Of Mice and Substance

The debate between Ivakhiv and Bryant continues with Adrian standing firm on his claim that entities are inherently processual (here) and Levi affirming his position (here) that there is a split between an object's manifest qualities (what he calls "local manifestations") and its substantiality (or "virtual proper being").

With regard to Levi's example of a mouse shot out into space Adrian makes the following comments:

"I don’t think it would be possible to say that a mouse shot out into space is still a mouse, because the definition of a mouse would include the kinds of processes (or “procedures”, to use Bogost’s term) that make up mouseness, and that mouse would no longer have any of them. It’s mouse-like form would start decaying quickly, and any internality that was characteristic of the mouse as a whole would no longer be there. To put it in OOO terms, once that internality has withdrawn from the mouse, it has withdrawn for good. (Of course, we can argue about whether the mouse’s fur, its teeth, its spleen, etc., have their own internalities, their own withdrawability. Whitehead would probably say that the “society,” the mouse assemblage, is no longer there, but that other actual occasions may continue. Those don’t constitute a mouse — except for someone looking at it from the outside who thinks it’s a mouse because it still has fur, teeth, and other mouse-like features, for a while.)"

To which Levi has now replied:

"My thesis, of course, is such a claim confuses a quality of a mouse with the substantiality of a mouse... life doesn’t constitute the substantiality of a mouse, but is only a quality or local manifestation of objects. As I argued in my previous post, local manifestations are relational through and through. Ivakhiv will find no argument from me against the thesis that the local manifestation of life as a quality is dependent on all sorts of relations with other objects. However, it doesn’t follow from this that life constitutes the substantiality of our poor mouse. Life is just a quality– a local manifestation –that those substances known as meeces might happen to actualize."

My position is that the sum total of an entity's "qualities" - as embodied in its extensive and intensive properties - is that entity's substantiality. There is no-thing in excess of an entity's assembled immanent actuality - or, what Levi calls 'local manifestation'. Every-thing is 'local manifestation' because every-thing is located within reality. In this case, 'life' is not just a "quality", or "singularity", it is an emergent property embodied in the mouse's extensive and intensive constitution - a constitution, or composition, or assemblage that is intrinsically processual, temporal and always existing in relation. Whatever withdrawnness an entity has it has by virtue of its structural depth - its embodied 'local' (which is actually co-local) complexity.

mouse recoiling in fear from philosopher's creepy space plans

So, ultimately, if you shoot a mouse into space it becomes less of a mouse than it was while it was alive and well on earth. It's substantiality, its capacities, its expressivity, its 'endo-consistency' has thus been compromised, degraded, or diminished as a result of its new (space vacuum) relational existence. And should the astro-inclined Mus musculus remain in such a state/context its immanent-assembly (substantiality) would eventually disintegrate and it would cease to be at all.

A Post-Metaphysical Morton?

Something occurred to me today about Tim Morton’s project that triggered a cascade of thoughts about the difference between ontography and ontology. In a post calling attention to the availability of Steven Shaviro’s Whitehead conference paper, Morton remarks, “reports of the death of metaphysics have been greatly exaggerated”.

Now I’ve never been shy about my opinion that much of what counts as metaphysics is the “learned poetics of an elite educated class”. And one of the reasons I think this way directly flows from my belief that phenomenology (broadly speaking and in an unconventional sense) is the starting point of any serious philosophical endeavor. This is to say, ‘knowledge’ of the world outside our skin encapsulated egos begins with experience. Everything we know, or have come to know, is based on our embodied encounters with reality.

Of course, humans have the added endowment of symbolic thought and semantic reasoning, which does indeed influence our every experience, but humans are capable of reflexive awareness, and as such can train ourselves to “bracket out” much of our pre-methodological semantic baggage in order to take up a radically empiricist (although not necessarily in the Jamesian sense) position within the world.

My point is, based upon my investigations into the nature of reality, I have come to privilege embodied inquiry while subordinating (as opposed to denying) ideation in the quest for understanding. And this is precisely why I argue that “ontology” (as the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such) actually derives from “ontography”, and is thus secondary to the more primal methodological imperatives flowing from embodied empirical encounters. That is to say, Ontography as embodied inquiry precedes Ontology as speculative ideation.

