Today, as a result of my camping adventure over the weekend, I find myself bruised, battered, burnt, and broken. Although I had a wonderful time– and my daughter Lizzie had the time of her life –I guess my 38 year old body (how did that happen?) locally manifests itself in a quite different way after sleeping on the ground than by 17 year old body did. So it goes. These are things that are worth recovering from.
At any rate, over the weekend I found myself thinking about structure and structural change. Although structuralists had the right idea in drawing our attention to relations, they didn’t, I think, do the best job in thinking structures and structural change. In part, the problem lies in the very term structure. In my mind, at least, the term structure evokes images of something very rigid and firm. When I hear this term, I think of something like steel girders in a building or radio tower upon which accidents can alight (like the way we paint the walls in the office building), while the structure remains the same. In much of the structuralist literature, these connotations come out clearly. In structuralist linguistics, for example, we get all sorts of speech events, but these speech events are often treated as mere accidents that play across the surface of structure while the iron pattern of structure remains the same. We get something similar in Levi-Strauss’s account mythology. We get endless variations of myths, but these variations are variations of the same structure, no different than the way in which we can have an infinity of different triangles, while the same basic structure of triangleness always remains the same. The girding remains the same while variations play upon the surface of that girding with their possible permuations already predelineated.
Here structure becomes something deeply mysterious. We seem to think of structure as a mysterious incorporeal entity that itself has no material reality of its own, but which nonetheless exercises causal influence on everything else determining it. The value of the concept of structure resides in drawing our attention to relationships, in drawing attention to how certain features of things do not reside in the things themselves, but rather arise from positionality of the thing in a system of broader relations. Here I hasten to add that these structures are, for me, themselves objects: They are objects that “interpellate” other objects for their own operations and self-continuance.
read on!
In other words, I don’t draw an opposition between objects and structures, but rather hypothesize that objects exist at a variety of different levels of scale and interact in all sorts of complex ways across these scales. In this regard, the structuralist concepts of “positionality” and “value” are only half the story. Viewed from one angle, an object interpellated by another object is a “value” or “position” within that system, i.e., it’s being is defined relationally in that system as in the case of the difference between a private citizen and a government official where the being of these entities is defined diacritically in relation to one another. Viewed from another angle, however, those objects interpellated by larger-scale objects themselves remain independent objects in their own right that exceed any of the diacritical relations that seek to interpellate them and that perpetually introduce entropy into the operations of this higher scale object. Nobody is ever just a police officer and a sound “b” is never just a diacritical relation to other sounds like “p”, “t”, and “d”. They always have a minimal autonomy that threatens to burst the enlistment operations of the larger-scale structure that strives to integrate them for their own continuance.
These points draw attention to the problem with the concept of structure. On the one hand, the concept of structure implies a concept of relations that is just too tight. The elements in a structure, it is said, are never independent of each other. Yet structures are always breaking apart or threatening to fall apart. They are always struggling with entropy or the threat of dissolution. What we need is a concept of relation that draws attention to relations while escaping this notion that the elements related have no independence from one another. The concepts and terms “network” and “assemblage” do this job admirably. Like structures, elements in an assemblage or network are related. Unlike the concept of structure, elements in a network or assemblage can break away and undertake other adventures. The being of the elements is not thoroughly diacritical.
On the other hand, this point about entropy draws our attention to what’s sorely missing in the concept of structure: work. Somehow structures are supposed to persist and exercise their structuring agency like Platonic forms without any material efficacy through which they endure and exercise their structuring agency. When I evoke the concept of work here I’m doing so more in the sense that physics deploys the concept of work as the energy and activity required to produce change in another physical system, rather than the concept of work with respect to labor (though clearly the latter concept of work is important as well). Surprisingly, with few exceptions, philosophy scarcely has any concept of work or energy. The point here is that the work required for structures to exercise force on other entities and to continue their existence throughout time need not be teleologically directed for an aim in the way that labor is. Many of the networks and assemblages that exist will maintain themselves across time without any teleology whatsoever… And this includes a number of “social” relations in the human world.
