Over at Fragile Keys Tim has a wonderful post elaborating on his philosophy, drawn from Jean-Luc Nancy, of “being-with”. I can’t respond in detail right now as I’m getting ready to head out camping and will be unconnected for the weekend, but I wanted to draw attention to this passage:
This would be the heart of the differend, perhaps: For me, everything is “related” because we all share this common structure of being-related-to, even if this just means being-related-to-myself. Because we are all there, we are all also with something else, even if that something else is myself! Not “related” in some scheme of interconnection, not “forged together” in some purposeful collaboration between humans and/or nonhumans, but simply being-related-there by dint of the fact that being-there is structured (“internally,” if you want) as being-with — as being-with-its-(other-)self (withdrawn, subtracted, split, divided, etc.). This is a “with” that cannot be destroyed, since its always literally there wherever any being is.
In my view, the claim that the with cannot be destroyed since it is already literally there wherever being is is a thoroughly dogmatic claim since it fails to account for the conditions of possibility of being-with and being-related. It merely asserts that beings are related, treating this as a primitive ontological factum, without grounding this possibility. I think this is one of the problems with the suspension of the natural attitude practiced by phenomenology that has clearly influenced Nancy (whom I admire with Tim). Because we have suspended the natural attitude, because we have “bracketed the world”, we feel as if we are entitled to say we are just related because I’m able to see my student Cameron sitting over there “immediately”. Having banished the independent and material world we then feel that we need not attend to things like the fact that I am only able to see Cameron over there by dint of electro-magnetic waves traveling between me and him that both take time to travel and that can fail to travel.
The epoche is fine as a methodological device deployed to allow us to describe experience so as to get at what must be explained, but it becomes dogmatism when it is deployed to legislate ontology on the basis of how we experience the world and when it is used to banish things such as the fact that relations can only occur materially and that as a result of the absence of many material interactions there are many unrelated things. While I think phenomenology has taught us much of value, I also believe that it has done tremendous damage to ontology and metaphysics by leading us to believe that we can infer structures of being from structures of lived experience. Some will say that I’m being unfair to phenomenology here– and yes I know that Nancy is not working solely within a phenomenological tradition, but his inheritance comes out clearly here –but let’s not forget that in Ideas Husserl directly says that the natural world cannot be the condition for consciousness because consciousness is the condition of the natural world. This entails that the manner in which lived experience is structured allows us to legislate the structure of being, that being and lived experience are identical. The price of this is incredibly high, requiring us to reject all sorts of things from other disciplines such as the points about time of travel and information theory with respect to relation I’ve been making.
April 27, 2012 at 6:15 pm
I’m not sure we’re totally clear on the ideas here, so I’ll try to clarify them, as they are admittedly difficult to understand and make clear to myself.
The claim here is not that “there are beings that are already related just because they’re there,” and the difficulty is in the very different usages of the words “relation” at play here. You are insisting that there are beings or objects first and then they must enter into relationships. Taking “relation” to mean this, I agree with you — you and I are “unrelated” until we start exchanging comments, post, e-mails, etc. But let me try and restate what I mean by relation, which I think is a bit different: for something to be in the active or verbal sense is to-be-related or to-be-related-to, even when this just means to-be-related-to-itself.
Again, I think the test here is to ask: name one example of a being or object that is not related to anything? and/or an object or thing that doesn’t even relate to itself?
So to say that to-be is to-be-related-to doesn’t necessarily even have to say anything about “external” relations which are the kind you seem focused, although I think that to-relate-to-myself is eo ipso to relate-to-an-outside (even if this is the “outside” of myself, which may even be an ideal). It means that a being is internally related to itself (of course “internally” is the wrong word) as to another. This “related to myself as to another” is the heart of an ontology of being-with, or “related to myself as to being with another.” Although I think “legislate” is the wrong way to put it, I think this is the general idea Nancy’s work in ontology seeks to bring out.
To reiterate just a bit (since this always is necessary here), the claim is not that everything is always already “with” everything else. The claim is that to-be-myself is to-be-with-myself, for something to be there it is always already there with itself. At least with itself: again, what if not some hyper-ideal object like God could be without relations even to itself? This kind of hypothetical “it doesn’t relate to anything at all” is something Nancy himself pokes fun at, something that would so enclosed and self-identical and substantively self-consistent that, all in all, it would never even come to be, it wouldn’t even exist.
Thus, to say that to be is to be shared, shared and partitioned ‘within’ and without’, simply means that beings come into being together. But to say that beings are with other beings doesn’t say anything about the nature of this being-with (and perhaps saying it was indestructible was incorrect). Like I tried to point out a few times now, the claim that we are “with” carries here even in the utter absence of relations (although again, this absence seems hypothetical) — i.e., homeless people or the untouchables are is still “with” all of us and our society despite their not being “in” it the way others are.