So what about Tim Morton? In response to Tim’s claim that metaphysics is alive and well (and perhaps sporting a slick new SR fedora), I responded by writing that even though metaphysics might still be discussed, taught and bandied about - thereby remaining technically “alive” - its credibility as a stand-alone thought procedure has been and will remain utterly destroyed.

I can summarize my reasons for why I think metaphysics is an obsolete project with three relatively straightforward assertions: i) experience, as discussed above, is primary/primal, ii) speculation, ideation and logic are derivative from our embodied experiential encounters, and iii) reality exceeds all languaging (cf. post-formalism). [And I won’t rehearse the various arguments against metaphysics arising from within the academy (mostly because I’m not of the academy) but instead briefly mention James’s pragmatism, Wittgenstein’s language-use critiques, Rorty’s combination of both those fellas, and Derrida’s deconstruction as a few bodies or work that have also claimed metaphysics as a dead end.]

The knowledge of the primacy of experience (what I call our 'primal methodology') can also generate an awareness of the limits of speculation (symbolic reasoning) - or what some have called “Post-metaphysical thinking”. Someone who thinks post-metaphysically is someone who allows their ‘realism’ to remain ‘speculative’, but also refuses to extend their speculations beyond the accumulated data of embodied and extended human experience. [‘Extended experience’ here referring to how our inherent sensual apparatus has come to be extended viz. the use of a variety of supplementary methodologies, instruments and technology.]

But again, what of Tim Morton? Well, in a nutshell, I argue that Tim Morton, despite his valorization of metaphysics, is in fact a post-metaphysical thinker. I haven’t said a lot about Tim’s work to date because I have yet to read The Ecological Thought (although it sits about 5 feet away from me as I type this), but I have watched all of his youtube videos and listened to most of the talks posted on his weblog, and quite enjoy his strain of thinking overall (especially the pre-OOO stuff). What struck me today, however, was how one of Morton’s key motifs demonstrates, to me at least, his post-metaphysical leanings: that is, the notion of “ecology without nature”.

I don’t have space to review what Morton means when he suggests that authentic ecological thinking privileges ecology (as praxis and method) over our conceptions of ‘Nature’, but I argue that by parsing out the distinction between those two notions he also points out the distinction between ontography (as praxis and multi-methodology) and ontology. And further, Morton’s prioritizing ecological-thinking over nature-thinking is identical to my claim that ‘ontography precedes ontology’. In fact, I would crudely represent the equivalences this way:

ecology = ontographic methodology (praxis)
nature = ontologic speculation (abstraction)

I may be bastardizing Tim's thoughts a little here, but I think the point needs to be made that our engagements within the world are more important, and more significant, than our talking about them. Am I wrong here? What do you think?

Ivakhiv and Bryant on Objects, Process and Orientations

I have a feeling I will be posting a lot of these, “hey go look at this” type of posts in the next few days, as it seems the ‘Objects vs. Relations’ debate is flaring up again among the speculative realist crowd. Adrian Ivakhiv has catalyzed discussion with comments he posted yesterday (here) about the recent Whitehead conference, and on the “the attractions of process”. Levi Bryant then responds (here) with comments about Adrian’s position, setting in motion much talk about objects and their relations, or, alternatively, about relations and the objects they form.

This is great news for a geek like me because the more these guys debate the more I understand where my views hang in the great hall of abstractions. On some level, I support most of what both Levi and Adrian have to say on these issues (which might seem odd, but actually isn’t), and would argue for a mediating position that respects both ‘individuation’ and ‘process’ as fundamental principles of the Real. 

Below are some interesting excerpts from each of these fellas. I’ll start with Adrian:

When an object-oriented philosopher makes the case for a description of the universe that is made up of objects, things that are never fully related and that are always somewhat withdrawn from other things, he (or, in theory, she) is making the case for describing the universe as a universe of things that do certain things, that act in certain ways, and that maintain themselves over time, like Tim’s mouse, unless something happens to change them from the outside. While this may not be equivalent to a Newtonian world-picture — of objects in space moving around and bumping into each other, setting off or redistributing lawful causal effects as they do that — it is, in its overall contours, highly consonant with such a world-picture (minus perhaps the space, and plus a kind of space-time curvature at each node for indicating where the objects might be withdrawing to). [source]

To which Levi responds:

