Apropos my last my last post I wanted to draw attention to a recent post by Adrian. Adrian writes:
This insistence that the very things we think of as lifeless objects are actually most alive, vibrant, shimmering, and ungraspable, is what makes OOO’s claims so radical and exciting. And yet it’s also what leads so easily to misunderstandings. It seems to me that the difference between objectological (Bryant, Harman, Bogost) and relational (Vitale, Shaviro, me to the extent that I’ve articulated it, et al) ontologies is not ultimately that great, but the strategy of articulating these ontologies makes them seem more different than they are. Graham, for instance, has often argued that processual and relational languages have had their day, the implication being that they haven’t done as much as an object-oriented approach can do. But I think that processual language (of the kind that Chris is expressing in his post) does a better job of reminding us why things withdraw. Speaking in terms of objects (Paris, umbrellas, train whistles, etc.) makes it too easy to fall back into the common-sense understanding that these things are just are the things that make up the world, and that their relations (and the processes by which these relations unfold) are secondary. Graham and Levi adamantly and articulately argue that this isn’t the case, that relations aren’t secondary. But habits of thought are difficult to change. Just because relational languages have been used by some philosophers to talk about some things (discourse, text, etc) doesn’t mean that they have been exhausted and found wanting when it comes to understanding ontology.
I agree with Adrian’s point about language and how we speak, but I’d prefer to say that it is relational and processual thought that has become a habit that prevents us from thinking, not object-oriented thought. For the last century we’ve repeatedly said “things are related” to such a degree that claims about interdependence, relation, and interconnection have lost a good deal of meaning. As Nietzsche might say, these have become stale metaphors and worn coins. I believe that one of OOO’s challenges is the question of what we might learn if, rather than treating “relation”, “interconnection”, “interdependence” as our “God-terms” or master-signifiers, we treated “object” and “substance” as our master-signifiers. Rather than beginning with relation, context, interdependence, interconnection, etc., what would we learn if we instead thought of autonomous objects perpetually shifting and jumping between relations? My wager is that this would teach us a great deal more in the ecological framework than endless talk of holism and relation. We would begin to ask how substances perturb networks, rather than treating networks as static and fixed systems where all is harmonious and balanced as we tend to do now.
Larval Subjects . 
August 21, 2010 at 11:48 am
Language is a concern, but in the realm of philosophy we are already out of step with any kind of commonsensical or quotidian use of words. We have to weave words together, most of which are also busy doing other work, so to speak, outside of philosophy. I don’t see this as a problem. Heidegger’s being-there, Kant’s intuition, Badiou’s event, etc, etc — no one but the absolutely uninitiated in philosophy would take these terms to connote a “commonsensical” or “everyday” meaning, right? If anything, we need to be wary of the usage of our language within the world of philosophy itself to make sure that concepts like objects and substances are compared and contrasted with previous philosophical usage, something that OOO has been doing all along and will continue to do with greater refinement and subtilization, I am sure. Also, I am usually unconvinced by claims that, simply because the possibility exists that some people might take it to mean this or that, we should avoid use of the words object, substance, essence, etc. That seems to be a dubious argument. If people are reading this blog and other blogs and interested in SR and philosophy in the first place, they should know that words work differently in different places, and that sometimes you have to just suspend your understanding and take the author’s word for it till it is given some concrete shape or contour. In this regard, and “with all due respect,” (I truly hate that phrase) no one who understands Levi and Graham’s use of object would take it to be commonsensical, quotidian, obvious, static or anything of the like.
There are so many things wrong with this charge of “commonsense.” To begin with, what people take to be “objects” in the commonsense world are what Graham would call sensual objects and what Levi might describe as local manifestations. The commonsense idea is that if I see or perceive something, that’s an object or a thing — this is obviously not the real object in either Graham or Levi. So, already we are beyond the everyday, “folk” idea of object. After that, the object just gets weirder and weirder.
Secondly, I think Levi and Graham provide a superior understanding of relations than the relationists do. They can distinguish relations that take place internal to a thing and relations that take place external to it — if you don’t distinguish this, then neither our experience nor our sciences nor our practices make much sense. Neither does our very ability to think or isolate things in the first place. A reality that has no interiors and only external relations does not match up with the reality we experiment and deduce with our various resources. Levi’s use of Bhaskar beautifully illustrates this truth (he spends considerable time with this in his book, but also here on his blog in several places). Pure relationism asks too much of its relations, that they should conjure up the kaleidoscopic differences at all scales of reality out of nothing but a deferral of relational effects: it doesn’t work. Hallward, in various debates with Graham, wants the relational effects of capitalism to construct the commodity water out of nothing — without a concept of something like an object, relations become quasi-divine, somehow creating its own disparate parts which can be separated from it (only to be, I imagine, equally created from nothing by a neighboring regime of relation). (Though here it gets very complex, as the commodity is created from the capitalist relations, yet is also an object with interior and exterior relations of its own within the system of capitalism.)
In any case, I don’t see the danger in using the word “object,” but there is a danger in not having an equivalent of it in our philosophical explanation of the world.
August 21, 2010 at 4:25 pm
To Joseph – Who are the relationists that make no distinction between internal and external relations? You mention Hallward, and if he denies the existence of water (as a specific set of relations and properties found in specific forms, etc.), which I doubt he does, would be one. But relationists, if they actually study existing relational processes, should be able to distinguish between internal and external relations for the kinds of relational processes (“objects”) that have a clear boundary between the two, as well as between all other kinds of relations for relational processes that might not. Some “objects,” such as artificially (humanly) manufactured objects, lend themselves better than other objects (bacteria, electrical currents, and the like) to such simple distinctions.
But the presumption that relationists make no such distinctions, as if a relational world was one in which all relations were identical to each other, leaving us with a big undifferentiated stew, seems like a straw figure for object-oriented ontologists to define themselves over and against. Even someone who’s main focus is capitalism makes a distinction between a society thoroughly (re)shaped by capitalism and another one that is not, and that therefore is capitalism’s “outside.” Capitalism, in that case, is the object that’s being attended to; but it’s certainly not the only object in the universe.
August 21, 2010 at 11:01 pm
[…] make a place for substance within ones ontology. In the comments section of one of my posts, Adrian writes: Who are the relationists that make no distinction between internal and external relations? You […]