April 28, 2012 at 7:17 am
omg you are actually unconnected! What does this mean ontologically speaking!!! don’t let the bugs bite
April 28, 2012 at 9:41 am
My prior comments approached a response in one direction, and I would like to test a different but supplementary response here, so as to go at the question from multiple angles– hopefully to provoke, if not more responses, then at least more nuanced ones.
You say that I fail “to account for the conditions of possibility of being-with and being-related,” and that I have said that “beings merely are related.” This is not true. My claim is that the condition of possibility for being-related is being-with. Simply put, two things can’t enter into (or exit) a relationship unless they are already there with each other. The condition of possibility for being is the “same” condition of possibility for being-with. (Stated otherwise, to be and to relate share a common condition: being always with other beings, for the one, and relating with always other relations for the other.) I do not think that this simply transfers a structure of lived experience to the structure of being; nor does it mean that we’ve said “being-with” is what consciousness says it is, or thinks it is. In fact, we’ve said the opposite: “being-with” (or just being, if you like) is what precedes and makes possible every intentional or conscious relationship, which is obviously just one type of relationship among many. But making any relationship possible, including the possibility of there being no relation at all, is the fact that there are beings and they are with one another– and I would say, with one another in the world, sharing a or the world.
To apply this to your example with your student, you are right that for you to relate to Cameron in a conscious way, to perceive him, to apprehend him or know he is there– for you to relate to him in any way, yes, something has to “happen,” boundaries of time and space need to be crossed by recognition as well as all those light particles traveling at you. But if you did not do this, if you kept your back turned and sat there reading or thinking to yourself — and even if you never once thought about Cameron — wouldn’t you still be there with him in the room? In the same way, the room shares its space with other rooms, the building with the whole block, and likewise everything shares the world with everything else: we are all there with each other here (you, me, Cameron, the room, the wilderness…)– even in the absence of every relation.
We are saying very simply that wherever there is one thing, there are many things; and therefore beings are with– no matter what ambivalent, aggressive, symbiotic, amorous, or non-existent “relations” they form thereafter. We have never found and we will never find a Being that exists so withdrawn from all relations and all possibility of relation that this Being was not even with us. Nothing, no being is like that here, not in this world, “our world”–not “our human world,” but rather ours, the world of and for all existents, all the beings of the world. To exist is to be with; this does not legislate ontology, it exacts it.
(A whole parentheses would have to be made regarding the implications of this when it comes to the idea of “my” self or “self-relation,” for here I am with myself, with others and (all) other things, but also with “the other of myself,” something deeper in me than me, or something that exceeds me outside of me, perhaps both in the one, experienced in my wonder in my suffering and my wandering in the wilderness — and all this before I am ever “myself”!)
April 28, 2012 at 11:24 pm
Levi,
Sounds rather like a disavowed Oedipal argument… Yes Nancy is not the son of Husserl… But yes he is and Daddy says xyz….
Will.
April 29, 2012 at 2:14 pm
Tim,
Claiming the being-with is the condition for relation does not yet solve the problem for me as my thesis is that some sort of material event must occur for a relation to take place. In my view, not all entities can relate to one another. My favorite example, again, is the neutrino. Because of its neutral electric charge it’s unable to interact with most matter. It’s literally unable to enter into relation and is therefore not with in any meaningful sense. It belongs to another world. In your remarks about Cameron you seem to discuss space as a container that we’re both in and therefore where we’re with one another. For me, by contrast, space and time are not containers or a milieu, but are networks of relations between entities. I treat container space/Newtonian space as a withness that precedes network space as a sort of illusion. In network space you and I are closer than I am to many of my other friends– say my Childhood friend Sean that I grew up with –because the path between us is more direct due to this medium. There are other persons that don’t belong to this space at all as there’s no Path between us at all.
April 29, 2012 at 2:44 pm
Levi,
I see where you are at and I think I understand your view. For me, the fact that I am with the table in my room, and with the big oak tree outside my window, and with the local deli down the street that I can’t see, etc., doesn’t have to imply a “container,” but a common space or spacing out. In some ways, I’m surprised this doesn’t jive better with you, since it simply says that I don’t have to be perceiving or relating to something for it to exist somewhere, nor for me to be with it in this world. So under your conception of networks, I guess I’m left wondering, where are networks are established? Or are there simply a multiplicity of networks of relations that have no common space whatsoever (not even a common plane of immanence)? Does place or do places as such first arise in networks? Then the challenge would arise when returning to individual and withdrawn object themselves, because they obviously have a “place” before they are related or before they enter into networks. Each object’s own “place” surely can’t just be in nothingness? Each object, being also a place of sorts, is somewhere. But then where are these objects that exist withdrawn before they enter into any relations? The difficulty for me, I guess, is that the only answer can be “they are in the world, this world that we share with all beings and things, our world” — and letting “our” speak as broadly as possible for all of “us” (neutrinos, Cameron, Seth, etc.) — without that answering or defining what “the world” is in any easy way.
