“Relata Do Not Precede Relations” _ Larval Subjects

Larval Subjects .

September 27, 2012

“Relata do not precede relations”

Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized [21] Comments In discussions of speculative realism, a lot of ink hasbeen spilled over debates about correlationism orwhether or not it is possible to think being apart from

thought, but, within an object-oriented framework, itseems to me that a far more profound ontologicalissue is at stake of which the issue of correlationism isonly a subset. Here I hasten to add that I owe thisconclusion to Graham Harman. The real issue is notwhether or not whether or not it is possible to movebeyond correlationism or whether being can onlyever be thought in relation to thought and whetherthought can only ever be thought in relation tobeing, but rather whether or not relations are internal or external. The thesis that relations areinternal is admirably summed up in Karen Barad’s statement that “relata do not precede relations”(Meeting the Universe Halfway, 334). The thesis that relations are external is the claim that entitiescan break with whatever relations they happen to entertain to other entities at a particular moment

and enter into new relations with other entities. Based on these two conceptions of relations, we canthus see why the issue of correlationism is a subset of the question of whether relations are internalor external. Correlationism is the thesis that the relation between mind and world or culture andworld is always an internal relation, such that thought is necessarily inseparable from world andworld is necessarily inseparable from thought. It is a specific variant of a broader thesis that allentities are internally related or inseparable from one another. We can see that if relationism orinternalism is true, it is impossible for it to avoid correlationism, for in a world where everything isinternally and inseparably related it would necessarily follow that all beings must be internallyrelated to minds or culture. This, however, is not the issue I wish to focus on.

Before proceeding to discuss these issues of relation in more detail, it is first important to addresswhat this debate is not about, as I’ve sensed there has been some confusion regarding these matters.

First, the debate over whether relations are internal or external is not a debate about whether or notrelations exist. All sides are agreed that there are relations. The question is whether these relationsare characterized by inseparability or separability. Can something break with its relations or is its

being necessarily determined by its relations such that it has no minimal ontological independencefrom these relations?

Second, the question is not whether or not relations are important or whetherthey make a difference. Whether or not my cat is related to oxygen or foodor certain atmospheric pressures makes a big difference for my cat. All sides,I think, can agree that the sorts of relations that obtain between entities makea tremendous difference to those entities.

Thus, third, the question is not whether we should focus on the analysis ofobjects or relations. In other words, the debate isn’t whether we should focuson objects, decontextualized, independent of any milieu, or whether weshould focus on milieu/relations. Rather, the discussion is whether or notrelations are internal to beings such that they are inseparable from theirrelations, or whether they are external in the sense that entities can break with

relations. As I have said with respect to my own work on many occasions inprint and publicly, it is not so much objects or substances that interest me,but what happens when a substance, machine, or object (they’re all synonymsto me) either enters into new relations or breaks with its existing relations. In

my view, internalism just does not do a good job of responding to this question because itpresupposes that beings are already internally related and thereby forecloses the question of whattakes place when relations are either severed or forged.

Finally, fourth, it’s important to be clear as to what sorts of relations we’re talking about here. Clearly there are some relations that are of a purely internal. A parent cannot be a parent without achild. There is no left without right. There is no North without South, etc. A triangle can only be atriangle through relations between three points. We can call these “diacritical” relations. Diacriticalrelations are relations that only exist internally. Indeed, I would argue that every substance has its“diacritical domain” defined by what I call its “endo-relations”. This is its internal relations– like thethree points of a triangle –without which it would not be what it is. The debate here is not betweeninternal relations of this sort, but about relations between entities, substances, objects, or machines(again synonyms); or what I call “exo-relations”. Is the relation that my cat entertains to all otherentities in the universe like that of the three, inseparable points of a triangle such that it cannot breakwith any of these relations, or does my cat possess some minimal ontological autonomy that allowsit to break from whatever relations it currently entertains, such that it is able to enter into newrelations? That’s the question.

read on!

