Here’s a quick reply to Levi Bryant’s reply to my post from this morning on objects and relations:
I have no qualms about Levi’s terminology, which I find to be generally very lucid and thoughtfully articulated. A philosopher not only has the right, but is expected to develop terms that mean something specific within the terms of their philosophy. If objects, then, are defined as “generative mechanisms, as powers or capacities to produce differences,” or as “four-dimensional space-time worms,” as “ongoing events” and “processes,” etc., as long as these definitions are consistent with the rest of one’s philosophical system, that’s perfectly fine with me. (In fact, I like it, since, aside from the worms, it sounds like the way I think of things.) At some point, it risks becoming akin to Humpty Dumpty’s words to Alice: “When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean; neither more, nor less.” But this is par for the course in philosophy, where one must be granted some space to develop the terminology that would bring new concepts to life.
The issue I have is not with either Levi’s onticology or Graham’s OOO as it is with the general perception (a perception I don’t think I’ve gotten from either of them, but from others) that “object-oriented” philosophy, as a kind of generic term, is a new and important development within Continental philosophy. Used in this broader sense, especially with the “-oriented” attached to the “object,” one can’t help but to think this means “object” in the everyday English sense of the word. And when I get asked (as I have been) why I’m interested in this trend, it’s difficult for me to answer that, because the term sounds too much like “objectivity,” “objectivism,” and all the other things the word “object” has been philosophically associated with.
The general answer others might give, I imagine, goes something like this: it’s a move away from X (subjectivity, perception, phenomenology, correlationism, Kantianism, relationism, or whatever else) and back to the actual real THINGS that make up the world. (That of course sounds, unintentionally I’m sure, a lot like Husserl’s “Back to the things themselves!” The difference is that here it’s the actual things, not our perceptions of those things. But I’m not willing to concede that we can purify the world of our perceptions.) While I can’t pinpoint where I’ve heard this, it’s still made to sound too much like a swing of the pendulum from one side (subjectivity, relationality) to the other (objects). And I dislike that both because I’m tired of swings of the pendulum, when what we need is more integrated accounts of how all these things (objectivity and subjectivity, etc.) work together, and because I think it will have a hard time doing much work outside the limited circles of (mostly) young Continental philosophers who use the term now. So my issue is really a strategic one.
Levi continues:
“If there is not something in excess of the local manifestations of entities at a particular time within a particular configuration of relations (actualism) then we are at a loss to explain how anything new emerges. For this you need something anterior to relations. “
I agree with this as long as the word “local” is in there, because I see spatiality – from the “local” to the “global,” and across any intermediate or middle layers – as produced through the same processes that make up reality. As for whether “you need something anterior to relations”, that would depend on how you define “relations.” But even as processual a thinker as Peirce would likely agree that relations are secondary (they are “secondness”) to a kind of creativity of phenomena emerging into existence (“firstness”). (Not that that’s what Levi means, but the point is that definitions make all the difference.)
When it comes to Levi’s account of ecological relations and of capitalism, I don’t think we are saying such different things. Levi writes:
“Our ecological questions always revolve around questions of what happens when new objects are introduced into an existing collective assemblage of objects. How does the introduction of cane toads change things in Australia? What happens to Australian ecosystems with the introduction of this new actor?”
This is one way of stating the case. Of course, the importation of cane toads into Australia is not simply the entry of an “object” into an existing ecosystem. It is part of a whose series of processes (colonialism, imperialism, etc.), which brought not just cane toads, but people, languages, weapons, sciences, and much else, and which triggered changes through the relational systems that made up the continent. My argument is that focusing on the object – the cane toad – may blur the outlines of the processes that are responsible for their introduction. But there’s nothing mutually exclusive about understanding both cane toads (in and for themselves) and the other processes that brought them to Australia. An actor-network perspective, for instance, is pretty good at looking at how the ‘cane toad-Australia’ network got built and at the role that the cane toads themselves played in this. That’s the kind of account I’m after.
