It seems to me that much of the so-called debate between processualists and object-oriented philosophers is a debate between a four-dimensional conception of substances and a three-dimensional conception of objects. The three-dimensionalist holds that “…objects [are] ‘three-dimensional’ [insofar as they are]… ‘enduring’, [and are] ‘wholly present‘ at all times at which they exist” (Sider, 3, my italics). In other words, for the three-dimensionalist objects are only mereologically composed of 1) spatial parts, and 2) those spatial parts are always present as the substance endures in time. In other words, substances, for the three-dimensionalist, have no temporal parts that can come to be and pass away.

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It is three-dimensionalism that gives rise to paradoxes like the Ship of Theseus paradox. Suppose you have a ship named the Ship of Theseus. Every day you remove a board from your ship and replace it with a new board. At some point your ship will be composed of entirely new boards. At this point, is the Ship of Theseus still the Ship of Theseus or is it a new ship? There are all sorts of ways in which we can vary this paradox. For example, suppose you have a ship called the Ship of Theseus and another ship called the Ship of Philadelphia. Every day you remove one board from the Ship of Theseus and place it on the Ship of Philadelphia and you remove a plank from the Ship of Philadelphia and place it on the Ship of Theseus. Is there a point at which the Ship of Theseus becomes the Ship of Philadelphia and the Ship of Philadelphia becomes the Ship of Theseus? Or again, suppose you daily remove a board from the Ship of Theseus and place it in another position on the ship. When all the boards have been rearranged and now occupy a new position is the Ship of Theseus now a new ship?

These thought experiments seem like idle curiosities, yet they do have far ranging ethical, legal, and political consequences. Given, for example, that all of the matter in my body is replaced approximately every seven years, do I still have legal obligations to pay my mortgage after seven years or my student loans? My obligation is dependent on me being the same person I was throughout time. But if my being is individuated by the matter of which I am composed, then I would no longer have these legal obligations. Three-dimensionalism will argue that in the first two of these thought experiments the objects are not the same object because they are now composed of different matter than they were before. In other words, their proper parts have changed and are no longer present. Here the proper parts of a substance are not temporal, but spatial.

When the processualist rejects the notion of objects it seems that they are conceiving objects in three-dimensional terms: as entities that are composed of fully present parts at all moments in time. If substances change, the processualist continues, then they are no longer the same object because their proper parts have changed. On these grounds, the processualist concludes that we should reject the existence of objects altogether. Entities are processes, not objects.

However, while I am deeply sympathetic to the processualists and consider myself a process ontologist– which I don’t take as being synonymous with being a Whiteheadian –this argument only follows if substances are three-dimensional as articulated above. If, in addition to spatial parts, objects also have temporal parts it follows that objects are not brute clods that simply sit still, but that in their endurance through time they are activities or processes. The claim that objects have temporal parts is the claim that they have time-bound elements such as a past. My childhood, for example, is a temporal part of my being, as is what I taught yesterday, what I did last week, etc. Three conclusions will follow from this: First, insofar as substances have both temporal and spatial parts, no object will ever be fully present, because every object will contain parts that are elapsed or gone. This is a good candidate for articulating one of the meanings of withdrawal, and is one of the reasons I have claimed that the essence of objects consists in what Derrida called differance (I have an article forthcoming on this entitled “The Time of the Object: Derrida, Luhmann and the Ontological Grounds of Withdrawal”). Here differance should not be understood as the claim that beings take on their being in and through their difference from everything else (e.g., the thesis of Saussurean diacritics), but rather as the claim that 1) beings differ in-themselves in that they change (regardless of whether any other objects exist), and 2) that the presence of an object or substance is perpetually deferred by virtue of the fact that the past of a substance has always already disappeared and the future is necessarily open. Second, it follows that objects or substances can develop. Clearly, while my childhood is a temporal part of my being, I am physically, psychologically, and intellectually very different than I was at the age of three. Now I grow hairs in odd places. Finally, third, insofar as substances are temporal, they are open. To say that an object is open is to say that it’s internal structure is not fixed but that it can develop in unexpected ways in the future. If four-dimensionalism is true, I see no opposition between the processualists and onticology or object-oriented materialism (OOM).

It’s important to note, however, that while, under this view, all substances have temporal parts, temporality is not structured in the same way for all types of objects. Consider the example of a rock with a high iron content that exists in an environment or regime of attraction saturated by oxygen. For part of its existence this rock existed as a small asteroid in outer space, before falling to the earth. Once it falls to earth it begins to undergo a change in its local manifestations as it rusts through the process of oxidation. Over time it grows more and more brown from this process. Now it is unlikely that the temporal parts of this rock function in the same way that temporal parts for a corporation or a human being. For the rock, events in its remote past cannot be rendered present in its current temporal phase, but remain where they are. The present of the rock is only affected by the immediately preceding temporal moment. By contrast, as I’ve argued in some of my meditations on memory and the importance of memory, those substances or objects that have the capacity of memory have a very different sort of temporal structure. For example, even though a traumatic event might have occurred in my remote past when I was a four year old child, this remote event can continue to be operative in my present as if it were happening right now. Freud depicts this vividly in the beginning of Civilization and its Discontents where he compares the nature of time in the unconscious to the different historical layers dug up by an archeologist, but in such a way that events in all those historical time periods behave as if they were simultaneously occurring now. As thinkers and artists such as Bergson, Proust, Freud, and Deleuze have argued, the past of certain autopoietic substances is such that it is present with the present and such that it continues to be operative in the present. It is for this reason that these types of “machines” (to use Maturana and Varela’s language) are not characterized by simple stimulus-response mechanisms where given a certain input you get a pre-delineated output, but rather where the output given a stimulus is open and contingent by virtue of the way in which the past gives these machines the ability to “rewire” their responses. Societies can pull on their past in the form of historical documents to respond to their present, such that they don’t end up brutely or mechanically repeating, just as corporations can draw on their past dealings with other corporate and government entities to strategize their current actions. The past, far from condemning us to mechanical repetition, is what undermines the possibility of mechanical repetition by virtue of how the trace comes to function in subsequent operations or activities of the system or substance (i.e., Freud’s “mystic writing pad”).

The key point is that entities or substances are not beings that spatially endure, such that their parts remain materially the same and present from instant to instant, but rather that from instant to instant endurance and existence consists in the activity of an object producing itself temporally and in act. As Gilson argues in his marvelously entitled book Being and Some Philosophers, existence is not a noun or a predicate, but an act or a verb. And as an act or a verb, existence is temporal, composed of temporal parts, and therefore necessarily processual. This contention is not cause for the rejection of the concept of object or thing, but rather for revision of what we mean by object or thing. The idea that objects are three-dimensional, that their parts are only spatial is untenable and therefore should be abandoned, not the concept of object.

In addition to the label “onticology”, my position could be called “object-oriented materialism” (OOM); and, were we specifying “Bryant’s object-oriented materialism” we could call it BOOM! I generally share Harman’s critique of reductive materialism, agreeing that we cannot reduce objects to their material parts. The cat that walks around my living room and the cat that some cruel bastard has blown up in a microwave both have the same material parts, yet clearly they are two distinct objects. In other words, it is not just the parts that matter, but how those parts are organized or related. However, here I don’t see why this observation should lead one to reject materialism. The materialist need only claim that all entities are materially embodied, not that all entities are reducible to elementary parts. In other words, there’s no inconsistency between materialism and theories of emergence. And, of course, emergence pertains to the organization, the relations, among those parts and not simply the parts simpliciter.

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This leaves the problem of changing parts and persisting or enduring entities. When I get a haircut or grow new hair am I the same person? Harman seems to argue that for the materialist, if the parts change then the entity is no longer the same entity. Yet this would only hold if the being of the entity were individuated solely by the parts of which the entity is composed. If, by contrast, entities are individuated by both their parts and organization, then so long as that organization is maintained, the entity persists. All that’s required is that that organization be embodied in some way.

