In response to my talk on flat ethics, noir realism raises some interesting questionsabout my defense of the existence of incorporeal machines. As noir realism writes:
The only question I have is in your division of incorporeal/corporeal. I guess I have a conflict with this dualistic approach of incorporeal/corporeal… i don’t see any separation between these two types of entity. The reason I say that is simple, even as I write this sentence I’m interacting with physical material objects that then through math and logic are manipulated through physical hardware and transformed into binary code that is translated into bits that are trasnported to the servers on the web from my own machine conveying the very material thoughts that I’m now about to publish. Are these incorporeal or corporeal? Is there a difference? What makes something incorporeal or corporeal? Is it a kind of object? Why not admit that all objects are material and have effect/affects within the physical? I think we have divided things because of their types, and through some need of linguistic habit rather than admiting the logical truth that thoughts are material as well, which means math is productive of material activation, language too.
I confess that I am myself surprised by my recent defense of incorporeal machines. As those who have followed my blog and work, I have been a pretty staunch defender of strict materialism, arguing that only material entities exist. In the past, this has led to some pretty heated debates throughout the blogosphere. To be honest, although incorporeal machines figure heavily in the book I’m now writing, Onto-Cartography, my commitment to them is still soft and I’m still working through just what they might be. Here I hasten to add that I am not the first materialist that has affirmed the existence of incorporeals: Marx occasionally talks about incorporeals, and certainly incorporeals are a key concept in Deleuze and Guattari. So what set of considerations motivates my recent defense of incorporeal machines given that I was so staunchly opposed to them in the past?
read on!
When I speak of incorporeal machines, I am not referring to ghostly entities that float around without bodies. At present– and I emphasize again that I’m still working through all of this, so I’m deeply interested in what others who have worked through these things more deeply in Deleuze and Guattari have to say on these matters –I’m committed to the thesis that incorporeal machines always have to have a corporeal body. Consequently, there is for me no incorporeal machine that is not embodied. No embodiment, no incorporeality. I realize this sounds paradoxical and contradictory. If there are no incorporeal machines that aren’t embodied, why don’t I just get it over with and say that these machines are corporeal and cut incorporeals out of my ontology altogether?
There are two considerations that lead me to resist the move of reducing incorporeal machines to corporeal machines: Iterability and identity. Unlike corporeal machines that are singular and always exist at a particular time and place (while also having a duration), incorporeal machines have the curious feature of being iterable, while remaining identical. As an incorporeal machine, a novel, scientific theory, mathematical equation, grammatical rule, recipe, political ideology, perhaps genetic codes, etc., can exist in countless corporeal machines (books, newspapers, magazines, symphony performances, brains, computer data banks, conversations, etc.), while nonetheless remaining that incorporeal machine. Every copy or iteration of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the paper of a book or in a computer program is still Hamlet, just as every execution of the operation of the Pythagorean theorem is still the Pythagorean theorem, and every performance of Beethoven’s Ninth is Beethoven’s Ninth.
In the case of fully corporeal machines, the entity can only exist at a particular point in time, at a particular place, and for a particular duration. Were we to say that the examples of incorporeal machines I just listed are, in fact, entirely corporeal, would would be forced to conclude that two instances of proving the Pythogorean theorem in a geometry class or two performances of Beethoven’s Ninth are entirely different entities. Not only would this be disastrous for mathematics (two instances of adding 1 + 1 by different people at different times would no longer be the same), but it would lead to a number of strange consequences in other domains pertaining to incorporeals as well.
If, then, it is true that there are incorporeals, they have very interesting features. For starters, where corporeal entities are finite in the sense that they exist in a time and place and for a duration such that once destroyed they can never be recovered, incorporeal entities possess a potential eternity. Why potential rather than actual? Their eternity is only potential because, as I said, incorporeal machines can only exist with corporeal bodies. If an incorporeal being loses its corporeal body (inscription in paper, smoke, brain neurons, computer data banks, sound-waves, sand, etc.), it ceases to exist. It is lost. Consequently, the condition for the possibility of the eternal is iteration and inscription in some medium. The incorporeal must be repeated through activities of inscription in order to continue to exist. It is the activity of iterating or repeating that counts here, not the inscription or trace. Note, however, that an activity of iteration leaves a trace and that trace, in its turn, can lie in wait as a dormant or sleeping incorporeal entities as in the case of a lost proof to a theorem gathering dust in an old monastery, or the Dead Sea Scrolls in a forgotten cave.
