Assembly Line: a processual object with its parts

I guess my take on objects is something like this. Objects are what objects do. What they do is exist. They also change. Objects are created, reproduced, modified, agential, and destroyed.

Creation is ontogenesis; an aesthetic and sensual process, causal in nature, deriving from objects and generative of objects though much else too. Reproduction takes two forms. One is the continuous reproduction (or re-enactment) of themselves, another is reproduction of themselves through the creation of a new self-similar descendent (though this reproduces ‘larger objects’ or societies). My concern here is more with the former. This reproduction, enduring, or continuing to be does not operate in a void. This continuation is vitally dependent on its environment, its context, its ecological position or its regime of attraction for its own perpetuation. Its environment is populated with other objects that it might encounter and these all have their own agency too: they give rise to the possibility of the aesthetic dimension, the medium of causality, on the interior of another object. This is the sensual experience of being. To be surrounded by objects in an unfolding process; a succession of events within events starring a cast of objects all half-nested in other objects, and participating in the realisation of a frenzied cacophony of unique experiences and gestures.

So each object is defined in part by its stream of encounters, its sensual experience, which leaves an invisible imprint that nonetheless partially modulates or orients the object to its subsequent experiences. But it is not a passive experiencer. Like the objects that surround it, it too has agency. The object has agency: it is after all a subject from its own perspective, its own protagonist. As ‘simple’ as its agency may appear to be, as instrumental or as artistic as it may be, its circulation is part of the cosmic poly-rhythmic, dance of being. As such, other objects are perturbed by it and carry its traces like the wake of a boat.

Time is unique to each object. An assembly line, for example, constitutes an object. It is an object that has its own coherent whole. It is not just an aggregate since its parts together, as an assembly line and not just as a heap of the parts, make possible a function that is not properly the parts but is, precisely, that of the assembly line. But the functioning of the assembly line, or rather its being, is clearly a temporal affair. An assembly line assembles and it is through the performance of assembly that an assembly line takes on its proper being. A stone, on the other hand, simply has to stone in order to persist. A river, conversely, must flow – or else it is a lake, a pool, a swamp or a reservoir.

Each object, in this sense, contains its own temporailty. However, each object is also a part of countless other objects and thus time is both external to it and internal to it. Inner time must always be something of a mystery, remaining hidden though structuring an object’s experience. Outer time is only experienced by an object as the tension between the rhythms of external objects (partially structured as they are by external objects they are all parts of) and the object’s own internal time. These times are incommensurable. Even though in some sense they can be said to be unfolding simultaneously, they are each unique. Objects have no alternative but to deal with time, one way or another.

These temporal objects – events and processes in their own right – do not (at least for the most part, it would seem to me) last for ever. When they are reduced to their traces, when their delicate essence no longer sings its saga, when their parts no longer play their parts, when they are unable to reproduce themselves; objects finally exit the cosmos, though their traces may long – perhaps eternally (or as close to that as we might imagine) – circulate, cavorting through the cosmos doing what such objects do (see beginning of this note!).

The ontography of doing/practice can only be conducted through an engagement with doing/practice as both focus and method of inquiry.

The point being made of course, is that in the wonderful world of international development, the achievement of development outcomes or results has typically been planned and measured in terms of numbers and quantities of things – from the distribution of mosquito nets and vaccines to increased GDP. “People” – that class of things that all this ‘development’ is supposed to be about – often appear as passive by-standers in a technocratic, managerialist vision of change that is primarily concerned with ‘things’.

Highly asymmetrical power relations within the international development industry (between donors, recipient ‘intermediaries’ and so-called ‘beneficiaries’, for example) can quite easily result in the exclusion of the voices and realities of those it is typically claims to be serving. People, in this set-up, are treated as objects or things, passive units to be manipulated, modified, changed, educated, treated, stimulated and even ‘empowered’. An alternative approach would be people-centred, thus ushering in a new development paradigm that is concerned with people, relationships and power. Through radical, emancipatory and participatory practices of knowledge-creation, new subjectivities would be formed in a dialectic manner through the process of change itself.

