Developing a comment I made in “The Antinomy of Objects”, NrG asks,
ALL ob-ject-als are assemblages, but NOT ALL assemblages are ob-ject-als. (And I’m sorry you had to repeat yourself, but it does help.)
I like the example of the desk parts that are not yet a desk but (and perhaps I read this wrong) are you saying that every aggregate has the availability (and I like this word instead of potentiality because potential carries with it a notion of motive or purpose – but, as I see it, if no one put together the desk, that purpose or potential would never come to fruition) to become an assemblage? If so, this means that in order for an aggregate to become an ob-ject-al, what is needed is the inter-action with an actor that responds directly to this availability. Or, to put it another way,those desk parts (ob-ject-als and assemblages in their own right, as you pointed out) which now form an aggregate are available for forming an assemblage that is an ob-ject-al (a desk); however, what is needed is an actor (in this case someone who can put together the parts of the desk) who responds directly to this availability.
This is a crucial issue for my ontology and one that I am still working through, so it is worthwhile to comment on it further. The desk example is probably not the best example because, as you point out, it requires a maker to pass from being an aggregate to an assemblage. While this is certainly a common way for aggregates to become assemblages, I don’t think we want to presuppose this for all aggregate to assemblage processes.
Take, for example, the process of group formation. You have all of these people that are themselves individual assemblages. These individual assemblages or persons might themselves have network relations of various sorts among one another forming larger-scale assemblages. For example, there might be friends and lovers among this population. The question then becomes that of how we pass from a mere aggregate of people and assemblages to a global assemblage composed of all the people in the population.
read on!
The film The Mist can be read as depicting the morphogenesis of groups or as being a study of the process of groups-in-formation making the transition from the status of aggregates to the status of assemblages. At the beginning of the film you have people belonging to the same town but in such a way as to primarily be an aggregate. That is, any unity or One among these people is minimal and weak, consisting of being members of the same town without these members thinking of themselves as an assemblage or One. As the film progresses and the people trapped in the store encounter more and more of the creatures in the mist, polarities begin to form within the population. The process here could be analogized to one similar to the process an egg undergoes as the yoke gets progressively differentiated over the course of development. Eventually fairly well defined assemblages are produced, consisting of secularists on the one side and the religious on the other side, as well as racial divides. These identities did not pre-exist the formation of the assemblages– or if they did it was only with a low degree of intensity. The people that side with the ultra-fundamentalist religious woman were not themselves ultra-fundamentalist at the beginning of the film. Likewise, the people that form the secularist assemblage were not significantly related to one another in any particular way. Rather, the identity that forms the aggregates instead emerges from out of the Brownian motion of this nebulous population of the city and reinforces itself as a One or Unity as it comes into being.
In this respect I’m inclined to say that every object is a split-object written as A, such that it is divided between its elements and its unity or status as One in such a way that there is a tension between parts composing an ob-ject-al and the Unity or One of the ob-ject-al that constantly needs to be reproduced in time. That is, because an assemblage or ob-ject-ile is itself composed of assemblages or other ob-ject-iles, it follows that there is a tension between the adventures of the assemblage as a One and the sub-assemblages that compose this assemblage-as-one (think of herding cats and then apply this to ob-jects).
That aside, the key point would be that here we have a transition from aggregate to assemblage(s) that is not the result of an agent or a designer, but is rather the result of an emergence. Once the assemblage has come to be as a unity of parts and One, of course, we can, for social systems and psychic systems, get self-reflexivity that directs ongoing unity among its elements in an intentional way, but we can have unities for these systems that aren’t the result of intentional design. Here the mist and the creatures in the mist function as a catalyst, inequality, or disequilibrium within the aggregate that is the occasion for the formation of the assemblage(s), without being the cause of the assemblages (i.e., we have a complex causality involving a number of factors in addition to the catalyst or disequilibrium that leads to new ob-jects).
Similarly, if we think about the United States, we see that this forms an assemblage or a One but only as split (A or Assemblage). On the one hand we have the assemblages that belong to and are included in the United States (i.e., in set theoretical terms there are elements that are included– illegal aliens –without belonging). These elements form complex assemblages among themselves. Thus we have all the persons in the United States, families, amorous relations, relations of friendship, classes, ethnicities, genders, discourses, network relations pertaining to business, religion, political groups, and different occupations, occasional networks that form as people are thrown together in a variety of ways, and so on. This multiplicity of assemblages is constantly bubbling and shifting, such that all of these assemblages, like cats, are moving about in different directions and according to their own aims. On the other hand, we have the One or Unity of the United States that counts all of these other assemblages as belonging to it. Between this One and all these [now] sub-assemblages, there is a perpetual tension where the One (whatever that may be) struggles to maintain itself as One in terms of all these sub-assemblages and these sub-assemblages mill about in their own directions and for their own aims. The Unity of the assemblages consists in various mechanisms through which Identity is maintained in time as an ongoing problem rather than a property (i.e., there are processes of “one-ification” that constantly need to take place for the aggregate to form an assemblage).
I am disinclined to claim that all aggregates can form an assemblage or an ob-ject-ile. As Spinoza points out in Book III of the Ethics, philosophically we can minimally say that one object can either be combined with another object, or destroys another object (think poison), or one object is simply indifferent to another object. If this is about all we can say from an ontological perspective, then this is because the principles of connection among ob-ject-iles must be surveyed in each domain or for each type of ob-ject (material objects, societies, organisms, psychic systems, and so on).
Larval Subjects . 
January 28, 2009 at 2:01 am
“it requires a maker to pass from being an aggregate to an assemblage”
Firstly, is the solar system an assemblage?The potential eventuality of an aggregate to become an assemblage does not rely on a humanist conception of intentionality.