This idea of dormant incorporeal machines leads me to a second point. Those corporeal machines that lack life, cognition, and the capacity for intentionality or goal directedness are governed by simple causality:
E1 –> E2 –> E3 –> E4….En
With rigid corporeal machines, local manifestations (effects of preceding causes) are the result of the preceding cause. Event 1 (E1) produces or causes local manifestation E2. E1 cannot cause E3 because by the time we reach E3, E1 is lost in the mists of time (Deleuze’s “chronos”). Only E2 can cause E3. However, because of the eternity inhabiting incorporeal machines as a result of their iterability, we get a strange situation in which remotely past events can affect present events. Put formally, we get a situation in which E1 affects events at E4 in ways that both disrupts the effects of E3 and that leaps over events E2 and E3. In short, we get Bergson’s cone of memory. Here the immediately preceding historical events do not fully determine the present event because the remote past wells up and contributes effects of its own.
This can be seen in the case of biological development where what is mistakenly referred to as “Junk DNA” that served some function for ancestors, but not for current species, is suddenly awakened leading the organism to develop and respond to current circumstances in very unexpected ways. It can also be seen, above all, in the case of culture, where incorporeal machines from the remote past well up and disrupt social conditioning in the present. A young woman raised and home schooled in a fundamentalist family, for example, happens to encounter a tattered copy of Voltaire’s Candide in the attic of her grandparents, reads it, and gradually her subjectivization becomes unraveled as a result of an encounter with a past that is no longer present and that was inscribed hundreds of years ago. This, incidentally, is one reason we should be cautious with social explanations conducted within the framework of historical materialism and new historicism. They miss the manner in which time functions for machines that relate to incorporeal machines, treating biological and cognitive corporeal machines as if they were rigid machines determined solely by contemporaneous events and discourses, missing the manner in which incorporeal machines from the the remote past can suddenly well up in the present disrupting the contemporary. In any event, incorporeal machines are one of the ways in which matter becomes creative, by virtue of a synthesis of the remote past with the contemporary.
One of the things I have not abandoned with my grudging acceptance of incorporeals (they’re causing me all sorts of headaches) is the thesis that things must materially travel in order to produce effects. While it is true, I think, that one and the same incorporeal machine can exist in many times and places at once, it must nonetheless travel through electro-magnetic waves, bits of paper, sound-waves, horseback, smoke signals, etc, to reach those places. No incorporeal machines exists in all places at once. This is why questions of material infrastructure and communications technologies are so important for questions of political change. If a revolutionary thought falls in the woods and no one hears it or its style is too turgid for anyone but the most adept of scholars to understand it, it doesn’t produce effects. A culture is not just a thought, but is also a material body that must be communicated and maintained in order to exist.
Returning to noir realism’s remarks, one of the questions that most interests me is that of how incorporeal bodies interact with their corporeal bodies as well as with corporeal bodies in general. In other words, “how does the medium affect the message?” Often an incorporeal machine requires the right sort of body to exist. You can’t do, as far as I know, differential calculus in Roman numerals, hieroglyphs, or cuneiform. You need the right sort of medium for these types of incorporeal machines. As a consequence, corporeal media have the capacity to generate new incorporeal machines. The corporeal machines used always contribute something. Mathematics done with computers is different than maths done with pencil and paper. The possibility of new theorems is opened. Likewise, as A Clockwork Orange suggests, Beethoven’s Ninth becomes something different when played on synthesizers rather than classical instruments. Somehow, while continuing to possess something of its eternal, iterative identity, it also becomes something other than itself and new in these different mediums. This would be one reason to be suspicious of the futurist, trans-humanists. Material media contribute something and no medium can be exhausted or replicated salva varitate by a series of zeroes and ones. There’s something unfathomable and infinite in matter.
