Over at The Pinocchio Theory, Steven has a post up discussing processes and powers. I confess that I’m a bit surprised by Shaviro’s remarks. He writes:
But I think that Whitehead lines up with Bergson and Simondon and Deleuze, and against Harman and OOO, in that all these “process” thinkers seek to account for how things come into existence, and how they endure; whereas OOO just seems to me to assume that its objects are already there.
I’m not sure where he gets this idea. I’ve written extensively both here and in The Democracy of Objects (which Steven’s read) on the emergence of objects, not to mention the processual nature of objects, their substantiality as consisting in powers, the manner in which they perpetually contend with the problem of entropy, the role that relations play in how they actualizes themselves in local manifestations, how objects evolve and develop, and so on and so forth. Indeed, I think one of the great ironies I find in the thought of the process-relational philosophers is that they use the words “process” and “relation” quite a bit, but generally, I find, say very little that’s concrete about process and relation! In other words, there’s a strange way in which they relate, at the level of the signifier, to the terms “process” and “relation” as substances! By contrast, we find rich discussions of the dynamics of both process and relation among the object-oriented ontologists.
We get a lot of lectures about Whitehead explaining Whitehead to us, but I think this misses the point that our differences with Whitehead are not failures to understand him (cf. my post on transference), but because of genuine disagreements with Whitehead. For me, there are three basic points of divergence. First, I believe that Whitehead is a complete non-starter so long as his account of God is not severed from his thought and his thought isn’t thoroughly severed from process theology. Following Donald Sherburne, I think that Whitehead’s account of God is incoherent and at odds with the ontological foundations of his own philosophy. Any engagement of Whitehead that doesn’t sever it from his concept of God and substantially modify his ontology is, I believe, a priori to be excluded.
read on!
Second, it is my view that Whitehead undermines objects by treating “actual occasions” as the ontological foundation of being. For me the minimal units of being consist of what Whitehead would call “societies”. In my view, the structure of objects or their status as dynamic systems is irreducible, and cannot be seen as mere aggregates of actual occasions. To this I add that I believe Whitehead’s account of actual occasions is incoherent or leads to a view of being as magic. If each absolute occasion is an absolutely instantaneous novelty and atom that issues from nothing else, then actual occasions are creations ex nihilo. That’s magic.
Finally third, and most importantly, I do not accept the Whiteheadian thesis that each actual occasion is related to everything else, nor that actual occasions are bundles of relations. To be a substance is to have the capacity to exist independently of other things. Relations can be severed. I acknowledge, of course, that this can lead to substantial transformations in the qualities of substances– this point is at the foundation of all my meditations on local manifestations and lends precision to the difference relations make; which is a precision we don’t find in the promiscuity of relations advocated by the Whiteheadians –but that doesn’t change the fact that substances can be separated from their relations. Were this not possible, where substances cannot be severed from their relations, no movement would be possible, no change would be possible, the point of experiment in the sciences would be incoherent (insofar as scientific experiment separates entities from relations so as to see how they behave when perturbed under controlled conditions), etc.
I can see how the idea that everything is related to everything else is spiritually comforting, but I believe ontologizing relation in this way simply doesn’t gel with the nature of the world in which we live. In the domain of politics, political struggle often arises precisely because subsets of the social system are invisible to the powerful and privileged or lack levers and forms of agency that allow them to control their life. It is here an absence of relation that instigates political struggles. Moreover, were everything internally related, it’s difficult to see how, in a case like the American, French, Haitian, or Russian revolution subsets of the population could have broken with the ruling order to form a new set of social relations. Here it’s notable that organicism (the doctrine that everything is internally related) has always been the preferred ontology of conservatives such as the Plato of the Republic or Edmund Burke. If everything were internally related, it’s impossible to see how ecosystems could fall into ecological crises as a result of the introduction of new foreign elements or the subtraction (extinction) of domestic elements. If everything were related it’s impossible to see how the controlled settings of experiment could be produced.
The whole problem with Whiteheadianism is that it gives itself, ready made, what be constructed or built. It starts from the premise that everything is related, and thereby undermines the most interesting ontological insight and questions. That insight is the insight that how things are related is contingent (other assemblages are always possible). That question is how the relations that do exist, the de facto relations, come to be built. This is why Whiteheadianism never has anything specific to say about relations or processes because, ironically, it’s foreclosed the dimension of building. Am I a process philosopher? Sure. I argue that objects are processes and processes are objects. Yet all of my work is focused on the precise nature of what processes are and how relations come to be forged. Above all, I’m interested in how relations can be broken so that we might be able to form a more just and equitable society than the one we find ourselves in today.
Larval Subjects . 
