In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche famously argued that metaphysics is a product of grammar.
With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede—namely, that a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but that this “it” is precisely the famous old “ego” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty.” After all, one has even gone too far with this “it thinks”—even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit “thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently—.” It was pretty much according to the same schema that the older atomism sought, besides the operating “power,” that lump of matter in which it resides and out of which it operates, the atom; more rigorous minds, however, learned at last to get along without this “earth-residuum,” and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians, to get along without the little “it” (which is all that is left of the honest little old ego). (Part 1, §17)
The world is parsed into nouns in the form of subjects and objects, adjectives or predicates, and verbs. Subjects and objects are then treated as substances or that which endures in times and lies beneath. Verbs or events are treated as that which happens to objects and subjects, such as the movement from one position to another in space as if on a sheet of graph paper. And finally predicates are what are said of substances. The ball, a substance, is red and spherical (predicates). The ball moves this side of the table to that side of the table.
As a consequence of this parsing of the world, all sorts of metaphysical and epistemological problems emerge. Insofar as subjects and objects are conceived as substances, the epistemological question arises of how it is possible for a subject to relate to an object. The object, as a substance, forever transcends the subject, necessarily being beyond the subject in all ways. We know the object through its predicates or properties, yet we encounter the entire problem of primary and secondary qualities or the indiscernibility of properties. That is, how do we determine whether the predicates we find in the object are a product of us or whether they belong to the object itself? Is color, for example, in the object or is it in me? On the metaphysical level, is the object simply a bundle of properties or is the substance something more, in addition to its properties, beyond these predicates? If the object is nothing but a bundle of properties, doesn’t it cease to be that objects when it gains or loses properties? If the object is a substance beyond its properties, what does it mean to speak of it as this object at all insofar as the substance which the object is is always in excess of any properties that it might have (the bare substratum problem).
Yet certainly “to be”, to exist, is something more than simply being a substance characterized by identity? Generally we restrict the verb “to act” to living beings. Animals act in bringing themselves to motion. Some claim that only humans are capable of acts. Action here is conceived as necessarily containing a component of will or self-willing. A rock, it is said, does not act insofar as it cannot will itself to act but can only be made to move through external forces. Etymologically the term act comes from the Latin actus, “a doing”, and actum, “a thing done”. These are derivatives of agere, “to do, set in motion, drive, urge, chase, stir up”. These Latin terms, in turn, derive from the Greek agein, “to lead, guide, drive, carry off,” and, interestingly, agon, referring to “assembly, contest in games,” as well as agogos or “leader”.
Read on
When we shift from conceptualizing objects as substances, but rather as acts, do matters change with respect to metaphysics and epistemology? Here the distinction between verb and noun is collapsed, such that the noun becomes a verb and the verb a noun. To exist is to act, to be set in motion in a particular way, to drive, and to stir up. Objects are no longer to be thought as substances in which predicates inhere, but rather as “objectiles” or “ob-jects”, that unfold in duration like a blooming flower. The term “objectile” should be read as a sort of portmanteau word like “projectile”, evoking the sense of ob-jects as events or verbs, unfoldings (ex-plications) of what is in-folded (im-plications), standing-forth from a ground against which the event makes or announces a difference. Generally we oppose space and time to one another. Yet if objectiles are verbs or events, then it becomes clear that the ob-ject must be a spatio-temporal dynamism rather than a substance that maintains its identity in space, moving from position to position.
(This picture is supposed to be dynamic, but unfortunately I can’t get it to work on this blog so I invite readers to view it in motion here.) Where the ob-ject is thought as objectile, the question is no longer that of how predicates inhere in substances, or whether a substance is nothing more than a bundle of predicates. Rather, the question becomes one of how the im-plicate becomes the ex-plicate or how events are unfolded. The treatment of objectiles as fixed, solid, and stable things other than events would here be a product of relative differentials of speed between our own bodies and objectiles. The stable objectile, the relatively enduring objectile, would be, as it were, a sort of stability among forces. Rocks are relatively inert due to gradients of heat and pressure, yet become flowing magma under intense heats and pressures. If my body ascends in the ocean too quickly or is thrown into outer-space, the nitrogen in my blood begins to boil. In other words, what appears to be an individual (the object), is in fact a dynamic relation between an environment and the objectile, whereby this environment evokes certain properties in the objectile.
