In developing onticology or object-oriented ontology, one of the things I’ve been aiming at is what I call, following DeLanda, though developed in a different way, a flat ontology. A flat ontology is, to use a term my good friend Jerry the Anthropologist recently shared with me, a lumpy ontology. In referring to such an ontology as “lumpy”, I intend an ontology that is composed of a heterogeneity of different entities. As such, heterogenesis is one of the central questions of onticology. Heterogenesis is the question of how the disparate, the heterogeneous, enters into relations or imbroglios with one another to form a collective and a common. These imbroglios or collectives can be thought as logoi. Rather than a single logos for the world, we instead get islands of logoi where the organization governing these imbroglios are emergent results of ongoing heterogenesis.
The idea of a flat ontology can be fruitfully understood in contrast to materialisms. Where materialism posits a single type of entity– whatever that type might be –out of which all other entities are composed, a flat ontology is pluralistic, positing an infinite variety of different types of entities. Flat ontology does not reject the existence of material entities like quarks, atoms, and trees, but merely asserts that these aren’t the only types of entities that exist. Consequently, when onticology claims that “to be is to be an object”, this thesis is not equivalent to claiming that “to be is to be material”. A city is an object. Indeed, it is an object that contains a variety of other objects and that depends on a variety of other objects both in terms of its own endo-relational structure and its exo-relations to things outside its membrane. Nonetheless, were we to take an inventory of all the material objects included in the city we would not have the “city-ness of the city”. For all intents and purposes, nearly all the matter composing New Orleans remained after Hurricane Katrina, but it was a very different city after this event and its continued existence still remains in doubt.
read on!
Onticology thus opens up a domain where it becomes possible to speak of material objects without reducing them to relations in a correlate between mind and world, and in this way departs from the various idealisms that predominate during the last century. It rejects anything like the notion of a “fundamental ontology” as understood by Heidegger where humans are placed at the center of being or where any object is implicitly understood as being correlated with some variant of the human in the form of history, tradition, language, signs, social forces, economy, mind, or whatever else one might like to put on the human side of the correlation. Ontology is not the investigation of being qua human, nor being qua language, society, history, social forces, and so on. Ontology is the investigation of being qua being. Humans, language, societies, history, social forces, signs, power, and all the rest are counted within being, but are not at the center of being and posses no privileged or exemplary place within being such that all ontological questioning must first proceed on the basis of this relation.
Instead, what we get in a flat ontology are imbroglios of objects on a flat plane where objects vie with one another in a variety of ways. Where a vertical ontology might treat the human as something that is, as it were, outside the world by virtue of a special transcendence that marks its discontinuity with nature, flat ontology sees humans as caught in imbroglios with other objects that never cease to surprise us and such that we are unable to determine where our agency beings or ends or whether agency comes from nonhuman objects or from ourselves. The factory, for example, is not simply the result of mute matter formed in the image of the engineers mind for social purposes like producing aircraft for war, but is itself a nonhuman object that introduces unanticipated agencies and affordances into the world far afield from the intentions of its designers. During WWII the factory is designed to produce aircraft, tanks, and a variety of other devices of war, but as women come to operate the factory as gears in the war machine, the factory also becomes a site of emancipation, introducing a new set of social relations that pave the way for the women’s movement in the next two decades. Climate change owes a great deal to the emission of greenhouse gases, but it mobilizes a set of objects or actors that are nonhuman, that generate new storm and weather patterns, that wreck havoc on farming and fishing, the unleash new and strange microbes, and so on.
These are imbroglios, where humans and nonhumans are bound up with one another in complex networks without any particular actor or object standing above the rest. And this, in the end, is what immanence or flat ontology means: a single world characterized by imbroglios, where no actor or object stands outside the others. Perhaps there are gods and spirits, but if there are then they do not stand apart from being or outside of the world, but are caught in imbroglios like all other objects. Like the strange gods of Epicurus and Lucretius, the gods would here exist but are constrained in their ability to act in the same way as any other entity. Zeus too would need an Archemedian lever to move the world.
