Harman has an interesting post up clarifying his views on the difference between real objects and fictional objects. As those who have been following my posts know, this issue has caused me endless headaches and I am still not entirely sure where I stand. At any rate, as Graham writes,
In a number of references to my work in the blogosphere lately, I’ve read that I think all objects are equally real. This is untrue. I believe, instead, that all objects are equally objects. But real objects are only one kind for me. The other kind are the intentional objects.
These two kinds of objets differ from each other in various important ways. Real objects are not dependent on the entities that relate with them. They withdraw or hide from all contact. Intentional objects are completely dependent on the entity that encounters them (which, for me, need not be a human or even an animal). Moreover, intentional objects do not hide. Saying otherwise is a frequent and understandable mistake, but Husserl’s intentional objects are by no means “concealed” in the way that Heidegger’s are. It is true that for Husserl there are an infinite possible number of profiles of a mailbox. But it doesn’t really matter, because a mailbox is not a sum total of profiles for him. Intentional objects are always already present for Husserl (and for me). They are simply encrusted with additional, accidental information that is not part of the essence of these objects.
I suspect that I am partially responsible for this confusion as I do hold– or am strongly inclined to hold at this point –that fictional objects are real objects. Here it is worthwhile to emphasize that “object-oriented ontology” does not refer to a single ontology. Leibniz, Whitehead, Latour, Harman, and myself are all object-oriented ontologists in that we all begin from the premise that being is composed of objects, yet there are vast differences between these different ontologies. It is for this reason that I refer to my own position as “onticology”– which sounds like a branch of medicine that studies cancer, and I suspect there are those that think of it as a cancer –rather than simply calling it OOO. Perhaps, for the sake of clarity, I will refer to Harman’s ontology as “ontography“, drawing on a term he playfully entertained a couple months ago.
read on!
At any rate, some differences between Harman’s ontography and my onticology are readily evident in the second paragraph quoted above. With Harman I argue that objects withdraw from other objects, however I arrive at this position for a very different set of reasons. In my view, the withdrawal of objects is the result of the difference between dimensions of objects or Ø and O1. Within the framework of onticology Ø or the matheme for the split or barred object refers to the endo-relational structure of the object. This endo-relational structure consists of a system of attractors defining the phase space of an object or all possible ways in which an object can actualize itself. Attractors are states towards which a system tends, whereas a phase space consists of all possible states a system can occupy. Thus, for example, if you roll a marble down the side of a bowl, the final point at which the marble comes to rest is a fixed point attractor of this system. By contrast, the phase space of this system is all the points the marble can occupy as it rolls up and down the sides of the bowl. I argue that objects are split or divided– or in Harman’s parlance, that they “withdraw” –because no object actualizes all possible points within its phase space. In this connection, O1 refers to an actualized point within a phase space that the object currently occupies.
Similarly, with Harman I hold that objects never “encounter” each other as the objects they are, but again for very different reasons. Where Harman holds that objects have no contact with one another, in my view objects perpetually enter into relations with one another but never encounter the objects with which they relate as the objects they are. Within onticology, this inability for objects to encounter other objects as they are follows from the ontic principle and is what I call “translation”. The ontic principle stipulates that there is no difference that does not make a difference. From this it follows that when one object interacts with another object, the second object receiving the difference of the first object also contributes its own differences, such that the difference of the first object is modified rather than transported from the first object to the second object without remainder. Evoking one of my favorite examples, the plant doesn’t encounter sunlight as sunlight, but translates this sunlight into sugars through a differential process of photosynthesis. In short, the differences issued by one object always become something else in the receiving object. In this regard, it is not, within the framework of onticology, that objects have no contact with one another– they rustle against one another all the time –but that they transform the differences they receive. In this regard, I partially accept Leibniz’s thesis that “monads” have no windows by which anything can go in or come out, while simultaneously expressing the world about them. The difference here would be that whereas Leibniz appears to argue that monads do not interact with other monads at all, but rather unfold as a consequence of their own internal principle, I see objects as information processing systems that interact in all sorts of ways with other objects while nonetheless transforming the differences they receive.
Returning, then, to the issue of fictional objects, I have a number of reservations about the distinction between real objects and intentional objects. Within the framework of onticology, I, of course, want to maintain a place for what Graham calls “intentional objects” or objects that are dependent on a relation to the systems in which they inhere. My worry, however, is that treating fictional objects as intentional objects doesn’t adequately account for the being of these entities. In this connection, fictional objects are an extreme example of a more general class of entities that can be referred to, for lack of a better term, as “collective entities”. Here I have in mind things like money, nations, cities, signifiers and signs, corporations, police officers, college graduates, presidents, kings, and so on.
The worry I have with Harman’s distinction between real and intentional objects is that none of the entities listed above seem to fit his model of intentional objects. Whether or not something is money, whether or not someone is a college graduate, a president, or a king is not the result of an intentional relation. I cannot make something money by intending it as money, nor can I make myself a king by intending myself as a king. I am not claiming that these collective objects are not dependent on the existence of humans. I am perfectly happy to concede that without the existence of human beings none of these entities would exist. The existence of human collectives, in other words, is a condition for the possibility of these entities.