Here my thesis is that at each point in time structures, assemblages, or networks must reproduce their organization through their actions. In other words, structures– which again, for me, are themselves objects –reproduce themselves through events and events are enabled through structures. Here I am hardly original. This is the thesis of Luhmann who argues that structure must reproduce itself at each point in time through events (in the case of social systems, through communications); it is the thesis of Bourdieu who sees human action as producing structure and structure as enabling action; it is the thesis of Giddens who sees agency as perpetuating structure and structure as enabling agency, and so on. In other words, each action is not only structured and enabled by structure, but each action also reproduces structure across time. Speech produces language and language produces speech. Racist structures produce racist subjects but racist subjects produce racist structures. And so on. The relation between structure and agency is not unilateral and hierarchical with structure determining action from above, but is rather horizontal with action producing structure and structure enabling action.
But if this is the case, it follows that structure is not the rigid and fixed thing that we imagined it to be under traditional structuralist accounts. For if it is true that structure or organization is a product of agency, then each reproduction of structure through action does not merely reproduce the structure as a copy to original, but modifies it as well. My acts of speech do not merely reproduce the system of phonemes and meanings for that particular language, but rather my discourse also modifies that linguistic structure ever so slightly in ways that other discourses might respond to. Here the work of Kim Sterelny in philosophy of biology is of the utmost value. Why, in the biological world, is there no end to evolutionary development? Such a question can only arise if we think of the environment of organisms as a fixed container to which organisms adapt. Working on this unstated premise, we then wonder why species continue to change once they’ve “successfully” adapted to their environments.
However, this conception of the environment as a container misses the point that environments are nothing more than relations between entities. When it is understood that the environment is nothing more than relations between entities, that it is not a fixed container, we then can see that with each successful adaptation other entities must adapt to that adaptation, which, in its turn, precipitates situations in which the entity that modified the previous relations now having to adapt to the other entity’s adaptations to it. But this is not all! Entities must adapt to their adaptations! Humans have modified their environment through the invention of all sorts of technological inventions. These technologies have allowed them to triumph over many aspects of their environment such as hostile climates such as excessively hot and cold environments or places where food is scarce. Yet these technologies are not simply instruments for human use. They take on a life of their own and become features of the environment to which humans themselves must adapt. Through our construction of environments we find that we must adapt to these environments that we have constructed!
This is how it is in all domains. Events are never simply “copies” of structure. Rather, they contribute difference to structure. And as a result, all of the other elements of structure must respond to these events. Some events that take place within an assemblage will certainly be more far reaching than others– as in the case of the introduction of the cane toad into Australia –but each wills contribute structure-modifying differences that lead the structure to develop in unexpected directions. There is thus an inherent instability to structure. For in reproducing itself through events these events will perpetually introduce differences into the structure that lead the structure to develop in new and unexpected ways (to a greater or lesser degree). A structure is thus something that never manages to sit still.
May 1, 2012 at 12:06 pm
indeed, reminds me of the rants a manic genius physicist turned architectural engineer friend of mine used to go on about architects and their blueprints. We need need the philosophical equivalent of those great test sites that material engineers use to expose the limits of composites/structures.
May 1, 2012 at 2:07 pm
>Here my thesis is that at each point in time structures, assemblages, or networks must reproduce their organization through their action.
Do you share Althusser’s view on this? I read Bourdieu as very much an Althusserian, and ‘habitus’ as an enlarged idea of ‘interpollation’, a kind of ‘practical proficiency’ which is, in the last instance, determined critically but not productively by the economy.
It occurs to me that while Althusser does actually allow a great deal of agency and autonomy (the contradictions between ISAs, and the ‘autonomous pole’ of each ISA allows for that) the relationship isn’t strictly between ‘structure’ and ‘agent’, but rather between historical and geographical/material constraint upon the possibility of capitalist economic relations.
