In light of an excellent discussion with Michael of Archive Fire today, I’ve come to realize that the concept of potentiality, of potency, is the theme of all of my philosophical work. This is always an odd moment where you realize that you’ve been writing and thinking obsessively about something without realizing that you’ve been doing so. And here, before proceeding, I hasten to add that despite our differences, I am both very fond of Michael and deeply sympathetic to his positions. After a somewhat rocky start, we’ve found a place of discussion where we are able to mutually respect each others work while also disagreeing. If there is one fundamental difference between Harman’s object-oriented philosophy and my own onticology, it is that he is staunchly and heroically committed to actualism, whereas I am thoroughly committed to the existence of potentiality or potency. For Harman, objects are thoroughly and completely actual. For me, objects are always split and divided (in the Lacanian sense) between a virtual domain of potencies, powers, or potentialities, and actuality or whatever qualities they happen to actualize or manifest at any particular point in time. Salt, for example, harbors all sorts of powers within it such as the power to melt ice even when salt is not melting ice.
It’s damned difficult to think the concept of potentiality, potency, or power. In Prince of Networks, Harman follows Latour in criticizing the concept of potency or potentiality because it undermines the possibility of novelty. For Harman and Latour, the problem with the concept of potency or potentiality is that it treats the object as already containing what it will become. Here we need only evoke the example of the acorn evoked in classrooms across the world when explaining Aristotle’s concept of δύναμαι, dunamis, or potentiality, as opposed to energeia, entelechy, or actuality. In these cases, we say that the acorn is the potentiality of the oak tree. The oak tree would be the actuality the oak tree or what the acorn is to become. The problem here is that this seems to suggest that the acorn already contains the oak tree, that there is nothing truly novel about the emergence of the oak tree, and thus that the concept of potentiality completely undermines novelty.
I fully endorse Harman-Latour’s critique of the concept of potentiality as it is posed. In my view, the challenge is to think a concept of potentiality that does not treat an object as already containing actualities of what the object will be in virtual form (as in the case of an acorn already containing the adult oak tree, but virtually). Along these lines, I’ve tried to argue, following Deleuze, that there is no resemblance between a power, potentiality, or potency, and the actuality that it comes to actualize. Potentiality, power, potency is pure capacity, pure “can-do”, pure ability. As such, it tells us nothing of the form that the actualized power will take when it becomes a quality or what I call a local manifestation. These potentialities are what I call, following Spinoza, “affects”, or the capacity to affect and be affected. They are structures of the object, they aren’t featureless, yet they do not embody any determinate qualities. In this regard, it is completely misleading to suggest that the power of an acorn contains an oak tree. No, acorns contain the possibility of all sorts of unique and aleatory movements (under specific conditions) that might become an oak tree.
read on!
Quality or local manifestation (the actual), by contrast, is purely creative, a genuine and novel event in the world. This is because power, potency, or potentiality, in actualizing itself, must negotiate all sorts of material differences to become what it is. As a consequence, the quality that an object will come to embody can never be fully anticipated on the basis of the power that an object possesses. Here I distinguish between “endo-qualities” and “exo-qualities”. Endo-qualities refer to qualities produced as a result of the contingent path that internal processes of the object trace in actualizing themselves. Objects must contend with their own past materiality in actualizing their powers. The thoughts that I have at this moment must contend with the thoughts that I have had, with the things that I have experienced, with the things that I have written in reaching actuality. I have a power to think, yet the actualization of this power must navigate this materiality or actuality of my being in becoming actual. As a consequence, the thought that I now have becomes a novel event, a new creation, or something that couldn’t have been anticipated based on the power to think alone. Such is the lesson of Bergson’s account of memory in Matter and Memory as well as Freud’s “Notes on a Mystic Writing Pad”. I can’t think the same thing twice.
