Over at Deontologistics, Wolfendale has posted part 1 of his response to me. I just wanted to mark a few quick points in response to this post. These remarks are abbreviated, so hopefully Wolfendale will be charitable with them, though he generally is.
1. Withdrawal. Within the framework of onticology, withdrawal refers to two things. First, it refers to the excess of any object over its local manifestations. In many respects, this is a very trivial point. All it means is that the being of any object is never exhausted by any of the actual states it happens to be in, such that therefore the being of an object cannot be equated with its qualities. For example, the water currently sitting in my glass is not boiling. Pretty trivial, right? If the water sitting placidly in my cup is a local manifestation, then this is because it occurs at a particular time and under particular circumstances. If local manifestation is a local manifestation, then this is because it is the actualization of a quality, property, or state in the world.
The lesson I draw from this is that the structure of substance must be different from any of the qualities it happens to embody. Put differently, substance cannot be equated with its qualities. As a consequence, I need an account of substance that accounts for its structured nature (thereby avoiding Locke’s critique of the bare substratum) without treating this structure as consisting of qualities. Such a structure is what I call virtual proper being. Virtual proper being, composed of the powers of an object and relations among these powers, is structured without being qualitative. Moreover, it disappears behind any qualities or local manifestations the object happens to embody.
read on!
Of course, at the level of knowledge, the concept of virtual proper being puts me in a pretty tight spot. We cannot directly encounter virtual proper being because all we ever encounter of objects are their qualities. The closest we can get to virtual proper being is an inference of what this structure might be like through varying the conditions of the object and observing how it behaves. In this way we can begin to map the singularities, powers, or attractors that inhabit the object through variations in the qualities of the object.
This aside, despite the triviality of the concept of local manifestation, the cash-value of this concept, I believe, is that it emphasizes the context dependency of local manifestations. The concept of local manifestation draws our attention to the way in which the properties or qualities of objects vary as a result of entering into different relations with other objects. In the context of epistemology, the concept of local manifestation thus draws our attention to the tools and instruments we use, as well as the environments we construct in observing objects, thereby enhancing our awareness of the ecology of objects, the contingency of circumstance, and encouraging us to vary environments to see if, whether, and how they change local manifestations.
The second sense of withdrawal pertains to, as Wolfendale notes, information. I argue that all objects are operationally closed systems. One consequence of this is that there is no information out there in the world, nor is information transmitted from system to system. Rather, information is a purely system-specific event, produced as a consequence of how a system is structured. Other objects can perturb an object, but the object that is perturbed transforms this perturbation into information according to its own structure. One of the central grounds for this thesis lies in the observation that one and the same perturbation can produce very different effects in different objects. Consequently, we must distinguish between information and perturbations. If this leads to the conclusion that objects are withdrawn, then this is because perturbations are never received by systems as identical, but are always transformed by the system that receives them.
2. Difference and The Ontic Principle. At one point in his post, Wolfendale alludes to our earlier discussions about difference that unfolded a year or so ago. For the sake of clarity it is important to note that since those discussions my position has developed substantially and I have largely abandoned the ontic principle as an ontological foundation. The Democracy of Objects will include “The Ontic Principle” (forthcoming in The Speculative Turn) as an appendix, outlining what I have abandoned from these earlier formulations, and what I retain. For those who missed these discussions, I had begun from the premise that “there is no difference that does not make a difference” or that “to be is to make a difference”. The more I developed this hypothesis, the more problematic I discovered it to be. On the one hand, the formulation suggested to readers that something must make a difference to something else in order to exist. Yet I do not think this is the case. On the other hand, this formulation made it extremely difficult to specify just what an object is. As a consequence of my meditations on information, I now think of difference as a relational term that is system-specific. In other words, difference is no-thing, but is a sort of relation and an event that occurs within systems or objects when perturbed.
3. Knowledge. I know Pete is probably exhausted by these points, but I feel compelled to point out once again that he is conflating questions of knowledge with questions of metaphysics. A representative example of this can be seen in the following:
The application of the metaphor of translation, or the idea of directness and indirectness of access, trades on a conflation of the notions of information and meaning. We can understand the idea that the meaning of what is said can modified through translation, because we have an idea of what the meaning is beforehand. We can understand the idea that we have failed to adequately convey something only because we can understand what it would be to do so properly.
To be clear, I do not discount questions of epistemology as some have suggested, but I do insist that questions of metaphysics and questions of epistemology are distinct. The example above presents a nice case of just why it is important to recognize this distinction. The issue of whether or not translation takes place is entirely distinct from the question of whether or not an entity knows that translation takes place. As a consequence, the issue of whether we need to know what a meaning is beforehand to know that a translation has taken place is really beside the point because translation is a metaphysical relation, not an epistemological relation. It is something that takes place in relations between entities whether they know it or not. For example, it is unlikely that plants have any idea that they are translating sunlight when they produce chlorophyll.
In many respects, the phenomenon of translation generates a sort of transcendental illusion for human beings. Because systems are operationally closed, relating directly only to their own internal system-states, they conflate these system-states with the being of beings themselves. Among the examples I use to illustrate this point in The Democracy of Objects is that of the Lacanian Clinic in section 4.5. The specific way in which the Lacanian Clinic is structured and the rationale behind how the Lacanian analyst conducts himself all arise from phenomena of closure pertaining to systems. Within the framework of neurosis, the entire structure of neurosis arises from the manner in which the analysand filters the remarks of others through the structure of his fantasy while simultaneously treating the utterances and actions of others as being identical to what these others intend and desire. In other words, the neurotic proceeds as if she had direct access to the other. In many respects, the trajectory of Lacanian analysis unfolds through a demonstration of the difference between how the analysand interprets the other and the Other itself. The analyst conducts herself as she does precisely to avoid reinforcing the neurotic’s believe that she knows the Other’s meaning. Through this practice, the analysand is gradually able to discover 1) that the desire she believed to be the Other’s demand was really her own desire all along, and consequently 2) is able to separate from the Other’s desire, affirming this desire as her own. The point here is that these ways of relating to the Other arise precisely because we don’t have foreknowledge of a shared or identical meaning. This difference in meaning is something that is discovered over the course of analysis.