There is a lot to this critique of dominant strains in development and the alternative approach it advocates. Proponents of this position may well find themselves put off by object-oriented philosophies, favouring instead process philosophies. Where the former appears to signal a continued concern with static things over people (most people can’t stand the idea that a human should be considered an object or thing… and I find myself wondering whether all objects aren’t equally well described as subjects), the latter appears to embraces the relational and temporal dimension of being more adequately. My sense is that this judgment constitutes something of a knee-jerk reaction to the word ‘object’. As such, it privileges epistemology and meaning over ontology and being, which is what one might expect from critical theory. Digging into process and object oriented philosophy, therefore, seems a necessary correction before going further.

The central tension – or rift – between process and object philosophy lies, in my view, in the super-being implied in process philosophies (Whitehead, Simondon, etc.). This super-being is Deleuze’s virtual, a field of pure potential, “more than unity, more than identity”, it is individuation or becoming itself. From this field of pure becoming, ontogenesis becomes possible. This virtual ‘ocean’ of becoming, is able to manifest itself in the actual in the form of objects. Objects then are derivatives of a more primordial reality. They are concrescenes of potentiality into seemingly ‘stable’ things that must either reproduce themselves from moment to moment in order to exist (in the case of living things) or else must be constantly reproduced by the primordial virtual immanent ocean of becoming itself.

Object oriented philosophies refuse to recognise any unified virtual domain underlying, connecting, holding, enabling, sustaining, producing or supporting the cosmos of objects as a whole. This would, effectively constitute a form of undermining or overmining. Rather, objects are withdrawn into their own private realities even though they are composed (in part) of other objects (which they treat as elements) and even as they encounter the other objects around them sensually and are experienced by those other objects in a similar manner.

In my version (ahem… my trying-to-figure-out-what-I-think) of OOO, all real objects are processual in nature: they unfold in time and time infolds in them. Some may be buzzing hives of dynamic activity (like a living being) while others barely change throughout their lives (like a brick). Either way, there is room in this OOO for becoming, being, doing, decomposing and all the rich and wonderful world of practice, process and event. All real objects are also composed of other objects: no object is an island, withdrawn and autonomous as it may be. The reality of being an object is being on the interior of other objects. This ‘being-in’ is always that of partial part: both a constituent of a whole but also withdrawn from – and therefore not reducible to – it.

What is perhaps most key here is that rather than deferring to some primary plane of becoming from whence springs all else, becoming is always what goes on inside an object. Indeed, it is what goes on inside objects. It is the particular fusing together or splitting apart of certain objects (partially) on the interior of yet other objects, in turn (partially) on the interior of yet other objects (ad nauseum) that is capable of generating new objects (partially) on the interior of those objects. The life of these new objects is a function of their power to circulate; a maintenance of the tension that is generated between their own powers and the exigencies and affordances thrown at them by the other objects into whose midst they find themselves born.

In this framework there is no need for a super-object. There is no ‘whole’ that is greater than the sum of its parts, parent of all other parts, or determinate of all other parts, but rather a bubbling cosmos of circulating and mutually co-constituting yet autonomous and agential beings, with their own very particular disruptive, reproductive and constructive powers. Rather than positing this as an abstracted field of pure or excess potentiality, it seems to me that it is best understood as multiplicity rather than unity. This multiplicity, however, is not more-than-unity (as Simondon might have it) but, rather, less than unity. How so? To speak of it as an ‘it’ is to misleadingly attribute ‘it’ a coherence and continuity that there is no reason to assume that ‘it’ possesses. It presumes a kind of view from within as though there were something from within which to view or experience it from (I’m fine if the ‘it’ is an experience subject but not something like ‘process itself’). ‘It’, rather, is a bubbling multiplicity of simultaneously unfolding becomings (note the plural) that cannot be reduced to any kind of whole or unified, singular, virtual plane however much it might be bubbling over with sheer potential. This ‘it’ is the cosmos of real, agential objects doing what they do (to and with each other).

