In my last post I introduced the Ontic Principle as the ground upon which any object-oriented philosophy must be based. On the one hand, the Ontic Principle states that “there is no difference that does not make a difference.” On the other hand, in Latour’s formulation, it states “there is no transportation without translation.” The ontic, of course, is the domain of entities or beings, as opposed to the ontological which deals with being qua being or what can be said of being independent of any reference to specific objects (here I strongly suspect that ontology has very little of interest to say, but more on that later). Consequently, if the Ontic Principle states that there is no difference that does not make a difference, then this entails that being a being or entity consists in producing a difference.
Entity is power and act: The power to produce difference and activity, the actuality, of making difference. I suspect that there are two further principles lurking behind this first formulation: The Principle of Reality and the Principle of Actuality. The Principle of Reality would state something along the following lines:
The degree of power or reality embodied in a being are a ratio of the extensiveness of the differences the entity produces.
In other words, the more real an entity is the more difference that entity produces. Clearly this principle is indebted to Latour’s understanding of the reality of an entity in terms of the extensiveness of its relations, Badiou’s most recent work on worlds, entities, and intensities with respect to appearing, and Deleuze-Spinoza’s understanding of entity as power. Reality and power would thus be co-extensive and defined in terms of act, as I gropingly tried to outline in a previous post.
The Principle of Actuality, by contrast, would be formulated roughly as follows:
Entities only are insofar as they are act-ual
In other words, there is no entity where there is no act-uality. Here the hyphen must be observed to underline the essence of entity as act. To be act-ual is not to be still and complete, but rather to be in act. If it is true that there is no difference that does not make a difference and that entity is difference, then it follows as a consequence that there can be no being that is not act-ual. Consequently, I banish any entity that does not act or produce a difference. A purely possible or potential entity is, under this model, no entity at all. I also set aside the vexed question of the Deleuzian virtual. As I understand it, the Deleuzian virtual refers not to some mysterious extra-actual form of being but rather refers to relations among actualities. The virtual is not something other than the actual, but refers to relations of acting between actualities. In this respect, the Deleuzian virtual would be a variation of Whitehead’s Ontological Principle which states that the reason for any entity is to be found in another actual entity or in that entity itself. For example, genes are purely virtual in relation to my body but are entirely actual at any point in time for themselves. Nonetheless, this raises a number of questions about causality and potency that I am not yet prepared to tackle.
It is of crucial importance to note one point. Clearly the Ontic Principle is a variation of Bateson’s famous definition of information:
Information is that difference that makes a difference.
This connection might give the impression that the Ontic Principle is epistemological, pertaining to autopoiesis, systems theory, or some similar theory of operational closure where systems constitute their own elements. Certainly I have written often about autopoiesis and systems theory on this blog. However, it is important to note that the Ontic Principle is strictly ontological in nature. To properly envision the scope of the Ontic Principle we must imagine, after the fashion of Roy Bhaskar (without necessarily sharing his ontology) a world without humans, or, after the fashion of Quentin Meillassoux, a world without thought. This is not because entities independent of the human are the real differences that make a difference– certainly humans fulfill the Ontic Principle and the Principle of Act-uality –but rather because this thought experiment allows us to think ontologically and in terms of beings entirely independent, where the question is not one of whether or not we register a difference but whether a differences is produced in and among entities regardless of whether humans are there to register them. Such is the ruin of Parmenides and his equation of being and thought.
Larval Subjects . 
January 10, 2009 at 4:40 am
“The degree of power or reality embodied in a being are an inverse ratio of the extensiveness of the differences the entity produces.”
Surely, you mean the opposite: that there is a simple ratio between the two.
January 10, 2009 at 1:04 pm
I like where you’re going with this, especially the fact that you’re getting humans out of the picture. In this sense we’re on the other side of the fence from Meillassoux, who really does think that correlationism is a mighty argument that can only be craftily hotwired rather than abandoned from the start. It took me awhile to see this; I was too quick to think that Meillassoux opposed correlationism in the same way that I do. (He made it perfectly clear in his Goldsmiths lecture, but I was in such horrible physical pain with a throat infection that I wasn’t following his lecture very well at the time. It only became clear to me in fall ’07, when I saw Meillassoux lecture in Maastricht and then read the Goldsmiths transcript in Collapse III. And now I wonder: how did I miss it? I sort of complained about it in my Philosophy Today review of AF, but treated it as sort of a nagging inconsistency, when in fact the WHOLE POINT is that Meillassoux wants to work from within correlationism.)
