Over at Mormon Metaphysics, Clark has an interesting post up arguing that Peirce already said all that OOP argues (Harman responds here). As Clark writes,
Which brings me to my biggest point. I just don’t see anything new in OOO. This isn’t an issue over “who got there first.” Nor is it to ignore the very real metaphysical differences between the various parties. It’s just that by and large this concern with objects especially as so broadly defined is part and parcel of pragmatism in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Relations in particular I think are handled a little better than OOO in pragmatism, if only because it pays closer attention to the kinds of relations there are. (Those in a 3rd person observer versus those which are “real” in a sense)
In response to Harman’s point that OOP begins from the ontological thesis that objects are independent of their relations, Clark, in comments, remarks that,
Objects are irreducible to any relations to other objects. Now let me temporarily lay aside the issue of whether a relation can be an object. (i.e. is “brother” in abstract an object) I think that both Derrida (as I read him, which I recognize isn’t the anti-realist way many read him in lit departments) and Peirce wouldn’t object to this. As Michael put it once, Deconstruction can’t be taken as a reduction. For Peirce this definitely is the case since Firstness can be an object for a sign. But firstness is inherently a matter just of itself. So by definition it is irreducible.
Where Peirce might object to Graham is that he allows a sign to be an object. A sign can have as its object either a matter of firstness (pure feeling or pure potential) or secondness (pure force or a pure relation) or an other sign. Now to answer Graham’s statement is a bit complex precisely because signs end up being complex in that way. I think Graham wants to say any object has an irreducible “part” that isn’t relations. But the question then might be whether this irreducible “part” can be identical with some other object’s irreducible “part.” My sense from Prince of Networks is that it can’t. But I’m not prepared to argue that just yet. (See 2)
A few points here. First, I think Clark somewhat misses the point in his suggestion that objects can be signs. Let’s recall a few things about Peirce’s semiotics. In defining signs, Peirce says that a sign is something that stands for something in some respect or capacity. Peirce further distinguishes three components of signs: 1) Sign-vehicles or that which conveys the sign (for example, smoke or the signifier “tree”), 2) the semiotic object or that which the sign stands for (for example, fire in the case of smoke, and an actual tree in the case of the signifier “tree”), and 3) the interpretant or that which links the two to one another.
read on!
Now, the point to note here is that within the framework of OOO, an object does not stand for anything. An object is an individual substance that exists in its own right. It is not something that stands for something else. In this regard, suggesting that an object can be a sign simply misses the point. The point is that objects are not relations. Were an object a sign it would have to stand for something else. Minimally this puts OOO radically at odds with Peirce’s ontology. Does this mean that OOO has to reject the existence of signs? No. It just means that signs cannot be ontologically fundamental.
In challenging Graham’s thesis about objects independent of relations, Clark comes up with the clever example of brothers. Is a brother, Clark asks, an object? If this example is challenging, then this is because predicates like “brother” seem inherently relational in character, i.e., you can’t be a brother without having siblings. Graham might disagree with me here, but I am strongly inclined to argue that brothers, indeed, are not objects. Rather, responding to a question that Jacob Russell asked me a week or so ago, I would argue that brothers are elements of an object. What’s the difference between an element and an object? An object is that which has independent existence or which is a substance in its own right. An element is that which can only exist in another object. In what object is “brother” an element? Well, a family of course. In other words, entities like brothers are parts of a larger scale object. In this regard, we should not confuse persons with brothers.
Clark appeals to Peirce’s category of “firstness” to defend the thesis that Peirce had already done the work of OOO. In my view, this doesn’t work. Peirce’s categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness describe degrees of relation. Firstness is absolute non-relation or the absence of all relation. Secondness consists of dyadic relations, the introduction of the first distinction in the world. Thirdness consists of triadic relations, e.g., the structure of every sign. First, Peirce tends to describe firstness as a mythological posit that thought has to posit but that does not exist. Clearly OOO is not making such a claim about objects. Second, in his discussions of firstness, Peirce speaks of firstness as quality without distinction. For example, he asks us to imagine a universe that consisted of a single musical note, unwavering, unchanging, for all eternity. Firstness would be pure quality without difference. Clearly OOO’s objects cannot be equated with such a thing as they are individuals and therefore distinct, whereas firstness is absolutely without distinction.