Materialism is sometimes criticized on the grounds that we don’t have a well developed concept of matter. In my view, far from being a black mark against materialism, this is a point in its favor. In this connection, I’ve been increasingly influenced by Katerina Kolozova’s discussions and deployment of the thought of Laruelle. Among all that I’ve read on and by Laruelle, Kolozova’s treatments are the first that have helped me to see the importance and significance of his form of critique. Among other things, Laruelle locates a sort of circularity internal to philosophical thought wherein that concepts of that thought end up determining the real. Here the problem is that philosophy structurally becomes locked in a circularity that far from reaching the real, determines the real by thought. Viewed in light of this thesis, the absence of a concept of matter is a strength of materialism rather than a weakness. Were we to have a well developed concept of matter we would find ourselves locked in the correlationist circle, such that we end up claiming that thought and being are identical. The absence of a well-defined concept of matter indicates that while thought, like anything else, is material, matter is nonetheless radically alterior and foreign to thought. The concept of matter is not– as per Plato’s requirements in the Meno –something that we possess in advance, but is rather a moving target that grows with our exploration of matter over the course of history. It is not something that we have already, but rather something that we must discover. Off to finish my syllabi.

Here events seem to resemble Harman’s description of objects drawn from Husserl (Hegel makes similar observations in the open to the Phenomenology as well as the Logic). There it will be recalled that objects are both a unity and a diversity. On the one hand, objects have an irreducible unity such that each object is one and cannot be treated as a mere summation of their qualities. An object, it seems, is never exhausted by a list of its qualities. On the other hand, objects are multiplicities or manifolds (language Husserl uses in Cartesian Meditations and elsewhere) in that they consists of many different qualities. So too in the case of events insofar as they seem to be a unity that is also a multiplicity. Yet when we look at issues surrounding how to individuate events we find ourselves faced with the question of whether there is genuinely an ontology of events or whether what we call an event is merely a matter of convention. In other words, do things such as battles, soccer games, and supernovae exist as independent events in their own right, or are they merely the result of linguistic conventions surrounding how how we arbitrarily delineate events? Clearly the realist will wish to treat events as entities in their own right. However, the realist will also wish to distinguish genuine events from events that are merely the result of some linguistic or social convention. She will recognize that not everything we call an event will necessarily be an event in its own right.

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At the risk of overmining objects, I would like to treat objects as events insofar as I hold that objects are both processes and that they take place or happen. As I’ve argued, objects are not brute clods that just sit there doing nothing until acted upon. Rather, they are ongoing activities. There are three ways in which objects have an evental structure. First, objects are evental in that they come-to-be or happen. Objects are evental in that they always arise out of other objects. For every object there is a point at which a plurality of distinct objects somehow enter into a unity forming an endo-consistency that is itself an object or distinct entity. Paraphrasing Whitehead, objects are born of the many and increase the many by one. The coming-to-be of a unit or unity is thus an event wherein an object happens or takes place introducing a novel, inexhaustible entity into the world that both would not be possible without the other objects of which it is composed but which is also irreducible to these other objects. My daughter cannot be reduced to the various foods, gases, and chemicals out of which her cells were built, she is not merely a pile of these things, but rather she is a distinct entity unleashed into the world (or, at least, unleashed on my once tidy living room). For onticology a key question lies in theorizing this transition from, to use Whitehead’s language, “disjunctive diversity” to “conjunctive unity”. At what point do we pass, in other words, from a mere pile or heap of entities in a disjunctive diversity, to a unity or unit in conjunctive unity that is an entity in its own right? The coming-to-be of an object is a unification of other objects. It is likely there won’t be a single answer to this question and that there will be many gradations between disjunctive diversities and conjunctive unities. By what processes are diverse entities gathered together to form a new unity?

Second, objects deserve to be thought as events because they have duration. One of the key features of events is that they are “elongated” in time, such that they spread across multiple moments. The duration of an object can range from the briefest possible instant such that an object comes into being and quickly passes away, to billions of years as in the case of the existence of the sun. Insofar as objects have a temporal dimension lying between their coming-to-be and passing-away– I personally don’t believe there are eternal entities, but I don’t rule out their possibility either; ie., my hunch is that all objects are finite –they have a structure akin to that of events.

Third, objects are evental in that every object consists of ongoing operations that consist of its activities as they exist from moment to moment. Here we must not assume that there’s a standard measure of what constitutes a moment that is the same for all events. I define a moment as the minimal unit upon which an object can carry out operations. Thus there will be events that are too quick and too slow for a particular type of object to operate upon. These differences will not necessarily be symmetrical, insofar as one type of object might be able to operate on events in the other, whereas the other object will not be able to operate on events in this object. Compare, for example, the operations of journal publishing and blog publishing. The units and operations of a journal and the blogopolis are capable are quite different because of the respective ways in which their operations are organized. Because of the lengthy process of gathering articles, editing them, and publishing them, journals are very slow moving and therefore slow to respond to debates and discussions in other systems. To be sure, journal articles are increasingly citing blog posts, but there will always a a significant time lag between operations (discussions, debates) in the blogopolis and operations in journal articles. By contrast, operations that take place in the ongoing existence-activity of a blog are much quicker because there’s no editorial process and because of the generally open discussion format in comment sections and between blogs. In relations between blogs, this different endo-structure surrounding publication and discussion will insure that blog discussions tend to evolve and shift directions much more quickly than journals (which is not necessarily a positive thing). Blogs are able to disseminate information much more quickly than journals, including information issuing from journals. For example, books and articles completely unnoticed by a journal can very quickly pass from obscurity to central importance in the blogosphere (in turn affecting journals in the long run as bloggers publish articles drawing on those articles and books in journal articles). We see a similar phenomenon revolving around temporal differences in operations with state governments. In the United States, it is likely that one reason the government has been so slow to respond significantly to climate change has to do with the structure of election cycles in this country. Responses to climate change require long-term changes and interventions, but the election cycle for American officials is 2, 4, and 6 years. This makes it very difficult to pursue long term programs and policies, causing issues of climate change to tend to fall of the radar (and here, of course, we also need to take account of relations between politicians and people in the energy, agricultural, and transportation industries). It becomes very difficult for government to register long-term, slow moving events within such a structure of operations.

Operations are events that take place within an object and are that through which an object maintains or continues its existence across time. The key question for any object is that of how to continue operations from one moment to the next. If the object cannot continue operations from one moment to the next it ceases to exist or falls into entropy (though in many instances it can come back into existence through a resumption of operations). Entropy is the disappearance of unity and the return of a disjunctive diversity of objects. It is a passage from a unified entity or event to a plurality of unities and events. In a comment responding to my post on some disturbing features of communication systems, Josh W. gives some nice examples of such dissolution. As Josh writes,

A particular “reality tv talk” social system might start to run out of steam, because the people involved have come to an agreement about the characters of the various participants. And like an autopoietic cell starving because it has exhausted it’s food supply, the social system could run down, leaving only it’s inactive fossils behind.

The two participants might have enjoyed the now-dead conversation for it’s other structural elements, but need to find a new core to make it flow, to organise it. I’m sure you can think of situations where you’ve wanted to find a subject to make small talk with someone, which you would then develop into a more full and engaging conversation. Such a subject can be necessary and self sustaining, but only within a specific domain or time span, and only take up so much of your actual time: So long as there’s some bad news, there will be newspapers, but maximising that variable might actually lead to decreasing the survival chances of the newspaper.

This “running out of steam” is another way of saying that the object in question– a particular conversation –has exhausted its ability to engage in further operations (communicative events) and has thereby dissolved into entropy or a plurality of objects (the two interlocutors go their separate ways). The unity of the event has dissipated because the moments that make up this event can no longer be produced. Elsewhere Harvey makes a similar point about capital. As Harvey explains, capital only exists in the process of exchange. Cease exchange and capital ceases to exist. This is why, Harvey argues, the Bush administration was so insistent on the “patriotic duty” of people returning to shopping following 9-11. The absence of shopping threatened the continued existence of the hyperobject of capitalism because there were no longer any operations occurring by which capitalism continued its existence.

