Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead, Didier Debaise made an interesting observation about the nature of propositions in his keynote at the Philosopher’s Rally (which was an amazing success and experience). While I do not share Debaise’s “subject-oriented ontology” where everything becomes a subject (rocks, planets, mantis shrimps, etc), I strongly feel that our difference is largely rhetorical rather than philosophical. I believe that there’s a strategic value to referring to all entities– including humans –as objects at our historical juncture, while he believes there’s a strategic gesture in referring to them all as subjects. In the end, however, we’re both making the claim that all entities are monads that integrate their world in their own peculiar and unique way. Our real difference lies elsewhere. He believes that every monad/subject/object expresses the entirety of the world, while I reject the thesis that every entity is related to every other entity. I think there’s a great danger in holding that things ontologically come pre-related. On the one hand, I think this view is just mistaken ontologically. As a materialist I take it as “axiomatic” that relations can be forged no faster than the speed of light. Indeed, in most cases relations and interactions don’t even move at this speed. Look into the history, for example, of constructing the great trans-Atlantic cables and all the constraints that emerged with respect to how quickly information could be transferred across these cables. Every entity, I believe, has it’s own openness to the duration of entities both above and below the speed of its own duration, such that many of these other durations cannot even be registered at all. The point is that relations must be forged. They aren’t given.
Politically, many of our problems revolve around non-relation or the fact that no relations are present between two or more regimes. In my own thought I distinguish between dark, dim, bright, and rogue objects (and perhaps gaseous objects as well, I’m still thinking on this). A dark object is an object so thoroughly unrelated that it is there in a situation but does not manifest itself at all in the situation. For example, my living room, where I’m now typing, might be filled with all sorts of dark objects that go completely unregistered in this situation. Perhaps me or my daughter will happen to perturb them in just the right way and they’ll suddenly manifest, pinning us to the wall or causing us to be pushed out the window. A dim object is an object that minimally manifests itself in a situation but only very dimly and in a marginally related way. Immigrants, the homeless, leftists (in the States), women at academic philosophy conferences, etc., are all examples of dim objects. They are there, they are manifest, but only dimly. Their voices go unheard with respect to majoritarian organization and policy. Bright objects would be those entities that strongly manifest themselves in a situation, exercising a strong gravitational pull on other entities. For example, white males and the 1% in the United States are bright objects. Numerically they aren’t majorities, yet they nonetheless organize a plurality of the social relations. The same could be said of certain technologies and foods that organize how we live. Rogue objects, finally, are objects that erupt within situations from without. Hurricane Katrina, the revolutionary, OWS, etc., were rogue objects that suddenly and out of nowhere manifested themselves in a situation, reconfiguring the relations of that situation.
The point is that politics is not so much about relation but non-relation. Hank Oosterling, in his media-ontology– what he nicely calls “radical media()crity” (“city of relations/mediums) –has it right in his focus on relation, but is wrong to ignore that these relations must be forged or engineered (he recognizes this completely, however, at the level of his practice). Like Oosterling, it is above all relations or what happens when things that relate that interest me; not individual entities in isolation. I just always make the caveat that things don’t come already related; they must be engineered, built, constructed. In this regard, leftist politics is always an engineering of relations through rogue objects for dim objects. It strives to more thoroughly relate the unrelated, the dim. By contrast, rightwing politics is a practice that strives to engineer relations that make bright objects brighter and to ensure that dim objects remain dim or minimally manifest.
Back to Debaise’s remarks on propositions. Following Whitehead, Debaise emphasizes that truth-functionality and entailment are not enough to capture the nature of propositions. In addition to this, we need a logic of events capable of capturing– what I would call, in my language or terminology –the situatedness of propositions in regimes of attraction. In other words, propositions resonate in very different ways depending on differences in the regime of attraction in which they occur. He gives the nice example of the proposition “Crossing the Rubicon” to illustrate this point. When I articulate this proposition and when Caesar articulates this proposition, logically the propositions are identical. The truth-value of the propositions “Didier crosses the Rubicon” and Caesar crosses the Rubicon are the same. But at the level of events, these propositions are quite different. When Didier crosses the Rubicon, nothing really happens beyond his own experience of crossing the Rubicon. By contrast, when Caesar crosses the Rubicon he himself undergoes an incorporeal transformation making him either a criminal general or emperor, and Rome undergoes an incorporeal transformation as well, shifting from being a republic to an imperial state. Truth-functionally and at the level of logic, the two propositions are the same, but at the level of events the entailments and logic are quite different.
