I’m still swamped with grading and will be so for another week, so I haven’t had much time to follow the blogs. With that in mind, I’m just now coming across Ivakhiv’s and Harman’s exchange pertaining to relations and objects. I have to say that I find this debate extremely gratifying because it seems to mark a new stage in the thought of the speculative realists. With the exception of Harman’s work (and perhaps Grant’s), early speculative realism devoted itself largely to the refutation of correlationism. Although Harman’s work often directed arguments against philosophies of access, it has largely been devoted to the development of a full-blown ontology as far back as Tool-Being. Among other things, the debate between the subtractive object-oriented ontologists and the relationist object-oriented ontologists is particularly interesting because it is deployed purely within the realm of ontology. In other words, it is no longer a debate between realists and anti-realists, but between two competing realist theories of existence. As such, it suggests discussion is moving past debates about whether epistemology is First Philosophy or whether ontology is First Philosophy… At least for a few.
As I’ve often remarked on this blog, I have the highest admiration and sympathy for Ivakhiv’s work. This admiration is not simply an admiration for his ontology, but also for his devotion to ecology and his ecological ethics. Nonetheless, I confess that I find his relationism and critiques of subtractive object-oriented ontology baffling. And if I find this critique baffling, then this is because Adrian seems to hold that subtractive object-oriented ontology rejects relations altogether, such that it holds that we should ignore relations among objects. Minimally, given Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics, which possesses the subtitle “Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things”, this is a very perplexing assertion, for when Graham evokes the term “carpentry”, he is referring precisely to relations among objects. Where Tool-Being analyzed the subtraction or withdrawal of objects from all relations as a primitive ontological fact, Guerrilla Metaphysics examines relations that obtain among beings. So the first point here is that subtractive object-oriented ontology does not reject relations.
read on!
The debate, I believe, among the subtractive object-oriented ontologists lies not in whether the world is composed entirely of objects or relations, but rather in the precise ontological status of relations as they relate to objects. For the subtractive object-oriented ontologists I think the issue can be summed up bluntly with a single question:
Is it possible for all objects in the universe to be somehow destroyed, such that only one object remains?
If you hold that this final object would immediately puff out of existence with the destruction of all other objects, then you are an ontological relationist. If, by contrast, you hold that this Last Object would remain, even if very poor in qualities, then you have sided with the subtractive-object oriented ontologists.
Now initially this sort of counter-factual question might appear prosaic and irrelevant, for we do not live in a universe where only one object exists, but rather a universe populated by an infinity of objects. Consequently, one might counter with the claim that such a question is merely a question of science fiction. However, how this question is answered has profound ontological consequences for universes populated by many objects. For the subtractive object-oriented ontologists, the issue is not whether or not there are relations, but whether objects can be detached from relations. And here I defer to Harman’s distinction between domestic relations and foreign relations. As Harman is careful to note, domestic and foreign relations differ from the traditional distinction between internal and external relations. Where internal and external relations traditionally refer to relations an object has to other objects in the world, such that the former refers to relations to other objects from which the object cannot be detached and the latter refers to relations with other objects from which the object can be detached, domestic relations refer to the internal structure or composition of an object, while foreign relations refer to an objects relation to other objects.
The debate for subtractive object-oriented ontologists is not with whether objects enter into foreign relations with other objects. They do. And in my own work, one of the prime targets of inquiry is what happens when objects enter into foreign relations with other objects. Put otherwise, I am keenly interested in the relation between domestic relations and foreign relations. The debate, rather, is whether all foreign relations are internal relations. If all foreign relations are internal relations, then objects puff out of existence when they are detached these relations. They cannot sustain themselves in existence apart from these relations. This is precisely what constitutes their relations as internal. By contrast, subtractive object-oriented ontology maintains that all foreign relations are external relations. This entails that within certain limits (destruction being that limit), all objects can be detached from their foreign relations to other objects.