One of the questions of greatest interest to me, then, is that of how incorporeals and corporeals interact with one another and affect one another. As we grow and develop, for example, our bodies are written upon by signifiers. Here we have the incorporeal machines of culture interacting with the incorporeal machines of our genetics interacting with the corporeal machines of our organic bodies interacting with the incorporeal flows of the material world that pass through us such as the food that we eat, the air we breath, the light we’re exposed to, etc. We need a theoretical framework strong enough to think about these interactions bilaterally rather than unilaterally. Where a unilateral approach would have either culture or genetics determining the machine that we become, a bilateral approach would be attentive to the interaction of all these machines, how they modify one another, and how, in modifying one another, they produce something new and unexpected. How are we to simultaneously think these machinic interactions together?
Larval Subjects . 
October 18, 2012 at 9:49 am
Incorporeal objects seem to be a superfluous hypothesis to me. What does the corporeal ontology miss? What does Hamlet as a corporeal object lack? It doesn’t retain *identity* through translations but I’m not sure that this matters. Does it matter that, corporeally, Hamlet in 2012 isn’t exactly the same thing as Hamlet in 1600? I can’t see why.
October 18, 2012 at 11:01 am
Very interesting!
Naturally, I tend towards seeing bodies in terms of abstract machines; that there is (almost?) nothing in the moment that cannot be recreated in the future, at least in principle, and thus all of matter is a combination of what you would call incorporeal machines overlapping with each other.
I can’t tell if I am breaking something with this, but it seems to me that a physical body breaking down is the disincorporation from of particular combination of social roles (passed on to new people) mental contents (recorded partially elsewhere), bacterial society, dna and biochemical reflex patterns, while of course, the person who was formed of that combination is gone.
When a man dies, both his atoms and his structures disconnect from each other and are often reformed into new combinations elsewhere, even though the unique motive force and personality of that combination is lost.
The corporal becomes about the difference between asking “what something is” and asking whether it exists now, the actual as compared with all of functional possibility.
Personally, I think composition of these machines with each other is about recognising them in terms of non-deterministic recursion. (There are probably other ways to do it, but this one makes sense to me.)
Basically, they act on an environment/state space/body that produces them, with basic repeating patterns that perpetuate their structure. But they have a bit of give in them, both because they have variables that affect their structure that they do not affect (the affect of hunger on conversation), and because they do not fully determine those conditions they do affect, but connect to them in an abstracted way (eg so long as one of five options is there, they can carry on).
This then means that from a dynamics perspective, they leave holes, and it is only by the connection of these systems together that these holes are filled up, producing repeating structures, except that as you try to define that repetition more accurately, new preconditions, new parameters, are always being discovered, meaning that larger societies must be brought in to preserve stability. etc etc. And in any real object, a vast amount (possibly infinite?) of these abstract machines must be stacked to narrow down possibility to now.
In short, corporal bodies are actually local manifestations of societies of incorporeal machines, and their properties as bodies tell you something about the incorporeal’s powers of combination.
I tend to like this perspective for it’s dynamic focus, obviously it makes a pigs ear of talking about medium and message, because cuneiform and proclamations become simultaneously both, the contents and messages of a medium becoming it’s social attachment points and use cases, and so the context within which it exists etc. I suppose you could talk about levels of dependence though.
October 18, 2012 at 1:42 pm
That’s a pretty thoroughgoing idealism, Josh. Afraid I can’t follow you in that doctrine of abstract machines as it thoroughly degrades matter and makes it a mere filler for abstract machines (hylemorphism).
October 18, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Hi, Levi — this is an argument we have had for a while, and I lack the time & energy to pursue it fully here. So I will just say it flatly. As far as I can tell, what you (together with Deleuze/Guattari) call incorporeals is pretty much the same thing as what Whitehead calls “eternal objects” (or “potentials for ingression”). In all these cases we are referring to something like a pattern or immanent organization that is iterable, that cannot be reduced just to material microcomponents, and yet that only “exists” insofar as it is physically embodied or instantiated. Idealism, from Plato onwards, basically consists in according some notion of substantial, non-physical being to these incorporeals; while eliminativism (or whatever else you might want to call it) consists in denying the existence or relevance of incorporeals altogether, in which case you only have “dead matter” or “vacuous actuality,” bodies or particles bumping against one another in a void. Such a model cannot work, because it “explains away” too much. I think that Lucretius already realized this, which is why his atomistic materialism necessarily needs to be supplemented with the clinamen. I’d suggest, therefore, that the clinamen is a proto-version of the genesis of incorporeals in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. And this movement is also pretty much the same as that in which Whitehead, although proclaiming against idealism that “there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” nonetheless insists that actual entities prehending other actual entities cannot be all that there is — there also have to be eternal objects and their ingressions, without which (just as without the clinamen) change would not be possible.
