I really didn’t want to get drawn into recent debates surrounding “lava-lampy materialism” because I’ve been both sick and busy with other things, but given Ivakhiv’s most recent post I feel compelled to respond (I won’t bother responding to Vitale’s post because I believe that anyone who describes other philosophical positions as a “cult” or form of “mysticism” has undermined all possibility of dialogue and discussion). Before getting into Ivakhiv’s specific claims, I would like to briefly outline my problem with what Morton has called “lava lampy materialism”. I have no problem with process and becoming. That said, I think many process philosophers tend to commit a basic fallacy. The argument seems to run that because objects are produced out of other things, there must be a gooey substrate or source from which these objects come from. This strikes me as a fallacy. All that we are entitled to say is that objects are produced out of other things. The thesis that objects must therefore arise from an undifferentiated field is another matter entirely and I see not a single reason for adopting such a position. Indeed, the claim that there is a pre-individual [read, “not composed of objects] field anterior to objects strikes me as the height of mythological thinking. Has anyone ever provided a single argument for such a claim? Not as far as I can tell. To repeat, I have no problem with the thesis that objects are, in many instances [I remain agnostic as to whether this is true in all instances… Perhaps there are universals] built out of other objects. This claim, however, is entirely different than the claim that there is a pre-individual field anterior to objects.
Outlining Vitale’s arguments, Ivakhiv begins by remarking that,
(1) OOO is relatively new and is still awaiting its pièce de résistance. I understand that a few of these are on the way, and that one of Graham Harman’s is specifically intended to address sixteen or so (is that right?) questions posed by OOO’s critics. I’m eagerly awaiting the results.
These are frustrating remarks for Ivakhiv or anyone else to make. Graham has written Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics, both of which develop his claims in great detail. In addition to this, Ivakhiv might consult my article in The Speculative Turn which is, I hope, carefully argued and full of detail. The arguments have been made again and again both on my blog and elsewhere. The arguments are, moreover, detailed and intricate. How many times must they be repeated? I have no problem with someone finding fault with those arguments. This, however, is entirely different than merely dismissing something on the grounds that it has made no arguments. Claims that something is a cult or a mysticism are designed to do precisely that. They are marginalizing terms, absolving the person advancing the “criticism” from any responsibility of actually addressing claims or arguments. Taking a page from Foucault, they function similarly to classifications of madness. Just as an attribution of madness works to silence the person to whom this predicate is attributed, claims of belonging to a cult immediately absolve one from having to respond to any of the claims or arguments one has made.
Ivakhiv goes on to write:
(2) Process-relational approaches (or whatever term one uses for them) are, on the other hand, well established. As Chris puts it, “there’s a whole cottage industry of Deleuzians, Whiteheadians, Peircians, etc.” In fact there are several cottage industries right there (even among just those three branches), which aren’t necessarily in frequent communication with each other, though that has been changing. OOO has hardly made inroads into these industries, so the road is wide open for engagement.
It is disappointing to see Ivakhiv (and Vitale) making appeals to authority (the established status of Deleuze, Whitehead, and Peirce). It is also surprising to see anyone who thinks within the framework of these thinkers (especially Deleuze and Whitehead) both of whom endlessly champion the new making arguments from authority. It is even more amusing to hear Vitale and Ivakhiv suggesting that OOO has “not made inroads into these industries.” Ivakhiv seems to forget that I’m the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, along with numerous articles on Deleuze. Not to toot my own horn, but that book also received extremely favorable reviews from such venerable Deleuzians as Ronald Bogue and James Williams (the latter, of which, is no slouch when it comes to Whitehead). I’ve even written articles on Deleuze’s account of individuation (yanno, how objects come into being) that have been translated into other languages. This strikes me as a rather larger contribution to these industries than either Vitale or Ivakhiv have made, but maybe they disagree, so I’ll set that aside. Does Ivakhiv ever give us a philosophical account of the genesis of objects, or does he merely say that objects are generated and processual. I don’t know because I have a difficult time finding his contributions to process-relational thought in print. He’s welcome to consult mine, however.