Throughout his post Pete talks about the requirement that we have a concept of what direct access would be in order to understand the manner in which translation distorts perturbations from other objects. However, in such remarks Pete is conflating requirements of epistemology with what takes place metaphysically in the world. Pete might indeed be correct in claiming that this is necessary for a knowledge of translation, but the concept of translation within the framework of onticology pertains not to our knowledge of translation but something that really takes place out there in the world in relations between objects. As for how we know this, I believe that this knowledge arises from disadequation between input and output in our relations with other entities. For example, part of how I discover that Pete is a closed system that translates in the world in a particular way arises from how he surprises me in responses to remarks that I make. Such experiences of surprise and befuddlement create circumstances where second-order observation can set in and I can begin examining both the distinctions that Pete appears to employ in relating to the world around him and distinctions that I employ.
4. Grounds. Pete contends that I begin from a metaphysical standpoint and proceed to infer particular things about the nature of objects. This isn’t quite accurate. Rather, I begin from the standpoint of inquiry and then proceed to ask what the world must be like for inquiry to be possible. I have outlined these arguments here and here, and devote the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects to these arguments. The second post contains the core of my argument. Pete says that he plans to respond to Bhaskar’s arguments in his next post, hopefully he will have read A Realist Theory of Science by then (if he hasn’t already).
5. Information. Pete, I think, misses the key to the concept of information within onticology. Pete quotes my remark that information is an event that connects difference to difference. However, what is crucial to the concept of information as I deploy it is that information is an event that selects a system-state and that information is always system-specific (he does seem to capture this latter point at certain moments). Throughout Pete’s discussion of information, however, I notice that he seems to oscillate between recognizing the system-specificity of information and treating information as something transmitted between systems. For example, Pete writes:
Taking this into account, it shouldn’t be surprising that there is some common metaphysical ground between myself and Levi, given that we both have some debt to Deleuze’s metaphysical thought. The most interesting thing is that I’ve put forward an interpretation of Deleuze’s notion of sign-systems that is very similar to the account just outlined (see here). This also holds that all entities are systems, that they have virtual structure (understood in terms of capacities and tendencies) and that they transmitsigns between one another which select system states. I think there’s a number of ways in which my elaboration of Deleuze is more comprehensive than Levi’s approach (at least, in the cut down form he presented it). I think the most important one is that I provided a more detailed account of what I call link-systems, which are the information channels which signs are transmitted along. I think that it’s important to maintain that there can be no information transmitted between systems without such an information channel between them. Such channels can be both spontaneous and temporary, but it’s also possible for them to be more permanent and thereby to facilitate continuous exchanges of information between systems.
I’ve written pretty extensively on Deleuze’s signal-sign systems both here on the blog (Pete can do a search) and in Difference and Givenness. Indeed, one of the things I’m rather proud of in Difference and Givenness is that it was among the first books on Deleuze to draw attention to the importance of his concept of signal-sign systems. Of course, while I am deeply indebted to Deleuze, onticology is not simply a rehash of Deleuze’s ontology, modifies it in a number of ways, and abandons other aspects of Deleuze’s thought. Here I would suggest that the proper place to look for an account of how systems are linked is not in Deleuze but in autopoietic theory.
Setting all that aside, however, I note that Pete talks about information as something that is transmitted between systems. Yet I argue the exact opposite of this. My thesis, following Luhmann, second-order cybernetics, and autopoietic theory, is precisely that information is not something transmitted between systems. This is what I mean when I say that information is always system-specific. Information is an event that takes place only within a system. It is not something shared by systems or transmitted between systems. To be sure, one system can perturb or irritate another system, but a perturbation is not information. This is a pretty central and important point for understanding what I’m getting at when I discuss information.
Information is itself already a translation. In this connection, Pete accuses me of not having fleshed out the issue of channels of communication or interaction between systems, while simultaneously glibly passing over my account of channels of communication! As Pete writes:
He’s talked about this in terms of the structure of ‘indications’ and ‘distinctions’ but I don’t think the specifics of this are very important for the point I’m going to make.
But the discussion of distinctions is important to the issues Pete raises, precisely because distinctions are one of the ways in which translations take place. In every event of actualization or local manifestation, there are two translations that take place. The first translation is the translation of a perturbation into information or an event that selects a system-state. Now, I’m open to a discussion of details as to how this first translation takes place. I’ve been pushing Luhmann’s theory of distinction pretty hard, but this first translation could also take place through less binary features of a system’s organization. The point here is that whether we go with distinctions or more complex and non-linear forms of system-specific organization or some combination of the two depending on what type of system we’re talking about, these organizations or distinctions 1) constitute the “channels” by which the system is open to its environment, and 2) are the mechanisms that preside over the manner in which perturbations are translated into information. What marks this first stage of translation is that the production of information is an event that isn’t produced by the system itself. Some sort of perturbation, whether from the internal environment of the system or the external environment (remember environments are always other than the system, even when internal) has to set this process in motion.
The event of information sets a second phase of translation in motion within the system itself. In selecting a system-state, powers or potentials within the virtual proper being of the object are selected and set in motion, initiating a process of actualization that generates a new quality or local manifestation. This process involves all sorts mediations and processes navigating prior states of the system and influencing what form the quality will finally take at the level of local manifestation. In other words, in this second phase of translation the quality isn’t already there, just lying in wait, but is a creative process that generates something new. Here, for example, we might think of protein replication in cells. The form that the phenotype takes (local manifestation) is not pre-delineated by something like genes in the form of a “blueprint”, but involves a variety of factors including the genes, the immediately prior states of the cell, environmental factors, and so on.
