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JOSEPH C. GOODSON: it is [the] idea of an organism, a totality, which basically crushes its parts into submission, that feeds and drains them into the fluid "whole," this ontology itself is woefully under-analyzed and too easily granted. Aristotle's response is as forceful now as it was to the pre-Sophists: if everything is a reflection, if everything is attributable to everything else, then nothing can ever change. At its root, every philosophy which does not admit of some kind of essential substance, form or unity is ultimately left scratching their head about causality, or dissolving it outright into a Heraclitean plasma. I can hear the rejoinder now: "but we want to think the middle ground between this disastrous, changeless flow and a world of specific, disengaged pieces of concrete that never meet at all." Well, then welcome to object-oriented philosophy, the only game in town at the moment which ventures to think the unified multiplicity that is the thing, or this thing, or any-thing at all. Every object is an ecology, but also an ecology. If a philosophy doesn't have some kind of basic tension analogous to a unified object and its pieces, then how can it really explain change?
MICHAEL: Who among the relationists has ever argued for a 'crushed totality'? Let's not continue to build strawmen here. Admitting organicity in the world is not necessarily implying “organism” as characterized by those who seek to deny totality. And, besides, the question of monism is not settled, so why should we act as if it is? Being dazzled by multiplicity is not a confirmation that reality is inherently torn asunder. The case has not yet been adequately made on that account in the view of many.
Thinking the middle ground is precisely what needs to be done. But there are many ways to do it. Some may find that language that reifies temporal individuality suits their fancy, while others may chose a more open-ended vocabulary to describe the coming into being and relative persistence of complexity. My suggestion remains that whatever signaling system we want to use we better damn well make sure we continually reference actually existing entities, lest we dogmatically confuse our pet theories (maps) for what is real and efficacious (territory).
Something you wrote that I certainly do agree with was this:
“Every object is an ecology, but also an ecology. If a philosophy doesn't have some kind of basic tension analogous to a unified object and its pieces, then how can it really explain change?”Brilliant! But again, there are many different ways to get that done, and Shaviro, Ivakhiv and Vitale all have seemingly adequate ways of addressing for that requirement that, I feel, continue to be overlooked or unfairly characterized.
JOSEPH: I don't think that relationism is stupid or nonsensical -- it isn't. There is a significant dimension of life that is relational, so there's no question that relationism is responding to something that is real. It most surely is. And I appreciate its radical overstatement in its ontological principles. There is something absolutely admirable in the courage of these thinkers (Vitale, Ivakhiv and Shaviro, along with Whitehead, Latour and Heidegger) who push their insights as far as they will go, and then see what the universe looks like.
MICHAEL: I can’t help but sense a bit of condescension here Joseph. By many accounts relationality has been drastically understated in intellectual history, and certainly among people generally. If anything, it is the case for objects, units, commodities, stand-alone complexes, and individuals that has been drastically overstated in the wider culture. Isolation, atomism and its bastard child anomie have all wreaked havoc in the hearts and minds of past generations – even becoming entrenched in so many of those institutions which seek to separate us and explain away deep relationships and the intrinsically embedded and hybrid nature of life. But it is the universe itself – as a diverse fabric of possibility and differentiation – that continues to demand we take process and contingency seriously.
JOSEPH: The problem, though, articulated in object-oriented ontology, is that they only pay attention to half of reality. So when blown up, that model of being is drastically top-heavy, because it is almost literally missing half of the world. Everything becomes diacritical, dependent in some way in its very essence on, or to, its relation to something else, and then that something is itself another relation on or to something else, and so on and so on. By this time, you can't encounter a unified entity at all -- you can only encounter a series of prior relations, perceptions or prehensions, all present in some degree or another (because, quite simply, there is nothing else to be but the result of a relation). But how could any such aggregate of nothing but relations possibly work? Where is its point of affect, of difference, of identity? Everything is drained of its specific power and deferred along an endless network with nothing really created or destroyed at all, since the sum total amount of energy of the network, its relational power, is always the same, neither more or less.
MICHAEL: Perhaps in some versions of extreme (or pop) relationalism this is an issue, sure. And I appreciate what you want to guard against here Joseph, I really do. In my own developing conceptual tool-kit I have a term for that ‘aspect’ of an object or whole (or as I prefer, assemblage) that is irreducibly an individual: onto-specificity. That is, objects/assemblages have an onto-specificity, efficacy or uniqueness that is irreducible, or ‘withdrawn’ into its own assembled immanent properties. However, and herein lies the crux, every actually existing object and assemblage is also entangled in a web of relations and contexts that occasion them – and which ensure a particular degree of vulnerability to processes, forces, affects and potencies not embodied in the very properties that constitute them. In other words, each object is generated out of the same background reality as every other thing in a way that allows them to inter and intra act upon each other, and ultimately – through various natural processes – allows new assemblages and relational complexes to emerge (or be generated). Thus, the only way that “unified entities” can occur at all is in deep relation to other differentiated occurrences operating on the same processual plane.
