In relation to my post on Speculative Realism and Scientific Naturalism, Deontologist and I have been having a stimulating discussion on the ontological status of signs. I advocate the thesis that symbolic entities have real existence and are entities in their own right. Deontologist holds that this is a “trivial”– a truly unfortunate use of language –use of the term “existence” and that only material or physical beings can be truly said to exist.
The discussion began as a discussion about the ontological status of fictional entities like Harry Potter. I hold that fictional entities like Harry Potter are real. In making this claim, I am not making the absurd claim that there is a material referent to the novels depicting David Lewis where a physical Harry Potter exists in one of David Lewis’ possible worlds. Rather, following basic principles of phenomenology, I contend that Harry Potter exists qua fictional entity. Harry Potter is real as a fictional entity. The important caveat here would be that where phenomenology might make this entity dependent upon a sense-bestowing intuition issuing from the cogito— at least in the Husserlian formulation –I hold, following Harman, that Harry Potter, as an object, enjoys independent existence once he has come into existence. To be sure, Harry Potter had to come into existence through the agency of an author, but once he has come into existence his existence is as independent as any other entity that might exist.
We could similarly draw on Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” and Limited Inc. to make this point. In these texts Derrida arrives at conclusions that are surprisingly congenial to object-oriented ontology. Meditating on the conditions under which the grapheme or sign are possible, he notes that in order for a grapheme to function as a grapheme, it must be iterable. As he works through the logic of iterability, he shows that it follows that the being of the grapheme or sign cannot be dependent on the intentionality of the person that uses it or enunciates it. In order for the grapheme, mark or sign to be iterable, it necessarily, as its condition of possibility, presupposes the absence of both the speaker, the referent, and the addressee. Derrida puts this point dramatically, remarking that every grapheme, text, or sign presupposes the death of the subject insofar as it is iterable beyond the intentionality of any subject or any context in which it might have been produced. Thus, like Kant’s famous glove turned inside out, the object-oriented ontologist need only give positive formulation to Derrida’s negative thesis. To say that the grapheme, sign, or text presupposes the death of the subject and absence of the referent is to say that the being of the sign, grapheme, or text is that of an independent and real object that is irreducible to the intentionality of the person that employs the sign or the referent to which the sign refers. Neither concept, context, intention, idea, or referent, the grapheme enjoys an independent existence tracing its course throughout the world in excess of any relations it might happen to enter into. Hopefully I will be forgiven for considerably condensing Derrida’s transcendental argument here.
read on!
Where I contend that Harry Potter, being a graphematic entity, is therefore real, Deontologist contends that this is a loose way of speaking that fails to look carefully at how we talk about Harry Potter. When we say Harry Potter exists, what we’re really saying is that it is as if Harry Potter is real within the framework of the novel. Yet Harry Potter only subsists in relation to the author that produced him (and who Deontologist, contrary to most literary and aesthetic theory, holds has authority over the character) and the readers whom he impacts. Yet this stance confuses the being of Harry Potter with, on the one hand, the conditions under which Harry Potter came to be produced (through the agency of an author) and with the effects Harry Potter has on the reader. The being of Harry Potter as a graphematic entity is independent of whatever contexts it might happen to fall into.
Now, this entire discussion can easily appear rather silly. Why should we care, we might ask, whether or not Harry Potter is real? It is not whether Harry Potter is real that is at issue here, but about the ontological status of symbolic entities in general. Fictional entities are but an extreme example or limit case of this broader category of entities. Where we come down on these issues, I believe, will have a significant impact on how we investigate the world around us. In other words, ontology makes a difference in how we approach the world. Thus, over the course of the discussion, I shifted gears and instead began discussing the ontological status of things like cities. In a manner similar to fictional entities, I contend that the cityness of a city consists not simply in the material entities (buildings, roads, telephone lines, water supply, etc.), but also in these strange symbolic entities. Without this dimension of the symbolic, I contend, the city would not be a city. Thus, it is perfectly appropriate to investigate all of these material elements– this is one of the reasons I’ve been pushing Braudel so much –but we also need to understand the role played by this incorporeal dimension of the symbolic. It is important to emphasize that in referring to the symbolic as incorporeal, the point is that the symbolic is not a physical thing like a tree or a building. To be sure, symbolic entities require material entities like brains, sound waves, paper, computer memory, and so on to subsist, but in their being qua iterable, their proper being cannot be exhausted by these media in which they reside.
In response to this thesis, Deontologist writes:
I will question one thing you say here though. You claim that a city is a symbolic entity, and I’m having a great deal of trouble trying to understand what you mean by that. Surely (as Jacobs tries to show) cities (with their characteristic people flows and such) will have formed before we explicitly recognised them as such, before we had any way of dealing with them symbolically. In precisely the same way as economies existed before Adam Smith came along and we started representing them symbolically. I find it hard to see how the cityness of cities essentially involves their symbolic character anymore than the economyness of economies.
The only sense I can make of the claim is that cities involve symbolic interaction, i.e., communication amongst the individuals within the city is an essential part of it. But I can see no reason why this makes a city ethereal or immaterial in any way. Ant colonies involve communication amongst the individuals that make them up, and they are perfectly material.
Can you explain why exactly a city is a symbolic thing?
