Emanating Sensations and Immanent Properties

Recently Tom Sparrow over at Plastic Bodies has been making a series of fascinating statements on what he seems to be calling “radiant sensations”. What strikes me most about Tom’s comments is how concise he is when suggesting that an entity’s ‘qualities’ are the immanent properties of its embodied expression.

Here is a particularly clear statement:

“Instead of thinking of qualities as attaching to or inhering in some substance, and thus collecting around their substantial core awaiting human perception to notice them, maybe we can think of qualities as exploding from the anarchic center of objects. On this view, qualities are not attached to substances, but rather emanations of what would be a substance.” [source]

I couldn’t agree with Tom more. Entities are their emanating qualities. I think that when we investigate how perception works in the world - in ourselves and other animals - we never actually find some inter-mediate gap between two entities where qualities appear to one or both of those entities in excess of either entity’s actual constituent-being. As Tom explains it, “qualities” are not something that simply come into being through indrect contact and perceptions of ‘substances’, nor are they peripheral to the deepest individuality of any particular entity. “Qualities” are intrinsic emanations of an entity’s individuality and being-in-the-world. What Tom might be suggesting, if I get him right, is that we might want to begin understanding entities as completely embodied actants in the world, fully disclosed of-themselves, and capable of being directly encountered by other entities exhibiting their own intrinsic ‘qualities’.

read this post on white background @ primate ontography

Tom elaborates in a subsequent comment:

"I guess the main point I want to make about sensation is that it’s not an exclusively human event: all bodies, animate and inanimate, are prone to sensations. How? Well, I’m obviously using an expanded version of the term ‘sensation’. A sensation is less something that happens to a body (although it is that too), and more of something possessed by a body. A property, if you want. This property does not reside in a substance, but rather is part of the disposition of a thing to generate certain effects (a thing being a collection of properties whose singularity is defined by its disposition, but I can say more about thinghood/objecthood later).

An example: sandpaper has the capacity to be abrasive. If it scratches a surface, it is because the sandpaper is abrasive, not because the surface (e.g. my skin) has the sensation of abrasion. The sensation of abrasion belongs to the sandpaper; it is not simply an effect that occurs in a sentient being. One might object that sandpaper is only abrasive for bodies susceptible to scratching, and thus it is the receptive body that senses. I have two replies. First, we could (and I do) make a distinction between the virtuality and actuality of sensations. Sensations are actualized liminally, that is, when contact is had between two bodies. Virtually, sensations (their effectiveness) reside ‘in the things themselves’. A thing just is a singular set of sensations/qualities, albeit a coherent and autonomous set. Second, on this reading, even non-sentient bodies can have sensations. Wood can sense the abrasiveness of sandpaper because the former can be scratched. Arguably, marble too can sense sandpaper, although marble is less prone to scratching…

I think in phenomenology we typically think of the object as the center of a series of perspectives (adumbrations) that circle around it. The vector of these perspective is pointed from the subject toward the object, thus the object sits pinned in the center of these perspectives, the force and distribution of which keep the object in place. I would like to think of the vectors pointing outward from the object, and thus the core of the object as dispersive and effective. This does not mean the object is ‘reducible to its relations’, it just means that the source of our sensations is the object’s radiation, not our intentional perception or our special status as sentient creatures." [source]

I’m not sure I follow Tom all the way to saying that non-sentient entities have “sensations”, but would suggest, rather, that all entities can be said to embody affective expression and catalytic capacities. But I certainly agree, contra many metaphysicians, that perception and sensuality can be understood as the embodied capacities evoked by direct encounters between the inherent properties of things.

It is my belief that it is the pernicious ‘theater of the mind’ ontology – where perception is understood as a staging process of qualities uncovered within mental space – which has generated most of the faulty epistemological assumptions over the years about our inability to ‘know’ things "in-themselves", or as they actually exist. By positing an unbridgeable gap between the empirical world and our "sensations" of it, metaphysicians also implicitly accept a supposedly unbridgeable 'gap', or non-commensurability between the empirical world and our own constituent being. From this perspective our encounters with actual entities become mythologized and explained away as mere ‘shadows’, representations or “impressions” in need of ordering by radically disembodied minds. Kant’s phenomenon/noumenon divide is but one iconic example of this ontological-epistemological conflation.

However this conflationary position is not strictly philosophical, but also, and in large part, a result of the habitual mistake of privileging ocular perception (seeing) over our other embodied perceptive capacities(senses). Of course there are cultural and historical reasons for this privileging in European and neo-European societies, but we need only refer to the Umeda and Kaluli of Papua New Guinea as groups of people who instead privilege auditory perception, resulting in very different sets of epistemological conclusions. As Alfred Gell puts:

“In the New Guinea forest habitat [dense, unbroken jungle]… hearing is relatively dominant (over vision) as the sensory modality for coding the environment as a whole… Umeda, and languages like Umeda, are phonologically iconic, because they evoke a reality which is itself ‘heard’ and imagined in the auditory code, whereas languages like English are non-iconic because they evoke a reality which is ‘seen’ and imagined in the visual code” (The Language of the Forest, p.247-8, 1999).

