Matter Matters: In Dialog With Levi Bryant

MATTER MATTERS:

- In Dialog With Levi Bryant -
 ______________________________________________

   Levi wrote a wonderfully informative reply to my earlier, rather naïve inquiry into his philosophy. He begins by clarifying further his conception of knowledge in contrast to what he deems to be ‘an obsession with how we represent the world’. It is the latter, theoretically dubious obsession, which renders the demand of construing knowledge around the expectation of ‘adequation to the real’, well... inadequate.

 It does so for several reasons, in Levi’s account. Chief among these, he argues that:

a)      Such theories assume a representational framework in which propositions are made to correspond to states of affairs in the world.

b)      Such a propositional account places an emphasis on results, i.e. on establishing the conditions under which it can be said that a proposition p is true or false.

  Accordingly, the non-representationalist model advocated by Levi would be unassuming of these premises, and claim that, on the other hand:

c)      An alternative account of knowledge does not have to run the gauntlet of epistemological agnosticism about the real.

   The vision Levi wants to endorse is centered on experimentation understood as a productive practice. The real that such an account will enter in relation is construed in Levi’s philosophy in terms of the endogenous, virtual structure of the objects which populate the world, and their relations. Therefore, the earlier accusation that any linguistic category could coin the real virtual objects withdrawing from relations as apprehended in local manifestations can be assuaged if such an alternative account can specify knowledge about or of the real otherwise. Here is where Bhaskar and the question of scientific experimentation do some constructive work. Levi writes:

“I was very careful to emphasize experimentation, yet reference to experiment appears nowhere in Daniel’s post. Rather, all that we see in Daniel’s post is reference to propositions and questions of how they hook on to the world. And indeed, if we don’t examine actual engagement with the world, then the question of how propositions hook on to the world turns out, in many instances, to be deeply mysterious. It comes to seem as if any proposition is as good as another (that there’s no criteria for “degrees of adequation”).”

     It is true in that I was not sufficiently attentive in acknowledging the proposed distinction between an account of knowledge based on scientific practice and one based on a representational theory. I would only note, provisionally ,that I am not sure how Levi cashes out this distinction when saying that propositional accounts focus only on results, i.e. premise (b) above. It seems true enough that the idea of adequation suggests that there are discursive entities which express real properties.  Fine. But this does not mean, surely, that propositional accounts must be descriptively impervious to experimentation, to process and production. An account of representation need not preclude considerations about practice; or at least it is not obvious that or how they do, according to Levi. For we could be asking about the epistemic status of propositions which express a theory of knowledge centered on practice, such as Levi's or Bhaskar. Just like practice seemed missing from my account, Truth seems conspicuously missing from his. He speaks about 'the truth of a theory by putting it to work and seeing what it does'. But it remains ambiguous whether he means that truth is a property of theories, or a feature of the propositions of those theories. If there is a well defined sense in which we can speak of theories being true, then that seems just fine. But if truth remains circumscribed to the propositional ambit, then it seems perfectly fine to ask how propositional statements made by science relate to what they designate or refer to. If Levi wants to reduce truth to the 'conditions of verifiability of a proposition', cornering us into a representational account of science focused on results, I profoundly disagree. Set-theoretical ontology, for example, can perfectly accomodate Truth as a category apart from representation, while salvaging the latter and knowledge around the notion of veracity. It certainly does not follow that asking for conditions of situation and state-of-the-situation, presentation-representation correspondence, one necessarily obviates a theory of practice. On the contrary, representation works in terms of a situation and its State, presentation and its parts. Representation picks out those parts which may be separated by the axiom of separation in purely indistinct multiplicities, without any conceptual baggage bringing propositions into the story, nor those of a subject of representation. Indeed, like the structuralist tradition holds following Althusser, the individual is product of the structure; which in set theoretical ontology is described in terms of an individual being nothing more than a multiple of the situation. Representation is thus formally isolated from Truth qua production, as the latter is seen in the form of the construction of generic subsets, and the forcing of the situation's generic extension through various processes of verification in a trajectory with no representative name, i.e. the generic is indiscernible.

It seems that Levi thinks that asking about how we know the real conforms to descriptions is to be asking a question about propositions made from a 'linguistic bias'. But why should this be so? Even if practice is primary for Levi, one can still raise questions about the status of scientific statements within those theories. And as far as these statements purportedly describe or relate to relations to real objects in the world, it seems perfectly fine to ask how these are articulated in relation. This doesn't imply we must construe the problem around features of propositions and their external counterparts (as Badiou's account makes clear, for example) and it surely doesn't suffice to make discursive correspondence trivial. If the latter is cashed through the relation between a situation (set A) and its state (set S(A)), it can be perfectly specified without making any appeal to linguistic entities, or mysteriously pulsating external worlds. My question ultimately concerns for Levi the inscription of local manifestations when they are discursively formulated  and as they purport to be indexes of features about withdrawing virtual objects. The question would be only to try and get clear on what scientific experimentation is said to involve and how it allows this knowledge to obtain.

Put directly: what precise status these theories and models, their formulas, syntactical structures and theorems, bear on the phenomena they purport to describe? What is the relation between the production of domains of phenomena which is relative to scientific practice, and the phenomena themselves? What are these phenomena, which presume a kernel of givenness to an experimenting agent, supposed to be? Representations of a subject; a transparent influx of the world? The question of practice needs to be explained in terms of a relation between elements which enter into a distinctively ontologized role. What is finally the status of such scientific statements produced in this practice vis a vis the Real which they are said to model in domains if not analogy-resemblance-identity-contrariness, all of which articulate the fourfold of representation Levi abjures?   This will turn out to be a tricky issue, as we will see below.

    Levi has deepened his account, following Bhaskar and Pickering with care. The adherence to Bhaskar concerns the question of how we come to know the real as externally existing, and expresses several aspects of scientific experimentation in grounding externalism: out-of-phasing, differentiation, structure, stratification, etc. Pickering, on the other hand, explains how in broader terms scientific theory expands itself through practice by modeling new domains of phenomena, taking materially productive research into multiple and unforeseen directions.

    However, and most importantly, the actual development of this process is highly contingent on a set of experimental practices which are not reducible to what is merely expressed in the theory's results, i.e. in the actual statements or expressions presented through theories and models in their writing. The use, application and transformation of science implies, as  Pickering endorses, that  “…the construction of theoretical models is not sufficient to describe what takes place in the science and why what takes place takes place”.

   Thus, nothing tells us a priori how scientific theories will expand, or fail to do so. The material production of science is highly contingent in its becoming, and so the models produced obey no pre-established route,  no a priori principle to determine the course of their trajectory or successful application. In the context of laboratory settings, instrumental and engineering demands, and the laboring practice of scientists, we find nevertheless that the objects before us frequently surprise us or resist us. The becoming of a theoretical model is expressed thereby in terms of modeling vectors which index differential strata, and which in turn presuppose a process encountering an objective resistance from (external) material conditions. Resistance, therefore, becomes an index of the real,  as expressed in scientific experimentation in Levi’s words:

     “The claim that resistance is an index of the real is to be restricted to the epistemological register. In short, one of the ways in which we determine whether or not something is a being or entity is through encountering resistances.”

    This is in obvious connection to Bhaskar’s account, which provides a picture of scientific experimentation on the basis of how objects may be out-of-phase with their qualities, and in which we discover virtual powers by gradual, tentative approaches by acting upon the source material.  In fact, the good scientific theory, Levi claims, is one which can effectively produce these differences or resistances. That is, a good theory is one which finds new modeling vectors under contingent experimental conditions, which not just informs us about the conceptually expressible differences between and among the objects we’re dealing with. In addition to these, science also produces and stratifies the differences which form its material basis through its experimental practice. And I think Levi is right in expressing that scientific knowledge involves a productive aspect which involves a material transformation, and not just a representational theory concerned with proposition-world mappings, in the sense he earlier expressed.

   I think that at this juncture very interesting questions arise about the question of materialism in relation to the status of formalization, modeling, practice, knowledge, domains of phenomena, phenomena, and the Real. To be as brief as possible, I will outline where the core stakes lie as far as I can gauge:  

There is in both Pickering and Bhaskar’s accounts, as expressed by Levi, a distinction between theoretical model and material practice. This seems to be in accordance to the classic philosophical distinction between form and content which fuels the possible distinction between formal and empirical sciences. The role of scientific theories is to model the material  phenomena in domains, which are also produced in practice. So we have simultaneously the transforming of the phenomena itself into domains, and the production of the domains qua theoretical entities. This is a tricky relation which is not given proper explanation, for it is far from clear how the resistance of the Real in the transformation of manner relates to the theoretical domains in a non-representational way, i.e. outside the fourfold determinations outlined above. It seems tacitly assumed that the relations between the domains of phenomena qua theoretical postulates which reach over the phenomena, are in some way analogous or even isomorphic to the structure of Real phenomena themselves. But if this relation of isomorphy-analogy obtains, it must surely be said how the features of real resistance allows us to elucidate this relation, and thus to know of it. For to simply assume the theoretical domains, which are finally sets and thus mathematical entities, are transparently 'correspondent' to the Real is to smuggle in a gratuitous representational account between scientific discursive entities and the real world. How such an account is any less representational or presupposition-laden than accounts of linguistic representation, is beyond me.

 Models do not represent scientific practices themselves, but  purportedly apply to ever-expanding domains of phenomena conditioned by the practice of the scientist and his environment, including the laboratory instrumental conditions under which experiments occur. This is why I do not hesitate to call the accounts Levi follows as ultimately empiricist insofar as they accept the externality of matter in relation to what is expressed to the notional material of scientific theory. The latter only models the former through the production of domains of phenomena, while it is resistance qua inadequacy to theoretical postulates in the way of unpredictable experimental occurrences which become the index for the Real as non-produced instead. 

     It must be said, however, that as far as Levi’s presentation is concerned, the account seems to presuppose a rather specific series of ontological commitments which make up the externality of this material world: that of practicing scientists, in laboratories, with equipment and instruments, and fabricating models. The material reality of scientific experimentation is underwritten by the agency of an anonymous scientific ‘practitioner’ within the strictures of intervention described in Pickering and Bhaskar in accordance to a very precise sense of what they take to be the work of scientists. 

     The problem as we have indicated is that it remains ambiguous in Levi’s explanation whether the domains of phenomena onto which scientific theories are expanded are themselves material and part of the materially engaged practice, or rather part of the theoretical models which produce the scientific postulates, belonging to the sphere of mere ‘results’. It seems quite plausible to say that these domains are produced and material at once, since they constitute, alongside the apparatuses, laboratory conditions, and everything else, that which is being-worked-upon (the matter tested and transformed) and that which is being-modeled (the inscribed differentiation and stratification of produced differences in domains). By the same token Levi surely cannot mean that only scientists produce real phenomena or matter, since it is on the other hand matter which preconditions the existence of scientists and the possibility of any local manifestation. There must be thus a tacit distinction between domains of phenomena and the phenomena  themselves at work here, which is far more mysterious than it seems at first.