Why should we bow to Newton’s concept of objects as purely passive points that are only acted upon without acting? Certainly we get a very different picture of substances in Aristotle’s De Anima and Generation of Animals. However, that aside, nothing in either my account of objects or Graham’s remotely resembles the Newtonian universe. Graham objects are both capable of acting (rather than merely being acted upon) and are infinite multiplicities of objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects. My objects are actors that perpetually face the problem of entropy or disintegration, thereby having to produce themselves from moment to moment to endure in time. [source]

Adrian goes on to make the following comments with re: to Ian Bogost’s notion of “firehose metaphysics”:

So if life (or existence, or any piece of the universe) is like water flowing through a firehose, it’s because life is movement. It is inherently temporal; it doesn’t stand still. But there is no hose containing it, and no faucet at the end of it controlling the flow. There is no programmer, no ventriloquist behind the world because everything that’s real is creative in its own becoming. And this is only “magic” (as Levi seems to suggest would be necessary) if one thinks that the things are not inherently creative and active in themselves. Since process philosophy defines them as such — that it’s first principle — there is no need for magic here. (Or it is all magic, which I happen to believe is a better way of thinking about it; but that’s another story.) [...]

Process-relational philosophies insist that if there are things running the show, these too would have to be the kinds of processual entities that are possible in a world that’s always in the process of its own becoming.

Stopping the flow of that world, actually, is the kind of thing that we can do if we attain a certain societal/assemblage/ecological complexity — a certain formal and structural (relational) consistency that would allow us to monitor things over time (the changing seasons, the growth of our children), to take pause and put (a part of) the universe on hold while we do other things, and then call back at a later date. This is where continuity occurs in Whitehead: it’s in the things that hold together as they move forward, arranged in larger, coordinated, but similarly active, creative, feelingful unities (Whitehead’s “societies,” or as Steve argues, “assemblages,” though the definitions of these terms vary). [source]

Cool. Especially interesting is Adrian's follow-up statement made in the comments section of his initial post:

My point is about a certain overt style of ‘languaging’ that makes it easier to think of a mouse as a mouse even when it’s no longer a mouse. Process philosophy, I would argue, makes it much more difficult to do that. [source]

But don’t take my word for it go read for yourself how things develop.

UPDATE: Adrian has two follow-up posts replying to Bryant (and Harman) and commenting on his intentions with his initial remarks: here and here. Apparently some of the OOO peeps didn't take kindly to the mention of Sir Issac, but hopefully people will calm down a bit and keep the debate going, because it would be shameful for people to gloss over substantial arguments in favor of dwelling on rhetorical statements.

Shaviro on Panpsychism and Object-Orientations

Steven Shaviro has posted his thoughts on the recent “Metaphysics and Things” conference at Claremont Graduate University on his weblog (here). Thankfully he also included a link to a PDF version of his conference paper, titled "Consequences of Panpsychism", addressing the objectological positions of Graham Harman and company.

I’m usually not comfortable with panpsychism in general (for several reasons), favoring instead to focus on the specific qualities of particular entities, but Steve’s thoughts are stimulating none the less.

One of the aspects of I really appreciated about Steven's paper is his summary of the four main challenges to contemporary philosophy presented by Object-Oriented Ontologies (OOO). Steven suggests the OOO position is guided by 1) a rejection of the human-world correlate ("correlationism"), 2) a rejection of 'philosophies of access', 3) a rejection of "relationism" ("the idea that every entity is entirely determined by, and can be completely described in terms of, its relations to other entities."), and 4) a rejection of "smallism" (the view that all facts are determined by the facts about the smallest things, those existing at the lowest ‘level’ of ontology).

Steven then goes on to relate and contrast Whitehead's process philosophy to those 4 key rejections with powerful effect. Below are a few of passages that brilliantly display the subtlety of Shaviro's critiques of several OOO positions:

Whitehead entirely agrees with OOO that terms can never be fully determined by their relations. A given term can always disentangle itself from some relations, and enter into other relations instead. But at the same time – and this is where Whitehead differs from Harman – no term can ever disentangle itself from all relations, and subsist entirely by itself. I can disentangle myself from the atmosphere, by isolating myself in a pressure-resistant bubble, and breathing oxygen from a canister instead. But deprive me altogether of my relation to oxygen, and I die. This means that I cease to exist as a thing, or as a term for any relations whatsoever. But after my death, my body persists as a thing; it interacts, or enters into relations, with the bacteria that dissolve and eat it. Of course, this can be avoided by cremating my remains, and sending the ashes into the depths of interstellar space. But even there, the dust that is derived by “a historic route of actual occasions” (PR 80) from the living flesh that I once was will still be affected by cosmic radiation, and will be subject to the fluctuations of the quantum fields that pervade empty space.” (p.9 ) […]