By contrast, exo-qualities are qualities that result from an interaction of the powers belonging to two or more objects. The way in which my body interacts with a particular wine is an example of an exo-quality. Wine is not drunk. Nor can we speak generically about drunkenness. Rather, each drunkenness has, as Bergson taught us in Time and Free Will when talking about actualized states of affectivity, has its own unique tenor and qualities. The way in which my body interacts with a cabernet or a pinot grigio will differ from the way in which another person’s body interacts. Moreover, my body’s reaction to the cabernet will differ from instance to instance. Cabernet will affect me differently on one day than it affects me on another day. The wine contains certain powers, yet it doesn’t contain these drunkennesses. Rather, each particular event of intoxication will result from a synthesis of powers and materiality under these singular circumstances.
If potency is so damned difficult to talk about, then this is because we can only talk about the actualized qualities of an object and never the powers themselves. To be sure, we can begin to map relationships between variables at the level of actuality and how they relate to the sort of qualities that come into being, but we can never quite get at the power of an object. That power is structured without being qualitative. And these powers are capable, in principle, of producing an infinite and inexhaustible number of unique qualities. Power always seems to slip away. When experimental scientists vary the conditions under which an object exists, placing it in contact with a variety of other substances, what they are trying to do is develop a diagram of the powers of an object by inferring the capacities it has by discerning the effects that it produces when interacting with this or that substance. In this way they hope to gradually develop a portrait of the substance’s powers by seeing the variations of the effects (local manifestations) it produces under a variety of conditions.
Some people seem to conflate the concept of potency, power, virtuality, or potentiality with possibility. In these cases, it seems it is asserted that the advocate of potentiality is introducing something spooky into ontology, claiming that it is possibilities that are really real. Yet there is a massive difference between the capacity of gasoline to burn, and the possibility of a president named Barack Bush that would be a strange synthesis of democrats and republicans. Around the former you take care when smoking a cigarette at the gas station, around the latter you merely entertain the possibility of what the world would be like if such a being existed. Barack Bush has no potentialities, whereas the gasoline is rife with all sorts of possibilities. Potentiality is the reason that we wear pressure suits when we ascend to altitudes over 50,000 feet. Potentiality is an entirely real dimension of objects, whereas possibilities are not. Potentialities are no less real than the hardness of water when I hit it after falling from 6,000 feet (an exo-quality), whereas possibilities nowhere exist in objects. In my view, people that entertain these worries conflate the real with the actual. There are all sorts of entirely real powers in objects without these powers being actual in the form of determinate local manifestations.
I confess I have tremendous difficulty understanding the position of actualism or the thesis that all things are entirely actual. For me, “actuality” implies what is frozen or complete, retaining nothing in reserve. Something is fully actual when it retains nothing whatsoever in reserve. Yet if this is the case, I find it difficult to see how anything can ever change. Repeating Aristotle’s argument, if I am fully actual how can I ever stand up (I’m currently sitting) and walk across the room? Because there would be nothing in reserve in the case of a fully actual being, it’s difficult to see how, short of magic, anything could change or move. The only viable actualist position I can see is something akin to Lucretian or Democritean atomism. For Lucretius, the ultimate atoms that compose beings are themselves changeless. They have their fixed shapes, are impenetrable, are indivisible, and therefore are eternal and unchanging. What changes is their combinations. The combinations are changed, yet the atoms remain unchanged. As a consequence, in atomism it seems to me that there is, in atomism, no genuine novelty in the universe because the fixed atoms already contain all possible combinations. I do not see how any position can be actualist without ultimately (implicitly) advocating an atomism of this sort.
The ethico-politico need, I suppose, that animates my militant commitment to potentiality is the need to believe that nothing is ever fixed by its position in an assemblage. This is my gripe with relationism. In reducing objects to their relations with other things, I fail to see how anything can ever change. Things here are their relations. If things are their relations then there’s no possibility of change, revolution, or transformation. As my writings testify, I am deeply fascinated with relations and what takes place when entities enter into relations. Yet I always reserve the possibility, the potentiality, of things breaking with their relations; especially those relations that are oppressive and horrific. What we fundamentally need, I believe, is an ontology that holds forth the possibility of things locally manifesting themselves differently where relations are changed and where things enter into new relations. This cultivates a practice of not simply analyzing relations, but also of engaging in experimentalist forms of praxis that actively seek to shift relations.