I see a few problems with this view of both cities and economies. Putting the matter in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology, as I see it the sort of analysis Deontologist is proposing reduces the being of the city to the plane of content and the machinic assemblage or relations among bodies, ignoring the role played by the plane of expression or collective assemblages of enunciation. Those collective assemblages of enunciation belonging to the plane of expression play a key role in the existence of cities, nations, institutions, economies, and so on and function according to principle different than those of the machinic assemblage. The concept of machinic assemblages is just a sexy term for relations among physical bodies or all those things that Deontologist refers to. By contrast, collective assemblages of enuniciation refers to the domain of signs and incorporeal transformations that are attributed to bodies. When one person says to another person “I love you”, this statement belongs not to the machinic assemblage or the relation between their two bodies, but is an incorporeal transformation of their relation to one another. Nothing physically has changed in their bodies through a cause and effect relation, but everything has changed between them in this incorporeal event. The point here is that the cityness of a city, while requiring all the bodies referenced by Deontologist in discussing the machinic dimensions of cities, nonetheless requires the plane of expression and collective assemblages of enunciation to exist.
It seems to me that it is misleading to suggest that cities exist prior to being recognized as such. I’m fine with the obvious point that at a particularly important cross-road an inn gets built, then a stable, then a general store, then a church, and so on. But this is not yet properly a city. At some point an incorporeal transformation takes place where a new entity comes into existence over and above all the elements that compose that entity. Just as my status as a professor is nowhere to be found as a physical property of my being, nor, in any particular skills teaching or intelligence I might have where research is concerned, but revolves around an incorporeal transformation that takes place in being granted a degree and in being hired by an institution, so too in the case of cities.
The problem with reducing things like cities to machinic assemblages can be illustrated with reference to Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind. In his famous example of a category error, he relates the story of a foreigner visiting Oxford. They show this foreigner the library, the dorms, the various buildings where classrooms are held, and so on. As the day concludes, the visitor says “all of this is very nice and you’ve shown me many fine buildings, but where’s the university?” The visitor here is making a category mistake similar to the one Deontologist is making, confusing the machinic assemblage of bodies with the university. In this regard, I suspect that Deontologist would benefit from reflecting on the critical conditions of his own project or what it is that renders his own project possible so that he might speculate in the right way. If such a reflection on the conditions of ones own discourse and their ontological discourses is so crucial, this is so that we don’t just sloppily fall into wild speculation in a way that lacks rigor and that arbitrarily endorses a particular ontological position based on, for example, an arbitrary decision to advocate materialism as a result of folk ontological prejudices characterizing our pre-ontological comprehension of being. For example, such an error would be made were one to believe that talk about how we “talk about” is somehow a tribunal against which ontology should be measured.
The being of the university, while certainly related to the buildings, is nonetheless not something that can be found in any particular building. It is another sort of entity entirely, just as a nation, while inseparable from a certain geography, nonetheless is something other than that geography. The point is the same when it comes to economies. At the level of machinic assemblages, we can, of course, say all sorts of interesting things about the emergence of markets. However, we should not forget that wherever there are market relations, the exchange of one good for another good is something different than the bodies composing the material assemblage and refers to something incorporeal. The fact that so many pounds of cotton comes to be treated as equivalent to so many yards of fabric is not a property that can be found in the bodies that are exchanged. Nor is it something simply in the mind, as Marx demonstrated, of those involved.
Rather, the value that allows the exchange to take place is another type of entity. Does it relate to humans? Sure. Would it exist without humans? No. Do these incorporeal entities require material substrates to exist? Yes, but they are no less incorporeal for all that by virtue of their iterability. Can it be reduced to minds or agents? Absolutely not. It is a collective entity that is neither a physical object nor an idea in a subject, which is organized according to its own principles. And without such entities things such as values, nations, cities, marriages, contracts, money, and, yes, fictional characters, could not exist. And they do exist in an entirely non-trivial sense that has all sorts of important impacts on the world. It will be objected that nonetheless these objects cannot exist without humans. Yet once again, all things being equal, stars are dependent on atoms, but the proper being of the star as an object is something other than these atoms that make it up. So too in the case of incorporeal entities like signs.
Larval Subjects . 
August 28, 2009 at 3:14 am
I haven’t followed all of the comments, so forgive me if I’m saying something that has already come up… but it seems to me that any object-oriented ontology is a positive feedback loop. It produces more objects rather than less. It is hungry, and reproductive. If there is some suspicion that something exists, then it probably does. For my part, I’d say that all the tenors of “Harry Potter” discussed above do indeed exist as objects, and that furthermore they are probably distinct ones to boot.
In a convenient happenstance, I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my keynote for the main international digital games research conference next week, the topic of which is ontology as much as it is games. Symbolic systems like videogames might be helpful in exerting torsion on linguistic signs, because they demonstrate how things are more complex than they appear. I’m a little reluctant to say much more about this until I’ve done my talk next week, but I’ll post it when it’s ready. For now, as an analogue, consider the many ways that the words I’ve typed in this comment exist. As signifiers, as signifieds, as HTML, as ASCII encoding, as bytes across the network, as electrical charges on an LCD display, … Objects are icebergs, in a way.
August 28, 2009 at 3:22 am
Very nice Ian! As Latour puts it, the point is not to make things less real but more real. And I think to this, following your observation, the aim is not to limit the number of objects but to multiply them.
August 28, 2009 at 3:50 am
Hi again,
I hope you will get back to the question I posed in the other comment vis a vis phlogiston — because your remarks above are quite relevant to this. The point I’ve been making is quite in line with what you’re saying above, to wit: the beingness of any object or term inheres not just in some sort of delimited physical boundary (i.e., in the case of a city) or even in some sort of correspondence with “truth” (in the case of the “phlogiston in this tree trunk” which we now believe has no physical correlate whatsoever), but in the combination of the sign or symbol and its language game or context. The reason one cannot omit the language game/life world from this is that something like “phlogiston” was a theory that in fact was in dynamic relationship with the world (in the “circulating reference” sense), it made predictions, etc., and as such the term “phlogiston” had some referential value not to an “actual” substance but in terms of the entire theory. As a sign within the theory, which was embedded in the real (Being), it had a certain beingness.
