In response to my post on individuals, Ian Bogost writes:
Perhaps I’m being naive, but I’m not sure the concept of the replicator is even necessary? Can’t the relations between type and instance, or instance and instance remain, or not, and still be explained via the same approach to relation that one would adopt for relations between yogurt tub and spoon, or alligator and television camera? It seems that there is a strong philosophical (as well as rhetorical) reason to avoid special cases.
An object like “soccer mom” is an object produced through what we might call “memesis” rather than “mimesis.” But once extent in a particular context, can’t its existence can remain flat without trouble? Again, perhaps I’m being dense here.
Incidentally, one of the reasons I use the word “unit” is because it avoids this whole business of explaining away the difference between real and incorporeal objects.
In a similar vein, Asher Kay writes:
LS – I understand now, but I’m not sure I agree. Mathematically, an identity could be viewed as referring to the same individual, so that saying “A=A” would be the same thing as saying “Bruno Latour = Bruno Latour”. This practice introduces some conceptual difficulties, but the formal systems still work fine.
On the other hand, the entities being identified could be seen as conceptual generalizations of the same sort as “soccer mom”. When I say “1″ mathematically, I could be referring only to a property that has no object attached to it. Cognitively, our minds are built to subtract out aspects of things just like we add things when we stick a horn on a horse to make a unicorn.
This is the area of OOO’s realism that is most difficult for me to grasp. Mathematics is a conceptual domain – meaning that it is restricted to certain obscure and dark corners of the material world. OOO seems to speak of concepts (including mathematical ones) as having the same sort of reality as what we’d call “physical objects”. I agree with this, but really only insofar as concepts are physical objects that happen to be very confusing to perceive.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t see how mathematics is any more special ontologically than soccer moms.
I’m still working through these issues myself, so I don’t have any hard and fast position as of yet. I suppose one way of articulating what I’m trying to get at is by contrasting the position I’m experimenting with with that of Plato’s. In Plato, when speaking of things like numbers it’s necessary to distinguish three things. On the one hand there is the number itself. For example, there is the number “2”. On the other hand, there are inscriptions or signs standing for the number itself such as an inscription of the number 2 on a piece of paper, in the sand, on a neon sign, in a computer, in a speech-act, or in someone’s thought while doing mathematics. Finally there are things that are counted by the number itself. For example, I have two cats. Someone can eat two french fries. A group can celebrate two days a year. And so on. Drawing on Peirce’s triadic notion of the sign, we can thus distinguish between the sign-vehicle or number as inscribed on a piece of paper or as spoken in speech, the “interpretant” of the sign which is roughly analogous to Saussure’s signified and which in this case would be the number 2 itself, and finally the semiotic-object which is roughly analogous to the referent of the sign and which, in this case, would be the counted.
read on!
The number itself, the inscription of the number, and the counted, under this Platonic model, differ from one another. For the Platonist, there is only one number 2 in the entire universe and this number 2 is eternal and unchanging. Suppose all countable objects, whether physical or imagined, ceased to exist. The number 2 itself would still exist exactly as it is. Moreover, even if there were no one to inscribe the number 2 on a piece of paper or think about the number two, the number 2 would still be the number two. In short, the number 2 is neither what it counts, nor is the number 2 identical to its inscription. On the one hand, the number two differs from what it counts in that the things that the number two counts differ from one another. I can count two kiwis or two knives. The two kiwis differ from one another, just as the two knives differ from one another. Moreover, the kiwis and knives differ from one another. Were the number two identical to what it counts, then the number two would cease to be identical to itself and would therefore cease to be the number two. On the other hand, if the number two differs from its inscription, then this is because no two inscriptions of the number two are alike and, moreover, we can write the number two as “2”, “II”, “ii”, “zwei”, and so on while still remaining the same number two.
While one need not be a Platonist about signs or numbers, signs are nonetheless generally treated as having this threefold character. The “interpretant” of a sign is treated as a type like “the number 2 itself”, that is distinguished from the sign-vehicle or “representamen” through which the sign is thought, conveyed in writing or speech or zeros and ones, and finally we have the semiotic-object which is roughly the referent of the sign.