Levi's position is subtle: phenomena are of the class of local manifestations, manifestations of the virtual object. The latter never gives itself as such, but only locally and partially. Thus if the scientist may occasionally encounter resistance it is because the objects it deals with may be out-of-phase; not displaying a power(s) they have, and which somehow  prevents thorough and transparent isomorphy to the theoretical postulates. Yet the question between the domains of phenomena and phenomena remains somewhat ambiguous vis a vis the distinction between local manifestations and real object. Specifically, is there any sense of speaking of phenomena as already individuated, prior to the scientific production and modelling of domains? If the domains are not merely representing the phenomena, but also producing them, in what sense does one nevertheless claim that objects are individuated quite independently of the theoretico-practical resources of modelling which we use to test the powers of objects. 

One may tentatively assume the following: the ‘expansion’ of scientific theory consists in the production of new theoretical axioms-language along with the construction of new domains which group phenomena, as much as a negotiation with the material conditions of production, i.e. the phenomena themselves. The domains of phenomena in question would thus be postulated sets of material beings/regions as sets which group local appearances which designate substances and their powers. These presuppose the phenomena which belong or are included in those sets, as tested by the possible resistance of a given powers in the object: the same object may or may not phenomenally be locally manifest in the appropriate domain. Thus water could be boiling or not, and this might allow us to stratify water across distinct differential domains for scientific production and testing. While the testable repetition of the same manifestations obtained under suitably comparable circumstance on the same material, guarantees the domains of phenomena pertain to virtual objects. These domains must thus be indexes of real powers in virtual objects, for Levi. It would make no sense for Levi to say thus that the local manifestation of an apple is simply a local manifestation of something which is of my own making, and that the object is in no relation to the statements-domains which scientist produce thus. That is, it wouldn't congruent with realism to say that the phenomena which appear and are modeled are power of the object as such. This would render the productivity of science impervious to the possible content of matter, irrespective of resistance, and of all the differentiations produced by the theory.

However, for this account to be rendered coherent, Levi must imply that the domains do not themselves produce the phenomena which belong to it; since that would mean that all phenomena are produced as individuated in the development of scientific practice and domains, something which would be either correlationist or Idealist (we will see why later). Finally, how are the phenomena in question, assumed as already individuated, known-as pertaining to the real object apart from any domains under which they are grouped in scientific statements? If the groupings which give know-that through know-how are always associated with a produced expressible domain, that is as a set, how is one to understand phenomena as non-produced, the phenomena themselves, as anchored in a subsistent and structured real already individuated into parts and powers, and not merely relative to our knowledge. Resistance here does not help in defining the relation between the phenomena manifested and as compiled in domains on the one hand, and the powers themselves as hosted by a virtual structure on the other. The answer may be anticipated from the following. Levi’s criteria, following Bhaskar and Pickering, requires that: “There are degrees of adequation based on the differences that the model has consistently been able to produce in practice.”
   This all seems to suggest that knowledge-that or adequation is measured against the standard of produced differences, the domains of phenomena which stratify and differentiate distinct phenomena.  The question here becomes again one of individuation: structure and difference are known in the production of differences which adequately model the real, but the real as such is known only in its resistance to full  integration, or structural isomorphy, i.e to the produced theory and expressed domains.   Seeing that Levi expressly rejects representationalist accounts, he surely does not mean to say that domains of phenomena represent phenomena, or things themselves. These domains are the material objects themselves, and not just the expressions which we give of them; the two are distinct but bear structural relation. Yet how this account is not representational is completely beyond me. Perhaps I am wrong, but correspondence theories coded in mapping mathematical structures to entities in the world are no less problematic epistemologically than those between words and world. If Levi's account is so thoroughly anti-representational, how are the domains produced made to express properties of objects themselves, rather than of mere appearances ala Kant relative to transcendentally individuated phenomena, or by virtue of the very domains constructed in formalization, which makes them formally individuated? Consistency only says that a  phenomenon will appear thus and may be modeled thus consistently, but it doesn't tell me how this phenomenon and its allotment into domains obtains for being-it-itself. This cannot be left in suspense. For how do we gauge not just that there is a real resistance outside our domains of difference, but realities which are numerically correspondent to our singularly produced domains as expressed by sets.

The answer here is that we can't, ever, for sure! But the question is more serious than that. Not being a materialism which favors scientific differentiation in production, Levi's own irreductionist account must tweak the criteria for knowledge about the real apart from conditions of pure differential production within scientific understanding. But the nearness to the real in terms of the withdrawal of objects appears difficult to discern in epistemological grounds: domains of phenomena are produced, as sets of differentiated individuated local manifestations expressed in sets. These sets are associated with powers in some unique object. The former can be out-of-phase with the latter. This tells us that domains model groups of local manifestation. But we do not only isolate arbirary local manifestations of powers, but the objects that presumably bear these powers. The variety of postulated objects is simply contingent on the stratification of domains, and these all fold back to the real as resistance. How are we to understand the individuality of such a non-produced phenomenon, then, lest we describe how the domains of phenomena under which they are individuated, are in some way not merely produced, but also correspondent to a real object/part? How is this correspondence understood or how can it can potentially fail? The 'out-of-phasing' of an object with respect to its properties, and the other criteria Bhaskar proposes just begs the question, since it continues to assume correspondence between the structure of produced domains which stratify differences in phenomenal, locally actualized appearance, and that of the virtual powers of objects themselves. But this correspondence seems wanting and threatening to an account that has sworn to abjure representation. 

As I indicated earlier, there are ways to construct an account of representation without falling into a representationalist vision of the sort Levi has in mind. Badiou’s distinction between parts and elements codes representation in terms of how the State doubles the count of a situation by counting its discernible parts (subsets). The twofold count is what conforms to the situation's structure. But in Badiou’s account there is no agency of the ‘experimental subject’ modeling a phenomenal field or doing the 'counting', since there is no subject of science, no ‘practicioner’ underlying its mathematized kernel. In Levi’s account, however, it becomes either necessary to specify how practical scientific knowledge models material phenomena in a way in which the latter can be said to be knowledge of the in-itself, and not just knowledge of the for-us; not just relatively.

For if we must say that all we know of the Real is that it resists our construal of domains in practice through which we differentiate and stratify, then the Real becomes, in a manner similar to Laruelle, in principle refractory from any ontologizing/formalizing structure which might individuate it in continuity with our fabricated domains. That is, lest we surreptitiously claim that domains are not really just produced, but representational or formalist, i.e. that the domains bear analogic resemblance or structural isomorphism to the structure of phenomena themselves. In the latter case, phenomena themselves would be theoretical postulates, and it is doubtful we can call such a theory a realism. Since in Pickering's account one can only survey the proximity of knowledge to phenomena themselves by virtue of the differences the model(s)  produces,  one must explain how these differences are not just indexes for the Real qua unspecified being in withdrawal (both quantitatively and qualitatively), but to the Real as structurally adequate to these differences or continuous with them. And indeed Levi acknowledges that we have not done with adequation, but merely with 'representational' accounts. Without criterion for adequacy, the domains couldn’t be of phenomena qua local manifestations of virtual structures. Since the question is now not only which domains we may produce in scientific practice but how these domains stand for features of the real, the question seems pending. Put more provocatively: how do we know the structure of what withdraws if what manifests itself is always known under conditions of production which remain specific to these conditions (the domain of phenomena)? 


In spite of all the insightful precautions, the demand to clarify the nature of proximity between production-dependent domains and production-independent phenomenal appearances qua indexes of real objects raises interesting questions. It seems that Levi’s subscription to Pickering oscillates between a representational empiricist account where the domains of phenomena merely designate/organize/produce phenomena which are individuated prior to the production of domains through analogic resemblance,  and the Idealist/formalist thesis according to which individuation obtains intrinsically as a function of scientific production, and the latter to the construction of difference, i.e. the domains of phenomena.

The former option cannot, however, appeal to resemblance and at the same time attempt to dodge representation without flirting with the status of scientific statements and questions about conditions for verification. The latter may provide one with isomorphy between domain and phenomena, but the externality of matter as resistence becomes either annulled as structured, or else an intractable index discontinuous with the domains produced: mysticism. That the latter option can be reconciled with a realism about scientific differentiation is dubious, since it seems to entail an unbridgeable qualitative gap between domains of phenomena on the one hand, which bear isomorphic relations to phenomena; and the Real 'as such' which remains known by a resistance in the order of given experience. This last option seems to me too close to the mystical option, and I doubt Levi would want to endorse it. The possible idea of a given without givenness, on the other hand, a non-individuated index of withdrawal, seems too close to Laruelle's practicism.

Rethinking Materiality - Mathematics and Matter
At this juncture, we can point out how naturalized epistemology is already denounced by Badiou for its apparent circularity: it attempts to clarify how productivity anchors itself on a resistant material basis, while at the same time explain the latter by the production of domains which are not merely heuristic with respect to the phenomena it analyses, but correspondent or adequate to it according to an extrinsic relation of analogical resemblance (albeit it remains unstated and unconceptualized in Levi’s introductory presentation):

“Thus in a surprising empiricist mimesis of the serpent of absolute knowledge swallowing its own tail, naturalized epistemology seeks to construct a virtuous circle wherein the congruence between fact and form is explained through the loop whereby representation is grounded in fact and fact is accounted for by representation [a theory of how science records ‘facts’].” [Pg. 139]

 As I see it, this is the result of the empiricist adherence to the form-content distinction which underwrites both Bhaskar and Pickering’s account.  Theories produce models, and the latter map into external material reality. This is facilitated by the theory of praxis underlying these accounts, the scientific standard for an agency which knows. I would love to know what Levi thinks of Badiou’s criticism to this account in his first book The Concept of Model. The core issue for Badiou is how to think of a robust materialism which accounts for its immanent historicity. Thus the latter requirement seeks to think of matter dialectically, and yet not as transcendent object for representational reification, or constituted by a subjective agency in Idealist manner. Matter is immanent to itself, and its becoming is dialectical and yet not anchored on any external guarantor. Thus Badiou will reject any accounts which locate at the basis of scientific phenomena the agency of a subject or individual, or community, which is tethered to inherit the weight of scientific productivity. Against Heidegger, who believes that science is to face a crisis at a loss for a metaphysical grounding, Badiou explains that there is no subject of science; and that therefore there are no crises in science. Science is its own subject:

“Such a state of affairs is symptomatic of contemporary science and represents its innermost danger… science will not allow itself to enter such a crisis because it is already much too preoccupied with the realm of serviceability” (Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Pg. 189

“[T]here is no subject of science. Infinitely stratified, adjusting its transitions, science is a pure space, without a reverse or mark or place of what it excludes. It is foreclosure, but foreclosure of nothing, and so can be called the psychosis of no subject, hence of all; fully universal, shared delirium, one only has to install oneself within it to become no-one, anonymously dispersed in the hierarchy of orders. Science is an Outside without a blind-spot…There are no crises within science.” (Badiou: ‘Mark and Lack’)

   Badiou’s way to do this cuts right into the central question about what constitutes scientificity. For Badiou, the empiricist model which distinguishes between form and content rests still on a transcendental conception, i.e. every empiricism is already in itself an Idealism. It presupposes a split between theory and practice in terms of formal systems and the material realm which provides the ‘content’ for the verification of the experiments of these systems. Therefore, the theoretical framework models materiality as such. This empiricist bias acknowledges that there is an externality of matter to its knowing, where the latter must situate itself as a ‘blind spot’. This is precisely the status of the scientific practice favored by Levi described by Pickering: the material activity of the scientific community producing models after a resisting reality. Thus against the hackneyed purported split between the formal and empirical sciences, the natural scientist can avow that only the latter deserve to be called scientific, an enquiry into the real, since they only interact with the material real, external to theories and their models. Theory models reality, reality itself withdraws from theory.