With this question in mind, let’s return to Barad’s exemplaryarticulation of relationism, that “relata do not precede relations”, andexamine why we might be wary of such a thesis. What is Baradsaying? On the one hand, she appears to be saying that entities,“relata”, are generated out of relations. We have the relation first, andthen the entities second. On the other, she appears to be claiming thatthese entities, “relata”, can have no subsistence or being apart from thatrelation. They are what they are only in and through this relation suchthat they can have no being independent apart from this relation.

In my view, this thesis is a catastrophe for ontological thought,empirical investigation, and concrete practice. To see this, let’s start firstwith empirical investigation. What is it we’re doing when weempirically investigate the world about us? Are we simply looking andrecording what we see? Certainly this sort of observation that we find infields like botany and zoology is of great importance, but it only makesup a small subset of what is meant by “empirical observation”. Empirical observation is not asimple “looking”– a view all too prevalent in a history of philosophy dominated by theoria and thedenigration of the servant in Plato’s Meno as its paradigm –but rather is far more defined by acting.

In the sciences, we do not simply look at entities, but rather act on them by perturbing them in avariety of ways by seeing how they behave under these conditions of pressure, temperature, light,when encountering these other chemicals or substances, when grown in these particular soils, etc. Inother words, our practice consists in varying the relations between entities to see what they do whenplaced in these new milieus or contexts.

Nor is this variation of relations restricted toexperimental practice in the sciences. There’s anincreasing body of research ranging fromdevelopmental psychology to pedagogical theory(you’ll see some of it in the forthcoming issue of O-Zone) that suggests that this is how children learn aswell. Children learn not by simply looking andlistening, but by acting on entities in theirenvironment and by varying their relations to otherobjects, to see what happens when these relations arevaried. Both the experimental setting in the sciencesand the phenomenon of learning suggest a verydifferent conception of what an object, substance,

entity, or machine is. A machine or entity is not a “bundle of qualities or impressions”, but rather isa collection of powers capable of producing certain effects under a variety of different conditions orrelations. An object is a factory or set of potentialities, not a set of qualities. It is through interactingwith objects or machines or through observing their interactions with other objects or machines thatwe begin to build up a diagram or cartography of what an object is. That cartography consists inbuilding up a profile of what an object can do.

Yet if it were the case that “relata do not precede relations”, none of this would make sense. In theexperimental setting it would not make sense to act on substances to see what they do or varyrelations between substances to see what happens, because entities would be completely exhaustedby their relations at this particular moment. Rather than saying garlic does this when it sits in abasket for three weeks or garlic does this when baked with olive oil in tin foil for twenty minutes at350 degrees, we would instead be forced to say that the garlic in the basket and the garlic in theoven are two entirely distinct entities. These variations in relations would teach us nothing aboutgarlic and the powers of garlic or what I call its “virtual proper being”. We can see just how strangesuch a thesis is in the domain of ecological thought. If it were true that “relata do not precederelations”, it’s hard to see why we would be concerned with what happens to bird egg shells whenexposed to DDT, or aboriginal critters in the Australian eco-system when cane toads are introduced,or what happens to streams and water supplies when certain chemicals from fracking areintroduced because, if this thesis is followed through, these are entirely new entities. Indeed, to takeBarad’s favorite example, it is very difficult to understand what quantum mechanics could possiblybe doing when acting on particles to locally manifest them in terms of position or vector, if thereweren’t some excess of the particle in relation to how it’s acted on in the experimental setting. It isonly where entities that possess some minimal ontological autonomy pass through a variety ofdifferent relations that these investigations make sense.

It is here that we encounter the disturbing political consequences of relationism as well. Ifrelationism/internalism is true, then it is incredibly difficult to understand what projects ofemancipation could possibly be about because insofar as “relata do not precede relations” therewould be no beings to emancipate because those beings calling for emancipation would possess noindependence apart from the social field of relations in which they’re enmeshed. Likewise, if it’s truethat “relata do not precede relations”, it’s difficult to see how deprivation from things such as food,services, resources, goods, etc., could be a political issue insofar as talk of deprivation presupposessome ontological independence from currently reigning relations.