Secondly, and perhaps of greater concern, is that the general condition of ‘this + potential’ becomes ‘that + exhausted potential’ of the object-based ontology undoes the insight granted by a processual approach where there are only iterative super-jects where ‘this’ is only ever so for an abstracted duration and potential is perpetually in a relation of futurity. This also goes for ’emergence’ where it is like an inverse Zeno’s paradox: The arrowing is arriving only because it will arrive. Emergence occurs because an objectile emerges? So the process of individuation is backformed from the moment an aggregate crosses over the perceptual capacity to perceived as assembled as such. Therefore, does your realist ontology demand a specific conception of assemblages that can be perceived as such? Assemblage = perception or perceptual framing?
I remember you writing that you do not use virtual and actual. How would you describe a catalyst then? Do the aggregate elements enter into a catalytic relation (phase space, basin of attraction) before they have catalysed as such? Which means the catalyst would be real before being actual.
I guess I need to undstand the role of collective individuation in your account of reciprocal determination!
January 28, 2009 at 2:39 am
Hi Glen,
Thanks for the remarks. No, I don’t think that assemblages are dependent on human perception or intentionality to be assemblages. I was responding to NrG’s specific remarks about unassembled and assembled desks. I’m inclined to hold that the solar system is an assemblage or an object-al rather than a mere aggregate by virtue of the way in which it holds together in time and exercises forces on in the galaxy. This would be the case regardless of whether or not anyone were there to perceive the solar system, i.e., the solar system was an assemblage or object-al preceding humans beings and will continue to be so following the extinction of human beings. In other words, perception is not what makes an assemblage an assemblage.
I am not sure I understand your second concern. Becoming-an-assemblage does not require the exhaustion of a potential. For example, there are dynamic objects that exist at states that are far from equilibrium such as hurricanes and tornadoes. For me a lot depends on what is meant by the virtual. Personally I find the term unhelpful and think that it has generated a lot of confusion, so I prefer to dispense with it altogether. I am unclear as to why one would equate a catalyst with the virtual because a catalyst is an actuality that precipitates change throughout a system of other elements. In my view, there’s no reason to see catalysts as something other than the actual. Rather, we get along just fine with Whitehead’s Principle which claims that actualities are only explained in terms of actualities.
Despite having a great admiration for DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, I am a bit nervous about his particular use of attractors. Suppose you take an attractor for a simple system like a bowl and a marble. I roll the marble down the side of the bowl. It roles up the other side and then back and then back in increasingly small movements until it comes to rest at the bottom of the bowl. This resting point is among the attractors of the system. Now it may be that I’ve failed to understand DeLanda and attractors, but it seems to me that he inverts the order of things with the manner in which he makes use of attractors. That is, for DeLanda attractors are doing all the work, whereas it seems to me that attractors don’t do anything at all. In the example of the bowl, it is forces and the object that are doing the work, and the attractor is just a part of the scientific description referring to the points of movement for this system. Now, if I’m right, this is a point of considerable ontological importance. For DeLanda you get a continuum of attractors or singularities out of which objects or entities emerge as effects, contributing little or nothing at all. Rather we get a differenCiation of this continuum that gives us a universe that is apparently composed of chunks or elements. For me, by contrast, the universe is composed of chunks or discrete entities and that the formation of new entities comes not from some other realm known as the virtual and containing attractors, but rather comes from interactions among objects themselves. That is, the universe my ontology proposes is not a continuum undergoing differenciation. But it could be that I’ve simply failed to understand DeLanda or the idea of attractors. They sure do sound like reifications of points on a graph, however.
January 28, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Hey LS,
Thanks for the very thorough response, it helped, but I still have a few questions.
First, I still feel that aggregates need to have an availability to become assemblages and thus an object. What I mean here is that something within the aggregate sets them up for the possibility to become a SPECIFIC assemblage and not another. I’m thinking here of a human stem cell (not specifically as an example of an aggregate but more importantly as an example of this type of availability to become any number of specific tissue cells; however the human stem cell is not available to become say, a wood cell or a plant cell).
And I want to stress that availability is NOT the same as potential. Availability simply denotes an ability to become – not a necessity. Even in your example of the Mist, the townspeople must have some sort of availability to become differentiated when a catalyst is introduced – race, creed, personal relationships, etc. All of these create the occasion (as I think you put it) to become an assemblage. For me, it seems that the availability of any aggregate to become an assemblage is based on its parts, its object-als, its relations, its other interactions, etc. If this isn’t the case, maybe I am still not catching on…
Second, in your comment to Glen you state:
“For me, by contrast, the universe is composed of chunks or discrete entities and that the formation of new entities comes not from some other realm known as the virtual and containing attractors, but rather comes from interactions among objects themselves. That is, the universe my ontology proposes is not a continuum undergoing differenciation.”
Based on your Principle of Irreduction, I am having problems reading the above comment. Wouldn’t this mean two contradictory things: 1) we cannot reduce the universe to specific object-als, or original objects – that is, those object-als from which the universe originated? but 2) if new object-als are created from interactions with already existing object-als, then wouldn’t all object-als either always already exist, thus no new object-als would ever form OR we truly can trace things back to original object-als?
Thanks again for the clarification…I am enjoying this.
January 28, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Hi NrG,
No disagreement here. I accept Lucretius’ axiom that nothing can come from nothing, and therefore Whitehead’s Principle which states that all objects are to be explained in terms of other objects. The question then becomes, like the example from The Mist, that of how these pre-existent conditions generate new qualities or properties. It was necessary for certain tendencies to be available among the population of the city in The Mist, but when the genesis of these new objects take place, the qualities belonging to these groups are new properties that form a new object. In part, I’ve tried to develop the concept of “constellation” to respond to what I think you’re getting at with what you refer to as “availability”. That is, a constellation is a set of available tendencies or conditions in a field that are unique to that situation and that play a key role in the genesis of an ob-ject-al. For example, the constellation of a grape would include properties of the soil, other plants and animals in the region, specific weather conditions that year, etc., all of which go into the production of grapes with unique qualities that account in differences between wines from grapes of the same species but grown in different regions of the world, and differences from year to year in vintage. Consequently, no assemblage can be what it is without its parts, but a threshold is reached in the genesis of the assemblage where new qualities emerge that aren’t simply deducible from the parts.
