Relational Objects and Intensive Beings

Apologies up front, because this post is necessarily much too dense. My intention is to provide as precise account of my own ontological leanings as possible. I do so because, frankly, I’m tired of rendering problematics that are, for me, already solved or accepted as irrelevant in superfluous ways. Summer is almost over for hell’s sake! And there is much more to think about than models and metaphysics.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to read Levi Bryant’s post riffing on comments I made about the need to take relationality seriously. Of course, anyone reading Larval Subjects knows that Bryant addresses relations by positing objects manifesting qualities in relational ways. But the notion of virtual proper being as that which ‘withdraws’ from actuality remains for many a ghost. And, at least for me, the idea of real entities as being somehow “split” is an unnecessary specter in Levi’s otherwise brilliant ontology.

Alternatively, I remain convinced that we must instead seek out the source of individuality in the expressible properties and affective potency of actual objects. Virtuality, whether posited as the hidden potentials of temporal objects, or as the mathematically-real ‘signatures’ (or latencies) of dynamical systems, or as a crypto-Platonic ‘essence’ of intangible withdrawal, is a concept completely unnecessary for the task of coping with and encountering real objects in the world. And, to be sure, the consequential and relational nature of the encounters and copings between real entities precedes any attempts at modeling or codifying them.

Moreover, the contingent character of objects, assemblages, units, sparrows or NGOs is only ever encountered in contact with the affective capacities or powers embodied by actual entities. The capacities, or what Bennett calls ‘thing-power’, expressed by actual entities are unleashed from the immanent depths of the assembled temporal and relational properties of particular things. Thus coping with the individuality and force (affects) of particular entities requires attenuation to objects by objects through the capacities particular to specific entities. [And by ‘coping’ I mean something more general: as quasi-Heideggerian imperatives inherent to particular beings as such. For example, as humans we cope mainly biologically, but rocks cope mainly minerally.] Riding waves of and as contingent actualities we humans pre-consciously take up the tasks of encountering (‘being-with’) and coping by virtue of our particular and relative variant of being – i.e., the specific properties of our ‘being-towards’.

Conversely, “change”, then, is not something that needs to be explained by way of the operations of metaphysically withdrawn objects, as if temporality is one side of an epic binary waiting to be switched on. Rather, change is the inherent movement of all beings as primordial relations gathered up and extended as variously differentiated and distributed temporal properties. That is to say, change is not something that happens to objects or entities – but rather change is the intrinsic condition of the being and becoming of existing kosmic properties. Change is the very condition necessary for individuation to occur.

In fact, the very individuality that object-oriented thinkers want to objectify is a consequence and consequential (and therefore meaningful) effect of coalesced or assembled extensive properties intensively organized. As a result of their contingent and temporal nature, object-assemblages are forever vulnerable (and thereby relatively accessible) to other object-assemblages, and also to the more diffuse affective dynamics at play in any particular situation. And here I use “situation” as a technical term for the variable confluence of extensive properties and intensive relations.

The moral of this particular onto-story, then, is simply that if we are to take relationality seriously we must also take temporality seriously, and taking temporality seriously means recognizing the inherent ‘vulnerability’ and openness of entities as they actually exist. And any human project that purports to frame the things-in-themselves, that is to say any declared realist endeavor, must eventually let go of essentialist thinking (characterized by a belief in ‘essences’) and content itself with attenuating and mapping the actual contingencies revealed (or disclosed) through and to us by our very own relative natures. Only then does speculation lead to praxis.