Adrian has another post up responding to some remarks I made earlier, focusing, in particular, on a remark I made about mice. In my post on the externality of relations I wrote that a mouse launched into outer space thereby dying as a result of falling into a vacuum is still a mouse. Just as Sylvester the Cat from Loony Toons liked to say “I love those meeces to pieces!”, I confess that I am deeply tickled by the example of “meeces” in space (I wish I’d come up with this example first, but unfortunately Morton beat me to it in Ecology Without Nature). Here I was pleased to see that our brilliant brat (her term, not mine) and outstanding novelist, Francis Madeson caught the joke. Quoting me, Madeson goes on to write:
“That local manifestation is dependent on relations to be sure, but the substantiality of the mouse remains, though perhaps it has lost some of its singularities.”
This may be the drollest understatement ever. Angry and pretentious? Au contraire, Paul. Joyful and life affirming. Some of us can and do learn necessary profundities from roadkill.
Quite right. Ivikhiv, however, finds this example deeply troubling (as it’s intended to be… not to mention strange!) and a symptom of what is wrong with triple-o. As Adrian writes in his most recent post,
To make a larger point about what Whiteheadians and other process-relational folks find most attractive about that tradition, which is, in part, the way it subverts a very prominent and well established way of thinking about the universe (which I characterized as Newtonian) and, in turn, proposes a fundamentally different one. In that different view, I don’t think it would be possible to say that a mouse shot out into space is still a mouse, because the definition of a mouse would include the kinds of processes (or “procedures”, to use Bogost’s term) that make up mouseness, and that mouse would no longer have any of them. It’s mouse-like form would start decaying quickly, and any internality that was characteristic of the mouse as a whole would no longer be there. To put it in OOO terms, once that internality has withdrawn from the mouse, it has withdrawn for good. (Of course, we can argue about whether the mouse’s fur, its teeth, its spleen, etc., have their own internalities, their own withdrawability. Whitehead would probably say that the “society,” the mouse assemblage, is no longer there, but that other actual occasions may continue. Those don’t constitute a mouse — except for someone looking at it from the outside who thinks it’s a mouse because it still has fur, teeth, and other mouse-like features, for a while.)
My thesis, of course, is such a claim confuses a quality of a mouse with the substantiality of a mouse. What is the mouse argument designed to do? It is designed to show that the existence of mice is dependent on a set of relations to a milieu. The idea is that in order for a mouse to be a mouse, there must be oxygen, a certain sort of gravity, a certain range of temperatures, etc. If the mouse’s being, in order to be a mouse, is dependent on all of these relations to other objects, then the being of the mouse is inextricably bound up with relations such that it cannot exist apart from these relations.
read on!
My rejoinder is that no, life doesn’t constitute the substantiality of a mouse, but is only a quality or local manifestation of objects. As I argued in my previous post, local manifestations are relational through and through. Ivakhiv will find no argument from me against the thesis that the local manifestation of life as a quality is dependent on all sorts of relations with other objects. However, it doesn’t follow from this that life constitutes the substantiality of our poor mouse. Life is just a quality— a local manifestation –that those substances known as meeces might happen to actualize.
Now I realize all of this is very strange. Perhaps I wouldn’t be inclined to make such odd remarks if my mother hadn’t died on the operating table and come back to life (in her near death experience, being a good Catholic girl, she went to hell, not heaven) and if my partner didn’t regularly bring people back to life on the operating table in her medical work. Moreover, perhaps I wouldn’t be inclined to say this if I weren’t aware that scientists have learned how to kill frogs and bring them back to life after they are dead. Indeed, I wouldn’t be inclined to say such things if I weren’t aware that people who die from hypothermia are later brought back to life. Yet I am aware that all of these things take place. Metaphysically we must account for this possibility. And unless Ivakhiv wishes to argue that my mother is no longer my mother because life constitutes the substantiality of her being, she died, and therefore lost her being, then I would hope he would concede that life is a local manifestation of certain substances and not a predicate of the virtual proper being of substances. “You attacking my mum, Ivakhiv?!? You callin’ my mum a zombie?!?” (shakes fist).