With regard to your second comment, I’ve probably spoken in a way that invites confusion. In my ontology, every ob-ject-ile is also an assemblage. To be an ob-ject-al is to be an assemblage or composed of parts. These parts are, in turn, ob-ject-iles and therefore composed of parts. Although I do not share Badiou’s account of how objects come to be, you might think of ob-ject-iles or assemblages as similar to operations of the count-as-one where a multiplicity undergoes an operation of unification. Just as any set can be infinitely decomposed or contains infinite dissemination within it, my ontology dictates that it is ob-ject-iles all the way down or that there are no first ob-ject-iles (like Lucretian atoms) out of which all other ob-ject-iles are built. Consequently, there are no ob-ject-iles that aren’t built from other ob-ject-iles, but there are no first atoms or objects out of which the rest are built. The Principle of Irreduction is not designed to say that objects aren’t dependent on other object– clearly I’m dependent on my DNA, food, various gasses, etc. –but rather to capture the sense in which an ob-ject-ile introduces something new into the world.
January 28, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Ahh, this makes sense now. I’ll let it sink in a bit. Enjoy the rest of this (n)ice-day.
January 28, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Levi: “In this respect I’m inclined to say that every object is a split-object written as A [split], such that it is divided between its elements and its unity or status as One in such a way that there is a tension between parts composing an ob-ject-al and the Unity or One of the ob-ject-al that constantly needs to be reproduced in time.”
Kvond: There is one great difficulty I have for the love for the binary, The thing that is and is not what it is. It is not that the United States is just an A, and then all its bubbling assemblages (composing a neat pair, the unity and its negation). Far too neat and tidy giving one the impression that logic is somehow transcending the object, getting to the underbelly of its conditions, qua logical form. It is that the borders that make up the object A are cross sectioned by the borders that make up other objects constituted by parts of its elements. That is, the elements that make up an object are not simply part of a Set Theory Relation, but polyvalent participants in other Objects (I prefer “bodies”). To speak of the Group that is not reducible to its elements is only part of the potential for description, for members of that group are participating in, making up the bodies of other groups, so that the determination of any one group is overlapped with the forces at play in another. To be simple minded about it, the “group” of African Americans is affected by legislation passed in bias against women (unspecified as Black), because African American Women help compose the group “American Women”. This consequence has ramifications on the “group” African Americans. This is so much the obvious, but any binary reduction of the “group” to a fundamental relation of “a term and its crossed out term” (nicely Hegelian or Lacanian), obscures this very important interdependency and cross semiotics of bodies (the elements in one body can be semiotic ally alters through their role in another body, such that one does not know where the change is coming from).
That is why there is something dissatisfying about speaking of merely objects (or bodies) and assemblages. It is not just that object cohere, having bubbled up through assemblages, from the molecular to the molar, but that the reason why the molar cannot be reduced to the molecular (so to speak) is not a point of logic or Set Theory, but that the elements of a molar body are already caught up in other molarities, playing out their informing, semiotic role in those groups.
In my opinion, (and this is a reason why I find something of Graham’s object world difficult to swallow), the failure of Identity is the an existential crisis or tension, or the mere necessity of crossing out a term, but rather the already vital and historical investment of constituent parts in other bodies.
There is a kind of blind spot that any recursively organized group suffers. There is an inside/outside epistemic boundary. Events within the boundary are taken as semiotic to the internal workings, the stability or coherent dynamism of the group, but also are readable as reflectant of events outside the group. States within the group then in a general sense “reflect” states outside the group, or when in error lead to self-criticism of elements (something within is broken, and needs to be purged). But this primary epistemic dichotomy is traversed by the fact that the elements that semiotic ally make up the group (informing it of its own states, and the states of the world beyond it) are already, often in huge veins, participant in other groups which cross section it. In this way, the semiotic dichotomy of inside and outside becomes confused (overdetermined one might say). Corporate structures which help compose the elements of the political powers of the United States but also the International economic community are both “inside” and “outside” of the group. Events outside ripple through the informing elements in a way that is not merely that of “reflection”, but affect directly the internal semiotic states, at times with great power. The cognitive boundary that makes up the informing quality of the group, allows it to be classified, can become dissolute, or momentarily possessed. Or, the very fine person that I am, let us say as a religious ethicist, my elements, could suddenly start semiotic ally behaving in a way that is incoherent with that “person” if the body of “race” (in which many of those elements are shared) suddenly is moved. The coherence of my object as an ethicist has not simply broken down into its assembled parts, but rather some of its elements are now reporting as parts of other bodies in such a way that that Identity is very hard to coherently maintain. What the simply binary of Identity and Assemblage occludes is the fundamental powershift in semiotic polyvalence.
[sorry for the long response, but your position got me thinking].
January 28, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Hi Kvond,
I like your way of putting these things and think this is exactly what I’m trying to get at with the notion of split-objects and assemblages.
January 28, 2009 at 8:17 pm
[…] at Larval Subjects makes an very interesting post which seeks to point out the constitutive difference between “objects” (or […]
January 28, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Levi,
Wow, I am glad that we are not running at cross-currents, for I sensed that in your appreciation for the binary, the crossed-out term, something vital was being lost. But as you see something of significance in what I am putting forth, I look forward to what becomes of it as it gets put back through your own vocabulary and interests, made anew as it would be.