As you know, I have long had problems with your, and Graham’s, critiques of what you both call “relationism.” I think that Graham’s opposition between objects and relations, or yours between internal and external relations, are too stark and massive, not subtle enough in differentiating shades and making distinctions. But your objection to relational definition *is* valid when it comes to what I am calling eliminativism, and what others call deterministic, mechanistic materialism. I think that Lucretius realizes this, that many other thinkers realize this (Leibniz, for sure, though I am less certain about Spinoza), that Whitehead and Deleuze both come to realize this — and that you realize this as well, which is why you are struggling with some notion of incorporeals. The problem, as always, is how to maintain some recognition of the incorporeal without letting this become substantialized (which would mean a slide into idealism).
October 18, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Reblogged this on noir realism and commented:
Levi answers my concerns over incorporeal/corporeal objects in his new essay…. quite interesting, indeed!
October 18, 2012 at 5:29 pm
Steven,
I think there are a couple very important differences here. First, Whitehead’s eternal objects are always already there. They really do exist eternally and at all times. Deleuze’s events do not, nor do my incorporeals. Second, they are teleological, functioning as lures for feelings. I’m just not willing to go there. I honestly just don’t understand the appeal of Whitehead, especially given his design theology.
In my view, it’s the Whiteheadian account that lacks any nuanced conception of relations. My theory of relations differs from Harman’s. I have no problem with direct relations, they just detachable. When we begin with everything always-already being related through negative and positive relations we authorize ourselves to ignore the investigation of relations because they’re already there, and are left without an account of why a relation makes a difference. For example, it’s hard for Whitehead to explain what difference a person being deprived of oxygen or food makes. I’ve written about this more recently here:
And here:https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/what-differences-make-a-difference-relations-again/
October 18, 2012 at 6:58 pm
I’m still not convinced, being a materialist of the new school materialisms I still affirm what I want to call a two-aspect theory of entities much in the same way that some Kantian scholars support a two-aspect theory of the noumenon/phenonmenon divide (see Henry E. Allison: Transcendental Idealism). As Allison and others situate it, there is no dualism, no two different entities, one called noumenon and the other phenomenon; instead, there is only one entity with two aspects or faces. Allison in an anti-idealist reading of Kant proposes a two-aspect epistemolgical based understanding of transcendental idealism in which the transcendental distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves (phenomenon/noumenon) be understood as holding between two ways of considering things rather than as two ontologically distinct sets of entities. The only thing I would argue against Kant is instead of a normative epistemological account I would opt for a transcendental realism and an ontological account of this two-aspect theory. This paradox is at the heart of Karen Barad’s treatment of intra-action and entanglement theory.
Karen Barad recently described this wave/particle paradox as the problem of the “very nature of nature: “light seemed to behave like a wave, but under different experimental circumstances, light seemed to behave like a particle. Given these results, what can we conclude about the nature of light-is it a particle or a wave? Remarkably, it turns out that similar results are found for matter: under one set of circumstances, electrons behave like particles, and under another they behave like waves. Hence what lies at the heart of the paradox is the very nature of nature” (KB 29).
What I see is that both transcendental realists and object-oriented philosophers are describing such things from one or the other aspect of this two-aspect theory: one is more concerned with the processes at the core of such entaglements (Barad’s intra-actions that make a difference), while OOO is more concerned with the surface tensions that arise out of this entaglement. I think that neither view holds the whole truth, but that both working in unison offer two sides of one coin so to speak. One sees waves, the other particles: but the actual entity remains the same under two-aspects.
In my ping back I relate more in detail:
http://darkecologies.com/2012/10/18/863/
October 18, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Although Walter Benjamin’s name was not mentioned here, what I found striking was the frequent descriptions of corporeals in terms of their auratic presence making me recall “work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility.” Therefore, it was not surprising to meet another writer of the same vein: Bergson.