Now Clark might rejoin that Peirce argues that signs such as icons are characterized by firstness by virtue of the fact that they signify through quality or a resemblance to what they stand for. Yes, this is true. However, this would ignore the fact that these signs are forms of firstness that contain thirdness within them, i.e., they stand for something in some respect or capacity. Yet this is exactly what objects do not do. Objects don’t stand for anything. Clark might then argue that objects must fall under the category of secondness because, insofar as they are individuals, they must be distinguished from other objects. That is, they must be based on a dyadic relation between themselves and everything else. However, this doesn’t work either because OOO’s objects are independent of every context and are irreducible to context (my arguments for this will become clearer with the release of The Democracy of Objects).
One final point. Clark argues that Graham has an inadequate account of time. I agree that there’s a lot more work to do in discussions of time and space, but it simply is not true that Graham treats time as a milieu or container in which objects exist. For Graham, time and space arises from objects, objects are not in time. Clark rejects Graham’s account of time because, he says, he is sympathetic to Einstein. However, it is difficult for me to see how Graham’s account of time isn’t perfectly consistent with Einstein’s account of time. Einstein says exactly the same thing: that time and space are produces of objects and how they bend space-time as a result of their mass and velocity. Now I am hesitant to say that Einstein gives the one true account of time and space. This is because I don’t think there is one account of space and time. Rather, time and space will take a variety of different forms depending on the types of objects we’re talking about, e.g., psychological time is different than social time and evolutionary time and physical time and so on. However, the point remains that OOO does not treat space and time as containers in which objects exist. Exactly the reverse.
Larval Subjects . 
August 28, 2010 at 3:24 am
Must an object always be complex? In that it’s manifestations are not reducible to relations–that is, to perceptions… but are an always limited set of manifestation of its powers… can an object be … what’s the word? monadic? A singularity? Or is it assumed that all objects, qua objects, are complex… if not at a given point in time, in their capacity for generational evolution?
August 28, 2010 at 3:27 am
… and I would add, doesn’t the power to evolve assume internal complexity?
August 28, 2010 at 4:48 am
[…] August 28, 2010 You can read it HERE. […]
August 28, 2010 at 11:01 am
How about the object in extension/actuality being a sign for the rest of the withdrawn object?
Or to put in other terms,
1) extension = sign vehicle
2)OOP object = what extension stands for, its sending
3)internal process = “interpretant”
Will.
August 28, 2010 at 11:59 am
you write
“Were an object a sign it would have to stand for something else. Minimally this puts OOO radically at odds with Peirce’s ontology. Does this mean that OOO has to reject the existence of signs? No. It just means that signs cannot be ontologically fundamental.”
I’ve been trying to figure out how you practice your OOO, so please excuse that I won’t stay with the relationship OOO-Peirce specifically, but rather shift out from the expression “ontologically fundamental”.
on the one hand you seem to be very democratic about granting reality to things (which I have come to use as a provisional master category for emergent knottings of real, human or not) and that is something I very much admire. in that sense I see OOO in kinship with ANT, post-ANT, feminist STS and perhaps most explicitly what has been termed a turn to ontology in the science studies nexus. these people are also using the o-word and some might even use objects and relations as master-categories. many would also grant a thorough realness to the most elaborate and eclectic Latour-litanies. signs could be in there.
from my understanding many of these peoples projects are as much interested in the cases as they are interested in ontology (or social theory if we, with Latour allow the social to mean the movement of association). science studies works only through empirical case studies some would say, and a common rationale for this would be that one will miss the twists and turns of the real if one tries to fix ahead of study what could be “ontologically fundamental”. when studying the sciences this is arguably a necessary stance, because how “objects”, “facts” or any new thing emerges and makes-do with us and other things is anybody’s guess really. the stories seem to be that mindblowingly contingent. from studying the sciences there has been a movement outward towards studying all kinds of other things the last ten years. by these studies doing “empirical metaphysics” the emergence of realities begins to look like a very contingent happening, whether it be doing politics, business, organizations, bodies, diseases and so on. all of these are being talked about in the plural and with lower-case initials now.. deciding the who/what and how beforehand is by many considered as desensitizing to an empirical registering the creativity of things, the emerging real, towards real times by congregating things.
now you probably know where this is going, so I’ll just flat out ask: how do you go about producing your sense of “ontological fundamentals”? am I correct in the impression that you see your project as working towards categories that can inventory fundamentally different modes of the real? what would you say is your method for taking inventory? do you do a lot of thought experiments? do you read many case studies? could you see OOO-philosophers doing ethnography?
