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. From Ethical Etymologies: Thinking Out Loud (Always Dangerous), for instance:
“Where today we tend to think of character almost exclusively as a moral or ethical property, character should probably be thought as “power” (in the sense of “capacity” or “ability”, or what a thing can do), or “nature” (in the sense of the “nature of a thing”, not in the sense of φύσις). In this respect, ἦθος is closely bound up with the Greek concept of arete or “excellence” (ἀρετή), which would later become the Latin virtus, which, importantly, has connotations of power (in the sense of capacity or ability) and strength. Again, it is sad how degraded the concept of virtue has become worn or degraded. The key point not to be missed with respect to the Greek concept of ἀρετή is that ἀρετή is not an exclusively human property. All entities, for the Greeks, have their “ἀρετή“, and in many respects this ἀρετή constitutes the proper being of an entity. Thus, for example, the ἀρετή of a hawk is its keen eyesight, its sharp talons, its ability to fly swiftly, and so on. The ἀρετή of a tree might be its sturdiness, the manner in which it reaches to the heavens, its ability to resist heavy winds, and so on. The Greeks, it would seem, were Deleuzian ethologists well before Deleuze, defining entities in terms of their powers, capacities, or excellencies, rather than qualities.”
What follows are some comments on Levi’s response to my concerns (which he identifies correctly) about object-oriented ontology’s premise of the absolute independence of objects from each other.
In general, that response (and his summary of Graham Harman’s) satisfies me that the object-oriented ontologists are well aware of relations, and the fact that he includes Whitehead and Latour within a “relationalist” wing of object-oriented ontologists strikes me as a shrewd but justifiable way of expanding the scope of the objectological project — which is fine by me (though most Whiteheadians and Latourians probably aren’t aware or don’t abide by the OOO terminology, at least not yet). Levi’s own definition of objects as two-sided (he calls them “split,” though for me this suggests a psychic rending that I’m not sure is necessary) — as “powers, capacities to act, or tendencies” that “withdraw behind their qualities and parts” in that “in actualizing a particular quality or an extensive form (a spatial configuration) the virtuality of the object or its endo-relational structure and attractor-singularities are not exhausted” — sounds like a suitably relational understanding of objects. That is, while the objects withdraw from their relations (qualities, etc.), that they are “split” suggests to me that they are both their relations and what’s left behind, the latter part remaining “unrelated” and maintaining an endo-relational structure that is unknown to those (including us) who may try to know them through relationship.
This suggestion in Bryant’s and Harman’s work that objects “withdraw” from our (i.e., any observer’s) full knowledge of them is attractive to me, in part, because it provides a recognition that we cannot know things without affecting them — that practices of knowledge-making are always practices of acting on the world. (This is something that both Latour’s actor-network theory and John Law’s notion of science as enactive “method assemblage” acknowledge, as do certain other forms of post-positivist philosophy of science.) Harman’s insistence that objects do not “touch” still seems odd to me, and inconsistent with Bryant’s acknowledgment of objects’ “splitness,” since the latter implies that at least one side of an object touches at least one side of another object. But I’ll leave that difference for the two of them to work out.
I also like Levi’s summary of Althusserian social theory and its “cascade of consequences” for French social theory since then. His argument is that had French social theory not ignored the part-within-whole “meriology” of relations between societies and the parts that make them up (individuals, social groups, etc.), then we would no longer be searching
“for the “Christ-point” in these endo-relational structures of the “empty square”, “degree zero”, “void”, or “subject”. Rather, the issue would become that of investigating how objects can act on one another, how they interact, and how it is possible for objects that are parts of another object to change the object of which they are a part. For example, how is it possible for a group – what Guattari, following Sartre, called a “subject-group” – to act on and change the endo-relational structure of the social object in which its enmeshed but from which it is nonetheless autonomous. And here one of the central questions would be one of how to navigate the autopoietic feedback loops that characterize the endo-relational structure of the social object as it strives to regulate the smaller scale objects of which it is composed, but from which it is nonetheless distinct. These feedback loops are points in phase space, limiting the basins of attraction of the social system. The issue here becomes that of how to avoid being enmeshed in these tendencies, feedback loops, or attractors such that ones actions simply end up re-enforcing the endo-relational of the structure, and how it is possible to push social systems into new basins of attraction without generating catastrophe. The point, however, is that there is already an autonomy within these systems. The question is that of how it is possible to act on the endo-relational organization of these systems.” (emphasis added)
This is very nicely put, and it’s a good reason for social theorists to look beyond the post-Althusserian school for an understanding of how social change comes about.
As an aside, I just want to point out a very minor quibble regarding Levi’s use of ecological theory: “An ecological system,” he writes, “is one object. It has a unique endo-relational structure that makes it act as one. But this ecological system both contains other ecological systems (for example, the ecology of a single tree in a rain forest), and contains other objects (frogs, trees, insects, soil, droplets of water, bacteria, birds, etc., etc., etc.).” This, however, reflects an outdated view of ecosystems, which has been rejected by the majority of scientific ecologists. An ecosystem is now generally seen as a convenient abstraction, but not a genuine entity, or at least not one that “acts as one” in any meaningful sense, i.e., in relation to its environment. The boundaries of an ecosystem cannot be pinned down definitively the way that the boundaries of an organism, more or less, can (with, of course, openings that make possible an inflow and outflow of energy, etc.). The same point, I think, would apply to social systems, at least as we know them today. But in principle the argument here remains sound, as one could find other examples that fit it well.
Now, back to the main issue of objects and relations. Levi summarizes Harman’s objections to relationalism (which he agrees with), saying, first, that “Harman argues that were objects nothing but the totality of their relations to all other objects then 1) objects would be nothing but a hall of mirrors with no being at all (i.e., there must be something independent of relations to account for the being of objects), and 2) we would be unable to account for the conditions under which change is possible.”