I do not locate Bergson in the discourse of remote past and immediate future. That would be to situate the philosopher of pure time in relation to the first passive synthesis of time in which contemplative souls (via the plate of imagination) draw difference as generality establishing the primary ground of chronos. Bergson is the philosopher of duration.The image of the cone dictates the two paradoxes of time. The abstract line (always displaced point between the horizantal repetition of the chronological present with the preservative instinct and the vertical repetition of the pure past that repeats with a default) or the always displaced instant is the synthesizer that gives a new gleam to all memories as if they were never lived the way they were since past is contemporenous with the present that it was. In other words, there is this strangest past, which is already past but never lived as present, responsible for the preservation of memories in themselves. And secondly, the whole past in the most contracted form exists simultaneously with the present. Bergson does talk about memories called by the materiality of the present, they emerge and find bodies as they are called foreword. But this is a process related rather to perception and will. And pure past as an agent should not be underestimated. Benjamin’s Das Jetz was based on the idea of the vertical repetion’s clash with the horizantal repetition. Of course, Deleuze would deem such an encounter (Ursprung) platonic and consider it amongst the misinterpretations of pure time as original mythical time.
Let us now briefly turn to Deleuze. I think the most frequent motto of LOS is that “what is expressed does not exist outside of its expression.” A more baffling statement is “language is coextensive with the event.” I will not reflect on the latter here, but let it suffice to say that in ATP where D&G talk about the novella, they make it clear that language, structure, signifier have nothing got to do with the event which first emerges perceptually in the question: what happened? In the case of the novella, we are curious in relation to the form of the secret not in relation to the subject matter of the secret. Moreover, the whole strength of the novella rests in that the secret remains a secret. Only linear and literal writing as for instance that of Kafka can be coextensive with the event.
Finally, the motto of our investigation. First and foremost, it is very Spinozist dictating that the essence as the essence of substance can only exist in the attribute. To conduct an investigation on the nature of the event beginning with language may sound rather anti-Deleuze, but we should keep in mind that this is a serial endeavor that attempts to dissolve the rigidity or the striation from the very start. In the first pages, we learn to think the event or sense by cleaning the proposition from pauses and rests (nouns and adjectives) to reach the infinitive, expression (cleared) itself or to put it differently, the expressed.of the expression. This incorporeal, or what we call the neutral sense event is already past-still future; it is attributed to the state of affairs when they are already past and moves toward the future in the proposition as expression itself. This is its splendor. It is a singularity made adequate to the line of Aion, the most contracted and the most expanded instant, the time out of joint which is the play ground of the displaced point that constantly tackles the chronological present by eluding it and that is also why this neutral singularity that waits its embodiments in time (eternal) is capable of incorporeal transformations which take place most frequently in language. Consider a judge giving a verdict, the guilty already changes assemblage before the material conditions are actualized: once again, already past-.-still future
October 18, 2012 at 11:10 pm
Of course we need incorporeals, if don´t we would be charged of naif empiricism/realism/materialism (even if these terms do not evidently have the same meaning)
October 19, 2012 at 7:18 am
“Of course we need incorporeals, if don´t we would be charged of naif empiricism/realism/materialism (even if these terms do not evidently have the same meaning)”
If our materialism still needs an other maybe we haven’t expanded it far enough. Once that other was ideality or spirituality, here it’s incorporeality. I cannot see the difference (though this may well be my failure not anyone else’s).
October 21, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Idealism?
Hmm, I suppose it is..
It’s the same kind of mindset that leads my chemist friend to say “everything is made of thin air!!” the solid becomes something so opposite from itself when looked at closely, that it takes some work to reconstruct it.
In the same way, if you have a very structural approach, the very materiality of matter becomes logic, look at the pauli exclusion principle for example, or the idea of an attractor embodying the stability of a real object that was previously assumed to be stable “in itself”. So the incorporeal becomes parts of the corporeal in the same way that organs are part of the body.
EG: A grammar, a writing type, is only material when it has content, there must be something that orders the letters and words, chooses between the possibile combinations, although there have been many placeholder contents that have been created.
Look at how wordpress make starter pages to fill their structure, or how font examples do their “lorem ispum” or whatever.
In a broader case, look at how writers wanting to explore an idea must find characters that put it into action, that fill the space in the middle of their social picture. Without them, there is no book or play, and the characters form a way in, a support structure to the world that supposedly contextualises them, allowing an actual story, and then, a physical book, to be created.
