Correspondence with Graham Harman: On Object Oriented Ontology

Correspondence with Graham Harman:

- On Object Oriented Ontology -
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I recently had a rather interesting correspondence with Professor Graham Harman, after raising some elementary questions from my first reading of his brilliant Prince of Networks - where he advances a startling reading of Latour as a novel 'metaphysician' who provides valuable theoretical resources for an object-oriented-ontology.

I would like to thank Professor Harman for answering my muddled questions. Below is a transcript of our correspondence; first my original e-mail and then Prof Harman's response. Although the original e-mail is mostly reproduced in the response, I thought it would be useful to have the original set of questions presented in their entirety, since they can appear (even more) muddled in the midst of responses. Anyhow, here it goes!

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July 20th, 2010

Professor Harman,

I just finished reading, for the first time, your Prince of Networks. An impressive, imaginative piece of philosophy. I had some very naïve questions, however, which I hope you might be able to answer for me, since I’m trying to get into Guerrilla Metaphysics now.

1) 1)You accept the ontological univocity of all entities/objects: chairs, dreams, parties… and so on, and so on (to use Zizek’s catchy abbreviation).

Furthermore, you accept their non-relational subsistence and qualitative determination (not just sensual). This seems to raise two possible concerns:

a) Virulent idealism (a ceaseless multiplication of actual entities) – You grant ‘reality’ to Pinocchio and ideal situations, just as with physical bodies and intraworldly occurrences. Does this mean that every possible thought of a fictional entity has reality? If I imagine a stickman figure without further connection to anything else, does this entail its reality? Of course you might say it has some form of reality, albeit a weak and evanescent one. But it’s not clear to me the precise ontological status of this hypothetical entity: it’s not strictly sensual, but it’s obviously intentional insofar as it possesses eidetic unity (it’s not clear to me, like Husserl, that we can speak of partial adumbrations in these cases, or whether we have to accept ‘fulfilled’ intentional acts for them; i.e. there are no 'hidden angles' in my imagining).

Is the reality of these objects then coincident with their intentional configuration? Or can we nevertheless speak of a relationless reality of the object / what would this be?

To complicate things a bit: what would be the precise 'point of contact' between this stickman figure and a second imagined object (the stickwoman), i.e. inside which entity would they meet? Is it my intentional-subjective sphere (mind)? If I understand you correctly, real objects neither meet by themselves (without mediation), nor are their pieces conceivably eidetic. What would the reality of the pieces or qualities of these imagined objects be then; beyond their eidetic presentation? So I’m wondering how these imagined objects fit within the triad of objects: real, sensual and intentional.

Finally, I’m wondering whether this ontological univocity and virulent proliferation of entities might not potentially lead on a downward slope to pragmatism. Imagine obscurantist scientific sects manage to convince the majority of the world's population to adopt their doctrine, so that all our current sciences are forgotten. Evidently, our descriptive stock for entities changes (perhaps restrictively). I take it you would endorse the independent reality of the objects underlying scientific discourse, by what seems to be vaguely modeled in a Kripke-esque figure of ostentation. These real objects then would subsist in their reality as objects, as well as with their real qualities.

But I’m intrigued to ask what is an example of a real entity, then, if it is not merely correlative to any given descriptive register and yet is thinkable (for this is not the ephermal and ineffable Infinity of theologians)? Which is the real object and stock of real qualities underlying the Inti-God of the Incas and the astral phenomenon described by science? Don’t we risk in this manner an all too-violent dispersionism of the Real in which anything we say is ultimately adequate to the Real underlying objects, insofar as discourse never reaches its ‘real’ qualities or primal substance-hood, but merely mediates it / relates to it in some level? What is the principle of individuation for real entities, apart from acts of reference, without relapsing into some correlationist corner?

This can be also called 'Quinean virulence': if we can say purely imaginary objects have realities, and parts as well; what individuates them as objects? Is it my choice of nomination/term? Is there any sense to say the stickman is really a singular object, and not just a bundle of stick-parts? And why can I say there's one real object underlying the stickman, and not an infinity of stick-part objects?

Clearly if we move onto the physical register we don’t even have ontological unity, and we must say all there really is are subatomic forces or particles. But since you have renounced naturalism, then surely you must say that the imagined or conceived stickman is not really physical anymore than it is really eidetic. For to deny its physical reality in order to assert its purely eidetic existence (as imagined stickman) would seem to run with the imposition of a matter-independent ideality. But if we cannot eliminate the physical so as to avoid reductionism, then surely we would have to accept the same goes for every reality following from all possible descriptive registers, and we have once again something of a nomological virulence. On the other hand, if we say that the reality of none of these registers (even the ‘eidetic’) exhausts the ‘real object’ (since the latter is resolutely non-relational) we seem to return to the problem of anonymity, both at the level of substance and of quality. For none of the available descriptive registers seem to exhaust the object of my contemplation, even if many of them appear necessary (I couldn’t imagine anything if I had no body / if I had no thought / no language…).

How can we therefore isolate real qualities independently of all relations? What would these be? If all the lists of irreducible strata of reality, ranging from parties to neutrons, are novel for OOO then this must be in a sense that’s not merely equivalent to, again, Badiou’s pure multiple (which, after all, could without problem produce the same kinds of varied lists only to add in the end – ontologically it is a pure multiplicity, which does not constitute a reduction any more than saying all objects are actors does).

If everything is ontologically an actor, and real actors and qualities exist, what can we say of them?

Incidentally, I get the same worry of dispersionism in Laruelle’s determination-in-the-last-instance; which I wrote to Ray Brassier about (he didn’t respond, however). If real objects are independent of all relations, and plainly indifferent to them in the last-instance, then don’t we risk making of them anonymous atoms (the Leibnizean problem you are well aware of) or else require something like a duality between ontological pure inconsistent multiplicity (void of ontological unity) and transcendental (phenomenological) constitution (which gives us objects), like Badiou does? Zachary-Luke Fraser (2004) has clearly explained why Badiou's notion of the count is not one that is performed by humans necessarily (contrary to your assumption in PON), but is rather found in the split between the formal unity of the object and its extensional determination, i.e. an object is entirely determined by what it constitutes, and yet it differs purely formally by a pure differentiation from its extension.

