In response to my last post, Alex Reid of Digital Digs posts a great comment summarizing what is at stake in the external/internal relations debate. Alex writes:
I think I get what you’re saying here Levi. Here is where the experimental/investigative project begins. Some relations are internal and necessary for a given object’s persistence. Other relations are external. These relations may affect an object or even destroy an object, but they can never be necessary for defining the object. In part, this is the principle of redundant causation, right?
Let me use a chicken for example. It could be free-range or in a cage; it’s still a chicken. It could break a wing; it’s still a chicken. It gets slaughtered. Now it’s a dead chicken. Is that a different object now? It gets prepared for cooking and roasted. Is that a different object? It gets eaten. At some point it ceases to be a chicken.
Objects are not immortal. At some point they cease to exist and their component parts become reorganized into other relations and objects. In a few billion years, the sun will likely expand and all the objects on the Earth will be reduced to atomic particles. I recognize that part of Harman’s complaint with DeLanda is the notion that assemblage theory suggests that objects are purely the product of historical relations. I agree that objects exceed their relations, become more than those relations in a non-deterministic way. Some relations are more important than others to whether an object is transformed.
As such, I wonder if the underlying question here is “what differences make a difference?” If we can agree that external relations can transform objects (as when the fire burns the cotton in Harman’s common example), then the question becomes how often do those transformations take place. In a process-becoming perspective the mutations are ongoing such that all relations become internalized. In an object-oriented perspective, transformations are less common and must be uncovered rather than assumed.
Alex gets right to the core of the question: what differences or relations make a difference and what type of difference do they make? The problem with the internalist position that claims that entities or objects do not precede they relations or have any independence from their relations, that claim that objects are their relations (see the previous post), is that they render us completely unable to think this question. If it is true that no entity or “relata” precedes its relations, is that we are left unable to think what difference the subtraction or addition of a relation makes to the entity in question. The situation is far worse in the case of Whitehead’s ontology, where it is said that every entity in the universe shares a perfectly definite “prehension” (relation) to every other entity in the universe and that each entity is but a bundle of the way in which it prehends other entities. Whitehead says that he wants to think the conditions under which novelty are possible, but it is difficult to see how there could every be any novelty in his ontology for the very simple and basic reason that there can never be any new encounters for entities. Why can’t there be any new encounters between entities? There can be no new encounters between entities because entities are already related to all other entities that exist in the universe. Where an entity is already related to all other entities that exist, there can be no question of a new encounter.
read on!
All of these issues are very abstract, so let’s take a concrete example to illustrate the point. Let’s take my beloved cat Tasha. If I take Barad’s thesis that “relata (entities) do not precede their relations”, I find that my relationship to my cat is very peculiar. It is my cat Tasha that I love and to whom I have duties and obligations as the human she has chosen to domesticate. Yet if it is true that Tasha (a relata) does not precede her relations, what am I to do when her relations change? Suppose I go on a trip for a few days and forget to feed her (something that I would never do given that I am her dutiful servant). Here Tasha’s relations have changed. Where before she had food (she was related to food), now she doesn’t have food. Yet if I take Barad’s thesis that relata do not precede relations seriously, this should be of no concern to me because insofar as Tasha, a relata, is her relations, and insofar as her relations have changed, she is no longer Tasha because her being as relata consists entirely of her relations. I should therefore have no concern for this being because it is an entirely new being by virtue of being a relata that emerged from a new set of relations. This is a rather peculiar conclusion, but one that follows ineluctably from the thesis that relata do not precede relations.
The situation is even more strange in a Whiteheadian universe or ontology. Because Tasha already shares a perfectly definite prehension or relation to every other entity that exists in the universe, it is impossible for Tasha to ever go hungry. The reason for this is that Tasha necessarily, according to this ontology, shares a relation to food and is therefore always already related to food. Therefore, if we take Whiteheadian ontology at its word, we are left with the conclusion that it is impossible for plants to be modified by heating, people to be without shelter, poverty to take place, creatures to go hungry, etc. Indeed, Tasha would necessarily already have every feline disease that a cat can possibly have because she is already related to every microbe and virus that exists. Again, this is a very peculiar set of conclusions.
