{"id":1119,"date":"2009-09-11T17:03:54","date_gmt":"2009-09-11T22:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/11\/more-on-harman-or-whats-outside-the-system-of-relations\/"},"modified":"2009-09-11T17:03:54","modified_gmt":"2009-09-11T22:03:54","slug":"more-on-harman-or-whats-outside-the-system-of-relations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/11\/more-on-harman-or-whats-outside-the-system-of-relations\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Harman, or what’s outside the system of relations?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"navigator.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The level of discussion following my review\/critique of Harman’s Prince of Networks<\/em>, along with Harman’s brief but welcome response<\/a>, has encouraged me to post a few more thoughts about this difference between “relationalism” and “objectology” (my term for a central part of his object-oriented philosophy or ontology), that is, between a view that holds that the world is constituted by “relations all the way down”, and a view that admits the world is characterized by relations (of all sorts) but asserts that each entity has an essential non-relational essence. (Thanks to Mark Crosby for his eloquent summary of the dispute in the comments to the last post.) Harman’s reply<\/a> raises a couple of issues I’d like to address at a little more length.<\/p>\n


\nGH writes: “But that doesn\u2019t mean that people and things only are what they are by virtue of the specific relations in which they are now involved.”<\/p>\n

Relationist responds: It’s not just the relations in which a thing is now<\/em><\/b> involved, but the relations that have shaped those relations, and back, all the way down. And because the relations that have shaped ‘me’ at any given moment are different from the relations that have shaped ‘you’ at that moment, it doesn’t all wash out in a big holistic stew (as GH would have it). Identity, or object-constancy, is still possible because the set of relations at a given nodal point can retain enough consistency to maintain a certain sense of sameness over time. But this is a perception that’s conditional on maintaining certain relations over time. (In this sense, the self is a temporal and historical construct, devoid, as Buddhists would say, of intrinsic or inherent identity. By no means does this suggest that we do not carry forward certain memories, understandings, sensibilities, and so on, for long periods of time, and that these can’t “disappear” and “reappear” to our consciousness.)<\/p>\n

GH concludes his reply by saying that “Only because something in me is not fully expressed by anything that happens can anything new ever happen to me.” To which Relationist replies: that “something in me” may be “not fully expressed” does not negate the relational nature of those “things in me”. Things making up “me” are carried through moment-to-moment — some of them get expressed in a manifest way, others get expressed — or perhaps “impressed” is a better way of putting it — in a ‘latent’ way, for instance, as a longing, a desire, a feeling of unfulfillment, and the like. (These don’t need to be consciously felt, since a ‘person’, and all the more so a non-personal object, is always more, perhaps much more, than what they may grasp in their ‘consciousness’ at any given moment.) These ‘gaps,’ if you like, build up so that when an opportunity for a certain kind of new relation arises, there’s a sort of pressure that shifts things in that direction, and you have novelty.<\/p>\n

So perhaps the dispute here is between those (like Whitehead, Deleuze, Connolly, et al) who hold that novelty comes from within <\/em>the system of relations (and then proceed to define what that system of relations is, how it works, what its relative insides and outsides are, e.g. Deleuze’s virtual\/actual, etc.) — versus those who hold that novelty arises from outside <\/em>that system of relations. The latter group includes GH’s non-relational (or not-reducible-to-relations) objectology, as well as psychological essentialisms, transcendentalist theisms, et al. From a relationalist perspective, the onus should be on these more-than-relationalists to specify what <\/em>is outside the system and how it interacts with what’s inside. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age <\/em> provides a good example of a transcendental theism which, in my reading, fails to define transcendence in a satisfying and coherent way, but rather hints at it with words like “fullness” and (when he’s being honest) “God.” Similarly, Harman doesn’t, to my satisfaction, define what his non-relational essence is. If it’s non-relational, is that because it’s never <\/em>been related to anything? In that case, where does it come from? Obviously, it can’t be that – so what is it? Where is it? And how does it relate<\/em><\/b> with the relational?<\/p>\n