We understand what motivates internalist/relationistclaims: All too often people believe they can act onentities in their environment without affecting otherentities in their environment. We see this in manytechnological and scientific practices that seem tothink that doing this thing here will not affect thatthing there. We see this in many economicdiscussions where people seem to suppose that peopleare entirely self-made and are the result of their own“grit”. The corrective then becomes attending torelations and avoiding what Hegel called “thinking abstractly“. In our frustration with those whothink abstractly, we then envision a metaphysics in which all things are necessarily related as anantidote. By all means, we should avoid abstract thinking in the Hegelian sense. Yet we must avoidthe converse abstraction of seeing all relations as internal, lest we fall into an equally debilitating

position. The idea that relations are internal undermines our sense of the fragility of relations, thatthey can be all too easily broken, and that the destruction of these relations often has incalculabledestructive consequences. Yet the idea that all relations are internal also undermines our hope in thepossibility of producing alternative worlds through the forging of new relations and the severance ofold ones. Internalism makes a stab in the right direction, but does not yet fully reflect its owninternal presuppositions and commitments.

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21 Responses to ““Relata do not precede relations””

1. thodgman Says:

September 27, 2012 at 8:19 amI agree for the most part with what you’ve said here. But I’m not sure if I agree with the terms inwhich this debate has been set up. Why must relations be either internal or external – in eithercase, *where* do they exist? This seems to imply they are material, but I’m not sure what matterthey would be made of, or why this would not mean relations are not also objects. At the sametime speaking of relations in this way feels very abstract to me. How would we have a concept ofrelations without having observed a variety of associations of objects, and having built throughinduction a variety of types of relations?

If objects are what they do, then I think it makes sense to say simply that objects relate to oneanother – and that relating is a dimension of action. Activity is not a thing, internal or external toobjects – it is the becoming of objects. And as the becoming of objects is the production ofdifference, I am hesitant to deduce anything about the nature of related objects absent theconclusions we make of objects related to objects in particular circumstances. As objects become,their relations aren’t fixed – there is flux, yet what changes is contingent. The way you havedescribed internal relations here seems to me to describe those relations that are more static – it isconceivable that one could be a parent without a child, but unlikely now and a stretch insofar asboth concepts are fairly stabilized metaphors. And the way you have described external relationsseems to me to describe objectification – the way (scientific) experimentation introducesdifference such that objects become (in a predictable, testable way).

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What I think the divide misses is that whether bringing ddt and bird egg shells into relationsproduces new entities or not is entirely dependent on the human decision to conceptualize thesethings differently as a result of what was inductively learned. Thus the relative stability withwhich we can say usually say that we created a new encounter which brought out new qualitiesin these objects without saying these are new objects, yet we still occasionally experience theexciting transformation that takes place when scientific experiment brings things into relation insuch a novel way that it forces us to reconceptualize what those things actually are.

As for correlationism, I’ve been increasingly feeling that this debate might be less important thanit is sometimes presented. Saying that the human and the world are inseparable takes on a verydifferent character if we consider both human and world to be concepts. And if, followingDeleuze, philosophy is the invention of concepts, I don’t think this claim entails a commitment tosaying that all beings or all entities are inseparable from mind. It merely entails theanthropological claim that philosophical concepts, as articulated through language practices, areinvented by humans. I am a bit hesitant here because I think this can be taken in an interestingdirection if we ask to what extent these concepts are the invention of an assemblage of humansand non-humans, but I don’t think that avoids the issue. Humans are still a part of thatassemblage, as far as we know only humans have concepts, and we are still conceptualizing thisassemblage in terms of the (non)human.