   Yet for Badiou precisely what distinguishes scientific production is its thorough mathematicity. Of course, as is well known, this underwrites his favoring of physics and his questionable dismissal of biology (that ‘wild empiricism’, as he calls it). For Badiou, even Quine’s naturalism cannot escape pragmatism as long as it locales the formality of scientific productivity apart from materiality itself. Thus Badiou’s extant mathematical Platonism: it is at once a theory of the most formal as the only material. Mathematics says what is explainable of being qua being. There is no ‘externality’ for practice to anchor itself and for its theories to model. Strictly speaking, what we have is always two thoroughly mathematical structures:

1)      An axiomatic framework.

2)      A domain of Interpretation.

The history of the scientific becoming concerns how it continually differentiates its own notional material in order to escape its appropriation by bourgeois epistemology. Scientific concepts stratify notional difference, while ideological notions usually envelop these, i.e. the form-concept distinction is one of such notion. Philosophy thereby wanders between a reactionary ideological envelopment of science, and a potential unveiling of these envelopments deploying truly materialist categories.  The obvious political flair of the last sentence shouldn’t distract us to what is being implied here. What science does is to immanently sublate the subordination of scientific concepts to ideological and notions, by re-stratifying that which philosophy de-stratifies. The appeal to an ‘external category called matter falls to a mere philosophy of matter, while a true materialist philosophy is immanently materialistic. In this regard, Badiou agrees with Levi in that: “The reality of the epistemological materialism which I am trying to introduce […] is indissociable from an effective practice of science”. However, this practice of science cannot be explained by the activity of an agent building theories to model material reality. Rather, the process whereby scientific production stratifies differences immanently is by constantly splitting its notional material in order to produce concepts for which no category/notion exists yet. And it is in this challenge that precisely we see how Badiou seeks to reject both empiricism and Idealism in the same stroke:

    “The broader epistemological import of this project is to develop a materialist account of the nature of scientific theory that challenges both the empiricist assumption that scientific theories merely model empirical reality, and the idealist claim that reality is nothing but an inert support for scientific theory.” (Brassier, 2010)

    The productivity of science is anchored on account of how it operates over its mathematical notation, in which it is progressively formulated: ““[U]ltimately, in physics, fundamental biology, etc., mathematics is not subordinated and expressive, but primary and productive”. This primacy and productivity must be explained, however, in its three fundamental aspects: stratification, differentiation, and how it is an index of materiality itself. And this must be so without any anchoring of it externally on a notion of subjective intervention. We could provisionally remark that this early conception of mathematical production as immanent, being its own subject, still coincides with the latter ontological formulation from Being and Event according to which mathematics speaks resolutely what can be known of being qua being. In any case, Badiou’s account seems very close to Bhaskar in what it needs to explain, and indeed it all turns on whether Badiou can effectively produce a theory of immanent material productivity through mathematics without resorting to any externality or endorsing a Pythagoreanism about number, i.e. stratified difference must index materiality itself. But if mathematicity is said to cut its own notional material, this must be a way which does not imply some external agency which ‘does the cutting’; it must be intrinsic to its own operations.  

Badiou thereby proposes to assess the scientific status of the concept of model to purify it from its notional (ideological) baggage. One can attribute this ideological notional coating of the concept of model present in bourgeois epistemology by diagnosing the latter as being structured around an unexplained differentiation – based on an unquestioned assumption and perfectly incapable of examining their underlying principle. In the case of bourgeois epistemology, this is the distinction between:

a) Theoretical form – The formal theory (mathematics) which has a function.

b) Empirical reality - Which lies independently of formalizations.

The articulation between the two has in turn (at least) two variants: the representationalist idea of theory mirroring pre-given / presented objective reality, or the structuralist thesis governing the idea of an anteriority of a formal apparatus where the theory provides the form of representation for access to reality (no reality without theory).

Let us attempt to understand each of the stages involved in Badiou’s presentation, for the sake of clarity. Following Brassier’s (2010) excellent presentation, we can begin by distinguishing:

1) Formal system (syntactical aspect):

- Finite set of symbols

- Logical operators (negation and implication)

- Individual constants (a, b, c)

- Predicates (P, Q, R)

- Variables (x, y, z…)

- Quantifiers: (Universal, Existential)

- Rules of formation

- Rules of deduction (generalization, separation)

- A list of axioms

2) Structure

- Domain for interpretation (non-empty set V)

- Marks (true/demonstrable, false/non-demonstrable)

3) Rules of correspondence (semantic aspect)

- Correspondence function F mapping individual constants to some element of V, and predicative constants, to some subset of V.

    This general layout expresses how scientific activity operated by the elementary mechanisms of concactenation, formation and derivation. The stratification of symbols in strings become solely the input to produce differentiations at distinct levels through deductions which allow for operations of generalization or separation, in accordance with an axiomatic framework. The intelligibility of statements in the theory are determined on the basis of its internally regulated production of differences (the deductions themselves).

Next, we explain how scientific concepts are enveloped in a historical development along categories and notions. This happens essentially in three steps: first science breaks away from ideological capture in also breaking away with its philosophical categorical representation; then this break is recaptured by philosophical categories (which can be the scientist’s own interpretation); science breaks with this second representation by reconfiguring around new limits independently and inherently established through its own formalization.  This is what renders the material becoming of science, as tethered to mathematicity, also dialectically engrossed in the tripartite constellation of concepts, notions and categories; science, ideology and philosophy.

Brassier’s tracing of this movement here is helpful and can be quoted in full:

     “The first break is the point at which scientific discourse subverts its current ideological representation by producing a difference that cannot be subsumed by extant philosophical categories. Philosophy then represents this break by de-stratifying (re-categorizing) this stratified difference, thereby re-enveloping the new concepts produced by science within extant ideological notions (these will be novel philosophical categories). Lastly, the moment of reconfiguration is the moment of the second break understood as a re-stratification of what philosophy has de-stratified; a re-stratification wherein the parameters of scientific discourse are re-established independently of science’s current philosophical representation.”

    Badiou himself traces the historical becoming of these developments, from Pythagoras to Godel, in seven moments which serve to articulate this movement:

I) The existence of a historical mathematics (namely ‘intuitive’ arithmetic); one that is open in principle (indefinitely stratified signifier).

II a) The ideological re-presentation of this existence as the trans-mathematical norm of completely controllable rationality (the ideological destratification of the mathematical signifier).

II b) The posing of a question to mathematics about their conformity to this ideological norm, in the form of the axiomatic and formalist intention, whose goal is to display a founded transparency (this is the ideological motivation of Frege and Russell).

III) Break: the mathematical treatment of this ideological re-presentation of mathematics via the actual construction of formal systems that ‘represent’ historical arithmetic (Principia Mathematica).

IV a) The ideological re-presentation of this break: formal systems conceived as trans-mathematical norms of rational closure via the idea of a nomological system (Husserl).

IV b) The posing of a question to mathematics about their absolute conformity to the ideological norm of closure: this is the metamathematical intention, relative to the internal demonstration of a system’s consistency (Hilbert).

V) Break: the mathematical treatment of ideological re-presentation via the actual construction of a mathematical metamathematics (the arithmetization of syntax).

Gödel’s Theorem: the structural stratification of the mathematical signifier does not answer the ‘question’ of closure.

VI) Ideological re-presentation of this break: Gödel’s Theorem is experienced as a limitation relative to the normative expectation.

            Ideological exegesis of this ‘limitation’ as:

-         openness of speech and concealment of being (Ladrière);

-         finitude;

-         splitting, suture;

-         ...

VII) Break: the general theory of the limitation-effect, positively conceived as a structural instance of certain mathematical objects (Smullyan’s epistemological truth).

           

The epistemological upshot of this convoluted adventure reminds us that mathematics operates upon its own existence such as it is designated in ideology; but that this operation, conforming to the specific constraints of a science, takes the form of a break, such that the (ideological) questions which make up the material upon which mathematics carries out its working reprise, find no answer in the latter.

(Badiou, ‘Mark and Lack’, 172)

      Philosophy de-stratifies science insofar as it renders its pure notional differentiation subject to some categorical operator which subordinates/sublates this. A good example here would be, as Deleuze has developed, how Hegel or Leibniz seize infinity into the dialectic of identity. The former subordinates infinite differentiation to the moment of essence in the infinitely large, as the historical movement of determinate negation which renders lays the ground on contradiction. For the latter, the vicediction of the infinitely small indistinguishes the difference (the mirroring of the monads), which it excludes in essence (Difference and Repetition, Chapter II, Pgs 42-46). The post-Cantorian reconceptualization of infinity, however, allows us to differentiate between various infinities of variable cardinal order, which devolves in the sequential expansion of ever growing, perfectly determinate sets (the series of alephs; see Being and Event, Meditations 14, 26-28). By edifying a new layer of stratification mathematicity produces a difference for which no category yet exists. This ideological re-presentation which is curiously also a philosophical operation (though not, it must be stressed, one made exclusively by philosophers) is constantly shed off by formalization.

