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Plenty of interesting arguments could follow this insight - some of which I’m not sure Levi would be comfortable with - but his main point is important, and, i believe, the crux of the neo-materialist position. Things are primordially active, energetic and contingent evental endurances – they are actualities. The vibrancy of matter-energy itself speaks to the inherent sensuality of existence: the world-flesh. And to understand ‘objects’ we can’t simply index their ontological semblances, rather what is required is the cultivation of our primate sensibilities (sensitivities) to affect more intimate relations with all those intrinsic powers and ontic specificities embodied by actually existing entities. The identity of the object/act is, then, an expression of each assemblage’s dynamic potency.
“Agency is ‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity. It is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices-interative reconfigurings of topological manifolds of spacetimematter relations- through the dynamics of intra-activity.” (Barad, 2007, p.178).
Below are two excerpts from Bryant’s posts I believe exemplify the main issues. To be sure, I agree with every single statement shared here:
“[T]he core of existence lies in activity. Existence as activity enjoys both an epistemological and ontological priority. Epistemologically, it is only through the acts of a thing that we can ever come to know the being of a thing. Ontologically it is only through the acts of a thing that a thing endures. In both cases, however, it cannot be said that objects are static or unchanging things. To be is to act and to act is to move and change.” [source]
I relate all this to what I have said previously [here]: every assemblage or object is a “material-affective substantiality with capacities unique to its individual existence. Such inherent substantial capacities are precisely what I call potency. And it is this general potency of existing entities which theorists refer to when they talk about a thing’s ‘agency’.”“Objects don’t act. To say that objects act would be to say that there is something, objects, that either act or do not act. But if there is no doer behind or underneath the deed, then we must say rather that objects are acts. The substantiality of substance is the substance’s activity. Likewise, we cannot suggest that substances or objects are products of becomings… because the substantiality of a substance is not a product or outcome of becomings or activities, but rather the substances are their activity. There isn’t first one thing, becomings or activities, and then another thing, objects that are the result of these activities. There is just the one thing, these activities, that is the substantiality of the substance. The idea that the objecthood of a substance is a product of a becoming that precedes it is premised on an arbitrary and subjective cessation of activity on the part of one who observes a substance that is not itself reflected in nature. Rather, when activity ceases so too does substance cease.” [source]
Posts
23 comments:
http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_berry_animations_of_unseeable_biology.html
for years I have been trying to get healthcare providers to understand that 'healthy' isn't a kind of default starting place that disease processes than take away from but an achievement. May be room to flesh out something like Sen&Nussbaum's capabilities model of human rights to analyze patient-care models and impacts.
-dmf
I'm still lurking.
I'm intrigued by Levi's recent developments. His commitments to Peirce and pragmatism are perhaps coming to the fore in his articulation. They are, especially in Dewey, act-theoretic philosophies. Saying that an "object is an act" sounds like something straight out of my dissertation, though we mean something notably different by it.
@Jason - how does Dewey mean it?
Short verson.
An "object" is a field of interaction, a dynamic equilibrium, given phenomenal character by the habits of the human organism as matched against the existent situation. The phenomenal object is discriminated by the organism out of the wider field of natural interaction, but is continuous with it.
The short version might be a bit too condensed, especially since it presumes a lot of metaphysical background at odds with tradition.
Regardless, "object" has no special ontological significance. The very idea of finding a singular fundamental unit is against the thrust of the pragmatist tradition as a temporalist tradition, i.e., a tradition that privileges time, temporality, and process over substance, stasis, etc.
I tried to find the relevant posts on my blog--there are many--but I'm short for time.
After reading this I am not sure how "activity" differs from "process," and why "becoming" is omitted if something like temporalism would be drawn upon to secure a definition for the activity in question (as in the pragmatist tradition).
Furthermore, we are not told what specifically individuates "activities" (as in plural) if there is no predication to be had - that is, objects *are* their activities - well then, so what?!?; we are then left with nominal differences only (what the thing "does" leaves alot of pointing to do - and an activity's beginning and end would also be nominally relative). That's hardly the sort of realism that I'm looking for, and besides, process philosophers like Whitehead, Peirce, et al. have already done a much better, and sensible I would say, job of covering all of this.