As a consequence, it becomes clear that all objectiles are attached to a field, a field of relations, a field of forces, through which properties of the objectile are evoked or ex-plicated and upon which the objectile acts in turn. Part of the reason the endless debate between sub-stances and predicates emerges is that objectiles are thought in abstraction from the fields in which they are immersed and through which that which is im-plicated or en-folded is ex-plicated or un-folded in the ob-ject. Iron, for example, only manifests the property of rust in relation to a broader field where water and oxygen are present. The iron is ex-plicated in relation to the field composed of oxygen and moisture. Objectiles must thus be thought based on a principle akin to that of magnetism, where properties are qualities are perpetually being drawn forth from the objectile in relation to its field and their singularities.
The question is no longer that of whether an object is a bundle or collection of properties and nothing more, or whether, in addition to properties, there is something deeper in objects, substance, that is in excess of the object (a sort of negative theology of objects where substance perpetually eludes any relation). Rather, the question now becomes one of those conditions under which the ob-ject is drawn out of itself producing these particular properties.
As a consequence, it now becomes clear that objectiles must be thought first as assemblages insofar as their being or nature only occurs as act in relation to field from which it is drawn forth; and second, as multiplicities. If objectiles as acts must necessarily be thought as multiplicities then this is because, first, objectiles are multiple in their un-folding or ex-plication. Objectiles are durational multiplicities undergoing continuous variation within themselves. If objectiles appear permanent and unchanging, if they appear to be substances rather than events or blooming flowers or explosions, then this is because of differentials of speed at which our bodies move relative to other objectiles and because of differences in scale.
As Lucretius observed so beautifully, all objectiles are in a perpetual state of motion and only appear to be still due to the scale at which we view them. Like sheep on a hill viewed from a great distance away, rocks appear to be still despite the fact that they are perpetually unfolding or ex-plicating themselves in relation to their field of interactions. Second, objectiles are necessarily multiplicities due to the assemblage or network they form through their external relations to their field and other objectiles, such that ob-jects must be thought as forming a field of mutual implications, both being produced and producing one another. A number of significant questions emerge here as to those conditions under which objectiles and fields can enter into various relations with one another. As Spinoza observed, some modes are complementary, others are indifferent, and yet others tend to destroy one another. Finally, objectiles are multiplicities in themselves like Leibniz’s famous pool of water where each drop contains an entire universe. As Leibniz so poetically put it,
65. And the Author of nature has been able to employ this divine and infinitely wonderful power of art, because each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. (Theod. Prelim., Disc. de la Conform. 70, and 195.)
66. Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls.
67. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond.
68. And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the garden, or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to be imperceptible to us.
69. Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves.
Insofar as objectiles are not static substances but rather acts and dynamic processes, it follows as a consequence that they must be infinite multiplicities insofar as their being will be a function of the relations and assemblages into which they enter. In other words, there are no ultimate identities or “simples”.
If we begin from this premise, the questions of epistemology change significantly as well. Epistemology has been obsessed with the question of how it is possible to represent the object, endlessly finding itself trapped in a circularity where subject and object are conceived as independent of one another and as individuals in abstraction from one another, such that the question of how it is possible to represent the object in-itself insistently and perpetually returns. However, if objectiles are acts or verbs, if they are drawn out always in relation to other objectiles and fields, then the question is no longer that of how to represent the object in-itself because there no longer are objects in-themselves. Rather, knowing is itself an activity where the subject as “superject” and the objectile co-imply one another, each drawing forth properties in the other through their interaction. To know is to pro-voke the objectile under determinate conditions, not to touch something independent of its projectiles. But enough for now.
Larval Subjects . 
December 22, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Where does the desire to transform the mutiplicity into a unity come from? Isn’t a body constituted of parts necessarily deceived?
December 22, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I’m not sure what you’re getting at in your second question. I don’t know that pitching the question in terms of desire is entirely appropriate, as I take it this transformation of multiplicities into unities is a process that would take place regardless of whether or not there were any living beings, i.e., even if there were no desire. The transformation of multiplicity into unity occurs wherever one multiplicity acts on another multiplicity of another order. For example, crashing waves act on sand and shells on the ocean floor as unities, despite the fact that the sand and shells are themselves multiplicities.