However, while the existence of human collectives is a condition for the possibility of these entities, I do not see why this dependence relation makes these objects any less real than other objects. Here I reason by analogy, citing two examples of other dependency relations outside the domain of human collectives. The emergence of eukaryotes was a necessary condition for the evolution of more complex organisms because they transformed the nature of the environment, introducing massive amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere over long expanses of time. Without this transformation, other organisms could not arise. The existence of the moon was a necessary condition for the evolution of much of the life as we know it on this planet to evolve in the way that it did. If the moon did not exist, the earth would spin at a far faster rate than it does now. There would be about four hours of day and four hours of night. Moreover, as a result of this rapid revolution, climate conditions would be far harsher, generating blinding winds and powerful storms. Moreover, in the absence of the moon coastal tides would amount to only a few inches. On the one hand, it is likely that these wind conditions would prevent the evolution of a number of birds and insects as flight just wouldn’t be adaptive in such an environment. On the other hand, it’s likely that low tides of this sort would have significantly impeded the formation of tidal pools that many biologists believe were responsible for creating the pre-biotic soup out of which life emerged. A similar point can be made about the earth’s electromagnetic field. Were the earth’s electromagnetic field stronger, it is likely that evolution would have taken place at a far slower rate as far less solar radiation would enter our atmosphere, causing fewer genetic mutations. These are all instances of one entity producing all sorts of differences in other entities.
My point here is that in these instances we have all sorts of dependence relations functioning as conditions for the existence of other entities, yet these entities are no less real as a result of these dependencies. The bird is no less real by virtue of depending on the moon and eukaryotes to exist. All things being equal, it seems to me that there’s little reason to suggest that collective entities like money or kings are less real as a result of depending on the existence of humans. Just as humans depend on the existence of eukaryotes but are no less real or autonomous for that reason, money depends on the existence of humans but is no less real or independent for that reason. Money is like a highly specialized organism that can only exist in an Amazonian ecosystem, but just as we wouldn’t diminish the reality of that organism by virtue of the fact that it depends on this highly specific organism populated by all sorts of other organisms, we shouldn’t treat the existence of money as merely an intentional object.
In this connection, I find that my position is close to the one that Graham attributes to early Latour. As Graham writes:
The notion that “all objects are equally real” can be ascribed, not to me, but to Latour in Irreductions. The reason Batman is just as real an actor as neutrons, in Irreductions, is that Latour defines actors as anything capable of modifying, transforming, perturbing, or creating something else. It is a relational definition of reality. And given that Batman can indeed affect other actors, by causing a heroic or sad mood, or by motivating the attendance of films or the purchase of toys, then in that sense Batman is real. But it is important to note that Latour no longer holds to this position. His “modes of existence” project treats fictional entities quite differently from scientific ones and other kinds. There is no account of the “later Latour” in Prince of Networks simply because Latour hasn’t published his book yet. He has a few articles out on the modes of existence project, but not enough yet that I can safely say I grasp what he’s doing.
But even in the early Latour (the only one we know in the published books so far), if all actors are equally real, not all are equally strong. It is by no means true that Latour regards any random superstition as no worse than the most rigorous theory. He simply has a different definition of what “rigorous” means than scientific realists generally do. He doesn’t think it’s a matter of the mind accurately copying states of affairs outside the mind. He thinks, instead, that truth is a matter of translation, and that translation requires allies.
With Graham I accept the thesis that the being of an entity or an object has nothing to do with whether that object produces a difference in another object. In onticology, if an object produces a difference, then it is. That difference production can take place in a thoroughly remote portion of the universe, unrelated to any other entity. It can consist in the simply “differencing” of its being in its act of existing. I am led to this view insofar as I hold that entities are acts or events. The issue of whether an entity produces a difference in another entity and the extent, scope, or scale of that difference is secondary to whether or not an entity is, and belongs to the onticological dialectic or issues pertaining to inter-ontic relations, not to the onticological analytic or those conditions under which an entity is.
Nonetheless, we can talk about differences in the strength of entities or in their ability to exist. Here there are all sorts of degrees of difference, ranging from entities that are capable of maintaining themselves durably for millions of years like stars to entities like Batman that are comparatively very weak or easily subject to change and modification. A king is stronger than Batman in the sense that the kingliness of the king is more durable than that of Batman. As Harman notes, this durability is a function of an entities ability to enlist other actors or objects in its ongoing autopoiesis or self-maintenance. Yet I need to flesh out the dynamics of these dependency relations in greater detail.
Larval Subjects . 
September 15, 2009 at 1:07 am
What you are doing here is v. valuable – altho as Graham Harman says it is superhuman.
‘In short, the differences issued by one object always become something else in the receiving object.’
Can this be reconciled with Latour’s claim that something is kept constant thru a series of transformations”?
“What a beatiful move, apparently sacrificing resemblance at each stage only to settle again on the same meaning, which remains intact through a series of rapid transformations.” (Latour, Pandora’s Hope, in the Circulating reference chpter, p.58).
