Object-Process Mashup – part 2

For the last couple of weeks my mind has been a swirl of objects and processes. From Latour’s ‘modes of being’, to Stengers’ ‘ecology of practices’, Massumi’s Activist Philosophy and the wealth of OOO watering holes I’ve frequented over the last year, I am struggling to pin down just what has been disconcerting me.

Many of my posts over the last year have been concerned with structural injustices (such as capitalism, patriarchy, ecocide) and what to do about them. It is clear that I – along with the rest of the world – am complicit (partly), largely inadvertently, in the reproduction of these injustices – yet I am not as free to simply break from them as I would like to be. It is clear to me that there are ‘objective’ (by which I mean pertaining to real objects rather than ‘truthfully known’) reasons for this entanglement in the hyperobjects of which I am a partial part. At the same time, it is also clear to me that reality is contingent: things do not have to be this way! There are countless other possible arrangements of objects. Levi’s terraism post provided a useful way for thinking through how objective reality can be mapped, deconstructed and (re)composed in alternative ways.

But ultimately, this leads back to the question of practice. Practice, as Latour has highlighted in The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, bridges the separate worlds of subjects and objects (or rather objects and objects): it is what objects do. Practice is what permits us (moderns) to carry on with our split theoretical factishes, our fragmented truth claims that do not constitute a unified whole but rather a proliferation of abstracted truth claims that hold together only in their own very specific conditions of production. Practice is what connects us to the rest of reality. Practice is the means through which any kind of terraism can be realised.

It is with this desire to better understand practice that I turned to Stengers (to learn about her ecology of practices) and then Massumi – both of whom draw considerably on Whitehead. In Massumi, processes are primary. Both subjects and objects (for Massumi, the classification as subject or object is just a matter of perspective) find themselves on the same side of the line drawn by an event or process. The event becomes an agency in its own right:

“The qualitative how-now of the event is the feeling it has of participating in itself. It is the  feeling of its unfolding self-relation. It is because an event “enjoys” itself in this arcingly immediate way that it is able to follow through with itself. And it is because it follows through with itself that it qualifies as self-creative.” (Massumi, 2011, Semblance and Event, p.4)

If we were talking here of an object that could be described as an event, this might be easier to swallow. But clearly we are not: “Neither object nor subject: event” and “Activist philosophy’s emphasis on the occurrent makes it a fundamentally nonobject philosophy.” (Massumi, 2011, ibid p.6). But this non-object experiencer that cannot be reduced to the objects that constitute it (and that is capable of ‘enjoying’ itself) has perplexed me. Is there really anything beyond the myriad objects and their interactions that are part of an event that could give that event its own autonomous existence – or even its own subjectivity (i.e. something that is capable of ‘enjoying’ itself)?

For Massumi, following Whitehead, the processual flow is primary. Objects are mere derivatives – almost illusions – appearing for cognizing observers incapable of apprehending the more primal reality of the processual/evental flow of becoming. Setting aside Massumi’s dismissal of objects as secondary, I found myself struck by (what I felt to be) the similarities between these processes or events and the objects encountered in OOO. The process/event, as I came to understand it, was being defined very much as an object itself.

In OOO circles, objects have been described as processes (and as such, ‘becoming’ has a home in OOO). Massumi states: “there is no essence or substance to things other than the novelty of their occurrence.” An object is, according to this reading, an event. But it appears to be something altogether quite different to describe a process as an object (and quite against Massumi’s articulation of process). What do I mean by this? While an object may be processual in nature – for example, as characterised by Levi in terms of autopoietic or allopoietic systems or by Bogost as procedural (I know this is a little different) – does it equally hold that all processes can be described as real objects?

What about the construction of a building, the cultivation of grapes, carving a sculpture, performing a concert or occupying Tahrir Square? These all constitute, it seems to me, what anyone might reasonably call ‘processes’ – or even ‘events’. They clearly involve myriad interactions between their component objects; all busily translating each other, succumbing to each other’s powers and introducing their own unique qualities and capacities. This unfolds over time and progresses toward some kind of culmination at which point the process – or rather the event – ends. Through this event, many new objects may have been spawned: buildings (and all their accompanying embellishments and sideshows), grapes and vineyards, sculptures, a melody or a ‘new’ government. I will return to this question of the creation of new objects (ontogenesis) later. For now I am primarily interested in the process itself and how we can best think it in OOO-ese.

The first question that struck me, in contemplating this, was whether trying to describe a process as an object was, in fact, a way of undermining processes (or events, practices) as a specific ‘mode of being’ (cf. Souriau – see Latour in The Speculative Turn). On the one hand, describing an event as an object might distort the processual reality of that event. On the other, it might not – for example, if the withdrawn molten core of the object were itself to be understood as a process. What must be avoided though, from an OOO perspective is a kind of hyper-relationism in which rather than withdrawing into their own private realities, objects withdraw into some kind of protoplasmic mass or flow. Levi has, for example, described his objects as processes on a number of occasions. So, if an object can be described as a process, why not attempt to explore this the other way round?