When I say that capitalism privileges objects over processes, and Levi replies that “the situation is precisely the reverse” — that “With the emergence of commodity capitalism we have not become focused on objects, but rather objects have increasingly evaporated altogether, becoming replaced by process and relation” — I think we are both guilty of oversimplification here. And I’ll grant that I overemphasized my point. But describing postmodernism as “constantly mutating and schizophrenic simulacra” doesn’t help us understand why it is that people still want to buy a particular car. Do they know they the car they think is “solid” will “melt into air”? If they don’t, then perhaps their perception will give us an insight that’s worth retaining. Part of my point was that it’s important that we understand the processes which make people want to buy (particular) cars, and Levi’s response indicates that he believes object-oriented ontology will help us understand these processes:
“OOO is more than capable of analyzing the relational networks that generate this phenomena. Part of its critical edge, however, lies in rejecting the move that would reduce entities to these relational networks. And it is precisely because it argues for an excess of entity over these relations that it promises a means of responding to these networks.”
I’m not sure how OOO does better than other accounts in analyzing these kinds of relational networks, but I’m open to finding out. I’m also still not sure what the “excess of entity” is. But based on Levi’s response to my post, I’m quite happy to concede that his onticology is pretty compatible with what I’ve been calling “relationalism.” So maybe I should just get over my issue with “objects,” and let a thousand objects bloom.
Adrian, your posts inspired a bit of spring cleaning of some recent projects, starting with this quote from OBJECT-ORIENTED PHILOSOPHY last weekend:
“You’re never a free cogito in real life. You are surrounded by rules and limits with every project, and discovering those is the key to being able to work with them in interesting ways”.
This seems to me as good or better an expression of the pragmatic maxim as anything CS Peirce ever came up with.
OBJECTS -> PROJECTS?
I was inspired in this direction of thought last fall by Steen’s NEW MAPPINGS’ “Future Fossils” post about the HAWK missile, an OBJECT that never was built, while the PROJECT of planning it was a vast operation.
In a late October comment at LARVAL SUBJECTS (to Paul Bains on Pierre Sonigo’s “A World of Bess”) I suggested: “I would not call myself an object, but I would consider myself a project”.
Anyway, to get to the point, in a 2008-11 INFLEXIONS (online) interview with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour suggests a project-oriented rather than an object-oriented ontology – the former being more process-oriented and requiring that ‘objects’ be ‘assembled’ into ‘projects’ (negotiating rather than withdrawing).
Latour suggests: “It’s based on the argument that having is much more interesting than being for the excellent reason that when you say ‘I have’, you are linked to the thing you have, whereas when you say ‘I am’ you are cut off”.
Perhaps the PROJECT is too intentional or anthropocentric compared to the OBJECT. But maybe this approach avoids the appearance of exiling relations to that which is external to their terms – the poor objects lost in Reza’s “Littered Universe”, doomed forever to expansion and estrangement..
I have been trying to follow this discussion for some time now and I cannot but suspect that there is some fundamental confusion regarding some basic definitions/descriptions. I would like to believe that this “object-oriented philosophy” is something new and exciting, but all that I read about it is just a creative (and sometimes confusing) combination of terms that I thought I recognized until I read a bit more. I agree with you that it is fair for a philosopher to choose a word like “object” and give it a particular definition, but there are limits, aren’t they? I cannot take a word “chair” and define it as “car” and then complain that people misunderstand me because of my peculiar use. Or better, if I make it mean “car” today and “love” tomorrow. I’m exaggerating, of course, but without some preliminary clearing out of definitional confusion, this conversation will go on forever, because we’re not sure what exactly it is about.
In this particular example, is your conclusion that “objects” in “object-oriented philosophy” (what/who is doing the orienting, by the way? do they orient themselves? orient where?) are the same as “relations” in your reflections?
