In comments, Dan writes:
Because it is brief and pointed and seems definitive, this post may be very useful for me at least. You say “Objects are not a point of view, full stop. They are not one object’s point of view on another object. They are not God’s point of view on them (objects, as Judge Schreber observed, are even withdrawn from God). They are not even points of view on themselves (those objects characterized by reflexivity still do not have unadulterated access to themselves). Objects are just objects.” Let’s take the last first: objects are objects. To me, his seems to be just the identity function again. Its content is not ontological at all but purely deductive, an assertion of a rule which lacks content apart from that rule, it has no inductive or experiential character of any sort nor — as far as I can tell — do any of the elaborations that stem from it. OOO has a logic of objects for which the real is a surplus. To me, OOO asserts a position that not only in the abstract, but theoretically, seems to be sealed against the things it wishes to address, like the scholastic who could deduce what things must be from a rational god. Obviously, the complex literature of reference and its failures might be brought to bear here though maybe OOO can shunt those over to that epistemic realm with which OOO will not put. I think the Derrida view would be fun to keep pushing here — and not because I am a D guy — but because I think the trace is his version of the “object” as an ontological turbulence, a kind of vortex, and not a representation or an normative object but just the current current. IAC, that wanders perhaps too far from what is at hand. Let me focus a bit. Even the claim “an object is an object” seems to make some attributes — like those resident in the identity function — about cohesion, duration, and permeability or does it? If not, how can an object be an object?
I can’t answer to all of Dan’s questions here, but I cannot tell you how striking I find his description of objects as a sort of ontological turbulence or vortex. What a stroke of genius! I have not seen a description of objects this apt since coming across Graham’s characterization of objects as containing all sorts of dark, hidden, volcanic potentials. In short, this is a keeper.
read on!
At the end of the day, what is all this bitching about correlationism about? It’s about our inability to be surprised, about the erasure of the excess or turbulence harbored within objects by reducing them to vehicles for intentions, language, signs, concepts, power, etc. This is a red thread that runs throughout all of Graham’s work. In his essays on metaphysics, Bergson suggests that every philosopher is marked by a sort of fundamental intuition that deeply wounds her and animates all of her thought. Maybe one way of marking the intuition that animates Graham’s work is in terms of a stunned surprise before objects. On the one hand, when Graham speaks of withdrawal, he is speaking of a sort of astonishment before the object that exceeds any mastery before the intentional gaze. Whether Graham is talking about withdrawal of what he calls real objects or the withdrawal of what he calls sensuous objects, he is struck by the manner in which objects are perpetually surprising, turbulent, unmasterable.
On the other hand, Graham’s work is marked by a deep sense of “lassen sein, or “letting be” (I’m always surprised that this particularly Heideggerian language doesn’t figure more heavily in his thought). It seems to me that Graham is deeply bothered, even offended, by any “enframing” of objects. His entire ontology seems to aim at “letting them be”. This letting-be would not be a letting-be in the sense of just “letting them alone”, not touching them, not engaging them, but in the sense of relating to objects in such a way that they are not subordinated/mastered under a concept, signifier, intention, etc, but rather are able to contribute differences of their own that aren’t merely grist to fill out a concept or form.
Let’s try and situate OOO’s concept of objects in the context of Derrida. Given the discussions we’ve all been having, all the reading I’ve been doing by and on Derrida, and the fact that Derrida is perhaps a more familiar context for others, a comparison to Derrida might give others some sense of what’s going on with OOO’s objects. In his discussions of iterability, Derrida emphasizes that in order for signs to function as signs they must simultaneously be iterable (i.e., they must have a minimal identity that allows them to be repeated in different contexts) and they must internally different such that they produce different meanings when landing in different contexts. This is why signs, for Derrida, cannot be defined by their relations or context. They exceed all contexts, perpetually harboring a turbulence within themselves that harbors the possibility of producing new meanings. In Ian Bogost’s terms, signs are units rather than elements in a system. Signs, utterances, fragments, bits of speech, bits of writing, etc., can always land in new contexts that disrupt temporarily stable contexts and that produce surprising effects within new contexts. This is why we never run out of ways of reading Shakespeare. Every text, in principle, is haunted by an infinity that it can never completely master.