If process is to be understood as object, it must be withdrawn, unified and autonomous. In effect it must come in the form of a bounded nugget rather than some infinite stream or flow. I will use the term ‘event’ to refer to such bounded nuggets of process. Clearly, the temporality of the object, when considered as event, comes to the fore in a way that it does not when objects are considered as objects. Events have beginnings, they arise as a result of some particular configuration of objects and their interactions that precede them. As some fuzzy threshold is crossed, the event begins to exist. It’s life is developmental in nature as it takes on its particular form and qualities over the course of its occurrence. Its end represents its reduction to traces – for example those carried by the objects it has spwaned.

Like all objects, the event-as-object is composed of other objects: its (partial) parts or elements. The construction of a building, understood as an event-as-object, for example, is composed of bricks, foundations, architects, masons, bulldozers, scaffolding, earth, ladders, diggers, cement, glass, window-frames, plans… Each of these objects has its own particular powers or capacities, each is participating in a frenzy of translations of the others as a series of interactions and transformations play out, gradually progressing toward the construction of the building. So far so good. But does this event possess any distinct reality besides the myriad interactions that have just been mentioned? After all, if it is ‘merely’ its parts and their interactions, if it has no separate and autonomous reality besides them, then surely it cannot qualify as a real object.

If it is, indeed, a real object, if it has an autonomy from its parts, then what exactly is its status. In Democracy of Objects, Levi – drawing on the work of Maturana and Varella – upholds that objects are either autopoietic (self-creating) systems or allopoietic (created-by-others) systems. Which of these best describes an event-as-object such as the construction of the building described above, if it is indeed an object? While autopoietic objects actively re-organise matter (other objects) in order to reproduce themselves (by translating, decomposing and recomposing these parts into its elements), allopoietic objects are created and buffeted by other objects and are most certainly not capable of using them for their own development. This does not deny allopoietic objects their own agency, but rather delimits their powers to reconstitute themselves from moment to moment.

So is this event-as-object an autopoietic or an allopoietic object? What kind of agency (capacity or power) is possessed by the event-as-object that is not simply present in its parts and their interactions? I certainly find it very difficult to think of ‘the construction of a building’ as an autopoietic system capable of organising other objects (perhaps my imagination is limited here) – which is closer to the spin that Massumi gives it when he describes it as ‘self-creating’. Perhaps then it must be allopoietic? Even this troubles me as it is not clear yet what autonomous existence it has aside from its parts and their interactions.

I found myself wondering whether it isn’t better described as a regime of attraction. A regime of attraction is, essentially, the specific set of exo-relations within which objects find themselves that consequently shape the powers that they actually manifest. For example, I find myself behaving a certain way with my family and a quite different way in a strategic review meeting. Each of these contexts (effectively a constellation of objects) constitutes a distinct regime of attraction that draws out the expression of particular powers (experienced as sensual qualities by the objects I encounter) which may be quite different in each case (though some may be quite the same). Clearly, the construction of a building – the event – as it develops, plays a fundamental role in shaping the exo-relations particular to the cohort of objects implicated in its enactment. Without this event, neither the bricks nor the architect would find themselves doing quite what they find themselves doing. The construction of a building, it would seem, exerts a kind of gravitational pull on the objects implicated in it – but does it really have its own agency or is it wholly dependent on others for its efficacy?

As the event proceeds, new objects are created: now there is a scaffolding; now there are walls; now a fence is erected. Each of these modifies the regime of attraction, creating the possibility of new exo-relations with the objects participating in this event. In a sense, then, it is the growing, changing constellation of objects implicated in this construction event which generate, collectively, the gravitational pull (regime of attraction), drawing other objects in and implicating them in novel ways in this event. This is all well and good, but it still leaves the question of the object-hood of the event largely unanserwed. Is it the event-as-object itself that brings these objects together and leads to the creation of new objects or is it merely the objects interacting with each other?

In a couple of posts some time back (see here) Morton discusses emergence. He makes very clear that emergence is always emergence-for or emergence-as and that, consequently, the emergent object is necessarily a sensual object. In this reading then, the event-as-object is actually an event-as-sensual-object for a perceiving object that pieces the frenzy of activity – of all these diverse participating objects – together. The only ‘meaning’ that this event-as-object has for the participating objects is the precise manner in which it – or rather the other objects implicated in it – leaves marks on them. Much of what goes on behind this sensual object – the teeming of implicated objects and their translations of each other – goes unregistered by the perceiver. But rather than receding to its own withdrawn molten core, doesn’t this sensual object open up onto a plenum of objects, each with their own withdrawn reality? Or perhaps it withdraws in two directions? One into its own molten core, bizarre and inaccessible as this may be, and two it expands outward into the other objects that are its parts.

I don’t pretend to have cracked anything here. I am merely struggling to get my head round the tension between objects and processes in an attempt to discern some ontological foundations that might inform meaningful ways of engaging with the world. In the year ahead I hope to engage more systematically with the question of practice – including exploring practice as object – and so it seems rather important that I am able to get my head round this. Any help would be much appreciated.

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