For some time I’ve argued that objects or substances (individuals) are “spacetime worms”. What does this meaning? It means that substances are four-dimensional. As Theodore Sider articulates it, “…four-dimensionalism [is] an ontology of the material world according to which objects have temporal as well as spatial parts” (Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time, xiii, my italics). We are all familiar with the idea that objects have spatial parts. My body has smaller spatial parts such as lungs, a liver, a heart, my brain (though some doubt I have one), atoms, molecules, etc. We are less familiar with the idea that an object or substance has temporal parts.
It seems to me that much of the so-called debate between processualists and object-oriented philosophers is a debate between a four-dimensional conception of substances and a three-dimensional conception of objects. The three-dimensionalist holds that “…objects [are] ‘three-dimensional’ [insofar as they are]… ‘enduring’, [and are] ‘wholly present‘ at all times at which they exist” (Sider, 3, my italics). In other words, for the three-dimensionalist objects are only mereologically composed of 1) spatial parts, and 2) those spatial parts are always present as the substance endures in time. In other words, substances, for the three-dimensionalist, have no temporal parts that can come to be and pass away.
read on!
It is three-dimensionalism that gives rise to paradoxes like the Ship of Theseus paradox. Suppose you have a ship named the Ship of Theseus. Every day you remove a board from your ship and replace it with a new board. At some point your ship will be composed of entirely new boards. At this point, is the Ship of Theseus still the Ship of Theseus or is it a new ship? There are all sorts of ways in which we can vary this paradox. For example, suppose you have a ship called the Ship of Theseus and another ship called the Ship of Philadelphia. Every day you remove one board from the Ship of Theseus and place it on the Ship of Philadelphia and you remove a plank from the Ship of Philadelphia and place it on the Ship of Theseus. Is there a point at which the Ship of Theseus becomes the Ship of Philadelphia and the Ship of Philadelphia becomes the Ship of Theseus? Or again, suppose you daily remove a board from the Ship of Theseus and place it in another position on the ship. When all the boards have been rearranged and now occupy a new position is the Ship of Theseus now a new ship?
These thought experiments seem like idle curiosities, yet they do have far ranging ethical, legal, and political consequences. Given, for example, that all of the matter in my body is replaced approximately every seven years, do I still have legal obligations to pay my mortgage after seven years or my student loans? My obligation is dependent on me being the same person I was throughout time. But if my being is individuated by the matter of which I am composed, then I would no longer have these legal obligations. Three-dimensionalism will argue that in the first two of these thought experiments the objects are not the same object because they are now composed of different matter than they were before. In other words, their proper parts have changed and are no longer present. Here the proper parts of a substance are not temporal, but spatial.
When the processualist rejects the notion of objects it seems that they are conceiving objects in three-dimensional terms: as entities that are composed of fully present parts at all moments in time. If substances change, the processualist continues, then they are no longer the same object because their proper parts have changed. On these grounds, the processualist concludes that we should reject the existence of objects altogether. Entities are processes, not objects.
However, while I am deeply sympathetic to the processualists and consider myself a process ontologist– which I don’t take as being synonymous with being a Whiteheadian –this argument only follows if substances are three-dimensional as articulated above. If, in addition to spatial parts, objects also have temporal parts it follows that objects are not brute clods that simply sit still, but that in their endurance through time they are activities or processes. The claim that objects have temporal parts is the claim that they have time-bound elements such as a past. My childhood, for example, is a temporal part of my being, as is what I taught yesterday, what I did last week, etc. Three conclusions will follow from this: First, insofar as substances have both temporal and spatial parts, no object will ever be fully present, because every object will contain parts that are elapsed or gone. This is a good candidate for articulating one of the meanings of withdrawal, and is one of the reasons I have claimed that the essence of objects consists in what Derrida called differance (I have an article forthcoming on this entitled “The Time of the Object: Derrida, Luhmann and the Ontological Grounds of Withdrawal”). Here differance should not be understood as the claim that beings take on their being in and through their difference from everything else (e.g., the thesis of Saussurean diacritics), but rather as the claim that 1) beings differ in-themselves in that they change (regardless of whether any other objects exist), and 2) that the presence of an object or substance is perpetually deferred by virtue of the fact that the past of a substance has always already disappeared and the future is necessarily open. Second, it follows that objects or substances can develop. Clearly, while my childhood is a temporal part of my being, I am physically, psychologically, and intellectually very different than I was at the age of three. Now I grow hairs in odd places. Finally, third, insofar as substances are temporal, they are open. To say that an object is open is to say that it’s internal structure is not fixed but that it can develop in unexpected ways in the future. If four-dimensionalism is true, I see no opposition between the processualists and onticology or object-oriented materialism (OOM).
