It is common to rebuke the new materialisms and object-oriented ontologies as falling prey to a primitive animism that attributes agency, desires, and intentionality to matter and things. Following a heated discussion about how things act upon us, influencing what we do and how we relate to one another, an archaeologist friend of mine disdainfully quipped that the fallacy of my position is that our cars cannot love us back. He continued, claiming that things don’t do anything to us, but rather that it is always we who put things to use according to our aims and intentions. When I evoked examples such as bars across public benches and spikes under overpasses to prevent homeless people from sleeping in these places, he would have none of it, and continued to insist that I was claiming that things have emotions and desires. Not only did he refuse the idea that our agency is distributed, that it doesn’t arise simply from us alone, but arises from how we related to the things of the world around us, but he did so with an outraged vehemence that I have great trouble understanding. Why is it that the idea that we don’t walk on the earth, but with the earth– that the gravity of the earth is part of what allows us to walk as can be clearly seen from the fact that it is impossible to walk on the moon –such a disturbing and threatening idea? Why is it so difficult to see that the blind man’s cane is a part of his sensory apparatus?
My friend’s response– one that is common and ubiquitous in my experience –reflects a deep and ancient conceptual grammar that underlies our thought in all disciplines and practices; one that I believe we desperately need to abandon. The distinction between subject and object reflects a further distinction between the active and the passive, the animate and the inert. Within this conceptual framework, matter and things are a priori passive and inert, and therefore can only be recipients of action, objects of action, and never actors themselves. In this regard, things are targets of our action and are for the sake of our use and mastery. Here we are all Aristotlians, seeing matter as a passive, formless medium that requires form in order to become a substance or thing. That form can never originate from the matter itself, but requires the outside agency of a subject– the craftsman that forms the clay into a brick by placing it in a mold –or God. If some sort of subject is always necessary for formation, then this is because matter is conceived as necessarily inanimate and inert. Matter cannot itself do anything, but rather can only have things done to it. It will be observed that this way of thinking embodies a will towards calculation, domination, and mastery at its core… A will that is at the heart of the ecological crisis we now find ourselves in.
read on!
It is remarkable that this way of thinking is still credible and automatic after the last one hundred years of science. If chemistry and quantum physics have taught us anything, it’s that– as Bennett puts it –matter is lively and vibrant. To be sure, things appear to be inert and it is this perception of inertness that leads us to think that things can simply be thrown out or dumped without repercussions. We reason to ourselves that they will merely lay there, doing nothing. Yet while the activity of things might be slow and imperceptible, there are always activities going on within things. The radioactive decay of plutonium and the chemical reactions in a landfill aren’t some sort of naive animism or primitive fetish. They are what is actually going on in things. The truth of the matter is that we simply don’t have a good language for expressing these things. Action language is all on the side of the subject and passive language is all on the side of the object. As a consequence, we can only conceive doings in subjects and are unable to think doings on the side of objects. We can’t see how a symbolic system like Arabic numerals, a pencil, and a piece of paper contribute to our ability to do mathematics, for example. Yet try adding 12,433 and 7658 using Roman numerals and without the aid of pencil and paper to simplify the process and remember the steps along the way and see how far most of you get. As extended mind theorists like Andy Clark argue, those symbols written on the paper are an externalized memory. Your memory is right there on the paper, not in your mind. And that externalized memory frees up your mind to engage on the simplified steps in reaching the conclusion. The symbols, the paper, and the pencil are a part of our agency and our agency can’t be reduced to our minds alone.
How many things are like this in our action and social relations? Just as evolutionary biologists talk about features of organisms in terms of purposes despite the fact that that is not how evolution works, new materialists and object-oriented ontologists resort to agent based language to describe how it is with matter and things because we simply don’t have any other language to express these things. This language of agency is not deployed to suggest that things and matter have emotions, desires, or wishes, but to capture the sense in which they act. I don’t think my cell phone wants or desires anything– though Kevin Kelly makes a plausible case for how technology can want things in What Technology Wants –but I do think it significantly modifies how we relate to each other, communicate, and navigate the world despite what our intentions and aims might have been upon first getting that smart phone. In the early days of the pocket and wrist watch, the person just wanted to tell time. However, as this technology saturated the world, precise time-telling became an obligatory norm defining labor, meetings, and get-togethers of all kind. One could, of course, opt to not where a watch are use clocks, but only at a great social cost. Inevitably you would end up getting fired for failing to show up for work on time. Where before you would show up to work or for a meeting a 8ish where 8ish could be seven or nine, now there came to exist a strong obligation to be at certain places at a precise time. The watch and clock did something to us that wasn’t our original intention. Every artist and novelist will tell you something similar, pointing out how they set out to paint or carve one thing, but that the paint and marble had its own “ideas” of what it wanted to be. The intention becomes modified by the medium.