I’m aware I’ll probably get some answers in “A Democracy of Objects”, but these questions have been in the back of my head me for quite some time. I’m not a professional philosopher, so I hope I’m not breaking too many rules of etiquette here in trying to compare “method” across “disciplines”. I do find your writing very inspiring to think with, it is just that this other (STS-) side of me is skeptical towards inventorying by any other mode than minutely historical inquiry that maximizes the possibilities of being surprised by what/who emerges and how, in (or rather with) real-times. I guess I’m most afraid of loosing out of sight the urgent creativity I see in emerging real-times.
thanks, and I’m very much looking forward to reading “A Democracy..”.
August 28, 2010 at 2:32 pm
[…] and Harman on OOO and Pragmatism In particular, Bryant and Harman are taking on the argument that Pierce got to OOO […]
August 28, 2010 at 4:22 pm
stefan:
I would take a look at Levi’s posts about Bhaskar and transcendental realism. I think this might answer many of your questions as to how he has come to the conclusion of “objects.”
Also I don’t see much in the way of “inventory” in OOO. The opposite, if anything: it seeks the broadest, a priori structures of anything at all that is real, if anything is real. Apart from Graham’s distinction of real and sensual, which is immensely broad and deliberately abstract so as to encompass any particular object, I don’t really see OOO as “inventorying different modes of the real,” as for OOO if it is real, it’s an object, tout court. This does not mean that OOO prescribes what is real, which I think many readers seem to think it is doing (Chris Vitale, for instance). OOO is not essentially an empirical investigation into what objects are real, but how an object, if real, must exist — what are its minimal ontological requirements? Levi will surely be able to speak on behalf of his own philosophy, but as a fan of OOO, I am not sure what “fundamentally different modes of the real” could mean for such an ontology. In Graham there are two, and in Levi there is one mode of the real.
August 28, 2010 at 5:05 pm
To represent Peirce is always of necessity to misrepresent him as his positions changed to a significant degree. Still most of the characterizations here comport with his average positions. Still, when you say that the dif between OOO and P is that his objects are relational and yours are not, I would like to hear more about icons, the firsts. As you know and note, he claims these are non-relational: they are — for him — themselves. This self reliance seems to be shared with an OOP object. Still, the picture is different. P wished, I think, to preserve certainty without eschewing the complexity of experience or relying on the hermetic of structure. He picks icons because they are for him self evident entities. They preserve the quality of the apodictic while not being purely ideal. They have for him an immanence which is resident. I think this too is shared by OOP — but you tell me. However, P was at some pains to point out that whatever icons as self sufficient objects have “per se,” it was qualified “in use.” Thus if the redness of apple was not a representation but an extant thingness, as soon as we saw it became an apple ( an index as natural synecdoche or mereology) or a sign of the Fall (a symbol), its firstness was no longer at hand. I am not sure OOP has the same humility.
August 28, 2010 at 7:28 pm
I was just doing some reading of Larval Subjects from when it first began — many fascinating topics ranging from Hegel to Lacan to Nietzsche to Kant, and I just quickly wanted to address something that many people have said about LS and OOO in particular. I, myself, find that OOO is a continuation of the work that Levi has been doing all along on this blog. No doubt it is in the form of Latour’s industrial nonmodernity — aleatory encounters, as he calls it, create vastly different trajectories here and there, branching into dark, shadowy areas. But, I think that OOO is still a consistent and thorough implication of the death of God and the death of ontotheology in the broadest sense. In fact, it is more Žižek than Žižek because in his work you still have a profound sense of a human exception to an otherwise indifferent and relatively “stupid” universe, a universe in which the human subject is a break and a wound in the fabric of things (Žižek is very complex, and this is a very distorting generalization, but one I think that is still in line with the spirit of his work). I think one of the most prosaically revealing moments of Žižek’s is in the very opening of the documentary about him, Žižek! (2005), in which he says that his intuitive, spontaneous sense of reality is that things are “out there,” are produced by a kind of imbalance or catastrophe and that philosophy is essentially a kind of narcissism. What is correlationism if not an intelligent, ontological narcissism? The difficulty, says OOO, with this narcissism is not its truth as much as its place in philosophy. The key is to finally de-exceptionalize the exception. For OOO, every single object is an exceptional rupture, a disconnected organization that is not grounded in another more fundamental entity. Everything in the universe is suspended in a kind of void, not just the human. Reading through this blog, you get a nice sense of this trajectory — the death of God is so thorough that it can’t even be a privileged human experience, for even that would itself remain a negative exception to the backdrop of the cosmos. No, the God of all objects is dead, and OOO follows through what a liberation of existence this has for all things at all scales of existence, some we are vaguely aware of, some that we will probably never even know we are ignorant of. I love Žižek’s writings and always will, but isn’t the next step in the death of God to grant objects their fully deserved autonomy from any perspective, be it a god or a human? True, we can only hint at, suggest and tentatively deduce what such an autonomy would be, but isn’t that the point? By denying a substantial thing-in-itself, we elevate our knowledges to a transcendent level. OOO lives in that netherworld between agnosticism and atheism of the object in a way that few philosophies have been comfortable — no, we have no direct vision of what an object is, but we must affirm that they exist, and this is what they need to do so independently of us and each other.