Moreover, even a passing acquaintance with the cognitive and neurological sciences would suggest there are alternatives to the ‘theater of the mind’ understanding of perception. In fact, neuroscientists have been quite clear that models of perception which maintain a supposed “gap” between subject and object are no longer tenable. All perception is embodied perception afforded through material and biological processes. I will not go into detail about the advances in knowledge within these sciences here, but instead point the interested reader here and here, and to the work of Damasio, Lakoff, Thompson and John Protevi for a fuller account of why many philosophers continue to get it wrong on issues of perception and experience.

As I understand it, humans do not interpret the world by constructing some representation of objects or entities “in their minds”, but instead directly encounter the world by sensing it and relating to it through their assembled immanent properties and emanating qualities - which in the case of animals includes biological sensory capacities. But the same holds for non-human entities or objects: they too emanate outward, expressing and acting upon (affecting) the world from their own “anarchic center” of immanent properties.

It is important to note that for me an entity’s properties are immanent in two ways: first, every entity is nothing other than the extensive and intensive properties it consists of – properties that are radically specific to whatever that thing actually is. As Tom puts it, an entity is “a collection of properties whose singularity is defined by its disposition”. And this “disposition”, for me, is an entity’s embodied structural capacity to affect and be affected. Secondly, all the qualities or properties an entity embodies emerge from, and are assembled by, the same preexisting immanent background of energetic-materiality and natural processes. This ‘background’, or what we might simply call ‘reality as such’, is literally what affords beings their being-ness. That is to say, all particular entities are collections or assemblages of properties and elements available in the wider, pre-human ecological worldspace. And because of this affinity or continuity all entities are of this world and act in the world at the same time. And it is this continuity or dual actuality in the world that allows entities to interact more or less directly, or ‘intimately’ with each other (depending on their proximity and relationship).

In this scenario, then, what we have during any encounter are two radically embodied entities directly interacting (relating) through the collision and/or resonation of their immanent properties, creating ‘qualitative’ affects in the process. And when I say “in the process” I mean exactly that: encounters between entities are temporal-relational events driven by the intensive processes and complex interactions between differentially assembled properties of each emanating entity. In other words, and to repeat, all relations between real ‘bodies’ (entities) happen precisely between the temporal affective forces (powers, potency, or efficacy) emanating from the immanent properties and capacities temporarily coalesced as those particular entities.

Incidentally, I think the combination of this ontological intimacy with the ‘temporal affective force’ of things (explained above) is precisely what Bennett’s theory of ‘vibrant materiality’ and ‘thing-power’ entails. Far from being cut off from direct access to each other, all entities, by virtue of their immanent properties, emanate or exert their particular ‘thing-power’ on each other creating dynamic catalytic encounters with varying affects and effects according to a) the constitution and disposition of the entities involved, and b) whatever other environmental variables or influences coming into play.

And, as Tom’s comments suggest, the implications of an ontology of intimate relation (with direct encounters) on how we think about perception and sensation are many. For starters, if humans have the capacity to encounter other objects more or less directly as affective assemblages of properties then some sort of realism would become a veritable default position – leaving solipsism and idealisms of all kinds dramatically indefensible.

As Tom notes:

"Realism hinges on the question of whether or not objects assail us. If we think they merely beckon us, then the idea that subject and object reciprocally determine each other’s form seems plausible. That is, a certain postdualist idealism/irrealism may be right. But if objects assail us with their qualities or with sensations, then there is something to be said about their autonomy from our perceptual or cognitive machinery.” [source]

I believe objects and entities do indeed “assail us”, and each other, with their “qualities” or immanent properties. And because an entity’s properties are both immanent in the world (partaking in universally dispersed material-energetic elements and processes), and radically contingent (emerging through particular historical and cosmological circumstances), they affect each other both directly and in radically idiosyncratic ways.

Let me pause to emphasize this point: the affect dynamics of real entities are radically particular to the historical and cosmological circumstances from which they come into being. And, yet, most dynamic-affective situations are rarely straight-forward - holding forth in complex, multi-dimensional ways that defy linear or multi-linear logic and description. That is, entities as temporal assemblages of immanent properties are vulnerable to a myriad of affects - attacked and attacking (relating) on multiple scales and from various angles, depending on the circumstances obtaining within the wider ecology of forces, flows and things.

And I do think Tom’s insight about 'emanating qualities' combined with an appreciation of the temporality of embodied assemblages leads to just such a process-relational view of interacting entities. However, to be sure, the jumble of concepts, entailments and conclusions asserted here are only my perspective, and may not even remotely reflect Tom’s positions or ontology.

Ultimately, I think Tom might want to take us in a slightly different direction – as evidenced a follow-up post titled, “Six Theses on Sensation” where he briefly outlines some thoughts on how to rework the concept of sensation  in order to “give it a more robust definition and render it amenable to realism as well as a certain materialism.” I think Tom’s comments give us a glimpse as to what just such a robust realism might look like, while also challenging us to rethink what we think we know about “sensations”. I will have more to say on this over at Tom’s blog in the next few days, but I would urge those of you interested in following Tom down that rabbit hole to go check out his site for further elaborations.