In my own work with object-oriented ontology I have been particularly keen to reconceptualize social and cultural theory in terms of onticology. Philosophical movements have a bad habit of going too far in the opposite direction, throwing out the valuable insights of previous traditions in their zeal to correct the excesses of these traditions. The last century was characterized by profound advances in our understanding of social phenomena. These advances should not be thrown out. However, what is required is a reformulation of social phenomena in terms consistent with onticology.
Just as all other objects find themselves caught up in imbroglios with other objects, this requires first that signs, for example, are caught up in imbroglios with non-semiotic objects rather than circulating throughout the world in a smooth space without resistance or encounters with density. If I have been attracted to the concept of memes, then this is because the concept of memes approaches this dimension of imbroglios with respect to signs. Many of us played the game of “telephone” in grade school. In the game of telephone one person whispers a message in the ear of the person next to them, which the next person then whispers to the person next to them. By the time the message gets to the end of the line it has been thoroughly transformed. What the concept of meme captures so nicely in a way too often overlooked by semiotic and hermeneutic approaches is the transmission of messages through a medium and the manner in which the medium (the technology of transmission), as McLuhan observed, transforms the message. Just as it is impossible to use a cell phone in those regions of the planet– say Antarctica –where there are no cell phone towers, the semiotic domain of the social is dependent on all sorts of mechanisms of transmission and exchange. Often the hermeneutic disciplines overlook the manner in which signs must be propagated to function. More importantly, the hermeneutic disciplines often end up working with idealizations of signs– signs carefully purified and distilled by the researcher, distinguished from noise –thereby losing attentiveness to the manner in which signs vary and change in being transmitted.
On the other hand, if signs are to be rendered consistent with onticology, then it follows that they too must be treated as objects or actors. A sign is not simply about something. Indeed, it is worth asking, as strange as it might sound, whether signs represent anything at all. Signs are not simply about something, but are something. They are actors or objects in their own right. Take the category of “Soccer Moms” that appeared as a crucial voting block during the 2004 United States presidential elections. Suddenly every on the news we began hearing about the political concerns of soccer moms and nascar dads.
A naive epistemological reading would treat the categories of “soccer mom” and “nascar dad” as representations of mothers that have children that play soccer and fathers that go to soccer games. Onticology has a rather different perspective. “Soccer Mom” and “Nascar Dad” (note the square quotes) are not representations of populations consisting of mothers who have children that play soccer and fathers that attend nascar events, but are objects in their own right. To put this point somewhat differently, a huge number of women who have children that play soccer have existed for quite some time. These women were and are all actors. However, in the 2004 election a new actor appeared on the scene: Soccer Moms. The category of Soccer Moms is a different actor than all these mothers that have children that play soccer. It is a distinct actor or object in its own right. If this “meme” is a distinct category, then this is because it is suddenly an entity that suddenly the media, politicians, and even those mothers who have children that play soccer must contend with. Where mothers that have children that play soccer are a multiplicity of different actors, “Soccer Mom” is a unified actor that “blackboxes” this multiplicity.
How, then, are we to understand the relationship between the multiplicity of mothers that have children that play soccer and this new entity, “The Soccer Mom”. Here it becomes necessary to rethink the relationship of representation. Rather than treating a statistical category of “The Soccer Mom” as a sign that represents something for someone, instead we should think of the phenomenon of representation in political terms. In this connection, my thesis is that the phenomenon of political representation potentially reveals more about how signs function than the model of epistemological representation. Where epistemological representation raises the question of adequation between the representation and the represented, political representation raises the question of how it is possible for one person’s or group’s (the represented) to speak through another (the representative).
The merit of the category of political representation is that it preserves the sense in which both the represented and the representative are distinct actors. In other words, ontological reality is granted to both sides of the relation, such that there can be struggle and conflict between the represented and the representative. In this respect, the representative can have aims and functions very different from that of his representated. From the standpoint of the represented the aim is to capture the voice of the representative for their own aims. Since the category of the represented is itself heterogeneous composed of a variety of different competing actors, there is struggle among the represented as well. Likewise, the representative often acts on behalf of aims different from those that he represents, as can be discerned with those politicians that belong to the political group known as The Family. In order for the representative to successfully execute his aims, he must enlist the consent of the represented, he must convince them that he actually represents them, even when he is operating in a clandestine fashion at odds with their aims.