I confess I feel like a lot of OOO, at the present stage, appears very close to what Badiou has already developed through the resources set-theoretical formalism.

2) 2) I’m a little confused by your repeated allusion to Meillassoux’s purported claim as to the inescapability from correlationism. You claim Meillassoux says we must oppose correlationism from within the circle. But isn’t the thinking of the absolute he proposes precisely escaping the circle, insofar as the necessity of contingency cannot be thought relatively? For Meillassoux is clearly not seeking to advance the empty tautology that everything we think about is necessarily thought about. That much is obvious. As yourself and Brassier emphasize, the real issue concerns the ontological status of the objects of thought: is the being of everything thought merely relative to thought? And in that respect, Meillassoux’s absolute answers in the negative: everything we think of must, on the contrary, be thought of as grounded on its absolute contingency, a contingency which by virtue of being absolutely necessary avoids the fideist claim by the correlationist, reducing the speculative scope to the ignorance of the in-itself.

Do Do you disagree with Meillassoux’s ascription of absolute contingency as necessary then? I know you’re working on a book on him now, so it might be smarter to wait and see.

3) 3) Finally, a Heideggerean question(s). You seem to lay a lot of emphasis on the status of withdrawn objects in Heidegger’s existential analytic. The withdrawal of the Zuhandenheit behind the veil of entities and relations seem to exhibit, in Heidegger, a space for real objects lurking in the background independent of such relations. But, I think Heidegger’s move from Vorhandenheit to Zuhandenheit is designed precisely to destroy the notion of the object; not only qua correlate of a subjective (or noetic) constitution, but from its unification into a singular entity/object. For one of the decisive formulations of the Zuhandenheit as a mode-of-being is that it not only grounds the background immersion of the world needed for reflexive reason but, more fundamentally, the primordial correlation between Sein and Dasein. Since being is not an entity, behind the level of Vorhandenheit objectivity we don’t get the subsistence of ‘real objects’; since objects are for Heidegger necessarily derivative abstractions which obtain upon malfunction. And Heidegger constantly insists on the dissolution of the subject-object distinction to the point where the Zeug is said to be never strictly speaking an equipment (Heidegger calls it ‘equipmental-whole’ and cannot by implication be a mere bundle of objects, not even relationless ones).

This equipmental-whole is clearly structured in a state of projection in which Dasein finds itself undistinguished from its world within the ‘for-the-sake-of-whiches’ of activity; and at that point it seems like Heidegger wants to uphold something quite opposite to what you propose: not a stock of real relationless entities, but a stock of objectless relations. My position on this matter is that this prefigures the symptomatic point where the ontological difference struggles to overcome the noetico-noematic distinction (as we know in the particular juncture of ekstasis-ekstema later developed in Basic Problems of Phenomenology; and in which Heidegger finds himself at pains to even approach the independence of temporal being). For Heidegger can never seem to quite tell us what this totally non-objective commerce between Man and Being is quite apart from his somewhat evasive use of metaphors; gradually to the point where the embrace of the poetic word becomes unavoidable and fundamental ontology becomes impossible.

In these lines I read the famous ‘shepherd of being’ figure: the shepherd is undistinguished from the herd of sheep irreflexively moving towards a singular purpose, in a pure projective continuum. Only when a sheep deviates from the flock does anything like an object appear in this transaction, the sheep as ontic object is only derivative from the primordial ontological indistinction where Dasein, delivered to the care of being, finds itself carrying out the purposeful act. Since being is not an entity, and since Dasein is its caretaker, it is only in the severance of abstraction that objects as isolated substances appear. So objects seem to be on the contrary, for Heidegger, features of abstraction rather than the background phantasms you conceive. Perhaps I’ve missed something crucial?

I know you have plenty to work on, so forgive me for my obtuseness and the short-sightedness of my questions.

Best,

Daniel

Graham's response

July 24, 2010

Cairo

Dear Daniel:

Thanks for your letter. Though I’m too busy to engage in lengthy ongoing correspondence about matters of such detail, I do have time to answer one such letter, and of course I’m happy to answer brief follow-up emails as well.

Here is my response to your questions. You numbered them 1-3, but I think there are actually four questions. (The first question pertains both to virulent idealism and to Badiou, so I have split it in half.) I’m also going to put your first question at the end, since it’s the most complicated.

So, the new order of themes treated will be:

1. Badiou

2. Meillassoux

3. Heidegger

4. virulence

1. Badiou. You write: “I confess I feel like a lot of OOO, at the present stage, appears very close to what Badiou has already developed through the resources set-theoretical formalism.”

It’s strange to me that you think this, because it seems to me instead that OOO holds the opposite of Badiou’s view on almost every key point. But let’s go slowly.

First, there seems to be some ambiguity in your claim above. At times you seem to hold that OOO is already saying the same things as Badiou, while at times you seem only to say that we ought to be driven to saying what Badiou is saying. And I disagree on both counts. For starters, it may well be that Laruelle runs into the problem of an indeterminate Real that resembles an inconsistent multiplicity in need of a transcendental constitution for individual objects to be present (this is my impression of Laruelle too, so I agree with you there). But that is not at all the case for OOO.

For instance, you write: “If real objects are independent of all relations, and plainly indifferent to them in the last-instance, then don’t we risk making of them anonymous atoms…” But why does this follow? Why would things become “anonymous atoms” simply because they are indifferent to relations?