Well OOO is claiming something similar about objects. Objects are this self-differing (that’s what withdrawal means, folks) minimal identity that a) can manifest themselves in an infinite number of ways when they enter into relations (the concept of “local manifestation”), b) nonetheless posses a minimal identity or iterability (they can occur in a variety of different relations), and that therefore c) are the ruin any thought of context, holism, totalizing system, or complete relational determination. As Dan so nicely puts it, objects are an ontological turbulence, a vortex, that withdraw from all relation (while perpetually landing in relations), insuring that the world is always full of surprises. Here OOO shares a profound affinity with Derrida’s “messianism”. Derrida’s messianism does not refer to the idea that there’s going to be a savior. No, what Derrida’s messianism refers to is the coming of the new, of that which cannot be anticipated, of that which cannot be conceptualized or mastered in advance.
In a certain respect, then, it is silly to ask “how is change possible”. Putting the issue in Derridean terms, an answer to the question of how change is possible would render change impossible. Why? Because were we to answer this question we would already predelineate change in a concept which would mean that the arrival of change is not an arrival of change at all, but merely the repetition of the predelineated concept in the form of a token of a type (the same). In order for change to occur, it must be purely without criteria. The most we can say is that change can and occasionally has taken place. However, while we cannot define criteria for change, we can articulate what being must be like for change to be possible. And here I don’t think I’m claiming too much in saying that for OOO the answer to this question resides in objects that possess a minimal identity allowing them to shift and move between different contexts while also differing from themselves.
The important caveat here would be that this is a general ontological feature of objects. It is not a feature restricted to how objects are for us, but ranges over the non-relational relation of objects to one another as well. So long as we don’t grant all beings an autonomy proper to their being as substance, we are left without the means of answering the question of how change is possible and have reduced objects to vehicles for other objects whether human or otherwise.
Larval Subjects . 
August 19, 2010 at 12:59 am
Levi,
I think you’ve really hit a vein with this post. I just read through it twice, because I think it distills very well a lot of what has been hovering around the conversations of the past couple of weeks.
It occurs to me that what you say toward the end about the question “how is change possible” also gets at the problems that Tim Morton recently mentioned that he has concerning Hägglund’s reading of Derrida – viz., that if we take the trace “as a literal account of survival” we end up positing either a Prime Mover or an infinite regress (i.e., back in the first antinomy). So, any attempt at providing conditions of possibility for change ends up undercutting itself. And the distinction you draw, between that attempt and the attempt at making an account of being vis-à-vis the possibility of change, seems to me to lend some good support to Morton’s position contra Hägglund. Then we may have a way to step outside of (or simply around) the ‘atheism’ polemic he sets up.
August 19, 2010 at 2:21 am
Do objects differ from themselves, or is this an illusion of our time-bound perspective? Objects are four-dimensional. Imagine a two-dimensional creature capable of perception, while its viewpoint strafes across, say, a carrot (I’m thinking of a metaphor from Terry Pratchett here, forget which book). “Wow” the creature thinks, “first it’s really small, then it gets big, then really quickly small again and then it’s gone”. Whereas for us three-dimensional, the carrot exists in its entirety – big and small at the same time (at different cross-sections). Seems to me that the reality of four-dimensional objects (i.e. all physical objects) is probably the same way – not changing so much as curved and gnarled in a certain unimaginable four-dimensional way.
August 19, 2010 at 3:11 am
It’s so exciting to be following this.. and watching a set of ideas emerge in the course of an ongoing discussion. I only wish I could convince more of my fellow poets what an inspiration this can be.
But a question: “In Ian Bogost’s terms, signs are units rather than elements in a system. ”
If you have time for it… what is it that distinguishes ‘units’ from ‘elements?’
August 19, 2010 at 10:16 am
Perhaps then in this way, objects are more purely ‘messianique’ (disregarding that
the messianique is a experiential structure…i.e. human.. for now) than Derrida intended or could conceive of. Waiting for the messianique
is as D writes a ‘waiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect or any longer’.
This goes beyond the withdrawal of objects because it is no longer simply leaving them be in their
turbulency; it is dispensing even with the allowance to be suprised at all in favour of a surprise without surprise.