My aim here is not to reject the formalisms of logic. Rather, the point is to indicate that formalism is not enough to account for the richness of worlds or logoi. The danger that resides in approaching situations purely in terms of truth-functional logic and structures of entailment is that it risks keeping dim objects dim and bright objects bright by failing to attend to the networks of relation and non-relation that organize the logoi of these situations. What we need is a propositional language rich enough to account for the richness of situations and the structure of events possible in these situations.
April 22, 2012 at 2:20 am
Apologize for the veer… though this post somehow raised the question in my mind… went from rhetoric to.. .never mind the mind map… to ownership, and the idea of integral relationships… like pairs of bacterium in the gut, neither of which can exist without the other … a bad example. But the question was… can there be an ontology of ownership? Is this necessarily always a social construct? I am plagued by possessive pronouns.. but they keep coming at back… MY cat, MY child, MY wife… my body?.. my brain? … horror horror horror! Maybe there’s something deeper here? … and for other connections we treat as social & contingent… more broadly stated… are there ontological RELATIONSHIPS?
April 22, 2012 at 2:36 am
This came up pretty clearly in Debaise’s talk as all relations there were treated as “possessing” somehow the other thing in relating to it. In other words, in relating you own and integrate things from a particular point of view. I find that problematic. But yes, there are ontological relations. They’re just not pre-given and the relation and what’s related always differ ontologically. From a monadological point of view, my grasping of the cat and the cat itself will always differ. We only ever encounter the cat from a particular point of view.
April 22, 2012 at 2:52 am
Where can I find a good definition of “situation”? The more I think about it, the more I realize that I don’t **really*** know what a situation is.
April 22, 2012 at 3:07 am
That’s a good question. I draw my definition of “situation” from Badiou’s Being and Event and the first volume of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. It’s something I really need to pound out more as a situation is not, for me, an object, but a constellation of objects.
April 22, 2012 at 3:32 am
Thanks. I’ll reread both of those, at least the relevant parts.
I get that it’s a constellation of objects, but what makes an object “in”, and what makes an object “out”? Especially given “dark” and maybe even “dim” objects …
April 23, 2012 at 3:27 pm
I have a question about your conception of the need to forge relations. First, I’m not sure why this forging is to be favored over disbanding and breaking apart. There are just as many relations that ought to be abolished as relations that ought to be forged, and until that is hashed out a bit, I’m hard pressed to see why fusion is any better than dissolution, or why the need to forge or engineered relations would be preferred over withdrawal and separation. Secondly, assuming for now that forging relations is to be desired, wouldn’t this have to imply a telos of some sort? Wouldn’t any endeavor to forge relations also have to a kind of plan of action, a production of ends, etc.? That is, some criterion for establishing when the relation has been effectively forged? ((Obviously, every forged relation is going to have its own criterion and end; but when we move to politics and the community, this “end” seems to come terribly problematic, and the very idea of “forging” us together makes me sqeamish…; again, why prefer this over withdrawal?))
Thirdly, set a bit apart, I will meditate on question, are things ‘pre-related’ or not? The way I read this statement of yours is that things do not have any purposeful relationship to other things unless that relationship is forged — where purposeful relationship can be anything from a symbiotic relationship between bacteria and stomach to the signifying relationship between the word “God” and a group of faux-Christians. The point is that, in all these cases of relationship, it’s not just relationship involved, but some kind of purposeful contact, use, or signification. Again, this all seems tied together insofar as the relations being forged, in this sense, are relations that DO and ARE DOING something — changing some status in some way, making for various *actual* effects between relata, etc.
I think I understand how you are using this word, then (please correct me if I am wrong). However, I would say that this might not be the only way to think through ‘relation.’ I am in relation to the moon without ever having to forget those relationships. I am also in relation to pollutants in the air, to a solar flare, to terrorism in Afghanistan. I am also in relation to the death of my friend’s father, for example, even if I wasn’t there when it happened, heard of it secondhand, and have yet to talk with him in person about it. Do you see what I am getting at? I’m in relation to things that might produce no *actual* effect on me, if only for the very reason that with all these things I share the/a world. As I see it, there is a relationality between my being and all other beings that doesn’t reduce me to this relationality, but lets me stand out (or stand out withdrawn) as “me.” There is relationship in simply being-there, being-there in the world or in the universe.