But back to the point… Here’s where we will disagree…
“Consequently, if the Ontic Principle states that there is no difference that does not make a difference, then this entails that being a being or entity consists in producing a difference. Entity is power and act: The power to produce difference and activity, the actuality, of making difference.”
You agree with Latour here: there can be no reality that has no effect on something else. And I don’t see why that’s the case.
I agree with the part of the ontic principle saying that one thing cannot be encountered by another without translation. But it doesn’t follow that every enity is real *only if it is currently being translated*.
All an entity needs in order to exist are a certain number of pieces combined in such a way as to assemble it. But why can’t there be an assemblage that is real, but that other assemblages manage to overlook or ignore?
Here’s a possible example that I used in Norway in November, a few days after the election: the McCain Victory Coalition.
Most likely, there *is* some way that McCain could have won the election. I can think of a McCain Victory Coalition that might have worked; McCain simply blew it and never came into relation with that coalition.
It does not follow that the coalition was merely “possible””. I think that it was real, and simply never came into relation with Mcain or the Electoral College, because McCain did not achieve the necessary work for this to happen. He failed to create an assemblage linking himself with the Coalition.
The usual response, which I find arbitrary, would say that the Coalition itself is only the *successful result* of McCain linking himself with a certain number of voters. I disagree. I think the coalition is real, and I think “McCain plus Coalition equals Victory.” But there is nothing wrong with saying the Coalition is there and was simply never activated.
Look Mom.. we’re not talking about “texts”! (It makes me happier than I can begin to say.)
January 10, 2009 at 1:25 pm
[…] 10, 2009 Levi Bryant has now embraced the term “object-oriented philosophy.” and perhaps it will turn into a full-blown subspecies of speculative […]
January 10, 2009 at 1:49 pm
[…] Bryant at Larval Subjects has embraced the term “object-oriented philosophy”, which could well become a full-blown subspecies of speculative realism. I like Levi’s […]
January 10, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Graham, interesting remarks. However, isn’t the McCain Victory Coalition acting or producing a difference in you evoking it?
January 10, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Great catch, John. Many thanks!
January 10, 2009 at 5:36 pm
“However, isn’t the McCain Victory Coalition acting or producing a difference in you evoking it?”
Yes, NOW it is. But not until I mentioned it. It’s just the old correlationist move to say “by speaking of something as non-relational, you’re already bringing it into relation and thereby making a performative contradiction.”
It works for Meillassoux, but not for me. That’s like saying “by talking about the ready-to-hand you’re already making it present-at-hand.” Well, yes and no. By speaking of the non-present hammer, it’s true that I’m making it present in a way, but that doesn’t destroy its non-relational hammer-being. To point to something does not mean that it’s exhausted by the pointing: “…the fool looks at the finger,” as Ben says on the naughtthought blog.
I think what happens in the case of the McCain Coalition is that a third object is formed in which I and the coalition are vicariously linked, and the real me encounters a distorted version of hte Coalition.
Of course, it may happen that no such Coalition exists; we make lots of mistakes. In that case, it is my real relation with some *other* real thing that gets mistaken for a McCain Victory Coalition. (“Actually, what you have in mind is just a loose assortment of ill-motivated sourpusses, embittered neocons, and closet racists, plus a few personal friends of McCain.” Unlikely, but always possible.)
January 10, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I’m not suggesting that something is exhausted by being pointed at. In my view it is impossible to exhaust an act-uality insofar as there is no limit to the number of relations it is able to enter into. It’s a shame that philosophers tend to treat physics and mathematics as their paradigms from the natural world, rather than things like chemistry and cooking. To get a sense of the inexhaustibility of act-ualities you really need to cook, because in cooking you encounter first hand how ingredients perpetually become other not only in relation to other ingredients, but from occasion of the dish to occasion of the dish. I shall never know the limits of Hungarian Paprika, not because of some epistemic shortcoming, but because Hungarian Paprika is unlimited in its capacity to produce difference.