Mark – I would happily follow a detour that led from OOO to POO (delicious acronym), and having Latour’s permission for that is most encouraging. I don’t think it’s necessarily anthropocentric, since dogs, trees, amoebas, and maybe even thoughts could probably be said to have (or be) projects. Whether a hammer (in & of itself) or a ‘Stop’ sign or a dog turd qualifies as a project would be something for POO-ists to contemplate.
One of the helpful implications of POO, besides accentuating the processual and negotiated nature of projects, is that projects are not only everywhere, they overlap and interlace and intermingle. So a metal hammer is part of the project of building a house or cabinet, but also part of the project of the hammer-making company (itself a project) to edge out its competitors, and part of the larger projects of humans’ mechanical manipulation of the world, and of oxidation (metal and air’s wanting to blend when they’re sitting around next to each other for a while), etc.
Frank – I appreciate your frustration… I wouldn’t say that OOP’s objects are the same as (my?) relations, though Levi certainly seems to be tweaking the definitions to make it sound like the two categories overlap. My reply to him was trying to build on that common ground. I suspect the ‘object’ terminology has gained a certain momentum fueled by the movement-building tendency evident among the OOP-ists. But that’s how philosophers have always done things – see Randall Collins’ The Sociology of Philosophies for examples from the whole (worldwide) history of philosophy. That said, I agree that there are better terms available to make the same points, so I hope they take these critiques constructively…
It almost seems ridiculous that there could be a fuss about claiming that there are ‘objects’ indep. of human perception – and that we could say stuff about them – rather than simply assert their existence (Kant)!
It doesn’t say much for the current state of phil Are things that bad. It would be easy to construct a comic sketch about this that would see the layman wanting most phil departments shut down..!
What might be interesting is to see the different ways objects exist – whether they are cadacualtic or have, rather only ipseity.
I also found it interesting to see how there could be a sense of being that was neither that of the external, or internal world. Avicenna’s being-as-first-known or Deleuze’s sense. (I tried to explore this in PoS).
000 would be a little constrained if it had simply returned to Aristotle’s external world (Socrates and this ox here).
I deliberatelly asked Mario this loaded question recently:
‘I am guessing that apart from empsyched beings there are nothing but fundamental fields.’
Mario Crocco:
“A tree isn’t just
a casual bunch of elementary realities, but
a causally-efficiently organized unity. It
lacks cadacualtez but possesses ipseity, i.e. its
own distinctive way of being one & unique.
What is this one?
A tree differs from a rock from microphysics
on, but this difference isn’t perceptual. Nor is it
virtual or potential, either.
Their difference is
causal-efficient, i.e. it is in the way of entering
time transformation (in the timelike-thin reality)
keeping (more technically, conserving) itself
(namely, the tree’s or rock’s “physiology”).
Organization is causal-efficient. Causal-efficiency
become apt to keep macroscopic organizations,
when inertial mass was acquired by some but
not all elementary “paricles”, early in cosmological
evolution.
Remember the related comments in
Palindrome.
When time got a macroscopic hold on
space, i..e when sequences were able to be conserved
so as to build on the past, then organizations developed in the hylozoic hiatus…
Submarines and rocks exist as microphysical dynamic
organizations built up to macroscopic scale;
psyches rather are originally one and cadacualtic
each, and their objects (or inner referentiations)
referred to submarines and rocks are
intonated molar differentiations always of a
particular psyche, referred to a perceived rock
or submarine as a consequence of this psyche’s
intellectual development.”
————————–
What rocks don’t do in this scenario is have the ‘intonations or ‘differentiations’ that cadacualtic psyches do. I would have to see how Graham Harman elaborates his claim that rocks have a ‘sensuous realm’ – but I think that it will only work if he ultimately sees no difference between psyches and rocks…
Just thinking out aloud and enjoying the blog as usual.
Hi Mark. Those were the days. When I used to comment on LS (smile). Before I got trashed…shame really.
