In comments Jeremy asks whether it is possible for an object to be a part of two other objects. Within the framework of OOO the answer is emphatically yes! This is especially common with social objects. I am an object that is a part of, at least, three other objects that I can think of off the top of my head. I am a part of my family, I am a part of the college where I’m employed, and I’m a part of the United States. Note carefully that many of these objects are not parts of each other. For example my family is not a part of either the United States, nor the college where I’m employed, and the college is not a part of my family. My family is an object distinct from me, my daughter, and my partner, even though it draws on us to exist (I’ll explain this another day when I’m not writing on my phone).
In my view, a good deal of social theory is horribly simplistic. On the one hand we get structuralist and functionalist (often based on holistic organism based analogies) that illicitly homogenize and unify the social as a total system. On the other hand, we get “nominalist” models that are the equivalent of sociological atomism, where the only valid units are individual persons and where aggregates are treated as effects of these individuals. Regardless of how much I’ve been influenced by his thought and how much I admire him, I think Latour tends towards this latter model. What we need, in my view, is the thought of a hyper-complex mesh with heterogeneous units existing at all levels of scale, all of which are characterized by autonomy and independence. With Harman we need to think objects wrapped in objects, wrapped in objects without these relations forming a holistic unity. This, I believe, would generate a revolution in social and political thought, or, at least bring greater clarity to existing trends.
Above all, we need to get over this claptrap of thinking objects as static and reified things. Trees grow, bodies grow, my coffee cup continuously changes as it enters into new exo-relations. Where did theorists ever get the odd idea that objects are opposed to processes? Being a unit and being fixed are not synonyms. What a weak and riculous conception of substance we have. One more effort on behalf of substance, comrades! And lest we believe that these weird mereological relations belong only to the social realm, let’s not forget that cancer is a phenomenon in which cells announce their independence from the higher scale object of the body. Likewise with all those hairs in weird places as we grow older. Every object is simultaneously a unit filled with it’s own operations and a crowd composed of other units doing their own thing. This weird relation, however, is no reason to abandon the concept of substance.
Larval Subjects . 
August 12, 2010 at 5:21 am
“In my view, a good deal of social theory is horribly simplistic.”
Yes. And yet, the OOO theory of participation in other objects is simplicity itself. Far less is required in terms of belief.
August 12, 2010 at 7:52 am
John Deely, ‘Afterword: On Purely Objective Reality’ in Realism for the 21c.
Ultimately, Aristotelian substances (subjects) have a basic enduring self-identity that could be affected by a number of ‘accidents’ or manners of being. A substance as such must be changeless and any changes can only be in other features (accidents) which are not essential to the underlying ‘changelessness’ of the entity or substance. A kind of withdrawal???
In changing I do not become someone else…
Not so different to your object enduring behind its manifestations. Which as you know is Souriau’s definition of a thing..
August 12, 2010 at 10:33 am
Another option is to see the substantiality of substance as a matter of temporal contiguity like Derick Parfit.
August 12, 2010 at 11:55 am
Nice post. Your third paragraph nicely sums up the reason I’ve been drawn towards the notion of the objectile that comes out of The Fold. The paragraph above nicely summarizes my reasons for thinking of the objectile as a way of ‘bridging the gap’ between Schaeffer’s phenomenological sound objects and Schafer’s relational sound events. IT also touches upon a bizarre tendency in architectural theory to label the transience or temporality of matters as immateriality, as if substance need be stable and fixed in order to qualify as matter. It seems that this tendency often comes out of the determining thresholds of a perception of solidity, a certain unwillingness or inability to accept the temporality of objects beyond our immediate perception of them.
This is also an interesting post for me as I remember being chastised by a supervisor some time ago for discussing the objectivity or independence of the body, the operations, life and death of organs or tissues that ‘I’ have no sense of, that do not constitute a component of my self image or identity. There was a sense that it was in someway sacrilegious to suggest that one is not the unified totality of one’s body, that we might acknowledge a gap between one’s sense of self and the operations of our guts, spleen or whatever.
August 12, 2010 at 1:45 pm
You write, “What we need, in my view, is the thought of a hyper-complex mesh with heterogeneous units existing at all levels of scale, all of which are characterized by autonomy and independence.”
If I can substitute the words ‘relative, but consequential, autonomy and independence’ in that sentence then I definately support your project Levi. In fact, in light of your latest postings on these topics, I think I have been overlooking just how flexible your framework is in general.
I’m learning a lot reading this blog.
August 12, 2010 at 4:05 pm
“Another option is to see the substantiality of substance as a matter of temporal contiguity like Derick Parfit.”
Yes. Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is a masterpiece really. He figures out a position very close to Buddhism, without the dogma–and says so…for a book of Xtreme utilitarianism (if you know what I mean), his conclusion is very heartfelt:
Is the truth [of no-self] depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was [a ‘deep further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity, and a fact that must all-or-nothing’], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But that difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others. (Parfit 1984: 281)
(From an essay I’m writing on hyperobjects.)
August 13, 2010 at 1:05 am
In defense of Latour – I think he does a fantastic job of finding a way through the middle of structuralism and reductionism. Latour, in my opinion, provides us with a way of seeing how structure arises from the interactions of all those different agencies. It’s solid empirically, because he doesn’t simply use abstract social forces to explain things away, but he also doesn’t reduce social structure to a mere amalgamation of agencies. Latour has dramatically changed the way I think about social systems.