{"id":1292,"date":"2010-06-14T23:36:45","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T04:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/14\/daughter-objects-processes\/"},"modified":"2010-06-14T23:36:45","modified_gmt":"2010-06-15T04:36:45","slug":"daughter-objects-processes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/14\/daughter-objects-processes\/","title":{"rendered":"daughter objects (& processes)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Levi has a nice post on pedagogy, objects, and his daughter<\/a>. His conclusions, I think, can be rephrased in terms more amenable to an objects-relations dialogue. He writes:<\/p>\n

\n

“What my daughter has taught me is the withdrawal of objects from their relations. […] What I\u2019ve discovered through my daughter is that all substances are abyssal black boxes. They are influenced by their surroundings, but they relate to their surroundings through their own internal structure or organization, generating deeply surprising responses to the world around them. She quite literally constitutes and creates her own being.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Since Graham has set out a challenge<\/a> (“Take that, relationists!”), I’ll take a very quick stab at a process-relational reply:<\/p>\n


\nYes, Levi’s daughter is a very specific set of relational processes that are autonomous from her surroundings (which she is also relationally engaged with). The genetic, epigenetic, maternal, bodily, social, and other relations that have collaborated to shape her, along with the ways she (the developing set of ‘internal’ relations that constitute her at any point in time) has responded to all of them, have made her into the kind of thing an OOOist would call an ‘object’ that ‘withdraws’ from its relations, and that a process-relationalist would call a subject-superject (or ‘society’) of the human kind. (These terms are specifically Whitehead’s, and are awkward, but let’s leave them in place for now.)<\/p>\n

For the OOOist the ‘real’ object withdraws<\/em>, as Levi describes, while for the PROist what’s real is not the withdrawal but the engagement<\/em>, the opening outward, the grasping, clasping, affecting and being affected. There’s no withdrawal that isn’t either a movement ‘back’ toward something else, which means also a grasping, or a movement at a different, and less noticeable, speed. There’s rhythm in that movement, a rhythm that contributes to the process that Levi calls his daughter. The difference here seems to be that the OOOist draws a kind of epistemological line at the withdrawn object, while the PROist assumes that the ‘withdrawal’ is a version of the same basic prehensive\/concrescent movement that constitutes any actual occasion or moment of becoming. (Shaviro’s post<\/a> about Harman’s withdrawn objects is useful in this context.)<\/p>\n

In other words, there’s nothing here, from what I can see, that a Whiteheadian process-relational approach couldn’t account for. (But all of that is moot if Graham’s challenge is meant in jest! — except as my two cents worth of continuing to think through these differences…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Levi has a nice post on pedagogy, objects, and his daughter<\/a>. His conclusions, I think, can be rephrased in terms more amenable to an objects-relations dialogue. [. . .] Since Graham has set out a challenge<\/a> (“Take that, relationists!”), I’ll take a very quick stab at a process-relational reply:<\/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":[16806,423],"class_list":["post-1292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-process-relational-thought","tag-object-oriented-philosophy","tag-whitehead"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-kQ","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1366,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/11\/05\/process-relational-theory-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":1292,"position":0},"title":"Process-relational theory primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the tasks of this blog, since its inception in late 2008, has been to articulate a theoretical-philosophical perspective that I have come to call \u201cprocess-relational.\u201d This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1324,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/08\/21\/in-defense-of-relations-again\/","url_meta":{"origin":1292,"position":1},"title":"in defense of relations (again)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 21, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"In response to my last post, Levi is arguing, as Graham has before, that relational ontologies have had their day, that \u201cit is relational and processual thought that has become a habit that prevents us from thinking, not object-oriented thought,\u201d and that \u201cFor the last century we\u2019ve repeatedly said \u2018things\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":1488,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/09\/and-anyway\/","url_meta":{"origin":1292,"position":2},"title":"and anyway…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 9, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Process-relational and object-oriented philosophers, as far as I can tell, share the idea that things have an interiority, a \"one's own-ness,\" that is not accessible to others in the way that it is to oneself. We can argue about where that interiority is located -- whether in one's experience (which\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":1292,"position":3},"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":1187,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/01\/29\/the-politics-of-objects-relations\/","url_meta":{"origin":1292,"position":4},"title":"the politics of objects & relations","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The objects versus relations debate has revved up again over at Larval Subjects, in the commentary responding to Levi Bryant\u2019s Questions about the possibility of non-correlationist ethics. The debate, as I would describe it, circles around the following question: If we agree that traditional philosophy has been too centrally premised\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10471,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/04\/11\/process-relational-ecologies-querying-some-terms\/","url_meta":{"origin":1292,"position":5},"title":"Process-relational ecologies: querying some terms","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 11, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"It's wonderful to see that process-relational theory is getting noticed in the study of social-ecological systems. A new article in Ecology and Society, Garcia et al's \"Adopting process-relational perspectives to tackle the challenges of social-ecological systems research,\" argues that a process-relational perspective, \"which focuses on nonequilibrium dynamics and relations between\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\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/04\/paradigm-event.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/04\/paradigm-event.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/04\/paradigm-event.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/04\/paradigm-event.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}