Onticology can rightfully state that there are objects that exist regardless of being observed – But altho it might seem trite to say so they have to have been observed or speculated about for us to discourse about them.
Thus the Stengerian question and challenge reappears: when, and how, can we claim to be reliable witnesses for nature, rather than creating pure artifices? Such that we can say ‘atoms exist!
“This of course is a question concerned with the paradigmatic case of scientific activity.
How does onticology reliably claim which objects would not be transformed by being known – so that a la Latour – the text (onticology) does truthfully speak of the world (Circulating Reference, p61).
Many people currently think ‘genes’ in individuals make a difference. Stengers 2003 book on Evolution (with Pierre Sonigo) seems to question this. Individuals don’t succeed each other – they are part of a system that ‘oscillates’.
“The choice of a level of observation of reference, of a Darwinian individual that reproduces, is no longer critical: all possible levels are treated homogeneously…The hive emerges from local interactions, but also the bee. The Darwinian model is liberated ‘all the way down.'”
Can we say that Pierre Sonigo is a reliable witness for nature and speaks truthfully of the world? How would we know – when a community of fellow scientists accepts that he has.
How do we know when onticology is right in claiming that such and such an object (an entity that can make a difference) exists?
September 15, 2009 at 1:51 am
I also wonder if this is a matter of objects different in kind, in some sense, not merely real/intentional objects. Then again, Graham also holds that the real/intentional are two modes of being, not two different kinds of object (I think I’ve got this right? — I feel unequipped to say much more about it at this moment. I’m currently engaged in a re-reading of Guerilla Metaphysics, so perhaps I will have another opinion then.)
September 15, 2009 at 1:58 am
Hi Paul,
Thanks! You write:
I’ve actually written about Latour’s circulating reference here and more or less endorse his epistemology.
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/re-circulating-reference/
The common mistake of philosophical epistemology, I believe, is to think that knowledge is an issue of representation. It pitches the issue in terms of how it is possible for a proposition like “the cat is on the mat” to correspond to an actual cat being on a mat. Given that the entities in the proposition– “cat”, “mat”, etc –do not meow, eat, have the capacity to be burnt, and so on, philosophical wonders how it is possible for the proposition to correspond to the object. Latour’s account of knowledge, by contrast, is not– if I understand it correctly –a representational account of knowledge. Rather, for Latour what takes place is a series of translations from one stage to the next, whereby a chain of differences is preserved at each stage. Additionally, there is a significant experimentalist dimension to Latour’s thought. Latour articulates this experimentalism (not to be confused with Deleuze’s experimentalism) beautifully in Pandora’s Hope:
Within onticology, this thesis would be articulated as follows: an experiment is one object acting upon another object so as to produce a difference in that object. This is exactly what onticology predicts. Insofar as any interaction between two objects involves translation, there is no difference in kind between the manner in which a scientist translates differences produced in a scientific setting through instruments like the CERN supercollider and all the computers that it uses to process that information, and the manner in which a plant translate sunlight into sugars through photosynthesis. Whether or not the differences produced resemble or mirror the differences belonging to the object itself independent of being acted upon is irrelevant. All that is relevant is the issue of whether or not these differences can be reliably produced or repeated.
I think this thesis is the cardinal sin of philosophy since the 17th century insofar as it conflates questions of epistemology with questions of ontology. In this regard, it confuses the manner in which we translate differences with the being of beings themselves, but these two issues are distinct. I am not making the absurd claim that we can know the being of specific objects a priori or without acting upon them. Of course inquiry is necessary. How would we ever know how and why iron rusts without encountering this difference and then placing iron in a variety of controlled conditions to determine when this difference is produced. We only ever encounter the world, as it were, through the window of the manners in which we provoke differences in that world. However, while this is the case, I nonetheless maintain that we can know all sorts of very general things about the properties of objects at the ontological level independent of our specific interactions with them. These are properties that belong to the objects themselves and are not a result of our engagement with these objects. With that said, however, I present the principles of my ontology as a series of speculative hypothesis, rather than as apodictic truths. In this spirit, my forthcoming article in The Speculative Turn contains the following epigraphs:
You write:
The answer is that onticology does not make the claim that objects are not transformed by being known. Insofar as every inter-ontic or every inter-object relation involves translation, and insofar as a relation between an object and instruments is an inter-ontic relation or a relation between objects, it follows that there is a translation that takes place in this relation. The difference between OOO and correlationisms is that OOO treats this as a general ontological principle pertaining to all relations among objects and not a special relation that only pertains to the relation between humans or animals and objects. All that is necessary is that there be some stability in the differences produced, not that that the differences produced share any glassy resemblance to the object in-itself.
I would be highly surprised (and dismayed!) if Stengers were making the claim that genes do not make a difference. Rather, I suspect she’s making the far more modest claim that genes do not make all the difference. This is not an unusual claim within evolutionary biologist. Biologists such as Gould argue that selection takes place at a variety of levels (not simply at the level of genes), and argues heatedly against genecentric accounts of both evolution and development. Similarly, the developmental systems theorists argue that genes make a difference, but argue against the thesis that genes make the only difference, instead arguing for complex organism-environment relations where a variety of differences contribute to the final developed outcome. “Making a difference” can range from very small and insignificant differences to extensive differences such as the one I outlined with respect to the moon in this post. From an ontological perspective, whether or not something makes a big or a significant difference is irrelevant to whether or not something is. In short, the statement “makes a difference” is not the precious thesis that everything is important.