More pertinently, I would like to ask where, exactly, the knock-down arguments for process relational thought are to be found in either Deleuze, Whitehead, or Peirce. In evoking this “venerable tradition” and “cottage industry”, Ivakhiv seems to suggest that there are established arguments in these fields. But are there really? In Process and Reality Whitehead bluntly states that he’s merely providing a “conceptual scheme” designed to be true to our experience. Yet he also admits that others are possible. In Difference and Givenness I do my best to provide arguments for Deleuze’s positions, but in doing so I go against the letter of Deleuze’s own concept of philosophy. Let’s not forget that Deleuze and Guattari (and Deleuze alone in his lectures well before the publication of What is Philosophy?) describe their work as an “invention of concepts”. They don’t give arguments for their position, but rather offer us concepts. They also tell us that they are free to take them or leave them (Guattari says this alone in Chaosmosis, Deleuze repeats it in Dialogues or Negotiations in his riff on making mistakes and conversations, and they say it together in their collaborative works). There’s no demonstration here, but merely a vision. The situation is much the same with Peirce who generally offers us a picture or a vision of the world, not particular arguments for their position.
Now I say this to raise the question of why we should acknowledge these positions at all. Where Whitehead merely offers us a conceptual scheme (conceding that others are possible), and where Deleuze tells us that he’s merely inventing concepts, and where Peirce just gives us pictures of the world, OOO actually tries to make arguments for the position that it’s developing. Again, I refer Ivakhiv to my piece in The Speculative Turn, and Graham’s Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics. Additionally, the entire first chapter of The Democracy of Objects is devoted to arguments for both the epistemic grounds for the existence of objects and why the world must be structured in terms of objects. Again, how many times do arguments need to be repeated? Ivakhiv is even free to look at my side-bar and read my manifesto posts providing an outline for these arguments. Given the absence of arguments in the first camp, I wonder where the charge of “mysticism” most aptly applies.
Ivakhiv goes on to remark that,
As a new kid on the block, OOO has been smart in garnering attention and occasional support from a few of the bigger names around, like Latour and Zizek. But attention, blog readership, numbers of downloads, etc., aren’t the same thing as intellectual conversion (to use that tendentious term), and if numbers are what counts, the process-relationists far outnumber the OOO-ists.
It sounds as if Ivakhiv is suggesting that we’ve been engaged in some underhanded marketing techniques. I would hope that the attention that we’ve drawn is more a function of perhaps, hopefully, maybe saying something important and presenting some compelling arguments for both our positions and things that have been overlooked in contemporary theory. As for “conversions”, when does this happen in philosophy and the world of theory? Mostly people just pick up the concepts in works they find valuable and run with them. They tend not to get converted.
Ivakhiv goes on to ask:
(3) Chris identifies a few of the pieces that haven’t satisfied us (the process-relationists) in OOO’s account of things: (i) How does an object come into being, change into another, etc.? In other words, what’s the relationship between substance and change? (ii) What makes objects ontologically primary (as Tim recently put it) and processes, events, relations, or anything else secondary? (I’m not sure if all OOO-ists share that valuation, but then that’s something for them to clarify.) And (iii) “How do we determine what to call can object?” or, what’s the relationship between language (and/or perspective) and the thing itself? I think OOO has some answers to the latter question, but whenever it gets raised the discussion seems to descend into a terrain of incommensurability between the two camps. There are other points at issue, which a reader of these blog debates can easily identify, but those are good places to start.
(i) How does an object come into being, change into another, etc.? In other words, what’s the relationship between substance and change?
First, can Ivakhiv point me to the place in Deleuze, Whitehead, or Peirce where these questions are answered? They say objects do come into being and change, but they do not say how. They merely say they do. This is part of what led Badiou, in The Clamor of Being, to say that Deleuze is merely a descriptive philosopher.
That aside, I agree, most objects come into being. They come into being from other objects. And how does this occur? For me, this occurs by the emergent object attaining what I call endo-consistency or internal structure and organization such that it has emergent qualities and takes on a life of its own.
(ii) What makes objects ontologically primary (as Tim recently put it) and processes, events, relations, or anything else secondary? (I’m not sure if all OOO-ists share that valuation, but then that’s something for them to clarify.)
Ivakhiv will find the answers to this question in abbreviated form in the manifestos in my sidebar or, if he cares to wait, the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects. Again, how many times do these things have to be repeated?
And (iii) “How do we determine what to call can object?” or, what’s the relationship between language (and/or perspective) and the thing itself?