Now notice that Adrian seems to conflate two distinct issues: the temporal endurance of objects and their substantiality. Adrian rightly points out that a dead mouse begins to degenerate rather quickly (in my language, it falls prey, in most circumstances where it has locally manifested itself as dead (when frozen this isn’t necessarily the case), very quickly to entropy). Therefore, unless a substances that has locally manifested itself as dead is a tardegrade or preserved in optimal cryogenic states, the window in which it can locally manifest itself as alive once again is very small. However, it’s important to note that the time-scale in which a substance endures has no bearing in whether or not a substance is, in fact, a substance. Substances can come into being and pass out of being in instances beneath the minimal thinkable or experienciable time, but are no less substances for that. The fact that the “half-life” of mice might be very short once they no longer locally manifest the quality of life has no bearing on whether or not the mouse remains that mouse substance after it has ceased to be alive. As I’ve argued, objects are perpetually disintegrating or fighting entropy. All Ivakhiv’s point entails is that our poor former mouse has now become a plurality of substances.
Additionally, and Ian, no doubt, will chime in here if I’ve gotten him wrong, the operational perspective, the thesis that the internal world of objects is composed of operations, is different than the thesis that objects are operating. Inasmuch as I understand Bogost, the thesis is only that objects are composed of operations. This, however, is a far cry from the thesis that objects are operating. These operations, perhaps, would be what I call “virtual proper being” (Ian suggested that there’s a close proximity between us in his Claremont talk). But it is not the case that an object must be operating to have operations. Qua substance, my computer is no less a computer when it is turned off than when it is turned on. Rather, at this point we would say that the operations of the object are dormant. Indeed, it is because the operations of an object can be dormant, because an object contains submergent qualities, that we need to engage in experimentalism. As Spinoza says, we don’t know what an object can do.
For my money– and, of course, I’m partial –object-oriented ontology actually does a better job of thinking relations than process relational views. I’ve made this argument to Ivakhiv on a number of occasions, but so far he hasn’t bitten. If this is the case, then it is because the careful separation of the substantiality of substance and local manifestation encourages us to attend to what relations make a difference and how they make a difference. And, as I argued in my externality of relations post, the relationists were right to draw our attention to the role played by relations in local manifestations, underlining the manner in which properties aren’t intrinsic features of a substance in the old subject/predicate logic, yet wrong to thereby reduce substances to their relations. What I’ve tried to suggest to my friend Adrian in the past is a subtle change of emphasis. In these debates I’ve tried to argue that the concern of ecology is not relation per se, but rather those relations that make a difference. If we look at the practice of ecotheorists (as opposed to their theorizations of their practice), we see them exploring not relations as such, but rather what local manifestations take place when relations are shifted. For example, the ecologist is interested in what changes or local manifestations occur when natural gas is released into a particular creek or drinking water. Yet here what we’re interested in is a split between virtual proper being and local manifestations, or the demonic powers unleashed when a substance enters into new relations. Process relational thought ends up obscuring all this by virtue of treating objects as relational from the outset and through the vacuous claim that everything is related to everything else, turning us away from the experimentalist perspective that asks us to attend to what local manifestations occur when these relations come into being.
December 10, 2010 at 12:04 am
Zombie mothers? Space mice? Well, now you’ve done it…
Seriously, this is great stuff, and a sorely needed response to relationism. I completely agree with you that if one goes so far to equate being with processes, then you move inevitably towards a total, unified Heideggerian system of world. But the mouse-being, its substance or virtual proper being, isn’t withdrawn into a hot, pitiless sun or smashed to bits against a cold meteor — it’s simply crushed and destroyed. (Precisely because it was something to be destroyed, to be crushed, to be tortured — not an endless stream of processes and parts.) The particles that remain scattered throughout the solar system of that mouse (psh, I hope its name was Mickey), are no longer parts of that mouse, so the star that absorbs them or the meteorite that flattens them isn’t partially a mouse. It knows nothing of mouse-being — because the universe isn’t a priori connected.
I think a huge difference between the relationist sense of things and triple-o is this difficulty in identifying, ontologically, something other than parts — that an object, in a very real sense, isn’t any of its parts at all. This is withdrawal, this is the transcendence of form, of the impossibility of direct contact with substance. We don’t really know what substance is — this elusive poltergeist — but the alternative is less workable, that is, of no alterity to process or relation.