Griffiths and Gray give a nice example of this in certain species of aphids in Cycles of Contingency. In certain species of aphids, mothers pass on the Buchnera bacteria to either their eggs or their developing larvae. Wondering what role the Buchnera bacteria might play in the phenotype of these aphids, biologists used certain anti-bacterial agents to prevent these bacteria from being passed on to offspring. Much to their surprise, they discovered that the aphids that did not get the Buchnera bacteria were stunted, sterile, and died rather quickly. The importance of this example– and examples can be multiplied, for example we can talk about the role played by ambient chemicals in ant development, determining whether the ant is a worker, soldier, or queen or the bizarre case of the “slave maker ant” that enslaves other ants –is that the local manifestation is not “already there” in the virtual proper being of an object, but rather is constructed along the way through the process of actualization. This process of translation involves a number of steps.
I can understand Pete’s disappointment in my failure to provide a more detailed treatment of translation in its two phases at the level of information and actualization, but all that I can plead is that I’m doing ontology and therefore can only present these claims abstractly because the precise nature of these processes will differ from object to object or from system to system. What takes case in the development of ants might be very different than what takes place in a social system. In the case of social systems, for example, it might be that binary distinctions play the key role in generating information-events. In the case of ant development it might be that a much more non-linear, complex, non-linear organization plays this role. These are questions that have to be taken up anew with each new system under investigation. They just can’t be answered in advance.
6. Marx. Early in his post, Pete glosses my response to Reid pertaining to Marx as follows:
I think he’s still misunderstanding the claims being made by myself and others regarding both the general importance and specific nature of normativity. I think this is evident in the most recent exchange between Reid (here) and Levi (here and here), over how to interpret Marx’s philosophy, where it strikes me that Levi has missed the point of the contrast Reid was drawing between Marx and Latour entirely. Reid was making points very similar to the critique of Latour’s a-modernism I’ve outlined before (here and here), and tying these in to Marx’s theory of fetishisation and ideology critique. Levi seems to have interpreted this as some form of correlationist gesture, wherein the natural is made dependent upon the cultural, rather than an attempt to rethink the relation between the natural and the cultural that does not fetishise (or hybridise, in my terms) cultural objects so that one can talk about them engaging with the natural directly, in the form of hybrid ‘networks’.
I have a hard time recognizing anything resembling my critique of Reid’s remarks in Wolfendale’s gloss here. Nowhere, as far as I can recall, was my criticism that Reid is falling into correlationism. My points about fetishism were quite different. For Marx fetishism consists in treating properties like value as properties of the object itself, rather than recognizing how they are products of social relations. For example, we might treat gold as being intrinsically valuable, rather than recognizing the value goal as a product of the social relations through which it was produced. In this connection, I charged Reid with a form of fetishism because he is treating norms as a priori and ahistorical, rather than examining the forms of social relation through which these norms are produced. In my view, this just won’t wash with Marxist modes of analysis. Rather, within a Marxist framework we need a historical analysis of how particular norms arise and come to regulate social relations.
My second criticism of Reid’s remarks was that he simply gets Latour’s concept of collectives wrong. Reid interprets both Latour and I as claiming that there’s no difference between cultural objects and natural objects. But that’s simply not true. The suggestion that there’s no difference between cultural objects and natural objects is equivalent to the thesis that all objects are cultural constructions. Latour levels withering criticism against such claims, and instead argues that natural objects play a key role in social relations that is occluded by the nature/culture distinction as it functions in Modernity. Because of how modernity has distinguished between nature and culture, when it comes to analyzing nonhuman actors, it treats them as mere vehicles of cultural significations, texts, discourses, signs, etc.
As a consequence, nonhuman objects qua nonhuman objects and the role they play in the social becomes entirely invisible. For example, modernist modes of cultural analysis are unable to account for the role that domesticated animals play in a society because they focus on these domesticated animals only as tokens of a narrative or discourse, rather than as real entities in their own right. Here’s something you would never hear in a cultural analysis at the MLA: That cultures that have more domesticated animals also generate more disease microbes and viruses and that, as a consequence, part of the reason that the domination of the Americas by the Europeans was so disproportionate and one way was that 1) populations in the Americas did not have as many domesticated animals and therefore did not have as many diseases, and therefore 2) European diseases were therefore able to wipe out tremendous numbers in the indigenous populations of the Americas, making military conquest far easier.
The point here is that the role played by these actants has nothing to do with significations, texts, narratives, signs, and so on, but with the role played by real nonhuman actors in human societies. The dominant way in which we currently conduct our cultural, social, and political analysis makes us largely blind to these sorts of issues because we’re busily focusing on texts, narratives, and discourses and ignoring factors like ocean currents, mountain ranges, the presence or absence of domesticatable plants and animals in a population, rivers, telephone lines, fiber optic cables or the lack thereof, and so on. In my view, this way of approaching social and political thought leads to an implicit racism, or, more moderately put, a deep ethnocentrism. For example, you get Heidegger explaining the difference of the West in terms of some fundamental cultural difference like the “Greek event” that revolves around thought and sendings of beings, ignoring all sorts of environmental factors like domesticatable animals and plants, geographical location, availability of resources, etc. Likewise with John Milbank and his pronouncements about the “Christ-Event”. One has to think about societies in a particular way– as composed predominantly of texts, narratives, discourses, and signs –to find these sorts of conclusions possible. I hasten to add here that I am not excluded texts, narratives, discourses, signs, etc., but am defending the parity of explanation where we take other factors into consideration without treating them as mere vehicles of discourse and texts.
Returning to the context of Marx, my point was that Marx is far more of an actor-network theorist than Latour lets on. Marx, in his later work anyway, does not resort to entities like class and society to explain the social world we see around us, but instead sees these as things to be explained. And in providing such explanations Marx evokes all sorts of actor-networks or relations between humans and nonhumans involving everything from how money, a nonhuman actor, comes to transform social relations, to factories and technologies, the availability of resources, and so on and so on.
