In my LAST POST I wrote,
Building an object is always problematic. When smaller scale objects are brought together with larger scale objects we always encounter a series of problems as to just how to make these objects work together. Engineering is a field of problems. When we bring objects together we discover that they behave in unexpected ways, that this object, brought into relation with that object, evokes surprising and hitherto unknown powers within one or both of the objects. We learn more and more about the volcanic powers of objects through relating them to one another and interacting with them, but we should be cautious in concluding that we ever know all the powers of objects (I’m inclined to argue that every object is inexhaustible).
In my view, this is one of the key reasons for maintaining that objects are external to or independent of their relations. As Spinoza famously said in Part III of the Ethics, “we don’t know what a body can do.” Insofar as objects display surprising qualities when brought into relations with new objects, it follows that objects cannot be reduced to their relations. Were objects reducible to their relations, then their qualities would be exhausted by whatever relations they happen to embody at a particular time. Put a bit differently, it would be impossible to account for why objects behave differently when situated in new fields of relations.
It is therefore necessary to account for just how this is possible. Two consequences follow from this observations:
First, holism or the thesis that everything is related to everything else is false.
Second, the thesis that an object is its relations must be false.
The reason that both of these positions are false is the same. If holism were true, then it would follow that each and every object must manifest all the qualities that it can ever manifest, precisely because the object already exists in all the relations in which it can possibly exist. Likewise, if relationism or the thesis that objects are their relations were true, it would follow that objects cannot surprise or manifest new qualities by entering into new relations precisely because there is nothing more to objects held in reserve or withdrawal from the relations the object currently maintains.
read on!
Short of an appeal to magic, it therefore follows that there must be something of the object in excess of any relations the object happens to entertain at a particular time. Put alternatively, objects must be withdrawn from their relations, harboring hidden and volcanic depths not exhausted by their relations. Either way the point amounts to the same: The concept of substance is ineradicable from ontology if we are to coherently think the possibility of change. It is only where objects, in principle, are irreducible to their relations that we are able to account for why objects produce such surprises when they’re brought into new relations with other objects.
It is this observation that lies at the heart of my distinction between “virtual proper being” and “local manifestation”. “Local manifestation” refers to the relational dimension of objects. Local manifestations are relational through and through and refer to the qualities an object actualizes when it enters into relationships with or interacts with other objects. For example, if you take a styrofoam coffee cup a few hundred feet beneath the ocean it’s size will shrink considerably. This is a local manifestation of the styrofoam cup that arises in relation to the pressure of the water compressing it. If these manifestations are local, then this is because it is these particular relations that produce these particular manifestations or qualities.
The important point here is to maintain the locality of these relations. Other relations will produce other local manifestations. In my view, relationists are right to recognize functional relationships between manifestation or quality and relation, but wrong to claim that objects are their relations. Here the motivation is pretty obvious: Historically talk of substance has tended to lead to a subject-predicate or subject-quality metaphysics that sees predicates, qualities, or manifestations as intrinsic to the object, ignoring what Boothby, in Freud as Philosopher referred to as “dispositional fields” or fields of relations that evoke or summon manifestations. The eradication of the category of substance is therefore designed to draw our attention to these dispositional fields as coefficients of manifestation.
The problem is that in eradicating the category of substance, relationists are left without an account of how change is possible. Without any hidden reserves or excesses outside of relation we’re left without the means of accounting for either 1) how relations can shift or change (the relationist falls into an actualism where there’s nothing but the extant relations they can appeal to), and 2) how it is possible for substances to manifest new qualities or manifestations when they enter into new relations. It is for this reason that I argue that objects are split between their local manifestations and virtual proper being, and treat the field of virtual proper being as a field of structured singularities, potentials, or attractors that are a) summoned in particular ways when an object enters into new relations thereby generating new qualities, and b) that have an activity of their own that upset and disrupt existing relations leading to new qualities and relations. Virtual proper being, for me, is the substantiality of substance that is withdrawn from relation, that is in excess of all local relations, and that always harbors the capacity to generate new and different qualities.