What I suspect is that you aren’t seeing the distinction between what I now playfully call “domestic” and “foreign” relations. The domestic relations of a thing concern its pieces, and of course no object can do without those. If the arrangement of my heart, liver, kidneys, and lungs were shifted just slightly, then I could not exist. (It does not follow that I am reducible to those pieces and their arrangements, but that’s a separate issue.) So in that sense I am the product of subpersonal relations. But it does not follow that I am therefore equally constitued by my “foreign” relations, such as my relations to various people or my exact physical position on the globe. Such relations can retroactively change who I am, but this is a special case that needs to be explained, not an automatic change that happens every time a hair falls from my head or my chair is moved 10 cm across the floor.

The reason I oppose Badiou’s pure multiplicity is that it falls into the familiar trap of an indeterminate world that is carved into pieces by humans. You answer me in advance by saying: “Zachary-Luke Fraser (2004) has clearly explained why Badiou's notion of the count is not one that is performed by humans necessarily (contrary to your assumption in PON), but is rather found in the split between the formal unity of the object and its extensional determination, i.e. an object is entirely determined by what it constitutes, and yet it differs purely formally by a pure differentiation from its extension.”

I haven’t read the Fraser piece in question. But though he sounds like a smart guy, consider me suspicious as to whether he actually accomplished in that essay what you say he did. For even if it made sense at all to say that an object “differs purely formally by a pure differentiation from its extension” (and it sounds like sophisticated evasiveness to me) this still doesn’t answer the question of whether that object existed prior to the count. If it did, then there would be no point in Badiou saying “the one is not” and also no point in his distinguishing between the inconsistent and the consistent. In my philosophy, by contrast, there is no such thing as an inconsistent multiple, and neither is it true that the consistent is consistent only insofar as it is counted. Rather, the real is consistent in its own right before any count (though I don’t use the term “consistent” in my own writings, of course).

My suspicion about about Badiou is that he is not nearly as original as people have credited him with being. Yes, he is a refreshing new voice in French philosophy. But is he really the author of “one of the great works of philosophy that will be read across the centuries?” I don’t see that at all. Badiou seems to me like just another smart guy who hasn’t escaped Kant’s shadow enough to lead us to a new era. That’s how I see it. I can tell you’re a fan, so my apologies if this comes off as brash or offensive; I’m just trying to orient you as to how I see the situation of contemporary philosophy. (And furthermore, your letter was fairly assertive in its own right, so I assume you don’t mind the same in return.)

Finally, how can you say that OOO resembles Badiouian set theory? For Badiou there is a distinction between inconsistent and consistent, with the “count” being that which distinguishes them; for OOO none of this is true. For Badiou sets are extensional; for OOO nothing is real if it’s merely extensional. For Badiou there is something very special about humans in an ontological sense; for OOO this is not the case. For Badiou mathematical formalization plays a major role for philosophy; for OOO it does not. For Badiou there can be no talk of already determinate hidden depths of the world; for OOO, that’s the whole point of philosophy. In fact, are there any issues on which Badiou and OOO agree? Maybe a few. One that I can think of is that OOO also agrees with the notion of events that rupture the state of the situation, though for me they are called “allure” and they are much more common than Badiouian truth-events. In my system they also come in four kinds, just like for Badiou, but they are different kinds from his. (Moreover, they derive from my reading of Heidegger, not from Badiou, who has never been among my favorite authors.)

2. Meillassoux. You write: “I’m a little confused by your repeated allusion to Meillassoux’s purported claim as to the inescapability from correlationism. You claim Meillassoux says we must oppose correlationism from within the circle. But isn’t the thinking of the absolute he proposes precisely escaping the circle, insofar as the necessity of contingency cannot be thought relatively? For Meillassoux is clearly not seeking to advance the empty tautology that everything we think about is necessarily thought about.”

I’m afraid you’re wrong here. What you call an “empty tautology” is one that Meillassoux esteems most highly. There is no going back on it for him: the correlationist is right that we can’t think something outside of thought without falling into a performative contradiction. See his portion of the Speculative Realism transcript in Collapse III, with its praise of Fichte and ridicule of anyone who tries to escape the correlational circle in the realist manner. His words there actually shock me a bit.

Now, consider an alternative escape from the correlational circle: Whitehead’s. Whitehead would simply say, as I do, that the human world relation is just one sort of prehension among others, and that the wider problem involves any relation between any two realities you can think of. For Meillassoux this claim would merely be cheating, because after all Whitehead is thinking of such a situation, and it is therefore a thought, and hence it is recuperated by the correlational circle. Meillassoux is by no means a realist in the old sense, and this is why he eventually disliked the name Speculative Realism.

You also write: “As yourself and Brassier emphasize, the real issue concerns the ontological status of the objects of thought: is the being of everything thought merely relative to thought?”

And here I’m afraid I disagree again. For me, if something is relative to thought, then its being is also relative to thought. My worry about the whole Meillassoux/Badiou/Zizek current (which you seem much more convinced by than I am, though I also admire them, especially Meillassoux) is that it adopts an idealist standpoint while also insisting: “We are not idealists!” But I do not accept the correlational circle in the first place, and I think any attempt to evade the good old fashioned realist question with subtleties such as “thoughts are relative to thought, but the being of what is thought is not” is a kind of unintentional sophistry: a way of swallowing idealism whole and trying to pretend that it hasn’t happened. And this is why Badiou always disappoints me in the end, and Zizek too.

You also write: “Do you disagree with Meillassoux’s ascription of absolute contingency as necessary then?” Yes. I disagree with almost all of Meillassoux’s philosophy, but its brilliance is so striking that I can’t help but watch in admiration.

3. Heidegger. This is simpler to answer, because you seem to think that my reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis is supposed to be a reading of what Heidegger personally meant to say, and that’s not the case at all.

You write: “You seem to lay a lot of emphasis on the status of withdrawn objects in Heidegger’s existential analytic. The withdrawal of the Zuhandenheit behind the veil of entities and relations seem to exhibit, in Heidegger, a space for real objects lurking in the background independent of such relations. But, I think Heidegger’s move from Vorhandenheit to Zuhandenheit is designed precisely to destroy the notion of the object; not only qua correlate of a subjective (or noetic) constitution, but from its unification into a singular entity/object.”