This is not a question for ontology but for epistemology. Ontology addresses what objects are regardless of whether or not anyone knows them or perceives them. Epistemology asks how we know objects. OOO isn’t making claims about knowing objects. However, it does have implications for knowledge. As many of us have repeated again, objects relate to one another by translating one another. As everyone knows, translation is never identical to that which it translates. Translation always produces something new and different. Humans are objects that relate to other objects. Ergo, humans translate the world around them. It’s entirely likely that certain things humans count as objects are not, in fact, objects but are just translations of a multiplicity of different objects.
However, this gets to something that came up in an email discussion earlier this evening. My interlocutor wrote:
The blue mug on the table. Does it exist ‘in its own’, even if I’m not here? To an electron, or does it show up to it electronly, and hence, not as a blue mug? In which case, there is no blue mug for the electron, and hence, we can only say ‘what appears to me as a blue mug’, without there being any ‘real’ object to anchor it. This is the core of the dispute, I think.
Notice the nature of the questions this person asks: “does it exist even if I’m not here?” “does it exist to an electron, even if the electron passes right through it?” What’s the problem? The problem is that the person is using the verb “exist” in the wrong way. The blue mug exists in its own right. It has nothing to do with whether or not we’re here, nor does it have anything to do with whether or not the electron passes right through it. The problem with this usage is that it is thinking the verb “to exist” relationally as “exists to“. But “existence” is not a relational verb of this sort. “Exists” is a property of the entity that exists, not a relation between another entity and the entity. If you begin with this relational perspective your thinking will be muddled on these issues from the very start.
Now I must sleep.
Larval Subjects . 
January 15, 2011 at 10:45 am
[…] afraid I agree WITH LEVI on both counts […]
January 15, 2011 at 2:08 pm
I suspect the arguments will have to be made many times more. Relational thinking is ingrained into our habits of thought and our language. You even said earlier on “_For me_, this occurs by the emergent object …” – when I’m sure you didn’t mean that the occurrence happens _for you_ !
What this whole argument remind me of: as a child, I found the ‘tree falling in the woods’ thing incredibly annoying. Either there was something terribly profound that I was missing, or people were just being obtuse …
January 15, 2011 at 2:15 pm
[…] Bryant responds to my last post (and by extension to Chris Vitale’s) here. I agree with him that he and Graham Harman have made worthy efforts at addressing concerns that […]
January 15, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Well said Levi, I think Ivakhiv’s newest post about filling a room with books based on D&G, Whithead, Peirce, etc… is a pretty idiotic metric of philosophy. OOO is still in its infancy and I don’t think it’s fair to criticize it in comparison to the “room full of books” of another philosophy. Can’t wait for “The Democracy of Objects”.
January 15, 2011 at 4:15 pm
“All that we are entitled to say is that objects are produced out of other things.”
Honest question:
How do you avoid the implicit metaphorical assumptions built into the folk psychology of words and concepts like “things”? As Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, and many other developmental psychologists have shown, there are various sensorimotor and evolutionarily ancient metaphors that influence our “common sense” judgments about how to carve the world up e.g. living things act differently than nonliving things, self-moving things are different from non self-moving things, animate versus inanimate, etc. There is also the worry of using the word “thing” as a multisensory abstract category to be applied to many things simply because the word evolved to take on that function of being applied to diverse sets of entities and events? The worry then would be to satisfactorily use the language of “thing” while stripping the term of its implicit metaphysical common sense bestowed by the necessity of life, which many cognitive scientists often describe as “essentialist”. In your own work, how do keep these evolved metaphor schemas from preventing clarity in thought when speaking to a lay audience with their own innate-learned knowledge about what a “thing” is?
Also, given that science has demonstrably shown how stable objects like rocks get formed out of less stable flows of molecules, atoms,etc., it seems like a good interpretation of “goo” is that it refers to this micro world of molecules, not some imagined,cartoony idea of “goo”, like ectoplasm or something. I think a charitable interpretation of “goo philosophy” must be done in lockstep with modern scientific knowledge, particularly our knowledge of the molecular, atomic, and subatomic levels of reality. I think Deleuze used the term “molecular” so much because he was familiar with the scientific theories on the molecular level of reality. To claim that he was talking about something else, some “goo”, seems uncharitable in light of the fact that (1) he claimed to not be using metaphor and (2) we can reasonably map his “descriptive language” onto scientifically respectable problems while retaining the conceptual essence of his ideas.
