I’m looking forward to Graham Harman’s forthcoming review of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and I’m glad to see that this discussion between object-oriented philosophy and Bennett’s vibrant materialism (and, by extension, the other theoretical impulses she draws on, which this blog, for the most part, enthusiastically shares) is getting underway. That discussion will no doubt continue over the summer as this blog, Critical Animal, Philosophy in a Time of Error, and maybe a few others engage in a collective reading of Bennett’s book. (Perhaps that should be followed by a group reading of Tim Morton’s new book, The Ecological Thought.)
While Graham’s argument that relationism is “a spent force” is obviously not one that will convince the growing number of scholars drawing in productive ways on relational theories (Whitehead’s, Deleuze’s, Bergson’s, Simondon’s, Latour’s, Serres’s, Stengers’s, et al), he’s entitled to make that case. He summarizes his objection here in this way:
“I don’t think the problem with correlationism is simply that it’s human and world, as though bringing non-humans in can fix things. Shifting from (cor)relationism to simple relationism is already a refreshing step, but still leaves the central problem untouched. There are too many pitfalls that arise when you think a thing is only what it is for other things, without reserve. [emphasis added]
“Why don’t more people see this? I think it’s because the realism of autonomous objects still sounds boring to people. It sounds as if one is defending a sterile landscape of essentialist billiard balls and eternal solid forms that engage in relations only through trivial and fleeting incidents.
“Towards a non-boring realism…”
I’ll agree that the “realism of autonomous objects” can sound boring, and I’m supportive of anyone who tries to make it sound less so (which Graham does, and very well). My only concern is that once one admits that these autonomous objects engage in relations not only “through trivial and fleeting incidents,” but in all manner of ways, and all the time — that things are always engaged in relations and are defined by the history of relational couplings and interactions that make them up — then the relational dimension starts to overtake the “objective” in its significance.
Let’s think for a minute: At what point do I, or did I, become an object? When an egg was fertilized by a sperm in my mother’s body? Or when I emerged from that body at birth? The latter would be a reasonable starting point, since the bodily separation is a defining moment, both physically and (usually) culturally. But surely I couldn’t exist for long on my own after that. Or was it when I learned to take my place within society as such and such a person, distinguished from others through the Lacanian mirror stage and over the course of a long socialization? But again, Lacan’s point is that this “I” is thoroughly relationally defined. So it would have to come back to the body. And yet does an ontology focused on bodily separation, aside from seeming a bit dated, tell us much of interest about life, the world, and how we could and should deal with them? I’m intrigued by the idea of an object-centered ethics, but I’m not sure what it would bring to the ruling liberal-democratic mix of utilitarianism and deontology — which are their own kinds of “democracies of objects” already — that isn’t already there in principle unless one adds a substantial dose of relationalism.
(By “there in principle,” I mean that each offers resources for non-anthropocentric ethics, resources that have been pushed beyond the human realm by environmental and animal-rights philosophers like Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Paul Taylor, and others. As ethical theories, deontology and utilitarianism are, of course, about relations — or at least about how to decide the relative virtues of alternative courses of action concerning relations — but their focus is on the duties, or consequences of actions, to specific kinds of entities. They are not really about the quality or character or feel of a relation. And I’m not sure what an object-oriented ontology would add to them in that respect unless it were to emphasize the “feel” of relations between specific kinds of objects — between a golf club and a golf ball, or whatever. Relationism, on the other hand, is all about the forces, the flows, the affects and contagions, the enablings and disablings, openings and closings, gatherings and dispersions, connections and resistances, within the movements that we find ourselves caught up in, wherever we are.)
I see no reason to defend one end of the relational spectrum over the other — the object over the flow, or vice versa. But it seems to me that when relations are made central to ontology, then the question becomes one of parsing out the different forms of relative stability and change one finds in the world (with the more stable over time, and over their developmental histories, being those we could call “objects”), the different kinds of relations one can enter into, and so on. On the other hand, when objects are made central, this dynamism is lost at the outset and has to be brought back in through redefinition, clarification, qualification, and so on. Redefining the world as made up exclusively of objects, with no subjectivity, seems a non-starter to me, since that would eliminate agency, experience, feeling and responsiveness from the whole picture. At the same time, redefining it as made up of things that are “only what [they are] for other things, without reserve” — the line I’ve emphasized in the above quote from Graham — also doesn’t make sense. Far from being a description of relationalism (as I understand it), that actually sounds like the traditional definition of an “object,” something that lacks any subjectivity or the capacity for it.