Clearly we only ever encounter objects in existing fields of local relations. However, ontologically we must work from the principle that every object, in principle, is detachable from its current relations. Insofar as there is a coefficient between manifestation and relation, it follows, of course, that detaching an object from its relations can produce significant changes in its local manifestations. Morton reminded us of an important example of this today when, in Ecology Without Nature he speaks of a mouse being shot into outer space (given my daughter’s recent obsession with the cartoon Angelina Ballerina— she jumps about in a lyotard and ballet slippers to the music, imitating the dance of the mouse, Angelina… Such is my life. –I’m sure she’d be delighted with this example). The relationist wishes to argue that because the mouse dies when it enters a vacuum, it has ceased to be a mouse and that therefore the existence is relational or dependent on a milieu. As Tim points out however, the mouse hasn’t ceased to exist when shot into a vacuum, it has merely lost a very important quality or local manifestation: life. That local manifestation is dependent on relations to be sure, but the substantiality of the mouse remains, though perhaps it has lost some of its singularities.
An ontological, practical, and political consequence follows from all of this. Ontologically we must postulate the existence of what Graham calls “dormant objects”. Because objects are, in principle, detachable from their relations, we have to entertain the possibility of entirely dormant objects or objects that do not manifest themselves at all because 1) they do not exist in relation to any other objects, and 2) they have no activity within them. Dormant objects are objects not currently in act, but which might come to act. Practically, OOO entails experimentalism. In his UCLA talk, Graham spoke of counter-factual imagining as a technique for getting at the withdrawn core of objects. What, for example, would Lovecraft’s horror be like were it to take place in Egypt? This counter-factual imagining allows us, Graham argues, to get at the substantiality of objects insofar as they’re capable of holding up in a variety of different contexts. I would argue that this technique is not simply imaginative, but also practical. Not only can we vary contexts imaginatively, but we can experiment materially and physically with the contexts of many objects, discovering new powers that they harbor within themselves. Finally, these claims are of political significance insofar as they lead us to reject the thesis that objects can be reduced to existing local relations, imagining the possibility of other relations and therefore leading us to seek the production of new relations.
Larval Subjects . 
December 8, 2010 at 1:56 am
So lets keep it simple. A while back you were ‘oscillating’ on the question of absolute withdrawal. Have you come to a conclusion yet on this. Is this local manifestation (by way of ‘accidents’) genuine, but partial, knowledge of a substance in its proper being? Graham argues v. strongly that this is imposs. We can’t know ‘wholes’ – however many aspects we have….You can’t have partial knowledge. What do you think on this today? I will post soon on why Aquinas says pretty much exactly what Graham is claiming. Different terminology same meaning…
December 8, 2010 at 2:17 am
I hope this isn’t too nitpicky, but isn’t there a difference between saying ‘everything is related to everything else’ and ‘everything already holds every possible relation to anything else’? In that case, objects wouldn’t be exhausted by their current relations, but they would be in some way or other related to everything else.
December 8, 2010 at 2:19 am
Paul,
I believe we only ever know relations, never the withdrawn core of objects. The atomic chart of elements, for example, is a diagram of local manifestations that occur when particular relations obtain.
I never find arguments “x already said all this in a different vocabulary” valuable or useful. You tried to post something similar here a week ago about Guattari which I didn’t post because it was filled with personal attacks. If you’re merely saying we have something to learn from Aquinas or Guattari, I agree, we do. You’ll note that Graham and I make constant references to the history of philosophy. If you’re making the claim that we shouldn’t say anything at all because they’ve already said it, I vehemently disagree. Although the final quote of The Democracy of Objects is from Guattari’s Chaosmosis I’m not at all convinced that we’re saying the same thing. First, let’s face it, his presentation is awful. Who really knows what the hell he’s saying? Second, my aims and goals are different, and we differ on a number of issues. Have a learned a lot from Guattari? Kinda. Is there overlap? Sure. But the “same” it is not. Likewise with Aquinas. There you have the whole God thing and in a Christian framework to boot. That’s something definitely worth desuturing yourself from. Second, I don’t see anything in Aquinas that resembles claims I’ve made about mereology, hyperobjects (with Morton), flat ontology (he’d be vehemently against such a thing), withdrawal (how can objects be withdrawn from his version of God?) or local manifestation. I like Aquinas in his conception of objects as acts, but that’s about it.
You seem to have this strange fetish for always tracing things back to other philosophers. I think that’s rather rude and is a way of shifting from the issues being discussed to something else. There’s quite a bit of difference between saying ” this reminds me of x in the work of philosopher y” (good and useful) and saying “this is just Aquinas or Guattari” (rude and trollish). Those who have a fetish for the history of philosophy should recognize that histories of philosophy are always selective and omissive. And please don’t come back with some variant of how history of phil is important for doing phil. My writings here and in publication are more than enough evidence that I take the history of phil seriously. I just question the value of any “contribution” that says “isn’t this just x?”. Maybe so. Aren’t you pleased then that x is finding new life in the present?