It’s important to note, however, that while, under this view, all substances have temporal parts, temporality is not structured in the same way for all types of objects. Consider the example of a rock with a high iron content that exists in an environment or regime of attraction saturated by oxygen. For part of its existence this rock existed as a small asteroid in outer space, before falling to the earth. Once it falls to earth it begins to undergo a change in its local manifestations as it rusts through the process of oxidation. Over time it grows more and more brown from this process. Now it is unlikely that the temporal parts of this rock function in the same way that temporal parts for a corporation or a human being. For the rock, events in its remote past cannot be rendered present in its current temporal phase, but remain where they are. The present of the rock is only affected by the immediately preceding temporal moment. By contrast, as I’ve argued in some of my meditations on memory and the importance of memory, those substances or objects that have the capacity of memory have a very different sort of temporal structure. For example, even though a traumatic event might have occurred in my remote past when I was a four year old child, this remote event can continue to be operative in my present as if it were happening right now. Freud depicts this vividly in the beginning of Civilization and its Discontents where he compares the nature of time in the unconscious to the different historical layers dug up by an archeologist, but in such a way that events in all those historical time periods behave as if they were simultaneously occurring now. As thinkers and artists such as Bergson, Proust, Freud, and Deleuze have argued, the past of certain autopoietic substances is such that it is present with the present and such that it continues to be operative in the present. It is for this reason that these types of “machines” (to use Maturana and Varela’s language) are not characterized by simple stimulus-response mechanisms where given a certain input you get a pre-delineated output, but rather where the output given a stimulus is open and contingent by virtue of the way in which the past gives these machines the ability to “rewire” their responses. Societies can pull on their past in the form of historical documents to respond to their present, such that they don’t end up brutely or mechanically repeating, just as corporations can draw on their past dealings with other corporate and government entities to strategize their current actions. The past, far from condemning us to mechanical repetition, is what undermines the possibility of mechanical repetition by virtue of how the trace comes to function in subsequent operations or activities of the system or substance (i.e., Freud’s “mystic writing pad”).
The key point is that entities or substances are not beings that spatially endure, such that their parts remain materially the same and present from instant to instant, but rather that from instant to instant endurance and existence consists in the activity of an object producing itself temporally and in act. As Gilson argues in his marvelously entitled book Being and Some Philosophers, existence is not a noun or a predicate, but an act or a verb. And as an act or a verb, existence is temporal, composed of temporal parts, and therefore necessarily processual. This contention is not cause for the rejection of the concept of object or thing, but rather for revision of what we mean by object or thing. The idea that objects are three-dimensional, that their parts are only spatial is untenable and therefore should be abandoned, not the concept of object.
Larval Subjects . 
January 27, 2012 at 3:57 am
If you don’t mind me returning with praise, thank you so much for noting “while I am deeply sympathetic to the processualists and consider myself a process ontologist– which I don’t take as being synonymous with being a Whiteheadian…” as I often don’t see that crucial distinction in the blogosphere. It’s also a way to undercut many process critics who haven’t thought beyond Whitehead. Now, back to the rabbit hole and Neverland of American philosophy….
January 27, 2012 at 4:14 am
“However, while I am deeply sympathetic to the processualists and consider myself a process ontologist– which I don’t take as being synonymous with being a Whiteheadian –this argument only follows if substances are three-dimensional as articulated above. If, in addition to spatial parts, objects also have temporal parts it follows that objects are not brute clods that simply sit still, but that in their endurance through time they are activities or processes.”
The obvious point to make is that processes produce objects at various singular points of concrescence (eg condensation, etc). The process is not *of* an object, ie the duration is of relations in these processes and not parts of an object. It also follows if substances are not *in* objects, but in events, with objects being local manifestations of events. The only reason we even think in terms of objects at all is because this is the innate correlationism of human perception.
I agree to a certain extent with your reading of Derrida, but Derrida does not restrict deferral to objects and instead is concerned with the event that is forever actualised through differral (eg ‘to come’ etc.). Reading Derrida in terms of objects is a reduction.