But the phlogiston *qua* phlogiston, by itself, I believe can’t be said to have beingness. It only exists in its total relationship — with the theory of phlogiston, as it was tested with respect to the world in a “circulating reference”, as a totality. In other words, it only has meaning and can be said to refer in any sense when taken in a holistic sense, with all of its connections to all other signs in the system that relate to it, and ultimately embedded in Being.
One could, I think, productively call this an “object” but I still object to calling this a “realist” ontology. There’s something fundamentally anti-realist still, here; I’d like to hear a more full explanation from you as to why you think objects ought to be considered to have beingness.
August 28, 2009 at 3:54 am
(In other words, I suppose, while I agree with most of your criticisms of deontologist, I think that if you’re going to include the symbol system as part of what you call the “object”, and also admit to fictional entities as part of your ontology, you’re giving up on the notion of correlation which ultimately brings us back to thinking in terms of the subjective and language games, etc. How do you then justify calling this “realist”?)
August 28, 2009 at 4:06 am
Hi Mitsu,
The difference is that I treat the entities as distinct entities. The sign is one thing, the machinic assemblage another. I wholeheartedly endorse Deontologist’s observations about machinic assemblages. There’s no qualms for me there. I merely assert that there’s (an)other object(s) involved as well: the signs. What I thus refuse is the reduction of the machinic assemblage to the sign, just as I refuse the reduction of the sign to the machinic assemblage.
August 28, 2009 at 4:09 am
Great post. I had a question, though, about your application of Derrida. I follow the idea that Harry Potter is iterable, but I’m not quite getting the next step to this making him an object, in the sense Harman uses the term. It would seem to me that the object in this case of iterability would be the arrangement of letters h-a-r-r-y p-o-t-t-e-r and not the fictional character, who represents one “iteration” of said arrangement. I could see, for example, my former literary theory professors reading the tales of the young wizard as being about a hirsute gardener or something.
In other words, I am wondering whether the object in question here isn’t the signifier and not the signified, as you, if I’m reading you correctly, suggest it is. The slippage that lets words escape intentionality and opens them to the myriad of potential relationships is a result of the arbitrary relation between s’d s’r, no?
Or perhaps I’m posing for you the city-vs-buildings problem in a different form. There are properties of the collection of buildings that result only from its incorporeal emergence as ‘city’ and, thus, there are sense of h-a-r-r-y p-o-t-t-e-r that emerge only in relation to the young wizard. Like, for example, the humor in comparing him to a gardener.
Even so, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
August 28, 2009 at 4:11 am
Let’s say the universe were to contain a rock with the word “phlogiston” on it, but no one who could or ever had been able to read that sign. What would the beingness of that sign be?
August 28, 2009 at 4:21 am
(I will add, by the way, that the above remark is not meant as a critique of your position that the sign is not reducible to the machinic assemblage — I actually agree with this. Information is, in some sense, non-physical, even if it depends on a physical substrate — this is again an idea of Bateson’s. But I do believe that it is important to recognize the context of information is the entire language game or life world, a sign cannot exist without that context.)
August 28, 2009 at 4:26 am
The difference is that I treat the entities as distinct entities.
*Nodding* This part is important and a bit hard to get used to at first, until it isn’t anymore. I’m sure that’s not helpful; it really is something of a conceptual break to make with scientific naturalism. I think this is much the same thing that Asher was struggling with recently.
August 28, 2009 at 9:09 am
Thanks for devoting a post this discussion! I must make several points though.
Firstly, I would ask you to remember that I have two independent theoretical commitments. I am committed to a distinction between real entities and pseudo-entities first, and my reasons for adopting this distinction are my reasons for claiming that ‘Harry Potter’ does not really exist. Secondly, I am committed to the metaphysical claim that what real existence consists in is materiality, but that I have a very specific conception of what materiality involves.
I thus have to argumentative strategies I’m deploying in my discussion:-
1) Trying to deploy critical reasons to show why we should not take entities like ‘Harry Potter’ to really exist. This is where my discussion of the different kinds of talk about fictional entities, and what we can draw from it, is situated.
2) Trying to show how entities which I do take to really exist (and which most people take to really exist) can be accommodated in a materialist framework. Here is where the argument about cities is situated. I’m engaged in this argument to defend against accusations that if I don’t accept fictional entities then I can’t accept other common entities I would want to (which would be a good reason against my formulation of materialism if it were true).
My argument is NOT that ‘Harry Potter’ does not exist because he is not material. Whatever materialist prejudices I may be working under might motivate my rejection of fictional entities (in a conscious or unconscious way), but they are not the _reasons_ I am offering for this rejection.
In the rest of this reply I’m just going to focus on the latter strategy, as the post I’m currently working on handles the former.
One initial point in this regard: You’ve endorsed not one but both of the ways I suggested that cities are symbolic. You admit both that cities essentially involve symbolic interaction amongst some of their parts (humans), and that there are no cities until we symbolically identify them as such.
I think the claim that there are no cities until we symbolically identify them as such is a real backslide as far as realism goes. This implies that when Jacobs writes her work on the social evolutionary processes through which cities formed (in the economy of cities), she is not talking about what you call cities. She’s talking about all the material elements (and the symbolic interactions between individual humans) without talking about the symbolic way we take up the city itself. For the record, I just think this is a bad theory about what a city is.
You don’t seem to endorse both claims about economies or markets though. It seems that here you’re just claiming that they’re essentially symbolic insofar as they’re constituted out of the symbolic communication of certain entities (humans) along with other things (most importantly the things sold). Lets ignore our disagreement about cities then, and try and work out whether an economy is not a material entity because it is constituted out of such communication.
I’m not entirely happy talking in the terms of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in part because in my experience they tend to engender certain confusions about what is going on in Deleuze’s ontology. I think you perhaps have too crude a reading of Deleuze’s materialism, and thus of my materialism also.