The situation is very similar in the case of signs. The sign is an actor in its own right that can take on a life of its own quite different from that which it purports to represent. The search for the Fountain of Youth can mobilize an entire army of other actors even though it refers to something that it doesn’t exist. The category of The Soccer Mom enlists the consent of mothers that have children that play soccer either through their silence in relation to the category or through their identification with the category. In other words, paradoxically, where the category presents itself as a representation of mothers that have children that play soccer, mothers that have children that play soccer can begin to form themselves in the image of The Soccer Mom through an identification with this category. Likewise, other mothers that have children that play soccer can contest the legitimacy of this new actor, decrying it as a spurious generalization or seeking to enlist it for their own ends. Thus, during the 2004 election, The Soccer Mom was generally presented as a group of women primarily concerned with issues pertaining to national security, terrorism, family values, and so on. In other words, the category was tailor fit to a rightwing agenda. In contesting The Soccer Mom, we can imagine groups of women getting together on the internet to form a group called “Soccer Mom’s for John Kerry”. In moments like this we encounter a disparity among actors or the fact that there are different actors at work in the relation between signs and what they purport to represent.
It will be objected that while the onticological theory of the sign– only outlined here –works well for reflexive signs pertaining to humans that can take up a stance with respect to the sign that purports to represent them, it makes no sense to speak of signs seeking to enlist other actors in the case of natural objects and nonhuman actors. What sense, one will object, does it make to suggest that quantum mechanics must enlist nonhuman actors to secure its position as a representative given that nonhuman actors are indifferent to the signs that we might affix them with. But even in the case of particle theory it is necessary to enlist other actors to establish the solidity of the sign. Just look at the debates surrounding grand unified theories (GUTs) in quantum mechanics. Entire armies of actors in the form of scientists, materials, engineers, and particles are currently being enlisted in the case of the Haldron Super-Collider to determine whether or not the Higgs Boson particle responsible for gravity actually exists. Will this represented actually speak when called upon? We do not yet know. If it does not, the strength of the “standard theory” will have been diminished as it will have been unable to establish the alliance it needs in order to establish itself as a legitimate representative. Like groups of the represented in social life that are always clamoring and filled with diverse voices, nature too is a rumble with all sorts of dissident voices at odds with its purported representatives.
Larval Subjects . 
August 17, 2009 at 11:49 pm
This is very interesting, and I’m sympathetic to some of your lines of thought. I find your alliance of ‘flat ontology’ with the claim ‘to be is to be an object’, over ‘to be is to be material’ quite problematic however.
I’ve always preferred to talk of univocal ontologies rather than flat ontologies, but as far as I can tell you are speaking of something similar. The idea is to give everything the same status. The problem is whether this common status all things have has any content. Put a different way, if being an ‘object’ does not imply being ‘material’, then what does it imply?
For instance, Quine has a purely formal conception of being, insofar as he think that ‘to be is to be the value of a bound variable’, or loosely, to be the referent of talk. On such an account it is _trivial_ that everything has the same status. Insofar as I take there to be true sentences that refer to Sherlock Holmes I am committed to the existence of Sherlock Holmes (in some sense). One could put together a similar account based on Husserlian phenomenology as opposed to Quinean philosophy of language, and simply hold that to be is to be an object of thought. But, this has very much the same problems.
It seems that you want to try to give some content to this notion of objecthood in terms of the kinds of relations that can occur between objects, or the ways they affect eachother. The most common examples here are causal ones. The problem as I see it is that causal relations are one of the best ways of picking out the material (for instance, one can hold that a city is a material thing precisely insofar as it composed out of, and enters into, causal relations). The pertinent question then, is what stops such an approach from collapsing into precisely something like DeLandean materialism.
For instance, DeLanda would not admit the existence of numbers, whereas Harman would be happy to. However, what kind of affects can numbers have on other objects? One answer to this question is to talk about cases in which I am caused to act in a certain way by my thought about a number. But this seems like a spurious form of causation. It seems that it would start to reintroduce precisely the kind of human/thought/language centric notions you are trying to escape.