With that said, I rather like Bergson’s answer to your question vis a vis the intellect. The intellect punctualizes entities in the world into unities so that it might act upon them.
December 22, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Excellent post, ideas like are what sold me on Nietzsche and Deleuze. But I have two problems, one minor and one major.
A) Physics dictates that objects are not infinitely divisible; there is a lowest common denominator. I don’t think this really affects the thrust of your argument.
B) Does this change anything practically? Yes, it changes the questions of epistemology, answers some and asks others, but on an every day level we already tactically distinguish between stable objects (the rock) and ones whose changes happen on a more relevant scale to us (i.e. the sky as affected by weather, which is a combination of atmospheric forces, its ground)?
What I take away in response to B) is the falsity of subjects, of actors who are consistent and eternal. The “internal weather” of John Barthes protagonist in “The End of the Road” is an appealing portrayal of this, especially with respect to the other character who tries hopelessly to live a perfectly rational and justified life.
December 22, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Thanks for the comment Ejypt. With regard to your first point, I think the verdict is still out as to whether or not objects are infinitely divisible in Physics. I concede that this is a popular working hypothesis (this would be one of the major motives for building expensive super-colliders), but I don’t think we have yet found ultimate units of matter. Moreover, matter increasingly looks like events, more akin to clouds, than anything described by Lucretian atomism.
As for whether it changes anything practically, I think the most significant element of my thesis pertains not so much to the idea that objectiles are acts, but to the thesis that objectiles are always attached to a field by which they come to be what they are. In other words, there is no object-in-itself that has its own properties independent of any relation, but rather objectiles are novel events produced in and through their relationship to specific conditions. I think this significantly changes the manner in which we investigate objects, but also the way in which we talk about persons and social issues. The main target here is what I call “abstraction”. I’ve written a good deal about this in the past, but here are a couple of posts that might give you an idea of what I’m getting at:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/09/29/working-notes-for-an-appendix-on-deleuzes-theory-of-individuation/
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/the-pedagogy-of-problems-and-the-figure-of-stupidity/
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/03/09/immediacy-mediation-and-stupidity/
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/existents-hegels-critique-of-the-in-itself/
December 22, 2008 at 9:02 pm
ANTHEM http://www.anthem-group.net/, on 11/28, provided links to “Graham Harman’s Talk on Manuel DeLanda” where Harman complains that for DeLanda and Latour “nothing is left outside of relations”. I wonder if he’d make the same complaint about this post? IS there anything left outside of relations in the terms you propose?
ANTHEM also has a link to Harman’s talk on “Intentional Objects for Non-Humans” where he suggests that “Time, space, essence, and eidos present four separate but related asymmetries between the two kinds of objects [real and intentional] and the disjointed balance between them”.
Perhaps you dislike the metaphysical baggage associated with terms like essence and eidos? Objectiles and fields seem like better terms to me, but Harman still insists on talking about images..
December 22, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Thanks for the links, Mark. I’m very much working through these issues– in a groping way –so any suggestions or helpful criticisms are welcome. I’m not uncomfortable with the metaphysical language at all so long as it doesn’t end up abstracting be-ings from their fields. I’m not certain that what I’ve said here reduces objectiles to bundles of relations. The claim that, for example, the liquid properties of fire can only be revealed in fields consisting of zero gravity strikes me as different than the claim that fire is nothing but these relations. Iron doesn’t manifest these liquid properties in zero gravity.
The tricky issue lies in characterizing this excess in the objectile or be-ing over and above the field in which the properties of the be-ing are drawn forth or manifested. I have drawn a lot of inspiration from Graham’s Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics— indeed, I think Graham and I are very close in most post on Hegel and existence that I wrote before coming across his work: https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/existents-hegels-critique-of-the-in-itself/ –however, I am ultimately uncomfortable with his characterization of be-ings as infinitely withdrawn substances that never touch one another (his unique take on Heidegger’s alethiea) and his resurrection of occasional causation. At present, I am moving in the direction of a sort of Spinozist metaphysics tied in with Whitehead and Deleuze that conceives be-ings as degrees of power and constellations of affects (in the strictly Spinozist sense). Of course, all of this as, of yet, remain highly undeveloped.