Leon / after nature
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/02/liam-semler-emergence-in-ardenspace-system-and-exile-in-shakespeare-pedagogy/
@Jason
To be honest, I’m really uncomfortable with the suggestion that objects are “given character” by human habits. This is a paradigmatic example of a correlationist argument that privileges human access above and beyond access more generally. I can’t support that type of formulation because I sense and believe in a Reality both prior to and inclusive of hominid cognitions and ego. Kant must be overcome.
I think there are all kinds of objects which exist according to their own onto-specific material-energetic compositions and relative organizations that have nothing to do with human habits or concern.
However, I completely agree that it is a mistake to apply the term ‘object’ so broadly (as a master sign for ontology) because such a concept is doomed to fail to capture the complex dynamics involved in ontogenesis, but I also think the term is perfectly legitimate when applied in specific ontic situations. That is, I argue we should avoid privileging either ‘objects’ (being) or ‘process’ (becoming) at all costs in an effort to delineate the actual range and relationships of beings and processes existing in the world.
I will continue to state it this way: reality is composed, extended and dynamically active according to the onto-specific (ontically particular) contingencies which obtain. No object, process, complex, situation, field, etc, etc, can be understood without an appreciation and reference to BOTH the actual properties and substances assembled AND the context from which they are generated and in which they persist - simultaneously. Individuals and complexes cannot be reduced (overmined, undermined, or hypermined) because they exist and endure under very specific ontic conditions.
Michael,
I am almost assured that we do not disagree, but that you interpret the terms in a manner that I do not intend. Experience is something nature does, not us. Human experience is something continuous with but not reducible to non-human nature. If any privileging is going on, it is of nature, not humans.
“Object” has a very different denotation than you likely presuppose. As I wrote, an object is a field of interaction regardless of whether humans are ever involved or ever exist. Where’s the correlation then?
But I didn’t need recent philosophical concepts to write what I did or to understand your terms. Many of the ideas floating around are fairly old, but got less attention until recently.
@Leon
I understand your point, and so would lean heavily on the idea that there is a “lot of pointing to do”. This, I believe is the work of ontography: the species-wide multi-methodological exploration of the wilderness of Being for adaptive purposes. Talking poetically about being and/or becoming is all well and good, but what do those language games do in terms of praxis? What does the process-game do for us that the objectological-game misses? I think a lot, but I also think we need to retain the insights of both games to evolve more affective and ratio-nal modes of perception and expression.
If you think Whitehead and Pierce cover all the territory that needs to be mapped out then fair enough. I suppose you are satisfied with the answers to your questions. But what about coming up with new questions for which there are no available answers? I find the more I follow traditional lines of thought the deeper I go down those particular rabbit holes. But I’m looking at digging some new holes.
This is not to say that I think Levi is covering all new territory, because obviously he is not, but only that aside from the objectological framing I like the language games he is playing. He questions are near identical to my own even though I might draw from different resources or seek out different types of answers.
Quick example: my commitment to the notion of potency. I think I can open new ground with this concept by synthesizing aspects of work done by complexity science, Merleau-Ponty, John Protevi, Lingis, Latour, DeLanda, Stengers, Malabou, Brassier, Mumford, the pragmatists and others into what can be loosely described as ecological realism or a nature-philosophy of praxis.
@ Michael
"But what about coming up with new questions for which there are no available answers? I find the more I follow traditional lines of thought the deeper I go down those particular rabbit holes. But I’m looking at digging some new holes."
Yes, absolutely. Digging new holes sounds very good of course - but I also share concern that Levi is neglecting some key (and perhaps rudimentary) elements that may reveal what is really at stake here; realizing such in order to keep going in circles or somehow tunnel into another rabbit hole by accident, if the analogy holds.
Adam/knowledge ecology has something up concerning this, will go check it out now.
Leon/after nature
@Leon:
What do you believe he is missing?
