“The point is that the appearance or manifestation of the object has nothing to do with the existence of the object. The object’s manifestation is secondary to its substantiality as an object. It is for this reason that objects cannot be reduced to their properties or qualities as someone like Hume would like to do. Qualities are like a rind that are but expressions of an object’s substantiality.” [source]Bryant then goes on to suggest an explanation of change based in his framework which, as far as it goes, is strait forward and logical, but which seems to grant objects a virtual substantiality beyond their actual properties. In short, I argue that Bryant elevates the 'shadow' of objects, the trace or signature of an object’s temporal actuality, to the status of essence - or what Bryant calls the “virtual proper being” of an object. But why do this?
Change can be “explained” by accepting that all objects, to varying degrees, are always already open systems. The substantiality of objects is a result of their assembled extensive properties intensively expressed in constant relation to their environment (including other objects). Thus all entities are embodied temporary beings vulnerable to modification and destruction - whether individually or in relation to their existence as part of another assemblage.
On an individual scale we can move from an object’s emanating qualities inward to its withdrawn structural properties without crossing any significant ontological divide before arriving at its organizational core.
For me, then, all entities are pulsating depth achievements (cf. Ivakhiv) with various potencies (or capacities) unleashed within the matrix of a simultaneous occurrence of composition and context. In this view nothing is “reduced” and nothing more is needed.
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12 comments:
Michael,
It's very difficult to see how you're able to arrive at such a conclusion based on anything I've written. In fact, my post argues exactly what you go on to argue: that objects are populated by all sorts of potencies or potentialities that allow for change. How you jump from this to the reification of objects (it's exactly the opposite) and essence is beyond me.
L
Entities are simultaneously individuals and open systems; processual units of temporary assembly and affect; chaos boxes shot through and through with cosmic properties; gathered capacities rambling through fields of affordances.
However you want to say it, it amounts to the same thing. Objects and assemblages are temporal “achievements” of an otherwise dynamic mesh of living properties flowing out from a primordial source.
Michael,
You're preaching to the choir. As I've repeatedly argued, objects are dynamic systems; i.e., they're open systems.
L
Hello Levi,
It could honestly be my mistake. I admit that. I find your notion of a "split object" very confusing.
I think where is falls off the tracks for me is where you propose a name ("virtual proper being") for something some aspect of an actual composition’s substantiality. From what I can tell, an object’s powers or capacities are intrinsic features of its properties unleashed in relation. That is, everything is local manifestation. The efficacy of an object is generated through the dynamic interplay between particular endo-systems – with their specific/historical properties and organization – and their exo-relations with other assemblages of properties (objects), and environments. I’m not sure I know another way to put it?
Let’s try it this way: every object is a temporary unit of extensive and intensive properties. These bundles of properties are open systems, often with more subtle, emanating properties at their edges. I argue that all of an object’s capacities are the result of these bundles being stimulated in relation. Each bundle is simultaneously unraveling (processual) and raveling (self-organized) through space-time. Thus an object is simultaneously irreducible to anything other than its particular bundle and continuously activated and vulnerable to the operations and affects of many other objects, as well as the environmental conditions which afford an object its continuation.
All this is to say, we can explain change and all the things you explain very well without positing a ‘virtual proper being’ that is “split” from its living manifestation. I get why you argue for it, but it’s not required in my opinion.
The substantiality of an object is identical to its manifest substances, its unique bundle of properties.
re: open systems, I was pretty sure you argue for operationally closed systems ala Luhmann? no?
Regardless, I eagerly await your book to get a better grasp of it all. I still feel like I am missing something...
Michael,
Operationally closed systems are also open. All operational closure means is that operations that take place within a system only refer to the system in which they take place. With that said, they are still perturbed by the world, evolve, and change. Operational closure refers to the particular way in which entities process these perturbations. For example, your eyes process certain wavelengths of light as red. The light itself isn't red. This is an event produced by how your brain and eyes are organized or put together.
I'm a bit baffled by your problems with my virtual proper being. You write. All virtuality means is power, capability, or potential. These are real features of the actual object. What's the problem?
You write, "operationally closed systems are also open." That helped. I get that, and I agree. If, for you, all objects are also open systems, vulnerable to being obliterated and substantially augmented, then I have no problem with your position.
But, with this in mind, I just don't see how an object's capacity to affect and be affected can be said to be withdrawn then? The "capacities" of an object are, as you indicate with your example of vision, non-local (or perhaps co-local), emergent events manifest in particular situations. The capacity for vision is unleashed in the event that is eyes meeting wavelengths, and therefore not at all withdrawn from the manifest qualities of either entities, but generated in relation (mingling). The emergent phenomenon of vision, i suggest (and following Gibson), is actually a co-implicated and interdependent event generated by BOTH the properties of eyes and the properties of wavelengths.
Thus every thing is on the same ontological plane. Every instantiation of a particular assemblage or object is BOTH an organized unit AND an open – therefore relational - system of bundled properties. And I agree that an entity is never fully defined by its relations, but it is also never fully independent from all relations.
So when someone suggests that an object's essential character is somehow “split” from that object's properties this seems to me to suggest an abstraction: a reification based on the statistical signature or 'shadow' cast by an individual entity’s manifest properties. When metaphysicians 'shine the light' of analysis on actual objects they infer, or extract/abstract a dimension or aspect of an entity that may not actually exist. At least that's how i interpret it. And again I could be wrong.
Here is how Graham described your notion of virtual proper being:
"Levi is more sympathetic to a notion of “the virtual” than I am. Levi’s real objects don’t have qualities, whereas mine do. Among other implications, this makes him even more sympathetic than I am to the models offered by DeLanda and Bhaskar, which I admire but of which I am also critical for placing the real action outside individual entities. That’s precisely what Levi likes about them, however."