Now the importance of this thesis revolves around the issue of change. Within the framework of my onticology, it is of vital importance to maintain that foreign relations are external relations because this distinction allows us to analyze the production of qualities or local manifestations as a result of objects becoming entangled with one another in foreign relations. The thesis is that when objects enter into new foreign relations, new qualities are produced. The virtual proper being of objects, which consists of their powers or capacities and their domestic relations, is the condition for these qualities. But these qualities are only awoken in local manifestations as a consequence of entering into foreign relations with other objects. Here I don’t think Graham and I are so far apart, for what I call a “local manifestation” correlates very closely with what Graham calls a “sensuous object”, where sensuous objects are apparitions of objects that emerge when one real object relates to another object.
Without this distinction between objects in their virtual proper being and local manifestations, or real objects and sensuous objects, we inevitably reduce objects to their qualities, and fall back into either a sort of noxious essentialism (subtractive OOO does advocate the existence of essences, but of a very different sort), or the thesis that objects are instantaneous points in space and time without any enduring being beneath their changing qualities. One of the major theoretical pay-offs of the distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestations or between real objects and sensuous objects, is that it introduces the counter-factual into our ontological meditations, making us attentive to how changes in foreign relations also generate changes in local manifestations or sensuous objects. As a function of the foreign relations an object enters into, qualities erupt volcanically, producing new qualities. In this way we avoid reducing objects to their actuality (their local manifestation or sensuous being), and instead begin to wonder how objects would behave were they to enter into new foreign relations.
Accordingly, we can distinguish between endo-qualities, exo-qualities, and local essences. Endo-qualities are real qualities of an object that emerge in the object as a consequence of its domestic relations, whether or not it is related to any other entity. Exo-qualities are qualities or local manifestations that emerge in an object as a result of foreign relations it enters into with other objects. Here, with exo-qualities, we get the prodigious domain of what he calls “translation”, for with the entanglement of objects in foreign relations we get a weaving of the differences of objects, of the powers of objects, that can’t be localized in any object. The blue of my beloved coffee mug, for example, is a weaving together of the molecular composition of the mug, photons of light, and my particular visual apparatus. It is only the entanglement of these different objects that produces this particular qualities, such that the quality, while entirely real, cannot be said to reside in any one of these objects alone. Finally, local essences refer to qualities that emerge as a function of structured entanglements of objects in a particular local arrangement. If these essences must be referred to as local, then this is precisely because they are dependent on highly specific entanglements of objects that don’t exist in other situations. If, nonetheless, these local manifestations are still essences, then this is because within these entanglements these qualitative productions are real and inevitable local manifestations.
The key point not to be missed, however, with the concepts of local essence and exo-qualities, is that these qualitative manifestations are not inevitable. Arrangements or entanglements of objects can be changed generating new local essences and exo-qualities. Yet so long as an excess of objects over their local manifestations is not granted, I don’t see how these sorts of changes can be accounted for. We fall back into the position of what Roy Bhaskar calls “actualism”, where objects are reduced to their local manifestations or status as sensuous object, containing no hidden reserve that would erupt differently with new entanglements. And that way lies the spectre of theoretical pessimism.
Larval Subjects . 
May 6, 2010 at 5:14 pm
Hi Levi – Perhaps the problem (as my last blog post admits) is that I tend to reply all too quickly to blog posts, and these (at least Graham’s and mine) aren’t always as deeply thought through as more formal kinds of writing. While I haven’t read Guerrilla Metaphysics, I’ve read enough of Graham’s published writing (Tool-Being, Prince of Networks, and a few shorter things) to know that he doesn’t reject or ignore relations; and I certainly know that you don’t reject them either. I actually think that all of us agree, in one way or another, on some kind of “object-relational ontology” (with qualifications, subtle definitions and different emphases, etc.). But because of our prior theoretical commitments, we emphasize one or another side of that, and misunderstandings ensue.