December 8, 2010 at 2:19 am
And as a Deleuzian don’t you take it as a given that all repetition produces a difference?
December 8, 2010 at 2:25 am
Chris,
I think if you claim there is a difference then you’ve already conceded the existence of substance because you’ve already conceded that something can relate otherwise. Additionally, I simply don’t think it’s true that everything is related to everything else. There are all sorts of things that neutrinos, for example, are not related to due to their neutral charge and consequent inability to relate to most other matter. It is their ubiquitous non-relation that gives physicists so many headaches in trying to prove they exist. This non-relation is true of all objects. Rocks, for example, are non-related to signifiers, being non-responsive to them. Holism makes experimentalism very difficult to understand.
December 8, 2010 at 5:37 am
Great post. Re: experimentalism. I wonder whether part of understanding withdrawal is precisely this–you can’t know something unless you alter its sensuality, as every well behaved electron wave knows. Like the rat neuron robot: maybe we can’t know what a mind is until we’ve made one–sort of practical counterfactualism? There’s an irreducible paradox here.
December 8, 2010 at 9:56 am
Great post. Guattari is unreadable. I am not a ‘deleuzian’ – have no idea what that would be.
as for ‘desuturing’ myself from a christian god – omg. ‘the great companion who suffers with us’ – fetish….
And referring to posts you don’t publish – well I said you were often fucking angry and pretentious. Amen.
December 9, 2010 at 1:30 am
My question is where this leaves the idea of emergent properties. Are they simply the actualized excess of the objects engaged in relation and therefore quantifiable in theory (if not a possibility in fact) by summing the portions of excess actualized by the relation? It seems strange to say that an emergent property such as any population data–density, for instance–is already present in the individuals (the objects) composing the population (the relation). But strange-sounding is usually good.
Or, to use a mathematical example, can we say that for a set including A, B, and C, each unit already contains, in dormancy, the potential for combinations of A+B, A+C, B+C, A-B, A-C, etc. etc., even if the full breadth of possibility is split between the units. Defined maybe as A contains in dormancy the potential relations A+, A-, A/, A*, such that the term A can be both defined in its overt status as a singular unit of the set and in its subterranean status of potential orientations in relation to any other units? Or is that oversimplifying the idea?
December 9, 2010 at 2:51 am
This interesting post reminds me (:-)) of Fitch’s Knowability Paradox: if all truths are knowable in principle then all truths are in fact known. Since all truths are not known, therefore all truths are not knowable.
An ontic version might be called the “Relational Paradox”: if all relations are possible in principle then all relations exist. Since all relations do not exist, then all relations are not possible. Unfortunately, I have no idea if the argument for the Knowability Paradox can be transformed in such a way.
Your argument against holism results in “it is not true that everything is related to everything else” which implies “all relations do not exist”. Then “all relations are not possible” would then be a corollary of that finding, if the Relational Paradox is valid. If so, the idea that “all relations are not possible” would certainly indicate that objects are withdrawn!
December 9, 2010 at 3:06 am
I am admittedly out of my element here so please forgive any naivete, but it strikes me that the withdrawnness of objects from relations has some sort of dependence upon those very relations, i.e. the withdrawn potential-relations of an object are only a “withdrawn” background against the foreground of local manifestations. I hope I am neither re-stating nor bastardizing what Chris said, but can’t the definition of an object as “the sum total of its relations” include its contingent and negative corollary of withdrawn potential? In other words, if we take up the metaphor of sound, aren’t local manifestations of objects just like sound-occurences and therefore reducible to a relation of contact (one object, hollow, withdrawn, sounding-out due to its hollowness by its very contact with another object, manifesting a certain potential-relation given the situated occurrence)? Although this manifestation is “a” manifestation it resonates only in that there is a hiddenness/withdrawnness to the object, for it is the hiddneness which properly resonates. Doesn’t manifestation as such exist only in that other unknowable and hidden manifestations are “behind” the manifestation? Perhaps I stretch my metaphors too far and, like I said, I’m out of my element–just thought I’d toss in my two cents. Love the post regardless.
December 9, 2010 at 4:09 pm
I prefer ‘magic’, or at least ‘mystic’, thinking. All understanding or making-sense of a situation or event is just ‘old magic’, ‘outdated-magic’ (i.e. outdated relative to our new magic), and occurs because last century’s metaphors have become literalisms through ‘forgeting’ and positive-ignorance.