Larval Subjects . 
May 26, 2011 at 2:36 am
Levi,
After this post I am convinced that you must read my book. I will send you a copy if you don’t own one. An entire chapter which makes connections you are making – drawing Deleuze, Whitehead and Peirce. Good post.
Leon / AFTER NATURE
May 26, 2011 at 2:52 am
Thanks Leon, send it along! Can’t get to it immediately though.
May 26, 2011 at 3:23 am
Great post Levi; these have been very productive days with lots of fresh new material. The sun also rises!
I just had a short question with regard to your appreciation of actual being as necessarily statis and having nothing in reserve. What do you make of Deleuze’s account of the actual, then, in which the actual is (allegedly) continuous with the dynamism of the intensive virtual realm? Does this also present the same kind of problem?
May 26, 2011 at 3:31 am
Will have to go over this with more attention.. but think this is the junction that has made your thinking so imaginatively potent for me… the leaping off point.. which I suspect my be it’s weak point, for your philosophically inclined readers… where borders dissolve… and ..
May 26, 2011 at 8:14 am
Wonderful post. As an increasingly zealous peak oil advocate, I think your statement of ‘ethico-political need’ and ‘militant commitment to potentiality’ is timely and well-put. As my recent blog entry on Oil Oriented Ontology suggests, acorns and oaks may not be the best example of potentiality for the twenty first century.
May 26, 2011 at 8:15 am
[…] Good post by Levi about POTENTIALITY. […]
May 26, 2011 at 8:57 am
Levi:
Excellent reexamination of this very interesting and often thorny problem of actuality, reality, potential and possibility.
I was wondering if you would comment specifically on DeLanda’s words here from his article in The Speculative Turn (I quote the paragraph here as I am afraid to distort by summary):
p 391
This distinction here he makes seems to be too relational, or too wide, for your tastes. It seems to me that you would disagree that the object’s potentialities are changed or altered by a kind of “possibility space” — though I read “possibility space” as similar to your regimes of attraction, which is not the same as the object’s endogenous potentialities. There is a question of terminology here, of course, as to what “capacity” means in the larger sense of DeLanda’s work, but, in general, what do you make of this idea (I know you are very familiar with the article, obviously).
May 26, 2011 at 10:06 am
Fascinating. I guess this will come down to the meaning of ‘actualism’ – for Graham Harman entities are nothing more than ‘what they are right now’. But what is the definition of this ‘now’…?….
May 26, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Levi,
I understand the distinction that you’re driving at here, but there’s not really that much etymological difference between potentialitas and possibilitas. The former has its root in the idea of “power” while the latter is rooted in “being able.” If you were to say that that there is a potential outcome, you’re saying that the outcome in question has the power to manifest itself. If you say that there is a possible outcome, you’re saying that the outcome in question is able to manifest itself, which would imply of course that it has the requisite power to manifest itself as well.
Perhaps you would simply like to make a distinction between “logical possibilities” and “real possibilities.” Anything is logically possible, as Leibniz pointed out, as long as its existence does not involve a contradiction. Something is only really possible if the causal forces of existence are present such that its own existence can be realized as an outcome.
“Entelechy” would be another term from Aristotelian/scholastic metaphysics that you could perhaps substitute, but of course it etymologically carries all sorts of teleological baggage.
I am encouraged by your last paragraph, however. The category of possibility or potentiality is the only imaginable ground for an emancipatory politics of any kind. Political conservatism, which merely argues for the necessity of existing relations as a determinate outcome of historical reality, misses the ongoing processes of reality, such that a new reality might be moulded out of the forces and relations of the present. Conservationism and preservationism in ecology are just as vile and reactionary. Political liberalism, perhaps even worse at this point, tries to ground necessary social relations in the fresh air of ahistoricity, in the realm of natural law.
I think it is important to retain “potentiality” and “possibility” as categories of the real, and simply qualify them as merely abstract or logical possibilities versus concrete or real possibilities.