Here again I think you’re conflating epistemological issues with ontological issues. Onticology makes no claims as to what beings actually exist. How could this be known a priori? That’s an empirical affair. All onticology hypothesizes about are what general properties beings must have if they exist.
September 15, 2009 at 6:21 am
[…] 15, 2009 Here you can find LEVI’S RESPONSE TO MY POSTS OF YESTERDAY. No one has the blogging energy to keep up with superman, but maybe I’ll have a blank space in […]
September 15, 2009 at 7:08 am
[…] for Something Deep « Adam Kotsko, meet Mark Lilla Objects September 15, 2009 Larval Subjects has another great post up, which follows on from a great set of posts from Graham Harman on the […]
September 15, 2009 at 7:25 am
Thanks for the post. I think I get it!
Btw, yes it’s not that genes don’t make a diff – it’s rather what they make a diff to – until the next paradigm shift.
How do we know that onticology is a reliable guide to the general props of objects – if they exist?
Answer: we don’t know – anymore than we know if Whitehead is a reliable guide.
All we can do is give due attention to the logic of the argument…
September 15, 2009 at 8:58 am
BTW, thanks for the quote. Haven’t read Meillassoux.
Sounds like Deleuze’s ‘sense’ – outside. Or Ibn Sina’s univocal essence.
‘For it could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory– of being entirely elsewhere.’
~Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An
Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.
Altho it is a bit of put down on ‘contemporary philosophers.’ You’ve got to be French to be that arrogant.
September 15, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Is a theoretical object a fictional object? If not, what is the difference? When we speak of objects generally and attribute to them attributes in advance of an encounter that may never occur, do they exist? Is their model an object? When we use narratives of science objects — say rust or the moon — that appear here not experimentally or observationally, are these fictional things? If not, why? When we think an object through a “pure prejudice” is that a mistranslation or an object of a different kind? A projection? Before we know it is a projection, how would we know it was not an O1 of the object we attributed it to. Related: is the representation of OOO an object? What kind? Is it epistemic? If not, on what basis does it assert a relation with objects generally? If OOO is monist, where is Spinoza? Or why Leibniz? I fear these questions may not be helpful themselves, but they are not merely rhetorical: they suggest a huge range — perhaps — of issues that are as yet unclear (at least to me).
September 16, 2009 at 1:36 am
Dan,
The issues are unclear to me and I’m trying to work through them. The most readily answered question is your one about Spinoza and Leibniz. OOO is not monist if, by monism, you mean that there only exists one substance. I take it, rather, that OOO is Lucretian in its orientation in that it begins from the premise that the universe is composed of discrete objects. Unlike Lucretius, however, it does not endorse the thesis that there are objects or entities that are the smallest possible units and that are eternal and composed of nothing else. Consequently, if OOO sides with Leibniz rather than Spinoza, this is because it rejects the thesis that all objects are a part of a single substance. There is not substance but rather substances. The idea is that to be an object is to be autonomous and independent of any relations it might entertain to other objects.
The reason I place particular emphasis on the reality of fictional objects is that these are objects that have being independent of their referent. Where fictional objects are concerned, the issue of whether or not there’s a physical Batman that corresponds to the fictional object Batman is irrelevant. Fiction brackets the referent. Consequently, the point isn’t that all collective or symbolic entities are fictional. Rather, the focus on the fictional object allows us to discover certain properties of symbolic objects, how they are organized, how they function, and so on.
If you readily have access to it, I highly recommend reading Latour’s Irreductions as it sheds a lot of light on these issues and what is at stake. You can find it in the second half of The Pasteurization of France. It is short, beautifully written, and full of all sorts of nuggets. Latour argues that while all beings, whether fictional or not, are real they are nonetheless not equally real. That is, there are degrees of strength that define the degree of reality a being possesses. For Latour these degrees of strength are not intrinsic features of an object, but can fluctuate over the lifespan of the object. According to Latour, an object becomes stronger by enlisting allies that support it. A plant, for example, is durable and stronger by enlisting all sorts of other actors in its environment such as the nutrients of its soil, sunlight, water, and so on. An army becomes more real by forming a well organized, yet flexible chain of command and by enlisting well supported supply lines. Similarly, a theory ranges from the very weak to the very strong. A very weak theory would be the thesis that everything in the universe doubles twice in size every two minutes. If this theory has a lower degree of reality than the genetic theory of development, then this is because it is very difficult for this theory to enlist nonhuman actors to support itself. What possible evidence could be adduced to support the theory? By contrast, the genetic theory of development is much stronger, much more durable, because the theory is able to enlist all sorts of allies to strengthen it. For example, we now play with genes like the characters play with culture in Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, taking genes from fish, splicing them with tomatoes so as to create tomatoes that are more pest resistant or that are more lustrous in their redness or that are tastier or that last longer and so on, or there are instances where we turn off certain genes in mice and observing that this creates a profound phenotypical difference by producing a mouse three times the size of ordinary mice, and so on. These mice, these tomatoes, the instruments used, chickens that grow fangs or additional vertebrae as a result of having genes turned on or off and so on are actors or objects that the theory enlists to strengthen itself. Just as in the game of Go where a disk becomes more powerful or stronger in relation to the other disks it relates to– gaining the capacity to encircle disks of another color and capture them –the more objects an object can enlist, the stronger, more durable, or “more real” it becomes. Put otherwise, the scope of the differences it produces expands as a result of the formation of these alliances. Additionally, it becomes increasingly immune to other dissident differences that would demolish the entity.