I mean, a coal mine through its stages of development (undeveloped, running, empty) isn’t an environmental factor which directly effects people around it, unless they’re using it for heating. It is, however, a factor that directly effects investment, establishment of certain productive relations, then these in turn effect interpolative structure in the neccesity of their reproduction – so for me it seems that habitus (in the sense of a ‘feel for the game’) can’t ever be a habitus-enviroment relationship, but only ever a habitus-economic relationship, since the neccesity of economic interpolation (ensuring people are dilligent mine-workers) is another world entirely for the neccesity of enviromental interpolation (ensuring people are good hunter-gatherers).
And you have to distinguish between enviroment and economics, otherwise economics ceases to be a product of human agency. (Or you make environment directly a product of human agency, which results in solar shades, geo-engineering, and so on.)
PS: Not sure whether I’m stating the obvious here, I’m not part of any institution, so I don’t get a great deal of osmotic ‘common sense’.)
May 1, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Althusser is probably the structuralist I disagree with most in all of my work. He treats the sub-multiples (persons) that larger-scale substances draw on to constitute themselves as completely absorbed by these larger-scale objects. I think this is ontologically impossible. I develop detailed arguments against this position in Chapter 5 of The Democracy of Objects.
May 1, 2012 at 4:28 pm
Put differently, for me parts are never successfully absorbed by structure. This is why I always emphasize entropy at work in every object.
May 1, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Thanks!
I think the tendency to think of structure as something rigid in philosophy concerns two deeply rooted tendencies of thought – two of the many tendencies one finds in Plato.
The first is to think that what is unchanging is more fundamental than what changes and explains the being of what changes. This is so deeply rooted in philosophical thinking that philosophers who challenge this idea (like Deleuze) often seem to other philosophers to be making incomprehensible claims. On this view, your own view expressed here couldn’t possible be true: that structure and the things it structures are co-determining – e.g., that structured items can change their structure by changing themselves. Someone who has in the deep background of their thinking the present tendency of thought is likely to say: “That can’t be structure! Or at least, it can’t be structure of the most fundamental kind!” This is not a criticism of the view you’re working through: I’m with you.
The second is to think that what explains is more fundamental than what is explained. I don’t know if this is a plausible reading at all, but I keep finding it helpful to think of this as what Heidegger called ‘ontotheology.’ Since explanation is a discursive operation, this tendency also seems to push strongly in the direction of correlationism: it will turn out that to understand being we’ll have to understand the forms in which we do (or must) make sense of being in our explanations. One thing I’m reading into your proposed concept of work is that you’re historicizing the explanatory power of structure – a variation on Spinoza’s claim that what explains x is that which, in * natural history*, causes x. Is this a distortion of the notion as you meant to be using it? If it isn’t, then Spinoza’s notion of conatus might be one way in which prior philosophers have gotten at what you are calling ‘work.’
May 1, 2012 at 6:23 pm
Have you read David Elder-Vass’s The Causal Power of Social Structures (CUP, 2010) or Margaret Archer’s Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (CUP, 1995)? Both present interesting (critical) realist criticisms of what they call “central conflationism;” i.e., the view that structure and agency are co-constitutive as in Giddens and Bourdieu. While they’re at it, they also go after methodological individualism and straight-up structuralism. My sense is that their understanding of social ontology is likely closer to your own than Bourdieu or Giddens.
May 1, 2012 at 8:52 pm
http://www.radioopensource.org/siddhartha-mukherjee-have-we-an-innovator-in-the-race/
May 2, 2012 at 1:43 am
Thanks for the references, Craig!
May 2, 2012 at 7:49 pm
In particular, Lévi-Strauss on myth can be quite mysterious (a matter on which I’ve commented at some length).