7. Normativity. A final point about normativity. Honestly I just don’t have a desire to repeat these discussions, in large part because I just don’t find them very interesting. Hopefully Pete will take no offense at such a remark. Time is always scarce and thinkers have to make choices as to how they spend it and what they devote their time to. I simply don’t find much payoff in these sorts of questions, which is to say that I don’t think they answer the sorts of questions I want answered. I’ll leave it to my normativity focused friends to plumb the depths of these sorts of issues. Over at Grundledung Tom has written a nice post explaining why he believes questions of normativity are important. I find much to commend here, it’s just not my area, that’s all.
I did, however, want to zero in on one moment in Pete’s post. Pete writes:
Finally, Levi has said a bunch of stuff in his response, in comments, and elsewhere, about psychological character of those of us with broadly Kantian approaches to normativity. I must emphasise again that one can be a Kantian about normativity insofar as one takes the notions of obligation, permission, legislation, and autonomy to be the fundamental basis of all normativity, and nonetheless deny Kant’s own particular ethical views (e.g., the categorical imperative). I would also emphasise that rule-based approaches to normativity need not imply some kind of strict ethics of external enforcement as opposed to internal developement (a la virtue ethics). It’s totally possible to think that what needs to be developed is rational autonomy, and thus an internal recognition of rules one should rationally follow. However, these are side points.
The main point is this: whatever the psychological tendencies of the loose philosophical grouping to which I belong are, they are irrelevant to the truth of either our individual or jointly held opinions. Truth is indifferent to this kind of stuff. Feel free to assume that I am a creature of pure ressentiment, whose only pleasure comes from forcing others to bow to my own preferred rules for whatever. The question is still whether this has any bearing on whether the reasons I give for my positions are good ones. If you think the answer to this question is yes, then we’ve got a far bigger disagreement than anything else I’m going to talk about in this post.
I have never said anything remotely resembling what Pete here attributes to me. In other words, I have not made claims about Pete. What I have argued is that rule-based or deontological models of normativity tend to generate a certain psychology based on judgment. From the standpoint of ethical questions, I think this is problematic and therefore tend more in the direction of Aristotle, the Epicureans, and Stoics where questions of ethics are concerned. I base this critique of rule-based normativity on psychoanalysis and Nietzsche.
Second, I think Pete’s remarks about me worrying over “external enforcement” show just how little understanding he has of the critique that I’m advancing. My problem with Kant style ethical systems has nothing to do with generating external systems of enforcement. Whether or not such a system leads to a system of external enforcement is really beside the point. My distaste for Kantian style ethics has to do with the sort of psychology I believe it generates in subjects. Not only do I believe this sort of ethics is psychologically unhealthy for the individuals that embrace it, I also believe that it generates rather ugly social relations based on judgment and conflict.
As for whether or not Pete has good reasons for his position, he seems to miss the point that I find those reasons unpersuasive and that I, in turn, have good reasons for my positions (which he appears to find unpersuasive). In many respects, I think this has to do with the two of us asking very different types of questions. As the post above illustrated, Pete tends to focus on questions of knowledge, making points like we must know some standard meaning to determine whether that meaning has changed in translation. I’m just not impressed by these sorts of arguments because I’m not making claims about how we know whether or not something is translated, but about what takes place in translation. Pete seems to think this is a scandal as, I suspect, he seems to think we must first know something before talking about what it is. I think this trades on a conflation of metaphysical and scientific knowledge, and believe that I’ve provided arguments as to how we can know these ontological truths without knowing what is specifically going on in a particular translation. At any rate, where Pete is inclined to raise questions of how we know whether the meaning of a text has changed in translation, I’m inclined to raise questions about what’s going on in aphid and ant development. These are just two very different sets of questions and concerns. For Pete it always goes back to someone observing the ants, whereas I’m just interested in what’s going on with the ants themselves, regardless of whether anyone knows it or observes it.
Now, when I say that I fail to find Pete’s arguments persuasive, I’m also fully willing to admit that I might very well not be understanding Pete’s arguments. I tried to make my way through Pete’s essay on transcendental realism, but found that I just had a very difficult time following it. I got lost in a maze of distinctions and concepts that, I believe, require a background in the philosophical cannon he draws from. While I have passing familiarity with this cannon, I certainly don’t have it at any level approaching Pete’s knowledge of this background. As a consequence, it’s very difficult for me to evaluate his arguments because it’s very difficult for me to know just what he’s arguing or claiming. I would have to become a specialist in the literature Pete draws on to evaluate these arguments, and I just don’t find that Pete has really demonstrated the payoff of such work to me, how it would enhance my own project, and why I should devote time to immersing myself in the literature upon which Pete draws. Before others jump all over me for this, let’s also remember that Pete is similarly ignorant of my background. I don’t think he’s devoted nearly the attention to Latour that Latour deserves, focusing, it appears to me, on Irreductions alone, nor, I think does Pete have much, if any, background in Luhmann, second-order systems theory, developmental systems theory, or Bhaskar. Indeed, in his most recent post, Pete confesses that he hasn’t read Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics, nor even finished Tool-Being, both of which, I would argue, are key Harmannian texts.
I say this not to denounce Pete, though I do find it curious that he has written so many posts on Harman’s object-oriented philosophy without reading a key text like Guerrilla Metaphysics, but merely to point out that we all have our textual limitations. I do my best to articulate my concepts and arguments clearly here, but these lines of argument are, of course, abbreviated and do presuppose some minimal background in the theoretical orientations I draw on. At any rate, one of the things I find somewhat oppressive in my discussions with Pete and other people that work heavily on issues of normativity is that ultimately they seem to reduce to something like “you should be investigating the things we’re investigating!. In other words, I often get the impression that what we’re really being accused of is not talking about what they’re talking about. Obviously, if I find these topics less than interesting, then this is because I feel that they’re not talking about the things we’re talking about! While I’m more than happy to have discussions about the details of various metaphysical points, I don’t see any of us writing the sort of prolegomena to metaphysics Pete seems to think is so vital. A big part of this, I believe, is none of us are the sort of foundationalists that Pete seems to be, i.e., many of us, I think, believe that the quest for such a prolegomena is Quixotic at its core.
