One of the interesting things that took place during the Georgia Tech Object-Oriented Philosophy Symposium was ongoing tweets as people presented their papers (they can be found at #OOO). One of the key terms I used throughout my paper was that of “entanglement”. I’ve lifted the term from Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, though, given my disagreements with certain aspects of her epistemo-ontology, I suspect that I use it in a rather different way. At any rate, my proposal is that one thing flat ontology should allow us to think is entanglements of objects without one type of object, such as language, overdetermining the other objects. In this connection, the marvelous, loquacious, and brilliant Barbara Stafford, who gave closing remarks for the symposium, was kind enough to remind us that “entanglement” refers not only to folded and arranged drapes such as one might find in a nomads tent, but also threads that are entangled with one another while retaining their identity. Needless to say, I rather liked these associations. The key point to be drawn from the concept of entanglement is that no one entity or thread (I think of objects as four dimensional space-time worms) overdetermines all the others. Rather, each thread or object instead contributes differences in its own way.
With the concept of entanglement I thus hope to challenge the form/matter logic drawn from Aristotle that still dominates, in a largely unconscious fashion, much of the discourse of philosophy and theory. Within the framework of this logic, form is the active agency that bestows structure on passive matter. We see this logic at work, for example, in how Kant’s a priori categories of the understanding are deployed in the Critique of Pure Reason. Here the categories are active agencies that bestow form and structure on the passive matter given in sensations. The sensations merely receive form. A similar logic is at work among the semiologists coming out of the Saussurean tradition. In Lacan’s earliest formulations, the real is treated as a sort of amorphous plenitude without gap or lack and the signifier comes to give structure or form to this plenitude. It is this point that Lacan sought to illustrate with his famous example of the doors in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”. It will be noted that the two doors are identical or that, beyond their spatio-temporal position, there is nothing to differentiate them. If, then, a fundamental difference is introduced between the doors, this vertically descends from the agency of the signifier– Ladies and Gentlemen –that bestows a new form on this matter of intuition. The matter of intuition, in and of itself, contributes no difference. For a critique of this form/matter logic, Susan Oyama’s Ontogeny of Information is indispensable. Once you notice it you see it everywhere.
read on!
An entanglement is something very different. Rather than matters being supplemented by forms, the entities populating an entanglement all already have topologically variable form-matters. As a consequence, there is not one agency contributing all form as in the case of Kant’s little demiurge (should we call him “Demiurge Minor”?) or the agency of language, rather we have an entanglement of matter-forms each contributing their own differences generating unique situated arrangements or local assemblages of objects. In one of his tweets, Ian suggested that this term “entanglement” might be a nice candidate to replace the terms “network” and “assemblage”. The terms network and assemblage both suffer from less than felicitous connotations at the level of language. Despite the original intentions of Latour and his gang, the term network has largely been bastardized to refer to relations among a homogeneous set of entities. Where Latour & co. originally used the term network to refer to a heterogeneous assemblage of entities, popular culture now uses the term network to refer to entities that are the same. Thus we get computer networks, railroad networks, facebook networks, family networks, etc. We don’t get networks composed of bonobos, railroad tracks, flautas, and rice patties.
The term “assemblage” suffers from problems as well. On the one hand, the concept of assemblages suggests something that is rather static, that is already assembled, that is already there. In this respect, it fails to capture the thoroughly dynamic way in which objects interact with one another. On the other hand, when confronted with the term “assemblage”, I find it extremely difficult to escape thoughts of an assembler. This might be one of my personal quirks, but I nonetheless find it very difficult to think of assembly without an assembler or the concept of self-assemblage. DeLanda and Deleuze and Guattari, are, of course, aiming at self-assemblage, yet in this connection their language seems to work against them. Insofar as one of the central aims of flat ontology is to avoid hegemonization or the metaphysical and ontotheological tracing of all difference back to an orginary difference that makes the difference, it is necessary to deploy language that avoids reference to the agency of Demiurge Minor and Major as the origin and ground of all difference.
