Recently Scott wrote a very generous post about my discussion of time in The Democracy of Objects. There he worries that my conception of time reduces it to information and is anthropocentric. This certainly is not my intention, so I thought it might be worthwhile to say a bit about how I conceive time. The main thing is not to see time and space as containers of objects. If it is true that objects make up the primitive or primordial constituents of being, then it follows that time and space has to arise from objects, rather than being containers in which objects are housed. In this I follow Lucretius, Leibniz, and Kant; all of whom, in their own way, treat time and space as arising from objects (though, in the case of Lucretius, space is treated as primitive and irreducible to objects).
Before getting into a discussion of time in my next post, let’s begin with issues of terminology. Rather than calling the entities that make up being objects (The Democracy of Objects) or machines (Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media), let’s call them “monads”. I draw the term “monad” from Leibniz’s ontology, without sharing endorsing all the characteristics he attributes to his monads. It’s not a question of abandoning terminology, but of varying terminology in such a way as to capture dimensions of a concept that can only be partially expressed in language, while also evading the linguistic connotations that often accompany terms in ordinary language. Thus, the term “object” has the advantage of drawing our attention to independently existing things, but has the drawback of leading us to think of something posited by a subject and that is a brute clod that just sits there for our gaze or regard. The term “machine” has the advantage of drawing our attention to the way things operate on inputs producing outputs, but has the disadvantage of making us think only of technology, but not rocks, atoms, animals, clouds, and institutions. For those unacquainted with the autopoeitic theory of Maturana and Varela (indispensable reading), there’s also a tendency to think of machines as clock-like mechanisms.
read on!
For those familiar with Leibniz, the term “monad” has the advantage of making us think of entities that experience, observe, and act in the world. In other words, monads are subjects. However, the advantage of the term “monad” over that of “subject” is that the former situates us in a pluralistic, posthumanist perspective. Upon hearing the word “subject” our cognitive tendency is to immediately think “human subject”. The term “monad” and strange and foreign enough to assist in avoiding this conjunction. Dolphins are monads. Computers are monads, Emeralds are monads. Stars are monads. The planet Earth is a monad. Quarks are monads. Each of these entities is a point of view on the universe. They differ amongst themselves, of course. They have different capacities as well. For example, some have awareness, goal-directed action, and desires, while others do not. Monads are, of course, composed of other monads. Paraphrasing Graham Harman, monads are wrapped within monads and are, in turn, wrapped in monads. The key thing to get is that Objects = Machines = Things = Monads. In this regard, we can say that OOO (object-oriented ontology) = MOO (machine-oriented ontology) = TOO (thing-oriented ontology) = MoOO (monad-oriented ontology). Every object is as much an “experiencer” of the universe (a monad) as it is an operator (machine) as it is an independent being (thing). Each of these terms draws attention to different features or dimensions of things.
Of the monads Leibniz writes that,
[i]f we choose to give the name “soul” to everything that has “perceptions” and “desires” in the general sense…, all simple substances or …monads may be called souls, but as feeling is something more than a simple perception, I am willing that the general name of monads or entelechies shall suffice for those simple substances which have only perception, and that those substances only shall be called “souls” whose perception is more distinct and accompanied by memory. (Monadology, 19)
For Leibniz, all souls are monads, but not all monads are souls. I cringe when writing the term “soul” due to its theological baggage. However, coming out of the Greek tradition, we can treat “soul” as merely signifying anything that has its principle of motion from within itself. Where a rock must be hit by something else in order to move, plants have “soul” in that they grow, animals have “soul” in that they both grow and can move about and perceive of their own accord, and humans have “soul” in that they can grow, move about, perceive, and reason. Whether or not these sortings are correct– some plants appear to be capable of movement and perception and many animals seem to have reason –the important point is that “soul” is here a synonym for “life”. There are living beings and nonliving beings, but all beings are monads.
As subjects, Leibniz remarks that,
…[just] as the same city looked at from different sides appears entirely different, and is as if multiplied perspectively; so also it happens that, as a result of the infinite multitude of [monads], there are as it were so many different universes. (Monadology, 57)
Objects are not just independent beings that exist in their own right regardless of whether anyone perceives them, thinks about them, or discourses about them, but as monads are also points of view on the universe or perceivers of the universe. Rocks are open to only certain features of the world and integrate those flows in ways that are different from plants. Mantis shrimp can see far more wavelengths of light than I can see. Insurance companies interact with people and are open to people in ways that are different the way in which cats and humans interact or the way in which two humans interact. Autistics encounter the world differently than people with depression.