Just reiterating your thoughts. The conference and the wake of conversations since then has been a lot of fun for me. Thank you.
December 10, 2010 at 4:38 am
[…] Here and Levi’s response and another response […]
December 10, 2010 at 5:44 am
Thanks for clarifying the difference between OOO and Process relational views where “the relationists were right to draw our attention to the role played by relations in local manifestations, underlining the manner in which properties aren’t intrinsic features of a substance in the old subject/predicate logic, yet wrong to thereby reduce substances to their relations.”
That is a fine point most miss. I appreciate the clarity of your thought, it has helped me along the way in my own divagations. :)
December 10, 2010 at 12:37 pm
very interesting post. love the writing and the meeces. I also feel closer to your thinking because you so clearly make room for history and thinking the etho-ecological. I am not so sure though that process-relational thinking is as much a universe-is-one pushover as you seem to imply towards the end. Whitehead for example is not a holist as I read him, but much closer to the pluriversalist modesty of James. I might be seduced to argue that the actual occasion is an inherently experimental event.
December 10, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Hi Levi,
Fascinating post. The question I have when after reading this is (and forgive me if you’ve answered this in a recent post), at what point does the substance mouse cease to be the substance mouse? Is there a point during decomposition at which what was a mouse no longer is a mouse?
December 10, 2010 at 2:04 pm
[…] his next post, Levi writes: it doesn’t follow from this that life constitutes the substantiality of our poor […]
December 10, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Levi, statements like this:
and this:
seem to suggest that “virtual proper being” is the equivalent a soul: A non-manifest remainder that exists beyond the embodies enduring entity.
Am i wrong?
December 10, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Michael,
No it’s not a soul. Substances can be destroyed. Hence the reference to half-lives. This is reason we have refrigerarors for our food. They slow down that cirtual proper being. Although she had a near death experience I don’t think there’s anything supernatural about such experiences.
December 10, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Ok, i think i get what you mean – but I wonder if the question ever arises for you about just how many ‘qualities’ need to be lost before an object can be said to have crossed the threshold from substantiality (territorialization) to mere ‘plurality of substances’ (deterritorialization)?
Could we not conclude that if an object reaches a certain ‘tipping point’ in its local manifestation it begins to empty its qualities out into the world, and relinquish it’s substantial withdrawnness..?
And if substances can be destroyed by the loss of manifest qualities then isn’t it more appropriate to assign substantiality to an entity’s actual ‘local manifestation’?
December 10, 2010 at 6:21 pm
I guess I wasn’t really referring to the supposed eternal nature of ‘souls’, but rather the immaterial, non-manifest quality, which, for me, seems to resemble the kind of ontologically withdrawn virtual beingness you advocate.
If virtual proper being is split from its local manifestations where does such substantiality ‘exist’? Isn’t the material-energetic constituents of an entity the primary nexus where it is vulnerable to being changed, encountered or destroyed?
December 10, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Michael,
All virtuality refers to is the power of something to do something. There’s nothing immaterial about it. Take the example of an unlit match. The match has the power to burn but is not burning now. Powers, of course, differ from any of the qualities that powers produce. The split nature of an object is not a physical split, but is a formal split like the difference between color and shape. There’s no such thing as a color that is not in a shape, nor a shape that is without color, but color and shape are nonetheless distinct. Likewise, virtual proper being never exists apart from an object but is nonetheless distinct from any of its manifestations.
How can an object be destroyed or lose its virtual proper being? Clearly through the destruction of its parts. My mother could be revived because her parts had not yet decayed. Perhaps we could have even frozen her for a while. Because her parts had not decayed her cells still had the capacity to operate, even thoughthey weren’t operating. They retained the power of life, just not the local manifestation of life. Had she been left on the operating table with no intervention she would have lost that power because entropy would have set in. In that instance she would no longer be the substance that she is but would have become another substance(s).
I object to the thesis that objects are their qualities or local manifestations because objects are always capable of doing more than they are doing at any given point in time. The reduction of objects to qualities is a variant of actualism that ignores the being of objects as power.