Signs and material entities are not entirely distinct for Deleuze. Indeed, one of the ways of characterising Deleuze’s panpsychism is to say that everything emits and receives signs in some fashion (as I’ve been trying to show in brief here http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/deleuze-the-song-of-sufficient-reason-part-2/). This is why the comparison between the ant-colony and the city or economy is so important.
The materialism I endorse does not treat the whole as if it is a sort of container of the parts, or a gluing together of static parts, but rather as emerging out of the interactions of the parts. As such, I am happy to accept that the university is not located in any one of the buildings, just as a the hurricane is not any particular grouping of gaseous molecules, or a wave any particular mass of water.
There are a bunch of really technical mereological point I’d like to make here, but I’m aware I’m running out of space as it is. Suffice it to say, for Deleuze, ANY interaction between entities is the establishment of a channel across which a sign is transmitted (i.e., any interaction is communication in a broad ontological sense of the word). This means that there are signs being transmitted at every spatio-temporal scale, and indeed, the transmission of signs between parts is what goes to constitute every entity as a whole.
The ant-colony is a perfectly good example here. It consists in the communicative interactions between its parts, any of which can ultimately be replaced, as long as the dynamic structure of interaction is maintained (there are caveats here, but I won’t go into them). Most importantly, the significance that any given interaction has is not just a matter of the internal structural composition of the ants that interact, but a matter of the structural features of the system as a whole. This is just the same as your description of how the significance of the saying of ‘I love you’ goes beyond the internal make up of either of the conversants.
Now, if we talk about the kind of communicative interaction which is unique to humans, we might talk about ‘symbols’ instead of signs. Obviously, symbolic interactions are very different from those between ants, but that is because the larger social systems in which they are involved (in terms of which we understand their wider significance) are very different from the eusocial systems of an ant-colony.
I don’t understand how there is anything about such symbolic interaction that can’t be accounted for without positing immaterial entities.
Let me put a caveat on that. I do see aspects of the ‘symbolic’ interactions of humans that can’t be accounted for in a straightforwardly material fashion, but I take these to be the normative aspects of such communication. For instance, the fact that when someone says ‘p’ they thereby commit themselves to ‘q’. But my other theoretical commitment, my distinction between real existence and pseudo-existence is meant to take care of entities that can only be characterised in such terms, such as propositions (namely, what is expressed by ‘p’).
In essence, my claim this is where my claim that the normative has no Being takes over. This does not say that there is no such real thing as human communication, it just says that some of the ways we describe it from a perspective internal to it, although perhaps necessary to that internal perspective (necessary to actually engaging in discourse), do not describe any features of the world. They say nothing about ‘what is’, although what they refer to can be erroneously hypostatized.
Thanks again, and I’ll let you know when my more in depth post on the other issues is finished.
August 28, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Deontologist,
Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps I am laboring under “too crude an understanding of Deleuze’s materialism”, or perhaps it is that I am aware that in Deleuze’s ontology the plane of express and the plane of content both have a form and matter. In discussing the incoroporeality of expression or the symbolic, nowhere have I suggested that it is independent of the material. You might have noticed, on this blog, endless references to mediums, for example, in the sense of McLuhan and in the discussions of memes emphasis on the manner in they must be replicated, i.e., copied into a material medium, to exist in the world. You might have also noticed that towards the end of this post I list a whole series of media or matters in which signs must be embodied. “Incorporeal” does not mean ghostly, but refers to patterns that can be embodied in a variety of different media. Elsewhere I have suggested, for example, that all objects are incorporeal. That would be a rather odd claim to make about my cats given that they’re pretty material critters until it’s noticed that what’s being referred to is the fact that the matter of my cats is constantly changing through cell death and the manner in which they convert foreign matters into cells, while still persisting as they cats that they are.
You also seem to miss the point about the relationship between machinic assemblages and collective assemblages of enunciation. The point is not that the collective assemblage of enunciation “really makes” the city what it is. The point is that the being of the city is doubly articulated or that it involves both a dimension of the machinic assemblage and collective assemblages of enunciation, where there is a form and matter of the machinic assemblage and a form and matter of collective assemblages of enunciation. In this context, if the collective assemblage of enunciation is referred to as “incorporeal”, then this is because the elements belonging to this form and matter of expression cannot be found anywhere among the elements of the machinic assemblage. They are a different type of entity than the buildings and infrastructure that belong to the machinic assemblage.
No. First, you refer to we who identify the city. There has been a persistent tendency on your part towards psychologism or a discussion of symbolic entities in terms of individual subjects such as in the case of your reference to ideas early on, then your reference to author’s authority over texts, and most recently here your reference to us identifying them. Not only is this an incredibly strange thing for a Deleuzian to say given that the collective precedes the individual in both his early works like Difference and Repetition (cf. chapter 5 of DR on psychic individuation as well as LS), but also because symbolic entities are not personal entities but a third type of entity altogether. I suspect this tendency arises from your adherence to ordinary language philosophy that treats pre-ontological understanding and how we talk about things in ordinary language as a tribunal before which ontological matters are to be decided, i.e., your correlationism.
The point here is a simple point about issues of genesis. Genesis is a transitional process between one or more entities and another entity. When I cook there is a transition between the ingredients that go into the dish and the dish that is produced. There is an important sense in which the dish is not the ingredients. Similarly, in our own solar system there is a transition between gases and the formation of the sun and the planets. There is a point at which a threshold or critical point is reached where a new form of organization is attained. This is no less true of the formation of a city. We can concede all that Jonas says about the genesis of cities, while nonetheless holding that there is a bifurcation point, as difficult as it is to pin down, where we pass from a plurality of different elements to a unified object. This is one of the weaknesses, I believe, of DeLanda’s thesis. DeLanda wants to make the claim that we should understand the being of beings in terms of their process of production. While I do not disagree with DeLanda’s thesis that there are all sorts of interesting things to be said about genesis, the being of an object qua object, its endo-relational structure or endo-consistency, and its genesis are two distinct issues. A good analysis of entities like cities– and I believe there’s a big difference between cities and quarks –will include an analysis of both the machinic assemblage and the collective assemblage of enunciation.