   Yet what does it mean to say that this production is, strictly speaking, material? It does not, Badiou emphasize, pertain to the spurious category of ‘matter’ invoked as the kernel of content or sensible material upon which formalization operators. Just as radically anti-phenomenological as it is anti-empiricist, set-theoretical ontology abhors construing matter around any form of panthematic presentation, the non-identical sentiendum of the aesthetic, even in its contrived naturalistic guises. Matter is a direct index of the scriptural materiality wherein difference is produced. But, as Brassier credits Zachary Luke Fraser in pointing out, this cannot pertain to the substance of graphic marks in paper, ink, and so on. This materiality is incorporeal, and here lies the real break with OOO; it does not pertain to any form of circumscribed substantiality. Since productivity is the index for materiality, Badiou emphasizes this Marxist link and insists that it is the formal stratification which produces difference and which produces intelligible differences apart from any category of representation, so that only then “...no signifying order can envelop the strata of its discourse”.  The domains of interpretation which serve as the structural support for the theory are thoroughly mathematized, and obey perfectly the extensional order of sets, without any intensional determinant playing the role of specifying the ‘nature’ of its contents. As Brassier puts it:

    “In the history of a science, the experimental transformation of practice via a determinate formal apparatus retrospectively assigns the status of model to those antecedent instances of practice. Conversely, conceptual historicity, which is to say the ‘‘productive’’ value of formalism, derives both from its theoretical dependency as an instrument and from the fact that it possesses models, i.e., that it is integrated into the conditions of the production and reproduction of knowledge.” [Ibid: Pg, 144]”

The ‘rule governed transparency’ of the mathematical machinery which articulates scientific productivity make the dualism of subject and object, and the idea of an experimental practice as anchored on a mediating agent, a residue of the bourgeois empiricism which remains ideologically enveloped. The means of mathematical production are likewise produced mathematically on their own account “there would be no formal systems without recursive arithmetic, and no rigorous experimental protocols for such systems without set-theory.” And it is in this element that scientific production finds its historicity, which becomes then nothing but the history of materialism as it negotiates its field with ideology: the problem is finally the history of formalization. Discontinuity is hardly a problem for science which needs to be accounted for irrespective of its immanent resources by appeals to the practicing scientist, laboratory conditions, and the externality of produced matter over modeling formal systems. Rather, discontinuity is immanent to its productive method, cutting itself loose perpetually. As Brassier concludes:

“Badiou’s account is one in which there is nothing that science cannot know because, dispensing with every vestige of substance, Badiou’s formalist ontology leaves no room for the inconceivable or unconceptualizable. Truth is the sole exception to the order of being, but science is one of the harbingers of truth.”  

I should say that I am aware that this position has been criticized for different reasons. Brassier’s Sellars-inspired account insists that formalization remains helplessly abstract if not wed to a perceptual realism, and therefore proposes to rehabilitate the cog of representation altogether for epistemology. Daniel W Smith insists, contra Badiou, that the field of axiomatics that Badiou’s set-theoretical approach favors obviates the intrinsic role problematics play in scientific production, leading the way to rehabilitate the Deleuzean conception of intensive multiplicities which morphogenetically become the source for material dynamisms, and not just the bare extensional stasis of the axiom.


The morale of the story is finally that as long as epistemology is wed to an external concept of matter, even if it is wed to experimental production, remains subject to the representational exigency (analogical resemblance) or the formalist coup (isomorphy). The former rehabilitates the representational cog Levi has sworn to abjure, while the latter vitiates resistance qua index for reality; insofar as it must admit of a structural continuity in the isomorphy between model and matter, form and content, produced domain of phenomena and the phenomena themselves. For Levi cannot settle with the thesis that phenomena only exist as produced or that they are individuated only in scientific production, without surreptitiously re-anthropomorphizing his account, and inflecting OOO into the proto-Idealist fable in which only knowing systems individuate objects, or the proto-Deleuzean notion that pre-individual singularities are non-individuated prior to psychic agency. The neat separation between epistemology and ontology, and circumscribing the question of the scientific determination of the real to the former, is thereby threatened. The ontological status of matter remains fatally ambiguous between the thesis according to which it remains in utter externality to thought (known only in passive resistance), and the thesis according to which it isomorphic to the structure of knowledge as individuated by scientific domains and theories (known by the active production of domains of difference). Since the phenomena which belong to these domains cannot be functions of scientific practice for OOO, they must be individuated isomorphically to at least certain formal structures or models at time, or else remain utterly qualitatively distinct and thus unknowable wholesale. But isomorphy only dodges representation by rendering the gap between form and content effectively null. Such an option, does not permit the external conception of matter as substantially resistant, but makes it rather formally accessible. Levi would need the latter to encode the difference between withdrawing virtual being, and local manifestations. Isomorphy can only maintain a concept of a resisting real in the form of a remainder, the matter external to the domains and which becomes palpable in practice by experiencing out-of-phasing. But if this resistance resists the transparent isomorphy of the scientific theory, then it must be because what doesn’t withdraw can never be isomorphic to the real, i.e. the latter is precisely what always remains outside. But then the entire production of difference which is supposed to tell us more about the real ends up being ideologized as a monotonous stupidity where stratification can’t be measured in its proximity (or lack thereof) to the real. Formalization operates by dissecting itself on the basis of a withdrawal of the real, but this renders impossible to verify that real can ever be isomorphic with any formal structure. This gap remaining open, the domains of difference made up by phenomena remain just that, phenomena, local manifestations seized into domains by production in our dealings, but never in principle knowledge of the real. At best, the practitioner is laid with the epiphanic encounter with the Real’s slippery asymmetry against its modelling attempts; the excess of a first mover, while the scientist in turn embodies the relentlessness of a dog trying to bite its own tail. The laboratorial considerations of scientific practice remain, it must be said, no less invested by ideological presuppositions than the representationalist prejudice Levi wishes to denounce. In the intractable alienation of the Real, one cannot but wonder why the production of difference constitutes anything like an approximation? That seems to gauge the intelligence of the dog in direct proportion to how many loops it has ran chasing its own tail.


In the end, either the real remains totally knowable and we have formalist isomorphy, or we know it progressively and only partially, in which case we have representationalist analogical resemblance, or we make stratification thoroughly knowledge-relative and make the real totally unknowable and we oscillate between between correlationism and Idealism. In any case, it is the externality of matter, the withdrawal of its substantive being, which resurrects the epistemological juncture with metaphysics anew, in what was to be a neat separation of their position. 


The resolutely pragmatic considerations underwritten in Levi’s realism through Pickering and Bhaskar’s account seem under that light, produced by an adherence to the form-content distinction. I think Badiou’s epistemological insights might clarify where certain core issues could be, even if I, for one, remain highly uncertain. In particular, since Badiou ends up bringing up the agency of a post-evental subject which can only work through the meta-ontological role of philosophy vis a vis the primary ontological role attributed to set-theory qua a theory of presentation. The entire dialectics of the event, even in its reworked form in Logics of Worlds remains to me wed to a dubious emergence of a ‘singularity’ which however audaciously smuggled, remains gratuitously in exception to the axiom of foundation. Nothing in the materialist dialectic of objects helps to account for this emergence, since ontology knows nothing of the event, even if it can specify the post-evental Truth in terms of the generic procedure. Without the act, however, Badiou’s ontology remains static, and open to the Deleuzean bite in favor of problematics. But the latter likewise can only proceed by reproducing, in Badiou’s estimation, a dualism of Idea and matter, virtual and actual, at the expense of univocity. Finally, if the materialism purported by Badiou is not an Idealism, in spite of his endorsement of the Parmenidean identification of being and thought, it is because the productivity of matter is immanent to itself and its own notional material. But an ontology identified with mathematics can have no truck with the spuriously external notions of ideology or philosophy any more than it can have concern with ‘matter’ or laboratory instrumentation. This is why the process of novelty occurs through four domains and is ontologically completely generic in its being. The philosophical meta-ontological intervention in Badiou’s discourse operates precisely as a point of exception where presentation  now solicits ontology to become a theory for its conditions  to render its models in art, science, love and politics. All of these are mere historical configurations of the base generic material being expressed through mathematics. The agency of a ‘pure subject’, then, comes to intervene in the emergence of a ‘singularity’ in the world, regulating the passage of the inexistent of the world into maximal existence, in disconnected trajectories. This meta-ontological exception is however, a lingering point in Badiou’s account for reasons Brassier (2007) has already pointed out, and which remain pressing in my estimation as late as LOW. But enough for now.


  I am very glad, however, to see Levi’s account illuminated by his references to Pickering and Bhaskar, and hopefully points towards a dialog surrounding these fascinating issues. I want to thank him again for his time and insightful production.

The Positive Side: Amends With OOO

- The Positive Side -

Amends with Object Oriented Ontology

____________________________________

   I am compelled to answer Graham Harman’s reply to my post about some of the problems I perceived in his version of OOO, given my doubtlessly incomplete and probably defective understanding of it. As some of the ensuing discussions with Levi, Joseph and others have encouraged, there is much more to be learnt from Graham’s wonderful work than I have been able to capture thus far. So, I should first say that I owe Graham an apology for being exceedingly critical, and not being as vocal about the aspects I find commendable in OOO; especially for not taking into consideration arguments in support of the claims I purported were either without justification, or bearing a defective one.

   By way of mitigation, I can only say that I never intended to project a caricature of Graham’s philosophy, but merely express my quibbles as I understood the arguments. Unfortunately, he expresses that I ended up misconstruing his position and obviating essential parts of his argument. For this there is no excuse. I can only say that I will attempt to do better in the future, and try to pick up on crucial missing details in my future readings. Also, I must confess that even if Graham was indeed kind enough to share with me some of his manuscripts in advance, I was only able to review these briefly, and I felt  that implying that I had possession of these in the commentary might have been improper for obvious reasons. But this is no excuse, since I  knew and did acknowledge for example that Graham’s Quadruple Object presents a series of diagrams illustrating his ontology, in much richer and thorough fashion than I did in my post. As a student, I am still occasionally imprecise in my adjectives, because of a lack of intellectual maturity which allows for precision. Part of why youngsters are polemic and energetic is because they are uncivilized still. I hope Graham doesn't forget that he is dealing with a first year graduate student, who has a long, long way to go before he can even hope to stand in the same position he is! I say this not necessarily with respect to knowledge about philosophy or skill, but also personal wisdom. I have a bad reputation for being a bit improper sometimes when I simply intend to be inquisitive, but I can see retrospectively why Graham got this impression.

So for all of these misgivings, I reiterate to Graham my apologies, and want now to rise up to the very pleasing invitation to formulate some of the aspects of OOO that I find most commendable. It is difficult for me, however, to state points of agreement between OOO and my own position because, alas, I do not really have one. Graham infers I have a love for Badiou’s work, which is very true, but I wouldn’t straightforwardly call myself a Badiouean at this point. There are aspects of the scientific realist guild of SR which I find very appealing (Brassier's work is notably influential on me), a lot of Deleuze is reverberating within me, and I find a lot in psychoanalysis and Zizek’s forays. This is where I see myself most comfortable, but at this point I would just really be modest and say I am learning and working towards a position. It might be constructive to try and formulate an own position, instead of perpetually debunking, but I feel I need a better grasp of things in the tradition before I do this. And clearly, if my understanding of Graham was so apalling, chances are I must be doing equally as bad in other terrains. Somewhere in-between this bundle of opinions, eventually, I hope, I might be able to say Iwith what I agree and not just what I like find inspiring. 

   Formulating discrepancies and signaling gaps has become for me a didactic tool to force me to formulate and disentangle my muddled intuitions, and has helped me a lot in progressively gaining clarity on the issues I entertain. After all, as a student, I am more than likely going to be wrong about plenty of things when commenting before I get them right. The beauty of the blog is that it allows you to formulate a preliminary understanding without getting too serious about it. In this case, it seems my reading was faulty for reasons I need to assess with further study. I don’t mean to have arrived at this result in bad spirit, even if I should have been more attentive to detail, particularly when it was expressly made available to me! I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to see the details of your work passed over in favor of facile dismissals, so I must take future precautions to be more empathic and rigorous.