Back in the world of international development, the question, I suppose is ‘so what?’ Firstly, I hope that the above implies that process and object need not be seen as conflicting. I hope I have shown how even ontogenesis – as what goes on ‘inside’ objects rather than ‘outside’ them – can have a comfortable, becoming-friendly place in object oriented philosophy. I hope that it would also help to recognize that the traditional emphasis on things that has come under critique, has little to do with what those engaging with OOO are concerned with. Instead, we are invited to see the objects that surround us as already-at-work, constituting regimes of attraction, doing things themselves of which we are barely conscious. Failure to adequately map out the real agencies of these processual objects, is to ignore the intricate design of the web in which we are caught.

In international development objects are generally considered only from the narrow perspective of the purpose for which they have been designed: reducing malaria, increasing seed production, providing health care, etc. But objects – in this world at least – are always caught up in wider material-semiotic ecologies of objects and both their production (i.e. on the interior of other objects) and circulation will transform the regimes of attraction of which they become parts. This has real implications for people who must encounter, confront, deal with, destroy, transform or use these new objects for their own purposes. They do not encounter the object-as-designed (because even a designed object always withdraws from the knowledge and intentions of the designer), but encounter it based on its particular local manifestion of the powers bound up in it.

Furthermore, and this is where Stengers’ ecology of practices comes in, the objects responsible for the creation of this new object are themselves creating another very distinct set of effects through the process of doing what they are doing. In effect objects are perpetually and simultaneously spawning other objects (from dinners to electrons) and participating in the reproduction of existing objects (from capitalism to climate change). As far as  human activity is concerned, it would seem, intention really is the tip of the ice-berg of consequences – at least so far (I appreciate that more often than not the intention itself is problematic, but even so…)

The question for me then, is: given this framework for understanding the relationship between processes and objects, what can we humans (in all their cyborgian multiplicity), do – with our cohort of co-participating objects – that can address the structural injustices that confront us? More specifically, how can we really compose, create, conjure, bring forth or birth new objects/processes (and of what kinds) that are efficacious in dissolving the real infrastructures of injustices (in all their multi-dimensional horror) and that are capable of weilding agency beyond anything that we ‘alone’ could ever be capable of? And how can we do this in ways that does not simply feed – through some wild tangle of causal connections – the very structural injustices that we set out to dissolve?

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.

Hilary said:

I think you’re misunderstanding Harman’s idea of ‘black noise’.

 Here’s how Harman describes black noise:

“Any noise exceeding the object of our attention is structured to as great a degree as the object itself. It is not a white noise of screeching chaotic qualities demanding to be shaped by the human mind, but rather a black noise of muffled objects hovering at the fringes of our attention.” (p.183 Guerrilla Metaphysics)

 Then:

“Accidents [as a particular kind of black noise] are an exception, belonging simultaneously both to the inner and outer sphere of a thing. Here, an important insight begins to take shape, for this very ambiguity is also the central theme of vicarious causation-that one thing touches another, but only indirectly, just as an accident belongs to a thing but only indirectly. And in fact, the form of black noise known as “accidents” will turn out to be precisely where vicarious causation unfolds.” (p.186 ibid)

If (1) we understand accidents as, in part, the influence of peripheral objects modulating the sensual objects we perceive, and (2) we accept causality as being based on allure (i.e. causality is aesthetic an asymmetric), then clearly those other objects that generate the accidents (i.e. black noise) also have a role to play in the process of vicarious causation.

The remaining points follow on from this very closely. Hilary asks:

If real objects must be able to exist apart from one another, how can the ‘third’ object of vicarious causation be called a real object, since it can’t be said to exist apart from the relation?

 Regarding causation on the interior of a ‘larger object’, Harman writes:

“If two objects can interact at all, they must both already be suspended in the same ether, linked by the vicarious cause of a larger object that they themselves both use as a base or alibi for their relationship. Simply put, causation requires a prior shared medium, since otherwise it would be impossible.” (p.189 ibid)

 This shared medium is the object of which the other objects are parts and is very real.

In response to Hilary, then, my main concern is that her question implies that we can no longer talk about objects as having parts because, in order to have parts, objects must be dependent on those parts – i.e. on other objects. This, it would, seem undermines their autonomy or independence. I don’t see it quite this way. Parts retain their autonomy just as the ‘larger object’ does. The larger object is not reducible to its parts though it is certain that, were these to be blown apart, the larger object would cease to exist (except perhaps as traces). On the other hand, the larger object, qua object, has its own autonomy, albeit contingent on the existence of its parts, but not reducible to them. The object is not just ‘a bundle of parts’ but is an autonomous object in its own right. The object treats its parts as ‘elements’. It ‘syphons’ notes from its parts and fuses them together to compose itself without exhausting its parts.