Adrian,
Apologies for the delay in responding. I’m just now discovering this post. For some reason your trackbacks and posts to my blog go to spam, so if you post something and it doesn’t show up please shoot me an email so I can find it.
I would like to respond to your remark about Humpty Dumpty and Frank’s follow up on that remark. In my view, the theory of objects that I’m proposing is not simply a matter of cooking up works and defining them however I like, but rather arises from the very nature of what objects are when subjected to philosophical scrutiny. It strikes me as very odd for philosophy to use ordinary language or common sense to be a final arbiter in philosophical matters. This seems to be what Frank is proposing.
The key intuition that motivates my account of objects is that objects manifest themselves differently depending on the relations they enter into with other objects. Water boils at different temperatures depending on altitude. Human lungs develop differently depending on whether they develop at sea level or in the Andes mountains. If an astronaut happens to be pushed into outer space his body decompresses, and so on. The color of an object manifests itself differently depending on its lighting conditions. Examples could be multiplied endlessly.
In the traditional concept of objects we have a relationship between a subject and its predicates where we distinguish between fixed predicates that can’t change without the object ceasing to be what it is (essence) and changing predicates that come-to-be and pass-away (accidents). The object is treated as a fixed and abiding thing. However, when we actually look at how objects behave it becomes clear that this model is inadequate. In my view, the popularity of this model has a lot to do with the social position philosophers themselves have occupied throughout history. For the most part, philosophers have tended to occupy a privileged position within the social order allowing for a good deal of leisure time. As a consequence, they’ve privileged vision or the gaze as a primary access to the world, rather than focusing on interaction and acting on objects. This has had a whole host of consequences for epistemology and ontology that have contributed to this inadequate conception of objects.
My ontology of objects revolves around a distinction between the virtual proper being of objects, local manifestation, and relation. The virtual proper being of an object is the set of powers or potentialities objects have as generative mechanisms. It pertains to what objects can do. Local manifestation is the actualization of a power of the object in a determinate quality. And relation is one of the driving functors in how an object locally manifests itself when it enters into contact with other objects. For example, the particular shade of color my coffee cup embodies when it interacts with waves of light or the manner in which a body decompresses or forms a boundary depending on whether its in a vacuum or a heavy atmosphere like the earth’s.
The point of the thesis that objects are always in excess over any of their local manifestations is that objects always have an excess of power, of what they can do, over any of their local manifestations. There’s always more in an object than any of the presentations it produces in the world. This has important theoretical consequences. Contemporary theory has been dominated by relationism and actualism for the last few decades and has found itself plagued with questions of how change is possible. Part of the reason for this lies in confusing the being of entity with local manifestation, ignoring the virtual excess of objects over any of their manifestations. Once we make room for virtual proper being, however, it becomes possible to see how shifting relations among objects also shifts local manifestations. This significantly changes the nature of the questions we ask. Moreover, once we understand that objects are acts, doings, and powers, epistemology is no longer conceived as mimesis or mirroring in representation, but as active engagement with objects to produce differential actualizations.
Levi writes: “It strikes me as very odd for philosophy to use ordinary language or common sense to be a final arbiter in philosophical matters.”
What is the criterion that philosophy must use then? I think agree about “ordinary language” but terminological consistency is not just a matter of “common sense” – how is philosophical conversation possible then if we don’t have some stable vocabulary, some consistent way of describing reality?
I also don’t understand this part and I’ve seen you say this many times in a variety of contexts (but I’m usually too intimidated to comment on your blog):
“In the traditional concept of objects we have a relationship between a subject and its predicates where we distinguish between fixed predicates that can’t change without the object ceasing to be what it is (essence) and changing predicates that come-to-be and pass-away (accidents). The object is treated as a fixed and abiding thing. However, when we actually look at how objects behave it becomes clear that this model is inadequate.”