That being said, I enumerate those features of Graham’s philosophy (and not just his ontology), which I find most inspiring, as well as OOO more generally:

1)      The insistence on the importance of vividness in philosophy, and highlighting its historical link to an imaginative, architectonic ambition, which furnishes for us novel ways of thinking and approaching the world in its complexity. This image of philosophy is what I most enjoy about the vibrant style and passion in OOO, and something which I also find stimulating in peculir ways in thinkers such as Deleuze (for whom importance is greater than Truth).

2)      I find the idea of a realism compatible with the withdrawal of real objects very interesting; insofar as it attempts to render compatible a full blown thought about the external world, and at the same time acknowledge that our knowledge/activity is partial and distorting. This is something which I think moderates realism in philosophy from becoming entirely insensitive to the very important lessons of critical philosophy, which often show us how painfully inadequate even our most cherished emblems of knowledge can be, inviting sobering modesty with respect how we view our thinking and footing in this world.

3)      Its seemingly boundless curiosity to explore different fields of discourse as a sine qua non for philosophy, de-localizing it from its restriction to the human cohort, but also from the strict philosophical text. Thus Graham embraces insights from Latour, McLuhan, just as Ian thinks robustly about video games, Levi about Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Tim Morton about Ecology. These are not fields external to philosophical interest, but all of the OOO members are willing to step outside the usual stock of heroes of the philosophical canon, and bring in fresh new air to the mix. This is again something which I think Levi would agree has prefigured some great advances in philosophy: Heidegger’s odd appropriation of Don Scotus, Deleuze’s bizarre stock of forgotten 18^th Century philosophers (Wronski anyone?). OOO repeats this gesture, expanding the contours of the field in which it plays, without losing grip on the philosophical benchmarks of our recent times. Thus Graham’s appeals to thinkers like Zubiri, his intrigue for the occasionalist tradition, Aristotle, Lingis, Latour and others, supplements his absorption of aspects of thinkers like Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas.

4)      Not to fear transforming an author, hijacking his thought from himself. This is a great philosophical move, from Aristotle's violence to Plato, onwards. Just like Meillassoux hijacks correlationist philosophy and exacerbates facticity to unearth an unforeseen realm of possibilities for philosophical thought, Graham attempts to not simply surrender a pious reverence for Heidegger (like so many of his ‘followers’) and takes a turn at the point where his philosophy does not merely give us an Idea to defend, but a crossroad to explore. The idea of the withdrawal of being is appropriated in Graham’s own idea of a withdrawal of objects. This articulates a philosophical problem presumably exhausted in a novel way, allowing us to see anew a face which had become worn out by predictable interpretations. Thus resists the sterile academicism that resembles the zombie-esque following of a sect (believe me, I grew up in Peru, where phenomenology dominates the philosophical scene).

Thus Harman, as well as the other OOO folk, are not principally interested in getting absorbed into a downward spiral of academic technical debates to prattle exclusively among specialists. This passion for philosophy to be accessible and open, and not secluded and esoteric, is a commendable passion which many great philosophers were right to uphold (James, Dewey, Heidegger, Deleuze, Lingis, Zizek, DeLanda…).Although I think there are indeed many theoretical problems with Graham’s thesis of withdrawal, those certainly don’t make it less interesting or worthy of thought.

  I don’t think, for example, that Ray Brassier’s appropriation of Laruelle allows for the kind of scientific realism he seeks to advance, not that his usage of Stove’s Gem to deflate the circle of correlation works either. Nor do I think Meillassoux’s bold absolutization of facticity on the basis of the contingency of thought works. Nor do I think Badiou's theory of Truth can be realist while the truth procedure remains circumspect to the disruption of an exclusively human act, and foreclosed to natural occasion. But these are all fertile, thought inducing ideas which even in their presumed error become catalysts for thought. Indeed, OOO is adamant in teaching us that it is better to be wrong but bold, comprehensive, and imaginative; than to be myopic, inane, and uninteresting, just to avoid being wrong. That is why so many people seem obsessed with refuting it: they are infuriated by what they perceive to be wrong, but also in a strange way fascinated by it. This is already a great classic of philosophical drama: Husserl and Heidegger, Plato and Aristotle, Putnam and Rorty...

5)      The stylistic embrace of clarity, without compromising vividness. Analytic philosophy is notoriously petulant in its purported claims to bear the field's standard for ‘good writing’, when as Graham rightly puts, it confuses technically coherent prose with good prose. Of course, obscurity is a no-no for philosophy. But there is no reason why philosophy cannot be tilting the emotional membranes of people: in fact, it should! Thinkers such as Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Rousseau,Descartes, Benjamin, Deleuze, Zizek and Badiou are all emblematic figures which knew how to use vibrant prose and literary imagery to the service of philosophical illustration and argument. By the same token, OOO represents a good case for how being literary and not just literal bears a philosophically interesting magnitude: Graham’s Guerrilla Metaphysics discusses the role of metaphor, humor in a philosophical manner, while his notion of allure makes an argument at the core of the process of discerning the opaqueness of the real in its resistance to fuse with other objects. Tim Morton recently delivered in OOO what was a tantalizing anticipation of an OOO theory of rhetorics, poetics and language. And Ian’s talk was an exemplary occasion of how a lyrical narrative, which touches an audience emotionally, can be conducive to triggering a lasting effect in the thought of people. Graham’s Circus Philosophicus doesn’t shy away from experimental form to communicate  and present a reelaboration of his familiar ontological thesis. This is one of the aspects that I conjointly enjoy between Harman and Badiou: the latter’s hypertranslation of Plato, his little book about love, the Pocket Pantheon of philosophers, Circus Philosophicus… all of them weird, enjoyable, passionate texts. And I also enjoy this experimental style developed in some authors following Deleuze-Guattari, like Reza Negarestani, and others.

6)      The reiteration that however we may want to endow science with an authoritative position in describing the structure of the real, this must be in a way that is never refractory from revision. OOO here goes further however, and claims that science seemingly enjoys no putative authority in the ranks of what we know and before the real, in favor of a democratic ontology. In spite of my uncertainty and doubts about this last move, which I attempted to explore in my post, I think that the fallibilism towards knowledge accentuates the philosophical modesty I spoke earlier, and is part of the de-anthropomorphizing function which begins with the contestation of correlationism. This in spite of my fundamental disagreements with the theory.

7)      The material embrace of the form of the blog for communication: engaging with a multitude of audiences, in a variety of forms, not shying away from discussion and even conflict. Of course, the blog format in its liberties is more conducive to error, misinterpretations, redundancies, lax analyses, and other shortcomings. But at the same time it de-privatizes speculation, opens the debate up to new audiences, allows authors to experiment without being pressed by the demands of publishing agencies, to participate and communicate with other think tanks, and produce new forms of discourse, art, and thought. The emergence of the journal Speculations, as well as the exemplary blogs by Graham, Levi, Tim and Ian, are all testaments to a new age of philosophy, to which we are lucky to be the heirs and opening acts.  

8)  They are all great people, and a fantastic group in their composite quality.  But they all have radically different styles and personalities, and are all very unique thinkers in their own right too. What they share only becomes stronger in time because of the things they don’t share. And in spite of the young age of the movement and some of its members, they have been very prolific and kept readers with new stuff to chew on. They are all very pleasant in conversation, and do not shy away with their humor and eccentricity. Levi made some really funny remarks about me being Peruvian. Graham is a great storyteller, as you can tell from his books. Tim is bonkers and outlandishly courteous and nice. And Ian is very cool, and down to earth guy who seems he'd be fun to get drunk with (that's a compliment in my book). I think Lacan was right when he said that the madman is also the king who thinks he is a king. I’m not saying these guys are kings,  but they certainly very nice folk, casual people, with whom who can speak freely without feeling daunted by their position in the academia.

It might seem like these points address mostly stylistic/personal impressions than philosophical agreements. But I must reiterate that at a loss for a position, I can only explain why it is I take the trouble to respond, however defectively, to OOO, and why I keep coming back to it. Even if it appears that my ‘disagreements’ are located in the more substantive issues, albeit in a distorted and unjustly understood manner, I hope this does some good to amend the wrongs that Graham perceives I did to him and his work in my last post. I must say that with respect to Graham's observations about my arguments' shortcomings, my lingering concerns persist, for the reasons formulated.

    And yet although I must not shy away from saying that the preoccupations I expressed back then still remain now, at this stage, I can say that I acknowledge the necessity to go ahead and review Graham’s work to see where those missing arguments lay, and how they might assuage my concerns. I can’t say they do, but at the very least, right now, I can’t say they don’t. And that means that in saying there were no further reasons where there were, defective or not, I was, plainly speaking, wrong.

Levi's Object Oriented Ontology - Virtual Structures and Local Manifestations

- Levi's Object Oriented Ontology -
Virtual Structures and Local Manifestations
_______________________________________________

   Levi has posted here a really good answer to my post from Saturday, articulating how his own version of OOO might address some of the core issues raised by my inquiry. I think it is a good beginning for the purposes clarifying some of the specifics around some tightly knit questions about individuation and the like, in their metaphysics. I think Levi does very well in beginning by distinguishing between metaphysical and epistemological realism.

More fundamentally, I think it is imperative to distinguish three determinations about real objects: that they are (existential), how they are (qualitative), and how many they are (quantitative). Following Levi's presentation, Bhaskar's argues first that real objects qua partitions of the world must exist: scientific practice happens on the basis of manifestations, and objects are precisely the conditions for these local encounters. Bhaskar also allows us to know that objects should have an endogenous structure in order to condition the possibility scientific practice. As Levi acknowledges, this leaves as epistemologically inaccessible from certainty the unified qualitative identity of particular objects qua virtual wholes (how they are), and their numerical status (how many they are).

    Nothing here, it should be noted, yet explains that the world must be external to the field of the subject, however, but only that the world must be objectified, differentiated and structured in order for there to be scientific practice. This is not at all unlike Kant, who claims that causal necessity and the possibility of scientific practice can only actually obtain on condition of the categorical determination that differentiates the field of sensibility of space-time for the subject of representation. For Bhaskar the isolation of entities and can only occur because the world is externally so divided, insofar as there is an asymmetry   between an object and its powers, i.e. the object can be 'out of phase'. This will turn out to be problematic for the externalist thesis, as I shall indicate below. But let us move on.