By this criteria I think we can define a whole range of degrees between absolute fiction and very strong theories, with a number of intermediaries in between. An absolute fiction is an entity that possesses very few alliances with other entities and therefore is not very resistant to change and destruction. I am told that Camus’ Stranger is a rewriting of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Mersault is Raskolnikov, the murder of the Arab is the murder of the old female pawn broker. If the object Crime and Punishment is susceptible to such easy modification or transformation, then this is because it enlists very few objects outside of itself and is therefore easily susceptible to change. Compare this with the humor theory of sickness. It took a long time to overturn the theory of sickness arguing that disease was the result of an imbalance in the four humors. Why? Because the theory of an imbalance in the humors was a good theory in the precise sense that it was able to enlist a number of other objects to strengthen itself. On the one hand, it was able to enlist actors such as the presence of snot, chronic diahrrea, vomiting, and so on that often accompany sickness. On the other hand, a number of patients often survived after they were filled with liquids, denied liquids, or bled. All of this rendered the theory more “real” or a stronger actor in the world. The issue is the same with all theories. For the theory to gain in strength it is necessary for it to enlist other objects at both the level of evidence and at the level of other supporters. We have an entire range of degrees between very strong theories and pure fictions, which are themselves all objects by virtue of the fact that they themselves act in the world as well. The doctor, for example, bleeds the patient as a result of the humor theory of disease and even today football players try to refrain from sex or masturbation before games.
September 16, 2009 at 11:22 am
I gather OOO stands diametrically opposed to Husserlian idealism, but… ‘onticology’ does sound similar or at least proximate to ‘regional ontologies’. Also, does the Latourian idea of more or less real objects find some kind of resonance with Husserl’s essences or ‘regions’ (which vary in terms of their generality)?
Apologies, incidentally, for the comparison of philosophies- which can often read as thesis paper trickery (“Husserl=Wittgenstein!”). But I am just now reading Levinas on Husserl, and his explanations of things like the relation of genus to form do seem remarkably pertinent to some of the discussions here. Even the differences are fascinating.
September 16, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Levi, one of my many admirations of you is your ability to produce text faster than I can respond. This of course is also an enormous frustration on my end. I have to meet students soon, so what follows is weak but maybe hints.
If OOO is not monist but a kind of atomism of scales, then one might ask how the things prehend each other in their differences. The interstices between — always mutual??? — prehensions form a connection of relation, translation, etc. but these occur in what? Your model of things seems discontinuous where convenient in the portrayal of object independence but also seems to suggest that objects are affective — their impersonal “knowing” (sorry I think the relation between the ontological and epistemic is more complicated than your story so far has provided – at least as I understand it) of each other which suggests a version of the contiguity which forms their relation. Forces in the physical models you appeal to work in-discretely over distance and thus seem to undercut the ideas of object independence and led, in part (I am not a historian of science) to the notions of fields and the sense of the illusory character of “Newtonian” objects. I have read before — too fast — the Latour and it reminds me of the Ethics but where we start at the “attributes” rather than substance level — down one order of generality. Nonetheless the Spinoza model seems more likely if we insert a Deleuzian “substance” instead of God/nature- this would be a monism of autopoetic differencing. You mention Lucretius and the difference is that the swerve would be everywhere and always. On fictional objects — my emphasis goes the opposite way from yours and farther I think from Harman — that if all objects appear only in those translated prehensions that “arrive” in the translator, then what we know of any object is always unequivalent to its potentialities (maybe close to the virtual/ actual in Deleuze). Thus the entity we name as the object must be always a fiction of that object’s multiplicity (not essence). For Spinoza, the actuality of objects can be judged by their power of affecting and measured by the multiplicity that arrives at the “receiver” and this strikes me as a good measure — the conatus of the object in manifest in its multiple (this is not I think Badiou though the vocab is close).
September 17, 2009 at 12:07 am
Hey Levi,
In your comment to Dan above you state:
“Unlike Lucretius, however, it does not endorse the thesis that there are objects or entities that are the smallest possible units and that are eternal and composed of nothing else.”
My question is how does OOO handle the Standard Model of particle physics? I’m guessing your philosophy works well since you say “substances” rather than a single substance” but doesn’t the Standard Model cut off the line of turtles all the way down?
I don’t know…just curious.
