Objects, Encounters and Embodied Qualities

Here is Tom Sparrow asking some important questions on his blog Plastic Bodies:

what, then, is a quality?

The question is Peirce’s, from his “The Principles of Phenomenology.” His answer is one I endorse, but I would quibble with him about it is one born out of phenomenology. Against those who would have qualities depend upon the mind of their observer, Peirce thinks of qualities as dispositions inherent in objects. He does not use the language of disposition, but rather the language of potentiality. But he is clear that by ‘potentiality’ he does not mean potentiality as lack of actuality, but potentiality as a real capacity, and not merely some dormant can-be-actualized-but-that-depends-on-actualization. His whole discussion hooks up with Shaviro’s recent commentary on Molnar’s Powers, and works in support of my account of sensations...

What I’m keen to defend is the view that sensations really reside in things; that things emanate to radiate sensations, and that an object is in one respect a conspiracy of qualities whose autonomy is embodied in its singular capacity/disposition/power to effect other objects.

I'm delighted Tom is now publicly expanding on previous comments he made regarding what he calls "radiant sensations". As I have written previously in relation to this topic:

I couldn’t agree with Tom more. Entities are their emanating qualities. I think that when we investigate how animal perception works in the world 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 indirect 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.

I believe the notion that all entities are compositions with embodied qualities interacting through the mingling of intrinsic properties is important for a robust realist ontology. For me, entities, assemblages or objects must be characterized in terms of both their individualized efficacy (or potency) as well as their substantial and temporal-processual finitude (or vulnerability). And to do this, I believe, we must resist idolizing supposed transcendental characteristics abstracted from their onto-specific properties and begin understanding entities by way of the embodied capacities they actually express in the world.

This is not to say that human knowledge can fully capture or completely translate or represent the totality of objects and their embodied capacities. Objects certainly withdraw from our understandings (knowledge) of them - if only because all primate knowledge is limited and partial. But human knowledge is not the only medium through which we encounter other entities. We encounter other entities by way of a multitude of constituting properties. In short, 'contact' is not simply about knowing but also about perceiving, and perceiving is a function of embodiment and sensation, which, as Tom notes, is more about the mix and mingle of given qualities.   

I reject the notion that entities totally withdraw from each other on an ontic level. I argue that primates, as with many other actual entities, have direct but partial access to real objects/assemblages via our shared cosmological (material-energetic) 'ancestry'. That is, all entities, including humans, are of the same material-energetic-based reality as all other actualities, and therefore vulnerable to the same affective forces. This is what I like to call ontological intimacy: the claim that all entities emanate and resonate on the same casual plane and therefore share a primordial intimacy, or 'kinship' with each other (cf. Simondon on the pre-individual status of the real). And the fact that particular entity-assemblages (wholes) are irreducibility to their sub-strata (parts) doesn't take away from the simultaneous fact that both parts and wholes, objects and assemblages, partake of the same affective ancestral reality.

Much to the annoyance of some, individuation, particularity, emergence and continuity are compatible and simultaneous facts about the world - and it is by virtue of their actual embodiment and intimacy that emanating entities encounter each other directly but partially.

I plan to think and write more on this topic, but for now you can read my previous comments on these issues here, here and here.

So let me just note that I welcome Tom's pursuit of a definition of qualities and sensation that respects their embodied actuality, and I look forward to Tom working through these ideas in greater detail. As Tom describes his own project:

"In the end – and this will constitute my attempt to think objects in their own right – I’m working toward a speculative aesthetics that will try to imagine a world where qualities conspire into objects and exchange sensations without the facilitation of humans or other sentient creatures."

Check out Tom's entire post here.