I am only here beginning to outline the evental nature of objects, but it seems here that some precision is required in how we use the term “event”. There are a variety of ways in which the term event is used and these different uses refer to very different ontological domains. I can think of four off the top of my head. First there is the objectal use of the term event. When we say that a tree is an event, we seem to be saying something different than what we’re saying when we say that a crowd of people on a subway car is an event. A tree is a “conjunctive unity” in a way that people milling about on a subway car is not. The people on a subway car seem to be a disjunctive diversity in that they don’t seem to have any unity over and above their individual existence as beings milling about (here there are interesting connections to Sartre’s concept of “seriality” in his Critique of Dialectical Reason). While both events are happenings, the former seems to have an internal endo-consistency that is absent in the latter. As a consequence, the first is an object whereas the second is not.

Second, there also seems to be a distinction between events as durational unities (the life of the tree as a single event) and events as operations taking place within the durational unity. A soccer game is an event and an entity unto itself, while the individual plays are events that take place within the soccer game. All of these operations or individual plays are pervaded by the unity of the game as a unit or object. Here it’s also interesting to note that the event as a unit is open-ended in that, insofar as the game unfolds in time, the game is not all there at once but is in becoming as it unfolds. As a consequence, while objects have unity, the being of an object is not all there at once but is unfolding in time.

Third, I think we should distinguish between events that result from an object’s internal operations and events that occur through one object affecting another object. The plays that take place in a soccer games are internal operations of the game without reference to anything outside the game. They are internal dynamisms or activities of this particular unit or entity (this particular game). However, if one of the players is struck by lightning or there’s a rain storm that stalls the game, we have one entity affecting another entity. While operations taking place within an object or system (the two terms are synonymous for me) are often tightly intertwined, we nonetheless should distinguish them for analytic purposes.

Finally the term ‘event’ is often used to denote “departure’ by thinkers such as Badiou and Zizek. Here we can characterize this concept of events in terms of Stephen J. Gould’s characterization of evolution in terms of “punctuated equilibrium” in contrast to those evolutionary theorists that advocate gradualism. The gradualists hold that speciation takes place through the gradual accumulation of differences that eventually lead to divergence between two species that were once one. By contrast, the punctuated equilibriasts hold that species are largely static until, at some point, there is suddenly an explosion of new and different species. I think that, in fact, there is truth in both positions. Many objects– I won’t say all –are perpetually changing because of events taking place at the level of their own internal operations. Yet at certain points, due to how a system is affected by other entities, sudden transformations can take place that generate very new endo-consistencies and destroy older forms of endo-consistency. That’s enough for now.

One of the key claims of autopoietic theory is that these systems are without teleology or goal. While from an outside observer’s perspective, we might perceive the cell as having a particular function as in the case of nerve cells relaying information, from the standpoint of the cell’s internal functioning the only “aim” of the cell is to continue its operations from moment to moment. From this perspective, the cell serves no particular function, but rather merely operates in such a way as to maintain its own existence.

Luhmann sought to apply autopoietic theory to society, arguing that societies are autopoietic systems. In approaching society in this way the claim was that societies produce themselves and their own elements (various social roles, positions, and institutions), and as operationally closed systems, they share no direct relationship to their environment or that which lies outside their boundary. For Luhmann, the events or elements of which societies consist are communications. In other words, one of the most disturbing Luhmannian claims is that societies are not composed of persons, but rather communications. As such, persons belong to the environment of such systems. They are literally outside of societies. As a consequence, because the elements of a system can only respond to other elements of a system, humans cannot communicate with societies and societies cannot communicate with humans. To be sure, humans can perturb social systems, but those perturbations will always be “processed” or registered in terms of the organization of the social system, not what the person intended. As Luhmann strikingly puts it, “communications can only communicate with communications”.

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In keeping with the non-teleological orientation of autopoietic theory, for Luhmann communication has no goal beyond producing more communication so as to continue the existence of the social system. In other words, unlike theorists such as Habermas where communication is directed towards an aim such as consensus, finding truth, justice, etc., for Luhmann communication only communicates to communicate. Nothing more, nothing less. And here we must recall that for Luhmann it’s not people that communicate– we might very well have all these admirable goals –but rather it’s only communications that communicate.

This is where things get very disturbing from the standpoint of emancipatory theorists and seekers of truth such as ourselves. If Luhmann is right, if it is true that the aim of social systems (not people) is to continue communications so as to maintain and continue their existence, then it follows that the central problem every social system faces is how to produce new communications based on events of communication that just took place. This entails that social systems will privilege those communicative events that contain, in germ, the maximal possibility of producing further communications. For Luhmann, systems will evolve selection mechanisms that privilege those communicative events that maximize the possibility for producing further and additional communication. At this point, everything is turned upside down. For if Luhmann is right, what types of communicative events will be privileged in the operations of such a system?

They will not be events such as consensus, because consensus leads to the dissipation of communication and therefore the disintegration of the social system (as the social system only exists in its continuing operations, just as Harvey observes of capital). Rather, the types of communicative events that will be favored in such a system will be all those that produce novelty or the possibility of further communication. As Luhmann often remarks, “information is the difference that makes a difference” and “information repeated twice is no longer information.” Information goes stale and thus requires the production of novelty to generate subsequent communication. Yet if this is true, what are the types of communications that will be privileged in such a system: controversy, scandal, vagueness, the obscure, paradox, conflict, the enigmatic, disagreement, the strange, and many other things besides that share a family resemblance to these things.

If these sorts of communicative events will be privileged within social systems, then this is because they maximize the possibility of producing further or subsequent communications. Where clarity and consensus tend to lead to a cessation of the production of further communicative acts, all of these communicative acts call for further communicative acts. With controversy everyone encounters the need to put in their two cents. The enigmatic, strange, obscure, and vague (as in the case of works of art), call for interpretations which are further communicative acts. Scandals, like controversies call for everyone to participate. Those things that are impediments to clarity and consensus seem to be favored within social systems, whereas those things that tend towards clarity and consensus also tend to be passed over unremarked. And if they are passed over unremarked, then this is precisely because, according to Luhmann, they aren’t generative of further communications. Here we might think of television news as a paradigm case. The old joke– at least in The China Syndrome –runs that “bad news is good news.” This is because bad news introduces novelty into the media system, allowing it to perpetuate its existence from one report to the next. By contrast, it is a disaster if the only thing to report is that children are well fed and doing well in school, people are walking about doing their thing unmolested, countries aren’t at war, the sun is shining, there’s no rain, it’s 75 degrees, etc. These things could only become significant news in the context of an absolute distopia. Contrary to what Michael Moore seems to suggest in Bowling for Columbine, the news media isn’t organized around a conspiracy designed to make us encounter the world as perpetually menacing, rather it necessarily gravitates towards the anomalous, the dangerous, the deviant, etc., as these are all communicative events that generate further communications thereby allowing the media system to perpetuate itself.

Likewise, we might here think about the paradox of analytic philosophy where the drive for clarity seemed to generate the greatest obscurity in technical vocabulary. Consider, for example, the writing of Sellars or the the Zen like koans of Wittgenstein. Doesn’t part of their success lie precisely in their esoteric nature, an esoteric nature that generated all sorts of further communications at the level of commentary, interpretation, and elaboration. Indeed, we could think of the analytic/continental divide as two strategies of obscurity that, out of their obscurity, have generated all sorts of further communications… Those further communications consisting of both commentary and denunciation. In other words, communicative acts that generate denunciation are, from the standpoint of autopoietic functioning, highly successful as they’ve continued the ongoing autopoiesis of the social system. In a very real sense, the opposition and conflict is what perpetuates and holds the social system together.