August 19, 2011 at 2:20 am
Levi: I’m done with my exams, we should get a beverage or two and discuss this. Since I don’t know OOO I’m not ready to comment on it, but I’m not sure you’ve read Whitehead correctly–or maybe I’ve not. It seems to me that Whitehead does acknowledge that the relationality of a given actual occasion to EVERTHING else may be nearly nil, but it is never nil. Obviously the “closer” something is, the more direct the relationships are. The point is that “almost nil” is not “nil.”
August 19, 2011 at 2:30 am
Levi wrote:
‘To be a substance is to have the capacity to exist independently of other things.’
Tell that to an organism…(the unit of survival is ‘organism + environment’. G. Bateson).
I guess that’s the thing – and that’s were you might be ‘wrong’, like dear kant:
For the Kant of ‘Thoughts on the true estimation of living forces’ (1747) substance is an absolutely indep and ultimately unknowable substrate. “Substances can (are able to) have no outer relation to things”.
Substances may change the relations they are involved in – but they are not relationless. They are relative beings i.e., + the relations they are involved in….in fact if there were totally unrelated substances one wouldn’t be able to say anything about them??? Except the strange qualifier that they were unknowable…..who could one say that an unknowable was capable of this or that….I know such silly questions.
changing/’severing’ relations doesn’t mean an S is ever relationless.
but hey, that’s just a thought…As you know I did write about this once – but at a far less sophisticated level.
does it really matter!
What amazes me is that the whole of the USA is not demanding an inquiry into the controlled demolition of the towers (by whom). See the whiteheadian/process theologian David Ray Griffin’s new bk on this:
http://davidraygriffin.com/books/debunking-911-debunking-an-answer-to-popular-mechanics-and-other-defenders-of-the-official-conspiracy-theory/
Positively reviewed by Lynn Margulis…it’s a kind of ontology – how do things ‘free fall’?
August 19, 2011 at 2:32 am
Paul,
I didn’t say the organism wouldn’t die if severed from it’s relations, only that it doesn’t immediately cease to be that substance. Life is a quality of the organism as substamce, not the substantiality of the substamce. I discuss this in more detail in the comments on the ecology post linked to above.
August 19, 2011 at 2:34 am
Scot, that’d be great, although I’m swamped the next couple of weeks. Whitehead does claim that every actual occasion has a perfectly determinate (his expression) positive and negative prehension to everything else in the universe.
August 19, 2011 at 2:42 am
[…] Levi Bryant has weighed in here, and, somewhat surprisingly, has identified himself as a process philosopher. I’m quite happy […]
August 19, 2011 at 2:43 am
[…] since Levi just RESPONDED to Steven’s post, I wanted to add one point of my own concerning a passage from Steven that […]
August 19, 2011 at 6:03 am
Why must processes be objects and vice versa? Given that this is essentially a debate between two aesthetic descriptions, can’t one method describe certain things, while the other, another? For instance, when a charge travels across a microchip, that event cannot be conceived of independently of its specific relations And when you describe the entire chip, including each semiconductor and capacitator–which participated in the earlier charge–the object in total, does not lose its coherence because the aforementioned charge is unable to occur–in its alienated form. It seems that these are just two coexisting descriptions of things rather than actually being each other, or being opposed. It might be more accurate to say that processes and objects allow the other to open themselves to more processes and objects, respectively. The processes internal to the chip allow the chip to relate within larger processes on the motherboard, etc.
August 19, 2011 at 10:59 am
ah you should know better than most that transference cannot be explained away by an analyst.
August 19, 2011 at 12:33 pm
I enjoyed reading your post and especially appreciate your desire to link your intellectual work with social change, to “form a more just and equitable society than the one we find ourselves in today.” Your goal is similar to mine. However, I believe that relationality (as I define it but quite possibly different from your definition) can play a crucial role in social-justice work. Objectification and dehumanization–which posit the disjunction and non-relationality of ‘self’ and ‘other’ play large roles in social injustice (think of how racism functions, through othering and dehumanizing individuals and entire groups of people. . . see for instance the treatment of Sarah Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus). Like you, I teach in Texas. My undergraduate students have generally bought into all kinds of “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” and survival-of-the-fittest thinking. They see themselves as entirely separate and untouched by the other people’s situations. Their sense of relations are, to use your word, broken. By presenting them with theories and examples of our interconnectedness, I invite them to view themselves differently and to see the ways systemic injustice issues impact them. Sometimes, they change. (I discuss this pedagogy at length in my book, Teaching Transformation: Transcultural Classroom Dialogues.)