So yeah, you end up with a kind of idealism, one that pre-assumes the success of science; that fundamentally, the being of all objects is in principle available to abstraction, if only at a limit of infinite questing in very favourable circumstances, and at overlapping scales.
The obvious criticisms of idealism don’t quite apply though, as there is no matter without form, and so no shaping of matter to fit form, although there could be structures disassembling each other by their interactions.
Likewise, these immaterial objects are dependent on their conditions for appearance, and appear then and only then (with their own modes of change, whoosh!), and can disappear if their own logic is not closed, or when disassembled by other objects.
I mean, in that respect it’s basically just buddhism!
Of course, you sort of do the same yourself by making everything we think of as a quality the output of a system. So all apparent material existence is secondary in so far as it is generated from powers of objects, but fundamental in the sense that it is inevitably linked to those same powers and helps to identify them. And if those powers can be plumbed at least in theory by infinite recombination with potential objects in different networks, then the same idealism of access with infinitely shrinking remainder applies; there is no hard limit to us knowing more.
October 22, 2012 at 1:02 am
The ghost of your critique of Barad haunts this post, and to me you seem to be very resistant to think beyond principles of classical physics, or to even consider alternative dynamics. Your description of the causality of corporeal and incorporeal machines both follow a classical determinism, even if incorporeal machines are overdetermined by the remote past. Your understanding of temporality and insistence that “things must materially travel in order to produce effects” implies a mechanics consisting of objects with individual trajectories and forces disturbing the path of those trajectories through space and time.
My point is not to say that one form of dynamics is right or wrong, or to say that we need to think about issues of entities (corporeal or incorporeal) and their interactions in physics terms. Rather, my point is that the questions you raise in the last paragraph of your post are ones pertaining to dynamics, that is, how things change and how they affect change. However, the way you have built up to and framed these questions a) do not explicitly acknowledge dynamics as an issue separate from concerns about the properties of entities and relations per se and b) narrowly constrain the possibilities for a viable dynamics within your philosophical framework (i.e. bilateral versus unilateral interactions). I think issues of dynamics have not been adequately addressed in OOO and speculative realism in general, which is why I think Barad has something important to contribute to the conversation. Dynamics is her foremost concern, and it is an area of inquiry that does not have to be confined to the natural sciences. Here is Barad on dynamics:
“Dynamics are about change. To specify or study the dynamics of a system is to say something about the nature of and possibilities for change. This includes specifying the nature of causation, the nature of the causes that effect change, the possibilities for what can change and how it can change, the nature and range of possible changes, and the conditions that produce change. The study of dynamics, as it is generally conceptualized within the natural sciences, is concerned with how the values of particular variables change over time as a result of the action of external forces, where time is presumed to march along as an external parameter. Agential realism does not simply pose a different dynamics (substituting one set of laws for another); it introduces an altogether different understanding of dynamics. It is not merely that the form of the causal relations has been changed, but the very notions of causality, as well as agency, space, time, and matter, are all reworked. Indeed, in this account, the very nature of change and the possibilities for change changes in an ongoing fashion as part of the world’s intra-active dynamism” (Meeting the Universe Halfway 179).
Barad’s agential realism throws down the gauntlet for a metaphysical theory of dynamics that works with but beyond the purview of the natural sciences. I think this is an important step that successful new materialisms, object-oriented ontologies, and speculative realisms will need to make. It is a question not only of what differences make a difference, but of how certain differences make a difference.
October 22, 2012 at 2:36 am
Brandon,
I’m not resistant to dynamics, rather I have a principled disagreement as to what dynamics is and think she gets it wrong. In the physics community I’m not alone in this.
October 22, 2012 at 7:34 am
It’s also worth noting that in physics even phenomena of non-locality do not violate the speed of light, ie, they take time to travel. If you wish to level a criticism, you’ll need to be far more specific rather than making rhetorical appeals to the difference between classical physics (bad, for you) and contemporary physics (good, according to you). Moreover, for an alternative realist view in physics you might look into the work of Gabriel Catren, who is also a working physicist.