However, there’s a reason why, in your two examples ‘structure’ appears “as a mysterious incorporeal entity.” Both language and myth are mental systems whose mechanisms are not accessible to direct observation. However much one may believe that those mechanisms are material mechanisms in brains and bodies, they cannot be directly observed. So we’re left trying to infer something about those mechanisms through indirect means.
These days, of course, we can do computer simulations of such systems. Those simulations are not so mysterious as they have to be specified in considerable detail in order to work.
May 2, 2012 at 9:05 pm
I’m hesitant about your use of the term “mental” here. Yes, these systems are difficult to investigate, but no more so than *any* ecosystem. This is what they are, ecosystems. The problem with the term “mental” is that it suggests they’re incorporeal and that they’re reducible to individual minds. Yet there are dynamics of ecosystems that are emergent and can’t be reducible to any individual parts.
May 2, 2012 at 10:08 pm
[Scratch the previous comment, Levi.]
The problem with the term “mental” is that it suggests they’re incorporeal and that they’re reducible to individual minds.
To be clear, I don’t believe either of those things.
May 2, 2012 at 10:54 pm
You write: “for me parts are never successfully absorbed by structure. This is why I always emphasize entropy at work in every object.”
Doesn’t this commit you to both material and operational openness? For example a person can be part of a particular village while also expending energy working fro the continuance of some other village (as, say, outsourced labor). However with organs related to bodies it is a different story. The parts are more constrained and more insensly associated and therefore more withdrawn.
Closure and withdrawal have always seemed to me a matter of degree and intensity. In fact, that is why I want to suggest a spectrum of assembly from more extensively withdrawn and intensively endo-related ‘objects’ to less extensively organized materials and ‘collectives’ – with less operational constraints and multi-scaled transversal relations.
The notion of complete operational closure is a problem for me, given that materials mix and mingle (thus causal precarity) and operant assemblies require affording exo-relations.
Just some thoughts.
May 2, 2012 at 11:29 pm
Michael,
The idea is that it’s the organization of the entity that’s going to determine what functional role the stimulus plays not the stimulus. For this reason the entity is structurally open (it can receive stimuli) but is operationally closed (activities in the system determine the function, meaning, and effect of the stimuli).
May 3, 2012 at 2:14 am
I guess I just can’t imagine a world were the stimulus does not also play an important role in how any particular system functions. I think function is ultimately determined in the mix. This is why i hold that everything is ‘local manifestation’, or as I would put it co-local manifestation or mutually determinate (situational).
For example, a body determines what it will do in response to virus in the sense of immune capacities and intrinsic vulnerabilities, however what that body will do is also causally chained to what that particular virus can affect. A different virus would evoke a totally different response, or non at all in some case.
A more ancestral example would be the evolution or assembly and of multi-cell clusters from the interactions of single cell organisms about 500 million years ago. When single cell organisms began to share their materials and form distributed networks of operation they eventually became a new kind of being altogether. As evolutionary biologist Will Ratcliff puts it: “A cluster alone isn’t multi-cellular. But when cells in a cluster cooperate, make sacrifices for the common good, and adapt to change, that’s an evolutionary transition to multi-cellularity.” This would be a case of deep operational openness leading to emergent properties.
I can’t imagine a material system that is not ontologically vulnerable in at least some way.
May 3, 2012 at 2:26 am
Michael,
Agreed on all counts. Stimuli just don’t determine system response is all. They trigger it without specifying it.
May 3, 2012 at 3:29 am
Stimuli do not determine they contribute. It is a co-specification. Either without the other is incapable of generating the event. Therefore co-operation requires operational openness.
May 3, 2012 at 2:20 pm
Nor, come to think of it, did structural linguists ever believe such a thing. On the contrary, half the point of distinctive feature analysis was acknowledging a distinction between sound itself and those aspects of sound that were relevant to a particular language. Different languages utilized different features and the features active in a given language changed over time. Language change loomed large in the minds of linguists until the so-called Chomsky revolution brought on a partial eclipse of historical linguistics.
