Why the animus against liquids, fluidity, process, organicity, change? Isn't reality a (dare I say complex) mix of stability and instability? In the real world of time and change, isn't it more useful to see stability as an achievement (as Latour would argue) rather than as the default position? And is "lava lampism" more than just a straw man for propping up OOO?
Yes, that's just it. To frame the debate in this way is precisely to have conceded to a reductive materialism that has no time for objects. On this view, “solidity” and “liquidity” are phases of the same underlying “thing,” the die always weighted in the direction of liquid—so that solidity is only a metastable equilibrium of a flowing process, etc. Forget the scientistic sheen of the comment—it's only meant to inhibit you. This is merely an aesthetic image: you are free to like it or dislike it, but there's no arguing with it. That's why I call it lava lampy materialism: some people just find lava lamps groovy. There's no accounting for taste (HT Kant). Of course there's nothing wrong with that: in fact, if the lava lampists were truer to their taste, rather than to scientism, we would have something to talk about (see below).
Beyond this, however, there is the matter of ontology. If you think that the lava lamp argument is just a rather kitsch version of undermining and overmining (see Graham's recent post on these terms re: Metzinger, which started off the current spat), then you simply can't agree that things are made of processes and, worse, that some things are more true to the process than others. (More fluid, more groovy.) Do Lego bricks (to name the objects Metzinger mentions) require some kind of Stalinist show trial in which they admit their denial of their inherent meltiness? And beg to be melted down in the name of lava progress? “Some things are more processual than others.” This is onto-theology, folks.
Things are withdrawn objects. OOO is proclaiming this, NOT that we should favor solids over liquids. To accede to some nice compromise (“Things are kind of melty but also kind of solid”) is still to believe in reductionism, eliminationism and so on. Lava lamps are precisely somewhere “between” melty and solid.
I believe Graham and I are definitely rooting for at least a fresh look at stasis, but because we do this, it doesn't mean that we think things “really are” static or that we prefer solids or whatever. That would be a childish misinterpretation, along the lines of “You prefer blue but I know purple is better.” Or more precisely, “I prefer electrons to be orbiting quite a lot faster than you do, and that's a good thing.” (The premise being that we are all talking about different kinds of the same thing, which isn't the case.)
Quite the contrary: it's the lava lamp argument that suffers from superficial aestheticism. An aestheticism that it denies at a more fundamental level, since what really runs the show are machine-like processes, not colors and grooviness. (This is one reason, by the way, why lava lampers can't have Buddhism to themselves.)
If you want an ontology where aesthetics really does run the show, you need OOO. And that brings me to my final point. As I'm arguing in my book on causality, it's the lava lamp school that suffers from a static notion of time as a container—the lamp in which the lava gloops, as it were. OOO sees time as a feature of the sensuality of objects themselves. If you want stasis, go with the lava lamps!
If you've ever heard minimalist music, you'll know what I mean. All those flowing processes produce the precise effect of stasis, of running in place. The first Westerners to hear the gamelan noted this with wonder.
Or just plain old house: it's a fluid dynamic of layered processes taking place in a four-to-the-floor container of mechanism, which makes you dance: that is, move in place. Colorful, beautiful, static, machinery.
Fluid dynamics are perfectly mechanical. They look lava-lampy to human eyes (a suspiciously correlationist fact). But the fluids push each other around pretty much like cogs in a machine. If you don't believe me, read David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order. (And he's a pretty lava lampy guy.) The term “organicity” doesn't scare me at all. I made my career studying it—in the form of Romantic poetry, the original lava lampy, process-not-product stuff. Organon (Greek) means tool, “component in a machine.” A machine is precisely organic. Organicism is a form of mechanism, with soft components. The parts of an organic whole are replaceable: holism cares not a jot for unique objects. It's a form of mechanism. No thanks!
I love house. I even kind of like lava lamps. Am I prepared to build my ontology on house or lava lamps? No.
With their quaintly aestheticized scientistic contraband (mechanism, protests notwithstanding), it's the lava-lampers who fail to explain causality, not OOO. Like lava lamps, process ontologies are a form of regressive kitsch, looking futuristic yet reassuringly passé, like a 60s sci-fi concept of the 21st Century. They leave humanism just where the linguistic turn left it: as the candy sprinkles on top of the cake of science.