The idea that a relation can make a difference only makes sense where we begin from the premise that substances, entities, machines, or objects possess some minimal autonomy from whatever relations they currently possess to other entities. “Minimal autonomy” means that entities can be separated from some relations and enter into new relations. Tasha’s being consists, in part, of an essential frailty where she can be separated from relations to other things like the food she needs to sustain herself, the temperature range in which her body can function, the oxygen she needs to sustain herself, the barometric pressure she needs to sustain herself, etc. Likewise, part of her being consists in the capacity to undergo new encounters or relations. She can encounter microbes that significantly transform her body’s ability to function. She can be taken to the Andes and encounter altitudes with different barometric pressures and concentrations of air that change how she functions. She can encounter various foods that either give her a luxurious coat and lots of energy or that leave her depleted and waxen. She can encounter people that treat her well or poorly. These are all relations that significantly change her qualities and powers of acting. Yet these changes, either through subtraction or addition, are only possible if Tasha has some minimal being independent of whatever relations she happens to entertain.
Thinkers like Whitehead are sometimes celebrated because it is alleged that by virtue of their relationism, holism, and internalism they enable us to think “ecologically”. Yet as I argued in a prior post building on some remarks made by Harman, what a text says its trying to do and what it actually does can be quite at odds with one another. Far from enabling us to think the difference that a relation makes, forms of thought such as we encounter in Whitehead actually inhibit our ability to think the difference that relations contribute. This is because such orientations of thought treat relation as always already there. If you want to think the difference relations make, you need to turn to OOO (or in my case, machine-oriented ontology), where the ontology in question is acutely aware that relations can always be subtracted or added, thereby opening way to an investigation of what difference the subtraction and addition of relations makes. Paradoxically, it is the defense of autonomous substances that allows us to think the importance of relations. And here, in a closely related vein, we should look less at how ecologists theorize being, and more at their actual practice. At the level of their theories of being they tend to argue that everything is internally related. But at the level of their practice we see them proceeding as good object-oriented ontologists, presupposing that entities can break with their relations and enter into new relations, and attending to what differences these additions and subtractions make. What happens, they wonder, when portions of the ocean encounter large algae blooms as a result of fertilizers running into the water? This is a question about what happens when a new relation takes place.
It was these sorts of considerations that motivated my thesis that objects or machines are divided between their virtual proper being and their local manifestations. I’ll concede this much to Whitehead: we need to get beyond subject/predicate thinking that treats entities as a bundle of qualities (predicates) inhering in a substance. Instead, I propose that we treat entities as a collection of powers or capacities rather than qualities. Entities are what they’re capable of doing, not whatever qualities they happen to embody at a particular point in time. A quality is not something an entity has, but is the way in which an entity actualizes a power under particular conditions (in a particular set of relations). The ball is not red, but does red in response to particular wavelengths of light. The scope of what an entity can do (its powers) is always broader than whatever qualities it happens to actualize at a particular point in time. Such a framework, I hope, encourages us to attend to the relations an entity enters into and how these relations affect its doings or the actualization of its powers.
Larval Subjects . 
October 2, 2012 at 9:27 am
“Because Tasha already shares a perfectly definite prehension or relation to every other entity that exists in the universe, it is impossible for Tasha to ever go hungry. The reason for this is that Tasha necessarily, according to this ontology, shares a relation to food and is therefore always already related to food.”
I don’t think that this reductio ad absurdum works. Just because Whitehead says that everything is related to everything else doesn’t mean that everything is related to everything else in the same way. Prehensions are composed of both positive and negative prehensions, things carried over and things left out. Therefore, while Tasha may always have a relation to food (just as with everything else in existence) this relation is variable. Continuous relation doesn’t indicate continuous possession since possession (in this sense of a cat and food) is only a particular prehensive configuration.
The cat can be meekly pawing at the kitchen window, enticed by the smell of cooking, or hungrily mashing its face into a bowl of minced meat. In either case the cat bears a definite prehensive relation to food but the positive and negative prehensions have clearly shifted. I don’t see what’s lacking in this respect. That isn’t to say that there aren’t problems with Whitehead’s metaphysics of universal relation but the above just doesn’t seem to hold water.
Besides that, I think we need to differentiate between three different things:
1. a thing cannot exist without all of its relations
2. a thing cannot exist without relations
3. a thing is the sum of its relations
3 entails 1 and 2
1 entails 2 but not 3
2 doesn’t entail 1 or 3
1 means that as soon as just one of a thing’s relations change that thing becomes another thing (no continuity).
2 means that a thing can be severed from some or even most of its relations, but also that it cannot be severed from all of them and continue existing (no dormant objects).
3 means that a thing simply is what other things make of it, with no remainder (no withdrawal, irreducibility, transcendence).