In experimenting with the idea of treating signs as replicators, I am basically pushing signs in the direction of a reduction to sign-vehicles and semiotic-objects, getting rid of the interpretant that treats the signs as a type over and above instances of the sign. I am having a great deal of difficulty articulating this hypothesis, so hopefully others will bear with me as I try to pin down what I have in mind. Reference to evolutionary theory helps to give a sense of just what I’m trying to get at. Despite the fact that evolutionary theory is a theory of speciation, it paradoxically does away with the category of species. Where prior to evolutionary theory– and I’m generalizing here –the species was treated as a type analogous to the number 2 discussed above, with evolutionary theory types of this sort disappear and are instead replaced by replicators.
What we have after evolutionary theory is instead organisms that have the capacity to replicate themselves individually either asexually or sexually, producing other individuals. Each replication differs slightly from the organisms of which it is a replicant. There is no eternal species or type standing above and indifferent to the individual organisms. Rather, what modern biologists call a “species” is, 1) a set of statistical similarities between individual organisms, and 2) a population located geographically in time and space. This second point, especially, is a substantial departure from the prior way of understanding the relationship between individual organisms and species. Under the prior model the species was outside of time and space and independent of the world and organisms. Under the post-evolutionary thought, species names a population composed of heterogeneous individuals that are more or less similar to one another and which is geographically located in time and space. When Gould refers to species as individuals, his thesis is entirely different from that of Plato. It is not that the species is always identical to itself in the way that the 2 itself is always identical to itself, rather it is that there is a real population composed of heterogeneous individuals there in the world. Gould’s point is that selection takes place not only at the level of individual organisms or at the level of genes, but that selection can take place at the level of species as well. For example, there can be a natural disaster that wipes out a species. Under the Platonic model, this sort of selection is not possible. Even if all individual organisms of a species cease to exist, under the Platonic model the species itself continues to exist just as the number 2 itself continues to exist regardless of whether anyone is about to think it and regardless of whether or not there are any physical entities to be counted.
When I propose to treat signs as replicators and individuals, it is something akin to this evolutionary model that I have in mind. First, what I am suggesting is that there is no type over and above instances of a sign in the world. Just as there is no species over and above individual organisms, but just individual organisms, there would here only be individual signs. Second, just as organisms replicate themselves by producing other organisms either asexually or sexually, signs proliferate through the world by being replicated or copied. Signs under this model would be closer to descendants of a lineage more or less resembling instances that came before, than tokens of a type. Just as organisms are one type of object, signs would be another sort of object.
At this point my brain fizzles out and I’m not sure where to go. To be quite honest, I find this way of thinking about signs, concepts, etc., rather horrifying and monstrous, but nonetheless I think it hits on something important with respect to questions of ethics as well as social and political thought. Because we often think of signs as types that stand for something else, we are content with establishing the truth of some proposition or grounding some ethical or political order. But if signs are like organisms in the sense that they must be replicated and in the sense that they are situated in time and space, then this is not nearly enough. It is not enough simply to have the right ideas or sound ethical principles. The rubber really hits the road with respect to the question of how signs, like organisms, replicate themselves or get themselves copied. Why is it that some signs circulate far and wide like viruses that suddenly appear everywhere? Why is it that other signs, while being really great ideas, are as rare as highly adapted underwater cave organisms that exist only in the underground systems beneath Death Valley?
When these questions are raised, the focus of inquiry shifts. It is no longer simply an issue of establishing the truth of a proposition or the rightness of an ethical judgment, though this activity certainly isn’t excluded. But now the question shifts to the dynamics of replication, how it takes place, what mechanisms increase the likelihood of replication, and what strategies can be devised both to diminish the replication of certain sign-complexes and introduce the replication of other sign-complexes. Badiou seems to understand this point well. When Badiou speaks of truth-procedures and subjects of truth, what he appears to have in mind are subjects that seed the social world with certain sign-complexes, gradually undermining the existing structure of signs and introducing a new semiotic regime or organization. Surprisingly, given Badiou’s hostility to sociologists of all sorts, Latour seems to understand this point as well. When Latour analyzes the new rhetoric invented by the scientist Boyle and the way in which he turned nonhuman objects into actors through his air pump, the emphasis is not so much on the experiment itself and how it allegedly demonstrated that space is a void, but rather on the replication of the experiment through the testimony of “respected gentlemen” and the repetition of the experiment as a sort of party game throughout Europe. The truth of the experimental findings is not enough, but rather it must be replicated throughout the world, creating an army of allies that testify to his observations.