And so what if he was just “describing” reality? What is OOO doing? What is any philosophy doing? Are theoretical physicists just “describing reality” with abstract languages, or are they performing some useful service to humanity by building abstract systems of thought in light of previous empirical knowledge? Are not philosophers providing the same service? Using abstract conceptual systems to step back and provide a broad theoretical system to make sense of large swathes of previously unrelated empirical data? As the theoretical scientist works with the experimental scientist, the philosopher works with other fields. I believe describing things in an accurate and technical language is useful for inspiration, scientifically, creatively, poetically. The power of Deleuzian thought, for all its abstract jargon and neologisms, is to act as a tool-box, to be used in diverse ways for the inspiration of various problematics, perhaps even only implicitly. Who knows what the power of a philosophy book will do? Perhaps it will set off a chain reaction in scientists mind that will eventually lead to a new empirical discovery. As Deleuze said, “I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician…Bergson says that modern science hasn’t found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me.” Deleuze gives us tools for challenges deeply help intuitions about how reality is carved up. Challenging onto-theology, essentialism, anti-essentialism, Kantianism, Cartesianism, pure phenomenology, etc. Is that not really awesome? Perhaps it can even help us think of about how reality “takes on a life of its own.”
January 15, 2011 at 5:12 pm
Gary,
The question you raise in your first paragraph falls under the heading of translation. These are all ways in which humans translate the world about them. So the response is that we don’t avoid it and OOO has never claimed that we do avoid it. That doesn’t change the fact that the world must be structured and differentiated as per the arguments I outline in the manifestos in the sidebar.
Your arguments in the second paragraph don’t hold up under scrutiny. You draw a distinction between, on the one hand, obects (your example of rocks) and the quantum/molecular world of goo. This fails, I believe, for three reasons: First, the entities of that quantum/molecular world are themselves objects. They are not other than objects but are instances of objects. Objects are built out of other objects and themselves contain objects. Second, objects like rocks have emergent powers and properties that, while unable to exist independent of those quantum entities, are irreducible to those quantum entities. Finally third, your reading of Deleuze is just inaccurate. Deleuze is quite clear that the field out of which objects emerge is a pre-individual field; which is to say a field that is not structured and differentiated or composed of objects. In other words, it is the “uncharitable” interpretation of goo you attribute to me.
Your point about metaphor gets into some intricate issues of interpretation of Deleuze. The assertions that x is not a metaphor begin to appear in Deleuze’s collaborative work with Guattari. Why do they begin to make this claim. Recall that Guattari was a Lacanian analyst and they wrote a book entitled Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In my view, nothing about this text can be understood absent the context of Freud-Lacan’s account of psychosis-schizophrenia. In his metapsychological writings, Freud had argued that psychotics treat words like things (cf “The Unconscious”). In seminar 3, Lacan expanded on this, arguing that psychosis is characterized by an inability to form metaphors. According to Lacan, this is because the paternal signifier is foreclosed in the unconscious. Insofar as the paternal signifier is the originary metaphorical operation, the psychotic is subsequently unable to form metaphors and relates to signifiers as things. Within Deleuze and Guattari’s framework it follows that their project requires a rejection of metaphor coincident with the rejection of Oedipal structure.
Your third paragraph, I think, misses my point. I am not suggesting that Deleuze, Whitehead, Peirce, et al are unproductive or lacking in value. If this were the case I wouldn’t continue to write articles on Deleuze and Whitehead, nor would I have devoted the third chapter of The Democracy of Objects to Deleuze. My point is that it is dishonest to suggest that there are knock-down, well devloped arguments coming from these thinkers that we’re obligated to respond to. When someone like Vitale charges OOO with being a “mysticism”, wondering where the arguments are, he should first look to his own house. I have a hard time finding these alleged arguments among the process philosophers, and through my scholarship on these figures I believe I have earned the right to advance credible criticisms. OOO, on the other hand, has worked diligently to develop genuine arguments. Strangely, these arguments go unaddressed.