Personally, 2 makes perfect sense to me (and it seems to be equivalent to “minimal autonomy”) while 1 and 3 seem absurd. Barad definitely seems to endorse 2 and probably 1 too but I’m unconvinced about 3. Maybe she does, it’s been a while since I read her book. Latour’s Irreductions endorses 1 and 2 (a thing lasts no longer than it is kept stable) while rejecting 3 (if a thing isn’t irreducible then it’s nothing). In practice his ANT rejects 1 even if in theory he endorses it since he constantly talks about enduring objects (I don’t think anyone can consistently form any kind of narrative without assuming that some things endure). Whitehead (with his atomism) must endorse 1 and 2. Levi says that he endorses 3 as well and i can kind of see that point but it’s important to note (as I say above) that, for Whitehead, things can be negatively related as well as positively.
My basic point is that these things are logically separable and, consequently, proof of one doesn’t necessarily constitute proof of the others.
October 2, 2012 at 12:35 pm
Philip,
If we take you’re route we’ve conceded that entities aren’t just bundles of prehensions, but that they have some minimal autonomy or being of their own. The aim here is not a reductio, but demonstration of that point.
October 2, 2012 at 3:00 pm
Levi, I have a problem with your literalizing of Whitehead’s notion of ‘prehension’ in this sentence: “The situation is far worse in the case of Whitehead’s ontology, where it is said that every entity in the universe shares a perfectly definite “prehension” (relation) to every other entity in the universe and that each entity is but a bundle of the way in which it prehends other entities.” Obviously this leaves out the fullness of Whitehead’s use of the four notions that underpin his ontology: actual entities, prehension, nexus, and the ontological principle. Of which it is ‘nexus’ (togetherness), not prehension that involves relations in the sense you attribute to prehensions. As summed up in this statement:
“Actual entities involve each other by reason of their prehensions of each other. There are thus real individual facts of the togetherness of actual entities, which are real, individual, and particular, in the same sense in which actual entities and the prehensions are real, individual, and particular. Any such particular fact of togetherness among actual entities is called a ‘nexus’ (plural form is written ‘nexūs’). The ultimate facts of immediate actual experience are actual entities, prehensions, and nexūs. All else is, for our experience, derivative abstraction(p. 20).”
I think you have to take into account the complex of those two notions, prehension and nexus, without which one or the other as an explanatory principle means nothing. It is nexus that is descriptive of the relations (togetherness) among objects, while prehension is a mode of internal analysis. So in this sense Whitehead would almost agree with your internal/external distinction, he would just define it as prehension/nexus with the caveat that he is describing an abstraction not an ontological fact.
Being an Idealist and a monist he affirmed the Platonic distinction of form and fact, as he states the case: “…philosophy is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness. It is by reason of their instinctive grasp of this ultimate truth that, in spite of much association with arbitrary fancifulness and atavistic mysticism, types of Platonic philosophy retain their abiding appeal; they seek the forms in the facts. Each fact is more than its forms, and each form ‘participates’ throughout the world of facts. The definiteness of fact is due to its forms; but the individual fact is a creature, and creativity is the ultimate behind all forms, inexplicable by forms, and conditioned by its creatures(p. 20).”
October 2, 2012 at 3:20 pm
To continue… As for how change is possible. Whitehead defines his notion of the ‘event’: “Thus the actual world is built up of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in any sense of ‘existence,’ are derived by abstraction from actual occasions. I shall use the term ‘event’ in the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions, inter-related in some determinate fashion in one extensive quantum. An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member. … The fundamental meaning of the notion of ‘change’ is ‘the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event.’(73)”. He explicates this use of event: “An event is a nexus of actual occasions inter-related in some determinate fashion in some extensive quantum: it is either a nexus in its formal completeness, or it is an objectified nexus. One actual occasion is a limiting type of event. The most general sense of the meaning of change is ‘the differences between actual occasions in one event.’ For example, a molecule is a historic route of actual occasions; and such a route is an ‘event.’ Now the motion of the molecule is nothing else than the differences between the successive occasions of its life-history in respect to the extensive quanta from which they arise; and the changes in the molecule are the consequential differences in the actual occasions(80-81).”
As you can see his ideas on change are based on the notion of the event, which includes difference in its abstract argument for how change comes about through temporal differences in the actual occasions of this event.
Whitehead, Alfred North (2010-05-11). Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28)
October 2, 2012 at 5:33 pm
To follow up on what Phillip said, just because all things are related to all others for Whitehead, doesn’t mean that they’re related in the same way and therefore can’t change. The relation between the virus and Tasha ‘x infects y’ can be replaced by the relation ‘x doesn’t infect y’ or vice versa. Does it make a difference if we say that at time t1 x is not related to y and then becomes related to it at time t2, or that at time t1 it is negatively related to it and then becomes positively related to it at time t2? It seems like this is just a question of how we want to define ‘related to’. Under Whitehead’s definition, there might not be any “new encounters” but there are still new ways of encountering.