Larval Subjects . 
July 10, 2010 at 7:31 pm
I want to be very careful with this comment and not sound like I’m being dismissive or anything, but having read your account above I can’t help but think that you take a lot of well-know philosophical ideas (and some are pretty worn out) and give them new names – so potentiality becomes withdrawal, primary qualities become virtual proper being, dogmatic postulation becomes a standpoint of inquiry and so on (I’m sure you are aware of this, one could take a bit of time and find a traditional equivalent to most, if not all, of your concepts). I’m sure there is a reason to do so (otherwise it would be fruitless), but I fail to see how it helps us move philosophical conversation along, i.e., how it allows us to free ourselves of traditional philosophical problems and their baggage. I’m afraid a subtle renaming won’t do, don’t you think? In other words, why reinvent the terminological wheel(s)?
July 10, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Steven, your post reads as if “Wolfendale on Onticology” is the only post by Levi that you have ever read.
July 10, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Hi Steven,
The short answer is no, I’m not simply renaming well-worn concepts, while yes I am deeply influenced by various strains of the philosophical tradition and generally mark those points of confluence in my more detailed writings. Withdrawal is not equivalent to virtual proper being, nor is local manifestation equivalent to qualities. Nor is virtual proper being equivalent to primary qualities. These concepts are designed to mark the context dependence of qualities as events. Poke around the blog a bit and you can get more detailed discussions of these concepts, or you can wait for the book.
July 10, 2010 at 9:45 pm
If this is an “abbreviated version” then I’m not sure what your full scale response would be like. I don’t really want to butt in here between you and Pete, but I’d like to address the issue of the triviality of withdrawal. I wouldn’t say, with Steven, that you are just reinventing the wheel, but you are certainly talking about “trivial” things that are not trivial at all and bothered many a philosopher before.
“First, it refers to the excess of any object over its local manifestations. In many respects, this is a very trivial point. All it means is that the being of any object is never exhausted by any of the actual states it happens to be in, such that therefore the being of an object cannot be equated with its qualities. For example, the water currently sitting in my glass is not boiling. Pretty trivial, right? ”
I don’t know about this. Postulating that being of any object is never exhausted by any of the actual states does not sound very trivial to me. Your example of water sitting there in a glass and having its quality of being boiling withdrawn (not manifested) sounds rather odd when put that way. The water could potentially be boiling under the right set of conditions – is the property of being in the boiling state a potential manifestation of this water in this glass? How about this example: water is sitting peacefully in a glass, but it could also be forcefully thrown in someone’s face, is this “being thrown in face” potential manifestation somehow part of this glass of water and in the present state of peacefully sitting in a glass it is withdrawn? Even the very fact of this water sitting in a glass is not so trivial – is the local manifestation of water sitting in a glass (not boiling) one or many manifestations? when does one stop and another begin? is it just statically sitting there or is it in constant motion that, as a result, produces the peaceful state of just sitting there. Etc Etc. My point here is not to criticize your notion of “withdrawal” but simply to announce my surprise that you would consider something like “water sitting in a glass” to be trivial and therefore somehow commonsensical. One can go on with the rest of that section on withdrawal in a similar manner: substance must be different from qualities etc etc are not trivial obvious notions but are very overdetermined metaphysical pronouncements – in a sense, if I understand Pete’s objections in sum, there’s a dogmatic moment of postulating at play here (“dogmatic” used in neutral philosophical sense of axiomatic postulation, not derogatory sense), masked as an appeal to trivial common sense.
After reading Maimon in the last months, I’ve come to appreciate certain aspect of questions like “what is an object/thing? how does it come into existence/is generated?” and especially in light of his notion of “differentials of sensation” I find your approach to be interesting as an example of metaphysics, so my questions are not meant to undermine your efforts, but to help me understand the metaphysical lure (in the same way you’ve attempted to understand normativity) of doing the sorts of things you do…
July 10, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Hi Mikhail,
It’s very generous of you to say these aren’t trivial claims. With certain concepts like local manifestation I think I’m pointing out very obvious and familiar things about the world we live in. Then again, the way I theorize these phenomena leads to controversial claims. I don’t, however, think I’m merely making dogmatic assertions. I believe I’ve provided grounds for these conclusions elsewhere in for example the manifestos in the sidebar. At any rate, where epistemology is concerned I tend to be rather “anti-realist”, though I think I’ve articulated the ontological grounds for anti-realism.
July 10, 2010 at 10:56 pm
I think we use the word “dogmatic” in different ways. Certainly, I don’t claim that I’ve read and understood all your posts, but I find it hard to believe that one can prove, for example, that every object consists of substance and accidents, especially since all we ever experience are, as you point out, only accidents. We infer the existence of substance based on a given metaphysical picture of reality (you’ve mentioned Aristotle, for example), picture we already have (have dogmatically postulated). If one is a rationalist in this case, one can speculate and produce more propositions that follow from the initial postulation (applying certain principles in the process). If one is an empiricist, one can test one’s theory and so on. But there’s no way to begin a philosophical investigation without some dogmatism, is there? What do you understand by “dogmatic assertions”?
To my point about non-trivial matter of waters sitting in glasses, I’d like to add the problem of space and time, or rather, emphasize it since you’ve already pointed it out. What always puzzled me in any discussion of objects is the following: I’m looking at a glass of water sitting on my desk – but where is the object? is it water? is it glass? is it the relation between the two? etc etc. I know you’ve spent many pages discussing these issues, but I wonder if you could help me in this particular case – if the world is in constant motion, as basic physics tells us, then the question of space/time is the most essential question of any metaphysics as it has to explain to us how objects become objects, i.e., how they are generated from whatever constitutes them (their parts)? This is not really a question, just an observation aimed to demonstrate my take on the non-triviality of what appears to be an object: what seems like a glass of water really isn’t it, is it? On my level, it looks solid and static, but on a smaller scale, it’s a whirlpool of elementary particles, on yet another scale, it’s nothing, absolute emptiness. The longer you stare at your glass, the less trivial it is, less substantial it is – at least that’s what physics would have us believe.