In connection with this thesis, a number of perplexing things about trends in the humanities academia become clear. When, for example, a theoretical orientation becomes regnant, we should not assume that this is because it has somehow generated a consensus or is agreeable to many academics, but rather that it has generated a controversy and work for academics. Here we can think of deconstruction, postmodernism, and phenomenology (and another theoretical orientation that has recently gotten a lot of attention). From a Luhmannian perspective, part of the success of deconstruction and postmodernism was that both orientations generated controversy, thereby generating further communicative acts throughout the academy in both declarations of allegiance and in denunciations. Likewise, postmodernism was able to perpetuate itself through generating controversy at the level of allegiance and denunciation up to and including the intervention of Sokal and Bricmont. Far from undermining postmodernism, Sokal and Bricmont actually contributed to the continued existence of postmodernism as a successful communicative strategy within a particular social system. The same can be said of the New Atheists with respect to fundamentalist religious movements. Far from undermining religion they actually perpetuate religious discourse and intensify it by creating a cite in which a proliferation of communicative acts were possible. With phenomenology matters are different. It’s unlikely that phenomenology has ever really generated a controversy (which is no doubt part of what made it attractive during the McCarthy years and their aftermath). Rather, what accounts for the success of phenomenology– like, in part, the success of deconstruction –is that it created work for academics, opening up an infinite domain of communicativity by creating all sorts of opportunities for further commentary, analysis, and investigation. By contrast, those philosophical positions that seem to languish in obscurity would do so not because they fail to hit the truth or say something significant, but because they fail to create any novelty or difference capable of generating further communicative acts. Shoulder’s are shrugged as people say “yeah, that’s true.”

So here’s the rub. These claims are not happy claims, nor normative claims citing approval. If these things are true, if this is how social systems actually function, these things are deeply depressing. The central question becomes, “how is it possible to intervene in such systems if interventions are routinely recouped so as to reproduce or continue the very systems we’re trying to topple.” Put differently, how is it possible to destroy these objects?

Nature itself, the world of process, ‘is a complex of passing events’ [...] The world is not an aggregate of objects. To see it that way is to have participated in an abstraction reductive of the complexity of nature as passage. To “not believe in things” is to believe that objects are derivatives of process and that their emergence is the passing result of specific modes of abstractive activity. This means that objects’ reality does not exhaust the range of the real. The reality of the world exceeds that of objects, for the simple reason that where objects are, there has also been their becoming. [...] The being of an object is an abstraction from its becoming. The world is not a grab-bag of things. It’s an always-in-germ. To perceive the world in an object frame is to neglect the wider range of its germinal reality. (Semblance and Event, 6)

I have not yet read Massumi’s book, but I do have the greatest respect for both him (he’s a great person) and his work. For some time now I’ve been perplexed by certain responses I get from others when I refer to “objects”. In this connection it is not unusual, upon hearing someone claim that being is composed of objects and relations, to hear others exclaim “it’s not objects that exist, but rather processes!” or “it’s not objects that exist, but rather events!” I confess these responses leaving me scratching my head, for why should there be an opposition between objects and processes? Or put a bit differently, what prevents us from thinking objects as processes?

I think the Massumi passage above nicely articulates what is lurking in the thought of those who denounce objects in this way. When we see Massumi contrast objects with “complexes of passing events”, becoming, and derivative of processes, it becomes clear that there’s a diacritical opposition in his thought such that objects refer to “being”, the “static”, the “still”, and that which is without movement. In other words, objects are, for Massumi, static clods that simply sit there without becoming or changing in any way. Under this model, insofar as we live in a world of becoming and change, insofar as “we can’t step in the same river twice”, it would follow that the universe cannot consist of objects. However, this would only be true if “object” signifies that which is static, still, and free of all becoming.

read on!

Yet this is precisely the conception of objects I’ve tried to argue against in my onticology. As I argued some time ago and ever since, for me objects are processes or activities. This is one of the major points of divergence between my onticology and Harman’s object-oriented philosophy. Where Harman argues that there is a static and unchanging essence that persists throughout accidental changes, I argue that objects constantly face the threat of entropy, such that they must perpetually reproduce themselves from moment to moment lest they cease to exist or be destroyed. In this regard, I follow the Whiteheadian dictum which states that “…how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is” (Process and Reality, 23). Shaviro, following Whitehead, gives a nice illustration of this thesis with respect to Cleopatra’s Needle in Without Criteria. There he writes:

Even a seemingly solid and permanent object is an event; or, better, a multiplicity and a series of events. In his early metaphysical book The Concept of Nature (1920/2004), Whitehead gives the example of Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment in London (165ff.). Now, we know, of course, that this monument is not just ‘there.’ It has a history. Its granite was sculpted by human hands, sometime around 1450 BCE. It was moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria in 12BCE, and again from Alexandria to London in 1977-1878 CE. And some day, no doubt, it will be destroyed, or otherwise cease to exist. But for Whitehead, there is much more to it than that. Cleopatra’s Needle isn’t just a solid, impassive object upon which certain grand historical events– being sculpted, being moved –have occasionally supervened. Rather, it is eventful at every moment. From second to second, even as it stands seemingly motionless, Cleopatra’s Needle is actively happening. It never remains the same. “A physicist who looks on that part of the life of nature as a dance of electrons, will tell you that daily it has lost some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it gets dirtier and is occasionally washed” (ibid., 167). At every instant, the mere standing-in-place of Cleopatra’s Needle is an event: a renewal, a novelty, a fresh creation. (17 – 18)

Shaviro’s remarks allow us to distinguish between two types of events. On the one hand, there are affects. Affects in this sense (there’s also a broader sense that I discuss elsewhere) are events that befall or happen to an object such as Cleopatra’s Needle being moved or the despicable act of Napoleon’s soldiers shooting the Sphinx’s nose for target practice (seriously, what was wrong with those guys?). By contrast, there are those events “internal” to the object that unfold as it exists from moment to moment. Even as the needle appears to be sitting still, there are all sorts of things happening within it as atoms spin about and interact with one another.

No object can sit still, even when it appears to be sitting still.. Rather, every object is perpetually in motion, tracing a path from moment to moment as it persists through time. Persistence is not a static feature of objects, but is rather an activity on the part of objects. Endurance is something that objects must do, not something that objects have as a default mode until perturbed from the outside in such a way as to be destroyed. It is for this reason that I describe objects as “space-time worms”. Recall the “paths” that reached out of the protagonist’s chest in the film Donnie Darko. Like worms, the film contended, there are temporal pathways we trace out into the future. Well this is how it is with objects, except with respect to the past. Like a worm, objects trace out a path throughout time and space through which they produce themselves from moment to moment through operations or activities taking place within them. Nor should the fact that objects are processes unfolding in time composed of all sorts of ongoing events lead us to abandon the term “object”. If the term “object” should be retained, then this is because processes are distinct from one another. The “Cleopatra’s Needle process” is distinct from the “Tasha-the-cat” process or the “Sun process”. Each of these processes is a distinct individual. To be sure, these processes can be entangled in one another in all sorts of interesting ways, but that doesn’t undermine their spatio-temporal individuality or uniqueness.

“Object”, “substance”, “entity’, “individual”, “thing”, “unit”, “system”, and “process” are, for me, all synonyms. In a lively and productive discussion on Twitter today, Dr Snaut remarked that when he hears the word “system” he thinks of “processes” not objects. That’s exactly right. As systems, objects are processes, they are activities. And, I argue, they are processual in at least two ways. The first way in which objects are processes has already been outlined: objects must reproduce themselves from moment to moment to avoid falling into entropy. This entails that there are all sorts of activities going on within objects, all sorts of operations, by which the object endures from moment to moment. Second, objects are activities at the level of their qualities. In my account of objects I distinguish between the “virtual proper being” of objects and their “local manifestations”. The virtual proper being of objects consists not of withdrawn essential qualities, but of powers. Here “power” refers to capacities of an object or what an object can do. I take it that one of the central aims of science is to discover the powers of objects and that these powers can only be discovered through acting on objects to see how they’ll respond under determinate conditions. In my account of powers I’m deeply indebted to the work of Spinoza, George Molnar and Deleuze, nicely outlined by Shaviro here.