At any rate, the point is that fictional entities such as Harry Potter and features belonging to the plane of expression where cities are concerned are ontologically indistinguishable. Presumably you’ve driven into cities before and have noticed signs saying “city limits”. Where is the city limit in the machinic assemblage? Is it in the sign? The soil? Rocks? The air? You evoke the communicative action of the agents in the city, yet if someone fails to see the sign and, for example, carries a gun into the city of Chicago (where guns are illegal within the city limits) are they immune to the laws of that region? No. There is thus another sort of entity that is not simply the thought of a subject and which is not an element in the machinic assemblage. And this element differs not in kind but degree from Harry Potter.
August 28, 2009 at 4:00 pm
>The difference is that I treat the entities
>as distinct entities.
>*Nodding* This part is important and a bit
>hard to get used to at first, until it isn’t
>anymore. I’m sure that’s not helpful; it
>really is something of a conceptual break to
>make with scientific naturalism.
Well, allow me to say, again, that I’m still trying to understand this point, which I hope you’ll address. You seem to be implying in your language that these objects stand alone, without reference to either subjects or communities of subjects — is this your assertion? But a “city”, “Harry Potter”, or “phlogiston”, it seems to me, only exists in relation to either a subject or a community of subjects. Do you agree with this or not?
August 28, 2009 at 4:09 pm
(I.e., in your example of driving into the city limits of Chicago, the laws are only enforced by the inhabitants of the city, i.e., the police. For the entity “Chicago” to have any effective difference-making capacity, it seems to require the “substrate” so to speak of the system of the community. Note that here I am not talking about a panel of experts sitting there judging whether or not something qualifies or doesn’t qualify as “Chicago”, but simply the physical dynamic system of all the inhabitants. As a thought experiment, if you had a universe in which there were no sentient beings at all, but magically there were all the buildings and roads and signs of the city of Chicago, in what sense does the city of Chicago exist? How does it make a difference?)
August 28, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Mitsu,
As I see it, the issue here is ecological. Let’s set aside the examples of phlogiston and Harry Potter for a moment and look at examples from nature. A rock is dependent upon atoms in order to exist, but nonetheless the rockness of the rock is “independent” of these atoms. Moreover, the rock possesses the properties it has in relation to all sorts of environmental conditions. For example, were the temperature of the planet significantly different, the rock would be molten rather than solid. Nonetheless, the rock is an entity in its own right. Similarly, there are organisms in ecosystems that are dependent on other elements of the ecosystem to exist like certain molds and fungi that can only exist in the Amazonian rain forests, but these molds and fungi are nonetheless independent entities in their own right. There are thus dependencies all throughout the world. “Harry Potter” is yet another example of such a dependency. It can only exist in an ecosystem that involves humans, but nonetheless it is in excess of and independent of what any human might make of it. What I’m objecting to in your thesis is that the objects to which a sign refer can be reduced to the sign or language game. The sign is one thing, the objects to which it refers are another thing. They can be linked to one another but not reduced to one another.
August 28, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Mitsu,
I’d claim that the city cannot exist in the scenario you describe. Nonetheless, the cityness of the city is a collective entity that is neither a thought in a persons mind, nor a physical object like a rock.
August 28, 2009 at 4:44 pm
“And they do exist in an entirely non-trivial sense that has all sorts of important impacts on the world. It will be objected that nonetheless these objects cannot exist without humans. Yet once again, all things being equal, stars are dependent on atoms, but the proper being of the star as an object is something other than these atoms that make it up. So too in the case of incorporeal entities like signs.” Levi, in an odd academic way, I am crazy about you, but as in many intense and largely unrequited affairs, you also drive me crazy. Your argument with Deon takes place as between two positions but the problem is that yours does not stay loyal to its own implications. Is not this concluding paragraph filled with more or less tacit valorizations, predispositions, assignments, and values that are not “flat”?
August 28, 2009 at 4:49 pm
>can be reduced to the sign or language game
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere — I’m not talking about reducing an object to a language game or a sign, I’m proposing a third alternative. I.e., as I’ve intimated before, I agree with your general aim, but I think you’re throwing out more “correlationism” than you need to. The alternative I’m speaking of is neither pure “correlationism” but it doesn’t go as far as your OOO, it’s in between in some respect.
If you agree that Chicago or Harry Potter can’t exist as an entity without the ecology of the community of subjects, which I had assumed you would, then we’re getting somewhere. The third example, however, phlogiston, is the one I think really most clearly illustrates the difficulty. Is phlogiston an object or not? I think if you admit Harry Potter into your ontology you have to also admit phlogiston, not only as a fictional entity but even as something that in some sense “refers” to the real world — but it, too, depends on the ecology not only of the community of subjects but to the context of the entire language game. This is not to say that I am trying to “reduce” the object to the language game, but merely saying that the object depends upon its ecology.
But the case of the rock is the really interesting example. I would make the obvious point that the only sense in which the rock *as an object* makes a difference (in the sense that we select out that part of reality and call it a rock) is in reference to aware entities, life forms of some kind. Otherwise in what sense does the objecthood of the rock make a difference (as opposed to, say, just thinking of all of its atoms and their physical interactions with the world)? The fact that we select it out of the background field of the universe as a rock and then relate to it as an object, it seems to me, depends on living beings of some sort to take it that way, as a singular entity. At the point that this occurs I would agree that the rock then takes on an existence which isn’t reducible, in a sense, to the material assemblage, but without that, I don’t see how the rock exists as an entity any more than my example of the uninhabited Chicago does.