Let us begin with the last of these points, addressing how the withdrawal thesis, which anchors a local manifestation to the real object, is to be justified through condition (1), i.e. that objects can be out of phase with their qualities. It is important to notice that this doesn't determine that by necessity every object will actually be out of phase with its qualities, and therefore that there must always be incongruence between the real object and the sensual counterpart, or between the potential virtual structure and its actual local manifestation. It rather determines that it can never be necessary that an object is fully actualized, i.e. that it locally manifests the entirety of its powers. The object may thus be out of phase, and this contingency explains both the possibility and interest of scientific investigation, since it an object were fully transparent at every time, no such inquiry would be required. Of course, there's a further unstated premise in Levi's account here, which states that an object may never manifest itself completely at any point in time: there are always aspects of it which remain withdrawn. It should be underlined that this specific point doesn't emerge in Bhaskar's argument, as presented by Levi in his post.

In passing, I wonder how much of Bhaskar’s account as presented in Levi's summary is endorsed by Graham. In any case, it is a very clear formulation to start the discussion! With respect to the connection between their two accounts, I would for example inquire about the following formulation:

“Within my framework, all local manifestations are acts or activities of objects or generative mechanisms. Here what we ordinarily refer to as properties or qualities are doings on the part of objects. The red of a billiard ball, for example, isn’t a quality that that billiard ball has or is.” 

   I preemptively anticipate here that an asymmetry is sketched between Graham and Levi’s accounts, insofar as for the former it would be strange to say the real parts/qualities of the object are something the object does but is not, insofar as for Graham there is a sensual object and sensual parts of the object. Of course, these do not belong to the real object which is its host, even if they do belong to the unified intentional real object which emerges from their relation. Alternatively, if Levi means that the acts of objects are what in Graham’s account correspond to the sensual objects/parts caused by their real counterparts, both accounts might be reconciled. But Levi would still need to say that the produced result, the actualized local manifestation, is an object in its own right, like Graham's sensual objects, which I think is not really his own position. But in this I digress. 

   My next observation resides particularly with respect to Levi's account on the apparent epistemological consequences that follow from these metaphysical theses. Particularly, the consequences that follow given the epistemic inaccessibility of how real objects / virtual structures must correspond to their real powers, as inferred through their local manifestations (quality); and how many real objects correspond to local manifestations(quantity). We are thereby to inquire about how local manifestations are suitable indexes to infer integral, real objects as their causal, virtual anchors. For example, the redness in the billiard ball is by implication the redness of a virtual power in a real, virtual object. This follows from the thesis that objects are structure and the world is differentiated, and the possible gap between an object's powers and its actual manifestations. But this doesn't yet help us in determining the qualitative identity of this virtual object as a whole, or indeed about whether the local manifestation corresponds to a virtual power in one virtual object or many.

 Levi seems perfectly at ease with accepting this result. He claims that indeed we have no resources to attain certainty about the qualitative identity of virtual structures, or about the integrity in the real counterparts to the local manifestations we perceive. So, against such a model, construing knowledge around certainty appears an incommensurable demand for thought.

   Yet I think my worries are here not so much about certainty as a condition for knowledge, but about the possibility of degrees of adequation. If there are no epistemic criteria to distinguish which descriptions/perceptions/actions might be better suited to coin their real counterparts than any others, then it seems we are delivered back into a form of correlationist agnosticism about the real, where the latter is thinkable, perhaps even as the necessary anchor for our experience, but never known in its ontic specificity. Therefore, the virtual powers we take to be manifested in actuality might correspond to anything our verbal stock of terms and descriptions might want to stipulate is in the 'great outdoors'. There might be a theory about how experience or experimentation  isolates objects in a way that restricts the scope of individuation of virtual structures on the basis of the powers manifested and thus coined as potencies in their real hosts, but this is a tricky issue for OOO given the irreductionist thesis. I'm not sure Bhaskar's scientific realism here can help Levi anymore than Kripke's naturalism can assuage Graham. 

I would consequently take issue with the following claim:

“As we saw in the previous section, experiment involves situating entities in controlled and isolated settings. If this is to be possible, it follows that the world must come in chunks. The entities of the world must be differentiated or independent. Were this not the case, then it would not be possible to isolate entities so as to conduct controlled experiments on them.”

      Bhaskar’s argument is probably here more sophisticated than what Levi has schematically presented, so I give him the benefit of doubt. However, while the world is said to come in chunks, this is only insofar as the local manifestations we witness in experience must entail virtual counterparts as their hosts, and since experience is salient with respect to a multitude of such manifestations, by implication the world must be likewise exhibiting structural complexity.

Nothing yet tells us about how local manifestations become anchored on real objects qua unified virtual structures, however, so that it could be said that there are many chunks qua virtual objects, rather than a singular, stratified, and partitioned virtual object which produces the entirety of local manifestations as locally actualized. This is a real problem, insofar as the ontology of objects presumes to distinguish itself from the processualist thesis by claiming that multiple individuals subsist, and not follow from the single apeiron,  the Deleuzean virtual of multiplicities in perplication, or whatever else. The problem is that without epistemic criteria to determine how local manifestations can be tethered to real objects, either in quality or in quantity, it becomes impossible to justify the claim that the world is composed of many real objects. For all we know, local manifestations might all follow from the singular substantial field, which would reduce it to something akin the Deleuzean differential intensive spatium.This would be in perfect coincidence to the thesis of out-of-phasing, differentiation and structure. The appeal to a hierarchical structuration of the world in emergence does not assuage this worry therefore, insofar as it is perfectly possible to imagine the multitude of local manifestations as emerging from a singular substance, or a problematic field of singular differential points in the Idea, prior to intensive individuation.

 The claims about the necessary transitivity of real objects are likewise unhelpful in this regard, insofar as nothing precludes the idea that what is independent of mind/society/language/experience might be one thing rather than many, or even a non-unified purely differential field of pure potentialities ala Deleuze’s spatium.

   Unlike Graham’s brand of OOO, however, we must notice that Levi’s account entails that the local manifestations of objects can be qualitatively mapped onto their virtual potentialities, while for the former there is a severe ontological gap separating real objects/parts which remain intractable as such from their sensual doubles. In Levi’s case, the local manifestations of real objects can be perfectly said to correspond to a real ‘virtual power’, even if it is impossible still to specify what exactly the real object(s) which is manifested is.  Thus, Levi can claim that:

“The foregoing makes no claims as to whether it is atoms, subatomic particles, organisms, stars, baseballs, etc., that exist. These are questions for actual inquiry and cannot be answered a priori.” 

     Unlike Graham, there is no qualitative abyss which renders the local manifestation by necessity distinct from its host reality, part or object, i.e. they could be balls, baseballs, and Roger Rabbit. This is not to say that the local manifestation is identical to the virtual power it actualizes, but only that it can be said to be congruent with a qualitative determination, as described by our singular terms. Thus unlike Harman, for whom our singular terms and comportments cannot but fail to adequately target the real counterparts or counterobjects behind sensual comportments, Levi’s local manifestations correspond to real powers, without being able to specify the virtual unities to which they correspond. This is the case even though real powers, as Levi claims, are “nothing like their powers”; they are still the manifestation of these specific powers: the distinction is here thus strictly speaking modal, i.e. there is nothing qualitative differentiating virtual powers from actualized local manifestations. It is important to notice the import of this reading.

    So when Kant said that being is not a real predicate, like Heidegger explains, he does not mean that a real chair is identical to an actual chair, insofar as identity is irreducible to quality. He meant that as far as their qualities were concerned they were indistinguishable, only their positioning in a world rendered them distinct. Similarly, for Levi, local manifestations don't bear less or more properties than the virtual powers they actualize, they simply manifest locally these same powers as triggered by a perturbation in the world.

I should specify at this point why the rest of Bhaskar's list of conditions for objects is still problematic under these lights, however. As I see it, neither differentiation, nor structure, nor stratification clarifies numerically why we should advocate a plurality of objects rather than one, nor qualitatively how they must be so.

Differentiation only tells us we can isolate realities to locally manifest themselves, but never what or how they are nor how many they must be. Thus we see redness and roundness in an object we call "billiard ball", but nothing tells us how we exactly we individuate this object. We isolate ‘things’, but nothing is as of yet said about how criteria for differentiation in scientific practice allows for real individuation, to assuage these concerns. I'm sure for Bhaskar scientific experimentation plays a clearer role here: we toy with what is before us, and with time we can map the features or powers an object may exhibit as a whole. Thus the proper name we endow the object with is simply to signify the set of those powers observed by and through experimentation. This, however, seems to solicit the thesis that it science's experimental activity which approximately clarifies and gains putative authority in isolating the powers of objects, and determining their identities, which would make the determination of entities relative to constructions in scientific practice. But of course for Levi this needn't be so restricted: a sculptor may know about the powers of clay more than a molecular biologist. Yet nothing still tells us how we determine that a certain set of powers suffices to constitute a virtual totality in the form of an object. As we will see in the end, Levi's argument here will be to argue for the peculiar powers of particular objects, which remain irreducible to their parts or partitions.

It is also strange at this juncture that Levi mentions that we isolate ‘things’ rather than local manifestations: what makes the differentiation of chunks in the world pertain to objects rather than local manifestations qua subjective appearances, say, or sensual objects and their parts, as in Graham’s brand of OOO? It is also not specified why exactly the differentiation must entail the reality of external objects rather than being individuated by the subjective psyche within a sensible field which might be fully ocnstituted by the mind (as in dreams), or whatever else. We don’t quite know yet why or how isolation entails externalism, i.e. how even those entities which appear to subsist outside their relations can be said to be necessary as such outside their manifestation to the perceiver/thinker. The answer to this, apparently, is that the implication of a virtual structure foreign to the manifestation is what implies the externality of any entity as locally manifested.  But this foreignness to manifestation doesn't entail externality to thought, but merely externality to the individuation apparent in the manifestation.

    It is important to note that as far as potentialities in the virtual being of the object may be ‘out of phase’, there is no argument for the causal correspondence of what is individuated as a local manifestation to a single virtual potentiality, and not just virtual object qua whole. Thus, just like in Harman’s case a sensual object/part was undetermined in its numerical correspondence to its anchoring real object(s)/part(s), for Levi a local manifestation cannot be straightforwardly said to be the manifestation of a single power, unless we specify how our descriptions of manifestations are anchored on virtual powers in a one-to-one correspondence. This would entail that we know that what gives itself as a single local manifestation is qualitatively and quantitatively the same as its virtual power, unlike Graham's account for which this if left open. But this stipulated congruence is as of yet to be explained or accounted for. We can let this go for now.

 Structure likewise only tells us that there must be endogenous powers in the world of scientific practice for experimentation, but not how these structures are unified into concrete realities. It must also be said it is not explained why objects must have structures qua stable duration of a collection of powers, rather than a perpetually changing, totally differenc/tiated field of pure potentialities as static Ideal multiplicities specified by singular points and organized relations (without objective individuality), and which become enveloped by intensive contractions which then give objects, like Deleuze says. I don’t think here Levi has forced the ‘goo-theorists’ into having to provide a justification, since they explain the emergence of stable objects through intensive individuation. At least those of a Deleuzean orientation! But I should stay out of that debate anyway, since it’s not really my point of contention.  Hierarchy and intransitivity I mentioned above, and should need to further discussion for now.