My thesis would be two-fold: On the one hand, any act-uality or entity is a difference, and any act-uality necessarily produces difference in some respect or capacity. The scope of differences can be very small. Here I would completely agree with you in your thesis that an act-uality can simply be ignored by some other act-uality. As Spinoza says in Post. 1 of Book III of the Ethics
However, the fact that one body does not affect or produce a difference in another body does not entail that no difference is being produced elsewhere in the world. Here my point is thoroughly ontological, not epistemic. I agree with the thesis that another body might not affect me at all, but that’s not the issue with the Ontic Principle. The Ontic Principle is about beings, not about our knowledge of beings. Thus following Bhaskar’s arguments about causality, the thesis is not about events that we register epistemically, but about beings are there whether we know it or not.
I’m still toying around with this, but I suppose that in part my line of thinking here would be Thomist in a sense, in that I am equating being and acting. To be is to act. Here then I would perhaps depart from Bhaskar in rejecting the notion of causal mechanisms that are without acting; but I still need to think about this.
January 10, 2009 at 6:17 pm
First, I’d be inclined to put Aquinas and Bhaskar on the same side of the fence. Esse is actus for Aquinas, but he doesn’t mean “acting on some external thing”, he just means the act of the thing being itself. It sounds like you’re thinking more of Latour’s sense of “action”.
My disagreements are these:
1. Unfashionable that may sound, a thing is an identity, not a difference. The inexhaustible capacity of Hungarian paprika to affect different tongues in different ways when combined with different base ingredients (which is all outer) *IS NOT* the same thing as the inexhaustible richness of the paprika itself (which is purely internal). That richness would be there even if no one ever ate paprika.
2. Same basic point, I guess. Why does the paprika have to affect something else before it’s considered real? It’s because the paprika is real that it can have relations, not the other way around. Hence, there could be many objects on this earth that are just loaded with rich properties without ever affecting anything at all. To be real a thing needs to have real parts, not real environmental effects. There is an asymmetry here that many people miss… Just because I’m an assemblage when viewed from below does not mean that I need to have assemblages above. In a sense, an entity is a firewall between its internal components and its relations with the outside world.
By the way…
“It’s a shame that philosophers tend to treat physics and mathematics as their paradigms from the natural world, rather than things like chemistry and cooking.”
AGREED! You are going to love Latour’s Irreductions, even in the introduction. (Read Irreductions first; skip over the Pasteur part until you’re done with Irreductions.)
January 10, 2009 at 10:01 pm
doctorzamalek,
One wonders where the existence of the McCain victory Coalition differs from the existence of the widely-accepted, ritualistic worship of Pallas Athena as the polis-goddess of the United States, given a different course of history in the West?
January 10, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Yeah. But I’m not saying that every thinkable aggregate exists. Just because I say “the set of all pinto beans, lizards, and centaurs that exists” does not mean that there is such an entity. We can be wrong in referring to such entities, and indeed there may not have been such a thing as the McCain Victory Coalition by November 4th. All I’m saying is that its existence or non-existence is not to be determined by whether or not John McCain happened to succeed in fusing with it on that night.
So I think the key is your phrase is “given a different course of history in the West.” You’re talking possible worlds, but I’m talking unexpressed realities of the current one.
I also don’t think that *all* entities need to pre-exist their actualization. It’s possible that “Object-Oriented Philosophy blog readership” did not exist anywhere until my first 11 hits before midnight yesterday. I would not say that a machine pre-exists its assembly. But the “machine” in this case, would be not the McCain Victory Coalition, but the *fusion* of that coalition with McCain.
In other words, when I’m asking “was there a McCain Victory Coalition that went unactualized,” it’s not like asking “is the guest house real even though we never built it?” but more like “did we have enough wood in the event that we’d ever gotten around to building it?”
But this could turn into a good pedantic way to ruin Levi’s thread, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
January 11, 2009 at 3:44 am
Graham, this is confusing:
“To be real a thing needs to have real parts, not real environmental effects.”