While from reading many of your previous posts on the subject, I know that you have claimedthat the main goal is to escape correlationist ontology, as opposed to something broader. Butinsofar as ontology is a human area of inquiry and a concept invented by humans, I’m not surein what way we can say that the conceptualization of the objects of ontology or the way they aretaken up can be separated from a human perspective. In an almost paradoxical fashion, I thinkwe talk about things in themselves all the time. All conceptualization aims at doing so, but fallsshort. And “the things in themselves” is still a philosophical concept with an anthropologicalhistory. Part of me feels like these observations on correlationism are rather banal, but Iarticulate them out of a concern that the disagreement (as manifested in this particular instance,at least) is really more a problem of communication and translation than anything else. I thinkthat the dual importance of both relation and reality – in a form closer to what both sides desirethan seems possible in either of the positions represented in your post – can be preserved throughthe small conceptual shifts I have suggested here.

2. Philip Says:

September 27, 2012 at 9:44 amI find this whole question very difficult to grapple with because, it seems to me, we are lumpingtogether far too many things.

Am I independent of the glasses on my nose?

Yes, I think that I am. I can’t see a damn thing without them but I won’t perish if they aremisplaced. Equally, the glasses won’t necessarily shatter or disintegrate if they are estrangedfrom my needy fizzog. I’m happy to say that the relation between my body and my glasses isone of independence.

Am I independent of the cold I had last month?

Yes, I am. The remnants of that virus may leave traces in my body and, were I immunologically

Yes, I am. The remnants of that virus may leave traces in my body and, were I immunologicallyweak somehow, the virus could have killed me but it didn’t, I persisted, I moved on. My relationto the virus (whatever traces it leaves within my body) is clearly logically external.

However, both the glasses and the cold virus make me different to how I would be without them.Therefore, it is incorrect to say that the specific form I take at present is independent of myHISTORY. Counterfactually, I would probably have persisted had I never gotten that virus andI’d probably survive without my glasses but the absence of these things would make medifferent to how I am with them.

If I am made what I am by my history — my past relations — is it still accurate to say that I am‘independent’ of my relations? Clearly we are running up against different meanings of the word‘independent.’ I would still BE without these relations but I wouldn’t be what I AM withoutthem.

And could I be without any relations? Of course I could get by without my glasses and Iwouldn’t be at all upset if I never got a cold virus again but I would surely perish rather swiftly ifthe air got sucked out of the room. Am I independent of ALL relations? Again, this begs thequestion of what we mean, precisely, by ‘independent.’

Well, according to etymonline.com, ‘depend’ derives from the Latin dependere “to hang from,hang down; be dependent on, be derived.” I thing that last word is the most telling: derive.Could I exist without a great many of my relations? Sure. But do I derive nothing from them?Hardly. Could I exist without deriving anything from any of them? I can’t see how.

If every thing is a trajectory then everything is a derivation, everything hangs down from orlatches onto its history. Of course ‘derivation’ sounds a lot like ‘translation’ and we can think of itin similar terms: just because A derives from B doesn’t mean that B determines A but it doesmean that A wouldn’t be A without B. Like translation, every derivation is a transformation — ifyou’re ‘hanging down’ from something you can always ‘hang down’ from something else butyou can’t float away as if by magic.

Long story short: these questions would make a lot more sense to me if we didn’t take words like‘relation’ and ‘independent’ as if they name undifferentiated phenomena or as if their meaning isobvious.

If all relations are of the same sort then it does seem as if we must either be internalist orexternalist. However, if we pick that term apart a bit we can see that both internalists andexternalists have a point. Similarly, one thing’s independence from another thing is as much aquestion of the meaning of ‘independent’ as it is a question of the metaphysics of relations.

3. Karl Bergman Says:

September 27, 2012 at 9:45 amWhat you’re trying to claim now is not that objects precedes relations, but that objects precedethe -particular- set of relations they have at a given time. But arguably, if a relation is broken,there is still a relation — only now temporally modulated, with the added qualification of “nolonger”. Variation is a process in time, and time itself, a set of relations (between former andlatter).

This discussion, in my eyes, have all the trappings of a pseudo problem. The concept of a relationimplies relata, and the concept of an object implies relations. Why would either of them have tobe “prior”? Even independence is a kind of relation, grammatically speaking. Let us not befooled by everyday thinking into equating “relation” with some kind of direct causal interaction.