In my account, I think it unnecessary for him to “split” objects, as I prefer an actualist conception against the notion of ‘potential’. I would also argue to the death that systems are always relatively open and never truly closed. Luhmann was wrong and DST is more correct….
Other than this I find most of his conclusions congruent with my own.
Michael,
I am almost assured that we do not disagree, but that you interpret the terms in a manner that I do not intend. Experience is something nature does, not us. Human experience is something continuous with but not reducible to non-human nature. If any privileging is going on, it is of nature, not humans.
“Object” has a very different denotation than you likely presuppose. As I wrote, an object is a field of interaction regardless of whether humans are ever involved or ever exist. Where’s the correlation then?
But I didn’t need recent philosophical concepts to write what I did or to understand your terms. Many of the ideas floating around are fairly old, but got less attention until recently.
@Jason:
From what I have read I think we would agree on a lot of things as long as we clarified the terms we are using. I would remind you that I may not be a careful in my deployment of philosophical terms as you might like, but my intent is to evolve novel considerations and not scholastic accuracy.
I certainly agree that objects are “fields of interaction” and “dynamic equilibriums”. I use the term neo-Deleuzean term ‘assemblage’ because I find it captures what should be emphasized about how individuals are simultaneously wholes and parts, with differing degrees of intensity, and complex relations. Recently I have been toying with the idea of understanding objects and assemblages as a matrices potency. In this sense a relatively individuated assemblage is a matrix of immanent activity and materials which generates expressive properties that can influence or amplify or become dampened inter-depending on the situation in which it eventuates/operates.
I think I mistakenly read you as saying that human habit (ala Hume?) gives form to objects that do not have form until they are phenomenally experienced. I no longer read it that way.
I would say that sensuality is something that nature is, and that sensitivity is inherent to the cosmos, but ‘experience’ (contra James) is only something entities with nervous systems do. I would refrain from slipping into a panexperientalist position only because I find it dramatically anthropomorphizing. That said, experience (as I qualify it) is continuous with to natural world.
Of course, we could argue all day about what “experience” means, or can mean, or how rudimentary it is, but I prefer to reserve that term for the emergent capacities of cognizant actants and use ‘sensitivity’ or ‘sensation’ as the primordial term.
Michael,
I understand the want for creativity. On the flip side, my predilection for scholastic accuracy also allows for much easier translation on concepts when one has a wide knowledge of theoretical moves and can recognize when they are being made. In those cases, the actual words used matters much less and aids only the “tone deaf.”
“Habit” as a post-Peircean concept is not Humean in even the slightest. Electron orbits are a “habit.”
There is no necessary reason to anthropomorphize when giving that definition of experience. You likely happen to have heard of it first or mostly from those thinkers and thus associate the two. That’s an accident.
To be sure Jason, I am not criticizing your style of philosophizing. You are an academic and it makes good sense for you to be scholastically inclined. It is good to have a wide ranging awareness of your field, for the reasons you state. I'm just letting you know where I am coming from so you will know why I might miss some of the more attached or tradition-oriented connotations and arguments you are offering. I don't have the background you do. That's all.
But outside of this I think I understand your position pretty well, and you seem to be getting what I'm after, so all is good.
You seem to be using "habit" to mean what I refer to as structure. If so, I think it is justifiable to say that the habits of one object can interact with the habits of another in ways that re-habituate both to varying degrees. In this way, all things are fields of interacting and intra-acting force with mutual determination. I don't disagree with such a description, but would wonder if by reframing things in terms of force-fields, as William Connolly does in 'A World of Becoming' (which i highly recommend), there would still be a tendency to underemphasize the extensivity and materiality of particular things in favor of some master trope (such as "field"). I still prefer the term assemblage in this case, or perhaps as I suggested above matrix.
I'm still unsure as to where you stand with regards to all this? Can you point me at a post or paper where you make your ontological commitments explicit?
