In a terrific response to my post on exo-relations, Caemeron writes:
I wonder if people are scared to comment on this? The topic here does get pretty obscure and daunting, but I would like you to say more.
I remain unconvinced by your claim that there are objects that aren’t related to any other object.
To begin, I’ll take your example of yourself in relation to planet earth. Isn’t planet earth the way it is because of its gravitational relations with the rest of the solar system, and the solar system with the galaxy and so on?
Secondly, what is your take on “the butterfly effect”, or the idea that miniscule events on the other side of the world can create large impacts through a serial progression? To the point, perhaps: by relation do you mean only direct relation?
you say:
This is one reason that we are able to claim that two objects can be spatially unrelated. If enough time has not elapsed for light to travel to the other object, then there is no gravitational relation between these objects.
Could we not add the word ‘yet’ to the end of this? doesn’t that give us a temporal relation?
Insofar as you want to say that objects create spatiotemporal relations rather than vice versa, I’m with you, but I simply find the notion of an object which is unrelated to anything else to be unthinkable (wouldn’t thinking about it place it into a relation?) And, if it is thinkable through Gaussian manifolds, which I know woefully little about, I don’t see how that might justify us in claiming that there actually are such objects (to throw your criticism of Badiou back at you)
‘Relation’ seems to me to be a very broad term. A number like 47 may not be in space or time, but is certainly related to many things conceptually, metonymically, mathematically, etc. It seems to me that we can even conceive of non-relation as a form of relation.
Is your claim that 1) an object is not necessarily related to every other object or 2) there are objects which are not related to any other object?
I think Caemeron here raises a number of points that are worth briefly expanding upon and clarifying. First, my thesis is not that objects are unrelated to anything else or that there are objects that are unrelated to anything else. Like Caemeron, I hold that objects maintain a variety of exo-relations with other objects. My body, for example, has the shape, height, and consistency it possesses because of the exo-relations it has with other objects like the planet earth, the molecules presiding over air pressure etc. Consequently, there are a number of qualities belonging to my body that would not exist as they do without exo-relations or relations to other objects.
read on!
What I am railing against is not the thesis that objects have exo-relations with other objects, but rather the thesis that an object is determined or thoroughly defined by its exo-relations. Put otherwise, I reject the currently fashionable thesis that an object is its exo-relations. I reject this thesis based on two arguments drawn from Graham Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics. First, argues Harman, the thesis that objects are thoroughly defined by their relations is “…too reminiscent of a hall of mirrors” (82). If objects are nothing but their relations to other objects, then objects end up evaporating altogether as each object is but a reflection of the other objects without any substantivity to anchor relations. In other words, the problem with the relational model of objects is that objects become, under this model, nothing at all. Consequently, the thesis is not that objects do not entertain relations with other objects, but rather that objects cannot be reduced to there relations. In order for ontology to be coherent, it is necessary that objects have a substantivity that is not simply a function of their relations.
Second, argues Harman, the ontological thesis that objects are their relations renders change incoherent. If the being of an object is its relations, then it is impossible to see how change is possible as there is nothing held in reserve to explain that from whence change comes. In other words, relational ontology gives us what I refer to as a “crystalline universe”. That is, just as a crystal is a fixed and static structure, the thesis that entity is nothing but its relations leads logically to the conclusion that the universe is fixed and unchanging. This, I take it, is an unacceptable conclusion.
It is for these reasons that I distinguish between endo- and exo-relations. Exo-relations are the relations objects entertain with one another in interacting with one another such that qualitative change is produced in one or both of the objects (exo-relations can be symmetrical or asymmetrical depending on the case). By contrast, endo-relations pertain to the being of the object in-itself independent of its exo-relations to anything else. In other words, the endo-relations of an object are its internal composition or its being, independent of how it is affected by other objects. My thesis is that endo-relations are the condition for the possibility of exo-relations. That is, an object must already have a substantivity of its own and a capacity to be affected for exo-relations between objects to be formed. For this reason, my tentative hypothesis is that the endo-relations presiding the internal composition of an object consist of affects. By “affect” I am not referring to emotions, but rather to the capacity to act and be acted upon, the capacity to affect and be affected, belonging to an object.