January 29, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Here’s something for all of us who have short memories…or are too lazy to search through all of the other posts (if I missed one please add):
Assemblages – Always objectiles in addition to being composed of objectiles.
Aggregates – Interactions among objectiles without yet forming an objectile in their totality.
Field – 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.
Hegemonic Fallacy – The reduction of difference to one difference that makes all the difference or one difference that makes the most important difference.
Latour’s Principle – There is no transportation without translation.
Objectile or Object-ile – 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. Thought of as both A) assemblages and b) multiplicities.
Ontic Principle – There is no difference that does not make a difference.
Ontological Principle – “To be” is to both differ and produce difference & being is said in a single and same sense of all that is.
Principle of Change – There is no relation that does not produce a change.
Principle of Irreduction – Nothing can be reduced to anything else.
Principle of Reality – The degree of power or reality embodied in a being are a ratio of the extensiveness of the differences the entity produces.
January 30, 2009 at 3:22 pm
As per: “Principle of Reality – The degree of power or reality embodied in a being are a ratio of the extensiveness of the differences the entity produces.”
I am wondering, does the principle of Reality give greater or lesser power to the water molecule H20, when compared to the man that was Mozart, or even his Opera Don Giovanni?
Just how are the “extensiveness of differences” produced measured?
January 30, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I might add, if the above posting of a vocabulary of terms in some way was meant as a pre-existing answer to my objection to a notion of a priority of crossed-out term, the idea of an object and its negation, I simply do not see it. That is, missing from this primary idea of an “objectile” and its aggregates is the dynamic that aggregate parts of one “objectile” (so to speak), are already constituting other “objectiles”, in real and semiotic terms. That is, a single element (or mostly, group of elements) is making a semiotic difference in one body, and at the same time making a semiotic difference in another body, such that given a contingent change the internal coherence of the said body can be challenged. This potential internal semiotic, polyvalent tearing is not really addressed by the terms “Field, Objectile, Assemblages or Aggregates” which possess only a kind of verticle modeling of bubbling-up coherence (just the kind that Graham Harman seems to reject). Neither this cohering sense of emergent “Objectiles” nor the crossed-out term of a binary logic (the object that both is and is not itself) speak to intersecting cross tension between objects, the way that their constituent parts tear at each other from within and without.
Of course, if this list of vocabulary terms was not meant as for the nature of my objection, my further clarification is not needed. I still do not see how my point is absorbed by what Levi means, despite him seeing that we are saying the same thing somehow.
January 30, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Kvond,
The question of how the extensiveness of differences are measured is an epistemic question, not an ontological question. I don’t think we can give any a priori answer as to whether Mozart or a molecule of H20 has greater or lesser power, because the degree of power belonging to an entity will be highly specific to the particular context in which the entity operates. In other words, one water molecule might have a very low degree of power because, in that context, it produces very little difference in the world, whereas another might have a very great degree of power as it has vast consequences in relation to its context.
January 30, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Kvond,
I think one major difference between my ontology and the one you’re articulating is that I would not give semiotics the privileged use you give it. As I see it, signs are tied to the living and are therefore one specific form of difference among many, whereas I hold that there are all sorts of processes that don’t involve signs at all. You write,
If you really think this then you have not been reading my posts. I have repeated emphasized throughout that there are dynamic relations among aggregates such that new objectiles are produced. I’m not sure where you get the idea that my ontology only allows for a vertical bubbling up of objects and coherence, nor do I see where you get the idea that objects are “cross-out” in my ontology. The thesis of a split-object is not designed to claim that objects are “crossed-out”, only that objects can contain other objects as in the case of a body containing a tape-worm or a factory containing persons and all sorts of machines, or a tree containing worms and insects of various sorts.
January 30, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Levi “I don’t think we can give any a priori answer as to whether Mozart or a molecule of H20 has greater or lesser power, because the degree of power belonging to an entity will be highly specific to the particular context in which the entity operates. In other words, one water molecule might have a very low degree of power because, in that context, it produces very little difference in the world, whereas another might have a very great degree of power as it has vast consequences in relation to its context.”
Kvond: At first blush this does not make much sense, except as a way to avoid the question altogether. For one would not only have to separate out not only each water molecule from each other, but also each and every example of Mozart’s opera, from all others. Are you saying that there is no way at all of measuring the degree of power of “all molecules of water”, such that we can talk about the molecule itself (the ratio of diffenences) and “all examples of Mozart’s opera” such that we can talk about the opera itself? That is, “Mozart’s opera” and “H20” have an indeterminate “degree of reality” in your description. Can one not talk of a “degree of reality” of the composite in your system?
January 30, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Kvond,
Perhaps because your question has nothing to do with the principle in question. I’m not sure how you arrive at this conclusion given that in my ontology all objects are composites. I really don’t understand your question, unless you’re thinking abstractly about water molecules independent of their interaction with other phenomena. The Principle of Reality is not a principle that pertains to the intrinsic nature of an object, but a principle that pertains to objects as they interact with other objects in the world in a particular context. Thus, to illustrate the principle, a pebble, in one context, might have a very low degree of power because it’s not bringing about many effects in other entities. However, if the Emperor of Rome happens to die from swallowing that pebble, the degree of power belonging to this pebble increases significantly because it leads to an entire cascade of consequences causing the fall of Rome. H20 can be said to have intrinsic properties or qualities, but this is not what the Principle of Reality is talking about. The Principle of Reality describes specific relations between specific entities and the extensiveness of difference generated in these specific connections. In terms of this, the power of an entity is variable (rather than an essential feature of the entity) because the relations into which the entity enters are themselves variable. Intrinsically a pawn on a chess board is not as powerful as a queen, however, depending on the relations among the pieces on the chess board at a particular point in the game the pawn can go from being a being of very little power to a high degree of power by virtue of checkmating the king.
