Larval Subjects .

Here are the first three paragraphs of my New School talk. All hell breaks loose from there, replete with Spinozist and dynamic systems theorist goodness.

Objects are improbabilities and are improbabilities in at least two ways. First, they are improbable in terms of the arrangement of their elements. Second, they are improbable in terms of the continuation of this arrangement across time and space. As improbabilities objects therefore share a special relationship to entropy. The greater the entropy of a system, the higher the probability that an element in that system will appear anywhere within that system. Thus, for example, a system composed of a distribution of gas particles that have diffused throughout a chamber is highly entropic because there is a high probability that any particular element that exists within that system will be located anywhere within the chamber. By contrast, a low entropic system is a system in which there is a low probability of appearing anywhere within the system. When our gas particles are first pumped into the system they exist in a state of low entropy because they are localized in a particular place within the system. That is, there is a high degree of probability that they will appear at a particular place within the chamber.

All objects are low entropy systems, yet not all low entropy systems are substances or objects. Even though the gas particles in our chamber begin in a state of low entropy by virtue of being localized or concentrated at one particular place in the chamber, these particles quickly evolve into a high entropy state as they diffuse throughout the chamber. The dividing line between substances and crowds of substances lies, I argue, between whether or not a system maintains its order across time and whether this order evolves into a high entropy state. Low entropy systems where elements are arranged in a particular way, such that the elements of the system are related to one another in a particular way and that strive to maintain these ordering relations across time are negentropic systems. Systems that strive to maintain the ordering relations between their elements across time are negentropic.

All substances or objects are thus low entropy, negentropic systems. Rocks, planets, armies, political groups, families, classrooms, governments, hurricanes, tornadoes, aardvarks, and giraffes, for example, are thus substances, while piles of rocks, crowds of people on a subway car, armies routed on the field of battle that are fleeing in terror, and so on are not. The latter are not objects in their own right, but rather are highly entropic crowds of objects. Thus, following Aristotle in Metaphysics Z, we can say that the substantiality of substances consists in the substance’s substantial form. Following the Lucretian declaration, all objects are material, but it is not the materiality of the object that constitutes its substantiality. Proof of this lies in the fact that objects can gain and lose material elements while remaining that substance. Cells in my body perpetually die and new cells are born, yet I remain this substance. Rather, the substantiality of substance consists in its substantial form, or the pattern and relationships between elements in that substance. My cats liver cells are located in this particular part of her body, her heart there, her nerve cells throughout the body in this or that way, bone cells in this way. These elements are organized in a particular way and located in particular portions of her body. Moreover, these ordering relations are maintained across time. I refer to this organization as the “endo-consistency” of a substance.

It looks like I won’t be going to Stockholm this time around after all. My college requires international travel to be cleared with the Board of Trustees and such requests have to be submitted 90 days in advance. I’ve been slain by a rule.

The last two weeks have been extremely productive for me, leading to the writing of three articles. For Identities: Journal of Gender, Politics, and Culture. I wrote an article entitled “Of Parts and Politics: Onticology and Queer Theory” that develops an onticological account of politics and the subject. For the Open Court Dungeons and Dragons anthology, I wrote an article entitled “Substantial Powers”. Due to some weird editorial decisions, this will actually turn into two articles, one entitled “Powerful Objects” that develops an account of the substance of objects as powers or capacities, and another entitled “Alliances and a Throw of the Dice” that gives an account of how compound objects are formed through linkages with objects, and an account of how chance presides over relations between objects and their actualizations. Finally, I’ve written an article entitled “The Time of the Object: Derrida, Luhmann, and the Processual Nature of Substances”, for the Metaphysics and Things collection that resulted from the Claremont Speculative Realism conference last year. This paper draws heavily on Derrida’s account of différance to give an account of the substantiality of substance as process or activity. I’d be happy to share any of these articles with anyone who asks so long as you don’t distribute them on the internet.