Larval Subjects . 
July 19, 2018 at 1:34 pm
How would you interpret the passage below from Aristotle’s Physics?
“All things existing in nature appear to have in themselves a principle of motion and of standstill, whether with respect to place or increase or decrease or alteration. But a bed or a garment . . . has no natural tendency in itself for changing” (192b14-19–Apostle translation)
July 19, 2018 at 2:20 pm
Not really the point, Robert. Is there a reason each thing you post here is combative and antagonistic? I’ve already deleted three other comments from you for that reason. I’m not interested in such “discussions”.
July 19, 2018 at 2:31 pm
The subject/object the indeterminacy principle:the theory that it is impossible to measure both energy and time (or position and momentum) completely accurately at the same time. uncertainty principle. scientific theory – a theory that explains scientific observations; “scientific theories must be falsifiable” So if you cant at the particle level then it is simply an illusion that you can with a visible larger object. The Object beckons, draws you in.
July 19, 2018 at 2:34 pm
You are arguing your defense in the DOMINATING DISCOURSE. or maybe I should say a DisCOurse that is BINARY. The fundamentals of this Discourse that we are still in at this time is opposition: us vs them; Dems vs GOP; Trump vs Hillary; good vs bad; and so on as Vonnegut said.
July 19, 2018 at 2:46 pm
Janet, who are you referring to?
July 19, 2018 at 2:56 pm
You larvalsubjects.
July 19, 2018 at 3:13 pm
What is combative about asking how you would interpret a passage from Aristotle? If we interpret it differently, maybe we would learn something from our differences.
Recall that I also recently offered a post with an example from Aristotle’s comment on the Meno to support your point about “examples,” which have also always interested me for reasons similar to yours. That shows that I’m not a troll, posting just to be combative.
Regarding the “agency of matter,” I’m sympathetic with the idea. I just think there may be additional evidence for it in the ingredient of agency that Aristotle finds in things that come to be by nature, as distinct from the craft by which a bed comes to be. Matter is inert in the dualism of Descartes but not in Aristotle.
Nothing I’ve said in any of my post qualifies a trolling. They have all been arguments what would give us a chance to learn from our differences.
July 19, 2018 at 3:48 pm
In Aristotle the phusis you’re referring to pertains only to living things. Yes, he claims things have a natural attraction to the earth, but that’s quite different than a chemical reaction in a landfill. I’ll take you at your word, however long experience blogging has taught me that discussions that start with a particular tone often lead to bad places. For the sake of my mental health and ability to continue to write in such a medium, I thus avoid these sorts of discussions like the plague.
July 19, 2018 at 5:40 pm
I understand and sympathize with your problem as a blogger. Wish I had a solution.
In this case, I think we have a difference in interpretation. A few lines after the passage I quoted, Aristotle adds that a thing that exists by craft or “art” “has no natural tendency in itself for changing; but insofar as it happens to be made of stone or earth or to be a composite of these, it has such a tendency and only to that extent.” In other words, the stone or earth or the combination of the two add to the artificial object made by art a “natural tendency in itself for changing,” but only to the extent of these natural components. A house made of stone and earth may collapse from change in the stone and earth. Such a change would be “alteration” (which is included in the first passage I quoted, along with “increase and decrease” and change in “place”) not a “natural attraction to the earth.”
Obviously Aristotle doesn’t have the modern science to explain some of the changes you note (e.g., radioactive decay).. But the changes you note are consistent with his view that the mark of nature is an internal principle of change (“natural tendency in itself”). If you want to trace all the changes Aristotle envisions to “natural attraction to the earth,” then you could fault the science but keep the internal principle of change. But it seems to me that “alteration,” “increase and decrease,” and change in “place” can be viewed as three categories of internal change.