From the point of view of the parts, then, the larger object has effectively become a form of black noise. It is also what permits interaction between the parts to occur. It serves as their ‘alibi’, or the common ‘ether’ or ‘medium’ that provides a basis for their sensual encounter. In this regard (i.e. as far as this particular relationship they share is concerned), the parts (objects in their own right) are on the interior of a third object (they may be in on the interior of multiple object simultaneously). The parts are not, however, wholly on the interior of a third object: they are only partially parts. Thus, for example, a living cell could be extracted from an organism (ouch!) and would continue to be a living cell provided it was supplied with what it needed to live. It doesn’t stop being a living cell simply because it is separated from the object of which it was formerly a part. This illustrates the autonomy of the part from the larger object it composes.

Hilary then continues:

to say that relations always exist as parts of a larger whole overmines objects, in my view, as it would seem to infer that objects exists only insofar as their relations to the larger object, in contrast to what you suggest.

It is not so much that relations always exist as parts of larger wholes but rather that unless two parts are both on the interior of a third object, these parts cannot enter into a relationship with each other. The relationship itself is a unique object and it is unified, withdrawn and autonomous, and therefore not reducible to the object of which it is a part.

If an object’s basis for relationship only existed as part of its “joint status” within another object, then the object’s powers or potential would be determined, in some sense, by the larger scale object, reducing the object’s capacities, qualities, and essence to a relation to another entity, one “greater” than itself.

I think I disagree with this. The basis for relationship is not only due to its joint status within another object. Rather, the particular capacities (or powers) that the given object has to enter into relationships with other objects serves as the basis for its entering into relationships. Of course, the nature of the third object ‘within which’ (and it’s always a partial within-ness) the relating parts find themselves will influence which capacities are likely to be actualised and in which ways (just as climatic or soil conditions may affect the germination of seeds). This is very different from saying that, in some sense, the object’s “capacities, qualities, and essence” were being reduced “to a relation to another entity”. Rather, their expression is contingent.

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…

I am pondering this tension as I try to work through some of the apparent contradictions between a non-violent object oriented philosophy (a la Morton) and the implications of following Levi’s terraism. Levi articulates three fundamental dimensions to what he calls terraism (we could call it ‘intentional perturbations of the cosmos’): cartography, deconstruction and composition (click here for more details). While cartography and composition, political as they are, appear relatively benign, deconstruction appears to be a little more violent in essence. It implies the intentional dismantling or destruction of assemblages and objects that are integral to the reproduction of the social – and more particularly – structural injustices. Levi gives the example of cutting a telephone cable or pulling money out of banks en masse. Such strategies operate by a very clear and simple logic: the material matters. The ‘power’ of the ‘powerful’ is reproduced through vast networks of objects that make the exercise of power possible. By cutting off the ‘supply’, as it were, the contingency of power, of the social order, can be revealed. This is not to suggest that discourse, beliefs, ideologies, etc. are not important ingredients in shaping who has ‘power’ in a given society but rather to return them to their rightful place alongside the material dimensions of power.

Morton’s work on non-violence, however, appears to be opposed to this kind of a destructive urge. Non-violence, in OOO, is extended from its usual focus on humans to encompass non-humans (still fairly common) and non-living objects (much less common). As Morton expounds here (his talk starts at around 43:00), there is an ontological basis to non-violence. Indeed, according to Morton, non-violence is the very foundation of existence (or rather, co-existence). If all objects are understood to be fundamentally split between essence and appearances, between I and me, then inconsistency is fundamental to the very being of an object. Violence, in this regard is the reduction of an object to its appearances (its past), which is to say its traces – i.e. to make it consistent. Violence is to deny an object the possibility of sustaining the inconsistencies that are part and parcel of its continued existence. On the other hand, Morton suggests that beauty is a non-violent experience of death or near-death; and that the shiver of the wine glass as it succumbs to the resonant vibrations of the opera singer is akin to a glass-orgasm. The glass then is experiencing a kind of beauty that goes right to its very core, reveals its fundamental fragility and causes it to shatter. Death, ultimately, is inevitable. The ego (the traces of formal causation on the interior of an object) operates as the boundary that holds off this inevitability. The experience of ‘beauty’ has the potential to collapse this ego, revealing the inner fragility of an object by bringing it close to death. Inner fragility, however, is what makes anything possible. If objects were not fundamentally fragile, they could never undergo transformations, be moved, etc. we would live in a static cosmos. How then do we disentangle death by beauty and death by violence?