May 3, 2012 at 2:50 pm
Bill,
What you say about structural linguistics simply is not true. One of Saussure’s most famous and quoted claims was that language is a system of relations without positive terms. “Positive terms”, of course, means independent terms. This was the guiding principle of the entire structuralist movement in philosophy and the humanities. Beings we’re defined by their position in a network of relations (diacritics) and did not have independent existence of their own. As Deleuze so nicely puts it in his essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism”, “‘b’ is literally nothing independent of ‘p'”.
May 3, 2012 at 3:00 pm
It’s also important to understand this point about structuralism because absent this point it’s impossible to understand the moves made in political theory in the late work of Althusser, Ranciere, Laclau, Zizek, and Badiou. Because social systems are understood to be diacritical, the only recourse for political change becomes that of locating a void place within structure where autonomous action not overdetermined by structure is possible.
May 3, 2012 at 3:43 pm
Michael, how about this; operational closure within a niche, so that within those situations, certain patterns of operation, a system preserves it’s own distinctive patterns of receptivity and affectivity?
Outside of those conditions, the system breaks up or gets swallowed by other systems?
Then you can define the niche as a specific instance of whole classes of relationship that contribute such that the co-specification specifies the continuing existence of the object. Yes it’s self referential, but you can probably go into the specifics of what exo-relationships are required and how.
Of course, there’s still the stuff about how structures may be both closed and disturb-able, which is exactly what Levi’s been talking about here:
A closed and disturb-able structure is both more and less stable than one that only exists with an exact niche; that structure is either eternal, because it’s relationships must and can only determine it, in all it’s specificity, or infinitesimally momentary, because a tiny movement from that system will lead to it no longer being that system.
The paradox of certain kinds of structuralism is that they suggest these eternal structures, like webs of glass, that “cannot move”. But as change in the real world carries on in ignorance of this prohibition, instead of being eternal, they are just a photograph of a moment. Only systems or objects that retain their essence in the midst of all the bumping and disruption of life can stick around, but the cost is that essence must be flexible; they must have internal room to move, and retaining essence while responding to the stimulus received can have a cost in terms of (potentially irreversible) transformations to that system.
A simple example is terrorism, and the difficulty in preserving liberality in the face of threats to liberality. The “natural response” in terms of the system’s own logic may have negative effects in terms of the system’s identity, and reflective people try to balance that, try to find a space for motion within liberality that accommodates this threat.
This motion will inevitably open up new forms of interaction between the social space and the people who make it up, as creating a new form of constitutive interaction is exactly what that internal motion is about, and it could well lead to new future shifts that were previously impossible, or unlocking old potentialities that got welded shut by previous adjustments.
(By which I also mean to say “good post Levi!”)
May 3, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Well, Levi, it’s been years since I’ve read Saussure and, in any event, he isn’t the only structuralist linguist.
Consider this passage from Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (Mouton 1956), p. 18:
While phonetics seeks to collect the most exhaustive information on gross sound matter, in its physiological and physical properties, phonemics, and phonology in general, intervenes to apply strictly linguistic criteria to the sorting and classification of the material registered bhy phonetics.” That distinction, between phonetics on the one hand and phonemics/phonology on the other, that’s a distinction between the sound in itself and the features of the sound that enter into a given language system. It’s basic to linguistic analysis.
If the philosophical extensions miss that distinction, well, then they miss the distinction.
May 3, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Bill,
It’s true of Jakobson as well. Yes, all the structures recognized the articulatory system (Saussure develops a nice account of features that contribute to sound formation in terms of whether elements of the articulatory system are open or closed). But 1) these material and contextual elements are explicitly excluded from analysis by the structuralists, and 2) phonemes in structural linguistics are nothing more than bundles of differential relations without positive terms. This is true of Saussure, Jakobson, Todorov, as well as Levi-Strauss, Althusser, and Barthes. This isn’t a “misreading” of the structuralists as you seem to be suggesting here, but the core of their doctrine. These points were at the core of the debates between the structuralists and the post-structuralists. If you missed all this then so much the worse for you.