As for experience, well, let us agree to disagree then. Like I stated, I want to retain the term for something cognitive entities do, as opposed to rocks, and would apply the term potency to those aspects of non-cognitive actants that are sensitive, expressive and active. That is, I don't think rocks "experience" things, but they certainly have potency and thus can be affective.
Michael,
I am not claiming that all things are "force fields," just that there interaction may be described in such a manner. But in this case, force and matter are roughly equivalent, and "force" and "existence" are almost synonymous terms.
I use "experience" in the way that I do to conform with my philosophical tradition, which adopted that diction precisely to combat the humanizing and cognizing of experience.
Here's a first link to "object" without the metaphysics, which I later discuss in a series of posts on "causal closure," etc.
Let me sum up the differences. As far as I can tell, I work in a tradition that offers many of the same things that you want, but does so very differently per being part of a different philosophical tradition. Honestly,
@Jason:
Not sure why you would want to "conform" to any tradition, but I know what you mean.
And I don't see how applying a term like experience uniformly to everything that exists as helpful? Far from combating anthropomorphic tendencies such usage simply installs a presupposed panexperientialism. Not very productive in my opinion.
And I would dispute the notion that your tradition offers what I "want" if only because I don't want anything, other than a way to conceptualize and cope within the Wilderness. Ontography, for me, is about increasing awareness and worldspace/life design. In spirit I too am a pragmatist. I want a language game that works for the project of being human (together), that is all.
As I have said before, I think adherence to a single tradition or set of ideas is actually harmful for thought, because a discourse's omissions become its shadow. Think of it like cross-training: would you only work on speed and not stamina or agility? Or would you only target your biceps and not triceps arms, or legs, in weightlifting? Only if you want to malform yourself and possible hurt your body. Likewise with ideology and theory. If we rely too heavily on one particular set of ideas or tradition we limit the theoretic options available (repertoire) and often end up warping our thought-processes at the expense of flexibility and innovation. I take a more ‘alchemical’ or mutational approach myself.
Again, I wonder what you think about objects and processes and the mix outside of what Pierce, James and Dewey have already said?
Michael,
There are excellent reasons to speaking/thinking in the conceptual vocabulary of a particular tradition, and even more excellent reasons for having facility in several. First, those who do not spend the time to learn a tradition from the inside-out have only a tentative grasp. Moreover, insomuch as the traditions overlap as they commonly do, a flexible mind will be able to recognize moves across traditions and skip over much hard intellectual labor of someone else who must learn each concept anew (and they usually take short cuts rather than do it).
As for “panexperientialism,” why does applying those letters in that spelling mean anything in particular? Your invocation appears to have great weight for you, but I don’t know what you mean, e.g., its intension and extension, as you use it. So what about the word? “Experience” is a word. It’s usage as I describe offers a particular strategy. I’m not convinced that it is the best, but at least anyone trained in American knows what I’m talking about. I mean, as far as I’ve seen, the way you use the word is more like a “reductio ad Hitlerian,” i.e., we’re against anything that we can associated with Hitler. So, unless you have more than a tactical, pragmatic beef with it, I don’t think it’s worth go on about. Speaking of that. Yeah, the tradition could do better, but that’s not my call if I want to be understood. Also, I always advise caution with language-game speak, because I’ve often seen people treat concepts as interchangeable as spoken words, which is not the case.
I agree about the single set. I think you might have forgotten our past conversations and are working through personal antipathies. Shouldn’t we do that over a beer? But seriously, if one doesn’t think within a tradition, then one will not get far short of having one of the rarest of intellects, and I’m not talking about intelligence.
Finally,
I am riffing off of what those three thinkers said, so I can respond to the question about what I think with “everything I’ve already said” barring the direct interpretations. They haven't said much of it directly or even indirectly as pure historical work is not what I do. And we haven’t even broached my Hegel, Spinoza, Whitehead, Aristotle, Plato, Lao Tzu, Nagarjuna, Buddhistic, etc. discussions.
Seriously, I really think you’re working through antipathies and categorizing me as a target for them when it’s not the case.
p.s. think of a tradition as soil to grow upon or raw building materials. Not whole houses. Of course, not every tradition-minded thinker treats them this way. Regardless, the traditions really do matter, as the most complex and abstract thoughts always show the trace of their lineage and often cannot be thought without that apprenticeship.
