Vitale and Ivakhiv on Objectological and Relational Approaches

It seems Chris Vitale now gets it. What ‘it’ is precisely I am still not entirely sure, but Chris now believes that a little dash of Latour and a heaping cup of semiotics renders Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) a compatible set of positions with Chris’ own relational “networkological” approach.

In a series of recent posts (here, here, here and here) Vitale explains his recent acceptance of many OOO positions and how he thinks its core elements could fit in with his own framework. The posts are quite dense, with many collateral insights that seem to sneak up from related crevasses. I don’t fully agree with much of what Chris is now saying about OOO in these posts - as I still have some difficulty with the unnecessary emphasis on objects as 'essences' - but his posts are well worth the read if you are interested these kinds of issues. 

Here are a few extracts from one of the most recent posts, which I quite enjoyed:

"[O]ur conscious networks only ‘know’ what the sub-conscious levels of the brain pass on to them. But we cannot know all that these sub-conscious levels know, because otherwise we would have to be these levels. But we see this even with physical phenomenon. Water boils because of changes at the level of its molecules, but there are changes on the sub-molecular level that may impact the way it boils, and in a manner that a scientific observer would not know unless they switched the level of their analysis from that of molecules-water to that which includes sub-units. And while water cannot ‘know’ why it boils the way it does, we can say that its experience of boiling works in this leveled manner as well. Much of this is described by the notion of complexity (complex systems, etc.), which describes whenever wholes cannot be deduced from the aggregate sum of their parts.

All these types of withdrawal are avatars, so to speak, which ultimately derive from the ’fundamental obstacle’ to knowledge described by the ‘network paradox’ – namely, that if all knowledge happens via networks, then the fact that networks necessarily foreground some things (nodes) which are linked to others (links), there are always grounds which are excluded. Nodes, links, grounds, and levels are the fundamental terms of the networkological project. The withdrawal via grounds and levels is built into the system at the get go, and particular obstacles to knowledge (withdrawal in OOO) are the results thereof…

Beyond this, the networkological perspective also has a series of concepts with many similarities to HYPEROBJECTS. Combinatories, or organized networks of networks, have many aspects in common with hyperobjects, particularly that they can be dispersed. There are also plexes, or quasi-living ‘wideware’ combinatories, entities like languages that evolve in relation to human beings.”[source]

Go check out the originals.

Adrian Ivakhiv has responded to Vitale’s posts with a succinct and intelligent post of his own here. Adrian finds reason to pause and outlines his own thoughts on the matter via a tour through Whitehead, Peirce and others. In the following passages Adrian cuts right to the quick of what I think continually needs to be reiterated about the remainders between OOO and more relational approaches:

The difference between OOO and the process-relational views Chris, Steve Shaviro, I, and others have espoused is not one of radical incommensurability but one of emphasis, language, and not much more (as I’ve said myself, for instance here.)…

One of the most basic commonalities between OOO-ists and process-relational theorists, all along, has been a deeply felt concern to go well beyond anthropocentric assumptions about who or what qualifies as a “subject”…

There is, then, at the finest level of reality, an ongoing circulation, a vibration, by which subjectivity and objectivity continue to arise wherever reality arises. You could say that, in its horizontal dimension, the universe appears as a vibratory oscillation, a sinuous wave, continually generating its own oscillation, in many directions all at once. In its vertical dimension (which is where I follow Peirce), each of these oscillations, if sliced into, contains a firstness, which is something irreducible; a secondness, which is the responsiveness and interactivity, the one-thing-arising-in-the-presence-of-and-after-another-ness; and a thirdness, which is the proliferation into, or consummation as, meaning, habit, and regularity, that builds worlds and makes the universe a genuine universe. In the midst of this movement forward and outward, entities take shape and acquire consistency, and these are the things (loosely speaking) that OOO-ists call objects…

The whole debate between the objectological and the relational approaches, like all such good debates, has that back-and-forth vibratory quality that I’ve described as being at the center of things, the motor of the universe. [source]

I find Adrian’s approach to these issues is always quite lucid and compassionately articulated.

And for good measure check out the comments related to these posts by Graham Harman (here) and Levi Bryant (here). Fun, fun, fun.