And this is how I interpret you as well; that you are saying the most important aspects (the withdrawn molten core) of an object places "the real action outside individual entities". If this is how Graham reads you, someone who knows you and has read your work in-depth, then what hope do I have of grasping what you "really" mean by that term?
From a different angle, when you write: "These are real features of the actual object", my gut response is, 'then why not just say that an entity’s powers to affect are inherent “features” of an objects overall properties? Why posit a "split" or withdrawal at all? Why not just say that an object = its endo-properties - properties that express certain capacities under particular circumstances? Everything we need to know about any given object is embodied in its material-energetic composition and relative expressions.
I think part of MY problem with the way you present your framework is the language, or how I interpret it. I know, for example, that the term "virtual" is a problem for me. It carries too much conceptual baggage. I suppose I need to go back and read D&G and DeLanda again to make the breakthrough with this term.
I used to have the same problem with the term “object”, as it resonates a certain static character, but it became clear to me that that was not how you deployed the term. The more I read your posts the more I understood how you used the term, as opposed to how I interpret it.
Another issue I have has to do with how i think about the notion of "potential". Potential, for me, is not something an object has per se - but what is possible between objects as dictated by the specific differences inherent to each particular cosmo-historical entity, going all the way back to the source (big bang or whatever). The historicity of all things engenders all differences that make differences (cosmic differentiation as such), and 'potential' is only what we detect might be possible between two or more very specific entities (bundles of properties).
But I ramble. In the end what does it matter? You frame it one way and I slightly different. The consequences we draw and the praxis it entails is where the emphasis should be placed. And that, maybe, you and I can agree upon?
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re: reification
I guess when you use a special signifier for something I understand as simply a feature of an entity's manifest properties I view this as you holding up (reifying) that aspect as the thing's essential nature - it's withdrawn essence. So, because all entities are ephemeral objects (that is, open and vulnerable systems), valorizing some particular aspect of that assemblage as essential seems misguided.
I feel that paying too much attention to an object's supposedly withdrawn virtual proper being is the same as valorizing a particular assemblage’s momentary/temporary configuration – and its resultant-relational powers - at the expense of its ongoing modifications. By the time we think we nail down an object’s essential character its configuration may have already changed.
Michael,
Arguments about choices of language are, I think, always uninteresting so hopefully this isn't just about language choice. Within my framework, the virtual proper being of an object is the powers possessed by that object. They are real features of that object or are in the object itself. An important point, then, is that virtual proper being is not "elsewhere" than in the object. When I talk about "split objects" try not to take that too literally. Maybe the concept of "formal distinction" will help. Two things are formally distinct (as opposed to numerically distinct) if they are really different from one another *but cannot exist apart from one another*. Color and shape are formally distinct but not *numerically* distinct. Colors can't exist without being embodied in some shape and shapes can't exist without having some sort of color. Nonetheless, color and shape are different with one another. Likewise with powers and qualities. Qualities, I argue, cannot exist without powers, but they are not the same as powers. There is a slight difference between color-shape and power-quality, however. Colors and shapes are always biconditional (color always implies shape and shape always implies a color). The relation between powers and qualities, by contrast, is not biconditional because you can have a power without it producing a particular quality. Either way, the powers are in the object itself.
The reason I'm so insistent on this dimension of objects is that these powers can be dormant in an object, doing nothing at a particular point in time, while nonetheless being real features of an object. For example, an octopus has the power to change the color of its skin as well as the texture of its skin, even if it is not doing so at a particular time. Likewise, an apple has the power to produce the color red even when the lights are turned out and it is not currently producing the color red.
I think Graham mischaracterizes my position a bit in his characterization of it. For me all objects have a structure to them, it's just that that structure is composed of powers or affects. These are real or actual features of objects. The difference, for me, is that objects need not be producing any particular qualities at any given point in time (they can be entirely dormant). The reason I argue this has to do with the history of philosophy. I develop this in more detail in TDO. Locke had argued that perhaps the concept of substance is a mere fiction because all we ever find are qualities in an object. Later on Hume uses this to dismiss the concept of substance altogether, arguing that what we call substances is just an effect of how *mind* associates sensations together. In response to this, I'm looking for an account of substance that is structured but which isn't composed of qualities. The concept of power does the trick, I think.
As for your questions about operational closure and relation, I'm much softer than Graham is. I don't argue that objects can't relate or are independent of all relation, I merely argue that objects never directly encounter one another. Rather, each object processes other objects in its own particular way. The important point for me is that objects can be detached from their relations.
L
Levi,
Given what you say here, and in your recent post, I'm not sure our differences on these issues remain substantial enough for me to worry about. I’m getting a feeling I should probably stop pestering you about your specific terminology and actually trust you when you say that the “split” nature of objects is only a formally distinction. I suspect I was taking your suggestions about the dual nature of objects way too literally (which explains my confusion about how you could argue for a flat ontology at the same time as suggesting objects are ontologically spit). I think I was reading Graham’s more radical assertion of withdrawal into your distinction between local manifestations and virtual proper being.
Our disagreement, then, can only be about “where” capacities or powers come from. You argue they lay dormant or are located in objects, and I say they are generated through contacts between manifest properties. Powers, for me, are co-local – that is, they a catalyzed in relation. The nuances here are great and could be articulated with much greater precision, but I suppose that should wait until another discussion.
But if what you are writing here is true, then I think you are correct in suggesting: “I think Graham mischaracterizes my position a bit in his characterization of it.” I think Graham reads you as I use to read you up until today.
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