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
- Gramci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971)
@Jason:
I think I have explained my beef with what I judge to be the liberal application of the term “experience” in comments on my last post, so I won’t rehash them again outside of suggesting that knowledge and perception must be differentiated.
I am intrigued by this statement:
“ Also, I always advise caution with language-game speak, because I’ve often seen people treat concepts as interchangeable as spoken words, which is not the case.”
Can you elaborate?
I’d also be interested in reading more about your interests in chinese philosophy.
A rare intellect... Yes, that is exactly what I’m after! I want to develop a mutant strain of intellection that functions symbiotically with existing discourses - while also serving as an agent that might weaken those discourses which seem to be particularly maladaptive, no matter how traditional they may be. You see, my project is completely non-academic. So any motivation to be intelligible to institutional forms and traditions is absent, although interacting with academics is surely required. Mine is an applied ontographic endeavour.
re: antipathies, well, you may be right. Problem is you seem want to support those very ideas which elicit my displeasure. I have little sympathy for elaborate metaphysic systems more reliant on generalization and heavy abstraction than on actual investigation and consideration of empirical data.
Finally, adherence and assimilation of traditions can also determine and condition an otherwise fertile and innovative mind in ways that entangle. By adopting the vocabularies and chains of reasoning of the masters we can end up treading well worn paths rather than blazing new ones. What is required in these turbulent times is those who seek to strike the right balance between canonical ideologies, scientific practice and improvised alternatives, in order to open up new circuits and discursive experiments resulting in the erection of strategic bridges between common discourse and specialized theory.
To be clear, we need specialists and those willing to extend our canons and traditions, working imminently within the city of established ideas, but we also need barbarians willing to blaspheme and raid the traditions, bringing chaos and novelty to its outer edges. Such Dionysian perversions keep Apollo alert.
PS- I’d have a beer of 5 with you anytime, so if ever possible I’m buying!
I’ll keep it short on the elaboration. Too often people, even scholars who should know better, conflate an orthograph, e.g., “experience,” with an idea as if the word pointed to some Platonic form. Sometimes scholars bicker back-and-forth about the details or “right way” to think that thought. But my own beef is that lack of recognition, especially in analytic philosophy, that how one thinks a thought is as important as what the thought is. So, as you may know, continental philosophy insists on knowing the history of philosophy in part because one thereby becomes trained in how to think the concept. Accurate conception is something that we are trained to do. Much of the language-game speak obscures this point, and that speak originated in a tradition that does not think that conception needs to be trained. They have become much better about this, but there is still a huge difference between the practice of philosophy and philosophy as a theory; i.e., I’ve had many analytics agree with me on this point, but then not spend the time doing the history and walking the walk.
In our current conversation, my point is that “experience” likely has a very different designation than you imagine, e.g., it should be thought with a strong Hegelian resonance and no Lockean or modern empiricism at all.
You appear to think of traditions as walls and fences rather than different earths from which to grow. If I must keep up that metaphor, then I guess I am saying that philosophers should be treants to eat and drink of a soil for a long time before moving on. And let’s not be hasty about it.
As far as targeting me as wanting elaborate and abstract metaphysics systems, I almost laugh that you’re saying that of the tradition that formalized the logic of science and who founding members were all scientists. Again, I just do not think you know the tradition as well as you think you do, and your antipathies are leading you to too many hasty and false generalizations. I mean, one of the reasons I am working on my won pragmatic phenomenology is because I aim for articulate a phenomenology that does not bifurcate inquiry into the metaphysical and phenomenological, i.e., the Cartesian dualism that still lurks in almost all contemporary philosophy. You worry about entangling roots, and I tell you that without some training, one is just being sophomoric and cavalier, or maybe just too paranoid. Your position in this regard is not as radical, new, or innovative as you make it, though perhaps you haven’t met many people walking it and think it rarer than it is.
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