Yes, that’s what Heidegger says. But it’s irrelevant to me, because my claim in Tool-Being is not that I understood Heidegger’s own personal secret meaning, but that I understand his great thought experiment (the tool-analysis) better than he does.

It is absolutely true that there is no such thing as “an” equipment in Heidegger’s opinion. There is really only one global piece of equipment, with everything assigned to everything else, and ultimately for-the-sake-of human Dasein. What I have shown is that there could never be any malfunctioning equipment in that case, and we have a reductio ad absurdum. Everything would be totally exhausted by its current usefulness, without excess. And this is why I think that Zuhandenheit cannot be read either as usefulness or as referential assignment. The real meaning of Vorhandenheit is not independence from relation as Heidegger seems to think, but the opposite: the Vorhanden is that which exists only in relation. Consider Heidegger’s several kinds of Vorhandenheit: Husserlian phenomena, broken equipment, physical matter as conceived by the natural sciences. All of these exist only as the correlates of someone perceiving, calculating, or measuring them. Hence, useful “tools” in the everyday sense are actually just another example of Vorhanden. The difference between unconsciously used and consciously observed turns out to be a meaningless distinction. The only way to read Zuhandenheit meaningfully is as the non-relational reality that withdraws from all purposes. I’m not sure if you’ve read my first book Tool-Being, but it’s all explained there.

You write further: “This equipmental-whole is clearly structured in a state of projection in which Dasein finds itself indistinguished from its world within the ‘for-the-sake-of-whiches’ of the activity; and at that point it seems like Heidegger wants to uphold something quite opposite to what you propose: not a stock of real relationless entities, but a stock of objectless relations.”

Yes, I agree that this is what Heidegger wants, but that doesn’t mean that it’s what truly follows from his analysis. I don’t think Heidegger would be a fan of my interpretation, but who cares? Husserl was not a fan of Heidegger’s interpretation of phenomenology either. That’s how progress is made in philosophy. I would add that Heidegger eventually reaches the point when he shifts to “the thing” and “the fourfold,” which serve as the basis for his more celebrated reflections on language. Individual things finally do come into the center of his philosophy.

You write further: “My position on this matter is that this prefigures the symptomatic point where the ontological difference struggles to overcome the noetico-noematic distinction (as we know in the particular juncture of ekstasis-ekstema later developed in Basic Problems of Phenomenology; and in which Heidegger finds himself at pains to even approach the independence of temporal being). For Heidegger can never seem to quite tell us what this totally nonobjective commerce between Man and Being is quite apart from his somewhat evasive use of metaphors…”

Yes, and I think we should avoid the pious Heideggerian assumption that Heidegger must have come up with something orgasmically new and unheard of on this point. He really didn’t. He’s just doing the correlationist dance of saying that he’s “beyond realism and idealism,” but then just giving us a form of idealism—or rather, correlationism. In this respect he’s just another phenomenologist. Phenomenology has never been very strong at dealing with the realism/anti-realism question. My view is that this is because phenomenology was born in an era when realism could only mean scientific realism, which is precisely what phenomenology needed to shut out of the picture in order to be born.

You also write: “Since being is not an entity, and since Dasein is its caretaker, it is only in the severance of abstraction that objects as isolated substances appear. So objects seem to be on the contrary, for Heidegger, features of abstraction and the background phantasms you conceive. Perhaps i've missed something crucial?”

No, I think you have Heidegger right. And in this sense he’s a lot like Bergson, though for different reasons: the individual object is just an abstraction. But that doesn’t mean Heidegger is right, and it doesn’t even mean that he interpreted his own discoveries correctly.

4. Virulence. In this part you ask lots of different questions and I will try to answer them one by one.

You write: “You accept the ontological univocity of all entities/objects: chairs, dreams, parties… and so on, and so on (to use Zizek’s catchy abbreviation). Furthermore, you accept their non-relational subsistence and qualitative determination (not just sensual).”

This is a common misunderstanding of my position, and I’ve had trouble changing it. It is not true that I support the ontological univocity of all objects. In fact, I am a very frank dualist when it comes to objects. There are real objects and sensual objects, and they are very different from one another. Real objects exist apart from all relation. They hide from us and from all other objects, because they are untranslatable into any model.

Sensual objects, by contrast, exist only for another object, and vanish as soon as that entity stops paying attention, sleeps, or dies. Nor do they hide. They are always there in front of us, but are simply encrusted with too many superfluous qualities to be recognized. This is why Husserl thinks we need the eidetic reduction, to rotate objects at different angles to try to separate the essential qualities from the inessential ones.

If you keep this distinction in mind, then most of your worries about virulence disappear.

For example, you write: “You grant ‘reality’ to Pinocchio and ideal situations, just as with physical bodies and intraworldly occurrences. Does this mean that every possible thought of a fictional entity has reality?”

Only in the sensual sense. Everything I dream up obviously has at least a dreamlike reality. But does it have autonomy from my thought of it? No. There’s no reality in that sense.

You write further: “If I imagine a stickman figure without further connection to anything else, does this entail its reality? Of course you might say it has some form of reality, albeit a weak and evanescent one. But it’s not clear to me the precise ontological status of this hypothetical entity: it’s not strictly sensual, but it’s obviously intentional insofar as it possesses eidetic unity…”

Actually, I think the stickman figure is purely sensual.

You write: “it’s not clear to me, like Husserl, that we can speak of partial adumbrations in these cases, or whether we have to accept ‘fulfilled’ intentional acts for them; i.e. there are no 'hidden angles' in my imagining).”

Here I would only disagree that adumbrations have anything to do with hiddeness. I don’t think a mailbox is “hidden” behind its adumbrations at all. I think the intention of a mailbox is automatically “fulfilled” as soon as I have it. The problem is that a lot of extraneous extra qualities of the mailbox are also there, mixed up with the eidos of the mailbox itself. For me, the eidetic reduction is not about achieving a hidden fulfillment, but about clearing away the cobwebs from a fulfillment that has always already occurred. I realize that this is not the orthodox way of reading Husserl, but the usual attempts to see “hiddenness” at work in both Husserl and Heidegger seemed like such a bizarre mix of apples and oranges that I was finally led to see the difference.