Hopefully I’ll be excused for growing rather weary with these debates. Increasingly they have a rather authoritarian bent that sounds as if we’re being asked to display our papers. There is also a tinge of hysteria, where we’re repeatedly being asked question after question without any of the answers ever being satisfactory. Lacan said that the hysteric has a desire for an unsatisfied desire. For the hysteric x is never it, despite the fact that the hysteric has it. This dynamic is notable in these exchamges. The goal posts keep changing and the responses fall on deaf ears. I literally devoted large swaths of my blog to responding to Vitale in 2009. Literally the majority of blog entries that year are devoted to responding to him, yet he claims I’ve not responded. I point him to writings where he can find my responses and then he responds by berating me for pointing him to places where I’ve responded to these issues. Then Ivakhiv comes along suggesting that Vitale is making valid points, as if these things have not been addressed. These arguments are intricate, detailed, have been made. Time is finite and given the hysterical logic that’s structuring these relations, it’s clear that no response will be accepted anyway as these debates are really about something else.
January 15, 2011 at 5:42 pm
> Deleuze is quite clear that the field out of which objects emerge is a pre-individual field; which is to say a field that is not structured and differentiated or composed of objects. In other words, it is the “uncharitable” interpretation of goo you attribute to me.
I am under the impression that Deleuze thinks the micro/macro distinction can be applied at any spatial-temporal scale, with each level of the scale being nested in other levels. The “undifferentiated” field *could* be what scientists would call molecules, and the differentiated individuals would be macro-collections of molecules, with emergent properties unique to that new configuration/functional structure of molecules. However, if we use a smaller spatial-temporal scale, then it would be the molecules that are individuals emerging out of some undifferentiated field of preindividual energy hidden within. This seems like a kind of light wave/particle issue: it depends on how we look at it. My intuition tells me that there are multiple answers to the question of, “are molecules objects or are they goo?” I think on some scales, molecules could properly be seen as a goo, while on other scales they are clearly objects. What I don’t believe is that there is a well-settled way of determining what they “really” are, outside of sheer definition, which seems arbitrary. Just as a scientist cannot declare by fiat that “light is a particle”, I don’t think we can declare by fiat that “the behavior of molecules is best understood when we conceive of them as individuals”, since I hold it to be plausible that there are at least *some* spatial-temporal scales where it appears most useful to talk about molecules as an undifferentiated, preindividual field. And since there are specific and well-defined mind independent properties displayed by the field, then we have every recourse for saying it is “real”, thus avoiding any problematic idealism usually associated with schools of thought that say it “depends on how you look at it”.
And in case you accuse me of a correlationism for my pluralism about descriptions, I don’t think it is problematic to talk about reality independent of human access. I just think it is problematic, but maybe not impossible, to determine for good what the appropriate spatial-temporal level for talking about any given slice of reality. And since the spatial-temporal scales we use determines how we answer questions about whether molecules or individuals or not, I don’t think the sheer fiat of “they are objects” is convincing, at least to my mind. I’m not challenging you to convince me, or implying you have an obligation to change my mind or respond to this question, I’m just stating my feelings on the subject. It’s not that I think OOO is logically incoherent or philosophically problematic in some deep theoretical way. I think it’s perfectly coherent. I just think there has got to be some useful and appropriate time for talking about molecules and sub-atomic reality in terms of preindividuals, while at the same time there must be an appropriate scale at which they can be seen and coherently understood as individuals. Maybe this is my pluralism inherited from Rorty and James spilling over.
January 15, 2011 at 6:18 pm
Gary Williams wrote:
I think Deleuze used the term “molecular” so much because he was familiar with the scientific theories on the molecular level of reality.
When D&G talk about the molar and molecular, they are talking about scales of organisation, not modes of composition. They do take it from chemistry, but not in the sense of ‘there is a molecular substrate’.
In chemistry, a molecule is defined as the simplest freely existing unit of a given chemical consisting of two or more atoms. A mole, on the other hand, is an amount of any given substance that contains as many objects (molecules, particles, ions, cells etc.) as the number of atoms in exactly 12 grams of carbon 12.
Very basically, a molecule is ‘bottom-up’organised (or self-organised, if you like), a mole is ‘top-down’ organised (i.e. a form of measurement imposed by chemists). Personally, I think this is much more interesting than questions about whether what is being organised is a pool of goo or a pile of objects.
January 15, 2011 at 6:27 pm
I agree that this is much more interesting, John. It doesn’t, however, change what Deleuze says about the pre-individual and the transcendental field. As I argue in the chapter on Deleuze, there are two competing tendencies in his thought: one which tends towards this idea of a single good that is then somehow cut up, and another which is object-oriented.