There’s an even more radical possibility; my friend Jonathan Tash (undergrad physics from Caltech, PhD in logic and philosophy from Berkeley) and I have been working on an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which one could say that the rock in a very real sense doesn’t exist at all without the presence of sentient beings to select it out that way — i.e., not just the rock but any localized objects in spacetime whatsoever. Our thesis is that the solution to what is called the “preferred basis problem” (which is: why do we observe localized object-like entities at all, rather than entities entangled and spread out across the universe in superposition?) is that this is required for awareness. If we’re right then the rock doesn’t really have any independent existence at all, except in relation to life of some kind, or in the sense of a potentiality in the background field of the universe. Of course, our hypothesis might be invalid, but I’m just throwing it out there as a strange possibility from the world of physics which can I think might aid intuition here.
August 28, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Dan,
You’d have to spell out precisely how such a claim is not flat. The point is mereological. An object is not the objects of which it is made while simultaneously being made of those objects.
August 28, 2009 at 6:08 pm
To clarify with a simpler case, let’s imagine a 10×10 grid of exactly equal squares. Now, suppose we were to select out the top right 4×4 sub-grid of squares and call it “booble”. To my mind, this “booble” has the same ontological status as a rock or a lichen or Harry Potter; it wouldn’t exist were it not for the ecology of you and I or other people deciding to call it a “booble” (in the sense of selecting out just that subgrid of the 10×10 grid). I think we’re agreed on that point.
I would assert that all of the examples of objects you’ve been giving are of this type, one way or the other. They all depend upon some community of subjects to define them or select them out. Now, you seem to have been asserting that, despite this, you’d like to call them “objects” with their own beingness in some sense independent of their dependence on this ecology — you’re welcome to do that, but the fact remains that in every case they *do* depend on this ecology. Isn’t that correct?
Acknowledging this dependence explicitly allows one to easily handle the case of phlogiston, as well; whereas not doing so leaves one I think in a bit of a pickle. I’d really like to see what you have to say about phlogiston, because it’s in that example where I think your approach and mine diverge (though I haven’t made it clear what my approach is, I will say it is, as I noted above, neither pure “correlationism” nor realism).
August 28, 2009 at 6:12 pm
It sounds like the position you’re talking about is pure correlationism. You write:
I’m not sure what the mystery is here. The sign “phlogiston” is one object. It produces all sorts of differences. For example, it mobilizes scientists and leads to all sorts of research experiments. Phlogiston would be another object. It just so happens that there is no physical object that the sign “phlogiston” enters into assemblages with.
Perhaps you’re not seeing the implicit contradiction in this thesis. On the one hand, you’re suggesting that the world is entirely different and that there are no objects in it. Your thesis, then, is that living entities partition out whatever objects it interacts with. What you seem to be missing is that those living beings are themselves objects that are organized in a particular way. So on the one hand you want to say that things like rocks aren’t really objects but are only “made to be objects” by living entities that perceive them. Yet oddly you exempt the living entities doing the perceiving from this principle. Yet what is doing the “taking as objects” for all these living beings that are taking other things as objects? What seems to be missing in your correlationist analysis of objects here is the notion of emergent properties that have organization that is dependent on lower-order entities but which are nonetheless independent of these entities. I am fine with the thesis that the rock as I perceive it might be very different from the rock as it exists in itself. That’s a big part of what the principle of translation is all about. However, what I do reject is the notion that the being of the rock is exhausted in the act of perceiving. It is still something that is producing that difference in my perceptual system and there are limits to the differences that can be produced. Unless you advocate some sort of dualism where living things or consciousness are entirely different than material things, I don’t see how the sort of contradiction I’m talking about here can be avoided.
August 28, 2009 at 6:17 pm
The example of “boobles” doesn’t work well because there you’re talking about individual minds, whereas signs are collective entities. Take the example of your social security number. Right now that number is doing all sorts of things quite independent of what you think about. It is in countless files throughout the United States, it is tracked in countless ways. All sorts of other information is linked to it. It determines your access to all sorts of benefits. Your social security number is not a psychological entity, but a collective entity that obeys principles independent of what any individual might like to make of it. You seem to be of the mind that simply because something possesses all sorts of dependencies on other things that somehow makes it unreal or less of an object. But there are all sorts of things that have this nature that nonetheless are entirely real and that produce all sorts of differences.
August 28, 2009 at 6:30 pm
>Yet oddly you exempt the living entities
>doing the perceiving from this principle.
Yes, this is a very good point! But believe me, I have not forgotten about this. It would take quite a while to explain my views on this in detail, but I’ll try to sketch it out here.
The reason what I’m saying isn’t pure correlationism is precisely because of the issue you point out, above. I do believe one can speak of some sort of Being that is logically prior to awareness or the arising of subjects. In this sense I am in agreement with you, and in disagreement with the “correlationists” (I keep using quotes around that because I’m not entirely comfortable with that term, but in any case it will suffice for now).
To go back to Brian Cantwell Smith (I know I’m referring to thinkers who aren’t commonly read in philosophy circles, but I do think you in particular would find his work fascinating), the way he would characterize it is that postmodernists speak in terms of what seems to be nearly pure relativity — but his view is that one can and should introduce a notion of Being that “underlies” so to speak reality. I agree with this maneuver which is why I do not align myself entirely with “correlationists”.