When, in Levi’s posts, were “effects” limited to “evironmental”, external ones? Doesn’t an assemblage act on its “parts” (and vice versa)? Whenever you’ve used the word “internal”, I’ve assumed you meant something (though I’m not clear on what) other than all the little bits that make up the bigger thing. I assumed this because of your insistence that this subterranean dimension is non-relational; it would follow that an object “withdraws” from its own parts just as much as it does from its environment. Something else would have to ensure its reality than having “real parts”, right?
January 11, 2009 at 5:14 am
[…] putting his money where his mouth is and starting a blog. In this respect, Graham obeys the famous Principle of Reality, recognizing that the more differences one produces, the more real one is. He’s a bit […]
January 11, 2009 at 5:16 am
Sorry for the confusion, I was using “parts” equivocally.
If a thing is emergent (and I do think real objects are emergent), then yes it is cut off from its own pieces (that’s the term they use in mereology for the component entities, whereas “parts” usually refers to the moments of the thing, not its component pieces). The thing can retroactively effect these pieces, as DeLanda says, but that’s not what makes it real.
To be real, a thing simply needs real *qualities*. In order to get those qualities, I hold that it also needs to have real pieces, but that’s a different argument and I should have said so.
Does Levi actually hold that a thing might only have retroactive effects on its own pieces and not on different things in the outer world? The possibility never occurred to me, and I’ve never heard of such a position; as far as I know, Latour never recognizes any cases where a thing affects nothing but its own parts.
Either way, I would disagree… I see no reason why an assemblage *must* affect either other things in the environment or have a retroactive effect on its own pieces. It CAN, of course, but I don’t see why it must.
All it needs to do to exist is to have an essence, meaning a certain qualitative character that belongs to it alone. It seems to me that this might happen without *any* outward or retroactive effects. (With one bizarre twist… I don’t think it’s possible to build a new assemblage without at least one of the pieces having a new *experience* of that happening, which is not the same thing as saying that the pieces must actually be altered in their real structure. But this is getting too weird for a comment thread, and needs to be explained in the context of the manuscript-in-progress.)
January 11, 2009 at 5:49 pm
doctorzamalek,
I can’t say that I fully understand your distinction. I am not talking of logically possible worlds (anything logically imaginable), but simply worlds that seem materially possible, but just didn’t happen (Athena worship in America does not seem that far fetched to me). It seems that you want to say that the oak tree that just didn’t grow (there was enough water, sunlight, soil, etc.) when the squirrel happened upon the acorn, is REAL. I don’t see the benefit of this “reality” (hence the determinism of Spinoza has some appeal to me). But you are correct, an extensive discussion of this reality may side track this thread. I look foward to bumping into this idea of reality in other contexts.
The best.
January 11, 2009 at 9:30 pm
[…] critique of the object-oriented metaphysics I’ve been developing in my recent posts (here, here, and here). I am deeply flattered by the thoughtfulness and time that Reid has put into this. […]
January 17, 2009 at 8:09 pm
hey LS,
A lot of this is over my head, but two thoughts based on what I (mis?)understand. One, I can’t think of any version of your Principle of Reality as applied to mountains where I wouldn’t disagree with it. It seems to me that mountains don’t produce differences but rather they persist over time. I mean, both are true – cliff walls change and don’t change, change is only identifiable because of some modicum of stasis – and your principle seems to pick one over the other without an argument. It seems to me that to make this principle work a lot of interpretive work is needed behind the scenes (like, “no, the mountain does change, see, in the following ways”) in a way which I think involves one rather flattening concept of difference (as if any two differences are, qua difference, identical – there’s a degree to which I think you’re sort talking about difference in an ontological rather than ontic register, to use your terms).
Two, on the Ontic Principle, I think that principle could make sense but it’s going to be false without some serious qualification – for one thing, is “make a difference” a yes/no affair (where, as you’ve proposed, the answer is always yes) or can we offer gradations of how much something makes a difference? If we can have gradations such that some things make more of a difference than others then it seems to me that there’s really not much wrong with saying some difference makes no difference – saying “X does not make a difference” would be a short hand for saying “X makes such a negligent difference that we can ignore it without making any serious errors.” The other thing left out of this I think is that difference and making a difference are relative things – relative to standards held by people, which vary by context. For instance, say Adorno and Marcuse both read Hegel’s Science of Logic in German the same translation but Adorno read the second printing which had a red cover and Marcuse read a first printing with a blue cover. I don’t know that that difference makes any difference for assessing their understandings of Hegel. I’m having trouble thinking of any context (except perhaps fiction writing) in which that difference could make a difference.