The problem, for me, has tended to arise when someone (this last time it was Graham) suggests that for a relational ontology, all possible relations must by definition be equivalent to each other (which I find absurd); or that relational ontologies are old hat and no longer relevant (as if there weren’t a lot of people – more, in fact, than all the avowed object-oriented ontologists in the world – doing good work with them). If someone publicly states that sort of thing, they should be able to respond to public criticism of it.
I like your single question very much (“Is it possible for all objects in the universe to be somehow destroyed, such that only one object remains?…”) as a way of distinguishing between these two kinds of realisms, and it helps me understand why I prefer the relational over the subtractive one. The question seems absurd to me (in a good, thought-provoking way) because it suggests that that lone remaining object is somehow unaffected by what occurs in the entire universe apart from it. In other words, it’s its own separate universe. To the extent that the universe is a universe, I would say that all things in it are related in one way or another: proximally or distantly (including to the point of irrelevance for any practical understanding), internally or externally, slowly or quickly, etc. But those things are always also in process; they don’t remain unaffected, because they don’t remain unchanging. Even if they maintain a stable form, that form involves some active relating to what’s outside it, some intake and output, etc. If it doesn’t do that, then it’s not only dead, it’s not there at all (because there’s no ‘there’ there).
However, if you or anyone else would like to prove that an object could exist on its own without anything else, even for a brief moment, I don’t mind hearing the argument. I just don’t think I’ll be easily convinced.
You write:
“If all foreign relations are internal relations, then objects puff out of existence when they are detached these relations. They cannot sustain themselves in existence apart from these relations. This is precisely what constitutes their relations as internal. By contrast, subtractive object-oriented ontology maintains that all foreign relations are external relations.”
What about some relations being internal and others being external? Delanda, for instance, makes this argument pretty clearly, but I think that any relational ontology would make distinctions of this sort, even if they don’t use the terms “internal” and “external” to do it.
Respectfully,
Adrian
May 6, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Let me start with your question. I guess my first question is does the answer have to pertain to this universe? Does the moment before the big bang count as part of this universe’s space time? If the physicists who predict the end as a “big crunch” are right, does the moment when all matter squeezes back into a single point count as part of this universe’s space time?
Or are these liminal sites defined as pure exteriority, as the outside of the universe?
You note that the debate is whether or not all foreign relations are internal. Is this the same as asking whether all domestic relations are external? For example, if the universe is an object, does it have any “domestic” relations? That is, are there objects within the universe, which, if changed or lost, could cause the universe to cease to exist? On the other hand, can we point to any objects in the universe which are not part of its composition? Or are all objects non-domestic components of the universe?
While we’re at it, is the universe a component of itself? Are objects in general components of themselves? How does OOO approach that question?
But back to the universe… What about my relation to the universe? I am component but foreign object to it; what is it to me? If the universe did not exist as such (with certain physical laws like gravity) then I could not exist. One could say that many things can change about the universe without having a noticeable impact on me, but if the universe itself didn’t exist then I obviously wouldn’t exist. So the universe, as an object, is a domestic relation to me? But the universe itself has no domestic relations and exists only as an absolute exteriority, even though it has a domestic relation with every object in the universe and every object in the universe is a component of the universe.
I understand the point OOO seeks to make here. When does difference make a difference? In the example in Harman’s post, the frog moves from one country to another but is still a frog. Obviously the movement is a difference, but it is not enough (or perhaps not the right kind of) difference to stop the frog from continuing to be a frog.
To me this has to be a question of pragmatism though. E.g., I have a pot of water. I stick it outside in the winter and it becomes ice. I bring it inside, it melts back to water. I put it on a hot stove and it turns to steam. Does it ever stop being water? Of course not. But if the object in question is not “water” in a chemical sense but a specific “block of ice” or “pool of water” or “steam cloud,” then these differences are domestic relations that make a difference.
