A while back, Mickhail, of Perverse Egalitarianism, asked me whether there was any particular reason that I formulate the Ontic Principle in negative terms. That is, rather than formulating the principle as stating “there is no difference that doesn’t make a difference”, why not instead state it as “all differences make a difference”. At the time, I had no answer to this question. The Ontic Principle, of course, is a variation of Gregory Bateson’s definition of information. Bateson defines information as the “difference that makes a difference.” If information is the difference that makes a difference, then this is because, loosely speaking, it is a difference that brings about a change in the operations of a system. When, for example, someone shouts “fire!” in a crowd theater, this counts as information because it brings about a change in the organization of this group of people. The second time “fire!” is shouted it no longer functions or counts as information, because it no longer makes a difference. Information, for Bateson, thus brings about a shift in a system and functions to select elements of a code. For more on this I strongly recommend Niklas Luhmann’s wonderful Reality of the Mass Media, which is far more accessible than his daunting Social Systems.
While certainly indebted to Bateson– and it’s truly sad that Continental social thought didn’t take the path of cybernetics and systems theory rather than structuralism –the Ontic Principle nonetheless says something different (though not necessarily in contradiction) than Bateson’s definition of information. Where Bateson declares that information is the difference that makes a difference, the Ontic Principle states that “there is no difference that does not make a difference”. In other words, Bateson’s definition is restricted to a particular kind of entity– information –whereas the Ontic Principle declares that the most basic essence of being an entity consists in making a difference. To be is to differ and make differences. There is no entity that is not composed of differences and that does not make differences. Here, perhaps, I part ways with Harman while sharing his insight, for where Graham understands objects as “vacuum packed” or infinitely withdrawn from relations to all other objects, the concept of objects as composed of differences, as being composed of differences, making differences, and as differing in themselves, both allows the preservation of Harman’s insight of objects as infinitely withdrawn while also explaining why they are infinitely withdrawn. If objects perpetually differ from themselves by virtue of constantly changing, they will be infinitely withdrawn insofar as none of their predicates will be fixed once and for all. Like Leibniz’s monads that were constantly changing and contained this principle of change within themselves, objects differ from themselves in undergoing constant activity and process. Thus it is not that objects differ from their predicates, but that these predicates are endlessly coming-to-be and passing-away, though often in ways too minute for us to perceive.
read on!
Perhaps, like Derek Parfit’s account of personal identity, the “self” of an object is not something in excess of its predicates, but is rather a temporal relation of connectedness among predicates. Like the famous question of individuation pertaining to the Ship of Tarsus where everyday a from the ship is removed and replaced by another board, the identity of the Ship of Tarsus is not based on its matter (the boards), nor even on maintaining the same pattern (we can imagine the ship also being modified in a number of ways just as London changed dramatically after the 17th century Fire of London, but lies rather in the temporal connectedness of the entity across time. This would allow us to say that events do not befall objects, but rather that objects are events. The important caveat would be that events are not instantaneous, but rather are temporally extended or “stretched” like ripples produced in a pond when throwing a rock. A football game, for example, is an event that is also composed of a number of other events.
At any rate, back to the question at hand: Why the negative formulation of the Ontic Principle. The term “ontic” (όντος), of course, refers to real being or existence. On the one hand we can speak of being qua being or the properties of being, what can be said of being, independent of any existing beings (this could be called “essence”), whereas on the other hand we can refer to existence, to the real, beings, or the there is. If we wished to describe the bookends of Badiou’s Logiques des mondes and L’Être et l’Événement, we could subtitle these two works The Ontic and the Ontological, for the former refers to Dasein, being-there, or ex-istance, whereas the latter refers to being qua being or what can be said of being regardless of whether or not anything exists.
Here the rationale behind the negative formulation of the Ontic Principle begins to come into relief. The virtue of the negative formulation as opposed to the positive formulation is that whereas the positive formulation (“all differences make a difference”) works in the ontological register, the negative formulation brings to the fore the “there is”, the “il y a“, or the “es gibt” placing us squarely in the domain of the real, Dasein, or existence. There is difference. “It gives difference.” “Being gives difference”. Prior to any questions of epistemology, of what we can know, of our access to being, there is the astonishing fact of the “there is” and the giving of difference. It is this giving of difference which is, precisely, existence. As the etymology of the term “existence” teaches us, to exist is to stand-forth or appear. Existence is that which distinguishes itself, that which differs, for in standing-forth something differentiates itself. This appearing is not an appearing to you or me– though often it is –but is rather a standing-forth in a world or a making a difference in a world… A world that is itself a composition or weaving of differences.
Larval Subjects . 
January 31, 2009 at 7:09 pm
“the identity of [an entity] … lies rather in the temporal connectedness of the entity across time.”
This is useful but still problematic. At what point does the identity of an entity change? I’m thinking in particular of this: when an entity is transformed in various ways into another one, at which point does it cease to be what it started out as and change into another?
For instance, we can think of the wood in a tree, which is converted with the use of axes and refineries into many pieces of white bleached paper. The temporal connectedness between the piece of paper and the wood of the tree is definitely there, but undergoes various translations.
If we say that an object is an event, then it doesn’t seem to be possible to draw any real distinction between the piece of paper and the tree, because this event (‘tree-paper’) is just one unified fluxing event without differentiation.
