On twitter and elsewhere a debate has arisen surrounding substances versus production. Here the thesis runs that production is prior or anterior to substance. Given that I write about production all over the place and thematize objects as in a constant state of self-production because they are perpetually disintegrating (this will become clearer once The Democracy of Objects comes out), this is a core theme for me. However, it does seem to me that the thesis that production is anterior to substances is based on a bit of a fallacy. The idea seems to be that because substances must be produced, there must be a domain of production anterior to and other than substance. I’m fully on board with the thesis that substances must be produced– this is one of the things that interests me most –but I don’t accept the idea that because of this there is a domain anterior to substances (this would be my gripe with Simondonian talk of the pre-individual). Rather, substances are produced out of other substances. Within this framework, being would always and everywhere be composed of substances– existence would come in chunks –but new substances would be produced out of other substances. Production is certainly anterior to substances, but this anteriority is not something other than substances, but rather is composed of other substances. In this regard, I just don’t see much of a debate between substance-ontology and production-ontology. Substance-ontology can thematize and discuss production to its hearts content. In doing so, however, it’s still discussing dynamics of substances in the genesis of new substances.
February 22, 2011
Larval Subjects . 
February 22, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Dear Levi-
Your statement of your position is intriguing: I look forward to reading about it when the book comes out. Are you taking any inspiration from Spinoza’s notion of conatus here?
My thought here brushes up against some of my comments on your Plato/Aristotle post. I tend to think of Spinoza’s notion of conatus as a way of avoiding Aristotle’s and Plato’s commitment to a conception of substantial forms as prior to (rather than dependent *on*) the historical vicissitudes of objects.
Here’s why I’m making this connection. A thing’s conatus – its tendency towards self-preservation – is, it seems to me, just as much the preservation of the *kinds* and *categories* to which it belongs as the preservation of its own individual existence. The existence of individual tigers propagates the species: keeps it in existence. If the earth were destroyed and all vestiges of tigers eliminated, the species would go out of existence. This is one of the reasons that the kind ‘tiger’ is a historically-bound entity. Another reason is that that the coming-to-be of the species was dependent on the generation of a certain population of objects: the speciating event or events which produced the species tiger. If it makes sense to think of Spinoza’s conatus in this way, and if this conception of conatus commits us to a conception of the kinds to which objects belong as *more objects* – historically bound individuals just as the objects belonging to those kinds are, we avoid the Platonic (and to my mind, the Aristotelian) move. That is, we avoid transforming kinds into ahistorical forms whose being is prior to the being of the world of objects: the world of change in which objects interact with one another in the unfolding of history.
At any rate, this is one route from thinking of objects as self-constituting to the rejection of, as you put it, ‘a domain of production anterior to and other than substance.’ Is it a route which is congenial to your way of thinking?
-Mandel
February 22, 2011 at 5:06 pm
Hey Mandel,
Spinoza figures heavily in my concept of objects and is discussed a bit in TDO. You might want to look at my article in The Speculative Turn. There I conceptualize objects in terms of their affects or what they can do. Although I don’t talk about conatus anywhere, my systems/cybernetic conceptualization of objects does something similar. I’m in the camp– following Darwin –that sees species as products of individual differences. For me, the individual and individual differences always precede the production of species as higher level individuals.
February 22, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Dear Levi-
I’ll definitely read the article. Just on the basis of what you’ve said, I’m now wondering if we might disagree on a certain point – specifically, when you talk about kinds as ‘higher level individuals.’
I tend to think of kinds and the individuals that belong to them as *interdependent*. That is, e.g. individual tigers depend for what they are as much on being members of the species ‘tiger’ as the species ‘tiger’ depends on them. Individual tigers, on this conception, are what they are in part because their lives are episodes in or aspects of the unfolding of the species’ history. If the species ‘tiger’ begins to dwindle and falter when Leo the tiger, this is part of Leo’s own history – even if Leo happens to be in a population of tigers which is flourishing.
Another way of putting the idea is that the species tiger is a *transindividual* entity (to use a notion that Etienne Balibar employs in his interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics). To call something a transindividual entity is to think that it is not something *prior* to the individuals making it up, but also not a mere construction out of individuals which are themselves prior to it.
I don’t know if you would accept this notion in any form, but the reason why it occurs to me that it might not be what you have in mind is that when you talk of kinds or species as ‘higher level individuals,’ it evokes (in me, at least) a picture according to which the members, so to speak, are thoroughly prior to the species: as if the species is a kind ‘construction’ from its members. In other terms, the phrase you use evokes some form of nominalism I’m hesitant to embrace.
Of course, I might very well be overreading your brief comment. I will read your paper, and perhaps then I’ll have less conjectural things to say.
-Mandel
February 22, 2011 at 5:33 pm
[…] quick philosophy post here. Levi STATES HIS VIEWS on a debate that is apparently underway “on Twitter and elsewhere” about whether […]
February 23, 2011 at 5:29 am
Mandel, the difference between Darwin and Levi on the one hand, and the Spinozism you suggest on the other, is that for sure unique tigers are all we’ve got–in fact we haven’t even got that. We’ve got this unique being, right here, resulting from random mutations of tiger genomes, looking and quacking enough like a tiger to have tiger cubs. In this sense, yes, THAT actual lifeform, which humans call a tiger, is ontologically prior to species. Darwin’s book really should have had scare quotes in the title. There are no species and they have no origin! Beware, this is not a form of nominalism. Who cares what this stripey beast of the Indian jungle is called? There it is.
February 23, 2011 at 5:50 am
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/02/producers-processes-or-objects.html
February 23, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Dear Tim-
I see, thanks. It sounds rather like nominalism to me – not, perhaps, in denying the existence of the kind (radical nominalism), but in thinking that kinds must be constructs out of individuals. In any case, it seems to me wrong to suppose that species or any other kinds are mere constructs from their members. But at least you’ve made clearer to me a place where I might find fruitful points of engagement with the view Levi was marking in his post.
-Mandel