September 17, 2009 at 1:24 am
Hi NrG,
I think the answer to this question lies in the point that OOO is not a materialism but a realism. Within my onticology, the sole criteria for existing is the production of differences. These differences need not be physical differences. In this respect, OOO is a slutty ontology or a promiscuous ontology, as it affirms the existence of a wide variety of objects, not all of which are physical. It might very well turn out that there are smallest possible particles within physics (it’s an empirical question, not a question that can be answered a priori), but since the real is not exhausted by the material such a discovery would not undermine the infinite decomposibility of being. You might find Ian Bogost’s work– especially Unit Operations –interesting in this connection. He works heavily with set theory in the development of his own object-oriented rhetorical and technological analysis.
September 17, 2009 at 1:40 am
Thanks, I’ll have to check that out. I only ask because I got the chance today to listen to a professor discuss his work on the LHC and the mystery of mass. And I couldn’t help but think of OOP/OOO.
September 17, 2009 at 2:07 am
I’m never sure why “turtles all the way down” is supposed to be more absurd than “the turtle at the bottom of the world”.
But Levi makes a good point that there might be a final *physical* particle without there being a final *ontological* one.
September 17, 2009 at 6:01 am
Wow, it’s all going to be about definitions.
For the finest hist of discrete scillations seeThomas Kuhn’s 1972 “Black-Body Theory and the
Quantum Discontinuity, 1894
-1912.”
In the Stengers essay ‘ Turtles all the way down’ (in Power and Invention: situation science) the turtle story is told to William James by an old lady. Were does it come from? I google now:
‘Philosophical allusion to the story goes back at least as far as John Locke. In his 1690 tract An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke compares one who would say that properties inhere in “substance” to the Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise “but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied — something, he knew not what.’
‘There are references in various Indian classical texts, including the myth that Vishnu’s second avatar was Kurma, a tortoise on whose back the Mandara mountain rested, or that the tortoise Chukwa supports the elephant Maha-pudma who upholds the world.’
The interesting thing is, as Stengers notes, a reply to such an assertion demands some consideration. ‘At what stage are we?…What do we know and where are we, in this anecdote?’
‘And the starting from that point, the question has to be asked: is there much difference between the old lady’s turtles and the fundamental laws of physics, if from these laws a physicist can claim that the totality of phenomena can in principle be understood…
‘I wanted to tell the anecdote of the turtle so that these slow and obstinate, prehistoric-looking creatures might remind us of how much we are today the unaware prisoners of a few powerfull formalized languages…
What is also relevant for onticology in this essay is a reference to mathematical representations of physiochemical systems used to speak about systems defined by physicochemical processes. ‘Here’s there no problem of legitimacy. However, this is not at all the case when modelizations address themselves to other types of systems…’
‘As soon as a choice is made between the interactions that one takes into account and those that are neglected – given the responsibility of ‘fluctuations,’ that is, the uncontrolled variability of individual behaviours – an inevitable risk occurs.’
Anyway, I recomment the essay simply for the translation which is, to put it bluntly, brilliant.
I would also recommend the untranlated Cosmopolitiques. I am reviewing Tome 6 (they are short) ‘La vie et l’artifice:visages de l’emergence.
Stengers makes some interesting comments about Gilbert Simondon’s concept of transduction. This became popular with thesis writers looking for material in Deleuze. It’s exciting to find something no-one has apparently given any attention to in English!
De toute facon, Stengers aims in on those who think the production of an infant having an individuated relation to language responds to the ‘same’ problem as the genesis of a crystal…
Where angels fear to tread.
Just for the record I came accross a nice line from Maturana today stating that the first task was to point to the organization that makes a living system a system that actively determines its invariant class identity.
There is also Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, and Francisco Varela. 1992. ‘Understanding Origins: an introduction’ (in Understanding Origins: contemporary Views on the Origin of Life, Mind, and Society).
I remember the essay having something to say about Derrida (and how he might have been interested in how something changes to remain the same) but I don’t have a copy now.
I still wonder if an onticology concerned with the general properties of objects will, by that very analysis, miss something that is not general and may only apply to certain objects – empsyched ones. That is like most ontologies, it will be blind to cadacualtez (the spanish neologism for each-onehood). It is, of course googleable).
‘This indeed constitutes téen pleísteen fysikeé aporían, the hardest problem in the investigation of natural reality.
Why one, finite observer, finds oneself thrown to experience “one’s” corporal and historical circumstance instead of another, finding oneself to be a human or a cat, captive of an inexorable contour and acting and building biographical memory inexchangeably tied to one’s congenital epoch or bounded series of resolved moments, culture, family, biospecies’ life history, genotype, or eventual personal disability, whether mild or severe, bodily or intellectual?’ (Mario Crocco, Palindrome).
September 17, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Let me start again maybe where Paul ends. How does individual reference work in OOO — the haecceity of “this”?
September 17, 2009 at 11:59 pm
i agree, a herakleios de o grammatistes!