The “local manifestations” of objects are their qualities. Within my framework, qualities are not something an object has, but something an object does. They are events that take place within an object under determinate conditions. In other words, qualities are not fixed features of an object, but rather are happenings on the part of an object. The reason we tend to think that qualities are fixed features of objects is because we tend to encounter objects under stable conditions. Thus, for example, because I perpetually encounter the rock in my back yard as having this weight, this texture, this color, etc., I conclude that these qualities are intrinsic and abiding features of the rock. What I fail to take into account is the regime of attraction in which the rock exists, such that these qualities are something the rock has rather than something it does. Regimes of attraction are the relational or ecological dimension of objects defined by their relations to other objects. In this case, the regime of attraction of my beloved rock– and the rock above isn’t really in my backyard, I could only dream of having a rock that cool –consists of its relationship to the planet earth, the earth’s temperature, the earth’s atmosphere, etc. Were we to place the rock on Mars we would find that its weight changes because the mass of Mars is about half of that of Earth, thereby producing different gravitational pull. Likewise, were we to place the rock on Venus we would find that qualities such as its color and texture change due to intense heat on that planet as well as the chemical composition of Venus’s atmosphere. These are local manifestations and local manifestations are events. They are local because they refer to local conditions in which the object is embedded and with which the object interacts. They are manifestations because they are productions of a qualitative state in the object. Insofar as they are manifestations, qualities are activities or processes that take place in an object.

There are two ways in which these local manifestations can be produced. On the one hand, local manifestations can result, as we have seen, from the interaction of an object with its regime of attraction or an objects interactions with other objects in its environment. When I walk into my air conditioned house from the intense Texas heat of my backyard, my skin prickles. The prickling of my skin is a local manifestation of my body produced as a result of a shift from one regime of attraction or set of relations among objects to another. By contrast, local manifestations can be produced as a result of processes or activities taking place not in relation to other objects but as a result of events and activities internal to the object. Here we might think of hormonal and cellular processes inside a developing organism where, at a certain point in its development, the organism undergoes qualitative changes. For instance, infants are often born with blondish hair, only to have their hair turn brown or red as they grow older. This change in hair color is probably not the result of the infant encountering and interacting with another substance in a regime of attraction (for example, a particular food), but is likely the result of unfolding chemical and hormonal processes within the infant as it develops (and yes, I recognize that all sorts of foods and chemicals in the infant’s regime of attraction or environment are involved in this development).

In the passage cited above, Massumi remarks that entities are always “in germ”. By this I take it that he means that entities are perpetually becoming. Yet this is precisely what we would expect if objects are processes. If there are all sorts of processes taking place within objects and as a result of interactions with other objects, then it follows that objects are open. What an object is today clearly shares a relationship to what it will be tomorrow, yet as objects trace their adventure through time and space they are always open to becoming quite different. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly and carbon decays. In their adventure through time objects can take on very different qualities and structures as a result of processes both internal to them and interactions with other objects. I think this is one of the most profound implications of Kant’s discovery of “synthetic a priori propositions” with respect to mind. What Kant discovered is that independent of experience, through activities of thought, it is possible to think something new that changes the very structure of our thought or mind. A synthetic a priori proposition is something that 1) issues from the mind alone (rather than being learned through sensation), and 2) that creates something new that wasn’t there before (it isn’t simply an analytic a priori tautology like “All bachelors are unmarried males”– sometimes their male seals too! –but rather expands thought). So too, perhaps, with all objects, where perhaps there is a creativity internal to objects that through their own internal processes or activities they are able to become something very different.

In response to this conception of objects people often sullenly respond by saying either 1) “but that’s not what ‘object’ means!”, or 2) “I think the term ‘object’ is misleading!” To the first of these charges I respond that if you don’t like my terminology you are free to use your own (I have no objection to the use of terms such as ‘process’, ‘event’, etc), but please do not attribute the claims of ordinary language to me with respect to objects. Moreover, philosophy does not take its marching orders from ordinary language. When speaking of objects, people might very well mean what is static or unchanging. People also thought the world is flat, have a rather impoverished view of matter, and equate time with clocks. The vocation of philosophy is to figure out, as best as can be done, what these things really are and this often involves significant departures from ordinary language and common sense. I believe that when we take seriously both our experience of entities and what the sciences have taught us, we are led to this conception of objects. Can anyone seriously think objects are static and still after the discoveries of cellular biology and quantum mechanics? Can we really continue to entertain the Aristotlean subject-predicate logic of substance in light of what we’ve learned about how substances behave differently under different conditions? Rather than jettisoning the concept of objects, we should instead transform our concept of objects or substances. As Whitehead remarks somewhere in Process and Reality, it is not the concept of substance that is the problem, but rather subject-predicate logic that sees properties or qualities as features inhering intrinsically in an unchanging substance that serves as substratum.

With regard to the second charge, I think that the term ‘object’ serves an important rhetorical function. If I choose to continue using a term like ‘object’ rather than ‘process’ or ‘event’, then this is because I think ‘object’ draws our attention to the most humble of things and the role they play in the various assemblages within which we dwell. Object draws attention to the concrete and specific. It calls for us to attend to the specific entities that affect us. It implores us to take seriously microbes, highways, fiber optic cables, cows, lightbulbs, and all the rest. This semester enrollment was surprisingly down at my college across the board. We can come up with some grand ideological explanation as to why this happened when, for the last two years, courses have been bursting at the seams. Perhaps we might argue that the economy is getting better so people don’t feel it’s necessary to enroll in courses. We can imagine administrators scrambling to respond to this ideology or these economic changes. However, it seems that the explanation is far more mundane. This last year the State enacted a policy in which students are not allowed to enroll in courses unless they have gotten a meningitis vaccination (a good policy given increasing cases of meningitis, I think). A humble policy, an entity like shots, and a virus seem to have dramatically affected enrollment. Recognizing this very humble and simple thing generates a very different response to the problem.

Over at Intra-Being, Andre Ling has written a series of excellent posts on objects and processes here, here, here, here, and here.

Graham Harman has been approached by David Chalmers to edit the Speculative Realism section of PhilPapers. I guess this means that SR and OOO have now become legitimate areas of academic research. This Spring Jon Cogburn (Associate Professor, Philosophy) will be teaching a course on Object-Oriented Philosophy and Graham Harman. Over at O-Zone there is a podcast of Ian Bogost’s “Seeing Things” along with a response by Robert Jackson. Speaking of O-Zone, don’t forget to submit your articles for the first issue on Ecology. Remember, for this issue “ecology” is not synonymous with the investigation of natural ecosystems, but refers to the investigation of any relations among objects. There’s an ecology of cities no less than Yellowstone Natural Park or a coral reef. We already have a number of fantastic papers lined up as well as outstanding interviews, so don’t miss out on the fun!

If memory as a virtual dimension of a being is so important, then this is because it transforms the nature of the causal circuit both between entities and between one moment and another (and here it’s important that I define “moments” not as the smallest possible units of time, but rather as the smallest possible units within which an object can complete an operation, e.g., moments differ for entities such as the US congress and individual human minds). If memory so fundamentally transforms the functioning of a system, then this is because the immediate past no longer holds sovereignty over what takes place in the present. Rather, we get a threefold relation between present, immediate past moment, and the broader past that follows the system. Compare a simple allopoietic system like a rock and an autopoietic system like a bacterium. In the case of the rock the events that it currently enjoys in its ongoing self-reproduction will be a function of the event that immediately preceded the current event. We will get one phase of the rock passing into the next.

read on!