I suppose what I want to know is: what positive content can such a univocal notion of objecthood have that is neither trivial nor collapses into materialism?
I hope this is clear. My suspicion is that there isn’t any viable middle ground here.
August 17, 2009 at 11:55 pm
I am presented with a sensory field. This field is not visual alone nor is it coordinated or static. I “pick out” a thing from the field and perhaps note that the range of available things that could have been picked out was potentially infinite — indeed since changing of another order of infinity (though I do not think these bear a Cantorian relation). The thing I pick has within its “borders” itself an infinite number of changing things. The thing picked, T1, is also permeable — indeed linked — to the field from which it is discerned. I cannot handle conceptually either the inner or the outer dynamic infinities nor their relation. How did I pick this thing? Was the picking not just impersonal but also unattributable? If the thing has a concept, was it resident or imposed? How did the “accidents” of the thing become inconsequent? Etc. In the appendix to The Logic of Sense, Deleuze offers a possibility but as “sense” related, closer to the human and as a “trace” closer to the paradoxes of the sign. I know this is another one of my confusing questions, but it seems you wish to have your flat onticology and eat it too. If things are not given, how are they taken?
August 18, 2009 at 12:46 am
All good questions, Deontologist! And questions I don’t have an answer to at present. At the moment I’m inclined to reject the thesis that all relations are causal relations, but a lot more work is required to determine just what kinds of relations these other types of relations are. I’m with Graham in affirming the existence of number. But just what that entails is a more difficult question. Hopefully I’ll work out some answers to these questions in the future. I will say that I do not see why dependence implies that something is not an object in its own right. Suppose we do ultimately conclude that numbers cannot exist without minds to think them– and I’m not convinced of this yet –why does this entail that numbers are not objects in their own right? Throughout the world we find all sorts of other objects that can only exist in and through other objects, but which are nonetheless objects in their own right. The city example I cite is a prime example. The city requires all sorts of other objects within it to exist. But in a very real sense– I think anyway –the city is an object independent of these other objects. There are all sorts of mereological issues to work through here. How is it that something can simultaneously be dependent on other objects to be while nonetheless being independent of these objects? If I’m fairly convinced that this strange move is necessary, then this is because I think we find these sorts of mereological relations throughout the natural world and not simply among human phenomena. The body of my cat, for example, is dependent on its cells but these cells are constantly dying and reproducing themselves. As a result, there’s a very strange, but nonetheless real, way in which the cat is something other than its cells and its cells are something other than it.
August 18, 2009 at 12:47 am
a nice anecdote of a nonhuman actor enlisting human ones in particle physics: I worked over the summer for a particle physics lab that had experiments both at the Tevatron Collider in Illinois and the LHC in Switzerland. I was looking at a graph of the cross-section of a particular event in the accelerator (basically the frequency of an event). It looked pretty much like a nice downward logarithmic curve (the shape of this: http://www.maaw.info/images/LearningCurve.gif [otherwise irrelevant pic found on google images]), but with a brief and short uptick at one point about halfway along the curve.
Apparently, that uptick has been present in the Tevatron’s data since the early 90s. It conflicted with theoretical prediction, and nobody knew the cause of it. This launched a frenzy of individual theorists spending hundreds of hours trying to come up with a theory to account for the uptick. Perhaps some thought that they with their new theories had uncovered a revolutionary process and would be famous.
Turned out it was some engineering glitch. Don’t quite remember what it was, but something like a screw or a pipe out of place in the accelerator. Something like that. Some of the world’s smartest people had been unwittingly under the emotional and intellectual control of an intimate object.
August 18, 2009 at 12:51 am
Dan,
If I follow your remarks correctly, they are of an epistemological nature, not an ontological nature. I am not making the claim that we can adequately represent objects or making a claim in the epistemic register. All I’m committed to is the ontological thesis that if something is then it makes a difference. Now, since I am myself an object, when another object acts on me or exerts a difference, it is nonetheless the case I also contribute differences in this inter-ontic relation. In many respects, the points you raise about sensory fields converge nicely with the points I’m making in this post about signs. A perception is an object in its own right. It is the manner in which one object translates other objects. There is no reason to suppose that sense-perceptions are verdical or share any resemblance to the differences that provoke them.
