!
June 19, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Joseph, v. interesting comments.
I guess the issue is the numerically one bit producing abs withdrawal.
Someone like Etienne Souriau would certainly claim that this is what makes a thing a thing.
(blockquote)”C’est l’identité de la chose à travers ses apparitions diverses qui la définit et la constitue. Il y a accord sur le caractère systématique de la chose, et sur ce fait que ce qui la caractérise spécifiquement, c’est de rester numériquement une à travers ses apparitions en utilisation noétique.(/blockquote)
(Souriau. Quoted by Latour in an essay on Les differents modes d’existence)
Click to access 98-SOURIAU.pdf
I see the temptation for absolute withdrawal but I think it’s mistaken.
Souriau’s position would advocate multiple modes of existence for a thing – not just ultimately one ‘behind’ the phenomenal.
In fact this is where there may be a problem. 000 takes away the subject but nevertheless keeps really real objects hidden behind a phenomenal veil.
Or as Latour notes the self-identity of substance which has obsessed phil since Plato.
“Absolute or relative, this poverty of philosophy is enough reason for the need to think and to attempt the Other as a mode of existence” (Souriau)
Latour’s comment
“Everthing is defined here: can we attempt alteration as mode of subsistence instead of always looking for the substance behind the alterations?” (Latour)
Latour argues that only Souriau has asked the question how many different ways are there of differing? ‘The Different Modes of Existenc.’ Altho Gabriel Tarde is v. close.
I’m not sure if Latour’s essay on Souriau is trans by Stephen Muecke (an old teacher of mine) in ‘The Speculative Turn’. Certainly Latour and Stengers take Souriau v. seriously.
It would be v. useful if Levi could include this thinker in his forthcoming book!
I’m not convinced that an appropriation of autopoiesis will stay the course for long…altho it has its interest… Maturana is now here:
http://matriztica.cl/index-63996.html
‘bringing forth a world with other’. (hervorbringen).
Levi and graham argue that every relation is a tranlation/distortion. I have said before that Latour does not claim this in Pandora’s Hope (chpter, Circulating Reference). Maybe we should check with him! I’ve always found him approachable.
A text doesn’t look like, or ressemble/represent, a rainforest, but according to Latour and his friends it truly tells us something about the forest – which has not absolutely withdrawn.
Maybe not an either or. In the move from the samples taken in the forest to the text something is conserved, or remains unchanged: the pattern or relations which in their being as relations are not changed by different mediums – they are neither real nor ideal. (See my Primacy of Semiosis for some introductory ideas on this and on autopoiesis). Not a plug, just a possibly useful reference.
I am not an institutionalized academic and never have been – nor will be (smile). Far too old.
June 28, 2010 at 12:46 am
[…] chapter of The Democracy of Objects in my mind, I find myself thinking a lot about the thesis that the world does not exist. In addition to the arguments I outlined in my post “Wither Went the World”, I find […]