The last few days have been fairly busy. I’ve completed the initial draft of my article for the Speculative Turn anthology, and am fairly pleased with the results. Hopefully a number of my positions will be clearer as a result of this article. I do, however, realize how much more I have to do. At the moment I’m sketching the arc for my next book. I suspect that it will consist of three parts entitled “Essence”, “Genesis”, and either “Societies” or “Networks”. In this respect, I am attempting to address four inter-related issues. First, with respect to questions of essence or that without which an individual object would not be the object that it is, I am examining the object in its internal constitution, independent of its relations to other objects. In my article I have argued that we must necessarily presuppose substances of this kind to render relations intelligible or to understand ontologically how they are possible. However, while objects have their internal constitution or essence that persists throughout time, they also have their outward face pointing towards other objects. The issue of objectal relations to other objects– what I call “inter-ontic relations” or “exo-relations” –falls under the heading of networks or societies. Here the issue is that of how selective relations emerge between objects and also how relations to objects evoke properties in objects. Not all objects can relate to one another. The issue of whether or not an object can relate to another object is an issue that points back to issues of essence or the affects or internal constitution of an object in its singular being. However, in relating to other objects, new properties are evoked in the object. My skin turns brown as I toil in my garden pulling out the weeds. Finally the question of genesis is the question of how objects emerge from other objects and attain closure or totality, or a status as independent objects in their own right. There is a difference, for example, between an aggregate of people on a subway and a group of revolutionary activists. How is this difference between aggregates and individuals, collections and objects, to be thought?
The first part will be something like a “transcendental analytic” of objects treated in their independence from or isolation from other objects. Here I will lean heavily on Zubiri’s account of essence as a system of notes constituting that which is in the object that makes it what it is, as well as Deleuze’s account of multiplicities and individuation as articulated in Difference and Repetition, and accounts of systems drawn from autopoietic theory and developmental and dynamic systems theory. The chapter on networks or societies– “communities of objects” –will draw heavily on Latour, Deleuze’s account of intensities, and Whitehead’s account of nexes. This part will be something like a “transcendental dialectic” insofar as it deals with relations among objects, rather than objects taken “analytically”. This will set the groundwork for the third part on genesis, which I am still very much working through. At any rate, it’s nice to have something of a sense as to where I’m going.
Larval Subjects . 
June 23, 2009 at 11:22 am
Hey LS,
Oddly enough, this post brings up some of the questions I was having after reading your article.
When you state above, that:
“Not all objects can relate to one another. The issue of whether or not an object can relate to another object is an issue that points back to issues of essence or the affects or internal constitution of an object in its singular being.”
I want to ask, what then of differences? For it seems to me that given the Ontic Principle, what you had created was a sort of Open System, where each object by necessity of Being had to not only be open for differences but also create its own differences through an act of translation. However, (and correct me if I’m wrong) what it seems you are trying to get at with your discussion of essence, is that an object is structured so that not all objects can directly affect (i.e., make a difference) on it – that essentially, your system is closed to some degree.
If we were talking about form and matter, I might automatically accept this new understanding of the object, for even if we were discussing a water molecule, we would be hard-pressed to argue against the seemingly inherent structure of the Hydrogen molecules bonding with the Oxygen molecule (in what I liken to a “Mickey Mouse” type shape), typed out as HOH. In other words, water has built into it (as a proper part) a specific form that is not present if one of the other parts or molecules is absent, as well. In this way the water molecule as structured, is closed off to other bonds. This is not to say that it can never bond with other molecules, but that as a structured, whole HOH molecule, it would have to change, structurally, to form something else.
Regardless, what I hoped to get at with this aside, is that once structure is imposed on an object, once form creates a whole, the once Open System of change and difference the Ontic Principle sets up, is restricted – for now only certain differences can actually make a difference on certain objects. Now, we (or perhaps nature) must categorize differences depending upon the differences that affect them and the differences they have the potential to create. Otherwise there would be no difference (in the sense of dissimilarity) between a mass of parts and a whole, between a heap of metal and a finished, structured motorcycle.
But again, if I am missing the point or forgetting something, please feel free to point this out. By the way, I really enjoyed reading your article – thanks again!
June 23, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Hi NrG,
Glad you enjoyed the article. I’m a bit terrified by it, to be honest. Hopefully it doesn’t sound as if I’ve lost my marbles.
Perhaps my position concerning the structuration of objects can be clarified with reference to Whitehead’s. For Whitehead every actual occasion (object/event) shares a definite relation with every other object in the entire universe. I think this thesis is either trite or wrong. Whitehead’s word for “relation” is “prehension”. Objects prehend other objects and transform the data that they receive from these objects. According to Whitehead this takes place through what he calls “contrasts” that contribute to the aesthetic unity of the overall structure of the object. There are two varieties of prehensions: negative prehensions and positive prehensions. Positive prehensions refer to prehensions that are received and worked over by the actual occasion or object. Negative prehensions, by contrast, are datums that are excluded by the object. This is where I arrive at the conclusion that there is something trite in Whitehead’s thesis that every object shares a definite relation to all other objects in the universe. He is able to say this on the basis of negative prehensions, but this is equivalent to saying that objects both positively prehend objects– that in excluding them the object is in some sense “aware” of the excluded objects –and that there is something mistaken in this position. If there is something mistaken in this position then it lies in the thesis that the object has some sort of “awareness” of the objects that it excludes. For me, these exclusions are not active— though I do think some emergent systems have active exclusions –but rather the object is in-different to what it excludes. It’s as if the object that the object cannot relate to does not even exist at all. It is only from the standpoint of the regarding consciousness or the “for-us” that the object appears to share a definite relation with what it excludes.
As I understand it, all that is required of the Ontic Principle is that objects make a difference. However, in making a difference, it is not being asserted that it make a difference to or on everything that exists. For example, nothing in my position precludes the existence of a humble and completely isolated object in a far off region of the universe related to nothing else at all. This is possible because objects have both their endo-differential structure and their exo-relational structure. At the level of endo-differences and relations, the object still produces differences, but these are differences that remain, as it were, internal to the system of the object. Here I side with Leibniz when he states that “…a substance cannot naturally be without action, and that there is never even any body without motion” (New Essays on the Understanding, Preface). Consequently, there is “making a difference” simpliciter where the differences or activity are system specific, and making a difference to something else. The Ontic Principle does not require the latter of all objects.
Without the thesis that objects do not relate to all other objects, I think we fall into a sort of night in which all cows are black, or a chaotic soup without any differentiation. Consequently, Onticology, as I understand it, requires an account of how the structure of objects– what I call “essence” following Zubiri –produces affects determinative of the capacity to act and be acted upon. The thesis then is not every object can act upon or affect every other type of objects. Objects are, as it were, selectively open to other objects.
June 23, 2009 at 7:51 pm
LS,
You stated in your response that:
“For example, nothing in my position precludes the existence of a humble and completely isolated object in a far off region of the universe related to nothing else at all. This is possible because objects have both their endo-differential structure and their exo-relational structure. At the level of endo-differences and relations, the object still produces differences, but these are differences that remain, as it were, internal to the system of the object.”
I guess my question is simply this: “How can we not have something exo- for every object?” Or to put this another way, how can we have a closed set without something exterior to the set itself?
June 24, 2009 at 12:37 am
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