I’m quite pleased with all three articles and think there’s a lot of unfamiliar stuff here for readers of Larval Subjects. At any rate, over at Object-Oriented Philosophy Graham, describing his own experience with the anxiety of writing and his endless revisions of his own writing when he was younger, has said that you just need to sit down and write. I’m increasingly finding that this is true. The Lacanian and Luhmannian in me helps to understand why writing is so anxiety provoking. On the one hand, Luhmann argues that meaning is the unity of an actual articulation and all the potential articulations that could have been made. Someone says “Pynchon means x in The Crying of Lot 49” and that articulation is meaningful precisely because it resonates with all the other possible claims about this novel that could have been articulated. The reason that articulation is anxiety provoking is because 1) to articulate is to be forced to select, such that your articulation necessarily generates anxiety (as Sartre so poetically articulated in his analysis of choosing in Being and Nothingness), and, more profoundly, 2) the manner in which the other potential articulations haunt the actual selection, such that one’s selection is revealed as contingent. The trauma of meaning is that other selections were always possible, such that there’s no way to ultimately justify your selection of this choice. What you actualize in meaning will always be “leaky”.

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Over at Ecology Without Nature, Timothy Morton has posted the final schedule for OOOIII at The New School for Social Research, along with the locations.

Speculative Realism: A Discussion With Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman will be held in the Skylight Room of the CUNY Graduate Center and will run from 6 – 9 PM on Thursday September 15th.

The schedule and location for Speculative Medievalisms II can be found here, and will happen at CUNY on September 16th.

It’s easy to speak ethical cliches. Yes, we all believe in equality. Yes, we’re all opposed to exploitation. Yes, we despise the ravages and horrors of capitalism. No, we aren’t for the promotion of needless suffering. Yes, we want people to be free to pursue their own aims. Sexual liberation ad freedom? Yes please! Destruction of the environment and extinction of other species? No thanks. Authority? Yuck, you fascist pigs. Everyone’s against eating babies and kicking kittens. We’re all against bad spelling, punctuation, and bad grammar too. We’re also against those that don’t forgive it.

Discussing your ethics and politics in academia is bit like showing your papers at the gates of the Berlin wall. One wonders why the question comes up at all. Yet to really speak your ethics– and I mean in the sense of a Kierkegaard –now that’s hard. Doing so is a bit like ripping your soul out and holding it out to the public for scrutiny. When one really speaks about ethics she’s not articulating a rule, but the very essence of her style of being… Her conatus itself. Sometimes I suspect that only philistines, one-dimensional beings, can bear speaking their ethics. Everyone else is too busy being it. Even more indecent is someone who asks for it. The question always implies either that you approve of eating babies and kicking kittens, or is a request to rip your conatus out and submit it to the public. I’m with James. Deeds, not words.

It looks like Stockholm will be a go (I just need to hear back from the Vice President of Collin). I’ll be there from the 28th until the 3rd. During that time I’ll be giving a two day seminar on onticology and a paper tentatively entitled “Entropy, Order, and Dance: Dynamic Systems and Objects”, in conjunction with the choreography festival going on that week. I can’t wait!

1) Every system (object) is founded on a distinction between system and environment. The environment of a system is not a container that pre-exists the object, but is rather constituted by its environment. It is thus necessary to distinguish between the world and the earth. The world is the environment of a system to which it is open. The earth is what exists regardless of whether the system exists or whether the environment can register it. The distinction between system and environment defines what is inside and outside the system. Every system therefore contains a boundary or membrane– whether operational or physical –between itself and its environment.

2) The environment of a system is always more complex than the system (Luhmann tends to conflate world and earth). For this reason, there can never be a one-to-one correspondence between a system and elements in its environment. Systems necessarily simplify their paths of access to their environment. These paths of access– for autopoietic machines –are ways of anticipating the future. For this reason, every system involves risk, for it is possible that its horizons of anticipation will come up against an event in the environment that it did not anticipate and that destroy the object. An example of this is the relationship between governmental systems and climate change. The duration under which climate change unfolds is too gradual for government systems to register them. Government systems, due to their system of anticipations, work on the premise that the climate will behave as it has in the past. As a consequence, they do not make the requisite changes to respond to these environmental changes. At a certain point this catches up, generating problems for agriculture, weather, etc., etc., that destroy the infrastructure social systems require to continue their ongoing autopoiesis.

