Levi Bryant has proposed a ceasefire on the objects/relations debate, and followed that up with a nice post calling for self-moderation of our more confrontational urges and for a more affirmative writing (and blogging) style that would render the form of our writing more consonant with its content. I’m all for the latter; it’s something I try to practice when I’m not too overcome by impatience (which is easy to get in the heatedness of online exchanges like these). As for a ceasefire, we aren’t of course at war, but stepping back and holding our metaphorical fire makes sense, and could even be timely given the agreements that Levi and I, at least, seem to have reached (which I’ll spell out in a moment). It’s become clear to me over the last year and a half or so of discussions with Levi that while he responds to things heatedly, he always comes back in friendly and generous demeanor, and I value that quality in him.
As for those points of agreement — anyone wanting to trace how these arose can read backwards from his reply to my comment to his reply to my reply to his reply to Chris’s replies to our replies to each other, probably starting with my attractions of process post (!!) — they are these:
(1) That Whitehead’s “prehensions” are very similar to Bryant’s “translations.” On “translations” Bryant writes:
1) that each and every entity translates the world in its own particular way, and 2) that the manner in which an entity translates another entity is never identical to the identity [entity?] translated. There are thus three dimensions to every translation: the translated, the translation, and the translator. The translated is the entity being translated. The translation is how that entity is translated. The translator is the entity doing the translating.
This first part applies to Whitehead’s prehensions as well, and the second is a virtual paraphrase of the definition of prehension that I had quoted from Whitehead:
(xi) That every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the ‘subjective form’ which is how that subject prehends the datum.
I don’t at all mind using the Latourian term “translation” instead of “prehension,” and not only for the sake of mediating the differences, but because Latour is close to my heart as well.
(2) That Whitehead’s “societies” are rather similar to Bryant’s “objects.” (Societies are the persistent, self-sustaining entities that structure the Whiteheadian cosmos; they consist of interacting sets of actual occasions.) Tracing this agreement is a little more complicated, but if one follows Levi’s one-paragraph sub-section on “Fault lines and the exteriority of relations” in this post down through my comment(#5) and his reply (#8) where he states that “The last paragraph of your response here is what I’ve been saying,” it becomes clear that we agree that objects (in Levi’s terminology), or societies (in Whitehead’s), can persist in spite of the fact that their relational constituents (prehensions, translations) may change. (Perhaps the term “constituent” wouldn’t be the precise OOO characterization, but it’s close enough for now.)
There are differences, to be sure, but these are generative, productive differences that arise from the two approaches’ different starting points: the “experiential event” based universe of Whitehead versus the more substantialist universe of OOO. So while OOO’s translations (relations) are seen as distinct from the objects themselves, Whitehead sees prehensions as integral to societies, not in the sense that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between prehensions and societies, but in the sense that without prehensions societies couldn’t exist; they are necessary but not sufficient for the existence of a society.
Another difference that I think we will continue working on, each in our respective ways, has to do with the role of semiosis. But this, too, seems more a matter of emphasis than genuine disagreement. Following Peirce, I take semiosis to be integral to experience “all the way down,” and I rely on the growing body of work in biosemiosis, zoosemiosis, and related fields to make this case. Levi, with respect to the linguistic and semiotic, argues that OOO advocates a shift in the understanding of language and meaning from “unilateral determination” (with an anthropocentric reference point) to a Latourian kind of “composition.” This is an idea I can get fully behind as well, and it’s one that’s compatible with a broadened, Peircian understanding of semiosis. (In fact, I once wrote an article advocating a shift from “deconstruction” to “decomposition” based on more or less the same rationale for which Latour later introduced the term “composition.” That piece, delivered at the founding conference of the World Forum on Acoustic Ecology and published in Musicworks 64, isn’t available digitally, though the music that accompanied it is (warning: wma file, or available from my music page), but it’ll be reworked into Ecologies of Identity once I get back around to that manuscript.)
So while there remain productive differences between our approaches, these are not as fundamental as they sometimes appear, and they make our conversations stimulating. Those conversations will, I think, be even richer once Levi’s Democracy of Objects and Chris Vitale’s, Steven Shaviro’s, and my current work are out in published forms.