15 comments:
Nice deconstruction of the organic -- well done. And that is precisely the point: it is this idea of an organism, a totality, which basically crushes its parts into submission, that feeds and drains them into the fluid "whole," this ontology itself is woefully under-analyzed and too easily granted. Aristotle's response is as forceful now as it was to the pre-Sophists: if everything is a reflection, if everything is attributable to everything else, then nothing can ever change. At its root, every philosophy which does not admit of some kind of essential substance, form or unity is ultimately left scratching their head about causality, or dissolving it outright into a Heraclitean plasma. I can hear the rejoinder now: "but we want to think the middle ground between this disastrous, changeless flow and a world of specific, disengaged pieces of concrete that never meet at all." Well, then welcome to object-oriented philosophy, the only game in town at the moment which ventures to think the unified multiplicity that is the thing, or this thing, or any-thing at all. Every object is an ecology, but also an ecology. If a philosophy doesn't have some kind of basic tension analogous to a unified object and its pieces, then how can it really explain change?
In any case, I join Graham in saying, great post. Kudos!
Or, pre-Socratics, rather. I am an idiot.
...but Aristotle's not, though! ;-)
Yes, Joseph. Actually I left that part out but it was on my mind as I wrote it: there's no genuine accounting for change on this view. And you are quite right—it's the pre-Sophists such as Anaxagoras that we're talking about here.
Joseph,
Who among the relationists has ever argued for a 'crushed totality'? Let's not continue to build strawmen here. Admitting organicity in the world is not necessarily implying “organism” as characterized by those who seek to deny totality. And, besides, the question of monism is not settled, so why should we act as if it is? Being dazzled by multiplicity is not a confirmation that reality is inherently torn asunder. The case has not yet been adequately made on that account in the view of many.
Thinking the middle ground is precisely what needs to be done. But there are many ways to do it. Some may find that language that reifies temporal individuality suits their fancy, while others may chose a more open-ended vocabulary to describe the coming into being and relative persistence of complexity.
My suggestion remains that whatever signaling system we want to use we better damn well make sure that we continually reference actually existing entities, lest we dogmatically confuse our pet theories (maps) for what is real and efficacious (territory).
[incidentally, outside of obscuring metaphors of lamps and such, I think Tim Morton (hi Tim!) usually does a great job of balancing the demands of thinking the real in the sense suggested above.]
Something you wrote that I certainly do agree with was this:
“Every object is an ecology, but also an ecology. If a philosophy doesn't have some kind of basic tension analogous to a unified object and its pieces, then how can it really explain change?”
Brilliant! But again, there are many different ways to get that done, and Shaviro, Ivakhiv and Vitale all has fairly adequate ways of addressing for that requirement that, I feel, continue to be overlooked.
Michael:
I don't think that relationism is stupid or nonsensical -- it isn't. There is a significant dimension of life that is relational, so there's no question that relationism is responding to something that is real. It most surely is. And I appreciate its radical overstatement in its ontological principles. There is something absolutely admirable in the courage of these thinkers (Vitale, Ivakhiv and Shaviro, along with Whitehead, Latour and Heidegger) who push their insights as far as they will go, and then see what the universe looks like. The problem, though, articulated in object-oriented ontology, is that they only pay attention to half of reality. So when blown up, that model of being is drastically top-heavy, because it is almost literally missing half of the world. Everything becomes diacritical, dependent in some way in its very essence on, or to, its relation to something else, and then that something is itself another relation on or to something else, and so on and so on. By this time, you can't encounter a unified entity at all -- you can only encounter a series of prior relations, perceptions or prehensions, all present in some degree or another (because, quite simply, there is nothing else to be but the result of a relation). But how could any such aggregate of nothing but relations possibly work? Where is its point of affect, of difference, of identity? Everything is drained of its specific power and deferred along an endless network with nothing really created or destroyed at all, since the sum total amount of energy of the network, its relational power, is always the same, neither more or less. Implicitly, somewhere, relations must be treated the way object-oriented thought treats objects -- that a relation has a specific power and a specific set of qualities such that it is able to something that nothing else can do, something which gives rise to this particular entity. One wants relations, somewhere, to be discrete and relatively isolated from one another, so that one may account for the differences that do appear in the universe. A relation is treated as if it isn't, by degrees, a sheer reflection of everything it encounters. My encounter with my desk is not the same as my encounter with the floor, or the ceiling or this computer -- but why? You have to start distinguishing relations to explain that, to say that this set of relations is absolutely different from that set. But once you start that, then you have to begin to see that these distinct sets are built of more distinctions -- the world begins to disintegrate, not reflect.