May 26, 2011 at 4:20 pm
I don’t want to beat this discussion into the ground here, because I appreciate our understanding of disagreement, but for the sake of clarity I want to respond to a few comments you made in this post:
“Salt, for example, harbors all sorts of powers within it such as the power to melt ice even when salt is not melting ice.”
Salt does not harbor the potential for ice-melting because ice-melting is an ‘emergent’ expression of the properties already fully existing in both salt and ice, and atmosphere, etc. Ice-melting is occasioned both by actual salt and actual ice in situ.
For Harman and Latour, the problem with the concept of potency or potentiality is that it treats the object as already containing what it will become.
And I think Harman and Latour are spot on here (and so Aristotle’s binary be damned).
Example: an acorn does not ‘possess’ the potential of becoming an oak tree, an oak tree is an emergent expression of an acorn unfolding its ever-present actuality in conjunction or participation with the sun, the soil, nutrients, water, etc. It is the admixture of properties emanating from all of those things which affords the oak-tree-growing event. In this sense, the acorn doesn’t simply hold within it the potential of becoming an oak tree, but rather contributes its substantive properties (e.g., its DNA) to the gathering or evental confluence that leads to oak trees being ‘assembled’. So even if the acorn is a nodal and potent actant in the ‘network’ which generates oak trees, it is certainly not the sole bearer of tree-potentiality.
The co-local “manifestation” (or expression) of trees is a result of an entire ecology/network of dynamic and distributed actually existing properties and relations, and the emergent novelties they generate.
I, like Harman and Latour, think the notion of potentiality is a reification or abstraction of logical possibilites. It is trying to essentialize what is virtual (as opposed in my thinking to the real) by placing it ‘in’ the actual.
” In my view, the challenge is to think a concept of potentiality that does not treat an object as already containing actualities of what the object will be in virtual form (as in the case of an acorn already containing the adult oak tree, but virtually).”
That is a hard task indeed. My solution, of course, is to think the distributed potency of ecologies of existing properties as they are expressed in combinatorial complexes (or regimes of attraction) – that is, in relation. Capacity is always afforded in conjunction.
”Quality or local manifestation (the actual), by contrast, is purely creative, a genuine and novel event in the world. This is because power, potency, or potentiality, in actualizing itself, must negotiate all sorts of material differences to become what it is. As a consequence, the quality that an object will come to embody can never be fully anticipated on the basis of the power that an object possesses.
Agreed.
And all I’m arguing is that every-thing is (co)local manifestation – thus novelty is inherent to actuality. If we consider, as I do, ‘actuality’ as a synonym for the “material”, or, in my view, the tangible, and not part of an epic Aristotelian binary, then we need only appreciate the temporality inherent to matter and energy (e.g., thermodynamics) to appreciate the ‘flowing’ or moving, tentative character of actual existing assemblages. ‘Actualization’ is an ongoing, co-implicated, entangled and dynamic process with temporary ‘ruptures’ or individuations (emergents). Particular powers, potencies and affect-capacities are, then, expressions of an object/assemblage’s already actual properties existing in relation.
”As a consequence, the thought that I now have becomes a novel event, a new creation, or something that couldn’t have been anticipated based on the power to think alone.”
Exactly. The capacity for thought is never a product of an animal’s intrinsic properties alone. The power of thought, as everyone from Freud to Foucault to Gibson to the extended-mind theorists have contended, is distributed across a network or ecology of affordance. Hence the extended mind hypothesis.
This is precisely why I reject the notion of total withdrawal. If objects were capable of withdrawnal, or total detachment from their relations, then nothing of consequence could actually occur.
Real world situations and events and expressions are thoroughly combinatorial affairs, where the exchange, mix, mingle and mangle of properties obviates the need for conceiving of essences, because we can trace the rise and fall of concrete material-energetic assemblages as they actually exist. Every-thing, in this sense, is a (‘democratic’?) participant in the evolving cosmopolitics of Being.
More later…
May 26, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Ross,
“Something is only really possible if the causal forces of existence are present such that its own existence can be realized as an outcome.”
Exactly. This is why i prefer the notion of possibility to potentiality.