“On the one had, contra OOO, every change in relations transforms the term into something different from what it was before. This is inevitable, because every change in relations is an event, involving an encounter that has never before taken place in quite the same way. But on the other hand, contra radical relationism, this change in relations only influences the nature of the term, and can never determine it altogether. There is always some scope for the term’s own decision as to how it responds to the change in relations that supervenes upon it.” (p.8-9)

“We might in this way oppose a Whiteheadian doctrine of underdetermination to Althusser’s notion of overdetermination. A thing is underdetermined by its relations. It is never free of them, but it also retains a certain capacity to resist them, to alter and combine them in various ways, and to select among them. And this is always a matter of degree.” (p.9) […]

"[F]or Whitehead 'it is the definition of contemporary events that they happen in causal independence of each other' (AI 195). I suggest that this is the source, and also the extent, of what OOO sees as the “withdrawal” of objects from one another. For Whitehead, 'the vast causal independence of contemporary occasions is the preservative of the elbow-room within the Universe. It provides each actuality with a welcome environment for irresponsibility' (AI 195). Things are “withdrawn,” therefore, to the extent that they are able to be irresponsible…” (p.10)

Source: http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/Claremont2010.pdf

In addition, Steven's willingness to engage the OOO brood in serious philosophical debate continues to stimulate much thought, and I find his argument to be a counter-balance to the strange rhetoric of objectological thinking. Do read the entire paper (PDF) @ The Pinocchio Theory.

Four Stone Hearth #107

 

So here we are: another addition of Four Stone Hearth. The Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focusing primarily on four lines of research: archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, bio-physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology. Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth.

My format for this edition will not follow any formal headings or sub-specialties if only because I like to dream of an anthropological project sufficiently complex and united that it truly embodies the mixed-methodological and theoretically rich discipline we (sometimes) aspire to make it. People have to have dreams. But let’s get to it shall we?

First up, the buzz of the North American anthropology scene these past few weeks is without a doubt the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) decision to make significant changes to its official statement of purpose. The AAA big whigs decided to change the statement from “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects…”, to “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. AAA’s decision to drop “science” in its statement in favor of “to advance public understanding” is a controversial move that seems to be dividing professionals from all subfields.

Daniel Lende’s post titled ‘Anthropology, Science, and Public Understanding’ over at Neuroanthropology (one of my all time favorite blogs) breaks the situation down quite nicely while providing several links to important sites discussing the still heated controversy.

Are there no alternatives to the dominant consumer-capitalist-finance economic systems? Well over the past few years numerous anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, economists and activists from 15 countries got together to ask the ‘tough questions’ and come up a collection of ideas and suggestions for moving us all towards a more sane and humane world economy. The result was the recently published book, The Human Economy (2010). Anthropologist Keith Hart launched the book Friday last week in Oslo together with two contributors: anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Desmond McNeill. Lorenz at antropologi.info reports on this important event here.

Meanwhile, at CulturePotion Franco has a post up titled, ‘Indigenous People of the Americas: Racism and Struggle’ discussing poverty among indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the persistence of racism and discrimination leveled at them. Franco surveys several countries and provides interesting stats along with a couple of compelling videos that bring home his main points.

Kambiz at Anthropology.net weighs in on the Dikika research group’s claim to have found bones with hominid cut marks that date to 3 million years ago. In a follow-up post Kambiz admits he had made some mistakes in his previous commentary, but maintains the initial research on the bones is deeply flawed.

Afarensis considers questions surrounding the relationship between lungfish, trout and humans with a post titled, ‘The Return of Darwinius masillae’. Afarensis also recently announced the upcoming Monkey Day version of Four Stone Hearth on December 14, 2010, hosted by This is Serious Monkey Business. Who doesn’t like monkeys? I mean really.

Ethnography.com has a stimulating post (essay) on ‘the continuing confrontation between subsistence farmers and development bureaucrats’ up that points out the clash of priorities between cultures, institutions and social practice. The author makes a solid point that policy-makers need do more to understand the local life-conditions of different peoples, as subsistence farmers have little incentive to allow themselves to be captured by the global machinations of techno-capitalism.