To the first point here, I would argue that a hall of mirrors, or whatever metaphor one uses here, is still a something: every hall of mirrors is a particular hall of mirrors, a particular set of relations that has come together in its own way and that continues in time to be always an ever differing/deferring hall of mirrors as it continues to interact with other such (halls of) mirrors. If we wish to call a particular hall of mirrors (identified by slicing through time and pointing to a cross-section of the whole mirror-laden lattice of the world) an “object”, we can certainly do that. And if we wish to argue that such an object remains the same object as long as it retains a certain structure (a certain configuration of relations between the mirrors that make it up) and becomes a different object when that structure becomes altered by more than a certain trivial degree (in which case we would have to specify at what point the trivial becomes the significant), then we can do that, too. All of that would follow very useful and common-sensical precedents in coming to grips with the world.
Clarifying Harman’s second argument, Bryant adds that “Harman’s point is that were objects the totality of their relations to all other objects in the universe we’d get a crystalline universe where structure is fixed and no change can take place.” But here, again, this point seems to me to be merely asserted rather than argued (though I’m sure the arguments appear elsewhere). Bryant had defined Whitehead’s and Latour’s “ontological relationist” variants of “object-oriented ontology” as the view in which “objects are constituted by their relations to everything else in the universe.” A more thorough relationist might argue that objects as such don’t really exist; they are, rather, a perceptual artifact, an effect or appearance arising out of a particular relationship, which is the relationship between an observer or subject (something that becomes subjective through a process of subjectivation) and an object or set of objects (the things that become objective to that subject in that moment). An object emerges only in relation to a subject; objectivity is co-emergent with subjectivity. That is, objects alone do not exist, nor do subjects, except insofar as they arise within a system of relations within which objectivity and subjectivity co-emerge.
To say that “subjectivity emerges” is to say that there is perception, feeling, response, and thus agency, even if it be the miniscule amount of it (relative to what we’re used to) that one finds in an amoeba or a cell or something even more microscopic. And to say that “objectivity emerges” is to say that something comes into existence which appears real, hard, solid, and which in turn becomes part of the world being responded to the next moment. All of this emerges within every drop of experience, with the universe being experience all the way down (or forward). Since the minutest particle of universe involves an opening, a capacity to act in one direction or another, then creativity and novelty arise, which in turn affect other things (events) and give rise to the lumpy and complexly networked universe that we have.
At the same time, no particular set of such relations (or any relations — between objects and subjects, between “halls of mirrors”, etc.) is identical to any other one. It is only when one conceives of relations as themselves effects or artifacts, i.e. as unchanging (in effect) objects (irony or ironies?), that a relational universe begins to appear crystalline. But relations are not that way. They are moments of becoming (Whitehead’s “actual occasions”), made up of perception, feeling, experience, and agency, structured according to the bipolarity of subjectivation (interiority) and objectivation (exteriority).
If the universe is indeed made up of such experiential events, moments of concrescence which come together to form larger emergent networks (e.g., “societies” in Whitehead’s terms) — and if the universe is therefore fundamentally a creative universe — and recall that Whitehead, Deleuze, and Bergson all strove to account for how creativity and novelty can arise — then there is no reason to assume that relations remain static, that all relations are identical to all others, and that every “hall of mirrors” simply mirrors all the other mirrors in exactly the same way, all the way down. At least I don’t see why that should be.
A final comment: Anyone interested in a more thorough articulation of Bryant’s onticology would do well to start with his manifesto and its follow-up. One curiosity that struck me as I was reading it is that Levi refers repeatedly to the Kantian revolution as the “Copernican revolution.” This is a wonderful analogy to make, but for one thing: the two were, in many ways, each other’s opposites. Where Copernicus took humanity out of the center of the physical universe, Kant (with Descartes as his predecessor) placed humanity back in the center of the mental universe — thereby fixing ever more firmly into place the division of labor between scientists (let’s call them the Copernicans), who study the objective workings of “nature”, and philosophers (the Kantians), who account for the subjectivity of the human.
Object-oriented ontology, and anti-correlationist speculative realism more broadly, seems want to decenter both of these moves at once by bringing humans back into the thick of things — as one thing (or, rather, many things) among others. That is, it aims to spread the “center” out across all things and relations. I’m all for that. My hunch, however, is that by putting most of their energies toward getting away from Kant (the mental), we move a little too quickly toward the physicalism of Copernicus. What we need is a balance between these two moves, the post-Kantian and the post-Copernican, a balance that recognizes subjectivity and objectivity as co-emergent and as both, together, diffused throughout the world. Whether we call the things of that world “objects” or “relations” (or “processes,” which I often prefer over “relations”) is less important than that we move away not just from the nature/culture and ideal/material dichotomies but also from the subject/object dichotomy. I guess that objectology just rubs me the wrong way because it’s not also, simultaneously, a subjectology — or if it is (and I’m starting to be convinced that it may be), that it’s name doesn’t reflect that.
As always, all of this comes with the caveat that I am reacting to blog posts rather than to the entirety of either Harman’s or Bryant’s work (which I’ve now read bit and pieces of, but not nearly enough). I’m genuinely grateful that they even bother to entertain my criticisms in this format (as opposed to arguments expounded in books or journal articles, which are much more carefully thought through, rigorously reviewed, etc., but which move so much more slowly). And I know that none of us really has the time to be blogging so much when we should be writing and doing all the other things academics do. The occasional flurry (like this) is enjoyable, but I don’t want to make them feel pressured to respond (nor indeed to have that pressure come back to me!).