“The category of possibility or potentiality is the only imaginable ground for an emancipatory politics of any kind. Political conservatism, which merely argues for the necessity of existing relations as a determinate outcome of historical reality, misses the ongoing processes of reality, such that a new reality might be moulded out of the forces and relations of the present.”
Well said. ‘Is another world possible?’ Of course it is. ‘Why?’ Because the material and social conditions of the present are ontologically vulnerable to reconfiguration or (re)evolution. The flexibility (pure difference) inherent to the cosmic processes of matter and energy are fertile grounds for the cultivation of novel modes of being.
“I think it is important to retain “potentiality” and “possibility” as categories of the real, and simply qualify them as merely abstract or logical possibilities versus concrete or real possibilities.”
And I fully agree. For me, logical possibilities can be understood as ‘virtual’ and concrete possibilities as ‘actual’.
May 26, 2011 at 5:24 pm
A question, Levi, about actualism per your standing up example. If actualism is metaphysically true and consistent, then what is a) change and what are b.) relations? Taken to it’s conclusion how is actualism not Newtonian or Parmenidean. A physicist named Julian Barbour proposes something similar to actualism, if I’m not mistaken. Moreover, why the pernicious either/or process- object distinction? You stated processes are objects, objects processes. That rings true to me. If objects are primary with no sort of reserve that admits relationality (thus nullifying primacy for either object or power) then one has a static and dead universe, clearly at odds with what we experience. So, I’m puzzled here. How does your position differ from this and what of process-relational philosophy do you keep?
May 26, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Sorry to double-comment: to make more sense of my thinking here: If objects have a capacity/power which is the potential to be otherwise than they are NOW (something you need if you admit that the universe changes) and if this potency is included in the object, what the object is essentially, then there is no *primacy* of actuality for an object, ontologically – perhaps only in terms of asymmetrical causality. So when we say actual, or if we speak of “actualism” then we must mean something other than full and static actuality. An actuality which excludes potency, or which relegates it *ontologically* to second place is impossible.
May 26, 2011 at 7:27 pm
Michael,
For me it’s as simple is this: if something has the capability to do something and is not now doing it, it has potentiality. If the DNA of the acorn can subsequently do other things than it’s doing right now, then it has potentiality. If it doesn’t have potentiality then it is unable to do anything other than what it’s doing right now at all.
May 26, 2011 at 7:28 pm
Leon,
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I don’t reject actuality, but merely say that objects have another side characterized by potential or virtuality. What I reject is the thesis that objects are fully and completely actual or actualism.
May 26, 2011 at 10:17 pm
“What I reject is the thesis that objects are fully and completely actual or actualism.” That’s what I was curious about (the definition being used here re actualism), thanks!
May 27, 2011 at 6:47 am
Isn’t the difference with Graham Harman that he posits absolute withdrawal of the true being of objects?
‘You’ claim that there is always a reserve in every actual manifestation, but these reserves are potentially available? There is no absolute withdrawal for onticology?
The question that arises for me is the value of these claims.
I don’t see Stengers getting into ontological claims – rather a pragmatism about what one/we/objects can do….instead of claims about what they are…? (And Latour or Guattari?). Do we have an obsession with ‘ontology’..? Maybe the most stupid thought I’ve ever had…..
‘Beyond material and political demands, what emerges is an aspiration for individual and collective reappropriation of the production of subjectivity. ‘ (guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 133).
Not claims about which side of a line philosophers will line up…. Ultimately an academic glass bead game for ‘professors’ of philosophy??????? He
May 27, 2011 at 7:25 am
“If it doesn’t have potentiality then it is unable to do anything other than what it’s doing right now at all.”
That is unless whatever it does later is a result of the combination, interaction and affordances of ‘other’ existing powers with which it is entangled.
DNA, for example, can only do something other that what its doing if it partakes in or relates to the particular potencies (embodied capacities) of other entities in the wider ecology. DNA requires energy absorbed by a body taken from an environment. DNA requires blood circulation brought about by lungs which draw oxygen from the atmosphere. Oxygen requires the process photosynthesis brought about by plants and carbon and the sun. Etc and so on.