December 10, 2010 at 9:03 pm
I think I finally get what you mean Levi, thanks for that – and your patience in this regard.
I especially appreciate this statement:
However, using your example, how can color or shape be distinct from their manifestations? If “virtual proper being never exists apart from an object” then maybe virtual proper being (as potentiality) should instead be considered a distinct element embodied within a manifest (actual?) entity. Thus, substantiality could be the simultaneous occurrence of manifestation and potentiality in the same actual-immanent object, non?
December 10, 2010 at 9:11 pm
I wonder, could there be a post-formal philosophy of objects then?
If the distinction between actual (manifest) and withdrawn (virtual) is formal distiction of aspects inherent to a real object, then maybe there is something to be said about a type of post-formal speculative approach to concrete situations?
For example Michael Basseches (1980, 1984) argues that post-formal thinkers use the idea of form rather than the idea of thing. ‘Forms’ are structures whose fundamental function is to change. As such, forms have system-like properties. Whereas ‘Things’ are characterized as structures whose fundamental function is to maintain their stability or identity. They have the properties of simple, linear, causal models seen in formal operations. According to Basseches, Richard, Michael Commons and other developmental psychologists, for post-formal thinking – as opposed to the formal thinking that precedes it (cf. Piaget) – onto-structure can never be temporally crystallized.
See:
Basseches, M. A. (1980). ‘Dialectical schemata: A Framework for the Empirical Study of the Development of Dialectical Thinking.’ Human Development, 23, 400-421.
Basseches, M. A. (1984). ‘Dialectical thinking as a metasystematic form of cognitive organization.’ In M. L. Commons, F. A. Richards, and C. Armon (Eds.), Beyond formal operations: Late adolescent and adult cognitive development. (pp. 216-257). New York: Praeger.
Commons, M. L., & Richards, F. A. (1984). A general model of stage theory. In M. L. Commons, F. A. Richards, & C. Armon (Eds.), Beyond formal operations: Vol. 1. Late adolescent and adult cognitive development (pp. 120-140). New York: Praeger.
Commons, M. L., Richards, F. A. & Kuhn, D. (1982). Systematic and Metasystematic Reasoning: A Case for Levels of Reasoning Beyond Piaget’s Stage of Formal Operations. Child Development, 53, 1058-1068.
December 10, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Michael,
I should have been clearer. I draw the concept of formal distinction from Deleuze. It doesn’t have anything to do with forms. Deleuze distinguishes between two types of distincts: formal and numerical distinctions. Two things are numerically distinct if they can exist apart from one another, while two things are formally distinct if they are really distinct but cannot exist apart from one another. You and I are numerically distinct but not formally distinct. Color and shape are formally distinct insofar as every shape has a color and every color occurs in a shape, but nonetheless shape is not color and color is not shape.
You seem to work from the premise that real and actual are synonyms. For me potentials are real but not actual. I am sitting right now but have the power or potential to stand. These powers or potentials are withdrawn virtual being.
December 10, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Morover, for me it is possible for a being to not be manifest at all and still be thoroughly real. Manifestation is not a condition for being real.
December 11, 2010 at 9:48 pm
[…] on to the meece debate between Adrian and Levi, which I think is essential here. Is it still a mouse if shot into […]
December 12, 2010 at 2:01 am
[…] the economic, social, and technological system, we can also add climate. Just as the poor mouse was dependent on an external milieu to locally manifest itself as alive, these relations among […]
December 13, 2010 at 8:27 pm
I think we have come to the crux here. For me anything real is manifest and therefore actual. Whatever is not manifest is either fantasy or latent in the actual constitution (properties, qualities, substantiality) of an assemblage (object). What you call ‘virtual proper being’, then, I call capacity – and not necessarily ‘potential’, because for me ‘potential’ is not a thing, it is neither real nor actual, but rather a human abstraction of what could be from what currently is. (and elsewhere I have said that potential is ‘pure difference’ but I’ll leave that for another day).
So for me the notion that some hidden metaphysical power lies somehow mysteriously ‘inside’, or in excess of the actual is, from what I can tell, a folk-metaphysical idea akin to animism. Unless, that is, there is some way to access the latent ‘potential’ or powers of objects/assemblages viz. thier embodiment in the actual manifest properties or qualities. [And this is not to say that your reasons for believing in it is necessarily naïve, only that there is no empirical reason to posit potentiality or virtual proper being as somehow real of itself in my opinion.]
