Of Mice and Substance

The debate between Ivakhiv and Bryant continues with Adrian standing firm on his claim that entities are inherently processual (here) and Levi affirming his position (here) that there is a split between an object's manifest qualities (what he calls "local manifestations") and its substantiality (or "virtual proper being").

With regard to Levi's example of a mouse shot out into space Adrian makes the following comments:

"I don’t think it would be possible to say that a mouse shot out into space is still a mouse, because the definition of a mouse would include the kinds of processes (or “procedures”, to use Bogost’s term) that make up mouseness, and that mouse would no longer have any of them. It’s mouse-like form would start decaying quickly, and any internality that was characteristic of the mouse as a whole would no longer be there. To put it in OOO terms, once that internality has withdrawn from the mouse, it has withdrawn for good. (Of course, we can argue about whether the mouse’s fur, its teeth, its spleen, etc., have their own internalities, their own withdrawability. Whitehead would probably say that the “society,” the mouse assemblage, is no longer there, but that other actual occasions may continue. Those don’t constitute a mouse — except for someone looking at it from the outside who thinks it’s a mouse because it still has fur, teeth, and other mouse-like features, for a while.)"

To which Levi has now replied:

"My thesis, of course, is such a claim confuses a quality of a mouse with the substantiality of a mouse... life doesn’t constitute the substantiality of a mouse, but is only a quality or local manifestation of objects. As I argued in my previous post, local manifestations are relational through and through. Ivakhiv will find no argument from me against the thesis that the local manifestation of life as a quality is dependent on all sorts of relations with other objects. However, it doesn’t follow from this that life constitutes the substantiality of our poor mouse. Life is just a quality– a local manifestation –that those substances known as meeces might happen to actualize."

My position is that the sum total of an entity's "qualities" - as embodied in its extensive and intensive properties - is that entity's substantiality. There is no-thing in excess of an entity's assembled immanent actuality - or, what Levi calls 'local manifestation'. Every-thing is 'local manifestation' because every-thing is located within reality. In this case, 'life' is not just a "quality", or "singularity", it is an emergent property embodied in the mouse's extensive and intensive constitution - a constitution, or composition, or assemblage that is intrinsically processual, temporal and always existing in relation. Whatever withdrawnness an entity has it has by virtue of its structural depth - its embodied 'local' (which is actually co-local) complexity.

mouse recoiling in fear from philosopher's creepy space plans

So, ultimately, if you shoot a mouse into space it becomes less of a mouse than it was while it was alive and well on earth. It's substantiality, its capacities, its expressivity, its 'endo-consistency' has thus been compromised, degraded, or diminished as a result of its new (space vacuum) relational existence. And should the astro-inclined Mus musculus remain in such a state/context its immanent-assembly (substantiality) would eventually disintegrate and it would cease to be at all.