This all becomes more complicated though when you distinguish between actual occasions and societies of occasions, as Dark Chemistry pointed out. Neither Tasha nor the virus is an actual occasion; they’re societies of occasions (even an electron is a society for Whitehead). I think larvalsubject is correct as far as actual occasions go, ie. their relations are internal and a new relation means a new occasion; but using examples of macroscopic objects like cats and food is inaccurate because those are not actual occasions.
I think the end result for Whitehead is not so much that there are no persisting and independent objects, but that 1) the concepts of persistence and independence are secondary to those of change and relation. Persistence is a certain kind of change, independence is a kind of relation ; and 2) persistence is a “molar” concept that applies only to societies of occasions. (Not sure about independence — Whitehead doesn’t talk about the relations of nexûs as far as I know. I guess a nexus could either be an element of a larger nexus, or be independent among nexûs, though composed of occasions that are related to other occasions outside of that nexus?)
The real issue then is whether you want to use the concepts of change and relation to explain the concept of object, or the concept of object to explain the concepts of change and relation.
October 2, 2012 at 6:52 pm
Nonmanifestation,
I think this just makes my point. If its possible for the nature of the relation to change, it follows that entities have a being that cannot be reduced to their relations. Without that minimal autonomy such changes in relation would not be possible. This entails that Whitehead’s ontology as formulated is mistaken.
October 2, 2012 at 6:56 pm
I should also add that Whitehead is quite clear in advocating the version of relationism Philip outlined in pt. 3. As Whitehead puts it, actual occasions can be *entirely* analyzed in terms of their prehensions/relations. The difference between actual occasions and societies of occasions is irrelevant to the basic argument. The same point holds for actual occasions.
October 2, 2012 at 9:20 pm
[…] OOO matters? As I am not into knob twiddling, I very much appreciate this post by Levi Bryant, What Differences Make a Difference?– Relations Again. Being NO expert reader, this post is ore of a note for me, about continuing to, hmm, make sure […]
October 2, 2012 at 9:38 pm
On more of a Baradian than Whiteheadian note, I agree that in considering the encounter between Barad and OOO, “Alex gets right to the core of the question: what differences or relations make a difference and what type of difference do they make?” As a proponent of Barad, this is a question I have been grappling with for some time. I have trouble dealing with the fact that Barad’s intra-active dynamics seem to suggest that every difference makes a difference. Even though she never says as much, her privileging of relations gives me the sense that every intra-action constitutes some novel existence, a new iteration of the world’s differential becoming. The claim of inherent ontological indeterminacy appears to require a radically high level of discontinuity and difference that is perhaps too much.
That being said, I am hesitant to argue that she does not allow for “minimal ontological autonomy”. She is quite insistent in making the point that agential cuts enact contingent instances of separability (339-40). That is, they contingently and iteratively, rather than absolutely and continuously, resolve indeterminacy. In doing so, agential cuts co-constitute discrete entities and properties within phenomena. I am not sure, Levi, if this satisfies your criteria for minimal autonomy, but it seems to me to at least get close. I think this point offers an opportunity for a productive dialogue between OOO and agential realism regarding the dynamics involved in the constitution of entities.
October 2, 2012 at 10:09 pm
Yes, Whitehead affirms a relationism, but it is of the atomic variety. Against Zeno’s paradox Whitehead tells us there is no continuity of becoming; rather, there is a “becoming of continuity(PR: 35)”. The actual occasions are the atoms of reality. Existence is process and actual occasions are the atoms of this process, each having no significant temporal endurance. They emerge or concresce over a short period of time, which is what he terms the ‘duration’ of the actual occasion. The moment they concretize, they perish: existence is a “perpetual perishing(PR: 60).” I want go into the details of how this process is finalized as “satisfaction”. But this passage of actual occasions from one concrescent temporal moment to another is what composes the apparent persistance of things; their “becoming of continuity”. The appearnce of the concrete thing is actually an abstraction from a process that defines many actual occasions.