With that, I’m heading back to grading (procrastination is all too easy), and then writing.
Someone in Australia seems to have put the original version of that Banff acoustic ecology conference talk online (you can google it if you want), but it’s one of those things that seem embarrassing in retrospect (it’s about 18 years old). The published version, which came out 3 years after the conference, was almost entirely rewritten and much better. The issue of Musicworks was a good one, if you can find it, with some good stuff on musical anarchism, composer James Tenney (one of my composition teachers), and more. I may make a pdf of it, but it will be much better still in the book version.
As for the music you hear on that wma file, it’s part 4 of Resurrected Fields, a long electroacoustic track I composed (or ‘comprovised’) in the early 1990s loosely mapping the rise and decline of industrial civilization (tt’s not technophobic – part 3 is enjoyable in a trancey-maximalist kind of way), part 4 being the hopeful/restful aftermath, electronic crickets and vibrant green hum and all. One of the things I was trying to recreate was the sound of factories humming in the distance where I grew up in suburban Toronto. I trust you’ll find the process-relational and objectological implications all too obvious.
It’s all about reterritorialization. Smooth, insectoid reterritorialization…
[…] now, considering the usual round of blog-squabble recently, here, here, here and here pertaining Whitehead and OOO. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe this to be the fault of the […]
Hi,
I appreciate your attempt to see what is similar about your two positions. But I think ultimately OOO is going to argue that actual occasions are individual substances. So there won’t be agreement. In this way, the task would be to show (if one can) that actual occasions differ as occasions/events from substance and cannot be construed as such. In addition, as Harman attacks the actual occasions/societies distinction precisely to further this end one would have to show the difference in taking a tree for example as occasion and a tree as society. Don’t forget Whitehead also distinguishes between a nexus/society.
What’s interesting about Harman is that he is brave enough to actually try to establish his position and to do so clearly and directly. Most would just take it for granted that there are things such as trees, quarks, the wind, Popeye, etc. and then proceed to discuss what their substantiality consists. But Harman actually tries to demonstrate that the in itself is structured by individual substance. I believe the grounding of his position fails. But I would be curious to hear what you think.
From my survey of his work, I find 2-4 arguments. One near the end of the Latour book in the analysis of a tree, one in the Asymmetrical Causation essay, one in the blogs, and one that floats around (in the sense that I hear other OOO people talk this way).
Let’s take the one that floats around first. This would be that since my phenomenological experience of a cube or coin is such that always one profile eludes me (if I see one side, I cannot see the other at the same time) shows that the cube or coin transcends my consciousness. But the claim is not that we invented the coin in our imaginations. Just because my own consciousness is structured by presence and absence shows that I am taking in something from the outside. It does not show that outside must itself be structured by objects. In fact, I may only have such a partial take on whatever is in itself that it might simply be a blur of processes that I myself congeal into a cube. Also the sensuous object cannot be fully withdrawn for Harman, otherwise the distinction between real and sensuous also breaks down (this distinction itself is of course a moment of critique not just in terms of primary/secondary qualities, but in terms of a deconstructionist critique of the whole tree as immanent object versus tree in itself distinction). Also due to the intentional object always being there means that even if it has an indefinite number of profiles, it is not infinite as the face of the Other is for Levinas (note his analysis in Totality and Infinity).
This dovetails with the argument from the blog. Here, Harman is fond of saying that my knowledge of a tree is not a tree. The tree transcends this knowledge. First, once again it shows that for Kant as per Heidegger’s reading in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics that the issue is the receptive nature of imagination and the passivity that marks us in our finitude. It does not show that the in itself is structured by individual substances. Second, it is not clear that the remark is true. Even without referring to God, one can refer to The Matrix, Star Trek holodeck, minds in vats, etc. Here, one is given the same exact experience of a tree we have phenomenologically that Harman points to. Neo sees, feels, etc. a tree that grows, drops leaves, bears fruit, etc. But the entire thing is made possible via the computer code of the robots. This code itself is ultimately not made up of objects, but of relations such as 0/1.