May 3, 2012 at 6:11 pm
I like that a lot Josh. And I don’t disagree with what you suggest.
I think my ‘issue’ might be one of emphasis. That is to say, I would not say Levi is wrong with regard to closure per se, but rather emphasize how systems are more or less closed depending upon their onto-specific properties and endo-capacities. I just want us to take seriously how all systems/assemblages remain ontologically vulnerable to direct influence on their substantial composition from extrinsic forces, which can result in radical transformations, trans-figurations, but also mutations, hybridization, co-operation and obliteration.
You write:
“This motion will inevitably open up new forms of interaction between the social space and the people who make it up, as creating a new form of constitutive interaction…”
The key in that sentence being “inevitably open up”. If openess is inevitable then is it not an ontological primitive?
My position is that unit-operations can combine with another unit-operations to contribute to co-operative (mutually-operational) actions or powers. For the OOO folk this would lead to the formation of a new object, but I think this is not warranted in all cases. Take Levi’s example: Levi vs. Levi-with-glasses. Levi is an assemblage with onto-specific properties, and yet when we add the properties and powers of a pair of neon orange spectacles to the Levi-assemblage his capacities are not destroyed or substantially disrupted but rather extended. Just because Levi can now see better (and possibly gain more street cred because of his coolness) does not mean his previous powers and extensive organization is subsumed by the new addition. Levi-with-glasses is not a new object (with a high degree of closure) he is an augmented assemblage with extended or distributed capacities. An even better example might be Levi-with-cellphone. By adding cell phone capacities to the Levi-assemblage his memory capacity is expanded, or his capacity for learning (via internet) is enhanced, but Levi does not become a wholly new object.
All that might seem trivial but I don’t feel it is. To understand how materials and complexes/systems interact, evolve or can be transformed we have to have an orientation capable of tracking the messiness, hybridity (monstrosity?) and mesh-work of life that simultaneously respects irreducible efficacies (individualities) while avoiding essentialist tendencies that fetishize and/or stunt our ability for genuinely ecological thought via logical delimitation. I suggest many supposed boundaries are not what we tend to make of them. Not that Levi does this, because I don’t think he does, only that this is what I think object-orientated ontography can lead to if we are not careful.
Instead I posit a spectrum of possible assembly ranging from a high degree of closure (what I would call “objects”) to radical openness (what I would call “complexes”). All systems are assemblages or matrices of activity, but some are more tightly organized and intensely endo-related, and some are less intensely associated, more transversive, rhizomatic, and often expressing massively distributed powers and effects.
That said, I understand that Levi and Tim Morton use the term ‘object’ in very technical ways (I love the notion of hyperobjects) which attempt to incorporate everything I am arguing here. My only point of contention in any given discussion would arise, then, in disagreements with those gents about specific claims re: the degree of individuality expressed by particular assemblages.
May 3, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Closure doesn’t mean invulnerability, Michael. A system that is operationally closed is not invulnerable, it is just vulnerable in very particular ways and under certain conditions. When Levi uses Luhmann here I take that completely seriously: nothing is passed from one system to another like a football being passed from one player to another. Closure means there’s no direct or simple transfer of something *into* another thing. This is why Levi spends so much time trying to understand what will perturb a system and what won’t. In a sense, a system makes another system change itself. Causality is less a sharing than a production.
May 4, 2012 at 5:05 am
I know what operational closure means Joseph. And I know how Levi is using it. I just don’t buy into it. Many systems exchange elements and incorporate materials from elsewhere into their substantial operations. Matter is promiscuous, and various assemblages co-operate. Co-operation entails mutual and direct (but partial) affectivity. Causality is about mutual production – with generative fields of interpenetrating activity birthing temporal entities. Every atom in your body was forged in stars. Absolute closure like absolute identity is a fiction.