In this connection, “entanglement” seems to hit exactly the right note. Entanglement avoids the anthropocentric and ontotheological connotations of references to the agency of Demiurge Minor (man, mind, or subject) and Demiurge Major (God, the big Other, or language). If, someday, someone elects to write an object-oriented ontology it would have to be one where God is not Demiurge Major, standing above everything in his omnipotence, but where god(s) are entangled with all sorts of other actants or objects. Zizek has already done some of this work in his concept of an impotent God as developed in The Puppet and the Dwarf and The Fragile Absolute. And oddly, Schreber’s God, with his ignorance of what takes place inside his creatures, is oddly resonant with some key claims of subtractive OOO. Schreber’s God is a God where all creatures are withdrawn or in excess of their apparitions or sensuous manifestations. Moreover, entanglements suggest dynamic relations among the threads tangled and all akimbo with one another, nicely capturing the ongoing dynamism of relations among objects in their interactions with one another. Finally, the concept of entanglement nicely captures the way in which these interactions are sticky. When I think of an entanglement I think of a relation from which it is difficult for something to extricate itself. An entanglement is something in which distinct entities are all knotted up. When I’m wearing my social and political theorist cap I’m particularly interested in these sorts of knots and entanglements. Here social and political theory could be thought as a branch of knot theory. Marx was a theorist of knots and entanglements. Through the deployment of a theory of knots and entanglements, through his cartography of dynamically evolving knots, he hoped to locate those privileged points where either new forms of entanglement might emerge, or where particularly weak knots might be found allowing for the emancipation of certain threads or four dimensional spatio-temporal worms.
As Karen Barad suggests, the concept of entanglement calls for a new sort of methodology. Here we must think in terms of what she calls “diffraction patterns” rather than forms structuring contents or matters. Diffraction patterns refer to the dynamics of waves as they interact with one another. Go to a local pond, lake, or river. Or simply fill up your bathtub. Throw a couple of pebbles in and note how the waves interact with one another once their paths intersect. As the waves intersect with one another a new pattern emerges. This is what I refer to as a translation. A translation is what takes place when the differences of one object are woven together with the differences of another object, producing a new quality. Within the framework of Graham’s ontology, a translation is, I believe, what he calls a “sensuous object” but what I prefer to call an “apparition”. If I’ve understood him correctly, Graham’s sensuous objects are objects that emerge within another object as a result of the qualities of one object relating to another object. In Lacan-speak we could say that a sensuous object or apparition is what an object is for another object. An apparition is the weaving together of endo-relational qualities with the endo-relational qualities of another object to produce a third quality. As such, apparitions are the result of diffraction patterns or are patterns that emerge when objects are entangled with one another. We can thus say that whenever entanglement takes place there are also diffraction patterns or translations generating new qualities or apparitions in the world. The key point here is that it is not one object that is the originator of the apparition or the new quality. It is the weaving of these wave-like emanations of difference that generates the quality. And, we can hypothesize pace John’s thesis that we don’t know what an object can do, that very different qualities would be engendered with different entanglements.
May 2, 2010 at 3:15 am
when confronted with the term “assemblage”, I find it extremely difficult to escape thoughts of an assembler
This is also Graham’s gripe with my use of Badiou’s set and count-as-one (i.e., someone must do the counting), but I still have some hope for retaining the “set” in my work. I have an approach I’m working on in the first chapter of Alien Phenomenology. We’ll see how it goes.
May 2, 2010 at 3:33 am
Unfortunately the hegemony of object-oriented ontology has waned significantly on Twitter. It was, however, a glorious day for #OOO.
I like “entanglements,” I really do. There is an assumed figure of the assembler whenever we think of an assemblage, and this rhetorical implication is something to be avoided in most, if not all, cases. However, sometimes there is an assembler.
But hold up. Doesn’t a flat ontology endorse a certain sense of homogeneity like the kind suggested by the term “network”? At the ontological level, the objects in a network, while distinct, are equally real. Can we endorse a homogeneity of networks at the ontological level while rejecting it at the empirical level? Not to mention the fact that under a proper Latourian analysis, even a computer network is not simply made up of computers and the cables that connect them. There are other actants involved.
At root, the notion that “there are other actants involved” (requiring a special analysis depending on whether we’re talking about roads, computers, or ant colonies) seems to be the key point, whether we use the term assemblage, network, or entanglement.
I see myself using all three according to the particular situation under discussion. I don’t think that any of the terms carry such strong implications that they, on their own, complicate the claims of your flat ontology.
May 2, 2010 at 3:35 am
Eh, I guess I’m getting hung up on the rhetoric again.
May 2, 2010 at 8:29 am
Ian’s right. And just so angry Badiouians don’t jump in and say that I don’t know what I’m talking about, let me say that I’m unimpressed when they add that the subject does not pre-exist the count either. As I see it, this simply “impersonalizes” the human/world correlate. It’s still a correlate. I still don’t see how it’s any better that Ereignis in Heidegger.
May 2, 2010 at 2:16 pm
A quick question about the pond and the ripples. What is the water and what is the shore in your analogy or are you not concerned with extending the metaphor that far. Just curious.
Been picking up on some old blogs lately. It seems you have quite the project on your hands. I read your two manifestos and hope to comment at some point.