4. Philip Says:

September 27, 2012 at 9:49 amI should add of course that Levi does make a distinction between different kinds of relations(endo and exo). But I still feel that terms such as relation and, particularly, ‘independence’ canmean a number of different things and, as such, often cause antagonism when people meandifferent things by them.

5. larvalsubjects Says:

September 27, 2012 at 3:17 pmKarl,

The effect of a past relation is not itself a continuing relation; were it, the death of loved ones andhunger wouldn’t be so devastating. Moreover, the fact that an entity can break with one set ofrelations and enter another opens the ontological *possibility* of a completely unrelated entity.

Phillip,

I actually do think that relations require material connection to take place. Entities either need toeither directly touch or some material entity like light, radio waves, etc has to be sent from oneentity to the other.

6. Dark Chemistry Says:

September 27, 2012 at 3:43 pmIt always seems to me people get stumped over just what correlationism is. Obviously it goesback to Kant’s Copernican Turn (so called):

“Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but allattempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend ourcognition have, on this pre-supposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we donot get further with the problem of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform toour cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition ofthem, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. This would bejust like the first thought of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in theexplanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves aroundthe observer, tried to see if it might not have greater success if he made the the observer revolveand left the stars at rest” (Preface to Critique of Pure Reason B/XVI)”

It is this reversal from both the empirical and rationalist theocentric pre-critical stance to Kant’sEpistemic Turn that is at issue in Correlationism. Kant subjective turn internalized the externalontological relations of transcendental realism of both the empirical and rational traditions:

“Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences.” (B/38) Onthe contrary: “…it is the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition ispossible for us.” (A/26; B/42)

OOO is not a return to the pre-critical ontologies of the past, but a swerve from those traditionsby shifting the questions from substance itself to relations. And obviously for relations to comeabout there must be a something that precedes a relation that instigates the relations to beginwith (the old joke of which comes first the chicken or the egg). And I agree Levi we havediffering kinds of relations. The shift beyond correlationism is to decenter the obvious connectionwith the human/world divide or gap that is central to humanistic thought and philosophy offinitude.

The major question is how do relations happen, how does contact or communication betweenobjects/machines happen: a concept of happening and event is at issue. A relation is an endresult of a process that has its origin in desire or anxiety, a probing of the lines of influencebetween objects rather than a study of the objects themselves.

7. Levi on internal and external relations « Object-Oriented Philosophy Says:

September 27, 2012 at 6:08 pm[...] HERE. [...]

8. Karl Bergman Says:

September 28, 2012 at 10:10 amLevi: I don’t fully understand what “ontological possiblity” means. The capacity to undergo newrelations seems to imply no more or less than the capacity to undergo new relations — i.e., it isperfectly compatible with the view that entities cannot be unrelated. And more strongly, if thebreaking of old relations -always- means undergoing new ones, then this implies that entities arealways related.

This, nota bene, is not the same as the stronger claim that entities are -nothing but- theirrelations. I wouldn’t want subscribe to this claim. But i feel that perhaps you are caught in a falsedichotomy, between this “strong relationism” that reduces entities to their relations, and yourview that entities are capable of independence. Once again I ask, why must either one, entity orrelation, “precede” the other?

9. larvalsubjects Says:

September 28, 2012 at 12:18 pmKarl,

An ontological possibility is something that is possible but that could never be verified. It couldnever be verified because knowledge is a relation and we’re talking here about an entityindependent of all relations. It’s possible because if an entity can break with one set of relations itis possible it could break with all relations.