July 11, 2010 at 2:35 am
Mikhail,
I don’t recall making any claims about accidents, or citing Aristotle as the ground of my claims. You’ll find the transcendental argument for my position in the second manifesto on onticology in the sidebar. That argument is not based on an appeal to authority. If you don’t find it persuasive so it goes, I’m not going to try and convince you.
July 11, 2010 at 3:33 am
Levi,
I don’t recall claiming you cite Aristotle as the ground of your claims, I said that you cite Aristotle. I also did not claim that you base your argument on an appeal to authority (which is apparently your definition of “dogmatic”). And I didn’t ask you to convince me either. I’ve just shared some thoughts, that’s all. Do what you will with them.
July 11, 2010 at 4:31 am
Mikhail,
I think I misread your last post. Such are the dangers of trying to respond on a phone while on the road. I take it that a dogmatic claim is a claim that does not ground the possibility for making the claims that it makes or what entitles one to make those claims. Basically I’m in agreement with Bhaskar when he argues that our experimental practice is only intelligible if we begin from the premise that reality is hierarchical, structured, differentiated, and that it must be possible for substances to be out of phase with the qualities of which they’re capable of producing. In other words, I make a transcendental argument that reality must be structured in a particular way if certain practices we engage in are to be intelligible. Additionally, for me one mark of dogmatism would be the belief that we can deduce the existence of any particular entity. For example, the rationalist deducing the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. I don’t think it’s possible to deduce the existence of any particular entity, but can only discover what entities do or do not exist through actual inquiry. All I argue is that reality must be structured in a particular way if experimental practice and perception is to be possible. I don’t make any a priori claims as to what does actually exist and what doesn’t exist.
I think the hierarchical part gets at what you’re getting at with respect to the glass of water and the smaller and smaller strata of reality. We can have regularities at one level of reality that are based on other regularities at another level of reality such as the movement of quantum particles you talk about. Without getting into all the dirty details surrounding thorny questions of emergence, my position would be something along the lines that structures at lower levels of reality don’t erase structures at higher scale levels of reality. So basically the point would be that you have all sorts of different scales of reality that have their own laws, structures, and regularities that are, I believe, irreducible to the lower levels, while also neither contradicting the laws governing the lower levels and while being dependent on those entities at the lower levels.
I’m really not prepared to make any hard and fast claims about time and space at this point, though I agree that they are fundamental questions. By way of observation, it seems to me that you are equating objects with their parts or rather that you are wondering whether objects are identical to their parts. While I certainly agree that objects can’t exist without parts, I don’t think the being of objects can be equated with their parts. Most of my examples for illustrating this point come from biology. Biological organisms are constantly losing cells and generating new cells, yet they persist as the organisms that they are. This suggests to me that it is the organization of a being that constitutes its objecthood as an object, not the parts of an object. I’ll leave it there for the moment as it’s been a long day and I’m worn out.
July 11, 2010 at 2:15 pm
I just can’t see why quantum physics has come to be the preferred model or picture of objects at an ontological level. Does knowing about the physical qualities of sound — its existence as a wave, its speed, direction, intensity, etc — bring us any closer to understanding Schubert’s ninth symphony, “The Great?” Even if you were to elaborate immensely on all of the physical conditions necessary to hear it, the relationship between the instruments, air, the ear and the brain, would you be that much closer to understanding the sonata and classical symphonic form, Schubert’s devilish dynamics or his finale’s “fun ride to hell” (as Simon Rattle called it) or its tone-color? Otherwise, it seems you would have to say that all of this other “stuff” — the symphony, the glass and the water — is just epiphenomena, illusory or simply not really real, a kind of collective hallucination. If it’s not real then why does Schubert’s 9th have vastly different, I would imagine, acoustics and frequencies and sound patterns and harmonics from, say, a Chopin nocturne or a John Cage prepared piano or a softly hummed voice or a didgeridoo? These are obviously very specific and particular organizations and unities. Also, I’m not claiming to know what they are — these are complex fields of study. But the point is, are we allowed to say nothing about them but what the quantum physicist discovers about energy and wave-particles (which are, themselves, I would think, very specific things). But ontology has to deal with everything, with a general description of the thing, and I guess, not being glib, but if the symphony or the glass is just an epiphenomena for quantum physics, epiphenomena is certainly something, and so enters into the realm of ontology, anyway. Besides, the other sciences such as evolutionary biology, paleontology, astronomy and so on aren’t abandoning their work to become quantum physicists. Just because we know something about reality at the quantum level doesn’t mean we understand, from that, the complexity of meteorological formations, or the biogeography of a species, or the nocturnal life of the vampire bat. It seems more than obvious that there are very different levels of reality without there being a more “real” level. Besides, quantum physics is a model or picture of reality and not the reality itself, and a necessarily fallible one at that (which it has to be, that’s the nature of any translation or construction).
Just some thoughts.
July 11, 2010 at 4:56 pm
“I just can’t see why quantum physics has come to be the preferred model or picture of objects at an ontological level.”
Well, I don’t see why it shouldn’t. I didn’t suggest (if you’re referring to my “glasses” examples) that it is in fact a “preferred model” but it is a model (one of many) and to prefer any model over any other model is to make a principled choice. Does knowing about the nature of sound help us understand Schubert? Of course it does. In as much as understanding the nature of sound helps us understand music, harmonic structures, consonance/dissonance, theme development and so on. Does it mean that a physicist would enjoy Schubert more? Maybe. Why do we need to make a choice about what aspect of Schubert we enjoy most? I like that he was bespectacled short fellow with issues of self-esteem – does that help me enjoy his music more/less? And what if I hated Schubert? Is it because I’m uncultured country bumpkin or is it because I’m too cool for school etc etc. I think you’re answering your own question – these are very complex unities, but physical elements are a large part of it because they make all the other ones possible (no sound, no music), does it mean that the physical level is primary (I don’t claim it, to repeat myself)? Maybe, maybe not – if you are studying acoustics, it certainly is. But the point I was making is that the reality of a glass sitting in front of me is far from self-explanatory (trivial) and simple – glass as I see it is only a small fraction of that reality, if you object against taking the physical view as primary, then why do we need to take a commonsensical view as primary? Saying that things are complex doesn’t really address the issue, since everything is complex etc etc. Therefore I find this comment to be puzzling:
“It seems more than obvious that there are very different levels of reality without there being a more “real” level.”