Perhaps because I’m not a professional philosopher, I define relationality differently. For instance, you write, “I can see how the idea that everything is related to everything else is spiritually comforting.” Perhaps. However, it can also be terrifying. For instance, if we are really related to all that exists, that means we’re related to things we (or I, at least) find heinous–like George Bush or (more and more, each day) our governor, Richard Perry. I’m still trying to figure out the possible implications of this type of radical interrelatedness (or what Karen Barad might call intra-connectivity).
August 19, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Hi AnaLouise,
No disagreements here. For me all that’s required is that relations are external to their terms and can be broken. Nothing about this denies that there are assemblages in which people are trapped like flies in a spider web. I call these “regimes of attraction”. Regimes of attraction are systems of relations that constrain an entity. A good example is class dynamics in Marx. Class is not a concept that explains, but that must be explained. How do humans get distributed and stratified in this way? Part of this explanation lies in the expropriation of land and access to the means of production, requiring or forcing people to sell their labor as a commodity. This is a field of relations or network of relations that constrains the entities within it. What’s important to me, however, is that these relations are contingent or capable of being otherwise. Such networks can be broken and new social assemblages can be built. The problem with the “pull yourself up by your boot straps” ideology is that it completely ignores these regimes of attraction.
August 19, 2011 at 2:33 pm
[…] Bryant, and Harman have responded to […]
August 19, 2011 at 7:13 pm
I am coming a little late to the party, still trying to catch up, so hopefully this isn’t too old a question. But how are you understanding relationality in Whitehead? It seems pretty clear that for Whitehead relationality is iteration, which would dissolve your problems two and three.
August 19, 2011 at 9:55 pm
My response, “Three Ways of Avoiding OOO.”
August 20, 2011 at 3:50 am
Saying an organism needs its environment in order to live does not mean that the organism *is* its environment. Add to this Levi’s understanding of environment—that it isn’t a pre-existent tub or field in which we place organisms, but rather a highly selective, organism-dependent construct (like a Heideggerian world)—and then saying “tell the organism is isn’t independent from its environment” is worse than useless, it’s simply obfuscating, or dishonest.
And when supposedly astute readers of OOO say things like “well, of course Whitehead explains how entities come about, but OOO doesn’t seem to bother, or care, as to how objects are constructed in the first place,” I can only say: with readers like these, who needs enemies? Gah!
August 20, 2011 at 4:23 am
Levi:
You write:
Do you find this very similar to Meillassoux’s own supercontingency, though rather than occasions coming into being and dying at every moment, there may be long moments of stability of laws, but those laws may change ex nihilo? The basic idea of not having any kind of antecedent reason—other objects or systems—that allow the emergence of further objects or systems seems to be a common idea here. Despite Meillassoux’s rigor, you have the result of a rather “magical” world in a similar sense: nothing can be said with any amount of probability and absolutely anything may occur without precedent or reason (and likewise return to nothingness for no reason whatsoever).
August 21, 2011 at 9:56 am
[…] commentary on the function of God in Whitehead’s cosmology, as well as Levi Bryant/Larval Subject‘s dismissive opinion that Whitehead is “a priori to be excluded” from […]
August 21, 2011 at 7:57 pm
Levi,
I would be interested to know how you view the difference between a theoreticians religious views and their philosophical views. Clearly, elements of Whitehead’s philosophy can be severed from his larger theological speculations (as Harman and yourself have done)- much to the chagrin of process theologians, I’m sure. However, I’m looking for further clarification on your views on these matters since so many valuable insights come from religiously committed thinkers.
As you might already know, for example, there is currently a lengthy discussion happening on the MEA listserv about McLuhan’s Catholicism- a position that, as far as I know, he strongly affirmed and held to be central to his media studies (even if in a modified, progressive way). Likewise, Latour doesn’t seem to shy away from his (Catholic) religious commitments, though again these don’t seem to show up in his theoretical works (save perhaps for his writings in “On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods”). Thus it seems that Whitehead, Latour, and McLuhan all have religious backgrounds that influence their work. Latour and McLuhan are perhaps more reserved about their religious views than Whitehead vis-a-vis their philosophical or methodological works, but nevertheless it seems like a question worth asking. To further complicate things, I know Harman has already called Latour the first “secular occasionalist,” a phrase that I think is accurate, but still begs questions about Latour’s extant religious beliefs, as they relate to his philosophy.
In short, then, I want to know how you parse a theorist’s religious beliefs from their philosophical ones, and, if it turns out their religious beliefs cannot be parsed from their philosophical ones, how do you to relate to those philosophies, given your naturalist/nontheist stance? It seems that your discussion of Whitehead here draws a strong line that might create problems later down the line if applied to all religiously influenced thinkers. Its an open ended question to be sure, and one I have been asking myself, your response would be very interesting and helpful to me.