In the same sense, if I run electrical current through the water and split the molecular bonds of hydrogen and oxygen, then we’d have to say we don’t have water anymore. But on the other hand, if was I was looking at the pot of water as a collection of hydrogen and oxygen, then the act of electrolysis wouldn’t alter the “domestic” relations of the objects.
In short, it would seem to me that question of “domestic” or “foreign,” “internal” or “external,” are always questions of scale and selection.
May 6, 2010 at 6:01 pm
[…] vs objects in archaeology, pt 1 An interesting discussion concerning relations and objects has taken place for a while between Adrian Ivakhiv at Immanence and […]
May 6, 2010 at 6:37 pm
Hi Alex,
Nice to hear from you. You write:
A couple of points here. First, I’m of the view that objects can generate other distinct objects. As such, I’m inclined to hold that the singularity constituting the universe prior to the big bang is one object that subsequently generates a plurality of objects. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I’m skeptical of referring to things like the universe as an object. While I’m certainly committed to the thesis that we can have larger scale objects that are composed of smaller scale objects, I’m not committed to the thesis that everything at larger scales constitutes an object. The reason for this is that objects aren’t related to all other objects, but only selectively relate to other objects. To call the universe an object it would be necessary for every object in the universe to be related, but this isn’t the case.
Domestic relations or endo-relations as I conceive them are never external, but are always internal. Consequently, no domestic or endo-relations, no object. However, it’s important not to confuse the parts of an object with the virtual proper being or endo-relational structure of an object. The relations an object entertains to its parts, in my view, consists of foreign relations that are external. The reason for this is very simple. Objects can lose a number of their parts, yet the object still persists as that object. For example, our bodies perpetually lose cells and gain cells, but the endo-relations or domestic relations persist. This, however, is not without limits. The object can lose so many parts that it ceases to exist or be capable of maintaining its endo-relational structure.
No, I don’t think objects are parts or members of themselves.
What is it that you’re referring to when you say you wouldn’t exist? Here, I think, is part of the importance of the distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestation, which can be roughly mapped on to the distinction between substance and quality. If the universe didn’t exist I would argue that you don’t cease to exist, but that you lose the quality of being alive. That is very different than claiming that you cease to exist. Being alive is a quality or actualization of certain powers of particular types of objects, not the substance of these objects. My post entitled “The Mug Blues” might clarify this point a bit if you haven’t read it already. When the lights are turned out, the mug doesn’t cease to exist, but rather it no longer blues or actualizes a particular quality. The foreign relations necessary for bluing are no longer operative when the lights are turned out. Yet the power of bluing remains in the mug. Likewise, when your oxygen is taken away you can no longer live, but that doesn’t mean that you have ceased to exist. All it means is that foreign relations or exo-relations necessary for you to actualize certain very important qualities are no longer operative.
I think your question about your relation to the universe gets at points I’ve been trying to make about mereology. The cells of a body are both objects in their own right and parts of another object, the body. As such, the cells of a body are both autonomous and independent and occupiers of points in an endo-relational structure of a larger scale object. Were the universe an object the same point would hold about your relation to the universe.
For me the issue would be that of what sort of foreign relations generate new qualities in the frog. It is not a question of whether or not the frog remains a frog. It does. But rather how the frog manifests itself differently as a result of entering into new foreign relations with other objects. The developmental systems theorists are excellent on these points. Plants, for example, will exemplify very different qualities depending on the altitudes they’re grown at, the temperatures they’re grown in, the air they’re grown in, etc. Here the plant has exactly the same DNA yet actualizes very different qualities. I take it that this is what Spinoza is getting at when he says we don’t know what an object can do. The object will manifest different qualities depending on the entanglements it enters into with other objects.