I’m not sure I can answer this question outside of saying something like this: beauty is when one object’s ego is dissolved by its encounter with another object. Violence is when an object is reduced to its traces. Perhaps I am asking the wrong question. Morton’s point seems to be that non-violence is the key to existence for any object: an object can only continue to exist if it is able to get along with itself and with others. This means that inconsistencies are not cancelled out but rather multiplied and amplified. It is the proliferation of inconsistencies that permit an expanding co-existence to take place. Violence, it seems to me, becomes a kind of icing on the non-violent cake of being. While non-violence is what makes being possible, that very being itself sustains a variety of violent encounters. In a sense, to the extent that the encounter between two objects is always between a real object and a sensual object – between a subject and a caricature – every encounter contains an inevitable violent dimension. The idea, then, that somehow the ontological necessity of non-violence for being translates into the possibility of perfectly non-violent existence seems to be difficult to uphold. How do I talk about you without reducing you to your traces? How do I encounter you without reducing you to that encounter? How do I overcome the fundamental biases that my inability to grasp your withdrawn nature evokes in me?

How do I avoid merging the recognition that violence is an inevitable feature of the world (it also has an ontological foundation in the caricaturing that goes on in all inter-objective relations) with the idea that, therefore, violence should simply be accepted? Perhaps, more than anything else, what we have here is an invitation to recognise that we can adopt ways of engaging in the cosmos, of encountering other objects (strange strangers) that recognise the inadequacy of our grasp of them, or indeed of all objects’ grasps of other objects. Rather than giving up, we adopt modes of being amongst other objects that leave the door open for the possibility of another object’s inconsistencies to be sustained, for the possibility of co-existence and the possibility of transformation. Perhaps, even, an aesthetic experience of beauty is generated that transforms egos and causes the assemblages that prop up oppressive and unjust regimes to dissolve; to decompose.

This brings me back to where I started, which is to do very much with the appropriate approach to dismantling existing assemblages – what Levi calls deconstruction – and the place of both violence and beauty in this process. How can we humans hope to compose new assemblages when all the pieces we need are already entangled in existing assemblages? And, perhaps even more worrying is that these very assemblages then begin to exercise and mobilise their own army of other agencies that further entrench them; that complicate the network of inter-objective entanglements in such ways that the current social order appears to be natural or inevitable (ideological state apparatuses, etc.)? Is it OK to organise a kind sabotage of the assemblages that supply power to an unjust regime? Examples could include boycotting of elections, removal of personal savings from banks, refusal to repay loans or taxes, direct vandalism of mining operations, severing of electric connections, etc., etc. I think the answer is probably: it depends. Surely though these are all acts of violence in the sense that they involve the destruction or undermining of some other object and, no doubt, it’s reduction to consistency. But then again, surely my vote is my own and it is my choice what I do with it, and similarly with my savings. However, if a sufficiently large collective agrees to pull its savings out of the banks, this could seriously destabilise the banks. And if that money is put into community or cooperative banks, it could contribute to the construction of considerably different assemblages. But what about the vandalism of mining operations? If such acts are carried out in a way that cause no direct harm to other humans and prevent untold ecological damage, are they legitimate?