The idea of prehension is the discovery of Whitehead’s use of ‘potenial form'(i.e., whatever appears to be a persistant entity is in fact a chain, or “society,” of actual occasions, one following and prehending another. It is the forms (Plato) that pass from one occasion to the next(i.e., not substance, but the overall oranization of the entity is passed on from one moment to another as form). Each entinty for Whitehead is created anew in each moment, and it is this self-organized form that insures this “self-causation”. Whitehead’s account of how pure potentia is manifested as actuality would take me a little to far afield of this discussion, but only to state that actual occasions are the means for the constitution of concrete particulars, not the concrete particulars themselves. Whitehead’s eternal objects are never actual, yet it is through actual occasions that their potential is realized. This is why for Whitehead actual occasions are the only “reality”. Whitehead’s idealism is a realism of the Idea as pure potential:
“But by the principle of relativity there can only be one non-derivative actuality, unbounded by its prehensions of an actual world. Such a primordial superject of creativity achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects. This is the ultimate, basic adjustment of the togetherness of eternal objects on which creative order depends. It is the conceptual adjustment of all appetites in the form of aversions and adversions. It constitutes the meaning of relevance(PR: 32).”
Whitehead, Alfred North (2010-05-11). Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28). Simon & Schuster, Inc.
October 2, 2012 at 11:12 pm
Dark Chemistry,
I’m quite familiar with the details of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Reference to eternal objects and actual occasions versus societies of occasions doesn’t change matters. Whitehead is quite clear that actual occasions are bundles of prehensions. As he remarks, “…the first analysis of an actual entity, into its most concrete elements, discloses it to be a concresence of prehensions which have originated in its process of becoming” (PR, 23). Lest we try to draw a distinction between actual occasions and actual entities, Whitehead tells us in the first category of existence that the two terms are synonymous (PR, 22). This point is enough to demonstrate that Whitehead does not hold that actual occasions can be separated from whatever relations they entertain. This point is dramatically confirmed a few pages later when Whitehead writes: “It follows from the fourth category of explanation that the notion of ‘complete abstraction’ is self-contradictory. For you cannot abstract the universe from any entity, actual or non-actual, so as to consider that entity in complete isolation. Whenever we think of some entity, we are asking, What is it fit for here? In a sense, every entity pervades the whole world; for this question has a definite answer for each entity in respect to any actual entity or any nexus of actual entities” (PR, 28). The question here is not whether or not Whitehead has been interpreted correctly– he has, though certainly I poked a bit of fun at him in this post –but whether or not this sort of relationism is coherent.
Your remarks also raise another problem from an OOO perspective. You write:
In Harman’s terminology, this thesis constitutes a form of undermining in that “concrete things” are treated as mere ephemera such that it is the atomistic actual occasions that are really real. While I am more than happy to agree that all sorts of processes go on within objects– my objects are organized processes after all –this doesn’t entail that these smaller scale processes are the really real and that the concrete entity is just a sort of epiphenomenon.
October 3, 2012 at 12:36 am
Yea, I understand that you are very well aware of Whitehead’s philosophy. I think your use of “actual occasions are bundles of prehensions” is what threw me off. It sounds so static and Humean, as if the fact, objects, actual occasions were atomisitc in the older static substantive way of the Greeks, when for Whitehead it is organic, Hegelian, Schellengian, and obviously modernized for a scientific community that was in the midst of the Einsteinian cosmological turn.
You say: “In Harman’s terminology, this thesis constitutes a form of undermining in that “concrete things” are treated as mere ephemera such that it is the atomistic actual occasions that are really real. While I am more than happy to agree that all sorts of processes go on within objects– my objects are organized processes after all –this doesn’t entail that these smaller scale processes are the really real and that the concrete entity is just a sort of epiphenomenon.”
Yes, in that we are agreed: he is an atomist in the Democritean sense, and is more of a pre-critical Occasionalist rather than an affirmer of the Harmanian secularization in Vicarious Causation. I don’t think Whitehead truly treats concrete things as mere ephemera, since for him they are real creatures, dynamic and real in themselves. He is exposing the use of these in philosophical speculation which is an abstracting process, not saying something essential about concrete facts. He is saying that processes go on both within object and externally. His main point is that the forms exist beyond the temporal manifestation of the concrete fact, and are manifested in each temporal emergence of the actual occasion.
Whitehead sums it up best with his question: “How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature?”
“In other words, philosophy is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness. It is by reason of their instinctive grasp of this ultimate truth that, in spite of much association with arbitrary fancifulness and atavistic mysticism, types of Platonic philosophy retain their abiding appeal; they seek the forms in the facts. Each fact is more than its forms, and each form ‘participates’ throughout the world of facts. The definiteness of fact is due to its forms; but the individual fact is a creature, and creativity is the ultimate behind all forms, inexplicable by forms, and conditioned by its creatures(PR: 20).”
Revisioning this statement in OOO terms:
Philosophy does not explain the concrete object as it is in-itself, instead it seeks to abstract out of the internal/external relations of this object the forms by which its temporal being is manifest. At least that’s my take on the matter. Well anyway a good discussion. :)
Whitehead, Alfred North (2010-05-11). Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28). Simon & Schuster, Inc..