“Attractors are states towards which a system tends, whereas a phase space consists of all possible states a system can occupy. Thus, for example, if you roll a marble down the side of a bowl, the final point at which the marble comes to rest is a fixed point attractor of this system.”
would it be correct to say that the location of a fixed-point attractor, for any system, would be dependent on the total system of relations; so that, for an object, as the phase space encompasses the entire object, an attractor must be potentially any point on/in the object. leading to another question: taking for granted a fixed-point attractor, wouldn’t there also need to be a non-fixed-point attractor? as in the marble example, there would be the fixed-point, but leading to it, the marble rolls to that point in a not-set path, but a likely predictable one that is dictated by bowl, marble, table, temperature, etc.
September 18, 2009 at 12:41 am
Dan,
I’m not sure I understand your question about reference. Moreover, this is an epistemological rather than an ontological issue anyway. I keep repeating this distinction, yet others strangely keep bringing it up and conflating the two modes of discourse. Anyway, moving on:
I haven’t taken a position on this issue, but I don’t see why there has to be a plenum in order for entities to relate to one another. A void could do just fine. You keep invoking “prehensions”. Aren’t you aware that Whitehead is an atomistic pluralist and not a monist? For Whitehead the universe is made up of actual occasions which are atoms. There is no single “substance” in the Deleuzian or Spinozist sense in which all these actual occasions inhere. He seems to find no difficulty in giving an account of how one actual occasion prehends another.
I am not sure why. I have never made the claim that objects do not enter into relations with one another. I have only made the claim that objects are not their relations. Inverting Deleuze’s expression, objects are external to their relations. Nothing here undermines objects entering into relations. You are a professor at a university. That is a relation. Would you cease to exist if you left that university? I note that this is the second time you’ve brought up Newton. As I remarked in a previous post responding to you, there is nothing in my account of objects that resembles Newtonian objects. Likewise, the fact that Newton appears here in the context of questions about actions at a distance leads me to strongly suspect that your science is not up to date. Einstein solved the action at a distance problem with his general theory of relativity. Where for Newton were the sun to cease to exist we would immediately feel the effects, in Einstein we discover that we would not notice any difference for eight minutes because this is the amount of time the effects of gravity take to reach us. In other words, there is a real interaction in Einsteinian physics. But again, these ruminations are outside the scope of ontology.
I don’t know what a monism of autopoietic differencing might be or why it is an advantage. I reject Deleuze’s monism because I believe the idea of a pre-individual field out of which discrete objects emerge is incoherent. We never get an account of why anything at all emerges, we’re just told that somehow things emerge from this field. I am not sure why people find this idea attractive.
Sighs. I haven’t mentioned the swerve anywhere. Whenever I mention Lucretius I evoke his atomism. Atomism is the thesis that the universe is made up of discrete units. When I say onticology has a Lucretian orientation all I am claiming is that the universe is made up of objects, not a continuum. I differ from Lucretius in not accepting either his reductivism or his thesis that there are ultimate, indivisible units.
I feel as if I’m not being read carefully here. I have repeatedly distinguished between an objects actualized properties and its endo-relational structure as a system of attractors defining a phase space. The endo-relational structure of an object is its virtual dimension. A quality is its actual dimension. It is odd for you to suggest to either Harman or myself that your thought is tending in a different direction. Harman’s objects are withdrawn and never touched by another object. This is not very different than what you’re saying here. My objects have an endo-relational structure that is always in excess of any actualization of the object. My principle of translation specifically states that there is no interaction between two objects that doesn’t involve a translation. This would be close to your “fictioning”, though I would never use such a term. You seem to be conflating OOO with representational realism or the thesis that we can represent objects as they are. This is in no way the thesis of onticology or its interest. In addition to the endo-consistency of objects, I define objects in terms of their affects or their capacity to act and be acted upon.
September 18, 2009 at 12:56 am
also,
concerning object interaction, can the terms ‘passive’ or ‘active’ be used to describe movement, or lack of, toward a connection?
September 19, 2009 at 1:19 am
I’m not sure I understand your question about reference. Moreover, this is an epistemological rather than an ontological issue anyway. I keep repeating this distinction, yet others strangely keep bringing it up and conflating the two modes of discourse.”
I – for one – keep bringing up because I do not yet understand how you keep the two apart other than as a rule that you enforce, as you say here, discursively. Certainly, I do not mean necessarily a human centered epistemology since I know that is forbidden here, but I am interested in an onto-epistemology coherent with your general project or are you saying that OOO is just a discourse, a language game where certain symbols are moved according to a dictated grammar. That cannot be what you mean. If the things you discuss occur in a realm apart from one with measurable differences, they might as well be fairies for they are subject to the same lack of ontological criteria.
“I haven’t taken a position on this issue, but I don’t see why there has to be a plenum in order for entities to relate to one another. A void could do just fine.”
OK could you define what you mean by a “void”? How, for instance, are the differences communicated between objects in a void? Please note that this is a question which presumes nor accepts nothing in advance.
“You keep invoking “prehensions”. Aren’t you aware that Whitehead is an atomistic pluralist and not a monist?”