Not all objects have the capacity to affect one another and therefore not all objects have the capacity to form exo-relations with each other. Thus, for example, I do not currently– much to my despair –have the capacity to be affected by advanced category theory. One will object that certainly, when I regard the category depicted to the right of this paragraph, I am affected and that therefore it is false to suggest that I cannot be affected by advanced category theory. However, this line of argument lacks precision, forgetting as it does the principle lesson of Husserl regarding the nature of intentionality. As I regard the diagram I do not intend the diagram as a category, but rather am conscious of it as a lusciously beautiful arrangement of lines, arrows, and functions without any access to the object for which this diagram stands. Like an ape, I point and gesture at the diagram with delight, wondering what it is all about, without, nonetheless, being affected by the category. In short, I am affected by the diagram as an aesthetic object not as a category. Interestingly, it is possible that I might develop the capacity to be affected by advanced categories.
Analogously, no matter how much I yell, scream, sing, and coo seductive words at a rock, the rock remains unaffected by my speech. Again, the physicalist will protest: “But certainly the sounds waves affect the rock!” Indeed, this is true. However, while the rock possesses the capacity to be affected by sound waves, it does not possess the capacity to be affected by speech. In other words, speech is not sound-waves. The rock is able to translate sound-waves in its own unique way, but it is not able to translate speech.
Finally, since both of these examples involve humans, we can refer to the example of the humble neutrino. The neutrino falls through most matter with an ease and slipperiness that is the envy of butter knives everywhere. So great is the neutrino’s capacity to slide through matter that, unlike butter knives, it does not touch or affect most other matter at all. In this respect, neutrinos have a very small number of affects. Not only do they have little capacity to act on or affect other types of matter, but they also have little capacity to be affected by other matter. This is why it is such a challenge to study these slippery neutrinos. To investigate anything it is necessary to form exo-relations with that thing so as to provoke or elicit the affects of which the thing is capable. The challenge posed by neutrinos is that of how to form an exo-relation with that which slips through nearly all matter.
My thesis is that ontology must simultaneously investigate objects in terms of their endo-relations, their exo-relations, and their genesis. The point about endo-relations is not that objects do not enter into exo-relations with other objects, nor, even, that we can find a single example of a totally relationless object in the universe, but simply that objects cannot be reduced to their exo-relations. When Caemeron points out that my body is dependent on gravity and air pressure, I think he is failing to distinguish between the internal composition of my body and the qualities of my body that result from being affected in a particular way as a result of the exo-relations it enters into. Suppose, for example, a diabolical correlationist, fed up with my harping about objects, catapults me into outer space. Clearly my body now undergoes profound qualitative changes. My eyes and blood vessels begin to bulge as a result of being plunged into a vacuum, the gasses in my body begin to boil and bubble, I scream out in agony yet without being able to make any sound. However, these qualitative changes are not my body as characterized by its endo-relations or its capacity to affect and be affected, but are rather qualitative changes produced as a result of the affects that compose my being. These qualitative changes are only possible through the endo-structural composition of my body.
When I claim that it is possible for an object to exist that possesses no exo-relations with any other object in the universe, I am not making the claim that such objects exist (how would I know?), but that insofar as objects necessarily possess an independent substantivity or being that cannot be reduced to their relations and is the condition for any exo-relations objects might enter into, there is nothing to prohibit the possibility of such a thoroughly un-related entity. Caemeron contends that it is impossible to conceive such an object, but I do not see why it is anymore difficult to conceive an object without exo-relations than it is to conceive a match that is not burning. Moreover, I believe that mathematically we have even developed the tools for analyzing the endo-relational structure of objects independent of their relations with the mathematical concept of multiplicity or manifold. As DeLanda so beautifully summarizes it,
…when Gauss began to tap into these differential resources, a curved two-dimension surface was studied using the old Cartesian method: the surface was embedded in three-dimensional space complete with its own fixed set of axes; then, using those axes, coordinates would be assigned to every point of the surface; finally, the geometric links between points determining the form of the surface would be expressed as algebraic relations between the numbers. But Gauss realized that the calculus, focusing as it does on infinitesimal points on the surface itself (that is, operating entirely with local information), allowed the study of the surface without any reference to a global embedding space. Basically, Gauss developed a method to implant the coordinate axes on the surface itself (that is, a method to implant the coordinate axes on the surface itself (that is, a method of ‘coordinatizing’ the surface) and, once points had been so translated into numbers, to use differential (not algebraic) equations to characterize their relations. As the mathematician and historian Morris Kline observes, by getting rid of the global embedding space and dealing with the surface through its own local properties, ‘Gauss advanced the totally new concept that a surface is a space in itself. (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 11-12)
The point here is not that the object does not have exo-relations or that the object is not the result of a genesis from other objects and prior states, but rather that the endo-structure of an object is subject to analysis independent of its relations.