Not sure what this post has to do with Pierce, but this had been on my mind and this seems like a good a place as any.
August 28, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Peirce does not make such a claim about icons. Icons are still, for Peirce, signs and as such relational entities. They are signs that stand for something else by virtue of a resemblance to that thing.
August 28, 2010 at 10:31 pm
Stefan,
I’m more or less on board with ANT. For me the aim is not to give an exhaustive list of the sorts of objects that exist, but to blunt the obsessive focus on how humans project meanings on to objects, attending also to how nonhuman objects contribute to collectives. In many respects I see OOO as articulating the ontology presupposed by ANT.
August 28, 2010 at 10:56 pm
(Haven’t read the comments yet)
My point about objects is not to reduce everything to signs (thirdness) but to note that for Peirce there isn’t merely thirdness but also secondness and firstness. For Peirce an object is one part of a sign but the object of a sign can be an other sign but need not be.
I’ll hold off saying more until I get to my posts going into more detail. As you might imagine one shouldn’t read too much into a brief one sentence reply to each of Graham’s points.
August 28, 2010 at 10:58 pm
BTW- on time I reread the section after Graham posted that note saying I’d read him completely wrong. I *think* I see why he says this. I was making a distinction between psychological time (applied in a more general way to objects) and physical time. There are I think some good reasons to misread him here. With his comments and rereading I think I see what he’s getting at, but frankly it’s not a terribly clear section. Maybe if I were coming from Guerilla Metaphysics and Tool-Being it might be easier to read. Again though let me finish my post where I’ll make more detailed comments. (And of course the point of my post was precisely to see where or if I was misreading him)
August 28, 2010 at 11:38 pm
As Levi said iconicity is a sign relation although it’s a type of sign characterized by secondness. Peirce had kind of fractal relation
August 29, 2010 at 1:08 am
Levi wrote:
Yes objects are not relations, but they can stand for something. Objects provide the foundation for a relation.. Strangely, I’ve just read this:
‘In the physical world of nature, science tells us, things are just what they are:
atoms do not “stand for” other atoms, and the revolution of the earth around the
sun does not mark a new day or night for either of them. With the advent of biological
forms of physical organization, however, all of this changes: atoms in their
physical configuration as ‘odorant’ molecules do “stand for” the presence of nearby
food or potential danger.’ (Don Favareau). You can download his intro chapter to ‘Essential Readings in Biosemiotics’ here:
http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/book/978-1-4020-9649-5?detailsPage=free
August 29, 2010 at 2:34 am
Very interesting discussion. I’d like to push a bit further with Peirce’s “firsts”…
Levi writes: “First, Peirce tends to describe firstness as a mythological posit that thought has to posit but that does not exist. [emphasis added] […] Second, in his discussions of firstness, Peirce speaks of firstness as quality without distinction. For example, he asks us to imagine a universe that consisted of a single musical note, unwavering, unchanging, for all eternity. Firstness would be pure quality without difference. Clearly OOO’s objects cannot be equated with such a thing as they are individuals and therefore distinct, whereas firstness is absolutely without distinction.”
My question:
1) Could something be an “individual” and “distinct” without being an individual and distinct with respect to others? If not (and it seems to me that the definitions of these words require that the objects be differentiated from, and therefore logically related to, others), then isn’t this a form of relation, if only logical relation? In other words, objects have a side to them (the withdrawing side) that is independent and unrelated, but logically speaking they remain always related, because this is the only was we can speak or conceive of them.
Peirce’s firstness, similarly, is a form of logical (categorical) relation, as you’ve described, but in actuality a firstness is non-relational. He posits firsts as being actual things, “modes of being,” “possibilities of appearance,” but not “mythological” in any way.