December 23, 2008 at 11:27 am
Very interesting post. Resonates with me in many ways, especially with my current obsessions with Spinoza and Deleuze. The Nietzsche quote you opened with shows him at his philosophically most acute without sacrificing all the love and humour that invariably comes with his writing. I will keep reading this blog. Thanks.
December 24, 2008 at 3:14 am
“Epistemology has been obsessed with the question of how it is possible to represent the object, endlessly finding itself trapped in a circularity where subject and object are conceived as independent of one another and as individuals in abstraction from one another, such that the question of how it is possible to represent the object in-itself insistently and perpetually returns. However, if objectiles are acts or verbs, if they are drawn out always in relation to other objectiles and fields, then the question is no longer that of how to represent the object in-itself because there no longer are objects in-themselves. Rather, knowing is itself an activity where the subject as “superject” and the objectile co-imply one another, each drawing forth properties in the other through their interaction.”
This sounds an awful lot like what Hegel is already up to in the Introduction to the POS. From paragraph 82 onward is where he lays out his epistemological method for the text, which he begins by characterizing knowing as an activity.
By the end of paragraph 85, he describes the process of relating an object of consciousness with its Notion as an unfolding of potential too.
I understand that one reading of Hegel has him advocating, in the end, for a highly nuanced epistemological and ontological closure. I mean, the POS does have an ending, but as Jay Bernstein points out an ending that is writing itself (a la In Search of Lost Time). To that end, there are those, like Zizek, who want to read Hegel as really leaving the door wide-open for further unfolding. What, if anything, is differently at stake between his process of unfolding and what you describe in this post?
December 24, 2008 at 5:56 am
Hi Joe,
Thanks for the comment. I have been strongly influenced by Hegel, primarily in terms of his critique of the in-itself in the Phenomenology, as well as his account of the logic of Essence in The Science of Logic. In his critique of the in-itself, Hegel effectively shows that the in-itself is a sort of illusion produced by the knower itself. In the doctrine of essence and his account of existence in The Science of Logic, Hegel provides a highly nuanced and valuable account of relational being that is deeply rewarding I think, regardless of whether or not anyone wishes to go all the way with Hegel (and I don’t).
With that said, I think there are important differences between what I’m trying to think through and what Hegel is trying to do. First, Hegel, in the Phenomenology, but also throughout all of his work, strives to demonstrate the identity of substance and subject, thought and being, essence and existence, as well as the identity of identity and difference. In my view, any philosophical position that begins from the standpoint of immanence cannot make this move as subject is but one being among others and all beings are equal or on the same plane within immanence. Although Hegel strives to establish the identity of subject and substance, undermining any sort of two world ontology, he nonetheless privileges subject as superior to other beings within the field of immanent being. My move, by contrast, consists in seeing knowing as no different or more privileged than, say, the manner in which zero gravity draws forth certain properties in fire. That is, this relational drawing forth is no less privileged than the sort of drawing-forth that takes place in practice bringing forth the world and subjects in a particular way. Despite his valiant efforts, spirit always gets the upper hand in Hegel. This can be seen, above all, in his nature philosophy which is viewed negatively as the Notion external to itself. This repeats itself in Zizek, where the symbolic and language are always given pride of place, indicating a anthropocentric position. One might object that for Zizek it is the real, not the symbolic, that has pride of place; but this would be to forget that for Zizek the real is simply a twist or wrinkle in the symbolic.
Second, for Hegel subject names a void, gap, or lacuna within substance that is ontologically primitive. I do not make this move or give the void a privileged place.
Third, although Zizek does indeed argue that the Hegelian system is open, he gives no indication of what further categories might emerge or how they might possibly emerge. Often he seems to suggest that the system is open simply in the sense that once you get to the end or reach absolute knowledge you see there’s nothing more to be known or that the path itself is the knowledge. By contrast, the view I’m working towards would be open to the production of new logoi.