Some violence, it seems to me, is perhaps not only inevitable, but also a very important part of the process of recycling objects in life-affirming ways. In a sense then, the destruction of objects is the liberation of their parts – so that these parts can be further broken down, assimilated and recombined to form new objects is fundamental to life and the multiplication of objects within the cosmos. What becomes important, instead of the violence vs. non-violence debate, is (a) the recognition that the multiplication of being(s) depends on a core of non-violence; and (b) that in a non-static universe, violence is a central mechanism through which new realities are producible. This forces us to turn our attention to the question of (objective) deconstruction and to make ethical choices about the objects we will (inevitably) destroy in the production or composition of new objective realities. There is also a lot of thinking to be done about the means of deconstruction, surely worthy of further ramblings…

Myth, it seems to me, could be described, broadly, as operating as fetish: a created, artifactual (mysterious?) entity to which powers and meaning are attributed and which in turn comes to influence patterns of social relations, despite its obvious origin in the hands of humans. Ideology, on the other hand operates as a self-validating system of ‘facts’, where claims to truth and objectivity prevail. In this sense, ideology (as that which has sought to replace myth with truth/reason) is an Enlightenment (and, therefore, modern) construct. As Latour’s extensive work examining scientific practice has revealed, however, facts, very much like fetishes, are produced by humans too. Subsequently, severed from the conditions of their production, they enter into circulation in society and become entangled in the production of new facts and new social realities.

Latour reveals the anti-fetishists’ naieve belief in belief that drives their disgust at the fetish-worshipers and their fetishes, which are so obviously (to them) irrational and sacrilegious. With their own (modern) form of rationality propped up on two fundamental splits – between subject and object on the one hand and between theory and practice on the other – the moderns are able to smudge over the profound contradictions inherent in their own ‘facts’. Latour also ensures we don’t forget that the root of the word ‘fact’ is from latin facere = to make. Based on this, he proposes the ‘factish’ as a term that combines fetishes and facts and permits a symmetrical comparative anthropology of the moderns and the non-moderns by revealing the underlying structure of their respective ‘factishes’.

Treating myth and ideology as non-modern and modern factishes respectively, it appears that although both are human-made, the traces of the work of human hands/minds in producing ideology are erased. Myth (from the Ramayana to King Arthur or the Communist Manifesto) operates as an evidently human-made story that seeks to convey something that must be deciphered, while ideology simply tries to hide its own artificiality with claims to ‘facts’. At the same time, the boundary need not be clear cut. Myth and ideology can intersect – and this is perhaps where the two risk becoming most virulent (as evidenced in much of the religious right, from some forms of Christianity in the US to some forms of Hinduism in India, etc., etc.). Critical theory has worked systematically to expose both myth and, subsequently, ideology, the former for its naievety, the latter for it’s insidiousness in perpetuating systems of exploitation. To the extent that each shapes social practices, beliefs, relationships, identities, assemblages, etc., each is seriously implicated in the differential distribution of powers within a society. So why not just smash myth and ideology to pieces?

Latour’s work leads us on a different path from one of simply trying to smash – i.e. eliminate – either myth or ideology (our own or anyone else’s). After all, where will those pieces go? The smashing of either (facts or fetishes, myths or ideologies), he shows us, is always followed by the construction of new ones that operate in ever more elaborate and complex ways, circulating through society and weaving new patterns of relationships as they do so. This is not something that we can ever get away from. Rather, we must strive to get better at acknowledging that splitting reality into myths and ideologies is much like splitting reality into fetishes and facts when what we are really dealing with are factishes: an endless stream of them that we keep reconstructing (in new guises) such that they keep returning, in new forms, to exercise their transformative powers – because of us and over us.

Only once we are able to come to terms with the ambiguous, paradoxical, constructed and autonomous powers of factishes, to grant them an independent ontological status, are we in a position to do the hard work of composing a new cosmopolitical order; one that does justice to the way the entities we create and encounter are born, circulate, weave the cosmos together and die – only to re-emerge, patched together, in a new guise, a new fusion of co-creaetion between humans and the cosmos. Learning to recognise the contradictions between our theories and our practices may well be a first step toward overcoming the blunders induced by both myth and ideology (while recognising that we can never quite be free from either). Another may be addressing the division of the world into subjects on the one hand objects on the other, a point I will explore in a subsequent post.

It’s the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable.

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What is this thing? Ostensibly it’s the equivalent of a local council, responsible for a small area of London known as the Square Mile.

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“over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster.” The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly remarked, it “has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate”

If that is not weird and horrific, what is? Read the whole thing! (here again!)