However, in the case of an autopoietic unit or system like a bacterium the event that immediately precedes its current state will not necessarily be determinative because it carries with it a genetic “memory” that, under certain conditions, can be reactivated in response to the immediately preceding event and in relation to the present. The consequence is that unlike perturbations of rocks where we get a one-to-one correlation between preceding event and outcome, an intervening term is introduced that can produce a surprising result in relation to the immediately preceding event. In the case of more complex units like animals, persons, social systems, and perhaps some computers, the dimension of memory is carried along with the system in its present like the tail of a comet that can be drawn upon by the system or object at will. My relation to my lover, for example, will not just result from the manner in which she or he immediately impacts me in the preceding moment, but will also result from the sedimented past that is activated in response to his or her “perturbation”. My response will also include all sorts of sedimentations of past interactions with people in the remote past. In short, the immediately preceding moment will not predelineate the subsequent moment.

Not only do complex autopoietic entities carry this remote past– superimposed on the present –along with themselves, but that cone of the past is ever growing. This is the meaning of Bergson’s cone of memory depicted to the right above. On the one hand, each moment contracts the remote past along with the immediate past of sensible stimuli, but also the past is perpetually growing in relation to the events of the present. It is this dimension of a past that is not the immediate past that complicates the responses of any complex autopoietic system and that allow for the creativity of these systems. A friend, for example, proposes some political course of action and I don’t simply respond to the perturbation of his speech according to the code of language and the internal dynamisms of my nervous system at this point in time, but suddenly recall the revolutionaries of the French Revolution and model my response based on my attachment to them.

This property of complex autopoietic systems such as animals, psychic systems, microbes, plants, social systems, etc., entails that we should be extremely cautious about speaking of these types of objects as having a fixed withdrawn essence that is invariant. The dimension of memory insures that these types of units will be creative, that their identity is necessarily processual, and that any talk of a fixed identity will necessarily be a moving target. They make themselves even as they are themselves.

In this regard, the real distinction in an onticological politics is not between relational and non-relational politics, but rather whether relations are treated as external or whether they’re treated as internal. The internalist sees relations as “organic”, such that all entities are internally related to one another in such a way that the position of any particular part is natural within that collective and other forms of social organization are not possible. The externalist sees relations as extrinsic such that there is no natural ordering of entities and such that it is possible for collectives to be organized in other ways. Historically externalism has been the position of leftist political theorists whether we’re speaking of thinkers such as Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Marx, Foucault, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, and so on. Again and again there is a demonstration that the organization of a particular social order is contingent and that therefore it is possible for it to be otherwise. There is a perpetual focus on the analysis of relations not for the sake of demonstrating that everything is a product of relations, but rather for the sake of showing that these relations are contingent and can be changed. The aim is to understand the mechanisms, the relational processes, by which certain oppressive orders are produced precisely so that those mechanisms can be contested and changed.

read on!

However, the debate between leftist and rightist thought is not simply a debate externalism and internalism. It is also a debate over what entities or units participate in political assemblages. Unlike Hegel, the neo-liberal is an externalist where relations are concerned, but it would certainly be a mistake to describe the neo-liberal as a leftist. Rather, the debate between leftist forms of thought and neo-liberal rightwing thought is a debate over both the units (to use Bogost’s term for “object”) that compose social assemblages and the mechanisms by which these assemblages are organized. As Margaret Thatcher put it, “society does not exist, there are only individuals and families.” For the neo-liberal, the only units that compose social assemblages are individual persons and the mechanism by which social assemblages are formed arises through them pursuing their own rational self-interest. If a person fails to find success in the world, then this is because they are lazy, lacking in initiative, or because they have failed to properly exercise their will. They are therefore responsible for their circumstances. In short, the neo-liberal is committed to the thesis that larger-scale units or objects such as markets, societies, groups, etc., do not exist and do not function as mechanisms playing a role in the opportunities open to smaller-scale units such as persons.

By contrast, leftist political orientations tend to be more pluralist where the units composing the social are concerned. In addition to units such as persons, they argue for the existence of larger-scale entities such as societies, markets, languages, groups, cities, etc. Here there is particular attentiveness to how these units interact with one another in relations of domination and in the formation of emancipatory possibilities. In other words, these units are entangled with one another in a variety of ways such that they constrain and enable each other. One way we can think the relations between objects at different levels of scale is metaphorically in terms of the way organic bodies assimilate food and in terms of antibodies. Where we have larger-scale units such as societies and markets draw on individual persons, among other things, as nutrients in order to sustain themselves in their ongoing autopoiesis. A unit like a capitalist market, for example, draws on my labor and the surplus it produces, as well as my consumption, to continue its operations from moment to moment, avoiding a decay into entropic dissolution. For this unit I, as an individual person, am only related to selectively in particular ways, with the rest of my features (and, in particular my needs, desires, and interests) become invisible. I am “digested” by this unit in ways that might be very destructive to me.

Likewise, insofar as larger-scale units, like all objects, only relate to other entities selectively, and insofar as, like organic bodies, they seek to allocate the other entities they relate to to specific functions within themselves as in the case of bodies allocating some cells to the liver, others to muscles, etc., larger-scale units such as social-systems semiotically and materially code among their elements, assigning some elements this position, other elements that position, etc. Insofar as the smaller-scale elements such as persons are irreducible to the role they take on as element in a larger-scale object, they often contest these roles. At this point, autoimmune responses emerge in the larger-scale object, either trying to allocate the individual person to their “proper” role (for that unit), or to destroy the part altogether, or to simply ignore it. This, for example, is what’s at work in institutional racism, sexism, and classism, where larger-scale units assign people particular roles in the system according to their race, sex, and class position and bring strong sanctions to bear to insure that people remain in those positions. Here the system is structured in such a way as to ensure that the pattern of relations among parts (men, women, sexual orientations, class relations, races, religions, etc.) are reproduced in the same way across time. The aim of terraism is to map these organizational patterns (cartography), devise strategies for undoing them (deconstruction), and build new assemblages (composition).

Nonetheless, among the leftists, while there is broad agreement that a variety of different units (and not just individual persons) compose social assemblages, there are debates as to just what units compose these assemblages. Among humanists, the thesis is that while social assemblages can be composed of units at a variety of different levels of scale (individual persons, institutions, markets, societies, cities, etc), nonetheless the only truly social and political entities are those that are directly composed of humans (through human agency, language, beliefs, ideologies, economic exchange, contracts, power, etc). Here the focus comes to be on these sorts of mechanisms and political engagement becomes largely a practice of enacting different laws, changing beliefs, critiquing ideology, and so on (all of which I believe, make no mistake, are salutary activities). By contrast, others such as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Isabelle Stengers, Deleuze and Guattari, etc., argue that collective assemblages are composed not only of humans and human societies, but of nonhumans such as technologies, microbes, animals, plants, rivers, etc., as well. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett argues that,

…the public [is] a confederation of bodies, bodies pulled together not so much by choice (a public is not exactly a voluntary association) as by a shared experience of harm that, over time, coalesces into a “problem.” Dewey makes it clear that a public does not preexist its particular problem but emerges in response to it. A public is a contingent and temporary formation existing alongside many other publics, protopublics, and residual or postpublics. Problems come and go, and so, too, do publics: at any given moment, many different publics are in the process of crystallizing and dissolving. (100)

For Bennett, the onto-genetic mechanism by which assemblages or regimes of attraction are formed are “problems” (at some point I’ll write on this drawing on Deleuze’s theory of problems, perhaps for my plenary address at the Deleuze conference in New Orleans this Summer). For both Bennett and Deleuze problems are ontological entities that exist in their own right and not just in the minds of persons. When we hear the term “public” our initial reaction is to think of people, but for Bennett, Latour, and Deleuze, the public is not composed simply of people, but of all sorts of nonhuman agencies such as microbes, animals, technologies, texts, fiber optic cables, etc., etc., etc. What units are included in a public will be a function of the problem that draws, like magnetism or gravity, entities together.