Finally fourth, Hegel still sees the relationship as one of adequation or truth, as can be observed in the second passage you quote above. That is, the issue is still bound up in questions of representation, even if within the frame of representation as an activity. Here the question isn’t one of representation but of creating or producing. Something new takes place in an interaction between an objectile and its field.
But as my said, my thoughts are still underdeveloped here, so I’m not yet prepared to give a direct critique of Hegel or other philosophers, just an indication of where I’m going.
December 24, 2008 at 10:03 am
Interesting exchange between Mark Crosby and Levi Bryant above… I suspect that Levi and I will never agree on the vicarious causation issue. But I think the problem with everyone coming from the general vicinity of Deleuze, Spinoza, Whitehead, Simondon, or even DeLanda is that they all lapse into a monism in the end, despite all disclaimers. There always ends up being some *continuum* of intensities or possibilities underlying the actual in their view.
Why all this prejudice against quantization? Why always a one-sided focus on continuum? As soon as you see that reality itself is broken into chunks, and as soon as you see that no chunk can perfectly be translated into terms of another, the problem of vicarious causation becomes urgent.
My feeling is that the current era of “continental” philosophy, while it may be a refreshing change of pace from the pre-1995 Heideggero-Derridean hegemony, will eventually be condemned for its one-sided emphasis on relationality and unity. The reverence for Spinoza at the expense of Lebniz (or his replacement by a falsified Lebniz of “the fold”) is a bad sign in my opinion, and I am prepared to argue that Leibniz is by far a greater figure than Spinoza. But Spinoza has become a nearly untouchable figure in our time, as Zizek noted– everyone must love Spinoza and attempt to stay true to his vision. (He’s obviously a great philosopher, but his vision is a disaster on nearly every particular.)
I definitely look forward to seeing what Levi does in the next incarnation of his work, but fear that the “constellation of affects” is a dead end because words like constellation are always “have your cake and eat it too” words: they’re trying to say that things are sort of independent but also sort of clustered into a loose group. The grave consequences of the true independence of things need to be faced, not avoided with linguistic ambiguities, and that’s why I hold a return to the occasionalist tradition to be unavoidable (though with local mediators, not God).
Anyway, I hate getting into blog debates because I can never keep up, due to my primitive browsing equipment here in Egypt. I just thought I’d weigh in once on the words of Levi, now my co-editor on a wonderful forthcoming anthology.
December 24, 2008 at 10:13 am
p.s. As for the “metaphysical baggage” associated with terms like essence and eidos, mentioned by Mark… I don’t see that the baggage is all that severe.
*I use “eidos” in a purely Husserlian sense, so it’s not really metaphysical at all. It’s simply a matter of phenomena. I circle a tree, and the tree shows different specific colors and shades at every instant as I move, yet I always still consider it the same tree. This indicates that the “bundle of qualities” approach to experience is inaccurate. A certain core “eidos” is present in numerous different experiences that make me think of the tree as the same tree in all cases.
*As for “essence”, I’m never sure why everyone gets so freaked out about this word. I draw it straight from Heidegger’s tool-analysis… If the hammer can break, this means that its current use doesn’t do justice to its full reality. But the full reality of the hammer is not the same as the full reality of the nail, screwdriver, book, candle, or dog. Each of these things has a genuine subterranean reality that is not fully expressed in the given state of the world. If a thing has an innate reality deeper than its current interactions, then that’s an ESSENCE. Nothing too controversial about that, provided you’re willing to go along with my realist analysis of the tool-analysis.
The reason everyone seems upset by essence (DeLanda, for instance) seems to be a different consideration having to do with change. They’re worried, in short, by natural kinds, and think that Darwin destroyed essence. Well, Darwin destroyed natural kinds but he did not destroy essence. Even if there is no species “lizard”, but only individual lizards, each of those lizards has an essence, because it has core features not exhausted by any of its actions.
Then there is also the Heidegger/Derrida “ontotheology” critique of essence, but that doesn’t apply to my use of the word essence, because I never claim the essence can become present in any way at all. The essence is always concealed.