You write: “Is the reality of these objects then coincident with their intentional configuration? Or can we nevertheless speak of a relationless reality of the object / what would this be?”

No, there is no relationless reality to sensual objects, because they always exist in relation to us. This is similar to the reason for why I am never impressed by Badiou’s claim to have spoken of objects without subjects. He doesn’t deliver on this claim.

Further, you ask: “To complicate things a bit: what would be the

precise 'point of contact' between this stickman figure and a second imagined object (the stickwoman), i.e. inside which entity would they meet? Is it my intentional-subjective sphere (mind)?”

No, they can’t meet at all, because they are not real objects. They can only exist contiguously in the experience of a real object (namely, me).

More: “If I understand you correctly, real objects neither meet by themselves (without mediation), nor are their pieces conceivably eidetic. What would the reality of the pieces or qualities of these imagined objects be then; beyond their eidetic presentation? So I’m wondering how these imagined objects fit within the triad of objects: real, sensual and intentional.”

Imagined objects are sensual. And there’s no triad of objects, there are just two: real and sensual.

I replaced the term “intentional object” with “sensual object,” and at first my motive was purely one of euphony. (I hate the sterile technical flavor of the phrase “intentional object.”) But recently I’ve come to see a second reason to make the change, which is that people wrongly use “intentional object” to mean an object outside the mind, which is not at all what it means in Brentano and Husserl. For them it means immanent objectivity, but people have hijacked their term.

As for the first part of your question, it is true that real objects for me cannot meet without mediation. I don’t understand “nor are their pieces conceivably eidetic.”

Next: “Finally, I’m wondering whether this ontological univocity and virulent proliferation of entities might not potentially lead on a downward slope to pragmatism.”

Yes, it could. But I do not uphold univocity, nor is my position vulnerable to virulent proliferation, for reasons described above.

Next: “I take it you would endorse the independent reality of the objects underlying scientific discourse, by what seems to be vaguely modelled in a Kripke-esque figure of ostentation. These real objects then would subsist in their reality as objects, as well as with their real qualities.”

I’m not sure what’s so “vague” about it. I agree with Kripke.

Next: “But i'm intrigued to ask what is an example of a real entity, then, if it is not merely correlative to any given descriptive register and yet are thinkable (for these is not the ephermal and ineffable Infinity of theologians)?”

Here you are setting a bit of a trap for me, because you want me to describe a real object that underlies shifting theories, but obviously as soon as I describe it, it will no longer be the same thing as the real object being described.

The reason why objects are not the “ineffable infinity of the theologians” is that they are not infinite, and they are also not entirely ineffable. We can perform certain operations with them that increase our knowledge of the universe, just as imaginary numbers in mathematics can be used in equations. To say that withdrawn objects are useless because we can’t say anything about them is sort of like saying that black holes are useless in physics because we can’t see the inside of them. Direct seeing is not the only kind of knowledge, after all!

Next: “Which is the real object and stock of real qualities underlying the Inti-God of the Incas and the astral phenomenon described by science? Don’t we risk in this manner an all too-violent dispersionism of the Real in which anything we say is ultimately adequate to the Real underlying objects, insofar as discourse never reaches its ‘real’ qualities or primal substance-hood, but merely mediates it / relates to it in some level?”

I would have to be God to know what the real object is that lies beneath Incan religious beliefs. You seem to think that the up-to-date science of the year 2010 should be allowed to serve as the privileged judge of that question. I don’t see why. Our science of today will perhaps look as antiquated in a thousand years as Incan beliefs do today.

Your worry seems to be: if no direct access with objects is possible, then anything goes. I can claim that my worship of fairies is just as good as quantum theory. But why does this follow? Who says that there can’t be standards of better and worse even in a world where direct access to the things is impossible?

Next: “What is the principle of individuation for real entities, apart from acts of reference, without relapsing into some correlationist corner?” Real entities are individualized by their qualities, and qualities for me are not universals. But let’s leave that question for another time.

Next: “This can be also called 'Quinean virulence': if we can say purely imaginary objects have realities, and parts as well; what individuates them as objects? Is it my choice of nomination/term? Is there any sense to say the stickman is really a singular object, and not just a bundle of stick-parts? And why can I say there's one real object underlying the stickman, and not an infinity of stick-part objects?”

In the sensual realm it is we ourselves who decide that the stickman is one sensual object. It is simply a matter of descriptive phenomenology to decide whether I’m encountering one stick figure or many isolated parts (I doubt that an “infinity” is possible for perception; that’s an exaggeration).

In the realm of real objects, the stickman is one if the stickman is a unified reality that has properties not found in its pieces taken in isolation. But I don’t believe in real stickmen, of course.

Next: “Clearly if we move onto the physical register we don’t even have ontological unity, and we must say all there really is are subatomic forces or particles.” This is not clear at all. And even if it were, then you’re still speaking of individuals: individual forces, individual subatomic particles. These are objects, and demand an object-oriented analysis.

Next: “But since you have renounced naturalism, then surely you must say that the imagined or conceived stickman is not really physical anymore than it is really eidetic. For to deny its physical reality in order to assert its purely eidetic existence (as imagined stickman) would seem to run with the imposition of a matter independent ideality.”

I’ve only “renounced naturalism” in the sense that I don’t think physical explanations and entities should be privileged over other kinds. You seem to think I am taking a kind of Platonic position and saying that eidos is more real than physical. That’s not true at all.

Next: “But if we cannot eliminate the physical so as to avoid reductionism, then surely we would have to accept the same goes for every reality following from all possible descriptive registers, and we have once again something of a nomological virulence.”

I don’t understand this part.