From the physical sciences, water boiled in a closed environment, so all H20 molecules of the water turn into steam, is a version of the Ship of Theseus (SoT) argument. Is it the ‘same’ set of H2O molecules before and after boiling? Yes. So what has changed and for whom? There is no in-itself here. Maybe you don’t think water in such an experiment is an object?
The SoT is an event involving the ship, concept of a ship and a proper name ‘Ship of Theseus’. The comparable singular points for the SoT are predominately *social* in character, just as the examples of your own identity and the physiological seven year cycle. Singular points for identity include complex actualisations across socio-physiological assemblages, such as marriage, sex-change, civil rights changes to legislation, and death. Non-human assemblages are produced around the affective affordances that give them consistency as a kind of non-conscious pan-affectivism (as compared to a pan-psychism), such as the affective character of a planet’s geology and events of tectonic movement.
I’d be interested to see how you deal with creation, Levi. Is ‘creation’ possible in OOO? Is ‘creation’ for you a local manifestation of an object that doesn’t exist yet (ie quasi cause, and belonging to a parent event)? Or is it the local manifestation of a series of lower order objects that combine into a new object? If so, what is the temporality of ‘newness’ for this ‘new’ object then? If anything is useful out of After Finitude, which QM frames in terms of the question of temporality of being out of non-being, it is this question.
January 27, 2012 at 4:16 am
Spelling! Apologies, rushed post
January 27, 2012 at 1:51 pm
The Canadian artist Juan Perales-Gomez is at work representing, perhaps, what you are probing here.
http://www.gomezperales.com/Pages/NewWorkPages/Index.html
January 27, 2012 at 2:40 pm
Greg,
You write:
In this passage you’re treating substances as products, results, or terminations of processes. But insofar as I hold that becoming and movement never cease, this is not the thesis that I am proposing. Within my framework objects are processes, they aren’t the outcome of processes. At every point of their existence and endurance they are activities. It is only three-dimensionalist assumptions that lead to treating objects as static results or products.
I’ve addressed the suggestion that objects are merely the result of human correlation in the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects here:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/9750134.0001.001/1:5?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
I believe that there are strong epistemological reasons pertaining to the nature of inquiry as to why objects cannot be treated as the result of human correlations.
I’ve outlined the relationship between objects and events in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/9750134.0001.001/1:8?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
As well as in this post:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/of-events-and-objects/
Creation is indeed possible in onticology. In my view, every local manifestation of an object is a genuine creation and the emergence of new objects from aggregations of other objects is also a creation.
January 27, 2012 at 5:40 pm
What drives an object to (re)create itself? Freedom, necessity, pressure, chance, unavoidability, accident? Would all these choices (or mixtures) be possible for a single object? There’d have to also be different types of freedoms cataloged (for example) — the freedom of my cat to stretch out beneath the heater, the freedom I exert when I read Foucault, when painting (which I don’t do; but not because I’m not free to — or am I?). Or in the same object: a blog post can arise in total freedom, or from a “misconception” that comes to light, or because you’re on a time schedule — all these things might interrupt in the “creation” of the object. Any border for the “creator”? Or do I re-active the activity of the creation when I (re)read it? And, as with writing, thus re-animate the object? Who finds who here? Do I find the object, or do I find myself?
A question can come from multiple “places” in our soul — so why couldn’t the “motivation” for object-permanence (this is the wrong word) — object-action — “objecting” — be various across time? Can new causal chains be created *ex nihilo*, or do we always start from *something*? Do you think — as a creator — the creation has to pass through a zero point (le degre zero)? Does the motivation for an object’s “acting itself back and back into existence” come from within, without, from its relations, from its lack of relations? Difficult — the answer seems to be “yes.”
I think I am feeling what is at stake a bit better. These questions remain answer-less, but the position is not uncommitted or unguided because of this. There is joy to the inquiry into any kind of object. There could not be an “end” to the activity — the object that is O. Which also means that it will never be “justified.”
