Object-Process mashups

One of my emerging lines of inquiry is concerned with engaging more systematically with the questions raised by Latour in his discussion of factishes – most notably the dual splits (of the moderns) between (a) object and subject and (b) theory and practice. I presume that most readers of this blog (and/or those it is connected to) are quite familiar with these debates and won’t get into them right now.

This last year, OOO has served me as an incredibly powerful ontological framework for just about everything. But one of the recurrent debates that I never entered but witnessed from the margins is that between OOO and process philosophy. As my attention is increasingly drawn to questions of practice and inter-objective dynamics I find myself wanting to probe the process philosophy literature (process philosophy featured in some form while I was doing my MA).

I plan to begin this by trying my hand at Stengers’ Cosmopolitics (on its way in the post!) and engaging with her work on ‘ecology of practices’. I also managed to get my hand on what looks like a challenging philosophical engagement: Brian Massumi’s Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Having entrenched myself in the world of OOO this last year, the introduction throws up some pretty serious challenges for me and my ilk:

“Nature itself, the world of process, ‘is a complex of passing events’ [...] The world is not an aggregate of objects. To see it that way is to have participated in an abstraction reductive of the complexity of nature as passage. To “not believe in things” is to believe that objects are derivatives of process and that their emergence is the passing result of specific modes of abstractive activity. This means that objects’ reality does not exhaust the range of the real. The reality of the world exceeds that of objects, for the simple reason that where objects are, there has also been their becoming. [...] The being of an object is an abstraction from its becoming. The world is not a grab-bag of things. It’s an always-in-germ. To perceive the world in an object frame is to neglect the wider range of its germinal reality.” (p.6)

As I try to wrap my head round what is being said here (a serious case of what Harman would call overmining), I find myself wondering why processes, events, activities and practices can’t all be equally understood as objects, albeit with weird or unconventional topographies. Indeed much of the account of the concrescence of an event seems to fit with a vision of objects as dynamic systems/processes as described by Levi of Larval Subjects in Democracy of Objects (now available on amazon!). Massumi says:

“the coming-together of the differences as such – with no equalization or erasure of their differential – constitutes a formative force. It is this force that propvides the impulse that the coming experience [of the event] takes into its occurrence and appropriates as its own tendency. [...] the activity differentials [...] co-compose a singular effect of unity resulting from how it is that they come differently together. [,...] a dynamic unity of self-enjoying occurrence – emerges from the energetic playing out of their impulsive differences.’ (p.5)

This sounds very much like the mereology of an object, composed of disparate parts. Processes and events have a beginning middle and end, they can have fuzzy contours, they are composed of other processes, activities, events and (why not?) objects that make their very existence possible. What is not object-like about these events? Is it the passage of time? Is it the unfurling, becoming-ness of the event? Is it to do with the experiencing subject of the event? Why can’t events simply be understood as constituting a particular class of object with its own idiosyncratic topography?

In my spare time, I carve wood. I’m just a beginner but I really enjoy it and I find it helps me to reflect and contemplate. I made a simple pair of earrings the other day. This was, no doubt an event, a process. It lasted some time. It emerged from notions I had of the wood I had on my desk, the tools I had available and what I thought would be possible and beautiful. The wood itself, once I set at it, succumbed to my saw, knife, rasps, files, hands, imagination, its grain and hardness offering up subtle resistances and causing me to respond in particular ways. Gradually it took on a new forms: from block to thin triangle, to hollowed out triangle curved with pointy edges, smoothed, polished, eventually pierced and attached to a small metal hoop. Gradually it had become an earring. My index finger was sore because of the friction of the knife in my hand. Trance-like, meditatively, thoughts had streamed through my mind as all this took place. I was barely aware of anything going on around me – even my tea had long gone cold.

Is this a story of process, object, event, practice or what? My girlfriend was talking to her friend, “Oh! Andre’s carving something!” The event. The object. The process. The practice. To me an event is an object: it has agency, autonomy, parts, is withdrawn from other objects, etc. It is able to enter into and abandon its relationship with other objects, including other events (such as cooking dinner or calling my parents). It is able to produce other objects (blisters, earrings, etc.). It is also ephemeral and fragile. If ‘it’ can be discerned then it is a thing, which to me means object. So what’s the issue here? Maybe I will find out as I read further…

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