The Monstrosity of Things

Over at Larval Subjects Mark Crosby commented (here) on Bryant’s version of the thesis that objects “withdraw” from their relations. I think Mark hits it squarely on the head when he writes:

"It’s not WHOLLY a function of the 'external events themselves', but neither is it WHOLLY a function of the 'internal organization of the object'. It’s a function of BOTH, and the feedback obtained only by their interaction. So, I can see no way to correctly say that they never 'touch' each other." [source]

I can think of no way that someone can adequately argue that “external events” and “internal organization” do not interact directly. I accept a formal closure based on the functional thresholding or affective governing powers of a system/object, but I would also argue that the immanent character of cosmological properties (materiality as such) affords a unified (or “flat") ontological plane of reality within which it is possible for objects to directly (but never fully) interact and affect each other.

This is what I mean when I say that there is an ontological intimacy between or among objects which makes them vulnerable to modification, mutation, destruction and hybridity. Perhaps we could call this the monstrous quality of things – the horror that not only Kurtz witnessed but from which we ourselves often recoil?

Responding to Mark's comments Levi had this to say:

I think it’s important to preserve those instances where an acting object produces it’s own events. Otherwise objects would be purely passive. In my view operations can take place within objects that are purely a product of the dynamism of the object. I think this is Kant’s singular contribution (the one that gets Deleuze all excited). In the second and third critique, Kant conceives a mode of self-production that isn’t merely an entity being activated by an external stimuli. This was the inspiration of both his moral law (divorced from all “pathological” motivation) and his aesthetic insights. The bizarre thing about a “synthetic a priori” judgment is that it is something that arises entirely from an agent yet creates something new. This, I think, is what needs to be preserved in a theory of auto/allo-poietic objects… This “a priori” creativity. [source]

And I understand Levi's point here. There is something of a 'remainder' which is specifically generated from the particularity or singularity of objects that seems to get lost in discussions that characterize causality or interaction in terms of the general temporal flux and flow of properties. The unique powers of objects must be acknowledged. I get that. Objects/assemblages have an efficacy all their own that is absolutely irreducible. I agree.

What I suggest is that this individual efficacy or affective potency is embodied in the emergent properties of objects - as expressions of an object's fully manifest composite configuration within particular space-time conditions. And this emergent substantiality of objects (its unique potency) is never completely cut off from the immanent realm of ancestral finite ("sensuous") qualities. There is an intrinsic intimacy between assembled properties (things) that affords the possibility of their interactions as well as their ubiquitous vulnerability to change. Such is the flesh and flow of the cosmos.     

UPDATE: Tim Morton agrees with me about monsters, sort of:

“We can assume that that these objects are monstrous. And when we study evolution what do we find? Monstrosity everywhere we look. What's more, these objects, consisting of other monstrous objects, can form monstrous affiliations with other monstrous objects in any which way. Everywhere you look, monsters.”

- Tim Morton