January 31, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Mike,
I think this is a good point and I’m still working through such issues myself. As I recall from years ago– it’s probably been fifteen years since I’ve read him, but I remember being vividly struck by his writing –Parfit develops a number of science fiction like thought experiments pertaining to issues of personal identity. He imagines scenarios where a person splits every five years or so. The question becomes in what respect we would refer to these doubled persons as the same or different. Does the fact that they arise from the same origin indicate that they are the same entity? Parfit answers in the negative, arguing that the successive splits are new individuations generating new entities (by virtue of the splitting in new trajectories of experience between the twins). Perhaps the same principle would apply to objects understood in a suitably temporalized fashion.
January 31, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Prior to any questions of epistemology, of what we can know, of our access to being, there is the astonishing fact of the “there is” and the giving of difference.
Is “fact” not a construction itself? Let’s assume that facts just are prior to any perception of them as facts, what are they then? Things? Objects? Relations? States of affairs? Let’s assume that we know what they are, know perfectly well, that our subsequent knowledge of facts corresponds to their actual characteristics, and let’s dismiss the question of how we can be sure that it is the case. In other words, there are no questions of access or questions of correlation, just facts as you present it – who is then astonished in “there is an astonishing fact”? Is not “astonishment” a human reaction to the state of affairs and therefore an illegitimate term here?
January 31, 2009 at 9:17 pm
thanks so this post
January 31, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Mikhail,
I’m not sure I understand your question or why it is a matter of concern. Are human beings beings that make a difference? If that’s the case, then what follows from my Ontic Principle? If you can answer that question, then why would you conclude that I disqualify or exclude things like human astonishment and wonder from my ontology?
January 31, 2009 at 9:56 pm
I’m trying to think about these issues from your perspective, that is, by dismissing or at the very least bracketing the epistemological concerns. You use a word like “fact” as if it is an innocent term which, if I follow the discussions of someone like Latour is far from being such. If we don’t exclude the human perspective, if we simply refuse to give a privileged status, then why is the fact of astonishment so significant or even interesting? If I am astonished at the fact of “there is,” astonished as a human agent, then because of my equal status as a being that differs, why does it matter? Is a duck equally astonished to find food every time it lands in the grassy area outside my window?
So if we disregard the issues of epistemology, how can we address the question such as “are human beings beings that make a difference?” I wonder. It seems to be more difficult than issues of my duck – duck is out there, I can claim that I have a perfect capacity to perceive all or most of its qualities as they are, but when it comes to me, I don’t know how to do it without raising the issues of knowledge claims. I suppose this is a larger issue of how object-oriented philosophy would deal with subjectivity?
Again, these might be questions for you, just attempts to avoid general issues of epistemology, which I find difficult simply because I tend to always think of a philosophical method before thinking of philosophical matter. If you find these musings non-sensical or irrelevant, feel from to disregard them.
January 31, 2009 at 10:09 pm
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February 2, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Levi, as you know I’m both a fan of Bateson and of Levi-Strauss. One of the better exercises in trying to understand the working of social systems (I make no claims about other sorts of systems just yet) is to compare the cybernetic acciunt of Kent Flannery (a Meso-American archaeologist of great renown) and Levi-Strauss’s notion of the order of orders in various of the published forms of his essay Social Structure. Levi-Strauss proves to have a more subtloe account, partly because women and goods can be signs (providing relations of encompassed and encompassing) while still being women and goods but also because all three women, goods and signs are being exchanged…that is put in motion and in Bateson’s terms make a difference thereby…though we should bear in mind that exchange also involves holding onto that which is not exchanged and even not to be exchanged (see S. Weiner). Its only if we priviledge a very narrow reading of linguistics that we end up with the sorts of problems with Structuralism I gather you refer to. So I would note that Levi-Strauss took up linguistics because linguistics had attained a level of formalism not found elsewhere. The major Gestalt psychologists had died by the end of WWII. Cybernetics was still pretty raw; Bateson’s own transformative encounter with schizophrenic speech and double binds was still in the future as were many of the events in biology you referred to in another thread. At the same time Goethean and Spenglerian morphology were out of fashion, even forgotten. One of the things I suppose I’ve been trying to do for some time now has been to reformulate something like Levi-Strauss’s order of orders using ideas from morphological understandings of how things–plants, children and so forth– grow. From such a perspective I’d take Mike’s example of tree-paper to be somewhat misleading in that growth and decay turn out to being rather like the generation or emergence of difference within the conjunction between environment and an internal or, in Bateson’s terms, tautological system.
February 3, 2009 at 7:53 pm
How would you describe the status of mathematical structures and objects on this account?
I ask this because I have been puzzled by a similar question in Deleuze… According to him, at least in D&R, mathematical Ideas seem to be on par with other kinds of Ideas, and work according to the same logic of different/ciation. But if one tries to read this back onto his account of temporal syntheses and temporal differenciation in the second chapter, it is much harder to see how mathematical structures fit. There is something atemporal about mathematics, isn’t there?
In this post, you (perhaps) seem to be implying that mathematics belong to the ontological rather than the ontical. Does this mean that mathematical objects do not exist?
February 5, 2009 at 2:48 am
Jonas,
I wish I had a good answer to this question, but I just don’t. Years ago I came to the conclusion that there is something unique and irreducible about mathematical objects. They are strange things that are neither subjective nor objective, but which are nonetheless absolutely real. My knee-jerk reaction is to think that the properties of 7 + 5 = 12 would be what they are regardless of whether or not any human or consciousness were about to register this conclusion from its premises. In other words, I don’t accept the idea that math is simply a “construction”, the thesis that “math doesn’t think”, nor the thesis that mathematical objects don’t exist apart from humans or other rational animals to think it. I suppose that places me in the realist camp where maths are concerned.
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