Why can an ‘entity’ (without any preconceptions of thingness, body, or substance) not have excess without substantiality? In non-linear dynamics even a set of relations forms RELATIVE EXCESS. A set of gears, springs, plates, etc. relate to become for me a watch, this ‘becoming for me a watch’ is an excessive relation created by relations (I realize this example is slightly skewed since watches are a human-informed form, but the way in which relations can leave room for relative excess I beieve still holds). And there is of course still plenty of room for ‘surprise’, ‘change’ and unpredictability in such relative-non-linear-dynamical system, such as when the watch becomes, for my dog, a chew-toy.
I do not want to claim that there is no room for ontological-substance, but just that you seem to presuppose such a category because you remain in an ‘old-magic’, and hence use ‘last century’s’ linguistic-relations to tackle and solidify what is still metaphoric, still magical, mystical. This seems apparent to me by your use of the mouse in space example. By ‘losing’ the local manifestation ‘life’ you grant being to this manifestation; i.e. it IS something that can be lost. Where, if we are going to try to be Deleuzean, and I think especially Spinozian, then ‘life’ is not ‘lost to the mouse’, the mouse instead relates differently, becomes differently, or is’s differently (‘is’s’ implying the fully verbalized verb-of-state ‘to be’; the is-ing of an is). In this way I mean to say that only by presupposing the possibility of segregating out substantialities, like ‘life’, from others, like ‘space-mouse’, can one take such an example to support that “the substantiality of the mouse remains, though perhaps it has lost some of its singularities”, instead of say, as support for an always changing relative-milieu. Finally, I don’t mean that we must try and work without presuppositions, I think that is impossible, but only that we need some new ones for our new magic, new linguistic-stylistics, new conceptual-differences, than those of ‘ontology’, ‘substance’, ‘independent’, ‘remains’, ‘external’….and by this I do not mean mean necessarily that we stop using these words, but that we ‘re-relate’ them; ‘new presupposition’ is meant to imply new ‘basic-relations’ informing (putting into forms) our thought.
December 9, 2010 at 4:34 pm
“That local manifestation is dependent on relations to be sure, but the substantiality of the mouse remains, though perhaps it has lost some of its singularities.”
This may be the drollest understatement ever. Angry and pretentious? Au contraire, Paul. Joyful and life affirming. Some of us can and do learn necessary profundities from roadkill.
December 9, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Nice post, Levi. I have to say that I agree with you on the holism issue – in fact, just the other day I was working on a post critiquing the holistic perspective in anthropology and other social sciences. I think it leads us away from real effective action – since actions, it seems to me (and I draw from Bateson and Latour on this), can never be holistic. It leads us, more often than not, to silver-bullet solutions that end up failing or causing more harm than good. That’s not to say that it’s not important – even essential – to look at the many different relations that manifest in any given situation, but we have to see ourselves as parts of a system with lots of complex feedbacks rather than as outsiders who can know and manipulate a system from above.
Something like that anyway – this is all just schematic because I don’t really have time to think it all through yet. Maybe in a week or two when all my papers are done. :)
December 9, 2010 at 5:01 pm
[…] will start (provocatively, I guess) by picking up on a moment in a couple of recent posts by Levi Bryant and Tim Morton, where each insists that a mouse shot into space somehow remains a mouse, just a dead […]
December 9, 2010 at 9:27 pm
@Matthew – Well said. And wow. Do you blog?
December 9, 2010 at 11:34 pm
[…] (her term, not mine) and outstanding novelist, Francis Madeson caught the joke. Quote me, Madeson goes on to write: “That local manifestation is dependent on relations to be sure, but the substantiality of the […]
December 11, 2010 at 11:22 pm
Yes, to say that certain things are unrelated depends on what we mean by ‘relation.’ I suppose I’m not sure of the definition of relation at work here, so I don’t know for sure whether I agree with you or not. We could admit some sort of ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon’-type relation that would easily link everything. But do you have a definition of relation somewhere? Sorry if it’s been covered here already, I haven’t been reading everything.
Also, I have no problem, personally, accepting ‘substance.’
December 22, 2010 at 11:14 pm
I might as well add to this, since nobody wants to answer. Does relation mean direct relation, unmediated in some way? Are there registers of relation–physically related, conceptually related, similar to one another, genealogically related, etc.? Obviously, unless we limit what we mean by ‘relation,’ it’s quite easy to show that everything is related to everything else.