But all this should not be sloppily dismissed or mistaken for “goo” metaphysics, because of my aforementioned ‘principle of onto-specificity’ – which reminds us that each occurrence, object, event or assemblage has its own unique structural (and material?) withdrawedness and affective potency expressed via its intrinsic properties. And the fact that such properties remain relational and vulnerable to affective forces and processes (that is to say, all objects are impermanent and temporal) does not negate any particular entity’s ‘historical’ capacity to be what it specifically is.
So you ask, ‘where is the force of things? Well, in the specific properties (“character”?) of the things-themselves as they are temporarily assembled and exist in relative (and relational) difference to other coalescences. Individuality, in this view, is simply the onto-specific result of the asymmetrical diffusion of existing cosmic properties coalescing according to the contingent relations of differential processes.
JOSEPH: Implicitly, somewhere, relations must be treated the way object-oriented thought treats objects -- that a relation has a specific power and a specific set of qualities such that it is able to something that nothing else can do, something which gives rise to this particular entity.
MICHAEL: Agreed. But remember, relations are not “things” at all (at least not to me). Relations happen between things, among things, and on every scale – but only because all things exist on the same plane of reality (hence flat ontologies), and are therefore accessible to each other, and are parts of the differential distribution of intensive and extensive properties.
JOSEPH: One wants relations, somewhere, to be discrete and relatively isolated from one another, so that one may account for the differences that do appear in the universe. A relation is treated as if it isn't, by degrees, a sheer reflection of everything it encounters. My encounter with my desk is not the same as my encounter with the floor, or the ceiling or this computer -- but why? You have to start distinguishing relations to explain that, to say that this set of relations is absolutely different from that set. But once you start that, then you have to begin to see that these distinct sets are built of more distinctions -- the world begins to disintegrate, not reflect.
MICHAEL: But, I suggest, only in abstraction. Once we start talking about actual immanent properties and materialities, and the differences that obtain between particular coalescences and their simultaneous contingent relationships, we begin to be able to trace particular entities in all their efficacious glory and rich character. If we grant that relations are not ‘things’ but that which happens among the processual activities of existing properties and occurrences, then the details or actualities of particular (onto-specific) worldly entities (or as Adrian says, “achievements”) are what is most relevant. Only when things are encountered for what they in fact are, and understood in the context of how it is that they are maintained and have come to be, do we approach anything like an authentic (primate) ontographic praxis.
JOSEPH: When Whitehead says that you always have a perception between the subject and the object, each being relative to the other's relation (one is both the subject and the object, both perceived and perceiver), how does that really work? What are you really perceiving but yet another act of subject-object perception, and another, and another...? How is one perception different from another if the perceiver is completely exhausted and poured into the perception itself? Once you posit some kind of alterity to perception, something that isn't of this perception, that is, that a perception of this object is unique because it is my perception and not the things that perceive me, or that have perceived me, or that will perceive me, and that the same is true for the object in front of me, that I'm not encountering everything that perceived it in the past, because most of those things had no effect on it at all, and that I am not encountering a shifting sum of those encounters, but some kind of tentative unit -- well, all of this seems inevitable. This is why Ivakhiv has to have recourse to Whitehead's notion of society, because things do not change with every relation or perception, nor are they are kind of running total of all those perceptions. I think he's halfway there. The next best step is to say that there are only societies, though of varying scale and duration.
MICHAEL: I honestly don’t know enough Whitehead to say too much about what his system can or cannot explain Joseph, so I won’t. All I can suggest in this regard is that I don’t read Adrian as adhering to a strict Whiteheadian ontology, but only see him using bits and pieces here and there while building his own conceptual apparatus – so I think you’d have to put that issue to him. I think Adrian goes much further than you suggest in his appreciation of the efficacy of things, but that’s just my reading.
As for Whitehead’s “societies”, well, I personally don’t draw a distinction between objects and assemblages, and relations for that matter; I think they all occasion each other in ecologies upon ecologies, all the way down, as they say. And, as you said, “every object is an ecology, but also an ecology”.
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There's a lot to respond to here. (Just quickly, it's spelled Joseph, with the "s" first. Close friends of mine spell it that way you did all the time, so it's a common mistake.)
I'll put this in two parts:
On the condescension remark, I don't think I was being condescending, but I was unclear: everything I said about relationism could be said about object-oriented philosophy, equally. By overstatement I was referring to Whitehead, and his idea that all philosophy is overstatement (which is meant as a good thing, not a criticism). But I wonder if the better, object-oriented version of that is understatement. Philosophy takes the infinite complexity of the real and understates it, and, now that I think of it, so do objects. Objects are a kind of understatement of their pieces. They don't relate to all of their components in the same way, nor do they exhaust all of the elements of their components.
