In response to my last post, Paul Bain’s remarks that it will be interesting to see where this new concept of withdrawal goes. Over at Speculum Criticum, Skholiast has an interesting post up, remarking that,
…for Harman and Bryant, the problem arises on the side of the (real) object–it withdraws, so how does it interact with anything else?
I suppose I should have been more clear in my last post, but first, the concepts of withdrawal are not the same for me and Harman, and 2) the concept of withdrawal I propose at the end of my last post is not a new conception of withdrawal for me, but one I’ve advocated for quite some time. Harman’s thesis is that real objects are withdrawn from all relations and that they can only relate to one another vicariously. I’ve never understood the thesis that objects can’t touch and the idea that they only relate vicariously. If objects are relating vicariously then they are affecting one another and touching. That’s a relation. While I can certainly see the epistemological problem of causality vis a vis Hume’s skepticism, I don’t understand the ontological property of causality. I take it that causality is just a primitive ontological given and that we don’t need any special account of how objects can relate. To be sure, objects can break with relations and share no relations to all sorts of things, but this is very different than claiming that objects are withdrawn from all relations. I assume that because my friend Harman is quite brilliant, I am simply somehow misunderstanding him, yet he does repeatedly remark that objects can never touch and that they are unable to relate to one another. I simply can’t figure out how this is possible if objects are not affecting one another in some way.
In my work I’ve tried to theorize “withdrawal” (maybe I need a different term) in terms of 1) the manner in which objects are split between their virtual and actual half, and 2) autopoietic theory’s concept of “operational closure” (in Whitehead the term would be “subjective form”). In the autopoietic framework framework, the thesis is not that objects cannot touch but that 1) entities only maintain selective relations to their environment (e.g., I’m unable to sense light in the infrared spectrum), and 2) that entities structure perturbations from their environment in terms of their own internal organization. In other words, the cause or perturbation doesn’t predelineate the effect. Obviously it plays an important role, but the effect will be a function of the perturbed object’s internal organization. I outline all of this in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects. Not incidentally, it allows me to retain most of critical theory and post-structuralist thought and critique, albeit in a modified form.
For me, the important thing about the virtual/actual structure of the object is that we can’t reduce an object to its current qualities. On the planet earth, for example, I weigh, unfortunately, about 195lbs. A naive approach to objects might treat this quality (what I call a “local manifestation”) as an intrinsic feature of my body. Here the thesis would be that a body, substance, unit, or object is nothing more than the some of its qualities. However, when I go to Mars I very quickly discover that seemed what so apparent and obvious– that I am intrinsically 195lbs; thank God I’m 6’1″! –is, in fact, an event on the part of my body. Qualities are not something an object has, but something an object does. On Mars my weight would be quite different because Mars is about half the mass of the planet Earth. In other words, the relations an object entertains to other objects play a tremendous role in its “local manifestations”, generating very different qualities under different networks of relations. I call these networks of relations “regimes of attraction” because these relations among objects draw out different qualities. These claims are dealt with in chapter 3 and 5 of The Democracy of Objects.
So here is what I was trying to diplomatically suggest in my last post. It’s difficult to see how objects thoroughly withdrawn from all relations and incapable of affecting other objects can make any practical difference in our dealings with the world. Such a thesis seems to lead to something akin to the claim that the world doubles in size every 30 seconds. By contrast, the thesis that the qualities of objects are variable under shifting conditions and that objects only relate to other objects under conditions of operational closure has profound implications for inquiry and practice. On the one hand, the thesis of operational closure entails that we can’t just assume that other entities (including other humans and social organizations) do not encounter the world in the same way, but rather that they encounter the world selectively and in terms of operational closure. Off the top of my head, this has massive implications for both pedagogy and political theory. It’s rather difficult to educate a kid if you’re unable to communicate with him at all (i.e., you’re using speech acts that don’t fall in the field of his selectivity) and it’s difficult to act on social institutions if you’re not engaging them at a level they can register. We need to map the internal organization and fields of selection in these other entities.