So of course I agree that subjects are embedded in Being. If you want to get back to the epistemological argument I was making before, my point is simply that we cannot know in detail what the structure of this Being is, for certain, though we might presume that our physical description of the world is in some sense probably related to whatever structure there might be. So of course I admit there is some relationship between our physical picture of the world and the makeup of subjects — I don’t believe in a pure transcendental subject, and I am certainly not a dualist!
All I am saying is that whatever the underlying *basis* of the beingness of a subject, one cannot know what that is in detail for certain, except to attempt to describe it in some language game or model or theory of some kind which is itself dependent on whatever subjective structures we have in place. You might say this is an epistemological problem and I’d agree. But there are quite radical possibilities here.
For example, one picture of the world which I alluded to above (the quantum mechanics interpretation Jonathan and I came up with) is that the universe could be some sort of underlying mesh of nodes in which topological feedback loops could exist (in a mathematical sense) which create what appear to be circulating feedback loops that allow subject and object to arise together, so to speak. In other words, one can imagine a logically prior Being out of which subject and object co-arise (not in ordinary time, of course), and these selfsame feedback loops then induce apparent space, time, objects, etc. I realize that is vague and I can explain it in more detail, but suffice it to say it is inspired by the physics question (preferred basis) which I mentioned before.
This is not pure correlationism (because I do admit it makes sense to posit some sort of Being of some kind) and it isn’t totally inconsistent with your view but it suggests radical possibilities which would place me closer to the correlationist camp than the position you are taking (as I understand it).
I apologize if the above is opaque; I realize it sounds odd, but all I can say is I’m happy to explain it in more detail if needed.
August 28, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Yes, of course, the social security number is a great example, I agree. But it has a function because of flows through a community (i.e., it functions as part of a language game). So yes, I totally agree it has a reality that is outside of a single subject. “Boobles” could also serve in this way if more than one of us were to agree on this and then start using the term in some way to interact with the 10×10 grid, etc.
August 28, 2009 at 10:08 pm
I’ve just put up my post on existence, pseudo-existence and OOO, and it’s drained me quite a bit, so I won’t say anything about your last response right now. I warn you in advance that it’s a bit long, but I hope I’ve at least nailed the difference between our positions on existence, even if I haven’t given a definitive argument as to why you’d want to adopt mine.
August 28, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Always remember to link: http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/applied-critique-existence-pseudo-existence-and-ooo/
August 28, 2009 at 10:19 pm
OK I will try to be a bit more explicit. Again, you conclude: ” And they do exist in an entirely non-trivial sense that has all sorts of important impacts on the world. It will be objected that nonetheless these objects cannot exist without humans. Yet once again, all things being equal, stars are dependent on atoms, but the proper being of the star as an object is something other than these atoms that make it up. So too in the case of incorporeal entities like signs.” 1. The “non trivial” while in reaction to Deon seems to leave intact a hierarchy of things or thing types. 2. “all things being equal” — oddly flatness requires that they are all different, not equal and further that their inequalities are not equal either so there is no same difference – I thought this is what you meant by saying at one point that the flat was lumpy 3.”stars are dependent on atoms” certainly within a valorization of a science and its prehensions, we can simplify stars in this reductive fashion, but such declarations off hand as “self evident” examples again hierarchize one version and instance of knowing. 4. “proper being” this seems more an ethical imperative than an observation — is there an extent set of “right” prehensions that allow us to stabilize the star and make it a fixity? “incorporeal entities like signs” signs are not incorporeal or at least no more so than atoms or stars. Your comment back to my previous also seems to me odd: “The point is mereological. An object is not the objects of which it is made while simultaneously being made of those objects.” Mereology is basically Boolean or set theoretical in character: things are not since their prehending elements are not set, constant, or even contained.
August 28, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Mitsu,
Your position is actually quite close to Kant’s. Correlationism is not the thesis that mind creates the world, but the thesis that it is impossible to think the subject apart from the object and the object apart from the subject. The two terms are inseparable. Similarly, Kant posits that there is something called being in-itself anterior to any subject but that we can never have any knowledge of it. The net result is that we can only ever speak of being in relation to a subject, which is the essence of correlationism or a subject-centered world. To speak of being independent of the subject is, under this model, incoherent.
August 28, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Hi Dan,
Deon’s point is that to say both a fictional character and a rock exist is a trivial sense of existence. By contrast, I begin with the premise that if something produces differences it exists and there can be no question of more or less trivial forms of existence where difference is concerned. This, I take it, is why “all things being equal” is a warranted expression in this context. If it produces a difference then it is. This is not, of course, a thesis about the magnitude of differences produced. In other words, the statement “all things being equal” is a thesis of flat ontology: that if a difference is produced then it is simpliciter. I’m not sure I understand your concern about the relationship between stars and atoms. In what way is their a hierarchialization here? I think the considerations about mereology are actually one of the more interesting contributions of OOO. The idea is that you can have objects within object in such a way that the object containing the other objects is, in a very strange way, independent of those objects and the objects contained by the other object are themselves independent of the object that contains them.
It might be that the term “incorporeality” is not the best term for what I’m trying to get at. Right now I’m vacillating back and forth. On the one hand, I’m inclined to argue that all objects are incorporeal, or that there’s a sense in which the objectness of objects is ghostly. By this I have in mind the manner in which the matter of objects constantly changes while the object nonetheless persists as a process. It might be that I just find this thesis appealing because of how provocative and counter-intuitive it is. I’m hoping to get a better sense of where I stand on the issue after I work through Suarez on substantial forms. On the other hand, there’s the direction I’ve been pushing with regard to symbolic entities where I could argue that there’s an important sense in which they differ substantially from physical objects. When I refer to signs as being incorporeal, I am not suggesting that they are not materially embodied (this is why the term is misleading). I am happy to agree that signs exist in brains, on paper, in computer data banks, in sound-waves, etc. The point is that the structural being of the sign and its iterability is the essence of the sign, such that the sign is not exhausted by any of its material instantiations. In part, I’m here running together Deleuze’s understanding of sense with an account of signs. When Deleuze observes that a battle is a sense that hovers like a mist over all of the soldiers clashing against one another (the machinic assemblage), I take it that his point is that the battleness of the battle cannot be found anywhere among these bodies but nonetheless haunts it like a mist that gives this assemblage of bodies the sense that it has.