And the latest issue of Anthropology Matters can be found here. This special issue in devoted to asking how anthropological theory might be better put into practice in the context of community development, while raising the issue of how development policy and practice in turn transforms anthropology.

Krystal from Anthropology in Practice put forth a fantastic post discussing ‘the evolutionary roots of talking with our hands’ (watch for a guest appearance by Kanzi, the most famous non-human primate on the ‘party’ circuit) and mentions recent literature on the topic of evolved animal communication. Here is Krystal riffing on proto-speech and gestural communication:

Gestures are an integral part of language. Arbib, Liebal, and Pika (2008) believe that gestures, via pantomime and protosigns, may have played a large role in the emergence of vocalization (protospeech) leading to the development of protolanguage (1054). Their hypothesis is based on the structure of the brain, specifically a mirroring of structures in the brain: near Broca's area, a region of the brain said to be involved in language production, is a region "activated for both grasping and observation of grasping" (1053). The proximity of a grasping region to a language region is intriguing. Individuals who have suffered damage to Broca's area have difficulties with language production. They can often understand others perfectly, but they have difficulty responding in all but the simplest of ways. Arbib and colleagues suggest that because damage to Broca's area also impedes the emergence of signed languages as well, the region should be understood in relation to multimodal language processes and not just vocalization. They believe this creates a strong case for understanding the place of gestures in the evolution of language.

Material World has a post up covering Larissa Hjorth’s research on gendered customizing of mobile communication, gaming and virtual communities in the Asia-Pacific.

Science Daily reports that researchers have uncovered an early Greek settlement in the Egyptian Nile Delta region believed to be one of the sites where Greek trade into Africa actually began. The settlement dates to the 7th and 6th century B.C.E.

Stephen Chrisomalis reviews Guy Deutscher’s new book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages over at his blog Glossographia – where he concludes the book has “some serious flaws” but that it is a fairly decent presentation on the relevant literature.

And Johan Normark of the wonderfully named Archaeological Haecceities blog has a post titled, 'Creativity in Anthropology', where he talks about a recent workshop on the future of gender studies in archaeology at Stockholm University, and the notion of creativity as it applies to human imagination and anthropological research.

Rachel Chaikof reviews Tom Boellstorff’s cyber-ethnography The Coming of Age in Second Life, and concludes, along with Boellstorff, that virtual worlds open new possibilities and social interactions for people at the margins and those seeking alternative relationships and new forms of expression.

Finally, Jeremy at Eidetic Illuminations brings up some fascinating questions about methodology after reading John Law's book After Method. Jeremy asks, “what would happen if we reconceptualized methods not simply as techniques for collecting data, but as tools for constructing realities?” A poignant question considering AAA’s revisioning of American anthropology as a post-scientific endeavor (see above).

Submissions were sparse this time around, and I was hoping to dig up a few more posts for this edition, but  was unable to expand the scope muchg iven some unexpected time constraints. However I really appreciate those who did take the time to contribute. I think anthro-blogging could be done on a much more extensive basis and events like these are important. I also want to thank Afarensis for the invite to host this carnival, and would willing do it again for under a dollar.

Four Stone Hearth will be back on December 14, 2010 with the special Monkey Day version of the carnival, hosted by This is Serious Monkey Business - so please post, submit and continue to spread the word. Thanks.

Audio: Stengers and Haraway at Claremont

Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway @ the “Metaphysics and Things: New forms of Speculative Thought” conference held at Claremont Graduate University on December 2, 2010:

 [h/t Adrian Ivakhiv via Matthew Segall]

Bryant Waxing Processual

More and more I'm starting to get a sense of where Levi Bryant is going with his version of Object-Oriented theory. There is much too much in Bryant's work for me to cover in a single post, but I have to say that given several caveats over the past few months regarding process and relations I am increasingly on board with what Bryant is offering.

Below are some significant remarks Bryant has made in relation to recent posts by Vitale and Ivakhiv:

Here are two declarations: 1) I have always been, am, and will always be a process philosopher (this is probably a significant difference between Graham and I). 2) The following two statements are true in my ontology: “Substances are processes” and “processes are substances”. For me the processuality of a substance is its substantiality. Nor do I think I’m far off the mark here for those who know Aristotle’s writings on animals.