Levi is too smart and knows too well these insufficiencies, so he delivers his own argument for the epistemic necessity of integral objects:

      “It could be that the computer is merely a collection of objects and not an object in its own right. I don’t claim certainty. Many philosophers, influenced– probably unconsciously –by a Cartesian tradition seem to treat certainty as a model of knowledge… When I make the claim that, for example, the Coca-Cola Corporation is an object, I am making both a very strange claim and one that ought to be defended with reasons. Here my argument is that the Coca-Cola Corporation both possesses powers and is interacted with by other entities in ways that are irreducible to any of its parts. The Coca-Cola Corporation is capable of doing things that its parts are not capable of doing. Likewise in the case of the computer. I believe the computer is itself an object, that it can’t be reduced to a mere aggregate, because it has powers and is capable of doing things that its parts are not capable of doing.”

    This is promising and interesting indeed! I’d like to know, nevertheless, how we are to exactly construe powers or potentialities. Given Levi’s account of hierarchy in objects, it must follow that entities within others have distinct powers from the higher end objective ‘genuses’:

“Higher scale entities have an autonomy, independence, or existence of their own characterized by their own generative powers. They cannot exist without the lower scale entities, nor do these higher order powers contradict the powers of the lower scale entities, but they are autonomous entities in their own right, irreducible to these lower scale entities”

     Of course, one can almost trivially say that my keyboard “S” key has powers that my computer as a whole does not have: i.e. its paint can be erased, it can be pressed to target a virtual ‘S’ on my screen, etc. But half of my S key surely also has powers that my S key doesn’t have! It can fit on smaller gaps, it has increased capacity to exert pressure against other surfaces, it can serve as an outline shape for a cubic drawing half the size of the square rendered by its double, etc. Needless to say, the same seems to apply to most partitions I can think of, and using standard like Quine examples we can get all sorts of funny scenarios. Not to mention Frege! Superman could surely do things Clark Kent couldn’t! Maybe this had to do with the psychological effect dressing up as a superhero has on the real bodily host, but this all remains rather fuzzy, since potentialities are never specified as distinctively physical, or indeed as pertaining to any descriptive domain for their individuation. So surely Levi cannot straightforwardly say that both Kent and Superman are local manifestations of the same real object, insofar as the latter is the same ‘embodied’ structure, in the sense of a physically extended body. Maybe Bhaskar could, but i'm not sure about Levi. And surely we don’t yet have a suitable index to distinguish even approximately (not with certainty) how certain qualities may resemble real counterparts or not.

As argued above, the structure attributed to the entity does little help assuage these worries, and that the numerical/qualitative withdrawal of real/virtual objects remain lingering in OOO as a dangerous resemblance to the correlationist thesis in which the in-itself is thinkable, but unknowable. Indeed, in Levi’s brand of OOO, the existence of withdrawing realities is entailed by the admittance of differentiation for practice, as well as the other features Levi mentions. But I think there are still questions to be raised, many of which I’m sure Levi’s justifiably anticipated Democracy of Objects will deliver! Thanks to Levi for the time, courtesy, and attention.

Some Problems With Object Oriented Ontology: Reality, Relation, Knowledge

 

Some Problems With Object Oriented Ontology:

- Reality, Relation, Knowledge -

_______________________________________________________

I – Withdrawal and Relation, Reality and Sensation

I was just thinking about some of my lingering preoccupations and questions about Object Oriented Ontology, which have in some ways remained even after my series of exchanges and conversations with Graham and Levi, through e-mails, at last year’s OOO conference, and in the blogs. I think in the past I might have been a bit too obscure when formulating  these, so I want to reformulate some of my concerns, this time aided by a few diagrams which help illustrate where the problem lies as I see it.

Concretely, my questions arise with respect to the thesis of withdrawal, i.e. the thesis that real objects recede when entering relations to other objects. The latter is supplemented with the thesis that two objects only enter in relation inside a third object, in which the first two become mediated. This third object is endowed with a unity and provides a reductive buffer zone where the two initial objects meet. The real objects underlying the relation, for their part, remain ontologically subsistent even if the relation and thus the mediating object under which it enters with another object is destroyed.

 For clarity’s sake, I will use in what follows the example proposed by Joseph Goodson about myself and my computer. First, we run the hypothetical thesis that there exist two real objects with a subsistent, endogenous structure, myself and my computer. Let us say at one point I am in class, away from my computer, and no seeming relation between the two occurs then. We simply have two isolated substances of the following form:

  That is coarse enough for a diagram! It must be noted that Graham's The Quadruple Object delivers a much more rich and contrived set of diagrams that the embarrassing ones presented here. Hopefully, these modest attempts will suffice for the points I seek to advance provisionally. In any case, things get more interesting in the next step.

  Provided I have understood Graham correctly, the next stage would describe how these two real objects enter into relation. As described above, this involves the appearance of a third object which buffers the two. Expanding Heidegger’s thesis that theory distorts or reduces its intentional object in relation, Graham argues that all relations between objects must perform this occlusion/reduction. Thus, the third object which constitutes the intentional relation between the two hosts is an emergent new object also called real, insofar as it is an entity ontologically irreducible to its parts, and which only obtains when two or more real objects enter in relation. The real objects corresponding to this relation would nevertheless remain thereby withdrawn from what would be communicated/transmitted and given inside the unified buffer of this third and emergent real object.

  One might thereby question whether we should include within this third real object the 'real objects' that constitute their hosts. This is a fairly interesting point in its own right, but has no bearing for my argument here. In what follows I capture the withdrawal thesis by excluding the real objects from the new real object qua emergent intentional relation, insofar as the aspects buffered therein do not comprise the totality of the entities which enter into the relation. So, to run with our basic example, let us imagine that I return home after class, and sit down with to my computer and start typing a blog post in it. The next diagram expresses the relation which obtains thus:

APPENDIX - January 28th / 2011
I know the arrows for 'translation' indicated here are debatable for the reasons which follow from those outlined above, but I don't think their placing affects the argument I shall offer below in any case. Also, this diagram seems to contradict Graham's claim that relations are always asymmetrical, i.e. a real object only ever interacts with a sensual one, and vice versa. No two real objects ever touch, just as no sensual objects touch. This, however, is problematic as I see it, and warrants a different reconstruction. The reason is that at the very least a considerable number of relations produce a bilateral distortion of their objects: when I type in my computer the latter distorts me and apprehends only a sensual correlate relative to its capabilities, reducing me to some relation specific construction (the fingers pressing it...). But by the same token, my fingers likewise reduce the computer qua whole to a series of partial sensual counterparts, i.e. the keys which I press, the feel they produce, the screen I watch. This being said, this creates an issue if we want to say that the intentional relation is a single real object, paired with the thesis of asymmetry. This is because if the real me is inside the relation paired to its sensual related term, we would surely also need, at the side, the complementary couple of the real computer with its sensual me. But this seems awkward, since, what we get in that case is rather TWO relations whose unity is far from obvious. This would seem to imply that such cases imply two different emergent real relations obtain, which I do not think is what Graham advocates. If one constructs this bilateral distortion in a single emergent relation, then we have two unrelated halves within the same emergent object, in which case there seems nothing to justify their intrinsic unity.

For these reasons, I believe the thesis of asymmetry fails to capture the essential problem of withdrawal and relation: all an object ever encounters is an aspect of another, and by the same token, no object as a whole ever encounters another fully. Objects distort each other bilaterally.  When I type in my computer I surely am distorted by the computer and only part of me becomes invested in this relation; just as only part of the computer ever interacts with this part. The real totalities presumed as causing these sensual counterparts which encounter each other are never given to any of the terms. Likewise, unless all objects or some objects (cognitively endowed systems, i.e. humans) can epistemically access their total being in every occasion of relation by some form of privileged access, beings withdraw from themselves in every case, and not just from others. In any case, the crucial point is that in every relation, what is given to each of the terms is never the real object in its totality, but only a translation/distortion. This raises interesting questions about how self-relation works in OOO, but i'll leave that aside for now. With this in place, we can proceed to review the main qualms and quarrels with Graham's account.

II - The Qualms and Quarrels 
The crucial aspect about the second moment is that in my relating to my computer there is a) a third real object constituted as the real Daniel-PC unity, and b) that the real Daniel and the real PC withdraw from what is given to each term within this relation qua unified object. What this means is that what is given to a term in the relation is never strictly speaking another real object as such, but some aspect(s) of it which gets translated, and which becomes relative to the particular network proper to the objects as emergent, unified reality. I know that the jargon of ‘translation’ is really Levi’s, but it is useful here to indicate that what the Daniel-PC unity unifies is not the real objects of their hosts as such, but the sensual doubles to which they become reduced upon encounter.

   Thus when I type in my computer the keyboard relates to a reduced aspect of my whole (the fingers touching it) while most of me remains withdrawn from what this relation relates. By the same token, the keys themselves as registered by my fingers whilst typing only constitute a small part of the whole contrived circuitry, processes and parts which surely make up the computer as a whole. No matter how apparently exhaustive the relation may be between two objects, in their relating their substantive realities withdraw, and only sensual images appear to each of the terms. Distortions are given to distortions; aspects are given to aspects. Or to use Graham's phrase: real objects never touch each other directly. The function of the third real object is therefore to create a 'linked complex space' wherein specific aspects of each real object get translated by its counterpart, given as a new (also emergent) sensual object. It should also be noted that in Graham's dualism of sensual/real entities one may also distinguish between substances/parts. Therefore just as much as the real-PC withdraws from my mediation in relation to the sensual keys parts and sensed PC whole as I distort it, there (may be) real key-parts and a real PC whole that withdraws from my distortion. The same obviously applies to the computer's/keys distortion of my own substantive unity and parts. The withdrawal of entities thus applies in the case human relations as much in practice as it does in theorizing. Extending the Lacanian thesis of the non-sexual rapport, or the Heideggerean thesis of ontological 'forgetfulness', OOO advances a thesis about the non-rapport between any real objects.

Here is where I find that some very rudimentary questions can be raised, in spite of Levi's recent proclamations about how OOO has been circumspect in providing support for their claims. The first obvious observation concerns the status of real objects. Since every time I think about, type in, or generally relate to my computer, either in practice or theory, the real object in relation to me withdraws, how do I know that it is, in fact, one real PC that is withdrawing and not a multitude of PC-Parts, or of qualitatively different real objects altogether? More specifically, since every time I think/act towards my PC this will be towards a sensual distortion of the object, how can I ever know anything about the structure of real objects as such?