This sort of replication takes place in every social assemblage from moment to moment and with the birth of every new child that must become a carrier for certain sign-relations. It is also among the mechanisms through which social assemblages are made to change. Finally, these strange objects enter into assemblages with all sorts of non-semiotic objects that both influence the success of certain sign-complexes and which influence these non-semiotic objects. For example, it is likely that the common appearance of sign-complexes surrounding vegetarianism in India and certain Asian countries has a lot to do with the manner in which much of the land was used for the production of rice. Rice, by virtue of its ability to yield multiple harvests a year and the ability to feed many more people than wheat. Additionally, as a result of aquatic farming techniques that constantly brought water in to fertilize the soil, there was far less need to cultivate the highlands and the mountains with livestock to produce manure for fertilizer. Where rice functioned as the staple food, the likelihood of sign-complexes surrounding vegetarianism rises. The point here is not that rice determines the presence of this sign-complex, but rather that non-semiotic objects like rice exist in an assemblage or imbroglio with certain semiotic complexes that increases the likelihood of the appearance of certain sign-complexes.
Larval Subjects . 
August 23, 2009 at 9:14 pm
If I may submit a suggestion, based largely on intuition rather than carefully analysis, there might be much in common between Peircean interpretants and Badiouan truth procedures. The problem, as always, is the analytic obsession of reduction to universals and general propositions, instead of accepting the ambiguous poesis of metaphors that really make the world go round..
Here is a note from a week or so ago from reading GUERRILLA METAPHYSICS: “the same SENSUAL ETHER that spreads between things and their visible qualities {that} will make possible the physical and causal relations as well” (154), is what Jesper Hoffmeyer has called the SEMIOSPHERE. In both Peirce and Harman we have, FIRST, OBJECTS: SECOND, the clash of intentional objects, whether called SENSATIONS (Harman) or INTERPRETANTS (Peirce;) THIRD, seeming to be independent of the Depths and Heights, we have the flux of surface ELEMENTS (Harman) and SIGNS (Peirce).
Anyway, Levi, very glad to see you un(re)covering your old Peircean roots, here. Best, Mark
August 23, 2009 at 9:53 pm
This is all quite interesting and helpful, although I’m not sure what to conclude immediately. I do like the kiwis, I can say for certain.
The original question was this: when OOO casts incorporeal objects onto the same plane as other objects, can the rejection of the type/token distinction can be extended to incorporeal objects. The question not posed is something like, is it necessary to extend the rejection to such objects? For one part, would OOO not conclude that the Platonic position of a formal type “red” or “two” is also an incorporeal object on the same plane as other objects? Yet, for another part, wouldn’t OOO also reject such a position’s transcendentalism, even as it accepted that the position is as “real” as cotton or Popeye? And further, wouldn’t the object-oriented ontologist also argue that these falsely accused transcendental properties are actually interior to the objects at hand, rather than existing on some other plane? Can they simply be whisked away and replaced with replication? I don’t know.
I wonder if the Zubiri/Harman concept of “notes” is of any use here. In Graham’s account, notes can be liberated from objects and treated separately, but only through metaphor. Thus the formerly-concieved universals are revealed to be just ordinary objects all along.
I guess I still remain unsure of whether signs pose a special case vis-a-vis objects, even incorporeal ones.
August 23, 2009 at 9:55 pm
I should note that Mark’s comment appeared while I was composing mine, so I didn’t see his before writing it. :)
August 23, 2009 at 10:40 pm
I think Deleuze makes a convincing case that the necessary condition of repetition is difference: Leibniz’s indiscernability of identicals from the other side. Count — whether number, numeral, or the enumerated — depends upon the identical through exactly the repression of the differences that make the counted what it is as a thing whether cognitive, graphemic, or referential. The absolute need for this error is constitutive of the analytic and the scientific. I wonder if it is not sneaking into ontics so that it becomes an ontological mereology?