When Whitehead says that you always have a perception between the subject and the object, each being relative to the other's relation (one is both the subject and the object, both perceived and perceiver), how does that really work? What are you really perceiving but yet another act of subject-object perception, and another, and another...? How is one perception different from another if the perceiver is completely exhausted and poured into the perception itself? Once you posit some kind of alterity to perception, something that isn't of this perception, that is, that a perception of this object is unique because it is my perception and not the things that perceive me, or that have perceived me, or that will perceive me, and that the same is true for the object in front of me, that I'm not encountering everything that perceived it in the past, because most of those things had no effect on it at all, and that I am not encountering a shifting sum of those encounters, but some kind of tentative unit -- well, all of this seems inevitable. This is why Ivakhiv has to have recourse to Whitehead's notion of society, because things do not change with every relation or perception, nor are they are kind of running total of all those perceptions. I think he's halfway there. The next best step is to say that there are only societies, though of varying scale and duration.
Joe,
Saying that I "have to have recourse to Whitehead's notion of society" is like saying that you (or whoever) have to have recourse to Harman's notion of sensible objects. Whitehead's notion of society is part of his ontology. If you don't like the whole ontology, that's fine. But if you're rejecting part of it under the assumption that that part should stand on its own, then that's not a fair reading of it.
To say that "there are only societies" would mean not just eliminating half of the ontology, it would also eliminate most of the explanation of what those societies are. It would mean depleting Whitehead of the original contribution his philosophy makes. Why would I or anyone want to do that?
I have a limited space in which to respond, so I will say that I think Graham does a better job in his response to Steven Shaviro in The Speculative Turn than I could here, and I would be reiterating what he says.
I'll answer the question myself I was going to put to you, which was, why begin one's ontology with objects rather than with the experiential and interdependent pieces of Whitehead? I think that when one begins by saying that an entity or actuality -- whatever is ultimately real -- is its relation to another actuality, that is, that it is made up internally of relations to other entities, be this experience, knowledge, etc, that this is a brilliantly problematic way to begin. As I understand it, the subject-object relation descends into the heart of every thing that is real, or, to say another way, to be real is to be in this relation of subject and object. My basic question to this is -- if the actuality is exhausted in this movement between subject and object, how is anything real happening in it? If the prehension is what is actual, then what is the subject prehending but just the object in the act of prehending, as subject, the other term in the relation? How is this not two mirrors held up to reflect each other's reflection, but of what? What is there to prehend if prehending is all there is? As Aristotle remarks in Metaphysics, perception does not perceive itself. Doesn't there have to be some alterity to the perception itself, rather than saying the ultimately real is itself a perception? (This is not the same thing as saying that a thing is always perceiving, that it is always relating -- this may or may not be true, and is a question of relations external to the entity, that is, independent of it.)
In several parts...
MICHAEL: I can’t help be sense a bit of condescension here Joseph. By many accounts relationality has been drastically understated in intellectual history, and certainly among people generally. If anything, it is the case for objects, units, commodities, stand-alone complexes, and individuals that has been drastically overstated in the wider culture. Isolation, atomism and its bastard child anomie have all wreaked havoc in the hearts and minds of past generations – even becoming entrenched in so many of those institutions which seek to separate us and explain away deep relationships and the intrinsically embedded and hybrid nature of life. But it is the universe itself – as a diverse fabric of possibility and differentiation – that continues to demand we take process and contingency seriously.