The point of this broader orientation– which I share –that includes nonhumans is not to reject the methodologies of the humanists and their concerns (laws, norms, beliefs, ideology, signifiers, contracts, etc.) but to broaden the field of political engagement, intervention, and analysis. The thesis is that not all social and political problems are problems of beliefs, law, ideology, etc. If we’re trying, for example, to understand the shift from Catholicism as the only reigning form of Christianity during the Middle Ages (and the Orthodox church as well!), to the Protestant Reformation and explosion of Christianities, we’ll find many interesting things at the level of belief that might have motivated this transformation, but would nonetheless be remiss in ignoring the role of the black plague in eroding confidence in the Church. These microbes were agencies in the formation of subsequent assemblages. If we ignore the fact that people living in northern Alaska have limited access to technologies such as the internet, markets, etc., we’ll give a highly distorted analysis of why they live as they do, presenting the rather uncharitable account of why their social assemblages have developed as they have (e.g., suggesting that such people are primitives). Once we include nonhumans in our social and political thought we both arrive at more nuanced understandings of why social assemblages are as they are (cartography), but also broaden our means of political intervention. Just as it makes little sense to debunk an alcoholics beliefs to get them to stop drinking when they are addicted, it makes little sense to solely rely on debunking people’s beliefs about the environment to get them to live more sustainably when material alternatives are not available to these people. Recognizing that people might be entangled in “sticky material networks” or regimes of attraction gives us the opportunity to set about undoing these networks (deconstruction) and providing other material alternatives (composition).

At this point we converge on the theme of flat ontology I develop in chapter six of The Democracy of Objects– and that Tristan Garcia develops more recently in his book Forme et objet. On the one hand, flat ontology rejects any ontological hierarchy within the order of being. All beings are, in this framework, on equal ontological footing. This thesis doesn’t entail that all units equally influence all assemblages or networks. Clearly, for example, the sun influences the earth far more than I do. Rather, flat ontology first signifies that no unit or object is any more or less an object than any other. Drawing on Harman’s concepts of overmining and undermining presented in The Quadruple Object, flat ontology refuses to overmine or undermine objects. It refuses the undermining of objects that suggests that something such as atoms, for example, are the “really real” objects whereas trees are not really objects. Or, in another example, undermining objects as Thatcher does in suggesting that institutions, societies, and markets are not real objects, but only individuals are real objects. Rather, flat ontology argues that regardless of scale, all entities from the very small to the very large are equally objects. On the other hand, it refuses to overmine objects, rejecting the claim that they are “falsely deep”, that the object is nothing but a bundle of sensations in the mind, relations to other objects, a series of events, etc. No, for flat ontology there is always an excess contained within objects or units over their manifestations. Rather, the thesis of flat ontology is that entities or units exist at all levels of scale and enter into all sorts of complex relations with one another.

On the other hand, flat ontology signifies that relations between units or objects are external (they can be broken) and that entities only relate to one another selectively. It is always dangerous to draw political conclusions from an ontology. At best, it seems that an ontology can exclude certain political claims based on the thesis that they are simply mistaken ontologically. For example, if onticology is right in claiming that relations are external, then organic holisms such as we find in Plato, Burke, and Hegel must be mistaken. Yet the thesis that relations are external and that objects only entertain selective relations to one another– and here my claims are very tentative –seems to suggest other things as well. For example, insofar as not every entity relates to every other entity, it follows that we must reject what Todd May calls “strategic politics” in The Political Philosophy of Postructuralist Anarchism. Put crudely, strategic political philosophy argues that there is only one base that organizes all social relations, and that political intervention should focus on action that targets this base and this base alone. Interventions that target elements of the superstructure and that do not directly engage this base would here be akin to Don Quixote tilting at windmills insofar as such actions wouldn’t get at the “real problem”, but would instead engage with ephemera that keeps the problem intact. Such would be the thesis of certain variants of Marxism, where economy and capitalism are the one true problem.

Yet if its true that 1) “publics” are brought into being by problems, 2) that problems are multiple and local, 3) that not everything is related to everything else, and 4) that entities only relate selectively, then it is clear that strategic politics must be mistaken. The point here is not that capitalism is not a important problem and that targeting it won’t produce significant differences in a number of assemblages, but rather that the problems worthy of political engagement are multiple and varied, such that not every problem is a problem of capital and not every network is an issue of capital. Feminists, race theorists, queer theorists, ecologists, etc., are fond of pointing this out with respect to Marxist thought. Problems can converge and diverge in important ways, but there won’t be one transcendent base or organizing principle that, for lack of a better term, gathers together all plateaus in which political intervention is called for. In the first place, then, a flat ontology would seem to defend the existence of multiple and irreducible sites of political engagement. There is no master theory, no ultimate code, that would allow us to gather all political problems together or unify them according to a single algorithm.

Following May, however, we can argue that there is a common problem that often persists among problems: the problem of representation. Here I am referring to “representation” in the political, not cognitive sense. As May recounts it, one of the central failings of much Marxist thought and social practice was that strangely it seemed to reinstitute alienation. We perhaps changed the coordinates of capitalism, but insofar as theorists were treated as a “vanguard” whose role was to “educate” the ignorant politics and insofar as agency was wrested from the proletariat in the form of the party and its leadership, we got a reinscription of alienation at the core of theory and practice. Here, as an aside, I’ll mention that Lacan’s conception of the analytic setting and Ranciere’s account of education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster are both designed to combat precisely the position of the so-called master as representative of the analysand and the student respectively. Again and again we encounter the problem of networks that become alienated by the logic of representation, where one figure, agency, or theory claims to be capable of representing all of those gathered together in the public created by a problem. It is a critique of this logic of representation that I strive to unfold in my analyses of Lacan’s account of masculine sexuation and in my diatribes against transcendence. The point here is not that representation is the ultimate problem, the genuine base, as some Marxists claim with respect to economy, because representation will be as varied as those discrete networks or regimes of attraction that exist. Rather, the point is that again and again we encounter alienation and oppression produced as a result of transcendence or representation. More on this another day as this post has already gotten too long.

…for Harman and Bryant, the problem arises on the side of the (real) object–it withdraws, so how does it interact with anything else?

I suppose I should have been more clear in my last post, but first, the concepts of withdrawal are not the same for me and Harman, and 2) the concept of withdrawal I propose at the end of my last post is not a new conception of withdrawal for me, but one I’ve advocated for quite some time. Harman’s thesis is that real objects are withdrawn from all relations and that they can only relate to one another vicariously. I’ve never understood the thesis that objects can’t touch and the idea that they only relate vicariously. If objects are relating vicariously then they are affecting one another and touching. That’s a relation. While I can certainly see the epistemological problem of causality vis a vis Hume’s skepticism, I don’t understand the ontological property of causality. I take it that causality is just a primitive ontological given and that we don’t need any special account of how objects can relate. To be sure, objects can break with relations and share no relations to all sorts of things, but this is very different than claiming that objects are withdrawn from all relations. I assume that because my friend Harman is quite brilliant, I am simply somehow misunderstanding him, yet he does repeatedly remark that objects can never touch and that they are unable to relate to one another. I simply can’t figure out how this is possible if objects are not affecting one another in some way.

In my work I’ve tried to theorize “withdrawal” (maybe I need a different term) in terms of 1) the manner in which objects are split between their virtual and actual half, and 2) autopoietic theory’s concept of “operational closure” (in Whitehead the term would be “subjective form”). In the autopoietic framework framework, the thesis is not that objects cannot touch but that 1) entities only maintain selective relations to their environment (e.g., I’m unable to sense light in the infrared spectrum), and 2) that entities structure perturbations from their environment in terms of their own internal organization. In other words, the cause or perturbation doesn’t predelineate the effect. Obviously it plays an important role, but the effect will be a function of the perturbed object’s internal organization. I outline all of this in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects. Not incidentally, it allows me to retain most of critical theory and post-structuralist thought and critique, albeit in a modified form.