Graham’s answer to this crude objection is simply that we cannot know anything with certainty about the structure of particular real objects. In our first correspondence, as elsewhere, he claims that we nevertheless could bear standards 'for better or worse' at a loss for such certainty, and given the fallibility of knowledge. But this is dodging the issue; since given the irreductionist thesis advanced by OOO, no set of descriptions and no ontic register is said to gain privileged traction before the real.   Just like science keeps revising its stock of phenomena and forces over history, we must accept the overwhelming possibility that those entities and forces to which we endow unity in our relatings might turn out to be in reality totally different from the way they appear to us right now. It is important to notice, however, that this limitation in fact follows in principle from Graham’s thesis of withdrawal, since the real object can never coincide or be exhausted with its sensual double under relation. Thus I never know if there is in fact a ‘real PC’ underlying the sensual-PC given to me within the Daniel-PC unity, or if there rather is a variety of subsistent/independent "PC-parts" as proper ontological wholes, much like Quine’s famous butchered rabbits. No field of discourse or individuating description in fact escapes withdrawal; no activity or approach from one object to another can reduce the abyss that separates them. The 'real qualities' which determine the real object are forever precluded from knowledge, and they remain qualitatively foreclosed from whatever our grasp of sensual qualities may bring, i.e. which means that they couldn't ever coincide in the form of representational adequation. Here is where the theory of 'allure' through metaphor is supposed to do some work for Graham, insofar as it tilts the tension between objects given their irreducibility. But I won't address this here (**there's a comment below which very rapidly runs through this issue).

   The inevitable consequence of this position of agnosticism about the real seems to be that I have to admit that withdrawing from my distortion of the PC given to me as a sensual double there might be no real PC after all. Instead, there might be  anything akin one can  conjure or individuate in the imagination or outside of it. Thus what I take to be a PC might turn out to be a semblance produced by the Cartesian Evil Genius, Roger Rabbit smoking a blunt, a used napkin, Nixon, an Eastern Airlines ticket reservation booth from 1982 still awaiting passengers, a Chinese dumpling filled with a mixture of gun powder and paprika, eleven trillion bottles of expired baldness lotion, etc. Even if the 'real objects' and qualities remain withdrawn due to a qualitative difference from their sensual counterparts, nothing guarantees that they should be given one way rather than another to support the peculiar brand of sensual double. And by the same token, metaphysical description does no better in speaking of trees and beetles when attempting to allude to the real trees and beetles underlying our sensual distortions, than if it chose to speak about Roger Rabbit instead.

This is because even if there are merely sensual objects, as those entities conjured in our imaginings, with respect to the real no term/action/thought is ontologically closer to the real than any other, since the gap is qualitative and global rather than a matter of degree or local. Harman can thereby distinguish between purely sensual and real objects on the basis of ostentation, insofar as the latter anchors our acts of reference on some real correlate(s), but he cannot specify which of our singular terms target correspondent realities behind their sensual appearance, since they all remain qualitatively different from the unspecified real object(s) which withdraw, and which never touch.  Just like Graham states that he would need to 'be God' to know what is the underlying real object withdrawing from my construction of the sun as an astral phenomenon and that of the Incas as a light-weaving God, all the phenomena withdrawing from by our multiple descriptions and comportments remain spectral hosts, anonymous noumena lurking behind the veil of appearances. Without any epistemological criteria to gauge the adequacy of relational terms to resemble or adequately represent their real counterparts, all sensual objects stand in the same  epistemic footing. Of course, Graham knows very well that there are purely sensual objects in my imaginings, fictions and the like; but this doesn't need to occupy us now, albeit it raises its own stock of questions. To forecast a Fregean example: would we say that there is a 'real man' underlying Clark Kent and Superman qua identities attributed to them within our distorting and reductive culture? Or would we say that there are two disjoint realities there, a true schizophrenic split of the real rather than a mere sensual split? If we say that there is one reality behind these two sensual objects, then we must ask what provides us with the knowledge about this unity. And if Graham's answer is that we simply do not know what or how many realities underly each identity, we must accept that the world in-itself remains shrouded mystery, and that we lurk among, after all, mere phenomena, like Husserl anticipated.

Although this position is perfectly consistent with Graham's rejection of 'certainty' as something that can be reasonably obtained, it must be said that it displays a striking resemblance to the correlationist hypothesis according to which the real is thinkable but is unknowable. This is what I have called elsewhere the problem of virulent noumena, i.e. the potential proliferation of real entities as subsistent outside relation, given the lack of epistemological criteria to measure degrees of adequacy between thinking and being, concept and object. It is important to note that this "cognitive barrier" does not merely apply to human comportments or relations, but that any entity will be destined to perform its own proper brand of reduction/distortion, and thus ontological occlusion. Except, of course, the hypothetical God alluded to by Graham in his initial response.

But if real objects withdraw in such a radical way, then one must ask what solicits the thesis of their existence at all? That is, given that all I know are sensual objects, how do I know in fact that there are such things as withdrawing real substances, gaining  access to their general structures, and not the infamous Deleuzean flux of morphogenetic production in actualization, the formless apeiron from Anaximander, the Heideggerean 'being of beings' which is not a being, and such. Everytime I think about 'my PC' all I get is my sensual reduction of whatever realities withdraw from it; but the latter remain utterly intractable to thought. Graham’s answer here, as formulated in the OOO conference here at UCLA, was that confronted with the choice between accepting that there is a single, formless apeiron, or a multiplicity of objects, he advocates the latter. As construed, this seems to indicate that Graham thinks that it is a matter of ‘axiomatic decision’ or perhaps phenomenological clairvoyance that there exist many things rather than one. Thus, my impression is that he would resist a characterization of OOO as dogmatic on the grounds that he simply has chosen to affirm the subsistence of objects; not any more than Badiou’s endorsement of the axiom of the void set is dogmatic to found and launch set-theoretical ontology. Incidentally, I know Graham believes Badiou’s construal of consistency as an effect of the count already constitutes an anthropocentric reduction of objects to some form of bundle of qualities ala Hume, in Badiou’s ontology, and I think Graham critically misreads the latter by conflating consistency with human/subjective-constitution (the former is rather native to structure, which is perfectly objective). But let us obviate this for the time being.

However, the problem of virulent noumena outlined above becomes a further problem for Graham’s theory of relation qua an extension of phenomenological intentionality, outside the human eidetic-cohort. This is because it is not just real objects that remain veiled in mystery from my comportments with the world, but the relatings between these objects themselves. Just as I cannot know what real object(s) underlies the Daniel-PC unity, I also do not know what sensual doubles obtain when two real objects foreign to me meet. This is because every time I consider or interact with an object, this will be through the sensual construal of my own activity, and thus relative to my knowledge and the sensual correlates within the unities obtained by my relatings. How do we even know thus that other objects relate, and that they also individuate their objects by mediating them through sensual buffers? If all I ever know are the sensual objects of my  own comportments, and my own ways of translating objects, then it we are delivered right back to Husserl for whom the intentional object of experience was finally that endowed to with eidetic unity by consciousness. What epistemic warrant would thereby ever allow us to identify how objects relate outside this consciousness in a way that suddenly corresponds to the entities-processes we postulate through our singular terms?

   So when I speak of the beetle crawling up the tree, how can I ever presume to describe this relation without surreptitiously anthropomorphizing it in terms of the sensual objects given to me? This occluding violence of non-human relations follows since I cannot but help myself to the vocabulary correspondent to sensual reductions within my restricted phenomenological sphere. But then it becomes impossible to specify what relates to what outside of me or indeed how it does so; which real objects and relations are adequate to my singular terms and which remain merely sensual fictions without a positive real objective anchor.  Let us here shift in example and imagine me walking back from class and seeing a lizard climb up a tree. This third completed diagram displays coarsely what I take to happen in this third moment of our construing non-human relations:

    Of course, strictly speaking, I couldn't even say I know there to be a 'real me' underlying my own sensual relations, let there be a story of privileged access here which I have missed. But the point is simply here that whatever I construe as a relation between the beetle and the tree can only take the form of a sensual correlate given for me, within a relation to myself, while their real counterparts and their substantive quality identity or numeric quantitative extension,  must remain occluded. Even though the diagram posits two anonymous terms (x,y), there could be in theory an infinity of such realities, of which we know nothing, within our relatings.

    The presumed de-anthropomorphizing role OOO would play in speaking about non-human relations between objects seems thereby vitiated, given the inevitable gap between real objects and qualities on the one hand, and their sensual counterparts on the other. The entirety of the world as specified by our singular terms becomes swallowed by the realm of the sensual, since the real object which withdraws is necessarily qualitatively distinct from what gets transmitted in the relation. It is thus not just that we could be wrong (i.e. that knowledge is fallible), but that we cannot but be wrong given the qualitative gap that obtains due to withdrawal. Knowledge thus seems confined to the realm of the sensual, much like for Kant it remained a category of the phenomenal. The point, in a nutshell, is that even when speaking for relations for other entities, these can only be specified as sensual entities in relation to us. Thus the agnosticism about the real objects can be extended to an agnosticism about non-human relations more generally.

As a result, OOO seems forced to oscillate between correlationist agnosticism, insofar as it affirms the withdrawal of the real in every occasion of relation and thus of knowledge, and a descriptive metaphysics in which the problematic of access to the world as it is in-itself becomes obviated as we deploy our terms and descriptions to match general features of reality. The in-itself thus becomes thinkable but unknowable in its particularity, even if we know it to be there and how it is there generally. There seems to be thus something of a regression implicit here to the pre-critical endorsement of an in-itself separate from the for-us, without grounds to base how in spite of their independence we have access to its general features through metaphysical description. Only metaphysics can tell us anything about real objects, their general ontological features, while the reality of particulars seems proscribed from thought.

    Indeed something akin to this seems to underlie Graham’s Whiteheadean pragmatic deflation of Meillassoux’s circle of correlation, when he simply considers human-world relation as one kind among many. Graham has (or had) a story to tell here about the role ostentation plays in anchoring our sensings to real objects, in fixing the reference of the relating into a real entity. But the problem pertaining to OOO is ultimately unsalvageable through this glossing appeal to ostentation and Kripke. For the latter, it is physical knowledge of spacetime in the natural sciences which determines the endogenous structure of the objects of reference, and saves him from the ontological indeterminacy of Quine; while for OOO no such privileged locus or principle of individuation exists to bridge our knowledge to the real, concept and object. The latter inevitably withdraws from us, as from all descriptive registers, except in their general features known to us through object-oriented metaphysics. How we ever gain access to this general knowledge follows from the axiomatic assumption about the existence of real objects, along with the theory of vicarious causation and withdrawal.

The problem here is finally that in denying that access to the in-itself can ever obtain, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish in what way Graham’s OOO constitutes a realism differently than the correlationist who claims reality is out there but remains unknowable (as a limit concept, as it is for Kant; as the 'being of beings' as it is for Heidegger, or whatever else). That Graham is able to describe how real objects are endowed with a general structure and claim that they actually ‘are out there’ seems justified by way of an appeal to the real outside our mediation, in unexplained congruence with the terms of his metaphysical theory. But the question remains: how can we ever know that real things exist and relate, if all I ever grasp is the sensual counterpart of some unavoidably withdrawn reality? In any case, I hope this very crude presentation of my position makes some headway into clarifying why I remain skeptical about the status of OOO’s putative realism.