I always thought the staple of any realism is the notion that some levels of complex reality are more real than others (things existing outside/independently of us are more real). If there’s nothing “more real” and “less real” then there is no standard of “reality” therefore there is no “realism” here. Surely, it all depends on what level of musical reality you choose as primary, but is that choice completely arbitrary? How are we to argue about Schubert if it is? If I said that Schubert music is annoyingly sugary and dull, how would you argue against me? In short, “thinks are very complex and reality is so awesomely diverse” isn’t really an answer to anything, just an excuse, it seems to me…
July 11, 2010 at 5:11 pm
“I don’t think it’s possible to deduce the existence of any particular entity, but can only discover what entities do or do not exist through actual inquiry.”
Not to belabor my point about physics, but what do you make of physicists deducing the existence of certain particles before they then go on to discover it? (Think Dirac’s prediction of anti-matter). Plus, your transcendental argument (if I understand it), states that “reality must be structured in a particular way if certain practices we engage in are to be intelligible” – what do you mean by “reality” here if not entities and related matters? is transcendental method not necessary suggesting that things must be in a particular way, that the world must be thus and not otherwise? The usefulness of transcendental approach, as you show, is that it establishes the rules of engagement with the world before the actual engagement, therefore it must necessarily tell us something about entities (even if indirectly) before we actually discover those entities. That is to say, using your language, transcendental arguments must make “a priori claims as to what does actually exist and what doesn’t exist” – otherwise it’s not transcendental.
I think we’re in agreement on the complexity and therefore non-triviality of such seemingly simple things as glasses of water, therefore if things are not so trivial, then the notion of withdrawal is not so trivial after all. That was my main point. I think you had a chapter heading on Space/Time in your book, if I recall correctly, I’m looking forward to reading that section because I think we both agree that it is rather important. If you ever feel like sharing a preview of that chapter, I’d be interested in taking a look, otherwise I’ll wait until the book comes out. Thanks for this exchange, I hope I’m not being difficult, as you know, this is how I communicate, it’s not out of some essential trollishness (whatever ontological entity that is), it’s out of intellectual curiosity…
July 11, 2010 at 6:32 pm
[…] of Levi’s accounts of meaning and knowledge. Levi already has a brief counter-response up (here). I don’t want to address his counter-points in great detail here, as I’m still […]
July 11, 2010 at 10:27 pm
Hi Mikhail,
That’s a really great observation, though I wouldn’t say that physicists deduce the existence of particles, but predict the existence of entities. They still have to go through the hard work of demonstrating that such entities exist. That, for instance, is why string theory is, at this point, merely a proposal. I don’t really understand your remarks about Bhaskar’s transcendental argument for the structure of the world. It doesn’t tell us what things exist, only that if they are to be discoverable by experiment they must be structured in a particular way. It could turn out that experiment is thoroughly impossible and unintelligible as a practice. Claiming that reality must be structured and differentiated for any experiment to be possible– because we need to be able to isolate phenomena to experiment on them, hence the differentiation thesis –is a far cry from the claim that any structures exist and an even further cry from claiming what unique structures these things have.
It’s unlikely that the book will include the chapter on space and time that I had proposed earlier. The more I’ve reflected on it the more complex I’ve come to believe the problem is and the more research it requires. Part of the issue here is that I’m not convinced that time and space have univocal meanings or ontological structures. As a consequence, it becomes necessary to discuss time and space from a number of different angles and that means a lot more research before I can determine what the major issues are and stake out my own position.
July 11, 2010 at 11:08 pm
“That’s a really great observation, though I wouldn’t say that physicists deduce the existence of particles, but predict the existence of entities.”
That’s certainly a valid distinction. I think I was taking prediction and deduction to be doing somewhat similar things, but it’s clearly not the same. So if I calculated that according to my theory an object X must necessarily exist, even though no one has yet observed it, I am indeed predicting something. I suppose your distinction is more subtle.
“It doesn’t tell us what things exist, only that if they are to be discoverable by experiment they must be structured in a particular way.”
I agree, but it (transcendental method in general) does tell us what sorts of things must exist. So it doesn’t tell me that this chair must exist as a particular object, but it does predict that chair-like things must exist, does it not? Unless I’m completely misunderstanding your use of “transcendental” – in sum, we come prepared to our experiments with “a priori claims”. In this sense, I read your statement (“I don’t make any a priori claims as to what does actually exist and what doesn’t exist.”) as suggesting that we don’t know what exists, but we do know what must exist – is that correct? It’s certainly a subtler reading than what I understood. It sounds more transcendental than I remember from our previous encounters on the subject.
I think space/time in this sense as part of transcendental discussion would have told us that things will necessarily appear as spatial and in sequence, but not what sorts of concrete things, right? Sad to hear the space/time chapter is gone, it’ll be interesting to see how you can talk about objects without raising space/time.
July 11, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Hey Mikhail,
We talked a bit about this before and I’m still quite up in the air about the questions you raise here:
For me there are a few questions here with respect to what my beginning point commits me to. Since I’ve begun from what must be the case for experimental practice to be intelligible, all I can really claim with any assurance is that there must be things out there that are structured and differentiated, such that they can be discovered in experiment. The idea Bhaskar has is this: When objects or generative mechanisms are out there in the world, they can exist and be there while not producing certain qualities or events because they’re in an open setting and either other generative mechanisms can get in the way, hiding their powers, or they can just be dormant. Experimental practice is premised on this possibility of generative mechanisms (what I call objects) being out of phase with the events they’re capable of producing. The point of experiment, the argument runs, is to create artificial environments where these generative mechanisms can be triggered so as to see what they’re capable of. But if this is to be possible, those generative mechanisms must have some structure and must be differentiated from other mechanisms because if they weren’t they wouldn’t be able to be separated from these other mechanisms.