Larval Subjects . 
June 29, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Hey LS,
But how can such a distinction (between endo- and exo-relations) be at all possible, since even if we believe to be discussing the endo-relation of one object, aren’t we at the same time also talking about the exo-relation of other objects? So for example, when we discuss our circulatory system in the vacuum of space, true, we are discussing an endo-relation with regards to our body. However, we are discussing an exo-relation with regards to our blood cells.
It seems, then, that any discussion of endo-/exo-, or part/whole relations needs to maintain the thesis that to change one side of the binary is to also change the other side. Therefore, to throw our bodies into space (a purely exo-relation with regards to our bodies) means that our endo-relations will also have to change. For the opposite is also true. If we contract a disease that produces massive boils on our skin, or that leads to the loss of use of an appendage, we could say that our endo-relations caused our exo-relations to change – and not just physically. People might stay away from us, or we may not be able to move around our physical environment as easily as before, therefore limiting our encounters with other objects.
I guess in a way, what I’m getting at is, who’s to say that an object’s endo-relations have to compose an objects exo-relation? Why not the opposite, as well? Can multiple objects’ exo-relations eventually create another object’s endo-relations? And, is it wrong for me to think of endo-relations as part-relations and exo-relations as whole-relations?
June 29, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Levi,
I’m back from conferencing and so can take a minute to respond to this. I have no quibble with the endo-, exo-, and origin distinctions as such. But I do have a query.
In anthropology we have a concept of ontological debt, i.e. those debts one owes simply because one exists. These debts are assymetric and unpayable. So, for example, I am here because my parents made love in the late Fall or early winter of 1955. I continue to be here because I eat. I cannot give birth to either of my parents, and not most importantly because I am male; no one can turn time around, at least not here and now. Equally, in order for me to eat, something must die, I being an animal (there is some small exception for people who ingest clays and other minerals).
The general logic of what I would call the world of the gift has to distinguish between symmetrical and assymmetrical gifts, hence patterns of obligation, emotion and so on.
I’m not sure, being an anthropologist, just how far I would go with this. But perhaps, at least for certain objects, like ourselves, could we say that the relations between exo-relations and endo-relations delineate the possibilities of existence (what I’ve called form) and further those relations between exo-relations and endo-relations are the conditions necessary for the other–exo- for endo- as well as endo- for exo- at least at the points of exchange and as we can know of such things, on the one hand, and as forms (which need not include us) can emerge on the other.
Your object without exo-relations may indeed be conceivable; we can imagine the unimaginable, even if we can’t give that imagination of the unimaginable much content. But in that we cannot know such an object (knowing being a relation, both endo- and exo- if the knower is in anyway self-aware), I’m not sure what good such an object is even to think about, scientifically at least.
June 29, 2009 at 11:48 pm
This may be obvious, but there’s parallel here with marxist/social theory with regard to how and how much social relations determine various things, like in some version of the Althusserian idea of overdetermination. I think your non-reductive ontology (while mostly over my head) offers some good resources against that social theory POV.
cheers,
Nate
June 30, 2009 at 12:03 am
[…] Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized Leave a Comment In response to my post on endo- and exo-relations, my friend NrG writes: But how can such a distinction (between endo- and […]
June 30, 2009 at 12:10 am
[hey Levi sorry to post twice, I read this a second time and the post of your you linked to. If you want to collapse these into one comment I wouldn’t mind.]
Three more things –
1. Your point about you yelling at a rock is great. You have an effect on the rock as a generator of sound waves but not as a generator of speech. That’s an elegant point.
2. This isn’t a rhetorical question – if ontology must investigate actual reality is ontology an empirical pursuit? (Are ontologists necessarily empiricists, in either a philosophical sense or the sense of doing empirical research?)
3. What do you make of Caemeron’s question about a relationless object – “wouldn’t thinking about it place it into a relation?”
This is interesting stuff you’ve posted.
June 30, 2009 at 12:23 am
Hi Jerry,
I hope the conference went well! I pretty much agree with everything you have to say in this post. For a while I toyed with the idea that all relations are symmetrical, but I’ve come around quite a bit on that point. Not only are asymmetries crucial in the anthropological cases you mention, but I think they’re at the core of a whole host of ontological issues pertaining to the nature of time and the development of systems. I agree that an object without any exo-relations whatsoever is uninteresting from the standpoint of inquiry. Investigation, I take it, consists in placing objects in salient exo-relations so that their affects might be disclosed. The point about an object with exo-relations is a point about ontology, not epistemology; which is to say that ontologically there are a number of things that are beyond our ability to know them. For example, I’m committed to the thesis that all objects have an endo-relational structure or unity that defines their essence or their “thisness”, but I do not think we can ever know this structure because it always exceeds any of its forms or qualitative manifestations.