May 2, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Hi Levi,
This is great stuff! Entanglement seems much more fruitful than even Reciprocal Determination. Which suffers this same limitation, determining what? It seems to be either a conversation ender or infinite regress.
I don’t know if this adds to the conversation or is beside the point. On assemblage DeLanda writes in his new work:
“Thus, what we need is a concept that allows us to retain both irreducibility and decomposability, a concept that makes the explanation of synthesis and the possibility of analysis intelligible. We could, of course, simply build this requirement into the definition of the term “emergent whole” but since this concept has a history, and since in this history the restriction against totalities has not always been enforced, it will be useful to introduce a new word for wholes that are irreducible and decomposable. We will refer to these wholes as assemblages.”
Also Steve Shaviro points out in Without Criteria that the original French translated as assemblage in D&G is ‘agencement’, which is more like arrangement or disposition.
May 2, 2010 at 2:58 pm
How odd. I really like the term entanglement too – I used it just last week to talk about the land use change and vector-borne diseases. I also like the metaphor of diffraction patterns – though I’ve always known them as interference patterns- and I recently wrote a blog post on those too.
I agree with anxiousmodernman, though. It seems as if our use of terminology ought to be strategic and metaphorical rather than insist on extending our metaphors perfectly to what we’re trying to describe. Networks, assemblages, entanglements, diffraction/interference patterns, etc. – they all work in different contexts and fail in others.
May 2, 2010 at 9:04 pm
[…] because right now my mind is, as always, elsewhere. Earlier today I read these two extremely worthwhile posts by bloggin’ philosopher extraordinaire Levi Bryant, and I encourage y’all to do […]
May 2, 2010 at 11:02 pm
As always I profit greatly from your posts. The idea of entanglement seems to me to finesse but not address the indiscrete in OOO. Let me try to be a little clearer. While for you, I think, things may be nested, therefore mereology, they are not miscible or on their own basis (not ours) indefinite. This is not a rare problem as every object is a process and its identity consistency is only relative to a hypothetical instant. This is perhaps why Sartre ends B & N worrying about slime, “the agony of water.” This is actual quite important for me, so I hope it at least begins to make sense as a question.
May 5, 2010 at 2:54 am
Fascinating discussion, especially since I’ve just finished reading this poem. Reading it again and seeing it from the way you conceptualize entanglement is providing me with more delights.
May 5, 2010 at 1:09 pm
“[DeLanda and] Deleuze and Guattari, are, of course, aiming at self-assemblage, yet in this connection their language seems to work against them.”
Well, just to recall (as John pointed out) that in D+G’s original language, the term is ‘agencement.’ I agree that ‘assembly’ has a constructivist (minor demiurge, godlet?) connotation, one which DeLanda perhaps pursues more intently. But I’ve always thought of the term ‘in French’ more in the sense of a distribution or array, a kind of dynamic topology, which includes fluid (merging and separating) elements. But is this really an entanglement? For me the latter always conjures an idea of a complex topology without touching threads/objects or whatever: a kind of ‘dry mess.’
Just some random thoughts.
May 5, 2010 at 1:44 pm
David,
Agreed with everything you say here. In many respects, the term “agencement” works much better, though sadly we have no precise English equivalent. I’ve been trying to get away from terms that are too static like “system”, “assemblage”, and “structure” so as to get at the sense in which these arrangements are interactive and dynamic.
May 5, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Levi, it intrigues me that adding ‘self’ to ‘-assemblage,’ ‘-structuring,’ ‘-organization’ and so on is taken to imply an otherwise absent dynamism. Presumably this ‘added dynamism’ derives from the idea of a ‘self-aware’ system or structure that continually senses and adjusts (itself) as necessary rather than depending on an external (other) creator who makes and fixes the system intermittently. The problem, I feel, is the insistent ‘phenomenological holism’ of this self-systemization (as in Varela and Maturana’s autopoiesis), which seems to imply the injection of a transcendental ‘monitoring’ subject.
The other usual solution to the terminological problem you’re addressing – adding ‘dynamic’ as in ‘dynamic system/structure’ or ‘perpetual disequilibrium,’or the like are obviously remedial only.
(great site btw! really enjoy the posts)
May 8, 2010 at 1:26 am
I’m surprised that no one has made the connection between your use of the term “entanglement” and its use in quantum mechanics. The idea that observables are indeterminate until observed (a fundamental quantum concept) and that once determined they may be non-locally correlated resonates for me with your “apparitions,” or Harman’s “sensuous objects.” Moving over to Lacan, I wonder if we could say that Lacan’s “Real” can be said to refer to the indeterminate observables before being observed, before being named, before moving into the realm of the Symbolic. How useful this connection might be is of course another matter.