Who is this “we” in the second scenario? So in the traditional view of objects “we the subjects” described them as X, but then “we” looked at them and realized we were wrong – but it’s still “we the subjects,” is it not? How is your attempt to get at the objects different from any other traditional attempt to do so, except that it is no longer interested in spending time on issues of access? That is to say, and it’s probably my main obstable here (and I do want to understand OOP), are we simply excluding issues of “subjects accessing objects” (traditional model, as you say) and speak of objects “as if” the problem of access is solved? If that is the case, then would it be fair to say that OOP does not disprove traditional approach, it simply ignores it and operates “as if” these issues do not exist?
And one more (sorry):
“There’s always more in an object than any of the presentations it produces in the world.”
So OOP is a version of Kantianism then? Thing as it is in itself is always in excess (vis-a-vis subject that is perceiving/representing it), there’s always more than meets the subjects’ senses.
Levi – Thanks for your detailed replies (here and on your blog, which I’ll get to when I get a chance).
When I read your third paragraph (“The key intuition…”) I thought you were making a distinction between objects and their manifestations – which would bring us back to something like Platonic ideas or phenomenological essences as pre-existing the actual expressions of those ideas/essences/objects… A relational view would contest that: once water boils, it is boiled water (steam). Once a pair of lungs develops in the Andes (or, for that matter, becomes subject to chain smoking and comes to harbor a cancerous growth), they are Andean lungs (or cancerous lungs) – there’s nothing that stayed behind as pure/essential lungness apart from what they are, even though they share many formal and real characteristics with sea level, healthy lungs, and even though they can always become healthy and cancer-free, or sea-level-lung-like, under the proper conditions.
But when I read the next few paragraphs I realized you’re making a more subtle argument, and it’s one I can more or less agree with, especially with the Deleuzian language of virtuality. As long as the distinction is not one between an unchanging ‘object’ and its changing ‘manifestations,’ but rather between what’s carried in potentia (virtuality) and what gets actualized, with both of them being part of the object as it moves forward in time (and changes through its relations), then I’m with you.
Levi: “The point of the thesis that objects are always in excess over any of their local manifestations is that objects always have an excess of power, of what they can do, over any of their local manifestations. There’s always more in an object than any of the presentations it produces in the world.”
ai: I agree with this completely.
Levi: “Contemporary theory has been dominated by relationism and actualism for the last few decades and has found itself plagued with questions of how change is possible. Part of the reason for this lies in confusing the being of entity with local manifestation, ignoring the virtual excess of objects over any of their manifestations.”
ai: I’m not sure why relationism is to blame for this. I think what you’re arguing could be put in relational terms or in the terms you’re using. In fact, the terms you’re using sound pretty relational to me.
Levi: “Once we make room for virtual proper being, however, it becomes possible to see how shifting relations among objects also shifts local manifestations. This significantly changes the nature of the questions we ask. Moreover, once we understand that objects are acts, doings, and powers, epistemology is no longer conceived as mimesis or mirroring in representation, but as active engagement with objects to produce differential actualizations.”
ai: Again, I agree with this completely. If objects, however, are reconceived as “acts, doings and powers”, that to me sounds like what I would call processes, or at least a process-relational understanding of objects. I have no qualms with it.
Thanks, again, for clarifying.
Note to Paul: I don’t think anyone here (e.g., me or Levi) is denying that objects could exist independently of human perception. There may be some philosophers who do, but they can be pretty safely ignored, no?
One final thought (to Levi): I wonder if we run into difficulties because you’re making a distinction between “local manifestations” and what’s “in excess” of them, while I just don’t believe we can ever specify or know ALL the “local manifestations” of anything, so to me the term doesn’t really make sense. If we can’t empirically confirm whether something is a local manifestation or not, or where the “local manifestations” of an object END and something else (its “excess,” its “virtual proper being”) begins, then why bring that into our description of the world?