August 23, 2009 at 11:21 pm
I’m not sure what the commenting etiquette is here, but given that this post grew out of the last one I’m going to respond to your last response to me there here, and comment on this post at the same time. Hopefully it will all make sense.
First of all, I apologise for some of the confusions of my last comment. The word ‘idea’ was perhaps poorly chosen. I used it because it was the word Quine used in the point he was making, and I certaintly didn’t mean for it to imply something purely subjective, limited to a given individual’s mind. Similarly, I should have perhaps avoided using words like ‘real’ in relation to the physical or material world. Getting that out the way, I’ll try and restate my major points in different terms, and then try and say something about this post.
The point I was taking from Quine is that one must do one’s best not to confuse talk about the referent of a sign with talk about the sign itself (be it talk about the sign-type or the sign-token). To make my point as simply as possible, I can draw on something you said in your earlier post on flat ontology and 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.”
Here you acknowledge that there can be a sign with a non-existent referent. Presumably, here you admit that the sign is not the referent. It is the sign which makes a difference in the world by mobilising all these other actors to search for a non-existent object.
My claim is that Romeo is something similar. If we admit that “Romeo has inspired many romantic acts”, we should not take it that some fictional entity named ‘Romeo’ has had some effect on the world, any more than we should take it that some entity named ‘the fountain of youth’ has mobilised many searches. It is the sign ‘Romeo’ (however we ultimately come to understand signs) that has these effects in the world, just as you take the sign of ‘the fountain of youth’ to have.
The point I was trying to get to is that the sign ‘Romeo’ does not have what I earlier called the internal properties of Romeo. The sign is not male, it is not from Verona, it does not love Juliet, anymore than sign of the fountain of youth can reverse aging. So when I was separating out three different ways of talking about fictional entities which seemed to talk about the same entity, I wasn’t talking about three different aspects of the same kind of existence. Signs are not fictional existents.
Ultimately, if we are willing to accept the analysis of the way signs that refer to non-existent entities make a difference in the world, then we can explain away the way fictional objects make in difference in the world in exactly the same terms.
If you want to endorse the existence of fictional objects above and beyond the domain of signs then one has to argue for the existence of the referents of one of the other two kinds of talk about fictional entities I identified: internal talk (where we talk about Romeo ‘as if’ he is an ordinary physical object), and external talk (where we talk about Romeo as a character within the story, with all kinds of special fictional properties).
Your best chance is to argue for the existence of the referents of external talk, but I think that this kind of talk could (and probably should) be incorporated within the theory of signs.
If one tries to argue for the existence of the referents of internal talk then I think you run up against insurmountable problems. This is because any argument for the existence of objects like Romeo, which have internal properties like maleness, is made problematic by the fact that such objects can have internal properties like ‘is a physical object’ (in the story, Romeo is indeed physical), or even ‘is a fictional object’ (in the case of fiction within fiction). The only sensible approach is to simply treat such talk as what it is, namely, analogous to talk of existent objects, rather than actual talk about existent objects.
——
Moving on to what can be said positively about the nature of representation, I wrote a little something about interpreting Deleuze’s theory of concepts that comes close in part to what you’re saying about signs (http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/deleuze-some-common-misunderstandings/).
The really interesting point we share in common is trying to understand ‘concepts’ or ‘signs’ in terms of an analogy with population dynamics. Here’s a couple ideas for fleshing this out more.
A species can be understood as an individual just in the sense that it is a larger scale process. What is this process? It is the process through which the population continually replenishes itself, it is a process of production through which individual members of the species are produced. In this, it is also a distributed process through which the genetic code of the species is mixed and maintained within certain tolerances, tolerances which are sensitive to environmental pressures and spatial groupings (producing adaptation and speciation, respectively). This consists in breeding relations between members of the population which both produce new members and transmit and mix genetic information.
We can understand communities of language speakers in a similar way. More specifically, they can be viewed as networks of individual actors who reciprocally influence one another’s behaviour through both implicit and explicit correction (this is not necessarily symmetric correction). These relations of correction are present in all instances of communication, which play a role analogous to breeding relations. They produce new performances, but at the same time they calibrate the way that the participants are disposed to deploy the terms within those performances.