In other words, I don’t think relationship necessarily has to imply the proximity of purpose, or use, or signification, or “doing” anything. Or even “affecting” — by being in this world (the only world there is), I’m related de facto to things that I will never know about or ‘feel’ in any way. But that doesn’t mean I’m not there “with” all these things; and I would say that being-with is being-related, albeit in a different sense than the one I think you’re using. I don’t think this would take anything away from your thesis that things are also withdrawn as relata from every “relation,” especially if “relation” means something that has to be forged, something that has a telos, purpose, significance, reason, end, etc.
Hopefully I have made myself relatively clear, and haven’t tried to breach too many topics at once. Also, I have no clue about Debaise, so I don’t speak in reference to him at all. And also, sorry for the length — I hope you don’t find it superfluous.
Tim.
April 23, 2012 at 3:41 pm
Guh – sorry for all those typos! I really hate them!
Since I’m posting again, I’m tempted to push what I said a bit farther and say that it is only in this being-with that the being-one (or being-monad, to use a term from your post) is possible — not in the sense that each thing “embodies” or “expresses” the entirety of the world (Debaise), but rather that it is only by being in a world that it can be itself as not-the-rest-of-the-world. Only by being with everything else can something not be confused with everything else. Being-with and standing-out or standing-withdrawn would necessarily “go together.” And in that sense, I’m totally willing to say that things are “with” without being “related” in any way, whether we take “relation” to mean something to be forged, or something purely incidental, accidental, coincidental, etc. I would simply be saying that nothing, no object, can stand out from a background — or stand withdrawn against a foreground — of nothingness, but rather that everything is “in” the world in one way or another (which doesn’t mean the world contains everything, but rather that the world “is” the spacing of all these things). For it seems to me that if there weren’t this world (again, the only one: this being-with that is not like togetherness, fusion, not even like “being-related”) the possibility of being-one, of standing out or standing withdrawn, would not even make sense. Everything has its space, but this space is a space in the world.
Tim.
April 23, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Hi Tim,
I didn’t intend to give the impression that I only think the forging of relations is important. I think the severing of relations is every bit as important. I’ve written about this quite a bit in the past. You might find this post, “Terraism”, of interest in this connection:
Terraism, as I conceive it, has three dimensions: cartography, deconstruction, and construction. Cartography is the mapping of entities and their relations in an assemblage. Deconstruction is the activity of severing or cutting certain relations within an assemblage that are deemed oppressive and destructive. Finally, construction is the forging of new assemblages and relations.
Your question about teleology is difficult. First, not all relations that are forged are teleological or purposive in character. For example, the relation that the oceans entertain to the moon is not purposive or intentional. It’s a relation that gets forged, but there’s no intentionality behind that forging. Evolution works that way as well. Purpose or function arises after the fact, it doesn’t guide evolution. As humans we find ourselves caught up in all sorts of non-teleological relations. For example, despite myself I’m carried off in all sorts of networks pertaining to technology and the natural world that significantly impact my action, possibilities, and that modify my aims. In my view it’s very important to escape the impression that we humans are the ones always calling the shots and defining the aims. Teleology is always collaborative and collaboration is never just collaboration between humans, but is also always collaboration between humans and nonhumans. I am never the one that solely defines the aims, but rather the nonhumans that I live in congress with modify my own aims, transform them, and often thwart them.
I disagree with your suggestion that relations between you and the moon, pollutants, friends, etc., do not need to be forged. Within a materialist framework, every relation has to be forged. The gravitational effects of the moon can only travel at the speed of light and have to travel to you in order to affect your body and the ocean. In order for me to see you light has to bounce off your body and travel to my eyes. Likewise, fiber optic cables and satellites are required for us to have this conversation. The same is true of the things like hearing about terrorism in Afghanistan and being affected by pollutants. There is no action at a distance nor instantaneous causal events or transfers of information, rather these things must always travel through other mediums to have their effects. Those mediums influence the form that these things take (i.e., a medium is never a smooth medium without friction or time delay, but always contributes differences of its own to what it mediates).
April 23, 2012 at 7:01 pm
The fact that all of the dark, dim, bright, and rogue objects listed above are considered as such only through human mediation seems troublesome.
Surely those same objects which you are calling dark might simultaneously be bright for one of the hundreds of other entities in the room, no?
I’m sure you’ve addressed this in much greater detail somewhere in your work, it’s just something I’m calling to attention with this particular set.