May 4, 2012 at 5:08 am
Ontological vulnerability equals operational openness.
May 4, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Michael,
They are ontologically open. They just integrate stimuli according to their own organization. For example, the way your eyes and brain transform certain wavelengths of light into the color blue, whereas my cats transform them into shades of grey.
May 4, 2012 at 4:12 pm
“Many systems exchange elements and incorporate materials from elsewhere into their substantial operations.”
The disagreement is in here, somewhere. You seem to be saying that there are physical things that are exchanged between systems and that is how they change each other? This gets to my basic problem with appeals to matter/energy. No doubt there is matter and energy, but that can’t be used to explain everything, because there are other things besides just atomic and subatomic entities. Societies and minds and star systems are just as real, so what does matter/energy really explain? You have to attend to the specific level of organization and not just what it is made of. So, yes my body is made of atoms from the stars. You can’t explain me AND the star just by looking at those atoms. There are millions, perhaps countless, levels between me and my atoms and between a star and its atoms that are just as real as both the atoms and the star/me. So why focus on that one level? I suppose I find appeals to a ontologically fundamental matter to be as limiting as appeals to language as the ground of ontology. Yes, language is one actant at one level, but that’s all.
May 4, 2012 at 4:15 pm
Or, to say it more directly, even if a star and myself share very similar physical components at one level, that isn’t going to do justice to the potential causality between us qua star and qua animal.
May 4, 2012 at 4:16 pm
I guess the sticking point for me generally is trying to make sense of processes of absorption and instances of extension. Absorption includes materials incorporating materials in a way that blurs the boundaries between substantial assembly and functional capacity, and therefore operation. Extension, as discussed above, combines the properties of two or more objects to amplify, diminish or otherwise augment the operational capacities of both, without creating a wholly new object. Extensive hybridity and distributed operational capacity are not easily reckoned dismissed. It is about complex causal relations. All of this seems to me to suggest thinking about operational closure in a different way. The idea of structural coupling goes a long way to describing this intricate causal complex, but from a materialist standpoint (i.e., considering the constant exchange of atoms and molecules, subsistence requirements, etc.) I think any particular situation is much more complex and messy. And I think we need a radically new combinatorial logic to be able to understand how this is so.
Closure is not a stable state but a precarious and dynamic achievement generated by the intra-activity of its composition but also through the inter-activity (and thus causal mutuality) of both system and environment. Complete autonomy is not possible, but relative individuation is. Relative to what? Relative to the background conditions and affective forces in which any system is implicated.
In fact, most systems consist of a collection of heterogeneous parts. All of these parts contribute to the character of the whole (as reductionists argue), but some wholes also have emergent properties and can generate tendencies to feed back and affect the operation of the parts. “Part makes whole, and whole makes part”, as Levins and Lewontin argue in The Dialectical Biologist (p. 272). This “dialectic” of causation is a dynamic and open process, capable of being guided, hijacked or disrupted by intervening on particular elements and various scales.
This multi-dimensional vulnerability (openness) and causal complexity is exactly what I mean by “precarious causation”: systems/objects/assemblages are always precarious co-operational achievements – teetering chaos-boxes of affective exchange – with more or less endo-consistency, forever dependent upon the conditions in which they subsist.
I think operational closure can best be applied when talking about entities capable of recursion, but it is not necessarily a ubiquitous feature of reality. I’m still thinking through though….
May 4, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Just one more thing, related to this, because I know you and Levi have been discussing this lately: I completely agree with your take on materialism. Matter is not a dead or faceless lump that is merely given organization by other things. No, I agree that it’s already ordered or structured in some way. But, again, so is every other causal level, so I don’t see why matter is ontologically unique or even basic or fundamental in this regard.