Do you think there is a kind of “cataloging” impulse in OOO? There seems to be a love for quantity, and a de-emphasis on the *valuation* of qualities. Or at least, I don’t see a clear value-analysis arising from these methods — I could just not be seeing it though. It seems like difference is both emphasized — as the on-going activity at the center/periphery of each and all things — but also de-emphasized, insofar as the ability to be *counted* seems to take precedence. Not in the merely quantitative sense, but everything has to “count” in the sense of “mattering” (our language goes a little haywire). What matters is not “the” difference but “that” there is a difference worth counting. This would seem to be the democratic impulse (if I knew your work better, I could comment). Do you think that there is an impulse to “account for everything” in OOM?
An explosion of inquiries, I know. Things I’ll mull over.
January 27, 2012 at 10:56 pm
I think the 3-D v. 4-D distinction is very helpful here. It highlights the difference between an OOM and what I’m calling an ontology of organism (OoO), drawing upon Schelling and Whitehead. In a Schellingian ontology, much is made of the distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans: nature is both process and product, rather than simply unceasnig becoming (though in some sense, the processual/creative aspect of nature never ceases, the dynamic evolution of nature takes on discrete form at various stages of the process). Similarly, Whitehead’s processualism is balanced by his atomism. It’s process all the way down, with nothing existing at an instant; but nonetheless, there are moments of free decision that constitute a break in the stream.
From the perspective of an OoO, space-time worms are not an especially helpful image for the 4th dimension. Whitehead famously rejected the Einsteinian picture of the universe as a space-time loaf. He thought this was a false spatialization of time, as if the future already existed somewhere. An organism has a temporal dimension, but I’d argue it is best understood as the ingression or incarnation of a form. Autopoiesis, in other words, is a physical (3-D) description of a process with a higher dimensional cause.
I’ll try to unpack this in a post later, have to run to class now!
January 27, 2012 at 11:26 pm
Four-dimensionalism is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while. I noticed in your as usual stimulating post a reticence with respect to the future, as one of the temporal parts of the object. 3 statements in particular interested me:
>> The claim that objects have temporal parts is the claim that they have time-bound elements such as a past.
>> First, insofar as substances have both temporal and spatial parts, no object will ever be fully present, because every object will contain parts that are elapsed or gone.
>> the presence of an object or substance is perpetually deferred by virtue of the fact that the past of a substance has always already disappeared and the future is necessarily open.
The first two statements mention the past and ignore the future. The third statement describes the past as “disappeared” and the future as “open.” I would be curious to hear more about the “openness” of the future. Do you consider the future more “open” than the past?
Your post is of great interest to me as I’m working up a larger project on four-dimensionalism in Schelling, Joyce, Benjamin and Deleuze-Guattari. One of the problems with four-dimensionalism is becoming, creation. How can a space-time worm become if time is laid out in its entirety? Isn’t the worm necessarily likewise laid out in its entirety, a frozen figure in the carpet of spacetime? What is needed is a notion of becoming that has separated itself from three-dimensionalism. Deleuze-Guattari somehow can talk simultaneously of becoming and of the plane of consistency as the plane of “absolute immobility” (not to mention talking about the “future acting on the present in a mode other than that of its existence”). What they mean by this still hasn’t sunk into my thick literary critic’s brain.
I’ve posted the original paper I wrote on Schelling’s timescapes on my blog, if you’re interested in perusing it. http://jayveeaitch.wordpress.com/
January 27, 2012 at 11:48 pm
Matt,
It’s difficult to see how autopoiesis could be a three-dimensionalism because the autopoietic entity is an entity that has a history, an evolution, and that is constantly forming its own parts and organization. This is exactly the opposite of the thesis that the parts of entities endure as identical across time. As Luhmann puts it, autopoietic systems must produce the elements of which they are composed from moment to moment. The concept of spacetime worms is only problematic if one holds that the future is already there. If, by contrast, the future is open and creation of the new this problem does not emerge. Certainly I do not hold that the future is already there. As always, I see talk of “ingression of forms” as a case of metaphysics in the pejorative sense as the postulation of entities that we have no good reason to postulate. Following thinkers like Deleuze and DeLanda, I see form as the result of a material genesis, not something that pre-exists formless matter and then mysteriously “ingresses” into that matter.
January 28, 2012 at 1:01 am
Thanks for this–I’m glad that this seems to accord with some arguments in chapter 1 of Realist Magic.
January 28, 2012 at 7:46 pm
It almost seems like Sider is acknowledging 3 dimensions of spatiality and an added dimension of temporality. But temporality is 3-fold as well (past, present, and future). The three basic dimensions for Peirce are Feeling, Reaction, and Habit. The problem with many 4-fold models is that they are a multiplication of dualisms.