January 15, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Gary,
I really don’t have a problem with the reading you’re proposing; but then I think that reading is object-oriented. That aside, I believe that I have provided real arguments as to why the “goo ontology” cannot hold up metaphysically (not the “goo reading” you’re proposing, but the one that’s being criticized). Those arguments are outlined in the second manifesto in the sidebar.
January 15, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Levi, I agree with what you wrote about Deleuze and the pre-individual above. I was not attempting to defend that aspect of his position.
January 15, 2011 at 6:39 pm
Here’s the link to the arguments:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/onticology-a-manifesto-for-object-oriented-ontology-part-2/
Please keep in mind that this is a very abnreviated form of the argument (I devote thirty or forty pages to developing the argument in The Democracy of Objects. At any rate, it’s not my view that the difference between goo-ontology and object-ontology is an undecideable incommensurability. I believe the former position is fundamentally incoherent and unsustainable.
January 15, 2011 at 6:44 pm
John,
Gotcha. I think D&G move in an object-oriented direction in their collaborative works, thinking more in terms of assemblages and machines (their word for “object” imo) than goo. In the past I toyed with the idea that the Bergsonian Deleuze and Deleuze-Simondon of DR had undergone a “turn” and abandoned the pre-individual, but it reappears in his final published essay “Immanence: A Life…” under the heading of the transcendental field. Nonetheless, I think there’s an object-oriented Deleuze to be rescued from Deleuze. Much of my more recent work has been devoted to this.
January 15, 2011 at 8:08 pm
I have probably said this before Levi, but at some point last summer, I realised that the object orientation was something that I simply couldn’t ignore. This realisation wasn’t altogether a pleasant one, as I feared losing everything. But following through on this realisation is beginning to feel productive and liberating.
Anyway, with support from the likes of Zizek and Latour, you don’t need my testimonials, but it must be close to the time when you can simply ignore the Ivakhiv’s of this world. His last post made me cringe for him.
January 15, 2011 at 10:57 pm
Thanks Ghost. Fear not, the book on object-oriented ontology and psychoanalysis in in the works.
January 16, 2011 at 4:26 am
“If we consider philosophical controversies, we shall find that disputants tend to require coherence from their adversaries, and to grant dispensations to themselves.”
— Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.6
*******************************************
Levi writes:
“It’s entirely likely that certain things humans count as objects are not, in fact, objects but are just translations of a multiplicity of different objects.”
This sentence can be broken down into two parts: 1) It is entirely likely that certain things humans count as objects are not, in fact, objects; and 2) but are just translations of a multiplicity of different objects.
The process-relational thinkers will accept #1. They will reject #2.
One argument for rejecting #2 is a claim that the category “object” succumbs to the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Whitehead writes,
“This fallacy consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored so long as we restrict thought to these categories. Thus the success of a philosophy is to be measured by its comparative avoidance of this fallacy, when thought is restricted within its categories.”
The process-relational thinkers are under the impression that the category of “object” is problematic.
What is an object?
We want to identify a few defining attributes of the central logic associated with the argument that it is necessary to acknowledge “objects” as an ontological basis for thinking.
Typically, objects are associated with a coherent structure (properties, boundaries) and a definite history. This typical definition of what constitutes a definition of “object” is problematic for BOTH the Object-Oriented Ontologies AND the Process-Relational Ontologies. In the case of OOO, the existence of objects is posited over-and-above their observable structure and history. Indeed, objects have internal organization, and historical trajectories; however, as Harman states in Tool-Being:
“Neither gazing at an object nor theorizing about it is enough to lure its being from concealment.” (p. 21)
Along these lines, consider what Heidegger himself says in 1919: “A science of lived experiences, then, would have to objectify them; that is, it would have to strip them of their non-objectlike character as lived experience and event.”
Thus, there is an issue here of “the relation between contexture and singularity in the entity”. (Harman, p.55)
Heidegger’s notion of Dasein points to this relation between “the special entity which has an understanding of being,” on one hand, and “actual existence in the world prior to” any abstraction/characterization as an object or a process, on the other. (phrases from Harman, p.42) The typical characterization of what an object is fails to encompass what OOO means by “objects”.