Second, the thesis that qualities are events resulting from a regime of attraction entails, at the level of practice, that we shouldn’t just reduce objects to a list of qualities (the old Aristotlean species/genus sortings), but that in investigating entities we need to vary their regimes of attraction to see what differences are produced. To see this point concretely, take the Humboldt squid. The Humboldt has a reputation for being extremely aggressive. In other words, we treat aggressivity as an intrinsic quality of the Humboldt’s essence. But what if Humboldt behavior results not from an internal essence of the Humboldt, but rather from features of the regime of attraction in which it is studies? Marine biologists investigating the Humboldt often do so around fishing boats throwing all sorts of discarded bits of fish in the water and that inadvertently capture Humboldt’s in their nets. What if the behavior of Humboldt’s we’re witnessing is the result of being under assault, and not the result of some sort of intrinsic essence? I’m not suggesting that this is the case. My point is that the distinction between the virtual dimension of objects as powers, potentialities, or capacities, and the actual dimension of objects consisting of local manifestations makes a real difference in how we investigate things. Rather than locating qualities in the object as intrinsic features, we instead see them as events that refer to a context of relations (a regime of attraction). In doing so, we come to conclude that the investigation of entities requires 1) acting on them in controlled ways to see how they’ll respond (this is what takes place in a super collider, for example), and 2) requires varying their regime of attraction or environment to see what differences these variations elicit. Such variation gradually allows us to build up a diagram of the object’s virtual powers or a concept not of what an object is, but of what it can do.
January 5, 2012 at 1:27 am
I just have a quick question. When you say that you take causality as an ontological given and don’t seek a special idea of how objects can relate, are you saying that you’re not trying to account for the potential to relate, the practice of relating, or both? I tend to agree with you in the case of the former, but I do think it’s important to look at what happens when objects relate to and translate one another. And I also think that a lot of the work that you, Kris, Tim Morton, and Eileen Joy are doing (for example, with all of your work on an object-oriented approach to textual analysis), gets at what happens during or as a result of a relation. Lots of good stuff on this in Democracy of Objects, too, I think.
January 5, 2012 at 1:37 am
Marisol,
No I’m not suggesting that we should ignore how objects relate. All I’m saying is that I don’t think there’s any special metaphysical problem that arises as to how objects can relate based on the premise that they’re somehow radically isolated from one another. With that said, I do hold that objects are defined by their affects or their capacity to affect and be affected by other objects. These affects differ from object to object and it is therefore crucial to investigate them. The example I like to give is that of the neutrino which, by virtue of its neutral electric charge, passes through most matter without being affected by that matter and without affecting that matter. The neutrino is unable to be affected by most matter or, to put it differently, is closed to causal interaction with most matter. This is what makes neutrinos so difficult to investigate. Another example would be my relationship to infrared light. I do not have the capacity to be affected by light in the infrared spectrum because of the nature of how my eyes are structured. As a result I cannot, unlike bees, mantis shrimp, etc., see certain patterns in corals and flowers because they only occur in this spectrum. All of these things are the sorts of things I’m interested in investigating under the title of “operational closure”.
January 5, 2012 at 2:07 am
Hi, Levi. I keep returning to my test case: Duchamp’s Fountain. The urinal (which is but a part of the artwork called Fountain) and the artwork, Fountain, must have different withdrawn cores. To me that’s already a difference that makes a difference. The artwork can keep on giving, can continue to execute and change and decay and even grow, dragging in other parts—a strange attractor, as you would say. E.g., the signature, R. Mutt, can continue to provoke semiosis: I could launch or relaungh a campaign to force the verb “to mutter” to join with the proper/improper dog’s name Mutt. The institutions can display the artwork under a case (changing what this artwork is, a vulnerable thing) or expose it, as the PMA does, opening it to me.