3) Systems (objects) are operationally closed such that every event that takes place within the system only refers to other events that take place within the system. Systems cannot communicate with their environment but only with themselves. This is part of what it means to say that objects are withdrawn from one another. The distinctions a system uses to relate to its environment do not themselves exist in the environment of the system. How a system registers the environment will thus not be identical to what it registers in its environment. For example, physical objects necessarily have weight but the way we measure weight is not itself a feature of the object measured, but is, rather, a feature of the system that measures. The distinctions a system uses to relate to its environment contain blind spots. To distinction is to cleave a marked space from an unmarked space, where the marked space opens what can be indicated in the environment. The unity of marked and unmarked space is the distinction and is a form. The unmarked space is one blind spot. It is what goes unregistered by the system using its distinctions. The distinction itself is the other blind spot as, when a system uses its distinctions to make indications these distinctions become invisible to the user, creating a “reality effect”. Kilograms come to seem like properties of objects in the environment of the system that measures itself.

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Over the next year I’m contemplating writing a book entitled Onto-Cartographies. This book arises out of my meditations on time, space, and entropy in the final section of chapter 5 in The Democracy of Objects.This book would flesh out spatial and temporal relations within an object-oriented framework. Locke famously argued that objects or substances are individuated by being simply located at a particular point in time and space. In my view, object-oriented ontology completely explodes this paradigm of individuation. Object-oriented ontology rejects the thesis that in order for something to count as an object it must be a simple and indivisible substances. Rather, aggregates can be full blown objects. Further, following the Lucretian and Kantian torch, it rejects the notion that time and space are containers or indifferent milieus in which phenomena (local manifestations) unfold, but rather argues that objects generate their own time and space. Moreover objects 1) can, within this framework, exist at a variety of different levels of scale from the very small to the very large like a city or a galaxy, and 2) can be composed of other objects (a city also contains other independent objects in their own right like groups, organizations, buildings, people, etc., etc., etc).

In The Democracy of Objects I argue that objects are dynamic systems that must reproduce and sustain themselves across time and space and that perpetually face the threat of entropy or the possibility of dissolution. Within the framework of onticology, objects are negentropic unities whose identity is not a substantiality beneath changing qualities, but rather where identity is an activity that must perpetually be carried out from moment to moment. In Onto-Cartographies, I am interested in exploring these spatio-temporal relations, and, above all, what they teach us about how objects relate. At the level of temporality, for example, I argue that not only can objects exist at multiple levels of spatial scale, but also at multiple levels of duration. There can be objects that unfold across a very slow duration such as hyperobjects like climate, as well as objects that unfold at very quick levels of duration such as the movements of a humming bird’s wings. Additionally, objects can be simultaneous in Euclidean, spatialized time, while nonetheless occupying different levels of historical duration in Bergsonian time, as in the case of the living historical present of the Amish compared to stock traders on the floor of the New York stock exchange. Finally, objects can be temporally discontinuous, flitting in and out of existence as in the case of academic classes that meet two or three times a week, or Congressional sessions that only meet during a certain session each year.

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Chances are I’ll be going on the market this year. If any of you know of positions you think I’d be suited for, please drop me an email. I am not particularly attached to philosophy, but would be happy to teach in a variety of different disciplines. Moreover, I am happy to go nearly anywhere in the country and am not particularly attached to the United States (Great Britain, Continental Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, I’m looking at you!). With my 5/5 teaching load here, my research/travel/teaching commitments are getting out of hand. Moreover, I yearn to be somewhere I can teach upper level courses geared to undergrads majoring in whatever field I wind up in and, if Venus smiles upon me, graduate students.

It looks like there’s a very good chance I’ll be in Stockholm for five days in the very beginning of October if my Dean gives me leave to travel. I’ll probably be talking about entropy, order, and the formation of collective objects. So if you’re in that part of the world and want to get together let me know. I’ll give further details as they arise.