May 4, 2012 at 10:56 pm
I think you’re much closer to Harman’s concept of object than you think. For Harman, the reason an object can change, is open to change—and why he rejects potential as a category—is because of the heterogeneous domestic relations which produce the object and which the emergent object cannot really domesticate. In fact, I think Levi and Harman are very close on this issue, no matter what either of them say about their own theory: for the emergent unity, entropy is really about the instability of the larger object, or unit or assemblage, relative to what is producing it. I never read Harman’s objects as being anything other than precarious or tentative. Of course, precious or tentative doesn’t mean unreal. Take this line, the final sentence, in fact, of Harman’s first book:
“Behind every apparently simple object is an infinite legion of further objects that ‘crush, depress, break and enthrall one another.’ It is these violent underground currents that one should attempt to reverse engineer, so as to unlock the infrastructure of objects.”
“Violent underground currents,” I mean…you can’t get more precious than that.
May 4, 2012 at 10:59 pm
Ha, “precious.” The word should be “precarious.” Well, those currents are precious, too.
May 4, 2012 at 11:56 pm
Michael,
Operational closure is the way in which autopoietic entities integrate materials from outside themselves. For example, what my body does with foods. The properties of the foods, of course, impact my body. Omega-3 fatty acids will impact my moods, for instance. But it is the structure of me as an organism that will determine the nature of that impact. At any rate, autopoietic objects are dissapative systems. The draw fluxes of energy and matter from their environment, transform them, and release flows of energy and matter into the environment. I might not be understanding you, but I don’t really see where we’re disagreeing. Think about it in terms of machines. Machines don’t leave the energy that flows into them unchanged, but transform that stimuli according to how they’re put together. That’s operational closure.
The point of the concept of operational closure is to encourage to look at things from the things point of view. How does the mantis shrimp see the world? What are stimuli for it? What are these stimuli signs of for it? This move prevents us from seeing stimuli as containing one and the same set of information in every instance.
Joseph,
I’m a substance monist; which is to say I think only one type of thing exists: matter-energy. There are no incorporeal things for me.
May 4, 2012 at 11:57 pm
Put differently, stimuli are, for me, material things. They’re physical and entities can only relate to their environment materially. This is what my recent post on Lucretius and simulacra was about.
May 5, 2012 at 12:02 am
Increasingly I have a very difficult time seeing points of overlap between Harman and I. For me there’s no problem of causality and therefore no need of vicarious causation. I believe objects can relate. My withdrawal means something very different (it’s how machines work over material flows that pass through them) do I’ve increasingly ceased using the term. I’m a thoroughgoing materialist, rejecting the existence of any non-material entities while he rejects the materialism. Finally, it’s relations that I find of interest, not individual objects. I only begin with units to concretely think ecologies.
May 5, 2012 at 10:07 am
Hmm. I’m not saying everyone should become Harmanians. I just think that his ontology has a lot more dynamism, and relationships, than people give it credit for.
Still, all your points are well taken.
May 6, 2012 at 5:48 am
Joseph,
I like a little more tangle in my metaphysical soup. The difference for me is ‘violent underground currents’ can be hijacked or amplified according to direct exchanges with material forces on multiple scales. The partiality of those exchanges is a result of an infrastructure with depth and complexity involving wild affective entanglements not monads.
There is a lot in Harman’s work I admire. He is a genuinely unique thinker and great writer. He wrote that one should attempt to “reverse engineer” the infrastructure of objects and I totally agree. But I don’t like the way he seems to be arguing for a gap between perception and reality. Assemblages don’t interact like Ferris wheels behind glass. Animal flesh, plants, viruses, police batons and sex demonstrate a strange intimacy with the world. So thanks you Graham for offering a fresh perspective, but I’m more interested in the precarious dynamics of energy-matter as it continues to stratify, organize and now evolve.
May 6, 2012 at 5:51 am
Levi,
I can accept operational closure as long as it is never thought of as complete. There are no monads. Co-operation is a distributed event.
May 16, 2012 at 4:31 am
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