Of Objects and Assemblages

Jeremy at Eidetic Illuminations has a fantastic post up asking, "Are Cultures Objects?". He's raising some great questions about the efficacy of the Object-Oriented project. I want to touch briefly on a few issues he raises:

I think Jeremy pins down exactly what needs to be thought about when he asked, “…at what point can a set of relations be said to have turned into an object?” This is very important because the language he used actually offers a way forward. He asked ‘at what point’? – and the answer is: precisely at the point something becomes more rather than less differentiated from its background context.

But there’s the rub! No-thing is ever completely separate or differentiated from its context. Both Einstein and quantum physics argue exactly this. Things, or objects, are only ever relatively differentiated from the ecology within which they emerge. All things depend (or interdepend) on other things. But, as Bryant pointed out, not all things interdepend (my word) on other things at the same time. It is not that all things are directly related to each other, but that all things exist under certain circumstances and depend upon particular conditions and background relations. And, to return, it is the degree to which any coalesced assemblage becomes relatively differentiated from the life-conditions (form of life) within which it always partakes and co-creates that it can be said to be an ‘object’ unto itself.

Think embryos. Within the matrix of a womb an embryo can be seen to be an ‘object’ (or, rather, an assemblage) relatively distinct from its mother. But should you remove that embryo from its life-conditions (from the womb) it would certainly perish and de-assemble. Object-assemblages simply cannot be ‘removed’ from the matrix of reality, and any suggestion that ‘objects’ somehow have some special ontological status outside the relational contexts in which they dwell is not telling the whole-story. So unlike embryos that become foetuses and eventually leave the matrix of their mothers, WE cannot leave the womb of materiality and our deeply ecological reality – we depend on it. Just like every other object-assemblage that actually exists.

For me, somewhat following DeLanda (and he following Deleuze), all ‘objects’ are assemblages. Some assemblages are more ‘loose’ and some are more stable, but all such beasts always exist in relation. I think, contra Bogost and Morton, the concept of an assemblage can do more ‘work’ than the term object – at least the way DeLanda uses it – because ‘assemblage’ captures the simultaneous-ness of conjunctive and disjunctive relations and of whole/parts (mereology). It’s a more indicative term.

So at various points things either move towards becoming more rather than less of an object, or they disassemble, or deterritorialize, and become less of an object. Therefore, there must be certain “thresholds” (or certain “tipping points”) where assemblages ostensibly become individuals rather than continue to exist as a) multiplicities, or b) hybrid transgressors. And of course there are assemblage-things that hover ‘in between’ being an individual and a multiplicity (or ‘society’), such as certain organisms or ant colonies.

It is a matter of degree.

This thresholding of immanent reality is why it is more important, in my view, to always investigate the world of things in their particulars (with all their onto-specific idiosyncrasies). To truly respect the “strange mereology” of the world-itself (rather than of OOO), we have to respect the specific determining properties and characteristics of each and every situation or assemblage. [Isn’t this also exactly what ethnography teaches us about understanding the local?]

And this, incidentally, is for me the exact difference between ontography and ontology. Ontography speculatively maps particulars, while ontology speculatively abstracts generalities. Both are useful , but ontography must remain fundamental, in a way that mirrors how ethnography is more fundamental than ethnology.

With regards to culture, I have all but abandoned that concept myself - because, as you, Max and many others have pointed out, there are so many connotations at play with that term. ‘Is culture an object?’ Depends on what you are willing to objectify.

Certainly there are cultural objects. For example, a totem pole. A totem pole is a tree that has been transformed by humans and inscribed with symbolic meanings. Thus, the totem pole is an object-assemblage of wood, paint and symbolic representation which combine in such a way as to create a new ‘culturally’ recognizable object. But the question then becomes ‘what is the relationship of the totem pole to various other elements (object-assemblages)’?

Is there enough of a relationship between human beings, language, totem-poles (artifacts) and other objects that we can say that its assembly is itself an object? Has a particular crowd of distributed objects intensified its relations enough to cross the ‘threshold’ of multiplicity and become a unity? In what way does "it" act as an object? And the only way we judge that is relative to the context in which these things occur, and relative to the specific affects (capacities and powers) expressed by all the immanent and coalesced properties involved.

That is to say, we must do ontography rather than ontology to determine the specific properties and affect dynamics (my term) occurring in any particular context.

So, the problem I have with considering culture an ‘object’, or any given social milieu a distinct ‘society’, is that it seems to objectify situations involving intricately differentiated phenomena with amazingly diffuse relationships. Human populations exist among so much complexity that to draw boundaries around too wide a gathering of people, places and things is ‘imagine’ too much. At best, cultures are loose assemblages and not, in my opinion, intensive OR extensive enough to be ‘objects’ per se.