Perhaps I haven’t been entirely clear on this here– I have to save something new for the book! –but my substances are constantly struggling with entropy (another long running theme on this blog). For me this entails that substances must reproduce themselves from moment to moment to endure. They are constantly disintegrating and fighting entropy or dissolution into other objects. This process of endurance is creative and evolving. Indeed, substances require information, in the sense I’ve discussed it on this blog, to reproduce themselves and that information has to be new (information repeated twice is no longer information). Like Whitehead’s “societies”, substances produce themselves through their preceding phases and do so in a way that always has an aleatory or creative dimension to it. Why, then, refer to them as substances? Because there is pattern and, as Whitehead puts it, “subjective aim”. Okay, there’s also something a little polemical in the term “substance” or “object” as well, but isn’t a potent signifier occasionally a good thing? Anyway, I have no objections to you guys using terms like “event” or “process” if you think those terms have strategic rhetorical import. All I ask is that you recognize that certain event-process-substances detach themselves from other relations and take on a life of their own. That’s not too much, is it?

Third, networks and relations. C’mon guys, you know in your heart of hearts that I love relations and endlessly direct analysis to relations. My key thesis is not that relations don’t exist or that they are unimportant, but that, following Deleuze-Hume, relations are always external to their terms (substances). The important caveat here is that substances are themselves bundles of relations. So what’s my thesis? My thesis is that entities can never be reduced to their relations. Every entity exceeds its relations and can enter into new relations. If I’m shot into outer space I die, but life is a quality. It doesn’t mean I’ve ceased to be a substance. Why am I so insistent on this? Because what we’re so interested in is not relations, but the possibility of shifting relations and creating new possibilities as a result.[source]

What more is there to say? Really? I would dispute the convention that all relations are "always external to their terms", if only because I would prefer to emphasize a much greater 'mingling' between the "external" and "internal" aspects of real entities (e.g., hybrids, symbionts, parasites, and a wide range of other complex non-linear assemblages), but that is a minor point overall. Given a sufficiently relational sensitivity to actual entities, I can certainly support much of the onticological project.

Update: adapted and revised from comments I posted over at Larval Subjects:

The notion that “'substances are processes' and 'processes are substances'" is very important for understanding Bryant's framework. If Bryant is sincere about such statements then I have two follow-up questions:

1. As I’ve said in the past, I strongly support much of Bryant's ontology, with the major exception of his position that there is a metaphysical fissure in the cosmos internal to "split" entities, suggesting a complete withdrawal of essences from actualities. And I understand Bryant's argument about the difference of "virtual proper being" and "local manifestations", where local manifestations are the locus of change and virtual proper being remains withdrawn and irreducible. But if all substantiality is processual then how does a completely 'withdrawn' entity enter into the flow of things? How can substance as essence become involved in that which is in process if not directly? Where/how is the ‘door’ from splitness to actual evolution achieved? (Or are substances as essences eternal? Or, alternatively, can we say that the actual (manifest) is primary and the potential (virtual) the shadow cast by local events?)

2. Isn’t the idea that substantial things enter into the flow of change an indication that they can and do remain in constant (direct but partial) contact with the world on a plane of immanence?

Vitale and Ivakhiv on Objectological and Relational Approaches

It seems Chris Vitale now gets it. What ‘it’ is precisely I am still not entirely sure, but Chris now believes that a little dash of Latour and a heaping cup of semiotics renders Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) a compatible set of positions with Chris’ own relational “networkological” approach.

In a series of recent posts (here, here, here and here) Vitale explains his recent acceptance of many OOO positions and how he thinks its core elements could fit in with his own framework. The posts are quite dense, with many collateral insights that seem to sneak up from related crevasses. I don’t fully agree with much of what Chris is now saying about OOO in these posts - as I still have some difficulty with the unnecessary emphasis on objects as 'essences' - but his posts are well worth the read if you are interested these kinds of issues. 

Here are a few extracts from one of the most recent posts, which I quite enjoyed:

"[O]ur conscious networks only ‘know’ what the sub-conscious levels of the brain pass on to them. But we cannot know all that these sub-conscious levels know, because otherwise we would have to be these levels. But we see this even with physical phenomenon. Water boils because of changes at the level of its molecules, but there are changes on the sub-molecular level that may impact the way it boils, and in a manner that a scientific observer would not know unless they switched the level of their analysis from that of molecules-water to that which includes sub-units. And while water cannot ‘know’ why it boils the way it does, we can say that its experience of boiling works in this leveled manner as well. Much of this is described by the notion of complexity (complex systems, etc.), which describes whenever wholes cannot be deduced from the aggregate sum of their parts.