At the end of the Latour book, Harman analyzes a tree. P art of his point is to try to show that things other than humans have experience (I believe it comes in or around the section on pan-psychism). Here, he seems to argue that because there are many different perspectives on what appears to be the same thing shows there must be a thin in itself. But it is not clear first that in all perspectives there is a thing. First, the wind blows by the tree. But might just feel resistance/non-resistance. No thing. That it is possible that in some cases no thing manifests itself would suggest that the in itself is more fundamentally something other than things. As the thing only appears in specified encounters. That means it may be the observer rather than the observed that makes for the thing.
Finally, take a look at the essay Asymmetrical Causation. Here we find an argument that because there are observers, the real in itself must be structured by individual substances. But there is no reason to believe anything other than a human even experience as the same observer throughout different experiences.
I appreciate you reading this post. Let me know what you think.
Noah – Thanks for the great question (and summary of Harman’s different arguments)… Here’s a very quick response, which is all I can give for the moment.
I’m inclined to think of the exteriority of things (what is seen, felt, prehended of them by others) as substantial and objective, and of their interiority as experiential. Things like trees in and for themselves are ‘societies’ and/or ‘nexus’ – structured and persistent (autopoietic) sets of spatially and/or temporally connected occasions that may or may not have central coordination and a (more or less) unified internal experience (as opposed to a multiplicity of internal experiences, one for each actual occasion that makes it up). But to an outsider (you, me, a frog, the wind?) the tree is a substantive object, or not, depending on how we each prehend it. Our experience of it doesn’t directly affect what it is in and for itself. So what Neo sees and feels is part of Neo’s experience, not part of the tree’s. If the tree is an actual tree, it may have an experience of Neo; and if it’s a computer generated projection, it probably won’t.
How that squares with Harman’s views I’m not sure. He defines objects and substance differently than I would. (In fact I’m not quite sure how I define substance… I vacillate between a few different concepts of it…)
But I also try to think of all this in wave/particle terms… Things in themselves are waves – events, or societies of occasions gushing forth into being. They are also particles – objects – when viewed a certain way, e.g. the way I view a tree (but not necessarily the way the wind does, or the way I would view water if I was a fish), but also the way I view *myself*. The particles are artifacts of the wave process, but they are not unreal; they are in fact as real as the ‘waves,’ just as mind is as real as matter, etc.
Not sure if that answers your question directly or not…
A little more on this: I follow the more or less Whiteheadian idea that objectification and subjectification are constituents of every occasion of experience. Trees are objects insofar as they are prehended by me or by someone else *as such*, and they may in turn prehend me, or – let’s be more realistic here – they may prehend the sun as an object (for instance, something to move toward). But their objectivity (to me and others) and their subjectivity (i.e. trees as subjective experiencers themselves, if they are this in a unified way) is processual in nature. What’s really *substantial* in this interpretation – what makes up the substance of the world – is the circulating dynamic of interactive process, the prehensions/concrescences arising in response to each other, etc.
So substance *is* process. The perception of *fixed* substantiality (e.g. that the landscape of trees and fields and factories around me is fixed in place, or that “I” am an unchanging core of my own mental/bodily perception) is the product of a series of processes that have become ingrained and habituated over time. But at its heart it is processual and unfixed; it is made up of actual occasions connected together in particular ways.
This, I suspect, is completely different from the way Harman would define substance.
Hi Adrian,
Thanks for the reply. I appreciate your taking the time to read what I wrote.
I was mostly just curious if you thought my critique of what I take to be the central argument(s) underpinning Harman’s move towards seeing the real in itself as being structured by individual substances works. From your postings and list of blog topics, I took that you are engaged in debates with OOO and well read in his works and thereby might be able and interested in seeing if I am onto something.
If I understand your own position you are claiming that an outside perspective sees a substantial thing
But I am not sure the computer generated tree can be seen in the way you suggest. First off, Harman’s position is based on beginning from within the Husserlian circle of intentional consciousness. From within that circle, there is no way to differentiate between what Neo experiences and what you and I do. I do not know that anyone is claiming that people that one’s own experience is also another’s. Perhaps Spinoza might claim my experience and yours are all affects of the one substance. But otherwise most would say we cannot directly access the experiences of others. In any event, Neo would try to make the same claims that Harman does, but be wrong as the tree is just ultimately 0/1. Talking about it as a substance would only make sense insofar as it can be talked about in terms of the immanent objectivity of intentionality.