The statement about whether objects are gratified in the wider culture and relations are not is far beyond the statement I made, which was intended purely philosophically, not historically or culturally. That's a very different line of argument that goes beyond the basic metaphysical point I was discussing.
Here is a brief picture of object-oriented ontology as I understand it: we don't begin with a context or a "background reality," but rather individual entities -- objects. An object relates to another object, this relation generating a specific organization which emerges from its parts. This emergent organization is the unity called "object." This new emergent organization can itself relate to another object, creating a new relation and organization, generating a new object, making the original object a part of this new one. The thing is, as I understand what you are saying, is that the object or entity is identical to its internal properties -- but I think precisely is the problem, because it doesn't explain why those properties should do anything in the first place if they themselves are just their internal properties and so on to infinity. Something new has to emerge somewhere that isn't simply found in its properties. You could call it an system of features (as Graham discusses in Guerrilla Metaphysics). The system doesn't withdraw into the components which make it possible, it withdraws into itself, which is a new organization of those components. But notice -- there isn't anything magical or absolute or eternal about any of this. In fact, if an object was identifiable with its components, how would it emerge and/or be destroyed in the first place? And object is vulnerable, but because it can't control or dominate its parts in any complete or hegemonic way -- they can and do rebel and go their separate ways.
Take the Space Shuttle Challenger, for instance. A proud and majestic shuttle-system undone by a rogue O-ring, among a confluence of other particular entities. The point is that the shuttle-system was not a complicated sum of parts in any arbitrary form, but an organization which only partly absorbed elements from its own pieces to sustain itself. The object-oriented point could be taken even further -- the destruction of the shuttle itself is an object, the O-ring acting, not just as an "immanent property," but as an object in its own right, together with the shuttle as a whole (and the altitude and fuel and speed of the shuttle and the g-forces, etc, etc). All of this unified in such a way to create some tragic new object, an emergent organization which itself used only particular elements of its components (the upper atmosphere, the shuttle, its passengers). In the interior of this organization (which is obviously not simply the sum of its parts), we have a kind of retroactive effect which cares nothing for the incredible diversity of those parts. The explosion-system does not contemplate the life of the astronauts, nor the rich symbols painted on the shuttle, nor the vast complexity and powers of the computers and instruments. This system, or new assemblage, only attacks very particular elements of its own parts, and remains absolutely indifferent to the rest. Also, notice, "interior" here does not mean the inside of anything in a spatial sense -- it simply refers to the metaphysical boundaries of this system.
You write:
"So you ask, ‘where is the force of things? Well, in the specific properties (“character”?) of the things-themselves as they are temporarily assembled and exist in relative (and relational) difference to other coalescences."
I agree that an object uses its parts, but that doesn't mean it is is its parts. In order for anything to have an effect as this particular thing, it also can't be relationally defined from above, either. This is basically Latour's thesis: every entity or actor is a black box, composed of a heterogeneous collection of other actors, but as a black box, it is still only real inasmuch as it effects other entities itself. But the level between parts (from below) and its exterior relations (from above) seems to dissolve as it is thoroughly relationally defined. Where is the link between them? This is what I meant when I said than an object is an ecology -- it isn't the parts of an object that acts or relates but a organized unity of those parts. I don't see any other way around it because if you define an object as its immanent properties, then all of these properties must be active in equal measure and at equal strength. But this simply isn't true. Properties are selected by the organization of the object in a variety of ways and through a variety of relationships, not all of them of equal strength or quality.
The only other solution it seems to me for the relationist is the extreme one -- that nothing remains the same and is different at every instant or in every slight change in its parts or relations such that the shuttle that was destroyed was not the shuttle that took off, but a completely different entity. Potentiality is really no help here, either, as the question of potential only defers the power of the object into its future relations. The Challenger didn't have explosion-qualities, but shuttle-qualities. The explosion-qualities emerge when the shuttle and other objects relate. An object's reality can't be defined by what it will do but by what it presently is.
Another issue for me, though, is this notion of an unspecified background reality. Where does such a reality exist? A background is the result of a perception, but in reality there is no background, only individual entities, some inside of other entities and some not. It is true, though, that in object-oriented philosophy, thus far, there is no super-entity which relates everything to everything -- be it a god, a ground or a context (or a background) or, in a similar way, a substrate like "matter" or "spirit." The problem with these ideas is that it says everything is connected without showing how they are connected. Rather, with objects, you have very specific regions of the world which have to work to be connected, but it isn't connected a priori.
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