JOESEPH: The problem, though, articulated in object-oriented ontology, is that they only pay attention to half of reality. So when blown up, that model of being is drastically top-heavy, because it is almost literally missing half of the world. Everything becomes diacritical, dependent in some way in its very essence on, or to, its relation to something else, and then that something is itself another relation on or to something else, and so on and so on. By this time, you can't encounter a unified entity at all -- you can only encounter a series of prior relations, perceptions or prehensions, all present in some degree or another (because, quite simply, there is nothing else to be but the result of a relation). But how could any such aggregate of nothing but relations possibly work? Where is its point of affect, of difference, of identity? Everything is drained of its specific power and deferred along an endless network with nothing really created or destroyed at all, since the sum total amount of energy of the network, its relational power, is always the same, neither more or less.
MICHAEL: Perhaps in some versions of extreme (or pop) relationalism this is an issue, sure. And I appreciate what you want to guard against here Joseph, I really do. In my own developing conceptual tool-kit I have a term for that ‘aspect’ of an object or whole (or as I prefer, assemblage) that is irreducibly an individual: onto-specificity. That is, objects/assemblages have an onto-specificity, efficacy or uniqueness that is irreducible, or ‘withdrawn’ into its own assembled immanent properties. However, and herein lies the crux, every actually existing object and assemblage is also entangled in a web of relations and contexts that occasion them – and which ensure a particular degree of vulnerability to processes, forces, affects and potencies not embodied in the very properties that constitute them. In other words, each object is generated out of the same background reality as every other thing in a way that allows them to inter and intra act upon each other, and ultimately – through various natural processes – allows new assemblages and relational complexes to emerge (or be generated). Thus, the only way that “unified entities” can occur at all is in deep relation to other differentiated occurrences operating on the same processual plane.
But all this should not be sloppily dismissed or mistaken for “goo” metaphysics, because of my aforementioned ‘principle of onto-specificity’ – which reminds us that each occurrence, object, event or assemblage has its own unique structural (and material?) withdrawedness and affective potency expressed via its intrinsic properties. And the fact that such properties remain relational and vulnerable to affective forces and processes (that is to say, all objects are impermanent and temporal) does not negate any particular entity’s ‘historical’ capacity to be what it specifically is.
Individuality, in this view, then, is simply the onto-specific result of the asymmetrical diffusion of existing cosmic properties coalescing according to the contingent relations of differential processes.
So you ask, ‘where is the force of things? Well, in the specific properties (“character”?) of the things-themselves as they are temporarily assembled and exist in relative (and relational) difference to other coalescences.
MICHAEL: But all this should not be sloppily dismissed or mistaken for “goo” metaphysics, because of my aforementioned ‘principle of onto-specificity’ – which reminds us that each occurrence, object, event or assemblage has its own unique structural (and material?) withdrawedness and affective potency expressed via its intrinsic properties. And the fact that such properties remain relational and vulnerable to affective forces and processes (that is to say, all objects are impermanent and temporal) does not negate any particular entity’s ‘historical’ capacity to be what it specifically is.
Individuality, in this view, then, is simply the onto-specific result of the asymmetrical diffusion of existing cosmic properties coalescing according to the contingent relations of differential processes.
So you ask, ‘where is the force of things? Well, in the specific properties (“character”?) of the things-themselves as they are temporarily assembled and exist in relative (and relational) difference to other coalescences.
JOESEPH: Implicitly, somewhere, relations must be treated the way object-oriented thought treats objects -- that a relation has a specific power and a specific set of qualities such that it is able to something that nothing else can do, something which gives rise to this particular entity.
MICHAEL: Agreed. But remember, relations are not “things” at all (at least not to me). Relations happen between things, among things, and on every scale – but only because all things exist on the same plane of reality (hence flat ontologies), and are therefore accessible to each other, and are parts of the differential distribution of intensive and extensive properties.
JOESEPH: One wants relations, somewhere, to be discrete and relatively isolated from one another, so that one may account for the differences that do appear in the universe. A relation is treated as if it isn't, by degrees, a sheer reflection of everything it encounters. My encounter with my desk is not the same as my encounter with the floor, or the ceiling or this computer -- but why? You have to start distinguishing relations to explain that, to say that this set of relations is absolutely different from that set. But once you start that, then you have to begin to see that these distinct sets are built of more distinctions -- the world begins to disintegrate, not reflect.