What really struck me though, as I finally managed to sift through hundreds of blog posts from the last couple of months was how much OOO resonates with my work and life. Perhaps it’s something to do with the way that I have so thoroughly internalised this way of thinking over the last year or so (am i developing a blind spot?). Perhaps it’s the nature of my work: my work is in the field of monitoring evaluation and learning for systemic change, primarily in the agricultural sector, working with different kinds of organisations, groups and individuals from governments, international agencies, NGOs, research centres and local governments to marginal, small-scale farmers and their groups. This work fits squarely on what is traditionally considered to be the boundary between culture and nature, society and technology. The truth be told, I have never come across something that I have found quite so compelling (and I’ve spent time flipping about in all kinds of different schools of thought, including what Levi refers to as critical cultural theory).

While my personal political views are (I believe) quite radical, my professional practice forces me to be pragmatic (not in some philosophical sense, just in terms of being aware of what constitutes a workable process for arriving at a robust next step that hopefully paves the way for more emancipatory possibilites). So many of Levi’s recent posts resonate with the practical work that I am involved in that it’s hard to believe it’s mere coincidence.

Take the post on rice cultivating societies and the stickyness of regimes of attraction for example (here). It just so happens that right now I’m involved in some work in S. E. Asia with small-scale rice farmers and a host of different kinds of organistions. In a nutshell the work is focused on promoting a relatively new, open-source, low external input and yield enhancing practice of rice cultivation which has been ‘systematised’ under the name of ‘System of Rice Intensification’ (SRI – read about it here). It, and the principles that underlie it, constitute what I believe to be a promising alternative to ‘green revolution’ type agricultural solutions on almost every level (political economy, resource/capital use, method of spread, knowledge-power implications, etc.) and is (so I am told) not looked upon particularly enthusiastically by organisations such as the International Rice Research Institute who one would have thought, would be leading the support for such practices (I hope to find out more about this soon!).

Moving beyond SRI as a list of clearly specified practices, it is about understanding the rice plant (and its different needs at different stages of development) more intimately and adapting one’s interactions with it according to the way that it responds to different kinds of treatment and conditions. For example, traditional cultivation practices usually involve transplanting relatively mature rice seedlings in large clumps of well over 5 seedlings, the new method suggests as few as 1 seedling at a considerable earlier stage of development. Whereas traditional practices space transplanted seedling clumps irregularly and close together, the new method suggests keeping a large space between seedlings and using regular intervals to ensure each plant has adequate space and to facilitate the harvesting process. The list goes on (e.g. rather than beating a clump of rice seedlings against their foot to remove mud when preparing seedlings for transplanting, seedlings should be treated gently). There is no particular advocacy for new commercially produced seed or increased chemical fertiliser or pesticide. The simple reason why these practices work is that they are more finely aligned to the way that an individual rice seedling develops (e.g. root and leaf development, flowering, fruiting, etc.). It’s really all about getting intimate with the rice plant’s powers and the way that they manifest locally in different ways depending on how they interact with their environment.

While humans can clearly play a significant role in shaping how these powers are expressed, it is clearly not a simple matter of humans imposing their will on the rice plant. The rice plant does not – indeed cannot – just do what humans want it to do and, for the most part, humans – even farmers – still don’t know everything about the ins and outs of the rice plant (despite having cultivated it for so many years). Yes, rice has been cultivated and modified by humans over thousands of years but at the same time, rice has shaped human societies reciprocally because of its own very specific needs (in terms of water, nutrients, etc.) and qualities. But despite this ancient structural coupling between humans and rice, neither has the human involvement with rice exhausted rice’s powers, nor has rice’s involvement with humans exhausted the humans’. Rice is an actant along with humans, warring tribes, language, irrigation systems, tools, families, weather systems, religious ceremonies, economies and geological formations and can lend itself quite comfortably to myriad other forms of ‘social’ organisation besides the hierarchical ones that happen to have emerged historically.