October 22, 2012 at 11:11 pm
Certainly, I am aware that nonlocality does not violate the speed of light according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and Barad makes this quite explicit as well (318). But it does not follow from that acknowledgement that nonlocal phenomena must therefore take time to travel. This is only the case if we consider traditional notions of space and time, that is, notions in which space and time are continuous manifolds in which phenomena can be positioned or located. As Barad says, “It should not be presumed that either the [spacetime] manifold itself changes or changes to the manifold are continuous. Discontinuity plays an important role. Changes do not follow in continuous fashion from a given prior state or origin, nor do they follow some teleological trajectory—there are no trajectories” (181). Thus, Barad’s explanation of nonlocality is that it is not some “spooky-action-at-a-distance coordination between individual particles separated in space or individual events separated in time. Space and time are phenomenal, that is, they are intra-actively produced in the making of phenomena; neither space nor time exist as determinate givens outside of phenomena” (315). Space and time themselves are subject to dynamic change and iterative reconfigurations, which leads Barad to ground questions of nonlocality in issues concerning separability versus inseparability.
Again, my point is not to say that a dynamics relying on trajectories of entities traveling through space and over time is good or bad. My point is that Barad’s theory, regardless of whether we deem it correct or incorrect, challenges our intuitive understandings about basic concepts of natural phenomena, such as space and time. It brings dynamics to the foreground of inquiry by questioning our assumptions about what is subject to change, and how so.
Thank you for suggesting Catren, who seems to be a nice contrast to Barad in his focus on Einstein and Heisenberg rather than Bohr—at least in what I have read of him so far.
October 23, 2012 at 12:00 am
Brandon,
If non-locality is subject to Einstein’s constant then it necessarily involves time to travel. That said, I share Barad’s thesis that time and space arise from objects and are not empty milieus in which objects exist. This is something I’ve argued for quite some time on this blog and in my published work, and is one of the central claims of the book I’m writing now, Onto-Cartography. You can find a brief discussion of this in chapter 5 of The Democracy of Objects. My debate with Barad revolves around her thesis that entities do not pre-exist their relations. This is not simply a thesis of OOO, but a thesis shared by Catren and a number of other working physicists. I have read her book, incidentally, so there’s no need to quote.
October 23, 2012 at 1:08 am
I should add, that the reason I’m so insistent on this issue of the time it takes for things to travel is that it is of central importance for the form that societies take and the understanding of relations of power. Societies organized around speech will take different forms than societies organized around writing, and societies where messages are transmitted by horseback and ships will take different forms than societies that have telephones and fiber optic cables. In our own current society, there are those who have greater and quicker access to information as well as greater ability to disseminate their messages and others that are almost voiceless. These are all issues of the time of a transmission and have a decisive impact on the form that a society takes as well as who possesses power and who doesn’t.
October 23, 2012 at 2:55 am
Thanks for your responses, Levi; that helps clarify things. I know this may be a whole other can of worms, but given your interest in the temporal aspect of message transmission and its impact on society and power relations, I would be very interested to hear your take on the potential cultural implications of further developments in quantum information and computing, especially given that this year’s Nobel Physics Prize was awarded to two researchers whose work on quantum optics directly influences those fields.
October 23, 2012 at 6:20 pm
“Their eternity is only potential because, as I said, incorporeal machines can only exist with corporeal bodies. If an incorporeal being loses its corporeal body (inscription in paper, smoke, brain neurons, computer data banks, sound-waves, sand, etc.), it ceases to exist. It is lost.”
Though I agree with your idea of incorporeal machines, I find your insistence on a corporeal form to be too dismissive, and ultimately wrong.
Take the example of a warp drive. This exists as several objects. Yes it’s a word, and has a corporeal form in the sense that it can be written down. That is one of the objects it represents, but it is more than that, it also theoretically exists as a physical construct (a second object) beyond the word. There exists a possibility that at some point in the future someone could actually hand you a physical device you would recognize as a warp drive. The fact that none exists now does not negate the concept, nor is it legitimate to reduce the idea to a mere word. The word and the physical object are two separate objects and should not be confused as being the same. Instantiating the word, is not the same thing as instantiating the physical object at all, and writing something down or thinking it does not give corporeal form to the physical object. The physical object is separate from it’s symbolic representation object.
The symbolic object of a warp drive can exist corporeally in brains or on paper, but the physical object of a warp drive does not currently. The physical object is incorporeal in nature, but not in practice, it hasn’t been instantiated yet. As is the case with many theoretical objects that engineering and science haven’t produced yet, but we have a hope or expectation of creating in the future.