August 18, 2009 at 12:52 am
to be clear, I’m not this Nick:
http://accursedshare.blogspot.com/
, and if i’d thought it through better I would have used a different name.
August 18, 2009 at 12:53 am
Way cool Nick! I’m deeply envious! I’d love to spend some time at CERN. Glad my meditations here don’t irritate the physicist!
August 18, 2009 at 1:00 am
I couldn’t call myself a physicist, perhaps an ‘aspiring.’
Nope, doesn’t irritate at all. It only lets me understand it all better by seeing the view from different penthouses, I’d say.
August 18, 2009 at 8:36 am
I’m trying to work out precisely what your conception of flat ontology involves. It seems to be what motivates a lot of your theoretical work, but I can’t get entirely clear about it.
Insofar as you take up Graham Harman’s work, I can understand that there is a motivation to allow in as many objects as possible. However, as far as I understand it, this does not mean that everything is an object. We can be mistaken about whether a given object of thought is a genuine object, or a genuine existent. The problem I’m having is that both of you seem to want to deny that objects are simply intentional objects (any object of thought whatsoever), but you also want to allow that our thought about objects can play a role in individuating them as proper objects.
To make my problem clearer, we can use what is perhaps the most persistent metaphor for your flat ontology: that it is about putting all entities on the same plane. I’m personally committed to something like this insofar as I’m committed to something like Deleuze’s metaphysics: situating all entities on a plane of immanence. It is useful to sketch my materialist plane of immanence in order to get at the difference from your plane.
The plane as I see it is composed of different spatio-temporal levels, and the entities at one level compose the levels at the next level through mereological composition. This mereological composition is a strictly causal matter: lower level entities compose higher level entities by forming causal processes that can in some sense maintain their stability in the face of external forces. Everything that is can be situated on this plane, as existing at some level (being composed out of causal interactions at the level below) and standing in causal relations at that level (which inevitably compose entities at the level above). Thus there is a general test for existence: if an object cannot in principle be situated in such a network of horizontal causal relations, an veritical mereological relations, then it can’t be an entity at all. Numbers are thus not entities on this view, they are not situatible in this mereological network (unlike cities and cats and such).
I’m going to take a little detour, but please bare with me.
As Brandom has shown in his work on, the formal structures that underlie our talk of existence are all about situating entities within a fixed network (a set of cardinal designators) established by a certain set of relations. Brandom takes there to be different forms of existence insofar as different relations set up different sets of cardinal designators. For instance, he takes the notion of numerical existence to be distinct from physical existence, insofar as the set of numerals (1,2,3,4…) is constructed out of successor relations, and the set of spatio-temporal locations (which can be occupied by unique physical entities as far as he is concerned) is constructed out of spatio-temporal relations of distance and time relative to some fixed point. In essence, to prove that something exists either numerically or physically is to say which (numerical or physical) cardinal designator it is identical to (e.g., ‘there is some smallest prime number’, needs to be cashed out with ‘the smallest prime number = 2’, equally, ‘there have never been any unicorns’ means that there is no spatio-temporal patch prior to now which has been occupied by a unicorn).
I don’t endorse Brandom’s equivocal account of existence, but I find that it does clear something up quite nicely. To have a univocal account of existence is precisely just to have a single network or plane within which one can situate any proposed entity that pops up. The relevant question is whether this plane needs to be composed out of a single kind of relation.
Moving back to your plane, it would seem that you want to have everything that I’ve so far been including on it, but you’d like to build an extension that includes numbers, as well as others that include various other things. We’ll focus on numbers for now though. The question is: how is it that the plane of numbers (which are all nicely related amongst themselves) gets tagged on to the material plane (which is all nicely mereologically composed in a causal fashion)? The only available answer seems to be something to do with human thought, in terms of some kind of special relation that we institute (be it one of dependence or not). It looks like the numerical extension to the material plane needs to be tethered to the human. One could put forward a similar suggestion for the fictional plane. My fear is that this makes the human a kind of ontological hitching post on the plane. It gives us a peculiar ontological privilege that doesn’t sit well with me.