All these types of withdrawal are avatars, so to speak, which ultimately derive from the ’fundamental obstacle’ to knowledge described by the ‘network paradox’ – namely, that if all knowledge happens via networks, then the fact that networks necessarily foreground some things (nodes) which are linked to others (links), there are always grounds which are excluded. Nodes, links, grounds, and levels are the fundamental terms of the networkological project. The withdrawal via grounds and levels is built into the system at the get go, and particular obstacles to knowledge (withdrawal in OOO) are the results thereof…

Beyond this, the networkological perspective also has a series of concepts with many similarities to HYPEROBJECTS. Combinatories, or organized networks of networks, have many aspects in common with hyperobjects, particularly that they can be dispersed. There are also plexes, or quasi-living ‘wideware’ combinatories, entities like languages that evolve in relation to human beings.”[source]

Go check out the originals.

Adrian Ivakhiv has responded to Vitale’s posts with a succinct and intelligent post of his own here. Adrian finds reason to pause and outlines his own thoughts on the matter via a tour through Whitehead, Peirce and others. In the following passages Adrian cuts right to the quick of what I think continually needs to be reiterated about the remainders between OOO and more relational approaches:

The difference between OOO and the process-relational views Chris, Steve Shaviro, I, and others have espoused is not one of radical incommensurability but one of emphasis, language, and not much more (as I’ve said myself, for instance here.)…

One of the most basic commonalities between OOO-ists and process-relational theorists, all along, has been a deeply felt concern to go well beyond anthropocentric assumptions about who or what qualifies as a “subject”…

There is, then, at the finest level of reality, an ongoing circulation, a vibration, by which subjectivity and objectivity continue to arise wherever reality arises. You could say that, in its horizontal dimension, the universe appears as a vibratory oscillation, a sinuous wave, continually generating its own oscillation, in many directions all at once. In its vertical dimension (which is where I follow Peirce), each of these oscillations, if sliced into, contains a firstness, which is something irreducible; a secondness, which is the responsiveness and interactivity, the one-thing-arising-in-the-presence-of-and-after-another-ness; and a thirdness, which is the proliferation into, or consummation as, meaning, habit, and regularity, that builds worlds and makes the universe a genuine universe. In the midst of this movement forward and outward, entities take shape and acquire consistency, and these are the things (loosely speaking) that OOO-ists call objects…

The whole debate between the objectological and the relational approaches, like all such good debates, has that back-and-forth vibratory quality that I’ve described as being at the center of things, the motor of the universe. [source]

I find Adrian’s approach to these issues is always quite lucid and compassionately articulated.

And for good measure check out the comments related to these posts by Graham Harman (here) and Levi Bryant (here). Fun, fun, fun.

Call for Submissions - Blog Carnival: The Four Stone Hearth

Who the hell would let me host a blog carnival? Oh, wait, it's official: on December 8, 2010 Archive Fire will be hosting the 107th edition of the Four Stone Hearth anthropology blog carnival! I'm honored, excited and now taking submissions from all you anthro-heads out there ready to rock blogosphere. If you have a post you want mentioned please send me a link asap. Or if you know of any recent anthropologically inclined blog offerings you think deserve mention feel free to let me know.

email: ambientdisorder@gmail.com

Here is the official description for the event:

The Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focusing primarily on four lines of research:

• archaeology
• socio-cultural anthropology
• bio-physical anthropology
• linguistic anthropology

Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth. Four Stone Hearth is published bi-weekly, Wednesdays in odd-number weeks.

It should be epic.

Conjuring the Gap

In a beautifully written post over at Menticulture Joe Flintham makes the following comments with regard to Graham Harman’s notion of “withdrawal”:

"I just want to dispel hidden realities which betray their appearances, or illusory facades which belie some more authentic realm... I don't want to bridge the abyss: I want to obviate the need for the bridge by unconjuring the abyss - closing the gap."