January 30, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Levi: “I think one major difference between my ontology and the one you’re articulating is that I would not give semiotics the privileged use you give it.”
Kvond: Perhaps then the difference is merely nomologial. I am simply using “semiotic” as “a difference that makes a difference” in a vitalistic conception of the world. Any difference that makes a difference is semiotic, that is it indicates a consequence that follows. Molecules that bond do so through the differences that compose them. These differences point to the difference made. The way that water flows is semiotic to me. To use the fire and cotton illustration, the flame is indicating to the cotton, which produces an effect.
Perhaps though you don’t accept a vitalistic ontology, for instance one like that used by Deleuze and Guattari. You would like to draw a categorical distinction between differences that make inorganic differences and differences which make living differences. Maybe you can direct me to a past post of yours that presents the importance of this distinction. If so, I would also be interested in how you jibe this categorical inorganic/living distinction with the Latourian notion that all are actors with equal footing. (I do see a difference between organic and inorganic, but these are not ones of strict category, but rather ones of degree).
Levi: I have repeated emphasized throughout that there are dynamic relations among aggregates such that new objectiles are produced.
Kvond: Hmmm. Perhaps I am doing a very poor job of getting my point across (while reading your posts). It is not only that aggregates can produce “new objectiles”, but that objects are ALREADY made up of, that is are intersected by other objects which are exerting a determinative force within objects. To put it another way, the tension in an object is not simply between its boundary (identity) and the disparate force of its aggregate, but ALSO the force that composite parts places across its coherence, as parts of other objects that intersect its boundary. This cross-investment of component differences is not simply as you call it a “dynamic” of the aggregate, but rather more the potential for autonomous incoherence from the perspective of the object’s Identity, of those parts in the service of other trans-boundary objects. This is a very specific tension which subverts the Identity of objects in a very particular way. You might not agree with this assertion of mine, but it is not captured by the idea of the “dynamic of aggregates to produce new objectiles” at least as far as I understand it. The aggregate parts are already acting as parts to other objects (which I call bodies), actions which can produce a mutiny of differences.
The only reason to point this out is that you have said that whay I am putting forth is something that you embrace, apparently without much reservation, but when I look at your terms, I do not see the notion there. It is perfectly acceptable that we disagree, but if we do agree I would like to see the nature of it.
Levi: The thesis of a split-object is not designed to claim that objects are “crossed-out”, only that objects can contain other objects as in the case of a body containing a tape-worm or a factory containing persons and all sorts of machines, or a tree containing worms and insects of various sorts.
Kvond: Yes, this goes right to my point. It is not just that other objects are nested inside a greater object, but that these aggregate parts are also operating as parts of other objects. So, to use your example, a tapeworm in body may be part of an aggregate of a symbiotic object the population of a tapeworm parasites and certain bacteria, such that the tapeworm’s behavior has a mixed role in the body of a person. Or, a factor may contain persons, but it is not enought to say that it contains persons, but to see the role these persons play as aggregates of other objects, for instance the role that the play in a union, or in working class masculinity. The aggregate role of “person in a factor” is challenged by the role of that element in other, determinative objects (bodies). It is not just a question of the “dynamics of the aggregate” but of the specific investments across the body of the whole, the way that events apparently external to the factory (for instance a Union vote, the passage of a piece of union legislation) are experienced by the factory whole to be both “outside” but also paranoically “inside” the factory. It is a very specific Conjoined Semiosis.
I’m not say that your description of Object and Aggregate forecloses this analysis (though I am saying that the love of the binary of a crossed out term, as a point of logic does obsure it). It is rather that simply speaking of the “dynamics of the aggregate” is not enough. Missing seems to be a vital distinction as to how the boundaries of objects connect to other objects.
January 30, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Levi: Perhaps because your question has nothing to do with the principle in question. I’m not sure how you arrive at this conclusion given that in my ontology all objects are composites. I really don’t understand your question, unless you’re thinking abstractly about water molecules independent of their interaction with other phenomena.
Kvond: The reason why I ask this question is because I have seen this as a problem of just this sort or principle which I have at times made great use of (following Spinoza), but it seems that I am having a hard time putting the point of its across to you. I am not speaking of the intrinsic properties of something apart from their relations. I am speak of the concrete relations which actuall compose an object. I’ll try one more time, with best hope.
Water, what we describe as having the H20 composition. Take all of its effects it is currently having, everywhere. Now take someone like Obama, and all the effects, the number of differences the person Barack Obama is having. Which if these two “composites” has more reality in your view, right this second, which one has a greater “a ratio of the extensiveness of the differences” produced?
I am also interested in your example of the swallowed pebble:
Levi: “if the Emperor of Rome happens to die from swallowing that pebble, the degree of power belonging to this pebble increases significantly because it leads to an entire cascade of consequences causing the fall of Rome.”
Kvond: Now, a breeze comes through the window where the cook is cooking the Emperor’s meal, and the pebble that is on the shelf above the cake mix as about to fall into the batter and achieve an incredible degree of “reality” is blow back a bit, the entire cascade of “fall of Rome” consequences is delayed or avoided [those “relations between specific entities”]. It seems your opinion that that breeze now has an much greater degree of reality than it did five mintutes ago? If so, do you really subscribe to the Spinozist idea that each thing is perfect and has an Ultimate degree of Reality when seen from the whole? How else are you going to separate out one cause from another? Are you saying that the Principle of Reality is mind dependent, dependent upon something that selects out “relations between specific entities” a species of Idealism?
January 30, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Kvond: “I might add, if the above posting of a vocabulary of terms in some way was meant as a pre-existing answer to my objection to a notion of a priority of crossed-out term, the idea of an object and its negation, I simply do not see it.”
I’m sorry, I meant nothing by posting the terms after your comment, Kvond…I really just didn’t know where to post it and I was too lazy to keep looking them up. No harm meant.