So, any claim that my Toulouse paper lapses into some sort of time-eaten reactionary metaphysics is refuted in advance. That’s partly why I always try to use a highly non-traditional *style*, to help reduce the impression that I’m just reviving an old-fashioned metaphysics. (However, I *do* think we need to bring back revised versions of substance, essence, occasionalism, and so forth. The history of philosophy is periodic, not linear. Things return that were once dead. But it takes a hell of a lot of work to make the old things function in the new environment.)
December 24, 2008 at 1:37 pm
When a living desirous speaking being speaks of being that exists in the absence of desire, isn’t he/she speaking of abstractions? What I am trying to suggest in the second question is that any conceptual “whole that is greater than the sum of its parts,” any synergetic system, unfolds from an unsystematic field. Time/space consciousness necessarily mistakes itself as its own field. In the absence of the mistake the conscious macrocosm collapses into the unconscious microcosm. In the microcosm, this “whole that it greater than the sum of its parts,” ie. the unity in the multiplicity, is only implied; the unconscious reality is an unorganized multiplicity. The origin of the species is the unspecific. Thanks for your writing; it provides food for thought.
December 24, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Nice to see you comment, Graham. Just a quick note. For me the crucial thesis in Spinoza is not substance monism (the verdict is still out for me on that, or rather, I’m not entirely certain why it’s necessary). Rather, the three crucial Spinozist claims for me are immanence or equal being, univocity or that being is said in a single and same sense of all that is, and entity as act. I take it that Spinoza is the key figure of the early Enlightenment period because of his rejection of any sort of transcendence, finality, and his development of a thorough-going naturalism. I don’t see that Leibniz is able to claim this sort of accomplishment. I get a little nervous whenever some figure is denounced as being untouchable and overly venerated, as it seems to me that this is a way of implicitly claiming that those inspired by that thinker are so for poor reasons or irrationally. First, I do not think Spinoza has this status within Continental philosophy, but is rather seen predominantly as one of the worst examples of speculative metaphysics (along with Leibniz, of course). If anything, Continental thought strikes me as being dominated by a Cartesian perspective as can be seen in the case of Badiou, Zizek, Sartre, and Husserl. I am not here suggesting, of course, that these thinkers share Descartes’ conception of the subject or metaphysics, but rather that their point of focus is on the primacy of the subject in one form or another. Second, I think Zizek’s hostility towards Spinoza stems directly from this commitment to the subject and, in particular, the primordial ontological status he accords to lack. Spinoza’s naturalism and commitment to immanence thus becomes a natural threat to any stance that still accords the human a central place within being, regardless of whether Zizek wishes to describe his position as an anti-humanism. I should add that while the verdict is still out for me concerning substance-monism (I’m as much a Lucretian, Whiteheadian, and Leibnizian, as I am a Spinozist), I do not see that monism swallows up all beings in the way you suggest. There is numerical distinction at the level of the modes and the modes do have their own internal power that can’t be exhausted by relations. If modes are simply folds of substance like origami, it is hard to see how the view that the fact that they are folds of a single substance diminishes the singularity of the folds themselves. That is, you seem to be dismissing the folds and focusing on the paper out of which they are folded. Yet is this very far from your own position? If I’ve read you correctly, you argue that substances or objects can emerge through concatenations of other objects or subjects, such that there are no minimal units in being. That is, you see substances as emerging in relations that are nonetheless infinitely withdrawn from other beings. Is this so very far from the claim that modes might be folds of a single substance while nonetheless being absolutely singular and unique?
I’ve written a good deal about constellations on this blog. The concept of constellation isn’t designed to think things as sort of independent, yet clustered into loose groups, but rather to think concrete and existing conditions leading to the formation of entities. In the natural realm a constellation can be thought as those set of contingent and specific circumstances that lead to the emergence of one species over another. In the social and political realm, the concept of constellation refers to those conditions presiding over the genesis of particular values, institutions, and group formations. In both cases, the target of the concept is transcendent principles that tend to render really existing conditions invisible to analysis. Thus, a good example of what is targeted by this concept in the social and political world would be Rawls’ conception of justice or Kant’s categorical imperative, while in the natural world it would be genus/species thinking. What the concept is attempting to get at are immanent logoi as opposed to one overarching logos. In many respects, the concept of constellation is similar to what Latour seems to have in mind by his concept of an “actor-network”.