There are those, like Derrida, or Heidegger in his poetic earth\/gods\/self-withdrawing moments, who admit they can’t say anything positive about what the outside-the-system is — and yet still proceed to point to it in evocative ways. Derrida might even claim that there is no outside, even as the system is always said to be slipping as if into a black hole that neither is there nor isn’t there. This is all consistent with the venerable tradition of apophatic<\/a> thought or ‘negative theology.’ In my reading, there’s a Harman who leans in this poetic-deconstructive direction as well, the Harman of ever-withdrawing tool-being and of ‘time, space, essence, and eidos’ — let’s call him Harman-x — and the interesting question for me is how the relationship between Harman-x and Harman-o, the objectologist, will unfold.<\/p>\n

The better relationalists, however, like Deleuze and Whitehead, don’t need <\/em>an ‘outside-the-system’ because their systems are already bursting full of radical openings in every moment. Neither Deleuze nor Whitehead can reasonably be accused of trying to make it impossible for novelty to arise (can they?); both, of course, were obsessed precisely by novelty and creativity, which is what makes them so exciting to those who haven’t found a satisfactory source for novelty\/creativity in traditional (dualistic, transcendental, Kantian, et al) metaphysical systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The level of discussion following my review\/critique of Harman’s Prince of Networks, along with Harman’s brief but welcome response, has encouraged me to post a few more thoughts about this difference between “relationalism” and “objectology” (my term for a central part of his object-oriented philosophy or ontology), that is, between a view that holds that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977,4422],"tags":[228,16805,16807,16789,423],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-process-relational-thought","tag-deleuze","tag-harman","tag-relationalism","tag-speculative-realism","tag-whitehead"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-i3","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1120,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/18\/relations-vs-objects-part-x\/","url_meta":{"origin":1119,"position":0},"title":"relations vs. objects, part x","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm glad to see that Steven Shaviro and Levi Bryant have stepped into the fray of the debate over the relative virtues of object-centered versus relation-centered ontologies. (Among others, e.g. kvond, Peter Gratton, Graham Harman of course, and see the commenters to Levi's posts on Harman and Whitehead). With some\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/02\/28\/process-objects-at-the-nonhuman-turn\/","url_meta":{"origin":1119,"position":1},"title":"Process-objects at The Nonhuman Turn","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The preliminary schedule is out for The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies. The list of speakers reads like a \"who's who\" of the neo-ontological, speculative-realist crowd in cultural and media theory: Steven Shaviro, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Mark Hansen, Ian Bogost, and Tim Morton are among the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1230,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/04\/06\/space-junk-the-relational-real\/","url_meta":{"origin":1119,"position":2},"title":"space junk & the (relational) Real","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 6, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wzUYiOV2-kE?fs=1&hl=en_US (This post spun off from the last, where I concluded by noting the increasing amount of debris out in the upper atmosphere. Somehow I couldn't resist pulling that image into the vortex of ecopolitics and the objects-relations debate, which is carrying on at hyper tiling, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Larval Subjects,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/wzUYiOV2-kE\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1117,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/08\/harmans-object-oriented-philosophizing\/","url_meta":{"origin":1119,"position":3},"title":"Harman’s object-oriented philosophizing","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 8, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I\u2019ve been reading Graham Harman\u2019s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects and Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. More accurately, I\u2019ve been dipping into and sipping from the first and systematically digesting the second. Given the amount of blogging that goes on under the rising star(s) of \u2018object-oriented\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8278,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/09\/harmans-reply\/","url_meta":{"origin":1119,"position":4},"title":"Harman’s reply","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Graham Harman's reply to my critical response to his book Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, which appeared as part of\u00a0a book symposium in\u00a0Global Discourse\u00a0earlier this year, is readable\u00a0online,\u00a0here.\u00a0 I won't address the details of that\u00a0reply here. Some of them relate to our divergent\u00a0interpretations of Latour, and since Harman has\u00a0now written\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1189,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/01\/31\/bryants-objects-a-possible-objectsubjectology\/","url_meta":{"origin":1119,"position":5},"title":"Bryant’s objects & a possible object\/subjectology","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 31, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Reading Levi Bryant's blog sometimes feels like having a brilliant storm of white-hot thought rain down upon one's backyard garden, the shoots struggling to stay vertical, but rendered that much stronger after the rain. There are wonderful passages in his recent musings on ethics, relations, objects, and ontology. 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