January 30, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Kvond,
The Principle of Reality is a Levi principle, not a Spinozist principle. I have never made any claim to holding that all of reality is perfect one way or the other. As I mentioned before, within my ontology, the power of an entity is variable and dependent on its relations, so I’m just not sure I understand your example from the breeze. In my view, yes an entity can go from having a very low degree of power to a very high degree of power as a function of the relations it enters into. Your comparison of H20 and Obama is nonsensical to me, as, in my view, we can’t talk about the power of water everywhere in the universe in these sorts of comparative terms. One H20 molecule on the other side of the universe might have a higher degree of power than one H20 molecule at the top of a mountain here on the planet earth. Moreover, one body of H20 molecules (i.e., a body of water or an assemblage of H20 molecules) can have a higher degree of power than another body of H20 molecules depending on the relations it enters into. All H20 molecules in the universe never form an assemblage so it makes no sense to ask whether collectively all water is more powerful than Obama.
January 30, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Kvond,
I would not personally use the term “semiotic” as I think it invites confusion due to the connotations of the term. I associate– not without good historical reason –the term “semiotic” with signs and signs with life. If one is a semiotic realist, as in the case of Peirce, I think one is thus led back into a form of correlationism or idealism. I do not see the thesis that all differences make a difference as a vitalistic notion, but then I’ve never been quite sure as to just what people have in mind when they evoke vitalism. Air pressure and temperature are differences that can make a difference (i.e., they play a role in the genesis of storms or in causing water to boil) but I don’t see why anyone would refer to these differences as vitalistic.
I’ve laid out the principles of my ontology in schematic outline over the last couple of months, so you can go from there. I’ve never defended anything like a vitalistic ontology, though it’s always possible that I am a vitalist without knowing it. I haven’t written anything on the difference between organic and inorganic matter and don’t really see it philosophically as my place to do so (I’ll leave that to the scientists). Latour’s thesis that all beings are actors is just the thesis that to be is to do something. There is nothing organic or vitalistic about such a thesis. There are living things that do things and rocks do things. They do things in different ways and I strongly suspect that there are continua between the organic and the inorganic, e.g. viruses are neither living nor unliving and life likely emerged from inorganic matter).
I’m not entirely certain I understand what you’re claiming or outlining here because your language is very dense and you don’t spell out what you’re getting at, but if you’re saying something like workers serve as part of a factory, sure, I’m not disagreeing with this at all. Additionally, the workers that function as parts of the factory-machine are not just parts but are also objects in their own rights that enter into a variety of relations independent of the factory.
First, you’re using the term “aggregate” here incorrectly (at least within the scope of my ontology). An aggregate in my ontology is a collection of objects that does not itself form an object. By contrast, an assemblage is a collection of objects that does form an object. Now clearly the parts of an assemblage play a key role in that object functioning as an object. Hence, all of those factory workers which are themselves objects also allow the factory to function as an object. Second, since assemblages interact with one another as aggregates, there is nothing to prevent events between and across assemblages to play a role within an assemblage. A piece of legislation, for example, can have a massive impact on intra-assemblic functioning. I’ve outlined this before in our discussion of ecosystems, so I’m not sure why you’re repeating a variation of the same point again here.
As a matter of etiquette one usually doesn’t continue to attribute a claim to a person when they’ve pointed out that they are not making this claim. You keep repeating that I treat objects as “crossed out” and I’ve said a number of times that this is not what I mean by split-objects.
January 30, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Levi: “The Principle of Reality is a Levi principle, not a Spinozist principle.”
Kvond: I am not meaning to deprive you of authorship, but only to understand how your principle varies with a very similar Principle already proposed by Spinoza, that something has a greater degree of reality the greater the number of ways its body can be affected or affect others. I am trying to discern where you part company with your more famous fore-runner.
Levi: “As I mentioned before, within my ontology, the power of an entity is variable and dependent on its relations”
Kvond: This is something that Spinoza would agree with.
Levi: “Your comparison of H20 and Obama is nonsensical to me, as, in my view, we can’t talk about the power of water everywhere in the universe in these sorts of comparative terms. One H20 molecule on the other side of the universe might have a higher degree of power than one H20 molecule at the top of a mountain here on the planet earth. Moreover, one body of H20 molecules (i.e., a body of water or an assemblage of H20 molecules) can have a higher degree of power than another body of H20 molecules depending on the relations it enters into. All H20 molecules in the universe never form an assemblage so it makes no sense to ask whether collectively all water is more powerful than Obama.”
Kvond: So you explicitly deny that all the water molecules in existence have NO connection to each other. That is, there is NO causal chain which would link up the effects of a water molecule here in my house with a water molecule in your house. I’m just trying to understand this.
For instance, when we say that 65% water, there is NO composite relation of effects between the water in my body and the water in your body. Though the water in your body supports your life, and water in my body supports my life, and that the water of each is connected to the history of water on this planet, in so sense does “water on this planet” form a composite object for you, some of it distributed here, some there. My body might as well be 65% mercury, and not water, as far as how you understand composites to be.
I ask this to hone my sense of what a composite is, how it is defined by you. For instance, the water that plays a part in the assembled connection between you and I does not form an composite object on its own, with its own effect on the assemblage. So, when the moon has its very slight tidal pull on the water on each our water parts, or a food supply tainting had another effect, these are disconnected for you, in terms of the object of water?
I guess the problem is that if you want to choose out a particular set of relations in order to define the power of something, I can’t see how you can remove the possibility of connecting any one state of the world causally from another other. The butterfly wing produces the tsunami, the properties of water (that is real water in real relations) produce life on earth.
For you water in one place is not water in another place, it seems. The water in each of our bodies is not expressive of the same history of conditions.
Thanks for you thoughts, learning what you think.