That’s why acknowledging our position as situated and always partial observers/participants is crucial (for me). Even with what’s closest to my own experience – my experience of having possibilities for action, of actualizing my own potentials, of being capable of agency, etc. – this difference is always one to learn about, to express in action, it’s always part of ‘my’ own becoming. It’s always a negotiated part of the world. If that’s the case for me, then I don’t feel that I should presume that it would be any different for others.
That’s why I find Whitehead’s approach appealing – because he situates subjectivity and objectivity as part of the relation of each moment, each actual occasion, which is an occasion of a world’s becoming. This applies to humans, to cats and elephants, to amoebas, to cells, and even perhaps (as far as we know) to the position of an electron within an atom – there is always a ‘gap’ or decision-point between one possiblity and another, and the crossing of that gap is the making of a feeling/perception/subjectivity/objectivity relation… What’s virtual and what’s actual can only really be known from the inside at the moment that something virtual becomes actual, i.e. as entity A ‘retrieves’ some possibility for itself and expresses it – which in turn changes the entity from A to A(1). And then to A(2), and so on.
Adrian – of course not! I should have put it differently (and this is not a comment about your work):
It is still surprising (certainly for a non philosopher) that OOO is considered a new development (i.e. considering objects and their interactions indep of human relations).
It says something about the hist of phil.
I guess physicists or ecologists think they are doing exactly this when they look at ‘particles’ interacting, or life on the Barrier Reef. ‘It’s not about us.’ (smile).
Hi Adrian,
You write:
The point is complicated here. I am committed to a distinction between substance and qualities. I’m proposing that substance is the virtual dimension of an object populated by powers and potentialities and quality is the domain of local manifestation or actualized powers. Moreover, I do hold that substance is enduring over the life of the object, though I also suspect that this depends on the types of objects we’re talking about. If objects are to be individuated by their powers, then it seems to me that there’s a big difference between living objects and inanimate objects. Living objects often develop new powers over the course of their existence whereas inanimate objects don’t. As a consequence, it seems to me that we have to make temporal considerations into account when theorizing living objects, i.e., such objects have temporal parts that overlap with one another in time accounting for why they are the same object.
At any rate, the distinction between virtuality and actuality is not a Platonic distinction, but a distinction between essence and appearance. Plato’s forms are eternal. Objects are not eternal but come into existence and pass out of existence. I also hasten to add that when I refer to essences I am not talking about types or forms shared by many members of a kind, but rather something entirely specific and unique to the entity in question. They are absolutely singular. The virtual dimension should be thought along the lines of Deleuze’s account of multiplicity or problems in Difference and Repetition.
In particular I’m thinking of the work of French theorists such as Badiou, Ranciere, Althusser, and then closely related to them thinkers like Zizek. Why is it that they feel compelled to posit a void in the form of the subject or an event to account for change? It’s because they adopt a relational account of being through their structuralism that makes it impossible for them to think how anything within a structure can doing anything other than reproduce that structure. As a consequence they feel compelled to locate a zero or void point within structure where something new can emerge.
I agree and this is one of my points: we can never know all the local manifestations of anything. However, it’s also important to note that the relation between local manifestation and virtual proper being is an ontological relation, not an epistemological relation. In other words, local manifestation is actualization of an entity in being not to a subject. Or to put it a bit differently, actualization or manifestation takes place regardless of whether there’s any sentient being there to receive it and is variable as a function of the relations the entity enters into with other entities. Of course, we are particularly interested in how our entity, humans, provoke local manifestations in objects.
Agreed. I think this insight directly follows from the sort of ontology I’m proposing. Different modes of engagement are going to produce different sorts of local manifestation in the world. Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway gives a beautiful example of this in relation to Niel Bohr’s quantum complementarity. Depending on the apparatus we use an electron will local manifest itself as either a particle or a wave. The apparatus of measurement– the object the electron enters into relation to –actualizes the electron differently and is unable to actualize both at once. How objects act on one another is thus going to produce different actualizations and thus it’s important to always keep in mind the situated nature of knowledges.