October 3, 2012 at 11:56 am
Hmm, not sure about this, surely the argument you are making is discontinuity of existence should invalidate concern? Ie the cat is no longer the cat I loved, because I am not currently loving it, therefore it’s welfare is now irrelevant.
Sadly, people do have this attitude all the time, in that they consider certain changes sufficient to cut off their concern, but extending that to any significant change seems a bit strong.
What if the cat, by changes in it’s internal relations, gains cancer? Is that discrete enough that you no longer value it as your cat? Or would that count as logically external but physically internal, given that the change from normal cell to cancerous cell is not determined by the cat’s constituent organisation?
Regardless, we can have concern for the ceasing to be, even if we do not continue that concern into the second version. In other words, you can be concerned that by your action the cat you loved is passing away, and that it both experiences hunger, and the shift from a cat reliant on your aid to one that looks after it’s own food supply.
If for example those theorists who support quantum spacetime succeed, and we find that all time is discrete, then this argument against care for the cat will discourage care for anything. “It’s not the thing I cared for, it’s a new thing created from it the moment after!”
More broadly, this reminds me of the discussion ages ago about formal relations and interactive relations. A cat has a formal relationship to the class of food, in that it’s structure assumes certain things. Real ecologists work by trying to create food webs, habitat maps, they try to map the inherent external relations of creatures so as to work out their capacities for interaction.
The organisms go together, they are already related, in terms of needs, potentials for conflict, synergetic possibilities and waste reprocessing, among many other possibilities. These relationships of a formal character can be satisfied by interactions, and indeed many of them must be, in some form, and it is this that allows you to map the ecosystem as a system; because of these automatic forms of relationality.
One of the tricks of living organisms is the various buffers and substitution mechanisms they are able to perform to work around the varying presence of their constitutive interactions. We can hop from meal to meal, from social encounter to social encounter, from friendship to friendship, from resting place to resting place, and from site of action to site of action.
Saying that objects simply “can” make these jumps ignores the specific function of a battery on a laptop; to dissociate the existence of the computing laptop from the constant condition of power supply.
In addition, this description misses out part of a classic emotion of ecological thinking; robustness anxiety: How often have you seen ecological types worry about how we don’t know what effect a certain change will have on the fundamental relationships of an ecological system? It’s happened to me quite a lot!
In contrast, the magical side of OOO, where the great barrier reef could maybe just change it’s interactions and go to Jupiter, slide from our visible universe, or register itself on the stock market, is more suited to the experimentation of hackers and builders than those who try to preserve and discover unintuitive constitutive relationships, and for whom “everything is already related” has vital motivating importance.
That’s not to say they couldn’t do with a bit of hacker mentality, as I think we’ll need more of that if we’re to deal with invasive species, rebuilding habitats, and all the other forms of adaption required given the inability of the conservation/precautionary approach to succeed fully. But that’s a pretty different thing from saying that such thinking inhibits ecological thinking!
October 4, 2012 at 12:51 am
Josh,
My argument is exactly the *opposite*. I am claiming that *internalism* such as we encounter in Barad where relata do not precede relations lead to the view that my kitty is an entirely different entity when a new set of relations emerges. That conclusion follows ineluctably from her thesis. My remarks are intended as a *critique*. My position is that entities *endure* independent of their relations or that there is a Tasha substance that cannot be reduced to whatever relations she happens to entertain. That’s precisely why I’m concerned with *Tasha* and not just this actualization of relations. The criticism you raise should be leveled at Barad or Whitehead, not me.
October 4, 2012 at 8:00 am
I always liked batesons’s example of a diff that involved nothing – not sending a tax return,,,,which makes a diff
not sure if alex’s assumption that all objects are mortal is the only cosmology.
there may be objects (psyches) that are ‘immortal’ – they do not exist in ‘time’. but that would require another cosmology – of which there are a few it seems
October 4, 2012 at 9:31 pm
Levi,
I’m not so sure treating an actual occasion as a “bundle of prehensions” is at all faithful to Whitehead’s scheme. Maybe you arguing that some other aspect of his thought forces him into an inconsistency on this point? If that’s not what you’re suggesting, then I fail to understand how an actual occasion’s process of concrescence–which Whitehead insists is self-created and transcends the whole of the past universe in a moment of private self-enjoyment–could be reduced to a “bundle of prehensions.” Don’t forget Whitehead’s formula of Creativity: “the many become one, and are increased by one.” It seems to me you’re selectively ignoring Whitehead’s emphasis on the distinct and novel oneness produced by each occasion’s concrescence.