Each monad is structurally open to the broader world in its own specific way (i.e., it has its own particular “sensibility” or aesthetic structure), and each monad has its own specific way of operating on the flows to which it is open. For example, a flower operates on light in a different way than an octopus. It is recognition of this that opens the idea of what Ian Bogost has called “alien phenomenology”, von Uexkull has called “ethology”, and what the autopoietic theorists have called “second-order observation”. Alien phenomenology consists in “observing the observer” or the attempt to think how another monad experiences or encounters the world. “Think like an octopus!” Rather than observing the octopus and analyzing what it is for me, I instead attempt to attend to what it’s like to be an octopus or how octopi experience the world. While I can never come to have octopus experiences, I can, in fact, understand a great deal about how octopi experience their world, what flows are open to them, what things in their environment are important to them and why, and so on.
Cesar Millan, the “dog whisperer”, is an exemplary alien phenomenologist in this respect. When he goes to help families who are having trouble with their dogs, he doesn’t begin with the premise that the dog is a problem for its family, but rather that the family and the environment they’ve built are a problem for the dog. Through his understand of how dogs experience the world, their behavior, how they think, their desires, and what they need, he suggests changes in the environment and the behavior of the family, leading to changes in how the dog behaves. Millan attempts to think like a dog so as to better attend to dogs. Rather than beginning from the premise that dogs are pets, he instead adopts the dog’s point of view and notes that for dogs the humans that make up the family are a part of the dog’s pack. The question then becomes one of whether the family is enacting functional or dysfunctional pack behavior from the dog’s point of view.
May 2, 2013 at 4:30 pm
do/can I interact with an insurance company or rather with a particular salesrep, webpage, lawyer, or an answering-machine, etc
May 2, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Cesar Millan, among people who take animals seriously, is viewed as a charlatan. What he says about dogs and packs is based upon what he believes wolves to be: problem is, wolves aren’t like that, dogs aren’t wolves, and people aren’t wolves either. Bullshit all the way down.
May 2, 2013 at 5:36 pm
Craig,
That might be. There is bad ethology after all. What’s important is the type or style of thinking the example illustrates.
May 2, 2013 at 8:42 pm
“Every object is as much an “experiencer” of the universe (a monad) as it is an operator (machine) as it is an independent being (thing). Each of these terms draws attention to different features or dimensions of things.”
Are you suggesting that there is no difference that makes a difference between how humans experience the world and how a rock “experiences” the world?
I completely agree that real objects are mostly accessed through sensual profiles and allusion (withdrawal) for HUMANS and other animals. This is what I refer to as the problem of epistemic access/relation. But from an empirical perspective it simply does not follow that all access/relation should be considered of precisely this experiential kind. There are instances of access which generally can be considered structural, in terms of casual dynamics (affectivity) between material-energetic functional systems. Humans always translate their experiences of a car crash, but dynamite explodes granite in a non-experiential manner.
Stated differently, anthropocentrism is a recursive activity generated by animals with self-organizing properties and sentience. Rocks cannot be ‘rockocentric’ because they do not have recursive bio-flexibility. They cannot centralize/coordinate their encounters. However rocks do have an irreducible atomic structure and compositionality that, as you state, allows them to operate in the world and deal with flows in particulars way – giving them a type of onto-specific ‘agency’.
Corporeality simply cannot be equated with consciousness, unless of course you want to adopt some sort of idealism (Schelling) or you want to propose pan-experientialism (Whitehead). Material “agency” strictly speaking is not sentience (let alone sapience) no matter how broadly construed. Sentience and aesthetic activity are emergent and irreducible capacities.
Am I wrong?
May 2, 2013 at 9:07 pm
CORRECTED:
What DMF is alluding to is that fact that insurance companies are sets rather than units. Whereas all objects are assemblages ontologically speaking there are different types of assemblages. Some assemblages are materially/structural continuous or extensively bounded (e.g., lawyers, sales reps, etc) and rightly considered ‘objects’, while others are primarily aggregate and extensively adjacent (corporations, social groups, etc), best described as ‘aggregates’ – no matter how operationally coupled they may seem. Attributing ‘thinghood’, then, becomes a tricky game of avoiding the polar tendencies of either over-exaggerating extensive connection and/or under-appreciating the intensity of cohesion and operational efficacy. Football teams and nation-states are not ‘objects’ but assemblages.
Coding this ‘delicate balance’ in relation to actual ecologies and the possibilities they afford is the task of ontography/onto-cartography proper, and has always been at the core of my discomfort with object-oriented rhetoric generally. Levi’s turn to “machines” goes a long way navigating these conceptual challenges.
May 2, 2013 at 9:38 pm
Michael,
Of course not! Rock “experience” is far less interesting than human experience, and as far as I know, is not accompanied by awareness or feeling. I tried to make that point when comparing how rocks relate to light and plants relate to light. All I mean to say is that even rocks are selectively related to flows in their environment, eg, they have no access to color. This is the danger of metaphors designed to intuitively illustrate concepts, I guess. At any rate, no I don’t advocate panpsychism or idealism.