Not to belabor the point, but here again I think it’s important to attend to the way in which Western philosophy has privileged the gaze and vision in its theorization of beings. Part of the reason we think objects are composed of fixed essential qualities is because we exist in a fairly stable environment where, for us, local manifestations tend to be rather enduring. Temperature, altitude, gravity, etc., etc., etc., tend to be fairly stable in our world generating the sense that objects have a qualitative core that is always the same. If one thinks knowing primarily in terms of vision (rather than acting on objects) they’ll be led to think the being of the object in terms of a set of fixed qualities rather than a set of powers or potentials. The virtuality of the object is only discovered when the object is situated in different material contexts that lead it to manifest differently. At this point, it becomes clear that the being of the being is not a set of fixed qualities, but rather a set of powers or potentials that manifest differently when they enter into different relations.
Sorry, I feel like all these words mean something, but when put together in sentences they lose all philosophical meaning, common sense or otherwise. How can you speak of essences as being “absolutely singular”, for example? You keep using phrases like “I’m committed to the distinction X” and “I’m proposing that X” – is this what counts for philosophical argument these days (forgive my frustration)? So if Adrian proposes the opposite or says that he is committed to Y – how are we to determine who is correct?
Why is “privileging the gaze” (another expression I do not understand) bad? We are humans, we have gazes, we can imagine what the world is like from a non-human perspective but it is us who are going to do the imagining.
So if we assume that there is a traditional subject-oriented philosophy and a new object-oriented philosophy, then why should we change from the old to the new? I take Adrian’s point to be that his philosophical efforts are applied to the problem precisely because he sees why old philosophy is bad and the new philosophy is good, but what about OOP? Why should we pay attention to objects? Simply because they were previously ignored? Maybe they were ignored for a reason?
Frank,
Presumably you’re familiar with the idea of singular terms from logic, i.e., terms that refer to a specific individual. A singular essence would just be those necessary conditions for an entity to persist as that singular or specific entity. Presumably Frank at T1 and Frank are at T2 are the same Frank. There must be something of that Frank that is structurally the same. That would be the singular essence of Frank. Scotus referred to this as “haecceity”. Haecceity or singular essence differs from essence as it is often thought in that it is not a type that is common to a plurality of individuals, but the structure of a single individual that is irreversible and unique to that individual alone.
I have not made the claim that gaze is “bad”, but rather that when philosophy privileges vision as the primary mode of access to objects problems emerge. In particular, we tend to think of objects in terms of fixed properties and locations in time and space. Compare this with the experience of, for example, the cook that grapples with objects. This leads to a very different cognitive and practical experience of objects. In cooking the cook encounters the manner in which objects undergo all sorts of changes and transformations when they are mixed with other objects, when they are heated in various ways (grilling, sauteeing, boiling, steaming, etc), and so on. What the cook discovers is the object not as a set of fixed properties, but the object as a set of powers or capacities that produce very different qualities under very different conditions.
Again, part of my thesis here is that the privilege philosophy has traditionally accorded to vision has to do with the social position philosophers have generally held throughout history. The Greeks came from a slave culture. Other philosophers have tended to have a life of leisure where others do work for them. Indeed, it seems that philosophy only occurs in a society where labor is distributed and where leisure becomes possible for a certain class within that society.
I contend that this has consequences for how theory is practiced. Because philosophers themselves seldom labor in the hands on sense, because they seldom act on objects so as to produce artifacts of various sorts, philosophers tend to privilege vision or mere looking at things (a very passive modality of sense) over acting on things. This, I believe, comes to significantly inform how they pose questions of knowledge and metaphysics.
My thesis is that we know not by looking or passively gazing, but by acting on things and seeing how they respond to these actions. It’s only in this way that we discover the powers of objects. Knowledge is about what objects do and can do, not about what properties an object might present to vision. This thesis, I believe, is consistent both with the findings of developmental psychology and laboratory science. The whole point of laboratory science, for example, is to manipulate objects, to act on objects to discover what powers they have under specific conditions.