Alternatively, capacities are real because they are embodied in the manifest/coalesced properties of an actual entity. The power of objects are expressions of the actual-embodied capacities inherent to the specific properties of entities in particular circumstances. Thus power and potentiality are not synonymous.
When you say “I am sitting right now but have the power or potential to stand”, what you are really saying is that as an embodied system (object) you are currently endowed with the manifest capacity to stand, but are just not activating those cpacities at present. Those capacities (to stand) are not entirely withdrawn but embodied in your current state/constitution. Moreover, you are vulnerable to being de-capacitated should your material-energetic constitution be changed (intervened upon), or the situational affordances removed. To exercise real power an entity must have the capacity to do so – and that capacity is latent but manifest in the actual properties of an entity.
You write,
I can see how you might think that Levi, but I think that because actual properties are plastic and dynamic we can easily posit an immanent ‘actualism’ while also respecting the inherent (embodied) powers of things. My discussion here about embodied “capacity” should indicate why.
I also think Jane Bennett showed this quite well in ‘Vibrant Matter’ where she posited no such withdrawal at the heart of things – and instead used Spinoza’s conatus as a way into an actualist version of vitalistic theory. I also think DeLanda’s formal distinction of ‘material/expressive’ achieves the same end. Capacity is embodied and unleashed, or activated in relation. Therefore a myriad of actual properties can express a variety of behaviors or powers in a variety of situations.
December 13, 2010 at 9:25 pm
I guess given that my ontology is a folk-metaphysical animism, Michael, there’s no point in further discussion. Also, you might want to go back and check your DeLanda as he rejects actualism and the virtual is a key category of his ontology. Finally, you might recall that I referred to these powers as capacities as well. You seem to think that the virtual is something mysterious or spooky. It is those capacities. You’re confused, I think, about what the actual is. “Actual” means “present”. The qualities rendered possiboe by these capacities are not present and therefore not actual.
December 13, 2010 at 9:43 pm
Michael:
Though Levi’s book is not yet out (and it does answer all of your questions very thoroughly on this point, I think), you might check out in the meantime Harman’s Prince of Networks, especially pp 127-134, as it discusses this very problem of possibility, potential, actuality and actualism.
In a nutshell, and I think I am interpreting Levi correctly here, “virtual proper being” is entirely actual if actual means real — it isn’t abstract possibility but something concrete. The point is that it is what makes possible any qualities which manifest in relationships with other objects. When triple-o hears “manifest,” it really hears relational, since to manifest is to manifest to or for something else. The goal of triple-o is to articulate the actual without manifestation — the actual which need not appear.
December 13, 2010 at 10:48 pm
Levi I’m not saying your ontology is a folk-metaphysical animism, i’m saying the concept of potential seems to be such in general. I truly don’t mean to offend.
I also know DeLanda accepts the virtual, and that’s fine, but what I meant was that his ‘material/expressive’ formulation seems to achieve what I am suggesting about the ’embodied-properties->actual capacity->expression’ relationship.
And perhaps you are right, I might be a bit confused with what philosophers use the term ‘actual’ here? Actual for me equals manifest – whether it is given to a perceiver or not.
From the Merriam-Webster:
Dictionary.com also refers to ‘actual’ as synonymous for ‘Real’ – which it defines as “being or occurring in fact or actuality; having verifiable existence.”
The issue is I just can get a hold on what “virtual” means in your framework, or what function it serves. And the only reason I am ‘bothered’ by it is because I accept or support most everything else in your framework in its entirety. Why not this aspect?
I’m quite certain, however, that it more about me not comprehending certain key notions than an issue of your detailed explanations.
Thanks for your patience.
January 12, 2012 at 1:08 am
I’d like to know who did your mouse astronaut photo.
I’d love to put it on my website: AstronomyHumor.com
By the way I have a wonderful albino rat called Snowball.
Thanks Cristina
January 12, 2012 at 2:04 am
Alas, I just did a random search on mice in space.