All of that only strengthens the case for a view in which relational processes — processes of subject/object-ivation — are taken as central. Whitehead’s redefinition of objects and subjects as specific to the occasion in which their objectivation and subjectivation (mutually) occur gets us out of the dualistic trap that sees the world as divided between objects and subjects, with entities falling, by definition, into one category or the other (e.g., humans or minds as subjects, and everything else as objects). It allows us to get into the moment so as to better identify the point of agency, the subjective feeling or “prehension” that, by virtue of responsive action or decision, becomes “satisfied” in the event of “concrescence” that is the “actual occasion.” And it also makes it plain that everything — every event that makes up an eventful universe — is like this, to a greater or lesser degree. Feeling, experience, and agency (and meaning/significance/semiosis, once one adds Peirce to the picture) are writ through all things. They are certainly not exclusive to humans.
Ontology, however, is to my mind just a starting point. We do our best to make sense of things — to ontologize and epistemologize — in order that we may act within the world in ways that are more aesthetically, ethically, and rationally pleasing, informed, and coherent. (I’m following a Peircian triad there, with aesthetics as our response to the firstness of things, ethics as our response to the secondness, that is, to those who impact us and whom we interact with, and reason as our way of thinking through the patterns and regularities, the thirdness, of the world.) Ontology informs our action, but getting stuck on ontology is ultimately beside the point. So when I think about why a relational ethic, aesthetic, and ontology are attractive to me, it’s because I experience the world as one of relations, one in which I feel and act in response to what happens to me and near me. Knowing how one object differs from another (or how they are similar) is important, but ultimately what counts is how we relate and what we do with our lives (the “our” being a relation, and the “lives” being relational processes). Pace Graham, I don’t think there’s anything “spent” or out of date about that.
There is also no reason why we shouldn’t have postmortal existence…would we then be an ‘object’ in your terms (i.e. objects as physical things)..?
As I mention in PoS ‘objects’ used to be ‘subjects’ – ‘objects’ arose as that of which we are aware ‘objected to thought.’ – now there’s correlationism!
But surely we can have objects which are not reducible to their relations, but are dependent on things other than themselves. Or cannot be understood apart from them (the eye and light).
A related topic would be whether we think ‘we’ or ‘I’ am brought into existence by my parents – the question of emergence..does the psyche emerge from the body. Crocco has an article on this ‘On Minds’ Location’. In this tradition one cannot locate a mind, only it’s site of interaction.
excuse the truncated posts. Travelling…
I paste the link to the Crocco article for all inquiring minds:
http://cogprints.org/4662/1/localization_of_minds.pdf
I was struck by the observation that ‘space’ is derivative, not primary, and being created all the time…
Funny, I once thought pace meant ‘following’ rather than its opposite, ‘against’.
Paul – Thanks for the Trocco link. Your point that “‘objects’ used to be ‘subjects'” is compatible with Whitehead’s understanding (though it’s more complicated than that). And I agree with you that “we can have objects which are not reducible to their relations, but are dependent on things other than themselves”. In a process-relational view, since relations are always in process, it would be meaningless to try to “reduce” something to its relations…
Re: space as derivative, I didn’t intend to imply that. As for ‘pace,’ my understanding of that Latin word is that it doubles for “with all due respect to.”
I’ve always felt that the ever-retreating object is nothing more than a projection of the ideological doctrine of the human soul, and that this untouchable “objecthood” is a stand-in for an essential isolation from relations. That this “objecthood” is then projected onto all things in the world makes it one of the most anthropomorphic, anthropocentric metaphysical models possible, making “object-oriention” something of a misnomer.
This is a very succinct collection of questions which object-oriented ontology should answer. You give a very elegant defense of relationalism, especially in your closing paragraph. I do think, however, that object-oriented thought can do all of the things you want relationism to do, and more. First, OOO doesn’t diminish the subject for the objective, nor does it simply raise all objects to the level of subjects. “Object” is really, following Harman, a boring term. It’s a boring signifier, given the place it has been demoted to in relation to the Subject. But all of this is wrong, I think. OOO’s object isn’t boring at all — it is everything you speak of. It is dynamic in its activity, it is kaleidoscopic in its dialogue with its environment and other objects, it is dizzying and hot in its seductive agency and as cold and distant as a star with its reserve of potency and energy. OOO doesn’t diminish the human subject, either. It wants to treat the human subject as it treats all real entities — in all of its glorious, ecstatic potential and worldly relationships. Also, perhaps more importantly, it wants to decentralize and deconstruct this precise dichotomy you critique between the human subject and “everything else.” For OOO, there isn’t the subject and object, there is only “everything else.”