August 28, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I’m having dinner guests over this evening and have to get cracking and start cooking. Making an obnoxious seafood and chicken jambalaya. If comments don’t get posted tonight it’s because I’m not around.
August 29, 2009 at 3:43 am
>impossible to think the subject apart from
>the object
What I am saying is that every object one wishes to define implicitly includes an information process; that is to say, every object you’ve mentioned (Harry Potter, a city, etc.) depends upon an information process (be it embedded in a community, an individual subject, a culture, a life form, etc.) The thought experiment of the quantum node world I was positing I believe demonstrates conclusively that one can at least imagine a universe in which this is strictly the case (and it may in fact be our universe), that is to say, where some sort of information processing loop is required even for inanimate objects to be said to exist (like rocks); i.e., without someone to name the “booble” there would be no “objective” criteria, i.e., without positing some sort of observer or God or something, to select out that phenomenon from the background of Being (whether you think of this as a sign or as a physical object).
Since there’s no way of knowing for certain whether or not the universe is structured in this way or not, there’s no way of demonstrating that a rock, for example, really has any independent existence without a subject, subjects, to observe the rock. In other words, what I am saying is the *object-ness* of a rock can’t be strictly said to be independent of a subject, except for the sake of argument.
Whether one calls this “correlationist” or not is up to you — it’s not a term I personally like. However, I will say a few things about my approach which I believe distinguishes it in style from most “correlationist” approaches.
The first is that I believe it is sensible to talk about the structure of mental process within physical models, even though I admit those physical models only refer to reality in an indirect sense, i.e., via the “circulating reference” of the entire model in relation to Being. The fact that we cannot be certain about the accuracy of the model doesn’t mean we can’t use the model to talk about mental and life process and speculate about how mental and life processes arise, and even speculate about other life worlds (for example, the life world of an amoeba, etc.) This is to say, I do not believe a human-centered viewpoint has to take any sort of primacy, and I also think scientific naturalism has a place — provided one understands the fundamental epistemological limits of scientific naturalism.
Whether one calls this correlationist or not, it’s certainly different from the human-centric style of correlationism as you’ve pointed out, and it brings in ecology, etc., as you’ve said you think is valuable.
Again I want to raise the subject of Bateson and Brian Cantwell Smith. Both of these thinkers are rarely discussed in philosophy circles I believe because they’re looking at mental process from a more scientific point of view. You have to think a little bit more in terms of systems theory, theory of computation, etc., to follow their arguments than most philosophers, in my experience, are comfortable with. But I think these approaches are very important to try to understand the relationship between mind and body, and to find a way of de-centering the discourse away from the human subject or human communities of subjects, which as I noted before I believe is important.
August 29, 2009 at 4:00 am
Oh I wanted to add one more thing about phlogiston. I don’t think you’re quite getting the subtle point I’m making about phlogiston. I’m not saying that it is akin to Harry Potter in that it is an entirely fictional entity; I am saying that phlogiston, taken together with the whole theory, embedded in a language game, embbeded in the world, *does refer* to the world in some sense. It makes predictions, and some of these predictions are actually consistent with observation. So in some sense one can say the entire phlogiston theory can be said to refer to the world, in some sense, and not be entirely fictional; yet the separated out entity “phlogiston” doesn’t strictly have a referent in the physical world (we think). I would say that, in fact, the same can be said for every other term, even things like “electric field” or “electron”, etc.; they all “refer” to the world when taken together with their theories, but to say there is “actually” an electric field “out there” I believe is incoherent.
I can make a similar set of arguments with respect to Chinese medicine; i.e., qi, meridians, Chinese organ theory, etc. The system as a whole seems to have therapeutic effects yet the individual terms in the system may or may not have referents in the physical world as we understand it. But the system as a whole works, it seems, to some degree, and therefore one can say it does refer in some sense to the real world. It’s just that the pieces, taken separately, may or may not actually “refer” very clearly.
While Western biophysical medicine may have a better correlation with the physical world, I see no reason to believe the situation is any different in principle. In physics this sort of thing comes up all the time; multiple paradigms with radically different terms which all “refer” in some sense to the real world yet have very different structure, terms, etc.
August 29, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Oh, it occurred to me this morning to clarify my comments again, slightly. I think the key thing I’m trying to get at is that one might tend to privilege the subject, or one might privilege the object, but I am talking about a view in which subject and object are inseparable (in this case, echoing Kant, and also echoing Nagarjuna’s idea of co-dependent arising of subject and object), where the subject has no special status except as part of a perceptual feedback loop which must close for the “world” and “observer” to come into being. My assumption, however, is that there is some sort of ground of Being, and one might even speculate as to its structure (via physical theories of various kinds), in which these feedback loops criss-cross; and because of this, there is no reason to privilege the *human* subject. In fact, even the notion of a human subject is itself just another approximate/questionable term within a language game, in my view.
The other point of simplification vis a vis “reference” is that I think it makes sense to say that theories or paradigms as a whole can be said to “refer” to the world, in their entirety, but one cannot rigorously say that any *part* of a theory necessarily can be said to “refer” to the world. Naturally, taking your ontic principle one can say this doesn’t matter, because you can still take the term standing alone to have “existence” — but in this case you’re talking about existence purely in terms of “things that make a difference” within a language game (i.e., relative to a community of subjects).