Now, this is where your discussion of signs connects back up again. I am very sympathetic to the idea of trying to get a grip on how it is that representation functions immanently on the plane, on the down and dirty causal interactions that make representation (and indeed misrepresentation) work. But this points out a difference between thought about ‘Soccer Moms’ and thought about the number 7. Those things which are purported to be represented by ‘Soccer Moms’ can become part of the causal explanation of how it is that the representational mechanisms function (or malfunction) here. The number 7 can’t. This makes the kind of thought or representation that is involved in the numerical case into something very peculiar. We seem to end up with a single plane that is nonetheless tethered together by a peculiar entity which can institute a peculiar type of relation.
Again, hope some of this makes sense. Very much enjoying the discussion.
August 18, 2009 at 9:43 am
This is an interesting topic. The quality (if we should call it that) of ‘aboutness’ has sent philosophy into many a cul-de-sac, both in the phenomenological and Post-Modern traditions and in mainstream analytic philosophy.
On the one hand we have signs within language, the ‘aboutness’ of which is seen to pose a problem for ‘flat’ or ‘univocal’ ontologies with a naturalist/materialist bent. How, basically, can the meaningfullness of signs be translated into strictly materialist terms? This problem has lead some philosophers working on the mind to posit a ‘language of thought’, but the problem is merely pushed up a level, for then the theorist has to answer how this language of representation is instantiated physically (it strikes me that this is the wrong place to appeal to emergentism..)
On the other hand we have the old and embarassing chesnut of intentionality/consciousness. How could it be that my thoughts, if they are just made up of brain matter, neurons etc. end up being unified and ‘about’ their object?
It seems that your approach is heading in the right direction for solving (or better to say: dissolving) these problems. ‘Aboutness’ in the mind or in the sign are not simple qualities in a straight-forward sense (like we might imagine height or weight for example). Rather they are a complex of relations between different elements in a system. Where humans are concerned, the concept of ‘disposition’ will probably be crucial in this analysis; signs have their ‘power’ partly because we are disposed to act towards them in certain ways.
If we take this approach, the question of how signs have meaning in a material world is no more difficult than the question of why people avoid the rain: dispositions developed through training, indoctrination, trial and error etc.
I’d be interested to hear though, larval, what your thoughts are on the ontological status of ‘dispositions’, given a flat ontology?
August 18, 2009 at 10:46 am
I guess you wouldn’t like Poisot’s late scholastic concept of ‘objective being.’
Anything is an object to the extent it is known. But in distinction to Scotus these ‘objects’ may mix up physical and ideal being – be imbroglios – and not be representations in the modern sense. And there may be many things that are never ‘objectified.’
But to say anything requires that they are ‘objects’ of awareness – even if suprasubjective?
“Thus, in a work published in Spain, during the 17th century, btween 1631 and 1635, the historian discovers the Thomist refutation [by Poinsot]` of the main physical and critical theses that constitute the foundatio of modern philosophy.”
Muralt, Andre de, 1985. Adequations et intentions secondes. Essai de confrontation de la phenomenologie husserlienne et de la philosophie thomiste sur le point du jugement.’ In: La metaphysique du phenomene. Les origines medievales et l’elaboration de la pensee phenomenologique. Paris: Vrin.
Poinsot’s conception of the coinciding univocal being of relations in objective existence, whether mind-dependent or mind-independent, is grounded in the primary object of the intellect, ens primum cognitum, as understood by Avicenna. The ontological rational or relation is univocal, neither physical nor psychical, altho capable of being either…Relations in their univocal being as ‘objective’ relations are neither ‘real’ nor ‘ideal’, altho at any given here and now they will be one or the other.
I try to navigate thru this in ‘The Primacy of Semiosis: an ontology of relations’ where Poinsot’s insight that relations (whose whole being is esse-ad – ‘being toward’) are signs is also developed. But it’s probably all bullshit.
August 18, 2009 at 10:46 am
Ooops. When I said ‘cardinal designators’ I meant canonical designators, as proposed by Quine. Misfiring neurons obviously.