In other words: nothing is expected from an object. Which to me seems perfectly reasonably if I under OOO somewhat.
August 19, 2010 at 11:40 am
Also, another philosopheme in Derrida useful to OOO (perhaps) is indeed this idea of “sein lassen” which you mention. It also resonates in Gelassenheit (Heidegger). In Derrida’s notion of “endurance non-passive” I find this similar idea of an im-passivity towards things/objects (neither passive nor active). Of course Derrida speaks of this in relation to aporia and the undecidable. In our context the object poses an aporia in this sense that a true letting-be of the object involves leaving open, completely and radically, whatever the object befalls. Usually “endurance non-passive” is spoken about in relation to aporia and alterity but I see no reason why it could not be productively applied to objects as well.
August 19, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Hi all,
Levi, I find this explanation extremely helpful. I’m presently working on some of these ideas myself. This, to me, is a key claim:
“Putting the issue in Derridean terms, an answer to the question of how change is possible would render change impossible.”
Derrida would likely consider OOO’s ontology of objects to be such an answer, tho of course his own “master names” may fall to the same criticism. As I read him, this realization marks the transition from his relatively straightforward essays of the ’60’s (principally collected in _Writing and Difference_ and _Margins of Philosophy_) and the far weirder stuff of the ’70’s, culminating in _Post Card_ and _Glas_. The early essays are very helpful in explaining what he’s up to but, like the _Tractatus_, they say what his own theories say he can’t say, so he throws away the ladder and starts doing it (or showing it, to continue the Wittgenstein analogy).
In any case, I think that the idea of talking about reality completely independent of our access to it, Jon’s nicely phrased zero-perspective, is anathema to Derrida’s thought. A transcendent signified riven by self-division may very well be better than one in full self-presence, but would still constitute an attempt to get beyond the mediation that marks all of our thought about anything, including our thoughts about the unthought. This is Derrida’s version of Hegel’s critique of Kant.
I think we can answer Levi’s question, “why does he continuously fall back an a discussion of texts whenever discussing anything in the vulgar sense?” I discuss this in the first section of my chapter on Derrida (pp. 434-42).
First, he’s actually pretty clear (more so in the interviews) that he sometimes uses texts in what we would normally call a metaphorical sense, and sometimes in a literal sense (we need scare quotes because he problematizes these ideas, tho without abandoning them). In the metaphorical sense, the features of writing that have been derided throughout the history of philosophy apply to any form of thought or discussion, making everything into a “text.” We can call this the modeling function since he’s pointing to features of textuality rather than discussing it in its own right. Thus, the infamous “there is nothing outside the text” means, I think, that there is no unmediated access to anything–we can’t set aside all signs and their unsaturated reference to other contexts to get to the Real Thing.
Second, it turns out that the literal distinction between writing and speech (esp. internal speech) maps onto metaphysical notions of mediation & meaning-leakage on the one hand, and absolute self-transparency, identity, and control. Perhaps the most important place that texts escape the authorial or stated intent are their comments about this distinction, topics ignored by the majority of readers before Derrida pointed out how consistently they magnetically arrange themselves around the metaphysical distinction. We can call this the symptomological function of the topic of texts. What philosophers say about the evils of writing, how it perverts or dilutes or alters meaning, is a surprisingly helpful clue to their overall views (_Of Grammatology_ is perhaps the best example of this).
Third is the fact that Derrida’s ruminations themselves are textual–he’s writing them, bringing the application of these ideas to his own work into play. Although he’s talking about something that affects all thought, it applies in his own case to his writings, making textuality an appropriate key in which to transcribe the ideas. We can call this the reflexive function, and I think it is partly responsibly for the shift in style to the more performative works of the ’70’s.
Sorry for going on so long. While I don’t think Derrida is a realist or an OOO’ist, I don’t think that just the fact that he talks mainly about texts rules it out by itself, once we appreciate the myriad ways he’s using the term. Although his anti-humanism does remove the mediation from any particular subject a la Kant, I don’t think he would say that it exists independently of all subjects.