December 29, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I just wanted to share this insight from the work of Paul Wienpahl, my late professor from UCSB. In his work, *Radical Spinoza* he writes this in regard to reading current translations,
“. . . where adjectives are used to modify ‘God,’ ‘Being,’ or ‘Nature,’ they should be changed to adverbs. In ‘God is uniquely’ the Latin is ‘Deum esse unicum.’ Unicum is an adjective, but I render it with the adverb. In Latin the accusative case is often used adverbially, so there is even a grammatical precedence for this. However, BdS also used the nominative case this way, that is, as an adverb (the careful reader may consult, for example, Prop. 8 and it demonstration). Even without grammatical justification, however, the thinking or philosophy involved requires the adverb instead of the adjective. Without the adverb we do not understand BdS. What is more important, we do do depart from or in any way change our conventional way of thinking. Reading BdS then becomes an exercise in memory and imagination instead of one of understanding.”
Wienpahl’s use of the adverb made me think our your idea of “objectile.” I hope you find it useful.
Jeff
January 2, 2009 at 3:52 am
Periodically non-linear, here, with one last irruptive objectile: YES: “Aesthetics digs to the bottom of the world” (Harman); but, perhaps it’s 3-fold, not 4-fold. As Reza Negarestani’s CYCLONOPEDIA insists: “And in ()hole complex, depth exists as the ambiguity or the gradient between inner & outer, solid & void … as a third scale or an intermediary agency which operates against the unitary or binary logics of inner & outer … Holes definitely develop a ternary logic” (54).
Compare Gilles Deleuze’s 1986 letter to Serge Daney: “Why THREE so often, in so many forms? Perhaps because THREE sometimes serves to close everything up, taking TWO back to ONE, but sometimes, on the other hand, takes up duality and carries it far away from unity, opening it up and sustaining it” (NEGOTIATIONS, 79).
This sounds hauntologically close to what Graham Harman writes in COLLAPSE II “On Vicarious Causation”: “My claim is that two entities influence one another only by meeting on the interior of a third, where they exist side-by-side until something happens that allows them to interact… a sort of plate tectonics of ontology” (190).
Perhaps instead of “5 kinds of objects”, there are 6: “real intention, real I, real tree, sensual tree, sensual noise” (AND sensual I ?) – along with 6 types of relations? (ibid., 201 – perhaps a more triadic set of relations can be derived from A David Napier’s Enneads of Engagement in THE AGE OF IMMUNOLOGY, 59-60, along with Jacques Derrida’s Enneads of Introjection in CIRCUMFESSION #59 ;)
Prospero ano y feliz edad.. Mark
January 3, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Very interesting post!
I am a researcher (Ethnology/Ethnography)and work a lot with qualitative data [interviews, participant observation et cetera], and this post articulates a lot of epistemological questions. I was thinking more precisely on the excerpt below from the original post:
“If we begin from this premise, the questions of epistemology change significantly as well. Epistemology has been obsessed with the question of how it is possible to represent the object, endlessly finding itself trapped in a circularity where subject and object are conceived as independent of one another and as individuals in abstraction from one another, such that the question of how it is possible to represent the object in-itself insistently and perpetually returns. However, if objectiles are acts or verbs, if they are drawn out always in relation to other objectiles and fields, then the question is no longer that of how to represent the object in-itself because there no longer are objects in-themselves. Rather, knowing is itself an activity where the subject as “superject” and the objectile co-imply one another, each drawing forth properties in the other through their interaction. To know is to pro-voke the objectile under determinate conditions, not to touch something independent of its projectiles. But enough for now.”