I’d suggest amending the principle (at least for purposes of social analysis, it may be different with regard to the hard sciences) to something like “for any difference there is some context in which that difference makes a difference” with perhaps a corollary of “there no differences which make a difference in all possible contexts.”
take care,
Nate
January 17, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Hi Nate,
Thanks for the terrific comments. I’m not sure I understand what’s at stake with respect to your first worry. Since I’m talking about the ontological register rather than the epistemological register, I’m not sure why the speed at which a thing changes relative to other things is relevant. In reading your remarks there, it seems that you have taken the ontic principle to be a principle of becoming, i.e., it would state that there is no thing that doesn’t become or change. While I’m sympathetic to this view and will probably develop it subsequently, I don’t think the ontic principle itself says such a thing. At present I myself have vacillated back and forth as to just what the principle is saying. On the one hand, I’ve treated it as stating that there is no being that is not a difference. On the other hand, I’ve treated it as saying that there is no entity that does not produce differences on other being(s). I’m inclined to affirm both significations, but that might require a restatement of the principle insofar as the first formulation doesn’t imply anything about relations to other entities. Further, I’m inclined to argue that for any entity that exists it necessarily makes some difference on some other entity, even if only negligible.
I think you make a number of good points with respect to your second concern, though I think this worry is already addressed by the principle of reality. The principle of reality tries to state that the degree of power or reality of an entity is a ratio of the differences it makes in other entities. Granting this, then there can be entities that make very little difference or impact very few entities, and other entities that produce innumerable differences or impact a number of other entities. This allows for something like degrees of power among entities.
I like your example of the color of Hegel’s Science of Logic, but I wonder why this would pose a challenge to the ontic principle. All the ontic principle says is that there is no difference that does not make a difference. Here the indefinite article is important, because it leaves open the question of the degree of difference or that to which the difference is made. As I get into the deeper intricacies of what constitutes an object I’ll thus have to give an account of how relations of difference are specified or produced among entities. In this connection, I very much like your corollary as it responds to a worry that thinkers like Graham have with relational ontology where they argue that if the being of an entity consists in its difference from all other beings then we are left with nothing but a formless chaos. With respect to this question you might get a better sense of what I’m getting at if you read my post entitled “Margaret’s Pepper Principle”, where I try to make the point that relations among singularities are always specific and limited. At any rate, I’d certainly agree that the color of the cover makes very little difference to the reader, though it does make a great deal of difference in other contexts such as in the relationship to the light it reflects.
One of the things that the ontic principle is targeting are forms of analysis where one difference overdetermines all the rest, without the other entities involved making any real difference. This, for example, would be the case in Plato’s metaphysics where the forms do the lion’s share of the work and entities are only degradations of the forms. Likewise, it would be the case in linguistic idealisms where the entities upon which signifiers descend are only bearers or vehicles of these signifiers, without contributing any difference back in their turn. The ontic principle tries to open a space where their differences speak and contribute as well, such that nothing is merely a vehicle of anything else.