Next: “On the other hand, if we say that the reality of none of these registers (even the ‘eidetic’) exhausts the ‘real object’ (since the latter is resolutely non-relational) we seem to return to the problem of anonymity, both at the level of substance and of quality. For none of the available descriptive registers seem to exhaust the object of my contemplation, even if many of them appear necessary (I couldn’t imagine anything if I had no body / if I had no thought / no language…).”

Here you seem to be mixing the reality of a thing with its epistemic exhaustability. Why would we even want to exhaust anything with some specific discursive register? Not only is it impossible in my philosophy, it’s undesirable to me as a person.

Next:”How can we therefore isolate real qualities independently of all relations? What would these be?”

This is similar to the trap I described above. You want me to give an example of a real quality outside relation, but obviously as soon as I give an example it will be in relation to me, will merely be a translation into discourse of a hidden real quality, etc. We cannot “isolate real qualities outside of all relations,” because what you’re asking for there is “to have a relation to real qualities outside all relations,” and of course that’s impossible. But this doesn’t mean that it’s useless to know that there are real objects with real qualities. As I said in the case of the black hole, direct observation is not the only kind of knowledge.

And consider metaphor. As Max Black showed so nicely, you can’t rephrase a metaphor in literal terms. This doesn’t mean that a metaphor gives no knowledge. Of course it does. You just have to abandon the narrow sense of knowledge as “correct propositions about the properties of things.”

Next: “If all the lists of irreducible strata of reality, ranging from parties to neutrons, are novel for OOO then this must be in a sense that’s not merely equivalent to, again, Badiou’s pure multiple (which, after all, could without problem produce the same kinds of varied lists only to add in the end – ontologically it is a pure multiplicity, which does not constitute a reduction any more than saying all objects are actors does).”

Badiou’s pure multiple can produce my lists of entities “without problem” only once they are counted and made part of the consistent mutiple. Badiou’s inconsistent multiple does not contain banks, snakes, icebergs, and forests: that’s the whole point of the inconsistency! For me, by contrast, the real world does consist of such things, and they are already in a duel with one another from the start.

There is no such thing as the “pure multiple” for me. There are only many different objects. Badiou is too much like the pre-Socratics with their apeiron for my taste.

Finally: “If everything is ontologically an actor, and real actors and qualities exist, what can we say of them?”

What’s the problem here? My books say all kinds of things about real objects. You can’t set the trap of demanding that withdrawn objects be spoken of in the same way as non-withdrawn sensual objects. The whole point is that they cannot be. But that doesn’t mean that we are left helpless before the ineffable, any more than astrophysicists are left to call the interior of black holes ineffable. You just have to find new, oblique methods of knowledge.

Thanks for the thought-provoking questions. I wonder, however, if you are willing to turn the same critical arsenal against Badiou himself? He seems to be getting too much of a free ride from his admirers these days! Best wishes, and keep me posted about your adventures in Lima and Los Angeles.

Graham Harman

Badiou's Mathematical Platonism

The Meta-Ontological Exception:
Notes on Badiou's Mathematical Platonism
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“The concept of model is strictly dependent, in all its successive stages, on the (mathematical) theory of sets. From this point of view, it is already inexact to say that the concept connects formal thought to its outside. In truth, the marks ‘outside the system’ can only deploy a domain of interpretation for those of the system within a mathematical envelopment, which preordains the former to the latter. […] Semantics here is an intramathematical relation between certain refined experimental apparatuses (formal systems) and certain ‘cruder’ mathematical products, which is to say, products accepted, taken to be demonstrated, without having been submitted to all the exigencies of inscription ruled by the verifying constraints of the apparatus." (AB, The Concept of Model)

Zachary-Luke Fraser advances a nice rejoinder to Ray Brassier’s outstanding analysis from Nihil Unbound. There Brassier asks what precise role metaontology comes to play vis the distinction between ontological and non-ontological situations. On the one hand, metaontology is clearly not ontology itself, since the latter only speaks of sets while the former speaks of presentations in general. As such metaontology cannot be said to be ‘founded on the void’ in the same way as ontology, since it operates with resources strictly external to the latter. On the other hand, metaontology suspends Leibniz’s thesis, which asserts the identity of being and the One (or being and unity), declaring the latter to be a mere operation (the count-as-one which structures every presentation). So it seems that metaontology stands somewhere inbetween the two ‘fields’ of presentation, enacting the transitivity of the very concept of presentation across the two domains, affirming the identity of ontology and mathematics. Luke Fraser thus seeks to dissolve the pertinence of the polarity between discourse and world in Badiou's mathematical Platonism by arguing that non-ontological presentations, thought in their being, must be already mathematized, i.e. must be thought of as models for set theory.

This way, it is not that set-theory qua singular discourse is ‘connected’ to its outside in non-ontological presentations via metaontology. Rather, all presentations are thinkable ontologically only as mathematically treated as a domain for the testing of the set-theoretical axioms: thus stipulating that insofar as ontology thinks of the form of presentations as sets, it thinks them in their being. This is part of the ‘mathematical Platonism’ that dissolves the transcendent bond between a formal language and its outside, and thereby dissolves the tension between a true materialism and what would appear to be a discursive brand of idealism anchored in set theoretical mathematics. So ontology and non-ontological situations are at once indiscernible as immanent (every presentation is immanently presupposed as having being mathematically intelligible in its being) and as transcendent (ontology is just one situation among others in itself;no situation contains all others; the concept of general presentation formally described by ontology is bridged through the meta-ontological decision):

“The point to which this brings us is this: To the extent that a mathematical ontology of concrete situations is possible, it must be possible to treat these as ‘models’ of set theory. Accordingly, these situations must be apprehended as being already mathematical in some sense, however crudely or vaguely understood. To the extent that ontology avoids the ‘empiricist’ mandate of being an ‘imitative craft’ (a characterisation against which Badiou rails in The Concept of Model), the correspondence between the ontological situation and its outside can be classified as neither a relation of transcendence nor immanence, but must be thought as a point of indiscernibility between the two. This is the source of all the obscurity attributable to the ‘Platonist’ position of metaontology, which forces us to ask, as Brassier does”,