Process thought, particularly Whitehead, is often criticized as claiming that ‘everything is related to everything else’. Rather, it seems that what Whitehead was getting at is that “at each time step [prehension] every cell [actual occasion] takes its present state as well as the states of its surrounding neighbor cells as its input. Its output will then be its own state in the next time step” (John Johnston discussing cellular automata in the “Life on the Grid” section of THE ALLURE OF MACHINIC LIFE, p169).
Mark (trying to alternate readings of THE DEMOCRACY OF OBJECTS with THE ALLURE OF MACHINIC LIFE)
January 28, 2012 at 11:11 pm
Hey LS! It’s been awhile, so naturally this post overlaps hugely with my areas of focus from the last six months. I actually wrote about the issue of substitution and replacement in my chapter on Finnegans Wake, and found Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems immensely helpful. Luhmann does a great job creating formal definitions for systems that explain how, for example, we can replace our cells without losing our identity. In addition, you might really enjoy the futurism of Deutsch’s (sp?) new book The Beginning of Infinity, which takes knowledge work to have a certain kind of independent importance in our universe (contra the critique of “anthropocentrism”).
January 29, 2012 at 12:05 am
[…] Bryant (Larval Subjects) recently unpacked his position that object’s are “spacetime worms” (HERE). It […]
January 29, 2012 at 2:08 am
I’m not sure what to do with the observation, but this seems relevant to a certain three-dimensionalism that’s common in business as well: a historic business might be described as “since 1833”, and try to present itself as an enduring substance that’s been preserved down the ages. But as you note, the opposite Ship-of-Theseus view, that this can’t be the same business because all the individuals involved have been changed, is also too simple an objection (and would seem to give too much weight to those that haven’t changed, like a historic building).
I don’t really have a theory on that point, so apologize for the idle comment taking up space; but I do think that four-dimensional existence of businesses and brands (both individually and through various mergers and such) has played a large role in modern capitalism and marketing, with relatively little scrutiny, so perhaps I’m submitting a request for an opinion on that subject. :-)
January 29, 2012 at 7:58 pm
Marx said that humans make their own history under circumstances given and transmitted from the past. This is a materialism that can be easily endorsed. But can a materialism be thought that asserts that objects make their own history under circumstances given and transmitted not only from the past but also from the future? I believe this is the kind of materialism Deleuze and Guattari attempt to construct in ATP. If the future is entirely open, then how is that “primitive” assemblages “intimate” the State form, and institute mechanisms for its “warding off”? I suppose one could argue that the content of the intimation is a phantasm, a “possible future” imagined and feared (the imagination and fear being conditioned by the past), as opposed to a real but virtual future object longing for actualization. But I always got the sense that DG meant the passage to be taken in the latter sense, especially since they talk about “the future acting on the present in a mode other than that of its existence.”
January 31, 2012 at 11:33 pm
Thanks for this! I’ve been wondering about the views of OOO towards temporality for a while now. I’ve been thinking about this mostly in terms of Harman’s somewhat panpsychic extension of the tool analysis, so it would be helpful for me to try and express this post in Heideggerian language:
Do all objects possess originary temporality and if so, what about world time and ordinary time? My feeling is certainly the first, possibly the second, and probably not the third, which seems distinctly human.
February 1, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Levi, As always I am struck by your intelligence, learning, and generosity. However, I also still feel completely unconvinced about that category that is your basic axiom: that there are objects as other than reductionisms of a certain manufacture. I have read most of what you have written, and I do not think I come from a correlationist perspective. I do not think “I am” and “they are” and I have trouble knowing them as they are. Since I do not believe I am or they are, there are no things to correlate or even mistakes to be made in an immanence without discrete entities. This may leave me with a problem about how to account for what passes “common sensically” for objects but that does not bind me to an epistemic theory but perhaps only to a variant and holistic ontology of “error.” I cannot here — maybe not anywhere — make myself clear but perhaps I can again ask a question. How does OOO tell the difference between an object or an event and a random intersection or interference?