So you see DNA does not ‘have’ or hold or possess a “potential” to unfold into an animal on its own. DNA, as with acorns, atomic bombs and Lady Gaga, requires the affective force and potencies (actually existing properties) of so many other contributing objects, assemblages and flows to enable and enact it’s becoming.
There is nothing about an entity’s being and becoming beyond its constituent material-energetic properties which allows it to change. Change is brought about by a shift in the complex matrix of affective force and distributed potencies within which objects/assemblages are generated, entangled and afforded their unique depth and individuality.
May 27, 2011 at 11:49 am
Michael,
This is why I suggested that something like Lucretian atomism is the only consistent form of actualism. At some point the actualist will have to argue that there are ultimate actualities that are themselves completely unchanging such that change is only a matter of their combinations and what emerges from those combinations, not a matter of the atoms themselves.
How would you accountnfor the concept of potential energy? A spring is tightly wound. Does it contain potential energy in it or not? When that spring is released it is actualizing that potential.
Note, I don’t disagree with your points aboutninteraction and combination. Within my framework, many of the potentials within an object can only be activated when the object enters into combinations with other objects. This is what the conceptsmofmexo-relations and regimes of attraction are designed to get at.
May 27, 2011 at 3:54 pm
I was waiting for you to ask that question. My answer is that such ‘potentiality’, say the case of a spring becoming wound, is in no way simply a property or capacity of the object. Rather, the spring is involved in a causal matrix which affords the spring an opportunity to store or hold energy through a partnership with forces and properties extrinsic to its particular constitution.
From Wikipedia:
And this reflects both the participatory and the dynamic nature of affect. Objects and assemblages are material-energetic coalescences or achievements existing in fields (matrices) force influencing, absorbing, producing, conjoining and exchanging their constituent properties and generating a myriad of cosmological affects.
The term “potential energy” was coined by the 19th century Scottish engineer and physicist William Rankine and specifically refers to the capture and transfer energy by and between objects in fields of force. But the broad use of the term “potentiality” as a something intrinsic to objects, I think, ought to be abandoned. To conceptually endow assemblages with a property or aspect they simply do not have in any empirical sense is, to me, ‘magical’ thinking. (And I truly don’t mean to offend here Levi, as I’m just being honest about what I think.)
We need to rigorously clarify the deep relational nature of expressivity. It is in the difference between or among “endo-properties” – as properties of specific material-energetic assemblages with limited intrinsic capacity – which generates particular unit-operations.
May 27, 2011 at 4:18 pm
And I do recognize the dynamicism of your framework Levi. In fact, you’ve fundamentally changed the way I think of the notion an ‘object’. And I have come to realize how important the objectological lens is for thinking the nature of the world largely through your blogging – with a little help from Tim’s notion of ‘Hyperobjects’.
My objections have only ever been about the supposed necessity of your notion of ‘virtual proper being’ or potentiality in thinking the basic character of worldly action. I think it is an unnecessary step to assign ontological importance to what I think of as a derivative human abstraction.
But I’ll keep reading and thinking on the issue and we’ll see how I think about it down the road. Above all, our discussions and your work has been for me indispensible.
May 27, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Michael,
That point about storing energy gets right to the point. Stored energy is precisely energy that is not being exercised and which is therefore potential. The actual, by contrast, is what is being exercised. Your remark about magic is a good one and I think gets to the crux of the issue. Based on a number of remarks you’ve made over the course of this discussion I’ve sensed that you see something magical in my concept of potentiality such that the potential is something other than the material. This comes out with special clarity when you discuss DNA and point out that DNA involves all sorts of processes in interaction with other substances to produce phenotypal qualities. The subtext of such observations is that you take me to be denying this and holding that DNA holds some mystical power that can do things all of its own accord. But I am not claiming such a thing. For me potentiality is affect or the capacity to affect and be affected. In order for DNA to do anything at all it must have certain capacities. Not everything has the right affects and therefore not everything is capable of producingncertain results or effects. I cannot, for example, get drunk off of water because water does not have the sorts of affects required to interact with my body in such a way as to produce the affect of drunkeness. I’ve developed this thesis in detail through the example of the neutrino in my post entitled “The Faintest of Traces”. Neutrinoes, due to their neutral electric charge, are unable to interact with most matter we’re familiar with. In other words, neutrinos have the wrong affects, powers, or potentials to interact with most of the matter we’re familiar with. There’s nothing mysterious or magical here. This is just thenstructure of these objects. The object has these structures regardless of whether it’s exercising these powers or interacting with other things. Hence the status of these powers as potentials. This, in my view, is the whole reason we engage in controlled experiments. Note that a controlled experiment is exactly what you’re talking about when you talk about betweenness, interactions, and putting-into-relation. In an experiment we put objects in relation with other objects to see what they’ll do. In short, we wish to see what powers or potentials the object harbors. If affects were always exercised there’d be no point to such exercises because there would never be an instance where the powers of an object fail to manifest themselves.