Likewise, for Process-Relational Ontologies, the chracterization of an object as having a coherent structure (properties, boundaries) and definite history is problematic. Consider the following from Whitehead, from the 1927-28 Gifford Lectures. For Whithead,
“The point is that every proposition refers to a universe exhibiting some general systematic metaphysical character. Apart from this background, the separate entities which go to form the proposition, and the proposition as a whole, are without determinate character. Nothing has been defined, because every definite entity requires a systematic universe to supply its requisite status….But in the absence of a well-defined categorial scheme of entities, issuing in a satisfactory metaphysical system, every premise in a philosophical argument is under suspicion. A precise language must await a completed metaphysical knowledge.”
(Process and Reality, p. 11,8,12)
The Process-Relational Ontologies are impressed by necessity of the organism acknowledging the following:
“There can only be evidence of a world of actual entities, if the immediate actual entity discloses them as essential to its own composition.” (Process and Reality, p.145)
For Whitehead, substance-quality notions of actuality (consider Levi: “‘Exists’ is a property of the entity that exists, not a relation of another entity to that entity”), as typified in positing objects as fundamental components of an ontology, are suspect because they attempt to generate a distance separating actual entities from the compositionality that constitutes the evidence of a world of actual entities in the first place.
For example, for an object to have an internal organization and definite history embroils us in questions about the composition of that internal organization temporally and spatially. The actual world or universe (QUA goal of a complete metaphysical knowledge) functions as a medium, but it would be hasty to claim that this medium is some unsatisfactory, incoherent “goo”. Importantly, for Whithead,
“[F]or the philosophy of organism the primary relationship of physical occasions is exstensive connection. This ultimate relationship is sui generis, and cannot be defined or explained.” (Process and Reality, p.288)
In other words, the Process-Relational Ontologies are positing relations, and compositionality in a medium of process-dynamic-connectivity, as constitutive of actual entities; while also acknowledging that the ultimate relationship — the actual, non-abstracted compositionality of the actual world — cannot be defined or explained.
Whitehead writes,
“I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error [in positing a metaphysical object with spatio-temporal properties] is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” (from Enquiry Concerning Principles of Natural Knowledge)
Thus, BOTH Object-Oriented Ontologies AND Process-Relational Ontologies have problems with common-sense-scientific notions of “objects”.
It seems to me that EACH of the Ontological approaches OUGHT to sympathize with the stance of others against typical notions of objects. For Heidegger’s Tool Analysis, what we observe and hypothesize about the being of objects, including the process of their composition and morphology, cannot exhaust the efficacy of those objects as metaphysically basic entities of a total system or actual world. In this regard, the Object-Oriented Ontologies can be viewed as persistently in agreement with WHITEHEAD’S OWN STATEMENTS about the necessity of pointing out that only a completed metaphysical knowledge will allow our philosophical systems to be “true or false”.
The Object-Oriented Ontologies are claiming that a completed metaphysical knowledge requires us to grant the sub-terrenean efficacy of objects over-and-above our characterizations of their compositionality, dynamic process, and relationships to other objects. What Levi is speaking of as “translation”, whereby objects perceive and impact the translational practices of other objects, is a concession to the awareness that our experience of the NON-OBJECTLIKE (read, dynamic, process-relational) character of lived experience is a translational gloss on the reality of vast multiplicities of objects.
January 17, 2011 at 12:01 am
ghost’s “…with support from the likes of Zizek and Latour, you don’t need my testimonials,…” struck me as a squirrelly understatement. It’s clear that in OOO Latour has a ready philosophical community to which to bring his long-brewing, passsionately-discovered 14 modes of being. And without the safe landing pad of OOO, can anyone imagine Zizek flinging himself this far out?:
“It is the very radical separation of man from God which unites us with God, since, in the figure of Christ, God is thoroughly separated from itself—the point is thus not to ‘overcome’the gap which separates us from God, but to take note of how this gap is internal to God himself (Christianity as the ultimate version of the Rabinovitch joke)—only when I experience the infinite pain of separation from God, do I share an experience with God himself (Christ on the Cross).” The Speculative Turn, p 413
It seemed to me in their contributions to The Speculative Turn, like Levi, Latour and Zizek were also “striving to straddle” and in doing so sharing their ecstacy and agony, respectively.