February 2, 2012 at 2:58 am
DaN, shrugs, the best I can do is make the arguments I have made for the thesis that being is composed of objects. This is not an “axiom” but a position that arises from a chain of reasoning. If you find those arguments presented in chapter 1 there’s little I can do. Certainly nothing in the assertions you make in this post or your last convinces me that my arguments are faulty. As for events, you’ll find a post I’ve recently written on events and objects below.
February 2, 2012 at 5:07 am
LS…I see that you’ve read around some in Luhmann (who you discuss in a separate post). I’m thinking that he really does put “The Theseus paradox” and such to rest by replacing our concepts of certain kinds of objects with the more descriptive entity of the “system.” Yes, my cells replace themselves, but as long as me as a *system* doesn’t halt during that process, the “me” I describe in most sentences about my physical self hasn’t gone anywhere. Likewise, nobody confuses buying new tires with buying a new car.
Luhmann makes a great point that systems are intentionally designed to have intakes and exhausts. It may seem weird to me that my cells are “new,” but it shouldn’t, any more than it seems weird to me to fuel those cells by introducing foreign objects (i.e. food, and, qua fuel, coffee) into my body.
In response to Dan’s question — what is the line between an “object” and a “random intersection or interference” — one can also point to the concept of the system. Two cars managing to swerve out of each other’s way is purely random. Two cars driving on separate sides of the road, based on a general social convention and a set of laws, is a traffic system in action.
I’m not sure why we’re bringing in the physics language of dimensionality and space-time. I’m currently reading The Elegant Universe when on break from T. S. Eliot, and as much as I find it enjoyable and provocative, I’d be very wary of suddenly writing about donut-shaped space in my next lit crit article.
I raise this issue because I don’t think the physics language is really necessary here — and it can be misleading. For example, let’s not confuse post-traumatic stress disorder with actually traveling back in time like a quantum particle. Part of the reason PTSD is so awful is that each return to the traumatic experience involves a felt experience of being between two times.
February 2, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Hi Joseph K,
Long time no see. Hope all is well with you. Luhmann is a key figure for me. While I do– following Maturana and Varella –distinguish between allopoeitic machines and autopoeitic machines, “system” and “object” are nonetheless synonyms for me. To be an object is, for me, to be either an autopoietic or allopoietic system. I outline all of this in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects (sorry for shamelessly plugging my recent book!). I do agree that systems thinking resolves the Ship of Theseus paradox. I think it’s valuable to evoke the Ship of Theseus paradox because it underlines just what an object would have to be in order to be an object (i.e., that we can’t equate the objecthood of objects with their material parts). It thus provides fertile ground for uncovering the ontology of objects (an ontology that is counter-intuitive in many respects). I’m not sure how I’ve imported concepts from physics into onticology. Certainly space and time are important features of being outside of physics as well, no? What I’m trying to emphasize in this post is the temporal and processual nature of beings. In my view, a number of critics of objects seem to treat them as atemporal and then proceed to reject their being on these grounds. Where objects are treated as systems this assumption disappears as systems are, by their nature, temporal and processual.
February 2, 2012 at 10:00 pm
4D objects on my understanding seem to exclude a rock or a stone existing as an object. Which to me seems odd. I am unable to see how a rock is active, other than through external input. The most apt way to decribe this state of affairs for me is to consider a rock the end product of other processes. The biggest stumbling block I have with OOM is understanding how a rock is a system.
Will.
February 2, 2012 at 10:37 pm
That makes sense. You’re responding to critics making claims that, in turn, oblige you to re-emphasize things like the fact that objects exist across time. That’s got to be frustrating. I guess part of my hesitancy to invoke physics comes from the hope that everyone else is going to make claims about memory, trace, and such that never actually contradict Einstein, or attempt to do so. It’s like that bumper sticker on my car: IF DERRIDA WAS OK WITH RELATIVITY, SHOULDN’T YOU BE OK WITH IT, ALSO?
February 3, 2012 at 1:07 am
Will,
There are all sorts of atomic processes going on in rocks at every moment so their existence is far from inert or passive. The difference is that allopoietic objects don’t strive to maintain a particular organization when affected by other objects. This doesn’t undermine their being as systems, however. Theyre still net entropic and resistant to change.