Now, my concern is this: usually the relation between the object and the subject in a fieldwork situation [ethnography] is theorized as a relation between closeness and distance; the detached and critical observer in constant resonance with the observed persons or objects life world [or whatever one might study]. Positively the researcher would be able to first come close enough to observe the object as an “object-in-itself” [the problem of correctly framing the object of study and get close enough to understand its world], and then withdraw to analyze and critically examine notes and empirical data for further writing on the object’s world [here reduced to an object in abstract space?]. Often the experience of the researcher, the subject in relation t to the object, is thought of as something stabilized [transcendental and possible for the researcher to abstractly write “self-reflexively” about], and so is the object [classical subject/object relation]. With your re-working of this into a dynamic field of interaction between multiplicities [internal difference] and the constitution of a field [external forces], it becomes a whole different affair. The relations and historical properties of both subject and object [remade into “objectiles”] are made into potentials and affects [and those being relative to the relations they enter into, where they are ex-plicated in relation to each other; here the differential of speeds you mentioned would be crucial for observing something: movements, texture, scale, levels, interactions, history, perceptions, feelings, sensations, change, change in time and constitution of space, stability, homogenization, heterogenization, micro-macro-meso levels], creating conditions or possibilities for a successful fieldwork. And the researcher’s own experiences, history and feelings, become vital properties to potentially be ex-plicated in relation to another body [the objectile] and the field become an active field [the experiences, memories, feelings, history of the “research-tile” are ex-plicated in the encounter with the objectile and this encounter would potentially be a more “profound” encounter would the researcher be already acquainted, familiar or immersed with the object under study; the capacities to affected in this encounter could be said to be of a greater degree than with an in-experienced researcher with no prior history together with the “objectile” under study?I am not sure this is an accurate way to theorize this problem, but something tells me that being already “a part of” a certain phenomena also could be posed in a positive manner] . The distance so much spoken of in literature about representation becomes somewhat obsolete when it is rather ex-plication and in-plication that makes ethnographic account possible to start with [here I exaggerate a little to get to the point]. And, this is close to how, for example, F. Varela (1987) theorizes the observer’s position in relation to systems as part of the system observed. The whole apparatus engaged for rigging observations become part of the research-assemblage. What I am trying to say is that this “move” towards assemblages and (dynamic) fields are altering relationships between subject and object in serious ways, epistemologically and ontologically. This comment, of course, was more of a kind of effort to create a connection to my field of research. I have been doing some research on social movements and there is always a lot of questions regarding the researcher’s position in relation to the movement one study, and whether or not one has been part of a certain movement, sympathize or not with a movement’s demand or political views et cetera. Sociologist Elspeth Probyn (1996) has written about this problem and she theorizes the relation between the researcher and the object in terms of assemblages. The “researcher-subjectivity” has no “self” that belongs to “itself”, argues Probyn, thus the “self” is always a product of entering assemblages, a changing multiplicity that the researcher has no control over. Theorizing it like this makes one wonder, maybe it is possible to argue that the coming-up close to, the getting know, feel and historically getting involved in the objectile’s patterns of change and stability [I am concerned mostly with ethnographic work here] is to be preferred if one plans a successful fieldwork. Ok, maybe many fieldworkers in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, sociology et cetera actually already thinks this the way to do fieldwork, but this epistemological and ontological shift could actually articulate a well-thought ontology of this much debated relationship within these disciplines.
Thank you for interesting posts,
Niklas
January 4, 2009 at 4:20 pm
So many parallel universes of discourse chiming in here (so in-sync out-of !) In case there is some interest, here is an outline of this so-called Ennead of Engagement elaborated from the mere list of words allowed by the editors of A David Napier’s AGE OF IMMUNOLOGY:
1.1.1 SENSING (check signs)
1.1.2 RECRUITING (get together)
1.1.3 MOBILIZING (assign roles)
1.2.1 DISCOVERING (new threat)
1.2.2 ALERTING (signaled to group)
1.2.3 EVADING (and quickly avoided)
1.3.1 RECOGNIZING (known threat)
1.3.2 SCOUTING (held at bay)
1.3.3 TRICKING (and distracted)
2.1.1 PRODDING (probe borders)
2.1.2 MASKING (slip behind)
2.1.3 DEFENDING (firm up fences)
2.2.1 SCAVENGING (gather supplies)
2.2.2 ATTACKING (launch effort)
2.2.3 INVADING (take territory)
2.3.1 ADAPTING (new approach)
2.3.2 APPROPRIATING (subsume some)
2.3.3 KILLING (destroy others)
(but not necessarily in that order ;) It should go without saying that the only thing anthropocentric about this is the words, which are not merely military metaphors and point to real “relations” common to most forms of animal life (Realism rocks and Human Hubris reels ;)
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