August 19, 2010 at 2:01 pm
*If you have time for it… what is it that distinguishes ‘units’ from ‘elements?’*
Jacob makes an excellent point. The Lexicon https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/a-lexicon-of-onticology/ might could use the occasional (seasonal?) dusting off and replenishment.
August 19, 2010 at 3:43 pm
I too am struck by the Derridean way of saying that to account for change would be to make change impossible, because you’ve made a “concept of change”, change-an-sich. The same thing is true, as I have often thought, of Levinas’ thinking– there is no Otherness, because any “-ness” subsumes under the Same; there is only encounter with this other, and then this one, and so on. This all is rather like the Meno paradox, n’est pas? But here’s the thing: it is also much like Kant. Rather than say, “if you could explain it, it couldn’t happen,” Kant says, “since you cannot explain everything, you can see how you can explain so many things.” Or as you put it once, Levi, (though I shan’t be able to quote you precisely), the limits of our knowledge (i.e. the withdrawal of objects) turns out to be the condition for any knowledge at all. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
August 19, 2010 at 5:11 pm
I think this is correct to a degree. I vaguely recall him actually stating this somewhere (or words to that effect) but I can’t find it at the moment. (It’d sure be nice if all his texts were available in an index somewhere like most of Peirce’s are) Where I’d probably quibble is that I’m not sure he thinks one can make a distinction between representation and object. It’s all selection by greater forces with some of the forces being other traces.
Peirce definitely heads in that direction though. An object is roughly anything that acts upon a sign. Which for Peirce entails it is “anything we can talk about.” (MS 966)
August 19, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Levi, thanks for the generous evaluation and the follow up. This discussion makes it much more possible for me to find some connections with my own positions. As usual though, far too much is here to chew especially because so much of it is evocative and hints at other possibilities. Not the idea of wonder, thaumazein, but its experience is basic in Plato and Aristotle but they turn to form and then taxonomy and these lead — as is sometimes evidenced in past disputes here — to trivia and, antithetically — boredom. Is that coincidental or does it reveal something , a symptom, of the practice as it relates to what we could call the “objects of philosophy”? Where would we be had we stuck more with a Lucretius where the swerve is not just originary but perpetual, even constitutive? The question then would not be how is change possible but how is stability ontological conceivable? Derrida speaks of the place of metaphor in philosophy where he sees each great figure’s concept and problem constituted by that figure, trope, or conceit that couches the endeavor. But the most basic metaphor for D is that of the literal, of equivalence, identity, “presence,” etc. This is the metaphor of the unchanging, the divinity, what Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.” Derrida undoes the traditional separation of epistemology and ontology that often figures largely here, because — as in Foucault and Deleuze — knowledge is an object. One might better say, knowledge is material information even if it can never be delimited to its own terms however much it may insist. Your final ideas, then, strike me as slightly misleading. Things do not differ from themselves they are the dynamic relations of forceful differencing that appear within a locality: thus the vortex.
August 20, 2010 at 10:04 am
Levi, you are on the button regarding oft-neglected Derrida’s anti-holism. As you say, if texts are iterable outside any historically given context (including a language or conceptual system) then they cannot be constituted by their inclusion in it.
I’m less confident about the claim that objects are a necessary condition of change if only because this is a problem for which the metaphysical solutions seem underdetermined. Most realists concede that there no a priori intuition or claim to conceptual necessity to provide a secure basis for theorizing about a world whose structure may vary independently of our ideas about it. The thinness of transcendental reasoning is probably one of the best arguments for realism. The existence of a wholly convincing argument which uniquely entailed one ontology and trounced all the others would suggest that the world is not structurally independent of our ideas and thus that realism is false.
For example, we think of events as occurring in or as located by objects, but there is no conceptual necessity, I know of, that precludes a world of events in which nothing endures ‘to’ or ‘in which these events happen. In an event-world there would be change without any ontological substratum.
There might be other equally appealing or unappealing ways of dealing with change: re-describing events occurring to objects as distributions of a property or properties through a space.
August 21, 2010 at 1:51 am
[…] nonetheless exceed all relation, all interdependence, all context, all ecology. As I argued in my Ontological Turbulence and Vortex post, objects are those minimally iterable beings that both fall into relations and can depart from […]