But changing practices is no simple feat. The farmers’ powers or capacities are themselves expressed in a selective manner as a result of the way that they are entangled with diverse other objects, both human and non-human, such as those listed earlier. These constellations of objects constitute a regime of attraction, essentially an autopoietic system or larger-scale object, which exerts its own gravitational pull on those partial parts (i.e. elements) that make it up. This larger object (we could call it ‘farming system’) is different and distinct from its parts (families, rice plants, soil, droughts, etc.) even though they compose it. Each part, therefore, exceeds (is withdrawn from) this larger object, just as the larger object exceeds (withdraws from) these parts.

Thus, no part can completely exhaust another and there remains considerable scope for introducing novelty into the way that parts interact with each other. While some of this can and does happen spontaneously, there is nothing like the introduction or creation of a new object to shake things up. It is precisely the ‘gravitational pull’ of this new object that has the potential to bring other objects into new relations with each other through itself by changing the way that the powers of these objects are locally manifested. Although, as per OOO, each object can only understand its own language, it would be a mistake to see these languages as static. The entanglement of objects with other objects in the production of larger objects (e.g. of farmers with other farmers, rice, training sessions, etc. in the constitution of a ‘farmer group’) has the potential to generate new distinctions that are collectively shared since they are composed of the different objects themselves. It is, therefore, in part, through deepening the receptivity of different objects to each other, to their (unexpressed) powers and capacities, that new patterns of interaction become possible. Doing this demands creating new objects that are able to exert a gravitational pull on other objects around them, thereby creating pockets of difference with respect to the larger objects of which they are a part.

Having written this, a couple of points jump out at me. First of all, if larger scale objects (hyperobjects) like farming systems that partially structure their parts are withdrawn (like all objects) in addition to being emergent, how can they actually be changed? Second, what does it mean for two objects to become more receptive to each other? Third, how can one balance the human and non-human in this process?

The second and third questions fit together so I will address them first and they will also help us answer the first one (saved for a later post!). For a human to become more receptive to rice means to acquire a shared language for communicating with rice. This is not about farmers ‘talking’ to rice but rather about farmers being able to recognise and respond to the signals that the rice sends out. Discoloration of leaves, failure to mature, low levels of grain production, etc. are all part of this language that exists between farmers and rice and could be thought of as alarms sent out by the rice, signaling underlying problems (much like the crying of a baby indicates some unknown problem). They do not correspond to the internal language of rice, which is always ultimately withdrawn. Neither do they correspond entirely to the internal language of the farmer, which remains withdrawn even from the farmer. Rather these communication events exist only in the relationship between the farmer and the rice and only to the extent that the rice communicates in a way that the farmer is able to register. The farmer communicates, whether they know it or not, with the rice plant through their practice of farming: broadcasting seeds, transplanting, kicking or handling gently, providing with nutrients, spacing tightly or far apart, irrigating or not and eating, etc.. A rice plant is only able to register those aspects of what the farmer does that corresponds to its own language. Just as governments are unable to register what you had for dinner tonight, the rice plant cares little for the colour of the farmer’s underwear. If it gets a beating against the farmer’s foot, however, this translates into damage to its internal structure that can have a lasting negative impact.

That rice has an agency (powers and capacities) of its own is, from the foregoing analysis, quite clear. But returning now to my role as a practitioner seeking to support positive changes in the lives of farmers, what does this mean? Do I work with rice or with farmers? Suggesting that we develop a program to make rice more receptive to farmers’ needs might at first sound bizarre – but isn’t this what most agricultural scientists developing GMOs, High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) and other hybrids are doing? This is a vast and sensitive issue and not one that I can treat adequately just in passing. But I would venture that there is a fairly significant difference between the development of a capacity to learn, experiment and innovate (i.e. the capacity of farmers to become intimate with rice) and the development of a capacity to do some very specific limited thing or set of things (i.e. the capacity of rice to have a shorter growing cycle, to tolerate drought, to resist disease or pests, etc.). The two need not be mutually exclusive and there are some fascinating examples of farmers intentionally breeding their own varieties. The question looming over the agricultural sector at large is where efforts (and investments) should be concentrated if the prospect of a global food crisis is to be averted (given simultaneous escalating trends of climate change, population growth, economic crisis, food price fluctuations, declining soil fertility, etc.) – or at least if its impact is to be mitigated.