The rhetoric here sounds provocative, but let me just say that Whitehead’s definition of prehensions in their nexus seems to make your point irrelevant if not distracting. On the other hand, the nexus does seem to indicate as he says “real” connections within an event that the differences share. So if Whitehead has become the sole criterion for the use of the term (this seems peculiar from an admitted theory slut who adapts what he borrows) do we not see in him exactly the epistemic you eschew? He says – on point I think: “The ultimate fact of immediate actual experience are actual events, prehensions, and nexus. All else is, for our experience, derivative abstraction” (P&R 20). You may duck this in part because of the “experience” part but I think he takes that problem as one not to be dismissed with the wave of a hand. IAC, I use prehension and other vocabularies here not to imply that I have sworn a loyalty oath to the philosopher’s original intention – if indeed that were possible to determine and did not change – that would suit the specialist (indeed I think such petty scholasticism may inhibit thought) but as a starting point for the something new you are attempting that falls sometimes between the established and mixed vocabularies available. For my own purposes, Whitehead is good to a degree but if I strain his vocabulary that is not only attributable to my ignorance and stupidity alone but in part to a desire to stretch the range of application. This stretching is something you – I think – do all the time.
“I have only made the claim that objects are not their relations. Inverting Deleuze’s expression, objects are external to their relations. Nothing here undermines objects entering into relations. You are a professor at a university. That is a relation. Would you cease to exist if you left that university?”
I hate hypotheticals as much as the analytics love them. I have no idea what such a question means in fact. As a linguistic practice, it asks me to construct an idealized and impoverished model according to rules of narration I know I am “obliged” to share but in fact do not. I am interested in such modes as new things but feel they have no bearing on the things they pretend to elucidate other than – and this is their function – to supply a changeling in the place of the problem.
“I note that this is the second time you’ve brought up Newton. As I remarked in a previous post responding to you, there is nothing in my account of objects that resembles Newtonian objects. Likewise, the fact that Newton appears here in the context of questions about actions at a distance leads me to strongly suspect that your science is not up to date. Einstein solved the action at a distance problem with his general theory of relativity. Where for Newton were the sun to cease to exist we would immediately feel the effects, in Einstein we discover that we would not notice any difference for eight minutes because this is the amount of time the effects of gravity take to reach us. In other words, there is a real interaction in Einsteinian physics.”
Yes, I brought up Newton before and your reply narrowed the reference to a particular sub-point where apparently you thought the citation answered the question at hand. Here neither the mention of fields nor the scare quotes around the name could stop you from “helping” me with your mis-reading of my position. Since my starting point here was to try and get you to elucidate your use of scientific models which you apply as if they had some given, true, or relevant bearing, your dictionary entry of physics seems not just irrelevant but evasive of the central question which is of a kind of circularity in presentations that lean on an extant ontology to build a new one.
“I reject Deleuze’s monism because I believe the idea of a pre-individual field out of which discrete objects emerge is incoherent. We never get an account of why anything at all emerges, we’re just told that somehow things emerge from this field. I am not sure why people find this idea attractive.”
I do not understand why it is “incoherent” and indeed I am not sure coherence at this juncture is an axiom that can be evoked without comment. While much of this seems self-consciously rhetorical, I will pretend the question isn’t. I find his field idea attractive because unlike a Monadology it explains that it is the same quality – the roiling of becoming – that brings what passes for objects into a configuration, which also always undoes again.
“You mention Lucretius and the difference is that the swerve would be everywhere and always. sighs. I haven’t mentioned the swerve anywhere. Whenever I mention Lucretius I evoke his atomism.” Sighs. I am not privy to your sub-selection of concepts from the authors you reference, and I would likely be more charitable were it not that you seem to reserve the right of deformation to yourself. Besides in the vocabularies of difference that often frame your discussion, is this not a central reference that one might suppose had a bearing?
“I feel as if I’m not being read carefully here.” Correct. I was moving toward “my emphasis” not trying to characterize yours, so I was not reading you at all at this point. “I have repeatedly distinguished between an objects actualized properties and its endo-relational structure as a system of attractors defining a phase space. The endo-relational structure of an object is its virtual dimension. A quality is its actual dimension.” While I do not believe this is a valid or understandable relation in my view, I do think I have understood your model: that is different than agreeing to it. “It is odd for you to suggest to either Harman or myself that your thought is tending in a different direction. Harman’s objects are withdrawn and never touched by another object. This is not very different than what you’re saying here.” I think this misunderstanding is all my fault because of a short hand I use since this is an arena to discuss your project and not air my ideas. While this likely will not help, let me hint a little. You inverted the Deleuzian idea that relations are exterior to their objects. My view is that objects are fictive epiphenomena of the relations that constitute them. All objects of common parlance and even yours then are simulacra that are like all others as transient, permeable, and unaccountable but “understood” or rather misrepresented as stable or fixed or hard edged. All my convictions are close to the opposite of yours and Harman’s. That’s why I enjoy your site so much.
September 21, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Hey Levi,
Your response above left me with a few more questions after I had a chance to think on it some more. I’ve posted them here:
http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2009/09/zombies-vs-humans-materialism-or.html
I don’t want to rekindle any “realism wars,” but I’m just wondering what role speculative realism sees science playing in its philosophy. At first I would say a lot, but the more I thought about your response, the less I agreed with this reaction. Feel free to comment (or not).