February 3, 2012 at 2:23 am
Levi, I am not trying to be difficult although that may be my natural skill, but I find nothing in Ch 1 of The Democracy of Objects that to me counts as an argument for the existence of objects. You begin in a kind of philosophical “in medias res” with your opponent correlationism and — I think well and rightly — suggest that the problems you find there are unnecessary. However, you still take the idea of objects and preserve it without justification: that is what I mean about it being as “axiom.” You then adapt Bhaskar for whom objects are also already a given. You valorize experimental practice as if this were not front-loaded with operational presumptions about the status of objects even as the “posthuman” (I prefer “nonhuman” as it is less freighted with the progressivism that is the hubris of the Enlightenment). However, even if one believes in the non-human materiality of experimentation — which one can through a commitment to immanence and not “objectivity” — the presumption that this production of relations indicates the certainty of “closed” “withdrawn” or “autopoetic” things is an unwarranted surplus. Certainly scientists call conjunctions of relations “things,” but this is not an argument but only shows a habit of interpellation I thought you were at pains to eschew. You quote Bhaskar “intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge.” The circularity of this relative to the concept of objects seems obvious: it presumes objecthood. To object to this ontological presumption of objects does not mean that one is a correlationist as indeed that mode also requires the axiom of objects even as it valorizes one, the subject object, over all others. In short, there is no argument I see here for objects only a convention. Everything you fight for I agree with but all these claims not only need not come from objects but can be scoped instead, and with fewer problems, through the concepts of flows, intensities, and non-objectual relations. If I have missed your argument for objects, I would be indebted to see it.
February 6, 2012 at 3:21 pm
Dan,
I provide a transcendental argument based on our experience of experimentation. The argument runs that if experiment is to be possible– and presumably we all agree that it is possible and does take place –the world must be a certain way in order for that practice to be possible and intelligible. How must the world be? It must be composed of discrete chunks, objects must not be identical to their qualities, and it must be possible to shift from context to context. From this we can infer the existence of objects or discrete beings. The correlationist is not able to account for how this would be possible by virtue of the constitutional role they attribute to either consciousness, mental categories, or language. In referring to this argument as circular you seem not to understand how transcendental arguments work.
February 6, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Yes, maybe I do not understand. Certainly, I agree that nothing stated above changes my mind, but I am very willing to entertain that I have missed the basis. Just list what you think are your best pages on the proof of objects, and I will review them with care.
February 6, 2012 at 3:59 pm
Dan,
I begin developing my argument around page 40 on. I don’t simply begin with the premise of the existence of the intransitive, but rather show that features of experimental practice are only intelligible if the world is a particular way, i.e., if it is composed of objects.
February 6, 2012 at 4:01 pm
Dan,
Additionally, you are situating your question in foundationalist terms. I’m quite clear that my argument is not foundationalist in character. Rather, I begin from the fact that experimental practice does indeed take place and then proceed from there to determine what must be the case for this practice to be possible.
February 6, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Levi,
I very much appreciate your suggestions. I think I may have a different sense of what the “fact” of experimentation is or what it shows. While I am interested in foundationalism in its many varieties and in what I would see as its epiphenomena, I do not think I am bringing foundationalism to the party here. IAC, I will try to do a better job of understanding your force since I do respect both your intelligence and learning.
February 6, 2012 at 7:36 pm
[…] have argued elsewhere, to be a thing is to be an act. And this in two senses. On the one hand, the endurance of any entity is not a fixed given, but is an activity on the part of that thing. The existence of a thing only […]
February 6, 2012 at 11:29 pm
I’ll try to produce a blog post that responds to the question of the existence of objects more fully — it is a fascinating question — but I think that the underlying reasoning here is often pragmatic (not less so when it is linked to experimentation). In other words, when I describe an ice cube as an object, I’m usually doing so partly by “turning down the volume,” so to speak, on my awareness of its potential to be sublated (say, by melting or evaporating). In other words, as I fill a glass with ice cubes, I’m thinking of them as though they were rocks, although later, when they melt into the lemonade and “vanish,” this doesn’t surprise me. In such cases, the “transcendental” element is my thought, as opposed to a transcendental quality in the ice.
February 10, 2012 at 12:05 am
[…] it up merely as a philosophical conception I think it’s pretty useful. I particularly love this take on four dimensionalism. (A topic I’ve taken up frequently here over the […]
February 29, 2012 at 5:48 pm
[…] no doer behind the deed I just mean that the doer is identical to the deed. Objects are four-dimensional such that their substantiality is temporal and processual. Contrasting my position with […]