May 2, 2013 at 9:49 pm
I think of entities like insurance companies by anology with brains. Neurons only ever interact with neurons, just as people communicating with insurance companies and within insurance companies only interact with each other. At the level of their totality as a system, however, they form an emergent entity that transcends the behavior of the elements. Insurance companies have their own language and senses (in the sense of the “five senses”) that differ from the senses of the people that function as their neurons. They are sensitive, as far as I can tell to four things: forms in the form of paperwork, actuarial tables, events like death, natural disasters and accidents, and fluctuations in the economy. When I talk to an insurance agent I am not talking to an insurance company. I can only communicate with insurance companies through the forms or paperwork I fill out (and likewise with the agent). Just as we communicate with each other through the medium of sound-waves, and dolphins and whales through sonar, insurance companies can only hear “forms”. Moreover, their intelligence, sentience, and cognition is every bit as alien to us as that of an octopus.
May 2, 2013 at 10:37 pm
[…] response to my last post, dmf and Michael make some interesting remarks. Dmf […]
May 3, 2013 at 2:21 am
Levi, then use a good example. Bad examples/illustrations ruin arguments!
(On your normativity line, have you read Andrew Sayer’s Why Things Matter to People? Likely productive in terms of your project.)
May 3, 2013 at 2:27 am
Craig,
I’m morecthan happy to use good examples! Point me to the ones that are widely accessible to a **non_academic* audience! :)
May 3, 2013 at 2:41 am
If you are committed to dogs, check out Andrea Horowitz’s Inside a Dog. There’s a long discussion on “packs” and “training.” It, however, is mostly a longer discussion of what I’ve already said.
May 3, 2013 at 3:13 am
Thanks for the reference!
May 3, 2013 at 3:55 pm
Craig,
I’ve been wondering for some time now why exactly is it that you are such a cunt? I’ve read many of your blog posts and comments on other blogs for a number of years now and you are always so very condescending and antagonistic. Maybe you should take the time to reflect upon how you come across and maybe even give Levi some credit. I know coming from me that quite an accusation. Maybe even hypocritical. But seriously.
May 3, 2013 at 7:00 pm
Michael, could you rephrase without being misogynist?
May 3, 2013 at 8:09 pm
Craig, yes, I can and should. You sir are a grumpy little sociologist. Smile more and hate less, please. Thank you. m-
May 3, 2013 at 9:35 pm
Michael,
Because your post itself does not come across in the same exact way you seem to abhor? It’s not condescending or antagonistic at all! Seriously!
May 4, 2013 at 1:14 am
Oh Christ, everyone knock it off. Craig is obnoxious, but smart and Michael could have expressed this better. Is the moon full or something?
May 4, 2013 at 4:02 am
Yeah, bad choice of words. I like obnoxious as substitute. But i’m fairly obnoxious myself, so that is a bit of a kettle black situation right there. How about weasel? No then he’ll say i hate animals and kill orphans. Maybe i’ll just drop it since it is all a bit of a joke anyway. Yeah.
May 5, 2013 at 5:04 pm
[…] my previous post, I discussed objects as monads. As monads, each object or machine is an observer or experiencer […]
May 7, 2013 at 1:24 am
‘I cringe when writing the term “soul” due to its theological baggage. However,
coming out of the Greek tradition, we can treat “soul” as merely signifying anything that has its principle of motion from within itself. Where a rock must be hit by something else in order to move, plants have “soul” in that they grow, animals have “soul” in that they both grow and can move about and perceive of their own accord, and humans have “soul” in that they can grow, move about, perceive, and reason.’ (levi)
I love the cringe :) The question remains whether all animals or plants in fact really do move themselves…
‘The term “semovience” differs from “self-motion” because the latter, like “automobile,” stresses being propelled by some internal engine but fails to keep any reference to non-reactivity. While keeping reactivity or non-reactivity in mind has become irrelevant for cars, whose lack of existential animation is not particularly controversial in our academic culture, it is however crucial when discussing psyches. (Since, historically, declinations have become fairly simplified, “self” in “self-motion” is identical to the nominative “self.” In contrast, the “se” in “se-movience” does not only mean “one-movience,” as the case not only points reflexivity, but also means the doing of something for oneself, like the middle voice in, say, Greek .) Thus semoviences, whose name in English is a well-founded neologism that comes from an old mercantile term used to describe goods which may move on their own, such as slaves and other livestock, are defined as the entities found in nature someway exempted from pure reactivity, or capable of starting causal physical series a novo. So of course they move themselves.’ (Szirko).