One might say that for Aristotle, everything is alive but that you need to distinguish the way of being alive covered by the Physics from the way of being alive covered by De Anima. That would be an alternative to the animate/inanimate dogma that you question and that i join you in questioning.
Maybe on the Aristotle passage we have to agree to disagree.
July 19, 2018 at 6:01 pm
I think I misunderstood what you were pointing at in the original quote. I thought you were contesting my claim that matter is inert for Aristotle by pointing to his theory of why things fall. My contention is that he models his concept of phusis on living things, not things like clay and rocks where I suspect he’d reject the claim that they have an *internal* principle of increase and decrease. Aristotle’s concept of nature is quite different from the modern one, though we hear echoes of it in many debates. Yes, I quite agree with what you’re saying about Aristotle with respect to techne or craft beings. In this post I run two things together without clearly distinguishing them. On the one hand, there’s the thesis that matter is not a passive lump, but has all sorts of things going on in it. On the other hand, there’s the thesis that agency is distributed and does not simply result from our intentions. Towards the end of this post I give a series of quick examples to illustrate this point in the final paragraph or two.
July 19, 2018 at 6:01 pm
Exactly why Foucault put an end to interpretation. Then you enter the swamp of endless ping pong in the dialectical Dominating Discourse. It is BINARY and forces you to take sides. It is just my reading, your reading and we differ. It doesn’t have to turn into an argument. But the STATE wishes to keep us in this Discourse as then we get distracted, we want to be RIGHT,WE WANT TO dominate WHICH IS WHY IT IS LABELED THE DOMINATING DISCOURSE.
July 19, 2018 at 6:02 pm
Yes, I understand Foucault in discourse quite differently.
July 19, 2018 at 7:47 pm
I might even take your discussion, your point Levi, A step further and say that this person that you’re talking about in your blog that is being antagonistic is indeed an object behaving in that same manner.
Now the step that I take here is actually including the phenomenal central subject. And this to say that everything in our field is objects. I think that’s really what Harman is saying? and probably what you are saying (Sorry I’ve read more of Grahams work then yours – but you could refer me to some of your essays and publications and stuff 😆): Is that how am I particularizing for kinds; maybe this is what the guy above there was bringing in Aristotle about.
Because if I can if I iinclude only my self as the centralphenomenal subject, then everything in my view, and not necessarily my opinion but exactly what I come across, is an object, and therefore has all the same attributes that I might want to attribute to that particular category that I call human. And we might say just the same, all those attributes that I might claim for a rock, is equally valid for the application of human being.
July 19, 2018 at 7:49 pm
… which is to say that it is equally possible for human beings to be hard immovable, dense and unthinking. Lol
July 20, 2018 at 9:41 am
Inertia, the inanimate, the stable seem to me a special non-normal case of change, although there is a fair bit of it, it is caused by active repetition, think of electrons orbiting protons in atoms, until they don’t, or objects falling to the centre of gravity of planets blocked by their solid surface, until the planet finally melts away. Arthur M Young discusses this in his The Reflexive Universe, and Robert Pirsig discusses the problems with subject-object concepts in his book Lila and proposes an alternative. Contingency, change, freedom, tao is fundamental, yet there is form and repetition. Agency implies some desire, need, choice, or information to forsake freedom to do the same again, because it has value or some sort of attraction. Do particles have agency? Are they drawn to the light or the dark, certain wavelengths or vibrations? Certain repetitions or habits. Maybe. Repetitions of course reduce freedom, they give us form and law, but what can we really say about what moves causality and activity? Can we really separate these concepts? To be moved: physical law or an emotion driven activity?
July 20, 2018 at 9:51 am
Of course at times all objects are more or less free or more or less constrained. Right now I am capable of saying an enormous amount or walking off in any direction (unconstrained particles have a lot of freedom too) but any moment I might constrained and be picked up and carried off like any other object (and particles can find themselves in one of many different sorts of atomic constraint, or within molecules at the next level up, where new constraints also mean new freedoms and possibilities).