January 30, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Kvond,
No, I don’t hold the Leibnizian, Spinozist, Whiteheadian, or Deleuzian thesis that all things mirror one another are connected. In my ontology some events register differences on other things and some do not, full stop. However, your example of the moon provides a nice example of why the Principle of Reality is important ontologically. The moon is one of those entities that makes a difference to a vast number of entities both on the planet earth and the solar system. It produces effects on other objects all throughout the world as you point out. Now, with respect to your observations about water and the body or the body needing water in order to live, there is a very big difference between claiming that our bodies need water to live and that our bodies use the same water– i.e., the same specific individuals –in order to live. This sounds like a category mistake between water as a natural kind and water throughout the universe as individual entities. It is possible, of course, that you and I have ingested some of the same water, but it is just as possible that we have not. It is important to distinguish between different waters because 1) differences in water from geographical place to geographical place will also make a difference in how individual animals and humans develop (just as one and the same genetic stock of grapes develop differently depending on where and when they’re grown), and 2) because we need these different individuals to account for different bodies, e.g., those bodies that are dehydrated because they don’t have water or those bodies that are sick because of what water in their region contains.
With regard to the first thesis, I do not state this. You’re working in the register of universal quantifiers, I’m speaking in the register of existential quantifiers. I make the claim that all water in the universe is not related, but I do not make the claim that some (existential quantifier) water in the universe is not connected. I’m perfectly happy to agree that some water is connected. As for whether some water in your house is causally connected to some water in my house, that is an empirical question. It might be, it might not be. It is not a necessary truth that it must be.
As for the history of water on this planet, that again is an empirical question that just can’t be answered a priori. It could be that all water on this planet shares the same history, and it is every bit as likely that some water on this planet came, for example, from comets. You’ll note, however, that you’ve shifted registers here. Before you were making claims about all water in the universe, now you’re talking about all water on the planet. These are two different things. We know about the genesis of atoms based on the development of stars. The elements a star generates are a function of the heat in its stars creating elements of different atomic values. Along these lines, there’s no reason to suppose that elements in a galaxy on the other side of the universe have the same origin as elements in this region of the universe. They might very well result from the same process (the life of stars up to the point of supernovas), but not the same origin.
January 30, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Levi: ” would not personally use the term “semiotic” as I think it invites confusion due to the connotations of the term. I associate– not without good historical reason –the term “semiotic” with signs and signs with life. If one is a semiotic realist, as in the case of Peirce, I think one is thus led back into a form of correlationism or idealism.”
Kvond; Perhaps these “confusions” are equal to the confusions produced by Latour’s use of the word “actor” or “actant”, also something traditionally reserved for the living.
I suppose I cannot help your, or other reader’s associations, but I have in mind not Peirce, but rather the very first Semiologist, Augustine who I think exhibits neither correlationalism or idealism.
Levi: ” Latour’s thesis that all beings are actors is just the thesis that to be is to do something. There is nothing organic or vitalistic about such a thesis. There are living things that do things and rocks do things.
Kvond: This is certainly dependent upon how you define “do”. I can’t see how you can define “do” in such a way that does not categorically separate out the inanimate from the animate, and at the same time does separate out semiotic properties, and not. Perhaps this resides in the recesses of your philosophy and need to be excavated here.
On your other points, I’ll let them lie somewhere between you not being understood, and me not making myself understood, where much often lies.
January 30, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Levi: “Now, with respect to your observations about water and the body or the body needing water in order to live, there is a very big difference between claiming that our bodies need water to live and that our bodies use the same water– i.e., the same specific individuals –in order to live. This sounds like a category mistake between water as a natural kind and water throughout the universe as individual entities.”
Kvond: I guess the problem is that I do not see the assemblage of water that makes of a tidal wave at the shore to be distinctly different in kind as a body or object, than I do the same amount of water divided up in public works, distributed through a city. It is still one body, having a mutitude of effects. And ultimately so, all the water in the world, having largely a shared history, has a mutuality of effects on the planet, regardless of its spatial separation.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify yourself, at least now I have a strong sense of the disagreement
January 30, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Sure, which is why I don’t use the term actors except in one context where sociology came up in a discussion with Alexei. Instead I use the terms “object” (or “objectile”) and assemblages. I strongly suspect that Latour uses the term “actor” as a provocation for precisely the reason you cite.
January 30, 2009 at 11:24 pm
It seems to me that there is a big difference between these two waters. In the first you have all of the molecules related to one another and working in tandem with one another as a tidal wave. The properties of these molecules assembled together take on special relations of force that do not belong to smaller bodies of water. By contrast, in your second body of water, you are dividing an assemblage and sending it elsewhere to enter into different relations. Just as objects can be built of other objects or assemblages can be built of other assemblages, assemblages can be broken apart to become other assemblages. That factory, for example, can be closed down such that the machines that were in it, the workers, etc., now enter into all sorts of new assemblages (many of which are not very happy).
Your thesis that water, sharing largely the same history, has a mutuality of effects on the planet is either a) outright false, or b) trivially true, or c) far too abstract and lacking in specificity to be of interest. It will make a tremendous difference ecologically as to whether water is channeled through irrigation ditches as in the case of Peru or the Roman aqueducts or the underground aqueducts bringing water to New York, or whether it is damned up as in the case of the Colorado river or the Yellow River in China, whether it flows freely like the Mississippi River, whether it is bottled, whether it is ingested, etc. These are all different ways of assembling water that have very different consequences on the region and the planet as a whole. Not only do these different ways of assembling water have effects on the planet as a whole– for example, damning can cause drought elsewhere on the planet –but these different assemblages can function as “actors” in a social network determining whether that network grows and expands or whether it doesn’t.
January 31, 2009 at 12:08 am
Levi: “Your thesis that water, sharing largely the same history, has a mutuality of effects on the planet is either a) outright false, or b) trivially true, or c) far too abstract and lacking in specificity to be of interest.”