When you evoke “pragmatism” here are you using it in the linguistic sense (context) or in the philosophical sense (James, Dewey, Peirce, and Rorty). If the former, I agree, if the latter no, I don’t think this is merely a matter of naming or how we relate to objects. Like the color of my blue mug, water has the capacity to be liquid or ice as a function of its endo-relational structure. These are qualitative manifestations of the object that occur when it enters into particular exo-relations or foreign relations with other objects and are deeply dependent on the chemical structure of the water. The case of steam is a bit different. When the water turns to ice and then melts into water it is still that water that has done this. By contrast, when water becomes steam it is particalized and becomes a plurality of new objects, not the original object. Here there’s a tricky mereological question about water that is boiled in closed containers. That water has been dissolved into a plurality of new objects. Yet when it undergoes condensation and becomes liquid again it contains all the same parts. Is it still the same water as before? i.e., Was that bit of water destroyed and then came back into existence as the same object? Or is it a new object? I’m still not sure where I stand here.
Right. The fact that relations are domestic and internal in an object doesn’t entail that they’re eternal and indestructible.
For me this depends on what you’re referring to when you refer to scale and selection. If you’re referring to humans selecting differences that make a difference, I would argue that this conflates epistemology with ontology. Rather, I believe these are features of objects themselves– even if we can’t ultimately know these features –not human relations to objects.
May 6, 2010 at 8:07 pm
[…] May 6, 2010 Levi has now jumped in IN RESPONSE TO ADRIAN IVAKHIV. […]
May 6, 2010 at 8:46 pm
“In the same sense, if I run electrical current through the water and split the molecular bonds of hydrogen and oxygen, then we’d have to say we don’t have water anymore. But on the other hand, if was I was looking at the pot of water as a collection of hydrogen and oxygen, then the act of electrolysis wouldn’t alter the ‘domestic’ relations of the objects.”
This isn’t very convincing. It’s the equivalent of saying that if Manchester United were disbanded but the players not killed, then whether or not any domestic relations were altered would depend upon whether we were interested in the team or the players.
Well, yes, but that’s a triviality. And Alex seems to be trying to argue from that triviality to the non-trivial claim that the disbanding of Manchester United is *neutral* in itself in its treatment of domestic relations.
But that is not at all the case. If I’m looking at the players and saying “the players are still there,” this does not mean that a real object called Manchester United was not destroyed just because I happened not to notice or care.
We’re starting to see pragmatism emerge as the standard opposing position to OOO. Chris Vitale’s supporting post for Ivakhiv made that same move (it’s humans who decide what’s an object and what’s not). Ladyman and Ross do it too, though with the bogus supplement that their pragmatic “real patterns” are real and not just in the mind (but they’re not, when you scratch the surface; see my article when it comes out).
And finally, and I’m sorry to keep on saying this, but I believe it: Badiou’s count-as-one has exactly the same problem.
Pragmatism = correlationism
May 7, 2010 at 12:51 am
[…] response to my last post, Ivakhiv writes: I like your single question very much (“Is it possible for all objects in the […]
May 7, 2010 at 2:34 am
I understand how one could look at pragmatism as human-centered. Of course, I suppose some non-human actor/object could be pragmatic. But you’re right that if we are saying it is humans that decide what is or isn’t an object that that would be a kind of correlationist pragmatism. And that would logically be something that would not fit into the OOO paradigm, right?
So what does it mean to determine whether something is or isn’t trivial? What does it mean to decide that the universe isn’t an object? To me, these seem like pragmatic, rhetorical choices.
I completely agree with your Man U example. I didn’t mean to suggest that the act of electrolysis wouldn’t alter the water. As I said earlier, it obviously it does. It just doesn’t impact the domestic relations of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a way that would alter their atomic structures.
But to go back to the water. If its “water in a blue cup” and then I pour it into a different cup, then its “water in a red cup.” Is the “water in the blue cup” any less of an object than the water or the cup or the atoms in the water molecules or the sub-atomic particles that make up the atoms?
I’m not saying that humans decide what is or isn’t an object. I agree with you. We don’t get to decide whether or not the universe is an object.