I completely agree. The world is much more intimate than the gap-conjurers would have us believe. The distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities only exists if you rely on a 17th century theory of cognition. And the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ only appears if we privilege ocular experience over our other sensual capacities. Full-bodied human experience is neither merely visual nor reliant on some metaphysical distinct realm of the sensual in its contact with the world. What the gap-conjurers fail to appropriate is our contemporary knowledge of how human awareness is embodied, extended and deeply visceral. We directly encounter and experience other things through our bodies, through our flesh. Interacting entities are thus collisions between the inherent properties of relatively distinct objects and the capacities they individually embody. And all such 'collisions' are catalytic events with variable affects.

Such intimate contact between things is revealed everywhere. Our bodies have an ancestral continuity with stars, geological formations, bacteria, minerals, cellular communities, etc, that can afford earthly things direct access to each other. For example, objects can penetrate us and we them. Entities can be literally absorbed by us and we them. There is a dark creeping intimacy between all living and non-living beings that cannot be ontologized away. We are all of this world.

However such access is never complete. Our fleshy encounters are only partial because each entity retreats into its individuality – as realized in its material and organizational depths. The individuality of an existent being is an expression of that being’s organized extensive properties and intensive relations. And these rambling assemblages of temporal properties and relations can be said to “withdraw” into the depths of their onto-specific structural complexity, which makes it hard for us to contact or experience them in their entirety.

Likewise, ‘withdrawal’ is also only ever partial precisely because all objects/assemblages remain intertwined, embedded, supported and in contact with the world. All objects come from the same ever-present background. That is to say, all individualities are intimately of this world - emboded immanent properties and relations that can, for the most part, be touched, investigated and intervened upon given the right methods or tools. 

Take, for example, the encounter between an apple and a horse. An apple is partially ‘withdrawn’ from a horse who holds it in its teeth because the teeth of the horse are only in contact with the skin of the apple, leaving the inner non-skin parts of the apple “hidden” and temporarily in excess of the horses bite. It is in this sense that the horse can be said to be in direct contact with the real apple, but not in its entirety. There are aspects of the apple that are partially withdrawn. Yet when the horse bites into the apple a deeper kind of access is granted, and the apple’s individuality has been compromised. And when the horse subsequently begins to digest the apple the very distinction between the apple and the horse begins to break down. In this case the interaction between apple and horse seemlessly evolves from a) partial contact and withdrawnness to b) deeper disclosure and access, and eventually to c) total absorption and disintegration in a way that completely obviates the need to posit an unbridgeable ‘gap’ between either the two objects ‘in themselves’, or between the horse’s encounter with the apple and its experience of that encounter. In an intimately enmeshed and complicated cosmos these things often touch, mix and mingle in ways that are specific to what they in fact are.

Similarly, there is no good reason why we should conjure a gap between the real and the sensual. And we need only look at one more concrete example to understand why. Take, for example, when two humans interact and shake hands. When people shake hands they make direct but partial contact via their epidermal extensions (skin), while at the same time the ‘totality’ of each person’s individuality remains more rather than less ‘withdrawn’. Such contact triggers a cascade of reactions from the extensive properties and capacities of the skin throughout the body and central nervous system that eventually affects the wider self-system and governing dynamics of the individuals involved, and in very specific ways – depending on the biology, personality, memories, cultural leanings, dramaturgical background and intentions of each individual. This cascade of direct but partial contact and affective stimulation is a more or less intimate experiential event that, again, completely obviates the need to conjure up a distinct and mediating sensual realm outside of 'the real' where "vicars" bridge the gap between encounters and experience. Our worldly (actual) properties mingle directly but partially with the relatively withdrawn or undisclosed worldly (actual) properties of the other person. And the same goes with all objects. The mix and mingle (and sometimes mangle) of objects is always direct (immanent) and partial (withdrawn).

And to reiterate, in the context of the hand-shake example, just because two people contact and experience each other directly on an immanent plane of actuality, or a shared worldliness (of hand-shaking), doesn't mean that they necessarily experience each other completely (e.g., simultaneously having access to each other’s spleens, brain stems, bones, etc.). Their encounter is direct but partial precisely because there are aspects of each other’s individuality that are structurally withdrawn.

It is in this sense that I suggest objects do in fact “withdraw” but are also partially vulnerable to direct intervention and contact with other objects. There are points of contact between things even while things themselves are partially structurally withdrawn from each other.

See Also: ‘Emanating Sensations and Immanent Properties’