Kvond: Well, this is quite interesting to me. For instance it is pretty much assumed that if water had the property of sinking when frozen, rather than floating, life itself would not have developed on the planet. Now, depending on models, at taken to be true, this is would not be a). outright false, b). trivially true, or c). Far too abstract and lacking in specificity to matter.
In fact, this is not an abstract property at all, but expressed in the real, concrete history of water’s interactions with other things, each time it froze and floated rather than sank, it had a constitutive effect on the kinds of differences that it made on the planet (it enabled all the differences of human intellection to come into being). This shared history (which you deny as important) is the very means by which water per force expressed itself, molecule by molecule.
As to the differences between water running through city works and into faucets and water composing a tidal wave:
Levi: It seems to me that there is a big difference between these two waters. In the first you have all of the molecules related to one another and working in tandem with one another as a tidal wave. The properties of these molecules assembled together take on special relations of force that do not belong to smaller bodies of water. By contrast, in your second body of water, you are dividing an assemblage and sending it elsewhere to enter into different relations.
Kvond: I did not say that there was no a difference between them, what I said was that there was not a categorical difference which makes them differently assumed to a kind of body or object. The divided nature of the water in city works does not mean that that water is no longer a body acting, any more than the Jews spread through out the world are not a body just because they are not located in the State of Isreal. In fact, its body (or object) has simply been made more powerful, in that it has effect on a greater number of differences in a greater number of ways than it would if it merely composed a tidal wave, exhibiting brute force.
If you kill a person and distribute their organs to other people, make use of its blood as paint in a painting, or alternately close down a factory and redistribute the machinery and the workers, this is not the same thing as distributing water throughout a public works. The reason for this is that water, so distributed, maintains vectors of relations to actions from a distance, even if distributed. Water in a tidal wave for instance will support microbial life, as will water in city works; or water in city works will inspire a poet, as water, just as water in a tidal wave. There are any number of even extremely minute mutality of differences to be played, such as a role in the biosphere as a threshold limit, and it only takes one difference in mutuality to determine a thing to be one body. The question isn’t whether these two things are different, but whether their difference precludes the water in city works to be taken as an object of its own, and also whether there are vectors of mutual differences between objects which would allow us to read them as one object. Is see no reason, no matter how precisely you describe the local manifestions of a dynamic of effects that include water, that PRECLUDES that water in city works, and the water in a tidal wave from forming part of one body which has a particular history in the world. Which is to say, even given the ecological differences made whether this water is dammed up, and that water polluted, there is no logical preclusion that all the water has not maintained a broadscale relation of differences which make of it one body, and part of this is understanding that all the water in a city works can also be taken to be one body, acting at a distance to itself, to other differences.
Again, glad to have our differences clarified.
January 31, 2009 at 12:13 am
p.s. I think I’ve made my own point clear enough in the above, so I give you the last word on the matter. Thanks for the discussion.
January 31, 2009 at 12:35 am
Sorry, I missed this one point of yours, which is on a separate issue, and important:
Levi: “I’m familiar with Augustine’s writings on signs, but fail to see how he doesn’t attach them to the mental.”
Kvond: Hmmm. This is to my ear an odd thing to say, because the “mental” is not a category (certainly not one matching up with Idealism), because the entire world is panpsychic, in which each thing “exists, knows and loves”. Indications are not “attached” to the mental, but rather the entire expression is already mental, that is to say, the mental is an immanent expression of Creation, the very groundwork of its ontology. The Being of something is not split into a duality of Matter and Spirit, but rather is a vector of communicability.
Levi: “What advantage do you gain from referring to the processes of, say, subatomic particles when almost all disciplines ranging under the title of the “semiotic” restrict signs to the human and the living”
Kvond: Well, as you are familiar with Augustine, I guess we can at least name one semiotician who does not restrict the semiotic to the living, or rather the reverse, all things are in some sense living, and thus are semiotic.
The advantage is, as far as I can argue, this taking down the semiotic passed the traditional limit of organisms has the same advantage of as taking “doing” all the way down to the basic levels of ontology. The doing is in some degree indicative. It is in nature of “doing” (as you say, “rocks do”) to indicate. This for me helps coherently place the power of rational explanation of causes and post-human ontology within communication with each other, working towards a panpsychic ontology which is the only recourse that a post-human ontology ultimately has (just my opinion). Graham apparently is moving closer to this position himself, for what it is worth.
In addition to this, perhaps the “disciplines” of semiotics need to be re-informed by the older Semiotician Augustine.
I leave you the last word on this.
January 31, 2009 at 4:35 am
It seems to me that you’re confusing history with natural kinds here:
Water does not sink when it’s frozen because of something to do with its history, but because of its atomic properties as a natural kind. I do not know enough about the physics of water to know if it behaves in this way in all conditions– e.g. fire rises on earth but behaves like water in space –or if these conditions are restricted to the earth. By contrast, to my ear at least, the history of water would pertain to the various states water has gone through here on earth (periods where it was condensed as a glacier, other periods where it was all in clouds and there were no bodies of water on the planet, periods where it rained, etc). I’m more than happy to agree that water, wherever it is in the universe, shares certain powers. It can bond with some atoms and not with others. It can freeze, turn into a mist, or flow when conjoined with other molecules, etc. These are properties characteristic of water as a natural kind, not due to its “history” (unless you’re using “history” in an extremely idiosyncratic way… In which case you should clarify this explicitly, as your use of the term “history”, much like your use of the term “semiotic” invites confusion). The Principle of Reality is not a principle that pertains to water as a natural kind, but rather what occurs when entities enter into specific relations with one another and is concerned with relations of extensiveness of impact of one entity with respect to another.
January 31, 2009 at 9:29 pm
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