MICHAEL: But, I suggest, only in abstraction. Once we start talking about actual immanent properties and materialities, and the differences that obtain between particular coalescences and their simultaneous contingent relationships, we begin to be able to trace particular entities in all their efficacious glory and rich character. If we grant that relations are not ‘things’ but that which happens among the processual activities of existing properties and occurrences, then the details, or actualities of particular (onto-specific) worldly entities (or as Adrian says, “achievements”) are what is most relevant. Only when things are encountered for what they in fact are, and understood in the context of how it is that they are maintained and have come to be, do we approach anything like an authentic (primate) ontographic praxis.
JOESEPH: When Whitehead says that you always have a perception between the subject and the object, each being relative to the other's relation (one is both the subject and the object, both perceived and perceiver), how does that really work? What are you really perceiving but yet another act of subject-object perception, and another, and another...? How is one perception different from another if the perceiver is completely exhausted and poured into the perception itself? Once you posit some kind of alterity to perception, something that isn't of this perception, that is, that a perception of this object is unique because it is my perception and not the things that perceive me, or that have perceived me, or that will perceive me, and that the same is true for the object in front of me, that I'm not encountering everything that perceived it in the past, because most of those things had no effect on it at all, and that I am not encountering a shifting sum of those encounters, but some kind of tentative unit -- well, all of this seems inevitable. This is why Ivakhiv has to have recourse to Whitehead's notion of society, because things do not change with every relation or perception, nor are they are kind of running total of all those perceptions. I think he's halfway there. The next best step is to say that there are only societies, though of varying scale and duration.
MICHAEL: I honestly don’t know enough Whitehead to say too much about what his system can or cannot explain Joseph, so I won’t. All I can suggest in this regard is that I don’t read Adrian as adhering to a strict Whiteheadian ontology, but only see him using bits and pieces here and there while building his own conceptual apparatus – so I think you’d have to put that issue to him. I think Adrian goes much further than you suggest in his appreciation of the efficacy of things, but that’s just my reading.
As for Whitehead’s “societies”, well, I personally don’t draw a distinction between objects and assemblages, and relations for that; I think they all occasion each other in ecologies upon ecologies, all the way down, as they say. And, as you said, “every object is an ecology, but also an ecology”.
Thank you for your time. I always enjoy your lucid comments.
Here is the part of my response that seems to be missing. Sorry for the fragmented nature of these comments Joseph. You can read the whole thing in order here if you choose.
JOESEPH: The problem, though, articulated in object-oriented ontology, is that they only pay attention to half of reality. So when blown up, that model of being is drastically top-heavy, because it is almost literally missing half of the world. Everything becomes diacritical, dependent in some way in its very essence on, or to, its relation to something else, and then that something is itself another relation on or to something else, and so on and so on. By this time, you can't encounter a unified entity at all -- you can only encounter a series of prior relations, perceptions or prehensions, all present in some degree or another (because, quite simply, there is nothing else to be but the result of a relation). But how could any such aggregate of nothing but relations possibly work? Where is its point of affect, of difference, of identity? Everything is drained of its specific power and deferred along an endless network with nothing really created or destroyed at all, since the sum total amount of energy of the network, its relational power, is always the same, neither more or less.
MICHAEL: Perhaps in some versions of extreme (or pop) relationalism this is an issue, sure. And I appreciate what you want to guard against here Joseph, I really do. In my own developing conceptual tool-kit I have a term for that ‘aspect’ of an object or whole (or as I prefer, assemblage) that is irreducibly an individual: onto-specificity. That is, objects/assemblages have an onto-specificity, efficacy or uniqueness that is irreducible, or ‘withdrawn’ into its own assembled immanent properties. However, and herein lies the crux, every actually existing object and assemblage is also entangled in a web of relations and contexts that occasion them – and which ensure a particular degree of vulnerability to processes, forces, affects and potencies not embodied in the very properties that constitute them. In other words, each object is generated out of the same background reality as every other thing in a way that allows them to inter and intra act upon each other, and ultimately – through various natural processes – allows new assemblages and relational complexes to emerge (or be generated). Thus, the only way that “unified entities” can occur at all is in deep relation to other differentiated occurrences operating on the same processual plane.
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