Granting that argument, all I’m really entitled to claim with any assurance is that there are certain differentiated structures out there in the world. I say that I’m entitled to claim this because experiments do take place and seem to successfully reveal something about the world. I can’t claim, with assurance, that all things that exist must have these characteristics. In other words, there could very well be other entities that are just a priori undiscoverable through any form of experimentation because they aren’t structured or differentiated.
When you get to the example of the chair, that’s where I begin going back and forth. Does it make sense to say that “chairs exist?” Graham definitely wants to make this claim. However, I have a hard time making this claim without qualification. I just can’t bring myself to say that were all humans to die out, chairs would still exist. That pushes me back into a more correlationist direction where cultural entities are concerned. With that said, I don’t think that cultural entities are purely subjective. I suspect that there are three broad categories of entities (though I confess it’s often difficult to untangle them): Purely subjective entities that exist only for a particular person at a particular point in time (like the fantasy I’m currently having of eating some jerk chicken), collective entities, and, for lack of a better term, “natural entities”. Collective entities would be things that are both dependent on human beings but nonetheless transcendent to the whims of any individual humans. This would be things like chairs, money, words, titles, etc. I can’t just wish myself into being president of the United States, nor can I will my dollar bill to be worth a billion dollars. There’s a real sense in which these things are “objective” and real, while nonetheless being dependent on the existence of social systems. Does that make any sense?
In response to my last post, I’m kinda surprised that you didn’t raise the obvious criticism of my claims about parts vs. organization with respect to my claim that the substantiality of substance can’t be equated with the parts that make up an object. There I had made an appeal to biology and how bodies maintain their organization while the parts change. The thing that really gives me headaches is whether this is true for inanimate objects as well. A lot of this goes back to questions like “when does a heap become a pile?” So take that cup of water you were talking about. Evaporation is always taking place, even if we can’t immediately see it. Does the water still remain that water when it loses a molecule of water? I’m just not sure how to answer this sort of question.
We’ll see. A section or two on this would fit nicely with the chapter I’m writing right now, but any claims I made would have to be tentative. I do have some thoughts here, but I’m leery about generalizing too much. I’m not, however, convinced that all objects are necessarily spatio-temporal. It could be that universals exist, for example, and I think that would be an instance of an object that is neither located in space and that is timeless.
July 12, 2010 at 2:21 am
Levi:
You write:
I am a little surprised to hear you say this about a chair. I can understand the point with regard to money, as money includes all kinds of purely relational, non-physical elements, but the chair strikes me as having a very particular physical configuration which makes it useful to humans. Certainly this dimension of the chair, with all of its meaning, significance and participation in relation to human existence would disappear, but I can certainly imagine, for instance, were humanity to die out, the chair could be overgrown with vines, or become the habitat of some insect like a wasp or spider, etc, etc. It isn’t a “chair” in the human sense anymore, but that’s the case for the chair right now, isn’t it? Once it exists, even now it is more than our relation to it. I can understand the point being less true for money or more symbolic forms as symbolic, but the chair strikes me as an example of something that would survive the death of humanity, or, if not the “chair,” than the pre-chair or the chair-excess. It seems to me that there is a certain autonomy to that particular kind of object than there is in money, for example.
July 12, 2010 at 3:45 am
Just one more question for the night. In Prince of Networks, pp 189-190, Graham distinguishes the sociological object of “Speculative Realism” from the “Monster X,” which is a purely sensual object. I was surprised about your chair comment because one strong element that has run through your development of onticology is that, if an entity is real, then it is real, tout court, and that you don’t place cultural or social collectives in a different category of reality from nonhuman objects or collectives. When Graham says that Speculative Realism is real as a cat, it seems that this statement also carries with it all of the caveats that you wish: it is an object that, without humans, obviously would disappear. But surely this is no ontologically, or onticologically, different from, eg, the contingent object known as the solar system, is it? I wonder if this is a genuine departure from Latour’s nonmodernity for you? How is being dependent on a social system ontologically different from being dependent on any other kind of system, eg, the way a rainbow appearing in the sky is dependent on certain atmospheric systems?
July 12, 2010 at 11:47 am
[…] often making wild and crazy normative claims, it often happens here on this blog). Mikhail had asked me what I think dogmatic thought is. With my response, among other things, I had suggested that it is […]
July 12, 2010 at 11:51 am
Hi Joseph,
This is more or less what I mean in my comments about chairs:
I’m not suggesting that chairs aren’t real, but that they necessarily have a system reference or exist within a particular system. This is part of why I distinguish between subjective objects and collective objects.
July 12, 2010 at 5:17 pm
You write:
“Rather, information is a purely system-specific event, produced as a consequence of how a system is structured.Other objects can perturb an object, but the object that is perturbed transforms this perturbation into information according to its own structure.”
Now how is this transformation possible? I have not been following your posts of late, but then this is something that is perplexing. And then further on, you mention:
“It is not something shared by systems or transmitted between systems. To be sure, one system can perturb or irritate another system, but a perturbation is not information.”
So, perturbations travel between systems and that too without carrying any gene (just the jargon!!) of information. Now, as a perturbation hits a system/object, information is framed according to the structure of the object that gets hit. Does this mean that information is all about the perturbations inciting the objects to create. I am at a fix here. i request an explanation as i think the two quotes are dichotomous.
July 12, 2010 at 6:22 pm
[…] through Graham’s Latour book right now and this was quite helpful. Pete: here and here. Levi: here and here. Hopefully Levi will expand upon why he see’s Peirce’s comment on difference […]