On this model we can see how patterns of word usage are features of the system rather than as features of individuals. To illustrate, in such a group it is possible for an individual to innovate, e.g. to invent a new word, or use an old word in a new way, and this innovation can be passed throughout the network. But, it is not limited by the original innovator, in that it is possible for that innovator to eventually be corrected by other speakers. Thus the usage of the word becomes a feature of the system beyond any individual, and the stability of this usage (within tolerances) is a function of the system’s self-regulation.
This is however subject to evolutionary pressures just as populations are: new dialects (and ultimately languages) can be formed by the relative isolation of certain networks of speakers, and the concepts deployed by those speakers are subject to environmental pressures to adapt and become more useful (at least when the pressures are not regressive).
This is a fairly schematic story however, and there is a lot more that needs to go into it. For instance, precisely what concepts are is not touched on (the Brandomian in me says patterns of inference are the particular behavioural patterns that are most relevant here). There is also the somewhat Quinean insight that there is no hard and fast distinction between the reciprocal correction of one another’s word usage and the reciprocal correction of one another’s beliefs.
Moreover, we still have not isolated precisely what the concept is here, i.e., what kind of object it is in relation to your account. As I indicated in the post I linked to above, I don’t think it’s an object at all. I think the concept (or sign-type) is neither the individual uses of it (the sign-tokens), and I don’t think it is the process through which these uses are produced and regulated (the language dynamic). It is something which insists in the process, a virtual form (or Idea, or multiplicity, or event), which is governs the actualisation of the individual performances, just as the virtual form of lions governs the production of individual lions (while insisting within the population dynamic).
I’ll leave it at that for now.
August 23, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Dan, although I’m not sure I understand your last two sentences, this is a really helpful observation. In this connection, one option would be to take a sort of Hegelian route. You’ll recall his analysis of identity in the Science of Logic where he argues that the principle of identity would not have to repeat the “A” of “A = A” if “A” did not already differ from itself. Zizek makes a lot of this in his magnificent For They Know Not What They Do as well. Where to take this, I’m not sure. While I was already moving towards the thesis of the materiality of signs– that signs aren’t simply about something, but are something –your observations have helped to intensify this by demanding a self-reflexive move for onticology where the theory of onticology must itself be treated as an object among other objects. All sorts of interesting aporia open up at that point, as the question of just what a theory is comes into focus insofar as theory cannot subtract itself, within onticology at any rate, from its own ontological claims.
August 24, 2009 at 10:00 am
I am appreciating your discussion of the threefold character of signs. What I think is most crucial to keep firmly in mind is that something like identity operates wholly and completely within the formal system of mathematics. If you step outside of that system, even the tiniest bit – to imagine the number written down on a piece of paper or to talk about the concept of number – it’s no longer the same thing.
A common view of word problems in mathematics is that they show how the mathematics applies to the “real world”. In fact, when we solve a word problem, we first scrape away all of the objects; then we solve the problem within the formal system we’re using; then we translate the solution back to the objects. If we do otherwise, we risk invalidating the solution. Here’s an example:
“Nandakishor has three beans, and Meifang takes away two. How many beans are left?”
The question is phrased in a way that specifically allows translation to the formal system. It is *not* asked, for example, whether “the larger part of the beans’ total mass is left”, because there might be one gargantuan bean and two tiny, stunted ones. It might matter a great deal (to Nandakishor, anyway) exactly which beans Meifang pilfers, but it’s irrelevant within the formal system, specifically because we’re not talking about objects.
August 24, 2009 at 3:44 pm
The problem with the Logics — as I understand them — relative to this discussion (I have not read that Zizek) is that Hegel wishes to sublate the difference between the material instance of knowledge and its “content.” In the Absolute, the dehiscence is undone and one can become “really” scientific. Thus, in his review of Hyppolite, Deleuze starts his life long rant against Hegel. Thus too my last two inscrutable sentences about science and the analytic because for them the difference between the thing and its model supposedly can be “purified.” I therefore get a rash when I see concepts or narratives of science spring up in philosophical contexts as if they were givens that can then act as touchstones.
August 29, 2009 at 8:44 am
[…] Critique: Existence, Pseudo-Existence and OOO Over at larvalsubjects (in order: here, here, here, here and most recently here), I’ve been having a discussion with Levi about existence, and […]