I’m really not sure what to do with your question of why we should worry about objects. I think I’ve already answered this question with reference to ecophilosophy, science and technology studies, and media studies. All of these field of investigation require an ontology of objects that isn’t centered around the human-world gap.
Levi – Thanks for your further clarifications, which I’m finding to be very clear and cogent. Your mention of Badiou, Ranciere, Althusser, and Zizek is also very helpful, as that gives me a better idea of where the criticisms of relationism’s inability to account for change are coming from.
The one (and really only, I think) point at which I still want to intervene is when you say:
“In other words, local manifestation is actualization of an entity in being not to a subject. Or to put it a bit differently, actualization or manifestation takes place regardless of whether there’s any sentient being there to receive it […]”
Here again I find it difficult to conceive of a situation where there would be actualization without a relation of some kind (i.e. a being/entity actualizing on its own). So saying it’s “in being” and not “to a subject” sounds odd to me, in part because I find it difficult to separate “a subject” from the relation within which subjectivity arises. That relation always includes a certain materiality and ‘objectivity’ and some kind of interactive dynamic. ‘My’ subjectivity, for instance, requires a body with specific sense organs and things to perceive through them, a history of formative experiences relating to others through gesture, language, and so on, and certain intermittent qualities such as (probably) wakefulness as opposed to a deep sleep. But other entities can have their own very different forms of ‘subjectivity’, though they might be so different from mine that traditional philosophy wouldn’t necessarily recognize them under that name.
I guess that I favor the idea that ‘a subject’ doesn’t really exist as a persistent and separate entity, but rather that subjectivity arises and persists in relation to certain material processes, perceived objects, etc. In my view, it’s not possible to carve the universe up into subjects and objects, with some entities (like humans) on one side of the line and others (like rocks) on the other.
That’s a long-winded response to a minor detail in what you’ve written. The rest I find persuasive, even if it uses a different conceptual vocabulary (at times) than the one I would favor.
Levi, thanks for your explanation. I’m sorry if my comment was somewhat rude and impatient. I appreciate that you take time to respond. I think I understand your position much better now. I find these issues to be very thought-provoking and therefore sometimes I get too involved in thinking about them.
You say: “My thesis is that we know not by looking or passively gazing, but by acting on things and seeing how they respond to these actions.”
I think this make sense to me, I understand what you’re trying to say. I realize that in order to clarify why your position is new and important, you have to contrast it with older positions, but certainly this (we know by acting, not by passively observing) is not a new idea, is it? Who ever said that we only learn about objects/world by passively gazing at them/it? To discover the characteristics of water, we don’t gaze at it, we boil it. I don’t quite agree with your characterization of philosophers as leisurely class at such (as you well know, they only became such a class when they became professional university lecturers, like Kant), but for what it’s worth, I see your point. So, if I can be so bold, how is your reflections on the nature of objects different from all the other leisurely reflections, since, if I understand correctly, you are a philosopher – how do you actively discover what objects are like? Are you thinking of abandoning philosophy and getting involved in something more active and less leisurely? I mean do I read your comment as suggesting that we must stop doing theory (ontology) and get our hands dirty with actual scientific work (practice)? Again, no offense but most people in this conversation (here, on your blog and elsewhere) are either professors or graduate students (future professors) – how is this a new break from an old lazy leisurely philosophy?
I think I understand your point about the value of an ontology of objects – my questions were poorly phrased. I still don’t understand how previous ontologies of objects failed in the tasks that you are proposing the new ontology of objects will succeed at? Surely, you are not saying that people before OOP never paid attention to objects?
The difficulty I have with “onticology” is its very unfortunate association with “oncology” (the word i always hear when I read it).
May Neologisms abound.