October 4, 2012 at 10:20 pm
I followed that you were making a critique, but in doing so you made a point, that concern is tied to a form of endurance that does not have those discrete steps.
Without that step, merely saying that their position leads to the idea of “discrete moments of relationship and their attendant objects following each other through time” will lead to blank, “Yes, what’s the problem?”
But in addition the possibility of a quantum spacetime means that the very form of discreteness you suggest we should find aversive could infect everything that has material spacetime existence, ie everything in your system.
I was considering some ways of bringing together discreteness and concern, which if done successfully would take the teeth out of that particular critique and also insulate you from the problems of non-commutative geometries damaging your personal relationships!
Anyway, it seems like the corresponding part of your system is actually the one on flat ontology, in that where they emphasise the exo-relations of creatures, you emphasise the endo-relations of their ecosystem.
Where many ecological thinkers go “to protect the individual, we must protect the relationships”, an ooo man might say “protect individuals, and you know what, their relationships also make an individual, protect that too”.
This line of thinking may not lead to detailed surveys of exactly why we need the environment to remain roughly as it is (ie the stuff “ecological services” is based on), but it may lead to considerations of alternative ecologies with different dynamics.
October 5, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Just for the record I should add that ‘not in time’ does not mean in some other world.
It’s imposs to explain in a comment, but involves an understanding of the ‘physical instant’ as having a certain thickness wherein time does not course.:.which has a lot to do with memory….
‘7. This suggests that such time processes do not course inside minds and anything that achieves sensed or known differentiations “sediments” them [Piaget] as its memories, altering itself by sedimenting away from time its causal involvements.
“Away from time” means “not on time courses but inside the instant,” which instant is where such reality which knows – as well as the whole of nature – occurs and simultaneizes the sedimented sequences (“memories”) of its reactions to its causal interactions.
This is tantamount to saying that whichever reality that knows itself ought to possess memory of what it knowingly differentiates; namely that, because nature vacates itself outside actuality and so every thing and process in nature, including each mind, only exists within the physical instant, the preservation of memories is an effect of the absence of time course, not of the presence of brain engrams.
To put it still otherwise, it means that, in the same way that impetus is superfluous to keeping unperturbed bodies in geodesic motion, en-graving such memories in the brain is superfluous to keeping them in mind.
8. The interval-like duration of the physical instant, or time-like period in which no physical action could ever insert a change, is unknown. Many physicists are sympathetic toward the view that identifies it as the Planck instant, but in present nature no separate force, or interaction modality whose relationships enter to de-fine the Planck instant, can produce a change before a “characteristic time” of some 1020 Planck instants or more: every transformation in time is, thus, cur-rently ticked on intervals always larger than this one. In contrast, it is observed that moments, the least interval which an awake mind can distinguish or resolve and during which no mental action can be done, have a magnitude of the order of the hundredth of a second, about 1041 Planck instants.’ (Crocco, On Minds’ Localization).
Strangely, this approach is a kind of upside down Platonism….!
‘The basic fact of contemporary hylozoism is thus that persons appear as finitudes of full ontic consistency, causally interacting through a window between the situated, transformable situations, and an unlocatable or non-situable realm of intransformativity from where causation is exerted and, because of that, this intervalically instantaneous actuality transforms. Strangely, this might be what Plato, even if heavily conditioned by the Pythagoric-Parmenidean worldview, obscurely intuited when dictating for what became Timaeus 90a that persons are plants, not earthly, but rather celestial: fytòn ouk éggeion allà ouránion. They have inverted roots, not inside the soil, but rather as if their ontic sustenance would come from the mane, our hair thus staying the closest to the firmament or tópos ouránion. But Plato could never have seriously dreamt of locating such a celestial realm of ideas – one that is the firmamental, as an unyielding and securely established firmament productive of this “underworld” or everyday realm detected by means of the senses – inside the instant situation of a nature that vacates itself outside instantaneous actuality.’ (Crocco, Palindrome).
Obviously this is virtually imposs to understand without some familiarity with this work. Another way of expressing the last sentence is that ‘actuality thus exists only at the present instant and exhausts itself in its being present there in full entirety’. There is nothing other than the present moment and past and future exist for psyches withing the present moment.