But the urinal can keep on giving too. How so? The urinal can change and emit molecular clouds, vapor pressure of solids; it can decay from within. But this would have no discernible effect on the artwork. Arguably, many nicks and scrapes and patinas could effect the urinal without effecting the artwork, without touching it at all. Or the urinal can weigh upon the plinth, causing the latter to sag or darken from chemical interactions of the surfaces. Fountain executes its reality. The urinal executes its reality. These realities are distinct even they overlap, one being part of the other, but a replaceable part and a durable one.
I’m thinking too of your example of the Humbolt Squid, but I’m thinking more about scaling effects of parts and wholes rather than networks that pull out some hidden features of an object at the expense of other possible features. And so, how to answer your question: “It’s difficult to see how objects thoroughly withdrawn from all relations and incapable of affecting other objects can make any practical difference in our dealings with the world.” Wouldn’t Harman flip this and say, only because objects are thoroughly withdrawn from all relations can they affect other objects. All practical differences in the dealings of any object with any other, all events and encounters, can only be thought on the basis of this reserve. That’s not an answer so much as a provocative inversion. Does it help? Maybe with the urinal becoming-Fountain it helps. No Fountain without the urinal doing what it does. So, must we metaphysicians retroactively posit powers that nonetheless must have been there in the first place? Maybe so. And maybe then the metaphysician is like the artist who creates readymades: the descriptions and litanies are decorative, illuminative, and attractive the way objects are too.
Ok, I’m spinning out of control here. I hope this is of interest.
January 5, 2012 at 2:19 am
Levi — I’m beginning to see much more cleary that what you call a “regime of attraction” is very similar to how I use the term “ecology” in my expanded sense. I’m not sure why this wasn’t obvious to me from the get go, but I think it goes some way to explaining why the upcoming Ozone issue on ecology is such an intuitive topic for both of us.
January 5, 2012 at 2:33 am
Adam,
Yeah, I try to avoid the terms “environment” and “ecology” when I write about these things because I think they misleadingly suggest the idea of a container, when, in fact, those “containers” are just relations among objects. Additionally, part of the problem is that when people hear the term “ecology” they immediately think “nature” and fail to see that ecologies are everywhere (as we approached contributors for the first issue of O-Zone a lot of genuinely ecological thinkers worried they have nothing to say about ecology because they don’t write on nature, but say media. What they missed is that regimes of attraction are all over the place and don’t need to refer to organic beings. Nonetheless, regime of attraction is the ecological dimension of my thought.
January 5, 2012 at 2:56 am
[...] a previous post I argued that politics necessarily deals with questions of relations. There can be no coherent [...]
January 5, 2012 at 3:45 am
Levi — Yes! We are in agreement here. I decided a while back to re-purpose the word ecology, turning it away from both “environment” and “nature.” This is in fact precisely what I’m working on in my essay on Whitehead and ecology; perhaps this what as me thinking about it and what made the similarities so clear to me in your above post. It may be the case that using ecology in my expanded sense will create some rhetorical problems for me down the line but, for me, placing ecology as a central concern of relations in general is a big part of what I hope to accomplish philosophically.
January 5, 2012 at 12:29 pm
I recently have come to be involved in taking care of a dog since my girlfriend has one and I think raising a dog is a great example of the practical implications of operational closure. People who are not used to dog tend to communicate to them as they do to other humans. Showing affections in the same way as well as dissapointment and anger.
To these people, a person who is skilled in communicating with dogs may seem harsh and un-loving, but they are simple communicating with dogs in a way that the dog clearly understands. That entails short, clear and simple ways that would seem rude were they communicated to a human.
What having a dog teaches you is that there is a difference in showing affection in a way that seems “natural” to you, or they way you would want affection to be shown to you, and the way you need to show it to be able to communicate with another being. A difference between affection as self-expression and as communication, if you will.
February 10, 2012 at 4:18 pm
[...] I may just not fully grasp the details of Levi’s position. I think some of the debate about withdrawn objects may relate to the notion of formal distinction in Duns Scotus which in turn pops up in Peirce (and [...]