August 18, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Lots of interesting stuff here, Deontologist. Before commenting, I just want to emphasize that the ontology I’m developing is not identical to Harman’s object-oriented philosophy. Object-oriented ontology might be thought as a genus of which there are many different species. They share the common commitment to the thesis that being consists of objects and that there are a plurality of different types of objects, while nonetheless differing as to just what objects are. Graham and I both begin in very different places and have different positions on the nature of relations and the structure of objects.
A couple of points/questions. First, in your construal of Deleuze I wonder how you handle his account of incorporeal events, especially as developed in A Thousand Plateaus. When, for example, an institution like a university grants a degree to a student, it is difficult to see how this event is physical or causal in the sense described by the science. Sure, all sorts of causal relations occur in this event. Neurons vibrate, bodies move, ink is inscribed on sheep skin, and so on, but the transition from student to bachelor of arts is not itself a material object. Moreover, no matter how deeply we look into these causal relations we never find the new object that’s emerged as a “bachelor of arts”.
All of this makes me think of Deleuze’s essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” written around the time of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. There Deleuze argues that the symbolic is a third category that is neither subjective nor objective. Symbolic entities are not subjective insofar as they cannot be reduced to intentional states in a person’s mind. For example, the value of money, while not a physical property of dollar bills or a chunk of gold, are not up to my whim. That value is something that is independent of me and that circulates throughout the social sphere independent of me. On the other hand, symbolic entities are not physical entities in that they do not seem to be governed by causal principles. Being a bachelor of arts affords certain possibilities to the physical body it befalls such as the ability to pursue a master’s degree or a PhD, but it doesn’t appear to cause that PhD or master’s.
In my understanding of the univocity of being the emphasis is that being is said in a single and same way of difference. All differences are of exactly the same sort in the sense that they are. In this regard, it seems to me that the thesis that only physical entities are undermines univocity in that it recognizes the being of only one type of difference. From a purely textual perspective this leaves me at a loss as to how to understand Deleuze’s constant references to things like the power of the false, incorporeal events, or the symbolic. Your concern seems to be that the existence of objects that are dependent on the existence of humans returns us to a human centered ontology. But I don’t see why that’s the case. Object-oriented ontology does not exclude the human, but merely argues that the human is not included in all relations. That is, it rejects the thesis that “to be an object is to be related to the human.” However, nothing here precludes the existence of objects that do require the existence of humans as a condition for their possibility. Perhaps the more salient issue would be that of how we distinguish those human phenomena that are merely a property of a person’s mind, from those objects that are dependent on humans in the way that water is dependent on two hydrogen atoms while nonetheless attaining the status of independent objects that cannot be reduced to the elements that compose it.
August 18, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Hi Paul,
Apologies for taking so long getting back to you. Your work actually got me into semiotics years ago and, in particular, got me reading Deely and Peirce. Unfortunately I have not gotten the opportunity to read The Primacy of Semiosis yet because of the price of the book. Is it available in another format? I suspect that I’d find much that is congenial to my own views in it, though I do not accept the thesis that objects can be reduced to their relations.
August 18, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Thanks for the response. I’ll restate my problems briefly, and then say something about my reading of Deleuze.
I’ve so far stated two problems:-
1) That I can’t see how one can have a univocal notion of objecthood without its univocality being a trivial matter.
2) That insofar as there is a single plane in upon which all objects are situated, it seems that humans must tie different parts of it together (in virtue of being related to both coffee shops and imaginary numbers), and that this seems to be a unique position that humans occupy.
On the second point, you are right to try and distinguish two kinds of dependence. Any sense in which the existence of numbers is dependent upon the existence of mathematicians would have to be very different from the mereological dependence of wholes upon parts. But this is precisely the reason that humans, or thinking subjects, have a certain unique position on this view – this kind of non-mereological, non-causal ontological dependence seems unique to thought. Regardless of whether we take numbers to be merely dependent, or totally independent, we give a certain kind of ontological privilege to the human, be it one of instituting new sections of the plane, or simply tying together existing ones through the mere possibility of thought.