“Where is Badiou speaking from in these decisive opening editations of Being and Event? Clearly, it is neither from the identity of thinking and being as effectuated in ontological discourse, nor from within a situation governed by knowledge and hence subject to the law of the One. […M]etaontological discourse seems to enjoy a condition of transcendent exception vis-àvis the immanence of ontological and non-ontological situations”(NU: Chapter IV)”

The relation between ontology/non-ontology is not strictly transcendent because non-ontological situations can only be thought in their being as already mathematized, i.e. for ordinary situations to be treated as models requires their mathematization into domains for set theory. It is not strictly immanent either because the ontological situation does not present all others, but only their general form as ‘sutured to their being’, inside the characteristic mode of thought that is ontology, i.e. there is no presentation encompassing all others, but only presentations of presentations, and void/nothingness.

However, the equation of mathematics with ontology, and thus the affirmation that set theory alone renders the form of presentation in all non-ontological situations, can only be performed by metaontology as declaring the equation of being qua presentation and inconsistent multiplicity qua the inertia of the domain of set theory. This in turn requires the primitive inconsistency of presentation to be foundational for the axiomatic, which Badiou perceives in the existential inscription of the pure name of the void as the primitive and radically non-phenomenological sign from which the entire stock of operations are woven in continuity with the axioms of set theory and on the basis of the primitive relation of ‘belonging’ alone. Metaontology is thus prerequisite to establish the indiscernibility of set theory as a unique situation and the wealth of possible non-ontological situations insofar as they are thought in their being.

Why must we assume that inconsistent multiplicity underlies the consistency of the pure multiple, which amounts to thinking being as fundamentally ‘without unity’ or as being-nothing? It is because the primitive subtraction of being from the count-as-one is thought in accordance with the Parmenidean statement that whatever is not One must be by necessity multiple. Since multiplicity resists unity, and given that being is essentially multiple, any discourse on being qua being will begin from the assumption of the non-being of the One, or the lack of any foundational figure of oneness.

Badiou assigns the multiplicity of presentation to its properly discursive (ontological) domain through the unique consistency of ZF set theory, which proceeds in the assumption of existence of a set with an empty extension. Once the operation of belonging to x can be said to be tantamount to ‘being presented to x’ via the speculative move, set theoretical strictures appear fittingly to depart from the sole assumption of the lack of a phenomenological given. Badiou explains the presupposition of lack required to render multiple being discursively through the sterility of the presentational domain set theory inscribes with the mark of the void. This identifies presentation with inconsistent multiplicity, and as such tethers being to set theory as ontology, enacting the thinking of that which primitively proceeds from the absence of unity, i.e. from accepting Parmenides’ embrace of the form of presentation as essentially multiple. The ‘suture to being’, again, thus remains strictly meta-ontological.

Of course, the additional assumption, also spotted by Brassier, is that non-ontological presentation is distinguished insofar as it presents the One, which necessarily makes the ontological situation qua theory of the multiple as the unique situation in which presentation is thought of in ‘its being’. The fictive being of the one is expressed as set theory operates consistently on the basis of the primordial lack of the void itself. It is thus that all unity is given in ontology solely against the impenetrable background of the void’s empty inertia. Each set is constructed on the basis of the primitive lack indexed by the void’s proper name, and is determined purely extensionally in terms of what it presents (which is always nothing but a function of replacement operating over the proliferation of subsets woven from the void alone -this is guaranteed via the axioms of void, powerset and replacement). Oneness remains thus the result of the operation of belonging, which presents sets whose being is nevertheless indexed to the void in the last instance.

“This splitting of unity into operation and effect is integral to the thinking of presentation and the metaontological delivery of the formal thinking of presentation to mathematics, and specifically, to set theory. It is set theory itself that formalizes this split, and provides us with a figure of multiplicity adequate to the thinking of presentation, and, more dramatically, to the univocal determination of the existent as presentation (and so of presentation as the presentation of presentations). To speak of a presentation is to speak of presentation affected by an operation of the count-as-one, and not of a presentation solidified according to the intrinsic unity characteristic of entity. The unity of a presentation is always extrinsic.” [ZLF Pg. 68]

It is this split between the one as an operation and as effect which becomes occluded in non-ontological presentations, where being attains fictive unity in closing this gap. It thus assumes itself identical to what it presents, or to its own singleton: x = {x}, thus violating the constraint set to it in well founded set theory by the axiom of foundation and extensionality (the couple of which require a set’s extensional determination or identity, and its incapacity to belong to itself). This indistinction between the one as operation and the one as result is thus the violation of what Zachary Luke Fraser designates as the two principles of multiplicity for Badiou:

a) Material component - Every set is extensionally determined.[1]

b) Formal unity – Every set is different from itself by a pure differentiation ( grounded in the axiom of foundation).

Consistency is thus the formal unity in which a presentation is given, its being-counted-as-one (yet different from itself) in the situation (one as result). On the other hand, presentation itself remains necessarily inconsistent as the retroactive presupposition of the multiple gathered is but merely counted-as-one, and thus presupposes its prior existence, not exhausted by what it unifies or presents in its formal unity (one as operation). In ordinary situations where this gap is closed, we do not think according to the being of what is presented, which necessarily differs from itself formally but on the basis of the fictional consistency of unity in which it appears.

The evaluation of such situations in the ‘moment of the One’, as we know, becomes properly the subject of Badiou’s Greater Logic in Logics of World and the phenomenology of objects.