For me, the important thing about the virtual/actual structure of the object is that we can’t reduce an object to its current qualities. On the planet earth, for example, I weigh, unfortunately, about 195lbs. A naive approach to objects might treat this quality (what I call a “local manifestation”) as an intrinsic feature of my body. Here the thesis would be that a body, substance, unit, or object is nothing more than the some of its qualities. However, when I go to Mars I very quickly discover that seemed what so apparent and obvious– that I am intrinsically 195lbs; thank God I’m 6’1″! –is, in fact, an event on the part of my body. Qualities are not something an object has, but something an object does. On Mars my weight would be quite different because Mars is about half the mass of the planet Earth. In other words, the relations an object entertains to other objects play a tremendous role in its “local manifestations”, generating very different qualities under different networks of relations. I call these networks of relations “regimes of attraction” because these relations among objects draw out different qualities. These claims are dealt with in chapter 3 and 5 of The Democracy of Objects.

So here is what I was trying to diplomatically suggest in my last post. It’s difficult to see how objects thoroughly withdrawn from all relations and incapable of affecting other objects can make any practical difference in our dealings with the world. Such a thesis seems to lead to something akin to the claim that the world doubles in size every 30 seconds. By contrast, the thesis that the qualities of objects are variable under shifting conditions and that objects only relate to other objects under conditions of operational closure has profound implications for inquiry and practice. On the one hand, the thesis of operational closure entails that we can’t just assume that other entities (including other humans and social organizations) do not encounter the world in the same way, but rather that they encounter the world selectively and in terms of operational closure. Off the top of my head, this has massive implications for both pedagogy and political theory. It’s rather difficult to educate a kid if you’re unable to communicate with him at all (i.e., you’re using speech acts that don’t fall in the field of his selectivity) and it’s difficult to act on social institutions if you’re not engaging them at a level they can register. We need to map the internal organization and fields of selection in these other entities.

Second, the thesis that qualities are events resulting from a regime of attraction entails, at the level of practice, that we shouldn’t just reduce objects to a list of qualities (the old Aristotlean species/genus sortings), but that in investigating entities we need to vary their regimes of attraction to see what differences are produced. To see this point concretely, take the Humboldt squid. The Humboldt has a reputation for being extremely aggressive. In other words, we treat aggressivity as an intrinsic quality of the Humboldt’s essence. But what if Humboldt behavior results not from an internal essence of the Humboldt, but rather from features of the regime of attraction in which it is studies? Marine biologists investigating the Humboldt often do so around fishing boats throwing all sorts of discarded bits of fish in the water and that inadvertently capture Humboldt’s in their nets. What if the behavior of Humboldt’s we’re witnessing is the result of being under assault, and not the result of some sort of intrinsic essence? I’m not suggesting that this is the case. My point is that the distinction between the virtual dimension of objects as powers, potentialities, or capacities, and the actual dimension of objects consisting of local manifestations makes a real difference in how we investigate things. Rather than locating qualities in the object as intrinsic features, we instead see them as events that refer to a context of relations (a regime of attraction). In doing so, we come to conclude that the investigation of entities requires 1) acting on them in controlled ways to see how they’ll respond (this is what takes place in a super collider, for example), and 2) requires varying their regime of attraction or environment to see what differences these variations elicit. Such variation gradually allows us to build up a diagram of the object’s virtual powers or a concept not of what an object is, but of what it can do.

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 31)

While I don’t accept the highly positivistic reading of this principle that Peirce proposes– for him it must make some difference to our five senses –I do nonetheless think he here articulates a good rule of thumb for evaluating concepts we should entertain and concepts we should just ignore. Here are a couple of examples. Suppose someone approaches me with the claim that everything in the universe doubles in size every 30 seconds. While this is certainly a provocative and interesting thesis, it is not clear that it’s something that we should entertain for long. If everything in the universe doubled in size every 30 second, then this “phenomenon” would be undetectable because everything, relative to everything else, would be exactly the same size. Thus, for example, while my ruler at T2 would now have inches that are two inches long compared to my ruler at T1, I would have no way of knowing this because all of the relative sizes of everything would be the same. Consequently, while it might be true that this is happening, there’s just no way anyone can know anything about it and thus it makes no difference in our thought.

Now, it’s likely that there aren’t many people arguing that everything is doubling in size every 30 seconds, but we do find philosophical debates that are analogous to this. One debate that comes to mind is the debate between free will and determinism. The determinist argues that insofar as we are a part of nature, all of our actions are predetermined such that we have no say in them. If I commit murder, for example, it wasn’t that I chose to commit murder. I no more chose to commit murder than the ocean tides choose to rise or ebb. Rather, this action was ineluctable given causal chains that begin with the beginning of time (if time has a beginning). Following Peirce’s principle, it is likely that even if this thesis is true, we’ll be inclined to simply ignore it. Why? Because even if it is true we will still experience our actions and the actions of others as actions we chose and that we’re responsible for. I simply cannot escape the impression that I’m the one that chooses to walk across the room.

It is these kind of claims that Kantian, post-Kantian, Anglo-American, and scientists denounce as “metaphysical”. A metaphysical claim is a claim that makes no difference. Consider the arguments that some conciliatory religious believers try to make. The scientists are right, they say, to claim that the account of creation depicted in Genesis is untrue, and that species evolved through a process of evolution. However, they continue, there is no contradiction in the claim that God fulfills his plan through evolution. Quite right! There is no contradiction in the suggestion that God fulfills his plan through evolution. However, the problem is that the introduction of supernatural agency into evolutionary processes produces no difference in how we investigate evolutionary processes. In other words, the supernatural supplement adds nothing to our account of evolution and therefore we’re left wondering why we should include it at all. This is a perfect example of a metaphysical thesis in the derogatory sense.

It seems to me that one of the single greatest challenges that proponents of withdrawn objects face is this charge of proposing an empty metaphysical abstraction that makes no difference. I resolve to treat the object as withdrawn from all relations such that we have no access to it whatsoever (this is not, incidentally, my concept of withdrawal). In this way I seek to preserve the object form all erasure under relation. Yet in doing this, what has happened? Have I not won a Pyrrhic victory? Insofar as I’ve claimed that the object is withdrawn from all relation and access, I’m also led to the claim that nothing can be said of the object qua object because the object is withdrawn. As a consequence, the object becomes, at the level of concepts, an empty point. As thoroughly withdrawn, I am unable to say anything of the object. Any quality that I might attribute to its reality is necessarily a quality for me (in relation), and not a quality of the object itself. And this is true both metaphysically (in the non-pejorative sense) and epistemologically. It’s not just that the object is empty for me, the person seeking to know the object. No, it is also that the object is empty for any other object, because the real being of the object is withdrawn from each and every object, existing in a self-contained vacuum, unable to touch any other object.

read on!

In other words, it seems that withdrawn objects conceived in this way, can make no conceivable difference because they are so thoroughly withdrawn that they are unable to touch or be touched by anything else. The object-oriented philosopher might protest, claiming that the positing of real objects makes a profound difference at the level of inquiry. For example, they might argue against a thinker like Derrida, characterizing Derrida’s position as the view that there’s an infinite semiosis of signifiers that are never reach a final signifier, such that the object can never be brought into presence in language. To this the object-oriented philosopher responds that while the object can never be brought to presence in language, that it can only be alluded to, the object can nonetheless be present to itself. Yet from the practical standpoint, it’s not clear how this claim makes any difference or how it differs from the claim that the universe doubles in size every 30 seconds. Strangely the object-oriented philosopher has both conceded the Derridean point (as he’s characterized it), while nonetheless thumbing his nose at the Derridean conclusion that we can’t pin down the object insofar as it’s asserted that the object can be present to itself. The literary critic is nonplussed because regardless of whether the object is present to itself, the literary critic is in exactly the same position as she was before. As a result she’s left scratching her head, wondering why she’s supposed to stop doing what she was doing before. In other words, the withdrawn object has made no real difference to her concrete, existential practices and relation to texts.

What the object-oriented philosopher has to explain is what difference withdrawn objects might make. Yet in answering this question it seems that it’s necessary to concede that withdrawn objects make differences that aren’t withdrawn. This isn’t a retreat back to correlationism, but rather the suggestion that perhaps what’s important in object-orientation doesn’t lie in withdrawal as it’s been dominantly conceived.