I do not have a problem with saying that we apprehend a tree as substantive. But OOO for instance wants to claim that is only the sensuous/intentional thing and to claim that the in itself is also structured by such substances. Here, it is saying we can say what the tree is in and for itself and that it is no different than us or anything else—an individual substance that interacts with other self-contained individual substances.
You write: ‘Our experience of it doesn’t directly affect what it is in and for itself.’ Here, I think someone like Whitehead would disagree. For Whitehead, perception is not passive. It is ontologically constitutive. The act of perceiving a tree affects it. Its cells perceiving and interacting also constitute it. For instance, if too many water molecules perceive an object at once it may shrink. But I am curious to hear what you would say.
You also write: ‘If the tree is an actual tree, it may have an experience of Neo; and if it’s a computer generated projection, it probably won’t.’ I won’t be curious as to hear why since the from Neo’s perspective the two are identical. The way you clarify this issue might also help me sharpen my view on Harman. Keep in mind I am also citing the Star Trek Holodeck as part of the thought experiment.
I like your characteristic of things in wave/particle terms. It I think shows us why OOO needs a stronger argument. Because this alternative on the face of it seems more plausible (although not to the natural attitude). But I wonder here what the metaphysical/ontological argument for arguing that the real in itself must be structured that way. That is to say, I wonder what key argument one would have to present not only to show that the real in itself must be structured this way (rather than another), but that one can know that claim or make it with some reasonable surety. I have been reading through Whithead as I am guessing he does provide that. But I am not yet confident to articulate his view. If you feel you can, I would be fascinated to hear.
Thanks again for taking the time to engage with me.
Noah:)
Hi Adrian,
I only now saw your 2nd posting to me. It appears we were typing at the same time.
I agree with your characterization of a process philosophy approach on substance, process, prehension, etc. Here, what interests me is the key argument that shows one view is right over the other rather than it being a matter of taste or even just what seems to cohere the best or offers the best tools for analysis.
As in my first post I try to note Harman’s key point. I would be curious to hear what you see as Whitehead or any other process philosopher’s or your own (as well of course still if you think my critique of Harman works).
noah:)
Hi Adrian,
No need to rush in replying. I understand what it is to be busy.
In the meantime, let me lay out to you what I mean by a fundamental argument. Now I am not saying that one is necessarily going to be convinced by such an argument rather than the coherence of a theory, what it allows one to do, if it confirms to other beliefs or not, that we do not abandon some theories simply because we become uninterested in their questions, etc. But we cannot really say we even understand a theory if we cannot articulate its main motivating argument for making the key moves it wants. Also, even if we use an argument to make interesting points or develop fun rhetoric, we may simply be basing things on a house of cards that crumbles in a moment.
It would easy to exemplify what I mean using Descartes since he lays everything out for us. But I think a better and simpler example comes with Plato. Many people can tell you Plato thinks there are ideal forms versus a world of shadowy things, etc. But what’s key is understanding his argumentation behind this theory to truly understand it. Obviously in the Phaedo we get such an argument. We see things that appear in equal. But everything we have seen since birth is constantly changing, sometimes one way sometimes another, nothing is perfectly what it is, etc. Yet we have this idea of equality. This idea is not changing. If it were, it would contradict itself. Equality must always be perfectly equal. So we cannot get the idea from sensory experience. It must be that we were souls before we came into this world. That we contacted this idea in itself. That we are now remembering what we forgot.
What I am suggesting is that I have isolated such a key argument in Harman (and interested in hearing if you think I am right and if my critique of that argument is right). And also, given the process philosophy you lay out on this blog, if you see there being such a key argument for your position and/or Whitehead Process Thought.
noah:)
[…] perception-signs allows me to address some recent debates surrounding semiotics. In a recent post, Ivakhiv writes, Another difference that I think we will continue working on, each in our respective ways, has to […]