May 27, 2011 at 4:42 pm
@Joseph
You add an important element here: “possibility space”.
This is exactly what I mean when I say that chance is the afforded by the inherent differences existing between assemblages. All assemblages have particularly configured material-energetic properties with resultant capacities. And thus capacities as such are inherent to the actual substantiality or materiality of a particular object. When embodied by a specific entity this symmetry or inherency is what I call an object/assemblage’s potency – its intrinsic (onto-specific) emanating capacity to affect and be affected. Yet, such affective potency is always afforded and expressed in relation.
And, finally, what actually happens between objects/assemblages always occurs with the “possibility space” generated by the various potencies, forces, and flows operating within a particular causal matrix.
Thanks for adding that nuance.
May 27, 2011 at 6:21 pm
[…] been a discussion unfolding at Larval Subjects on the status of potentiality, along with some of the questions that the concept […]
May 28, 2011 at 4:09 am
I’m not a professor of philosphy (or a Prof of anything – just a newly minted PhD) and I know very little about any of this – so apolgies for my naive question, which is primarily addressed to Michael: if all that objects have are emergent properties and they’hold’ no inherent or essential properties (potential) how do objects differ from each other? If all objects are only describable by their emerging actualities, do all objects hold the possibility of becoming any other object? Or are they describable by limits rather than possibilities – each manifest assemblage precludes some possibilities and therefore objects come to hold some essential limits?
May 28, 2011 at 12:58 pm
[…] skipped over this paragraph from Levi’s latest post, wherein he basically renders redundant my post on potentiality. I fully endorse Harman-Latour’s […]
June 1, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Really cool post. Much of what you’ve said here reminds me of Agamben’s (re)reading of Aristotle’s notion of potentiality along (what I think are) very similar lines, especially when you write that “Potentiality, power, potency is pure capacity, pure “can-do”, pure ability.”
Here is Agamben: “If potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able [i]not[/i] to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality [i]not to[/i] (do or be), or, as Aristotle says, that potentiality be also im-potentiality (adynamia).
…What is potential can pass over into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be fits adynamia). To set im-potentiality aside is not to destroy it but, on the contrary, to fulfill it, to turn potentiality back upon itself in order to give itself to itself… Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself [i]sovereignly[/i], which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non recognoscens) other than its own ability not to be”. (Homo Sacer, p. 32)
I wonder if there’s a fruitful dialog to be had here between Agamben and yourself? I’ve always had a bit of trouble coming to grips with this passage but in light of what you’ve written it seems chime quite nicely.
June 1, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Thanks Alex! I honestly don’t know Agamben well at all. I recently picked up a critical study of his work that traces it from beginning to end (forget the title and author). He argues that potentiality is the central concept of Agamben’s work. I’m thus eager to see what crossovers there might be.
July 3, 2011 at 12:12 am
[…] swirling environment, I venture to say they are two potential selves, which Levi Bryant discusses here, yet to become. The concept of Reflexive Ecology, for me, emerges here, between the relationship of […]
November 6, 2012 at 4:12 pm
[…] Two concepts of onticology which you have established as important are wilderness and potentiality. In fields concerned with an idea of landscape- geography, ecology, archeology, landscape […]