I won’t say much about Deleuze, as I have to go soon and maybe we’ll discuss it another time. Two points need to be made though. On the one hand, I think that having certain socially instituted statuses is reducible purely to causal terms, at least from an external point of view, because social systems are causal systems. We have no problem thinking about the social statuses of ants as being causally instituted and causally affective, and we should have no such problem with the human domain (there is of course the internal normative domain of what such statuses obligate and permit us to do, but this is a whole other kettle of fish as I’ve suggested elsewhere). I don’t think Deleuze’s remarks about incorporeal events or the symbolic should be taken to be limited to the human, subjective or even intersubjective social realms.
Personally, I take his discussion of ideal events in the logic of sense to be about the structure of the virtual tout-court. Ideal events provide the underlying intelligible structures that are actualised in particular actual events (importantly, multiple actual events may actualise the same ideal event).
However, there is the issue of the classic ontological distinction between objects and events, or substances and occurrences. I think that Deleuze definitely has something to say about this but that it is not often read well. The fact that that I’ve been talking about material entities and objects seems to imply that these are entirely distinct from evental ‘happenings’. In truth, I think there is only really one category in Deleuze, where things that we’d think of as substances are really just occurrences that maintain themselves processually. This is sort of indicated in ATP when he talks about haeccaeities. This requires a lot more discussion though, and I don’t quite have the time now.
August 18, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Hi Deontologist,
I’m not in disagreement with either of your points. On the one hand, I thoroughly agree that the univocity thesis is a perfectly trivial matter. This is why I begin from the premise that if something makes a difference, then it is. It is a perfectly banal and trivial thesis, though I think a number of consequences follow from it. I even agree, for the most part, with the second thesis. The onticological thesis is not that there are not unique properties of systems or networks involving humans, only that human-object correlation does not lie at the foundation of all objects. Ecosystems are unique and special as well, with properties that cannot be found in any other network– for example, ecosystems surrounding volcanic vents –but this does not entail that all objectile relations are relations to a specific eco-system. In terms of Aristotle’s square of opposition, the difference between correlationism and object-oriented ontology can be characterized as a difference between the rules governing the upper and lower portions of the square:
The correlationist proposes a statement on the upper portion of the square of opposition: “to be is to be the correlate of a subject.” In its subjective (Berkeley) and absolute (Hegel) variants it excludes the possibility of objects that are not correlates of a subject (“some objects are not correlates of a subject”).
The object-oriented ontologist’s thesis is more modest. It begins from the premise that some objects are correlates of a subject. Where the square of opposition excludes the truth of the negative universal judgment and the negative particular judgment if the universal affirmative judgment is true, the lower portion of the square of opposition allows for the truth of both subcontraries or the particular affirmative judgment and the particular negative judgment.
August 18, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Very good, and helpful for a talk I’m putting together for the end of the month. The Soccer Mom example is particularly useful, thanks for it.
If I can take up deontologistics’s questions for a moment, on the numerical requiring an extension to the human. The example of Soccer Moms is maybe more helpful than numbers here, since the former category is clearly connected to the human. We have a precedent for treating such matters as entities thanks to Latour, for whom Popeye can be an “actor.” In my view, there is no problem with “flattening” human-concept-objects onto the same plane as rocks and numbers, since the point of flat ontology is precisely not to privilege the “origins” of objects in the first place. This gets even more delicious when we consider the fact that rocks and numbers and lighthouses might have their own equivalents to our own formal and fictional objects!
August 18, 2009 at 8:01 pm
‘I do not accept the thesis that objects can be reduced to their relations.’
BTW that is not at all the argument of PoS.
Fundamentally the thesis of Poinsot is that there are:
(1) relative beings (which are not relations but cannot be understood apart from their relations) and
(2) the actual relations these relative being are involved in.
This is ‘precategorial’.
But it all sounds v. dry. I can send you my last spare copy if you promise not to be rude about it.
But I would need a postal address! You might be interested in the way
Deleuze’s ‘sense’ is related to this – ‘so terrible in it’s neutrality’ (or something like that). The being of ‘sense’ is like the being of relaton. The chapters on Deely and Heidegger/Uexkull/Umwelten might also interes.
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