- Annotations on Meditation 26 (The Concept of Quantity) in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event

In Alain Badiou’s theoretical framework set-theory as ontology comes to explicate the notion of quantity through some technical concepts worth elucidating in close detail, even if, as Badiou admits that the formal exposition of the ontological operations can exceed philosophical (and therefore meta-ontological) interest. In particular, it is easy to overlook Badiou’s explication of the concept of a ‘function’, since it is delegated to a short (but doubtlessly crucial) Annex at the end of the book. There, a function is described straightforwardly as a particular kind of multiple, in unproblematic continuity with the strictures of set-theory and the pure multiple. In what follows we’ll try to elucidate the surrounding notions, since the prose in the book lends itself to easy confusion.

A function f of a given set α to a set β, which can be written f(α) = β, establishes a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets, where it is understood that:

- For every element of α there corresponds via f an element of β.

- For every two different elements of α there corresponds two different elements of β

- For every element of β there corresponds via f, an element of α.

At this point, the set-theoretical grounding becomes quite necessary to follow Badiou’s argumentation, since the concept of ‘function’ outlined above is defined, after all, as simply a particular kind of multiple. What kind of a multiple is at stake here? Here we must move to Appendix 2 of the book, which provides the sought for clarification.

Badiou begins by describing multiples which constitute relations between other multiples. These are structured as series of ordered pairs, and are written as follows:

Let’s assume the existence of a relation R between two given multiples α and β: R(α, β). Badiou describes relation as getting behind two ideas: that of the pairing of the two elements, and that of their sequence or order. This second condition guarantees that even if R (α, β) obtains in a given situation, it is possible that R(β, α) does not. The first condition entails that all relations can be expressed as consisting of two element multiples, written in the form <α, β>, so that to say that there exists a relation R between two existing elements α and β finally amounts to no more than saying: <α, β> ε R. Given that for any two existing elements α and β there exists necessarily the set which has α and β as its sole elements {α, β}[2], although se will see right away that this set is not identical to <α, β> . The only problematic aspect pending is finally that of order, and thus of the stipulated asymmetry between R (α, β) and R(β, α):

Interestingly enough, the ‘ordered pair’ solicited by Badiou is not simply the pairing of α and β, but actually the pairing of the singleton of α, and the pairing of α and β. So we get:

<α, β> ↔ { {α}, {α, β} }

This set must exist, given that the existence of α and β guarantees the existence of their respective singletons, as well as their pair. Therefore the union of either of the first terms with their conjunction must also exist. In other words, for any given two multiples α and β there exist two different possible ordered pairings, which are not identical:

<α, β> ≠ < β, α> .↔. { {α}, {α, β} } ≠ { {β}, {β, α} }

Notice, however, that both ordered pairings are completely indifferent with respect to order in the terms of the set {β, α} / {α, β}; which are transparently identical sets. The impossibility of substitution and thus the asymmetry of the two orderings laid above occurs in the difference occasioned by the choice between {α} or {β}. This must mean that an ordered pair always consists, for any two elements supposed existent, of the two-element set consisting of the singleton of one of the two elements and the two-element set consisting of the two already given elements. Additionally, it is implied that:

<α, β> = <г, у> .->. (α = г) & (β = y)

Finally, to say a relation R obtains between two given sets α and β entails:

<α, β> ε R or <β, α> ε R

Having established that a relation is a multiple composed of ordered pairs, Badiou proceeds to explain how a function may be described a particular kind of relation. The trick here consists in grasping adequately the abovementioned idea of ‘correspondence’. Let us assume a function f that makes a multiple β correspond to α: f(α) = β. Having established functions are relations, and relations are sets of ordered pairs, it plainly follows that functions are sets of ordered pairs. If we then allow R_f to stand for the function of α to β, we can write as follows:

<α, β> ε R_f

But the peculiarity of the function resides on the uniqueness of β, so that no other element can correspond to it by it. This means that for any two multiples β and y that correspond to α via a function R, it must be the case that β and y are identical. Formally we write:

[f(α) = β .&. f(α) = y] -> β = y

Or, alternatively:

(<α, β> ε R _f .&. <α, y > ε R_f) -> β = y

If we want to unpack this formula, we write:

({{α}, {α, β}} ε R_f .&. {{α}, {α,y}} ε R_f) -> β = y

With this Badiou completes his reduction of the concept of relation to pure set-theoretical constructed multiplicities. The next step is to ground the comparison between sets in the series of ordinals (natural multiples[3]). With respect to a multiple’s ‘size’ or ‘magnitude’, there always exists an ordinal which is equal to it (which is not to say only natural multiples exist; we know this isn’t true given the existence of historical multiples). Badiou claims that thus ‘nature includes all thinkable orders of size” [BE: Pg. 270]. Here things turn a confusing, since Badiou doesn’t really provide an example until later. We can, however, give a very simple case to illustrate how exactly this happens.

First, recall that the series of ordinals are woven from the void alone, as the structured sequence or passage from the void into its singleton, and thus consecutively in serial manner. If we repeat the basic example laid above where R_f stands for the function of α to β. We got:

[R(α, β)] ↔ [f(α) = β] ↔ [< α, β> ε R_f]

Or, more explicitly:

{ {α}, {α, β} } ε R _f

However, we can easily see that the multiple thus produced has the same power as the ordinal which composes the Von Neumann ordinal Two, and which is guaranteed given the sequence of ordinals:

Π: {{Ø}, {Ø, {Ø}}

Notice, however, that although this ordinal certainly has the same power as the given set, there’s an infinity of ordinals with the same power as the laid set: we can easily imagine the ordinal: {{{Ø}}, {{Ø}, {{Ø}}} and successive variants, all with the same power. The requirement is merely that there will be at least one ordinal with the same power. Identity as such is guaranteed through the comparison of a set's extensions, where the axiom of foundation guarantees the void lingers within each form of presentation (forbidding non-wellfounded sets from proliferation indefinately; self-belonging becomes forbidden). I will continue with these notes later.

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[1] See the annotations below to explain the procedure of the determination of the identity of a set on the basis of the extensional determination of each set; which delivers us to the concept of quantity.

[2] See Being and Event, Meditation 12.

[3] Meditations 11-12.