‘Aristotle conceived knowing, gnoeín, as a variety of metabolic assimilation
only for the purpose, and with the precise objective, of being able to
compose a unique descriptive series with which to delineate the full variety
of living beings – by comparing species among themselves and comparing
the developmental sequences of individuals. With this conceptual tool, Aristotle
was able to achieve his purpose, of attaining conceptual means suitable
for unifiedly and uniformly describing the living beings found in nature
in all their possible forms. His informational view of knowledge, presenting
it as a variety of metabolic assimilation, is thus why Aristotle managed to
institute biology as a unified science. (crocco)
‘For Aristotle, in view of his mentioned purpose, it was uninteresting
to detect if within the series of organisms animated by a vegetative sensitive
soul the individuals of some species included an existentiality circumstanced
to sense and move its body. This is the case of a dog, for instance.
Other organisms lack such an existentiality in charge of biological
functions, for example a starfish – or its common ancestors with the dog, if
Aristotle could have paid attention to them. These other organisms operate in a purely reactive way: they are unable to inaugurate innovative causal series semoviently, that is
to say with decisions. (crocco)
‘These animals lack any intrinsically unbarterable element, and thus any knowledge inasmuch as experience: in these animal species having an Aristotelian soul but not circumstancing an existentiality, their “knowledge” is mere information, gnoseologically uncharacterized – and only metaphorically called “knowledge” by external observers
interested in keeping Aristotelian homogeneity for the biological series.’
It might be shocking but many living things, esp ones without a brain might be more like automata – purely reactive…..and not having any ‘experience’ at all……
Btw, I wonder if it’s right to say that monads are stucturally ‘open’ – aren’t they technically ‘closed’, determining what counts as a perturbation because of their structure….structure determinism/operational closure…..this maybe just terminology but m/v spent a lot of time arguing about ‘closure’ – as you have also done…..
May 7, 2013 at 2:10 am
Who cares what M/V said? Let’s not be so Oedipal! Besides, they argued, as far as I know (and you’re the scholastic expert here), that we’re operationally closed and structurally open. :)
May 7, 2013 at 11:24 pm
omg levi, you write in this message that mv are ‘indispensable reading’ – so I guess you do kind of care what they say. The main point is that we aren’t ‘open’ to anything at all – yes, responding in different ways as you put it -but not to ‘inputs’. As I said, it might just be terminology – but sometimes it makes a diff…:)
What I find much more interesting is that many things that ‘move’ are not, in fact, moving themselves. We could even say the universe is moving/growing as we speak….!
May 8, 2013 at 3:44 am
Paul,
I just mean that I’m not interested in maintaining scholarly fidelity to any thinker, but take what I find valuable and discard the rest, and that quotations are not arguments but appeals to authority. That said, the language of operational closure and structural openness does come from Maturana and Varela. Perturbations are inputs.
May 8, 2013 at 8:43 am
you are mistaken. There are no ‘inputs’ to autopoietic systems, – that’s the only real point of their ‘theory’. There is no ‘structural openness’ in m.v. (there is no such concept or term. …..it’s not about ‘scholarly fidelity’, just understanding what they in fact wrote. But you can take it any way you like…it’s a free world. forget about it….
May 8, 2013 at 12:12 pm
Paul,
Animals don’t eat and plants don’t photosynthesize? Eyes don’t require light to see? This theory without inputs is quite remarkable!
May 8, 2013 at 3:03 pm
Paul,
I spent some time trying to track down references to “structural openness” in Maturana and Varela and Luhmann. It looks like you’re right. However, the term is fairly common in the literature on autopoiesis. I suspect that the term arose from a reworking of the concept of “structural coupling”. All it means is that 1) systems can be perturbed by their environment, and 2) that systems specify what and how they’re open to these perturbation.
I’m aware that Luhmann, Maturana, and Varela all develop a critique of the notion of “inputs”. I simply don’t follow them in this critique. While I share their thesis that inputs can’t specify the response of a system, there’s nonetheless all sorts of things entering systems in the form of perturbations. At least, that’s my position.
May 8, 2013 at 9:05 pm
Yes, apart from the terminology, the main thing is not being able to specify. Technically i guess there is no informational/informing ‘input’ to a closed autopoietic system…but we don’t need to waste time on that….I think the term was ‘thermodynamically open’, ‘informationally closed’ – in fact you can quote me on that.
What’s more interesting about M’s work were the things that were not in the system, but in the relations btwn systems – behaviour, languaging etc….
You know Varela was a practicing buddhist, shame he died so young.
May 9, 2013 at 6:26 am
and of course the whole interest of their approach is that they were seen as self-referential monads – triggered, but not informed…
October 12, 2013 at 11:43 pm
[…] objects, but are also subjects and we need to be cognizant of this. Hence the idea of a “monad-oriented ontology“, that is attentive to how other objects encounter the world about them. Even Luhmann […]