Peirce:
“Firstness is the mode of being which consists in its subject’s being positively such as it is regardless of aught else. That can only be a possibility. For as long as things do not act upon one another there is no sense or meaning in saying that they have any being, unless it be that they are such in themselves that they may perhaps come into relation with others. The mode of being a redness, before anything in the universe was yet red, was nevertheless a positive qualitative possibility. And redness in itself, even if it be embodied, is something positive and sui generis. That I call Firstness. We naturally attribute Firstness to outward objects, that is we suppose they have capacities in themselves which may or may not be already actualized, which may or may not ever be actualized, although we can know nothing of such possibilities [except] so far as they are actualized.” (Lowell Lectures, CP 1.25, 1903)
“The first must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be fresh and new, for if old it is second to its former state. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation; it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown! What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence — that is first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it.” (A Guess at the Riddle, CP 1.356-357, 1890)
The latter makes it sound as if a first, to be a first, must be something original, fresh, spontaneous, etc., to an other; but in fact once it is anything to another, it is so because it has become a second. What Peirce is trying to capture with the concept of firstness is not merely “mythological”; it is quite real, but it is a reality uncapturable by words or concepts. (The word “firstness” points to the thing without capturing it, like the Zen finger pointing at the moon; it is the finger that is doing the pointing, but this doesn’t eliminate the reality of the moon.) Firstness is a relational concept, but the actual firstness is real, if ungraspable.
Isn’t this what OOO is getting at with its perpetually withdrawing objects? Peirce would say that it is the firstness of an object that withdraws as the object enters into secondness and thirdness – which any actuality (i.e. relationality) has done. But the virtuality (which is real, not mythological; ontological and not just epistemological) remains an unrelated “first.”
Just thinking out loud…
August 29, 2010 at 3:26 am
A quick comment. I’m not sure describing this as a “challenge” is right. I’m honestly confused on a few issues – primarily the nature of relations. This was more a question designed to help me understand the nature of relation. I just did a third reading of the “Questions” section of Prince of Networks which helped a bit more. More and more though I think there is an equivocation over relations though.
Regarding your other points, I think you missed what I was more or less saying. However that’s not surprising since my comments were more akin to a table of contents outlining my future responses. For Peirce objects (as he uses the term) can be firstness, secondness or thirdness. The types of entities we talk about are probably best seen as having all three elements. So I am a sign (thirdness) but I’m also an actor (secondness) and yet there’s something about me independent of external relations (firstness).
There’s a lot to say here, and it’ll just have to hold on. I had a comment written (14) but it appears to have been cut off somehow. What I was saying is that Peirce has a kind of fractal nature to his categories. Thus signs (thirdness) can be broken down into three kinds of signs: icons (firstness), indexes (secondness), symbols (thirdness). The same thing goes on with his logic and phenomenology. So Peirce can be talking about firstness but unless one is clear about what kind of firstness he’s talking about one has to be careful. Often for instance firstness is feeling or pure qualities. Typically when speaking of metaphysics he means by firstness pure potential since it is not actual, can’t enter into relations as such. However one might criticize this since by potential he means potential to do things which would appear to be something other than firstness. I’d agree this is confusing and perhaps a valid place of criticism. I suspect Peirce’s response would be to break out logic and request we be clear about what we are talking about. If it requires one term, it’s firstness; two terms then secondness; three or more terms then thirdness.
Dan, while Peirce’s positions did change by his mature period (1893 onward) he was pretty consistent. Many would say on major points he was pretty consistent from the 1860’s to his death but that’s a major point of contention right now. (See the controversy over Tom Short’s book – especially Joseph Randsdell’s rejoinder) I confess that I tend to see there as being much more consistency than change. But even I’d admit development on some points. I tend to primarily read the mature texts though as I find those most valuable.
I think this is different from Graham’s sense of objects but probably much closer to your own. (Although I’m going out of my way to not guess too much as to your form of OOO until I read your forthcoming book – but I know actuality vs. virtuality is a big difference between you two)
August 30, 2010 at 4:58 pm
[…] this post is also keyed into the latest debates between the ‘G’ man , Levi on one side and numerous bloggers on the other, arguing that OOO is nothing new and has been […]
August 31, 2010 at 10:41 pm
[…] I mentioned I’ve not had time to respond to Levi’s post on OOP and pragmatism beyond a few brief comments. I hope to finish that up tonight. I’ve just been really busy […]