This understanding of the instant as having a thickness differs from
the so-called Chrysippus-Newton-Sommerfeld notion of instant, which supposes that the interval-like “thickness” of the present is null – infinitely smaller than the aforesaid 0.000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 000000 053916 or whatever other fraction of an interval of situational transformations of the duration of a second. Lately this curious construal of actuality is in conflict with other cultural views. For example the Latin cultures, more than a thousand million people of strong emotional affinities who have never heard the predestination speech and also use the noun “time” when referring to the weather (and where more money than needed for a quiet life is often unsought; so that, in order to levy from them excise taxes, extra “needs” must be artificially pumped in by transculturing media), construe an instant as the appreciable interval of an eyeblink – un abrir y cerrar de ojos – and would never have dreamt it null, zero-seconds, or infinitesimal. This last, curious misconstrual comes, as mentioned, from the Pythagoric-Parmenidean view of time and the misunderstanding of “being” as if “to be” were merely a predication of distinctive “properties,” a view selected and promoted within Greek city life.
October 6, 2012 at 11:32 am
Parts of this discussion remind me of the endurantism/perdurantism debate that I was discussing with another OOO’er recently. Perdurantism is said to better accommodate special relativity, but undermines objects by parsing them into temporal parts (X is an instantaneous temporal part of Y at instant T. An object is said to overlap with its temporal parts I suppose, but it would seem to parse an object into a endless discrete instants. I guess I’m asking whether or not onticology requires a modified form of perdurantism or endurantism, some middle ground that doesn’t undermine objects or model them as static 3-D spatial entities, and what impact this might have on the idea that any new set of relations creates a new object.
October 8, 2012 at 10:54 pm
Or in other words: from the minds’ own reference frame (as with every other efficient physical cause, time does not elapse (just like the photon that takes no time to travel – from its own reference frame).
‘Change Is Forbidden between Physical Cause and Effect – Or, Why It Is Impossible to Plant an Interruption between the Observer and Her Observed
Diversity.
No matter the length of the photon’s journey, for massless carriers
of causal action the action is not spatially conveyed if measured in the
carrier’s own frame of reference: action always acts in the same spot, in its
“local” immediacy.
So time does not elapse between emission and absorption,
even if outer observers should construe the causal carrier as taking
millions of years “in flight.”
This is a crucial link that articulates space, time,
and causality. It thus plays a pivotal role in relativity theory, where it makes
another scientific point that deserves philosophical underscoring. Because of
the influence acquired by Hume’s error and the persistence of societal factors
that originally induced it, Poincaré, Einstein, Lorentz, Hilbert, and the
other founders of relativity physics saw in this special celerity, c, a feature
of light – “light’s speed invariance”; light and visual features (‘videas’, as
‘Ideas’ was originally written, with an initial letter digamma already lost by
the Greek alphabet in Plato’s time) have been always a special predilection
of Platonisms – rather than a feature of every efficient physical cause.’
And because of this non-elapsing of ‘time’ memories remain simultaneized (or made simultaneous) – we don’t go backwards in time to find a memory.
Hume’s error:
‘Nobody
could reproach David Hume (1711-1776) for not having foreseen that, more
than a century and a half later, Max Planck (1858-1947) was to discover
that physical causation comes in packets, so that in producing effects action
packets annihilate and one could only see the effects – never acquiring any
impression from the (exhausted) causative action by observing the extramental
changes it had already produced.
Hume was expecting such an impression
for action and, on its nonoccurrence, rather than declaring that
causation yields impressions only when the observer is the very causal
agent, Hume declared causation to be an ungrounded idea both for extramental
and for intramental realms.
Hume’s mistake is important in the
modern history of ideas. Hume’s error induced Inmanuel Kant (1724-1804)
into the slumbering in which his subjectivist-transcendentalist dream occurred
(Kant himself, of course, viewed it inversely, stating that Hume
awoke him from his “dogmatic slumbering”) and, bolstered by political and
ideological confrontations, persuaded many moderns to view minds as ineffectual
(epiphenomenal) and being as predicative (analytic). But let me return
to natural science.” (Crocco, Palindrome).
October 11, 2012 at 9:57 pm
just for the record the understanding that there is no ‘gap’ btwn the observer and her observed mental contents mirrors Ruyer’s claim that the brain is acting like an ‘absolute surface’ (or volume) in which there is an autovision without gaze.
We are not looking at our phenomenal impressions from a distance – neither are we close up. It is not the space of geometrical optics – or a cartesian theatre. D/G take up Ruyer’s idea in the concl to What is Philosophy. They also describe concepts as ‘absolute surfaces’ (a kind of abs immanence). They are referring partic to Ruyer’s masterpiece ‘Neo-Finalisme’.
Harding had a similar vision in ‘On Having no head: zen and the rediscovery of the obvious.
I’ll stop there before it’s too late