If there is any point to political thought or activity, surely OOO is a champion of it, because it says categorically that the concrete economic, political, social and material situation is not fossilized into unbreakable relationships, and though these situations appear quite inescapable, OOO says that it is only because there is excess, there is untapped reservoirs deep in the heart of all the entities in these situations, that we are not condemned to that status quo. It is trying to say that these relationships do not determine our existence. We have to have the courage to realize that dark reservoir of the human-object, the human-entity, and that we can act in ways these relationships don’t exhaust. But, at the same time, OOO is deeply honest about this endeavor: if we are to change the world and not simply describe it, we have to realize we are not sovereign, but in concert with a near phantasmagorical array of worlds upon worlds, of an near infinity of agents and actors which do not bow to our languages or thoughts, each an ontological reservoir of power and relation. But, OOO seems very bright to me, that it says that we can transcend the relationships that we are stuck in, be they economic, political, linguistic or otherwise, because we are not absolutely defined by them. I see OOO as offering a kind of challenging optimism when it comes to questions of agency and freedom. Challenging, because this will require great work, as Levi calls it, a real cartography of situations. It means, I think, great attention to the sciences, to sociology and economic investigation, and to not simply take the objects and their reality for granted (which, I think, correlationism seems to promote a kind of indifference to the concrete life and full-bodied independence of entities as they are). OOO is just beginning, and your questions are something that I think will require time and thought and real engagement with these entities and situations.
As I see it, OOO is not privileging the static over the process — it is trying to investigate precisely how an entity is both itself in process and more than this process. It is trying to offer an ontology worthy of the entity itself, as it both changes, is open to change, and remains an entity. If you want, OOO seems to unveil the inherent subjectivity of all objects, not in any anthropomorphic sense, but in the sense of what we have traditionally (since Kant) imagined as belonging purely to humanity — that each entity actively interprets each other entity according to its own inherent structure or power, but without losing itself in that doing. Or, that like our own subjectivity, each entity withdraws from the relations that it is in, such that it is always capable of new actualizations. I don’t see any diminishment or depletion or reduction of either human-entity or nonhuman-entity in this.
Sorry to be so long-winded, but I very much agree with the sentiment of your post and the direction of your concerns and felt that OOO can and, really, is proffering, what I think are, strong and tenacious arguments in answer to these questions. In any case, I agree completely with Harman: we need an enjoyable and engrossing realism of objects that does justice to the adventure of the objects themselves. I think this is happening over the blogosphere and in the margins of academia, already.
Joseph – Thanks for your enthusiastic defense of OOO. I think what you’re describing really is where Graham and Levi are trying to go, and I don’t mean to take that away from them. If anything, I hope my questioning helps them work out a few of the kinks in their ontologies.
you write:
“OOO’s object [. . .] is dynamic in its activity, it is kaleidoscopic in its dialogue with its environment and other objects, it is dizzying and hot in its seductive agency and as cold and distant as a star with its reserve of potency and energy. [. . .] [OOO] wants to treat the human subject as it treats all real entities — in all of its glorious, ecstatic potential and worldly relationships. Also, perhaps more importantly, it wants to decentralize and deconstruct this precise dichotomy you critique between the human subject and “everything else.” For OOO, there isn’t the subject and object, there is only “everything else.””
This is beautifully put, and I find the first sentence to be on a par with Harman’s and Bryant’s most captivating writing. As I’ve said before (here and on Levi’s blog), my discomfort mainly arises from the outward appearances of OOO – e.g., some of its basic terminology (like “object-oriented”, which suggests an everyday understanding of “objects” rather than the subtle and nuanced definitions they provide), its emphases (which I may be wrong about, since I haven’t read all their writing and since their work is evolving all the time in any case), and occasional offhand claims for itself and against others (i.e., relationists). Once we get into the details, I find their thinking to be very rich and productive – and exciting, as you clearly demonstrate.
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