April 23, 2012 at 7:03 pm
Taz,
Absolutely. I think neutrinos, for example, are very dim objects. This is not because we have difficulty studying them (though we do), but because their neutral electric charge prevents them from interacting with most forms of matter. It’s entirely possible, however, that they are extremely bright within other networks of material relations.
April 23, 2012 at 8:53 pm
Following up on Taz, then: a dark, dim, etc object is only that in a particular situation. It’s the situation that’s the determinant, not the human mediation. Re the neutrino being bright “within other networks …” etc that would be w/in a different situation than the one in which they’re dim. At least that’s how I understand it.
April 23, 2012 at 8:58 pm
John,
Yes. Situation for me is a generic term for any relation between units regardless of whether or not humans are involved. That said, I do reserve the possibility that there are completely dark objects that exist in no situation because they are so thoroughly unrelated.
April 24, 2012 at 5:10 am
Per teleology – I am well aware that you want us to stop thinking that humans call all the shots, and you’ll notice that I never said that we do. But when you are using a word like “forging relations,” I simply don’t know how to understand that phrase other than as some kind of “purposive creating,” some kind of “meaningful connecting,” etc. (and in that sense, it’s hard for me to not think you’re telling humans to forge the connections!). I don’t mean to get into semantics, but I think people are going to be confused with statements like “The moon has to forge its relationships with the ocean.” Rhetorically, it’s just a bit strange to talk about things that are basically accidental, incidental, coincidental, non-teleological, instantaneous, and in a sense, “default” — as being “forged.” It makes it sound like there is some necessity here that you are imposing, an obligation to forge relationships, doesn’t it? How does it not turn in to a program for action that you are advocating? ((As you said, it’s just something you think is “important”; I’m just saying the rhetoric always feels otherwise.))
Per relation – we’re going to have to agree to disagree, I think. Under your paradigm, it is as if everything existed in its own space, in its own various mediums, or worlds, whereas I am of the view that everything exists in the same world, and therefore everything is with everything else in an irrevocable and irreversible way. This means that, even if there is “no relation at all” in the sense of affecting, effecting, changing, modifying, impacting, etc., everything “relates” insofar as everything shares this world. This is not a matter of action at a distance, the mysterious passage of information, etc., because the absence of making an impact, or relating, is also a form of relationship. I don’t think this being-with is something that has to be “forged.” In fact, to think that it “has to be” in any sense is… evil.
April 24, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Tim,
It’s simply not true that the gravitational effects of the moon are instantaneous. They move no faster than the speed of light. If the sun suddenly disappeared, we wouldn’t experience the gravitational effects for eight minutes. This is one reason that there isn’t one world. Information transfer between entities doesn’t take place instantaneously and there are therefore entities that aren’t related at all.
April 24, 2012 at 1:27 pm
[…] that came to mind this morning when I read a remark by Tim responding to one of my posts. Tim writes: I don’t mean to get into semantics, but I think people are going to be confused with statements […]
April 24, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Levi, you say, in passing, “In the end, however, we’re both making the claim that all entities are monads that integrate their world in their own peculiar and unique way.” I am not sure I ever saw you say this “out loud” before. Deleuze’s late book on Leibniz is, for me, one of his most difficult and would seem to portend some difficulty for OOO as I understand some of your commitments, but I am very unsure. D’s version of what is often called “occasionalism” I would have thought did not suit you as then “meaningful” relations become – I think – “expressions.” Still, the concept of the monadic division of labor D sees puts many of the qualities you attribute to objects within “spiritual subjectivity.” This is way too much too fast, but as an instance in The Fold Deleuze says “Monads are distributive units that follow a relation of part and whole, while bodies are collectives — flocks or aggregates” (100). Even if we “rhetorically” bridge the gap between subjects and objects by the objectification of subjects, their functionality as monadic still retains the problematics of their determinations of the expressive matrix in the instance in question. Thus objects are always “objects for” and “objects themselves” becomes an impossible category. This seems to mean that generalization or universalization is always from the unfolding perspectivalism of the monad in/out of question. This structure of always located relation disallows a fully literal/scientific enframing except insofar as that ignores exactly that particularized unification that it expresses differentially. Or not?
On velocity and one world: to say that particular consequences reach a locality at different times and with different intensities and variables does not make the world discontinuous but heterogeneous. Indeed, the “oneness” of the world seems a manifestation of its differential impulse. This oneness is not circumscribed rather something like Anaximander’s apeiron, an inequality.