I guess my point is, the instantiation of incorporeal objects into corporeal entities is not instantaneous, nor required. The fact that something doesn’t exist doesn’t negate the incorporeal concept of it.
October 23, 2012 at 8:17 pm
Skydaemon,
Concepts have corporeal bodies. Their corporeal body consists of collections of neurons in brains, inscriptions on paper, 0’s and 1’s, etc. There’s always a material inscription of some sort or other.
October 23, 2012 at 9:37 pm
I wasn’t referring to the instantiation of a concept, those are symbolic representation objects, and are what are contained in brains or on paper.
You seem to have no way of describing the actual physical thing and how it links to it’s incorporeal essence. You appear to be claiming the actual creation of the physical warp drive is identical to the mere thought of it.
Perhaps I can make this more clear by laying out the objects I see that are involved.
1)”Warp drive” symbolic word incorporeal object.
2)”Warp drive” symbolic word instantiated object. A physical manifestation of the incorporeal word object, as in when it is written onto paper.
3)”Warp drive” concept incorporeal object.
4)”Warp drive” concept instantiated object. A physical manifestation of the incorporeal concept object, as in when it is stored in neurons in a brain. This is potentially the physical manifestation of the design.
5)”Warp drive” physical incorporeal object, as in the abstract or virtual object (from programming terminology). This is effectively a list of minimum criteria (attributes, functionality etc) which must be possessed by a physical object in order to be classified as a warp drive.
6)”Warp drive” physical instantiated object. The actual functioning physical device which would transport a starship or whatever. A real world object meeting the criteria of #5.
Your position effectively claims that #5 cannot exist until #6 does. I disagree. To me, it is entirely possible to define the criteria that a physical object must meet prior to its creation.
What difference is there between #3 and #5? I’m not wholly sure, but your argument makes it clear that they are different. Perhaps #3 is a design, and #5 is the actual thing. If they were not different, then there would be no difference between neurons in the brain containing the concept (#4), and the real physical object (#6). Their (#4 and #6) instantiations are clearly different types of things, and so it makes little sense that they are considered equal instantiations of the same incorporeal object.
October 23, 2012 at 10:58 pm
Er, no and it’s rather imbecilic that you would attribute such a claim to me. A concept is one thing, the thing that a concept denotes is another. The concept of a horse or warp drive does not bring horses or warp drives into existence. Nonetheless, concepts themselves must be embodied in some material medium. They can’t float around in some Platonic ideal world. Thank you for your mansplaination.
October 24, 2012 at 7:09 pm
So is an incorporeal machine a type of retroactive machine? For example, in Lacan we can think of the object-cause of desire (objet a) as a partial machine, only actualized (or made full) in, say, a subject’s symptoms. The body via the symptom is the space of incorporeal actualization.
Just wondering…
October 26, 2012 at 1:10 am
Nathan,
I’d have to think on that more. I’d be interested in hearing you’re take here; especially with regard to incorporeal machines like DNA and computer code.
April 17, 2013 at 2:13 pm
Reblogged this on rebeccapic and commented:
As a dancer who is constantly refiguring the relationship of the body and thought, the corporeal machine and incorporeal machine, and using this to create a whole dancing, performing body this above statement fascinates me, ‘machine interactions’ in terms of the body as site for meeting, contact and interaction with other bodies, Contact Improvisation might give insight into this question….
April 17, 2013 at 2:25 pm
Have you also looked at Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen Body Mind Centring, she also has an interesting take on cells and the materiality vs biology of the body.
Dance is also said to prescribe it’s own language, take a dancing body in improvisation, it is dealing with the corporeal body and incorporeal, the incorporeal past does arise, but improvisation requires a presence and meaning to come from the moment the corporeal body is in action, ‘action’ being ‘live’. There is also the incorporeal in the traces each moment the corporeal dance produces, however, what happens to the incorporeal when it is witnessed by other corporeal and incorporeal machines… just thoughts :)
May 17, 2013 at 6:50 pm
[…] have been giving a lot of thought to Levi Bryant's recent post on writing and incorporeal machines. Obviously (at least from my perspective), understanding symbolic action's (e.g. writing) […]
June 9, 2013 at 3:20 am
[…] universities, revolutionary groups, political parties, and red-ass orangutangs. Other machines are incorporeal– though they always have a corporeal bodies –like scores of music, recipes, […]