But maybe I’m missing something. Maybe in OOO it isn’t objects all the way up or down? If the universe isn’t an object, then what is it? An aggregate of objects? Does it not exist? Is the Milky Way an object? Is quantum foam an object? If humans don’t decide what constitutes an object and what does not, then is the distinction between non-objects and objects laid out in physical laws?
May 7, 2010 at 3:22 am
Why is rhetoric being given this privileged place?
Rhetorical entities are one set of actants or entities among others. Yet it seems that you’re subordinating all entities to these rhetorical actors and treating them as the entities that contribute all the differences rather than entities that contribute particular differences in particular collectives. Rather than thinking of rhetorical entities as determining salience or triviality as Demiurge Minor, why not instead see rhetorical actants as entangled with other actants, contributing differences but by no means dominating the field like little gods that impose form on everything else? To my thinking this is no different than eliminative materialism, but rather is just eliminative idealism or linguisticism. Where the eliminative materialist dissolves all objects in atoms and neurons, the eliminative idealist or linguist dissolves all other objects in language or human concepts. As a consequence, it becomes a variant of ontotheology. Where theistic ontotheologies treat God as bestowing form on an apeiron or undifferentiated whole, we instead get “speaking-being” or parle-être imposing being on an undifferentiated chaos or “real” (in Lacan’s early sense). What is it that gives parle-être this remarkable power to generate all beings out of itself?
May 7, 2010 at 8:59 am
Levi,
You write, in response to Alex:
What is it that gives parle-être this remarkable power to generate all beings out of itself?
This is probably rudimentary, but it reminds me of discussions I used to have (I’ve since lost interest) with theists when they bring up certain proofs of God. The most pervasive logic, as we all know, was the idea that the universe is somehow deficient in some way, either ontologically, causally, in design, etc, and must have some source transcendent to itself to account for its own supposedly (deficient) existence. The problem, of course, is that the logic was never applied equally to the question of the God-term, so that the logic stopped short of asking why it is that this other term is not equally deficient or contingent and itself needing something transcendent to itself. The idea of the rhetorical or linguistic idealism is very similar — to explain the complexity of the world, we turn to the transcendence of language, but what explains the complexity, then, of this language itself? Why does the critical philosopher stop there? It can only be that, like the theist’s conception of God or divine transcendence, it removes the responsibility of a truly immanent critique and investigation of the universe, itself. If God explains everything, it really explains nothing. Rather than look to the immanent complexity of causes and effects, the universe is made into a One, a whole (in classic Lacanian fashion) and all of the difficulties or problems of why things are the way they are (or what they are) are really, I think, erased. Rather than seeing language immanently as cause and effect, we have an inexplicable and utterly imperial flow of being from language as if language itself wasn’t a part of being. The linguistic idealist doesn’t go far enough. Yes, language is a very significant part of human existence, but using it to account for the complexity and variety of the world is a covert kind of theology.
May 7, 2010 at 6:01 pm
As a rhetorician, I do have an interest in the rhetorical, the symbolic, and the pragmatic. However I would not privilege these as an explanation of the universe or how objects are created. As such I think we are miscommunicating.
However, I am interested in the means by which one determines whether relations between objects are domestic or foreign, internal or external. It strikes me that all relations are among exteriorities. In that respect, I suppose I follow along with DeLanda. If objects undergo continual change as their exposure to other objects shift, that does not make them any less objects in my view. As such I wonder about the problem of which differences make a difference that is introduced in this bifurcation of relations. A continuum of intensification makes more sense to me than an either/or.
March 29, 2012 at 3:16 am
Your question, “Is it possible for all objects in the universe to be somehow destroyed, such that only one object remains?” assumes that the universe is not an object. I’m not sure that is a valid assumption.
March 29, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Tetontech,
I don’t assume that the universe is not an object, I actually give arguments that it is not an object.