June 30, 2009 at 12:37 am
Thanks for the comments and kind remarks, Nate. You’re spot on with your remarks about Althusser, social relations, and overdetermination. On the one hand, I think a theorist like Althusser is right on mark in seeking to elaborate the endo-relational structure of society as a social object. I also think he’s right on mark in investigating the downward causality of these objects on other objects that enter into its composition, i.e., the manner in which a society translates the individual persons that enter into its composition. The problem, I think, with these theories is that all too often they end up treating their models as exhaustive of the realities they describe, forgetting the excess of the other objects that enter into the composition of the macro-level object. As a result of this, they end up posing all sorts of problems as to how change is possible because they’ve placed all the differences in the social system, ignoring that there are other networks, systems, and objects that have their own differences in excess of the differences presiding over the endo-relational structure of the social system.
With respect to your second question about ontology as an empirical pursuit, I don’t think this necessarily follows. I think we can say very general things about the nature of being and the composition of beings without entering into a specific analysis of any particular type of being. On the one hand, the endo- and exo-relational structure of any particular being is, in many cases, an empirical issue. On the other hand, the thesis that objects have endo- and exo-relational structures is ontological and independent of the specific being of any entity. I say this with the caveat that I take ontological theses to be speculative hypotheses that are subject to further revision in light of experience.
I’m inclined to say that thinking an object does not necessarily place that object into relation, because a number of relations, as Jerry observes, are asymmetrical. Thus, when I think an object it certainly produces differences in me, but I don’t see that it necessarily follows that it produces differences in the object. Again, this depends on the types of objects that we’re talking about. Clearly the relation between the anthropologist investigating a tribe is in many cases symmetrical because he produces differences in that culture by being there. Likewise, in quantum mechanics the relation between the observer and the particle is symmetrical because the observation affects the particle. However, it’s unclear to me how the thinking of, say, the sun, affects the sun or how my reading of Schieffelin’s The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers affects the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. In these cases the relation strikes me as asymmetrical, producing a difference in one direction only.
June 30, 2009 at 3:01 am
thanks for responding to my questions. this post clarifies a lot…
so, an object is only in relation to another object if that object produces differences in it/affects it?
this is an interesting move, which I will have to think about a bit. I would think that it would also be a case of relation for an object to affect another object without itself being affected, so that the object I am thinking about would be in relation to me even if this made no difference to it. I wonder on what basis you can exclude that second kind of relation without falling into physicalism.
to refine my original question, which Nate mentioned, what I really wanted to get at was a kind of antinomy of thought and existence when it comes to this idea of an object without relations.
it seems to me that either the relationless object is thinkable, but thus does not exist because if it did exist then thinking it would place it in a exo-relation (which would be avoided if it were only a thought-object) or the relationless object exists, in which case it would have to be unthinkable because for it to be thinkable it would have to be able to enter into a relation with something outside of it (a thinker).
in other words, if we can conceive of it, it doesn’t exist; if it exists, we can’t conceive of it. but all of this is predicated on my taking thought as an exo-relation of the object, which you seem to be trying to avoid.
a related question is: which one is active and which passive when I think about a rock? I am tempted to say that the rock affects me, while I don’t affect it, which would make it active and me passive. I wonder what you think and whether you want to reject the active/passive terminology?
June 30, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Yes, Levi, the conference went very well. I’ve been asked to publish my paper on W H R Rivers (you might be interested in how he formulates his idea of the unconscious; I can send a cite).
I too was wondering more about the object without exo-relations. My, no doubt naive, sense is that such an object cannot be within any other object, or say behind an event horizon, as minimally that which is/was outside would be part of what created the barrier preventing exo-relations (of most kinds) so constituting exo-relations of a very limited or particular kind; I’m not so sure that one need conceive this problem in terms of parts and wholes so much as in terms of container/contained. So I wonder, L, whether you haven’t smuggled G-d back in, or at least something awfully big.
October 8, 2012 at 6:35 pm
For your consideration. Admittedly based on a linguistic/rhetorical/epistemological “machine,” but expanded under the influence of ontology:
http://o-oosnap.blogspot.com/2012/10/notes-on-9-point-ecosystems-heuristic.html