January 19, 2009 at 12:17 am
hi LS,
Thanks for the generous response. I felt nervous wading in here, like I was going to just be off base or worse, annoying, since as I said I’m really out of my league here. On my first worry, I’m not totally sure what I’m concerned about. I’m not a very ecologically minded person but I have some vaguely green colored misgiving tied to this. I’ve recently started rock climbing (mostly indoor) and I love it. Rock climbing changes the climbed upon surface, perhaps to such a degree eventually that it renders it no longer climbable. That’s a problem. What an ecologically minded climber (or a climber with a long term interest in maintaining climbing sites) wants is to minimize the differences in a given climbing site. I want stasis in the cliff, not change. I took the ontic principle as prioritizing entities which are dynamic – productive of changes outside of themselves or characterized by changes in themselves. With regard to climbing, the ontic principle as I’ve understood it prioritizes climbers over cliffs. Now, there’s no stated moral charge to the ontic principle as you’ve suggested it, so “prioritize” doesn’t mean anything like “favors the success of” or anything like that. That said, I do think it’s a bit hard to avoid some level of implied moral charge, in that the ontic principle as I’ve understood it (and I may not understand it) is a description more – or is more obviously a description, and is a description of the preferred qualities – of climbers than cliffs. The ontic principle *does* describe climbing sites too – they serve as nests for animals, they change my body by allowing me a place to strengthen my body and sometimes injure it – but it doesn’t provide something of what I want (which is fine, a theory need not be a tool for all purposes). Part of what I want as a light green (lazy green?) novice climber who also likes philosophy is resources for (and philosophically rich descriptions of) ways of saying “don’t erode the climbing site.”
Not sure that’s any clearer but it’s the best I can do. I appreciate your patience.
One other comment on this, you said that to say “there is no being that is not a difference (…) doesn’t imply anything about relations to other entities.” I think this may be a mistake, or again perhaps I misunderstand, such that the “every being is/has a difference” (I intend that a as a paraphrase of “there is no being that is not a difference”, if you don’t accept the paraphrase please let me know) is more defensible than you suggested – if we think of difference a as a relational category then to say “difference” is also to say “relation” so that “every being is/has a difference” entails “every being is/has a relation.”
Second thing, you said “I’m inclined to argue that for any entity that exists it necessarily makes some difference on some other entity, even if only negligible.” I agree completely. But I’m not sure how to square that with this: “One of the things that the ontic principle is targeting are forms of analysis where one difference overdetermines all the rest.”
It seems to me that there’s not much of a difference (only a negligible difference) between seeing some difference as negligible and seeing some difference as overdetermining all others, depending on what overdetermination means. We might take “this difference overdetermines all the rest” to mean “this difference is the only difference which is not negligible.” Now, I think that such claims should be treated with very high scrutiny or even rejected prima facie when made for anything but restricted contexts, but I do think there are contexts where such claims make sense. For instance, we can pitch “the economic base determines culture” as a transhistorical claim about human societies. But we can keep “the thing that sets apart really good rock climbers is that they conserve energy by using their legs more than their arms” or something like that. That may not be a good example, but what I mean is two things – a) that there are some contexts in which it is not a mistake to take some difference as overdetermining all others (and only some, clearly sometimes it’s a mistake to take one difference as overdetermining all others) and b) that a) is implied in what you’ve said here.
I hope this makes sense, and if you’ve gotten to some of this already in subsequent posts I apologize. I’ve not had time to catch up with the many posts you’ve written recently. Will do as soon as I can.
take care,
Nate
January 20, 2009 at 12:47 am
[…] object-oriented philosophy, ontology, speculative realism Between Levi Bryant’s fascinating posts on what he call’s “The Ontic Principle”, and Graham Harman’s new blog […]
January 21, 2009 at 5:27 am
[…] will be recalled [hopefully] that in my posts “Objectile and Agere” and “Brief Remarks on the Ontic Principle“, I defined objects as acts or verbs and articulated the Principle of Act-Uality. The […]
April 23, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Makes a difference to what exactly?
The designation assumes a field in which actions have equivalence or at least share a language set.
In my experience being doesn’t get you very far. It is a node of contact, possibly.
It presupposes the accumulation of significance and is mirrored accross a shared interface which is its main limitation.
More interesting is the transontic principle which states that being is a phase in which differences are valorised but not yet decided. A stimulating and diverting read.
May 4, 2009 at 1:22 am
[…] way or other. These thesis is further confirmed, I think, by the fact that my post entitled “Brief Remarks on the Ontic Principle” has consistently received the most daily traffic for months. While I would love to believe […]
May 15, 2009 at 7:49 am
Reality is …
that I came to “Brief Remarks on the Ontic Principle” only because larvalsubjects is the link on Google Images to an absolutely stunning photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope …
May 15, 2009 at 8:16 pm
[…] an ontology would look like in very schematic forms in my post Principles of Onticology (and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). In developing this ontology it should be […]