Some open questions for now or later.
Tim.
April 29, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Hi Tim,
For me it’s not so much that things have to be perceiving each other for there to be a being-with between them, but rather that there has to be some sort of interaction going on between them taking place. All the things you list are instances where a network is in place. Thus, for example, when I’m not talking to Cameron and don’t perceive us, there’s still interactions taking place between the two of us in a network: viz., gravitational relations, inhaling particles from each others respiration, etc. We belong to a common network. That said, for me there’s no “where” that networks are established. Rather, networks are the only where. In this connection, I’m inclined to argue– and I know this is a tall order –that there is no place beside network place. Place is place in a network. In this regard, it’s helpful I think to take concrete examples of networks such as airline networks. Within a network there are going to be some hubs or nodes that are more dominant than others, such that one has to pass through them to get to other places in the network. When I flew to Amsterdam a couple weeks ago I couldn’t get a direct flight from Dallas to Amsterdam, but had to first go to Detroit and catch a flight to Amsterdam from there. Spatiality and withness is structured by these sorts of paths, such that I have to pass through these hubs or nodes (Detroit) to get to another place. In this regard, there will be some entities that are brighter in a network than others because they will be more richly connected or related. Others will be all but invisible because there’s no set of linkages between them. In many of these instances relations could be occasioned, they’re just not occasioned at present. What interests me is the cartography of these places and relations, how they were formed, how they are structured, what paths exist in them, and where they diverge.
April 30, 2012 at 1:53 am
Hey Levi,
This has been a very fruitful interchange for me, hopefully for you also. You’ve said, “….for me there’s no “where” that networks are established. Rather, networks are the only where. In this connection, I’m inclined to argue– and I know this is a tall order –that there is no place beside network place. Place is place in a network,” …and this has at least clarified some of my final questions in this discussion. I suppose I would still ask, “Where is an object before it has entered into any relations, into any networks?” Surely, “It is right where it is,” but where is that? In that sense, again, I’m hard-pressed to think of an object that exists totally “outside of a network,” that is, an object totally unrelated to anything else, and where such an object would be. I’m then run back to one of the core ‘theses’ of ‘being-with’ — very simply, that where there is one thing, there are many things. And therefore, to be is “inevitably” to be with. The second step has to do with “my being with myself,” but that is another region of discussion, broached in my first comment here, but perhaps best left for later. (However, incidentally, one of the most obvious targets of such an ontology would be the self-enclosed “self” itself, the “subject” or whatever who would dream itself withdrawn into the mind/body so far that it feels unrelated, etc.; in this conception, the self is already other than itself, already related to its other-than-itself, whether to be “found” inside or outside itself, etc.; and it is in relation to this “outside of myself, which is somewhere with me” that one becomes a “self” in the first place.)
Tim.
April 30, 2012 at 2:08 am
Hi Tim,
As I understand it, an unrelated object would just be a network of one. Insofar as space is a milieu of external relations it doesn’t make much sense to talk about an isolated object as having coordinates with respect to other objects. Coordinates only make sense for objects that are related. This leads to the interesting idea that two entities can occupy the same “common sense” (Newtonian container space) yet have no coordinates with respect to one another insofar as there are no paths between them.
I’m not too concerned with the idea of a self-enclosed subject. The problem with the neoliberal, self-enclosed subject is that it is self-made yet still able to act on the world in a completely free way without friction. Yet this is exactly what I argue against with my account of objects and space-time. There are no sovereigns in my universe. Moreover, while I hold that it is possible for there to be completely unrelated objects– if such objects exist I couldn’t know anything about them as I’m unrelated to them –it doesn’t follow that unrelated objects are in any way interesting or rich. In my view, the development or evolution of objects requires interface with other objects in a network space. A purely self-enclosed subject would not be like a demiurge but more like someone in a coma as it would be an object without any interfaces with other entities and therefore an entity unable to develop.
May 2, 2012 at 12:49 pm
“An electric train pulls into the Gare St.-Lazare, inside I’m leaning against a window. I keep clear of the weakness that would see here only insignificance, given the immensity of the universe. If one takes the universe to be a completed totality, then sure; but if there’s only an unfinished universe, each part has no less meaning than the whole. I’d be ashamed if I sought in my ecstasy for a truth that, raising me the level of some complete universe, took away the meaning of “the train pulling into the station.”" –Georges Bataille, Guilty
This short quote seemed apropos.