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time
April 24, 2012 at 4:13 pm
Dan,
I’ve continuously said this in the context of autopoietic systems theory. Autopoietic systems theory just is the thesis that each autopoietic system integrates the world in its own particular way. This makes up the theme of chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects and has been written about copiously on this blog.
April 24, 2012 at 4:19 pm
Dan,
Your remark on the heterogeneity of the world misses the point. Leibniz and his heirs make a very specific claim that is or is not true: they say that every monad expresses the entirety of the world from a particular point of view. But if everything is not related to everything else– as the speed of relation argument shows –that simply isn’t true. And if that’s not true, there’s not a single world that contains all, but a variety of worlds. Moreover, there are entities that cannot connect to other entities at all. The neutrino is a nice example of this insofar as it’s unrelated to most matter we’re familiar with.
April 24, 2012 at 11:14 pm
This does not seem to me fully on point. I did not say I was nor attribute to you some Leibnizian purism. Indeed, I would think that when you use the word “monad” you do not want all that appears in the monadology. I tried with the quote from Deleuze to probe a bit more what you might mean as I did with the reference before to the disagreements about Clamour but those frames seem uninteresting to you as questions: which is fine. IAC, I not sure then which point is missed or by whom. Saying that things take time when they move from point to point does not that the world is not one but that the information about the world at any point is partial and belated. For Leibniz. I thought, this appeared in two of his laws on identicals and continuity. While every monad has one perspective it is not complete or undifferentiated. Still, I find these hard questions thus “Or not?” I apologize for my belated interest.
April 26, 2012 at 12:06 am
Levi, I understand all that, but we’re still in disagreement. I’m still here in the world with entities that I have absolutely no relationship to, that have no effect on me. I am still with them in this world (materially!), and I still share the world with them. I came from them and I go back to them, and there is no exiting the loop. For you, that being-with doesn’t mean much or make much sense, I know; and for things to relate, in your opinion, there has to be some effect, some transfer/translation of information, something has to happen across a ‘medium,’ etc. That’s why you believe Leibniz is wrong, because he isn’t taking into account the ‘speed of relation’ argument which you think prevails here. But I think it is wrong to make a comment about Leibniz from a standpoint stripped of God, since without that it seems hard to get a taste for it (i.e., beyond its truth claims about monads, worlds, etc.). Perhaps that’s why the ontology of being-with that I express is so meaningless to you also, so easily disprovable, etc.
I want to read your newer post in a bit, but one other comment first, when I say there is only this world, I don’t mean to imply a unicity to it or any simple “oneness” to it. Nor do I mean to say that there aren’t multiple worlds within the world. Obviously, a “world” is a multiplicity and the various articulations of its multiple elements, interacting or not interacting, relating or not relating. But it’s still always a world, with other relating or not-relating worlds, etc. And like it or not, I trust our common speech in saying — it all takes place in this world, our world, without back-worlds, this world the only one.
To close, perhaps I’d frame the question otherwise and say: How do we relate to those with whom we have nothing in common, no relations?
April 26, 2012 at 12:36 am
Tim,
I think this remark indicates a fundamental point of disagreement between us:
Here I categorically disagree. You seem to conceive the world as a container over and above the entities that populate the world. My position that a world (and the indefinite article is important here) is nothing more than relations between entities. Where there are no relations between entities those entities do not belong to the same world. In other words, there are no containers. This is one reason that I claim that entities do not all belong to the same world. There are discontinuities of relation and where there are these discontinuities we have another world.
As for your points about Leibniz and God, I quite understand this. But the issue here is not one of interpreting Leibniz and what he thought to be the case, but of evaluating whether or not his positions are true or hold up under scrutiny. While I find aspects of his philosophy beautiful (and with Voltaire, find others horrifying), I nonetheless find him to be mistaken on a variety of points for reasons I’ve outlined. We need to take care to avoid the tendency of Continental philosophers to turn every genuine philosophical dispute into a misinterpretation of the thinker disputed.
April 26, 2012 at 1:28 am
[…] the last few days Tim of the great Fragile Keys and I have been having a debate on the nature of relation and whether everything is related to everything else. Today I think Tim […]
April 26, 2012 at 8:07 am
I believe there is a genuine differend at work here. I’ll respond on the other post shortly.
April 26, 2012 at 2:36 pm
[…] interesting discussion has come up between me and Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects (here and here). It seems to get at a genuine differend between Levi and me, which I would like to […]