10. muge serin Says:

September 29, 2012 at 6:57 am

I am writing this first commentary without reading the comments above which I shall returneventually. Thank you for this intriguing writing, most of which I read. Perhaps one must sayrelations are immanent rather than internal. Spinoza and Deleuze pointed this out in talkingabout modal essences and modal existences. Modal essences for these philosophers accentuatenot relations but relation of relations, modal existence on the other hand is a different type ofinfinity determined by appetite (conatus) and the eternal rules of mechanics and composition.Inevitably, these two are related, the latter the determination of the prior. For the latter one, wealso need to emphasize chance, ‘deontic’ existence, some may refer to this as ‘fall out of grace’but it is nonetheless to come to terms with a realization and affirm whatever falls on the tableand bind bundles of intensity (or potentialities as you remark), discover common notions qua ex-perience (especially of youth, the stupidity of youth) towards singularities. Subtraction of the egoculminates in the affirmation of the purport of a unique degree which I call singularities.Substance, machines, objects. No, the former, the outmost can never be a synonym for the lattertwo unless common notions have become inseparably active (including plant and animal) tobecome active affections. This we can find in the eschatology of Henri Bergson as well as inBenjamin’s divine violence albeit differently (more messianic and political form). All in all, we aretalking about form here, form that is to liquidate real difference. In other words, this is an issueof aesthetics as well as kinetics. When it comes to geometry, I guess we need to think of ageometry in action, once again this you can find in Deleuze’s Spinoza and in Husserl’s famousbook which I have not yet read, but sense it is very valuable.Cheers!

11. muge serin Says:

September 29, 2012 at 4:14 pmI think I agree with Dark Chemistry, as I tend to call myself at times a Kantian (not well-read inKant though I know the four poetic formulas well) in disguise as Antonin Artaud. Anyways, thediscovery of today was the beautiful word: correlation which is already past and still future.Thanks.

12. Alex Reid Says:

September 29, 2012 at 4:55 pmI think I get what you’re saying here Levi. Here is where the experimental/investigative projectbegins. Some relations are internal and necessary for a given object’s persistence. Other relationsare external. These relations may affect an object or even destroy an object, but they can neverbe necessary for defining the object. In part, this is the principle of redundant causation, right?

Let me use a chicken for example. It could be free-range or in a cage; it’s still a chicken. It couldbreak a wing; it’s still a chicken. It gets slaughtered. Now it’s a dead chicken. Is that a differentobject now? It gets prepared for cooking and roasted. Is that a different object? It gets eaten. Atsome point it ceases to be a chicken.

Objects are not immortal. At some point they cease to exist and their component parts becomereorganized into other relations and objects. In a few billion years, the sun will likely expand andall the objects on the Earth will be reduced to atomic particles. I recognize that part of Harman’scomplaint with DeLanda is the notion that assemblage theory suggests that objects are purely

the product of historical relations. I agree that objects exceed their relations, become more thanthose relations in a non-deterministic way. Some relations are more important than others towhether an object is transformed.

As such, I wonder if the underlying question here is “what differences make a difference?” If wecan agree that external relations can transform objects (as when the fire burns the cotton inHarman’s common example), then the question becomes how often do those transformationstake place. In a process-becoming perspective the mutations are ongoing such that all relationsbecome internalized. In an object-oriented perspective, transformations are less common andmust be uncovered rather than assumed.

That’s what I “see” anyway.

13. muge serin Says:

September 30, 2012 at 10:13 amRegarding what Alex Reid says, I think one should also consider what happens to the ‘doer’ ofthe chicken as well as the chicken. IF we are talking about correlation, we are talking aboutcomposition where in the paradox cause and effect relation is perpetually displaced. Anotherimportant aspect of composition is the image of the composed smeared in the composer. In otherwords, did the cat eat the bat or the bat eat the cat? What matters is the surface, whence wealways produce qua zero intensity, our one and only medium. On the other hand, allegory is theclaim to capture all relationality concealed in masks beyond masks, such metemopsychosis alsoreveals the collector hidden in allegory, if it (one or the french pronoun on, let’s say the fourthperson singular) were to succeed, it becomes a name for the event. This was Nietzsche’s doctrinewhich he called simulacrum of a doctrine, he claimed he could become all the names in history.He knew the rules of composition, he was the poet-philosopher, but he lacked solidarity or co-relation.

This may sound a bit cryptic, but I hope you will see the matter in hand that demands moreelaboration which exceeds the present commentary.

14. Dark Chemistry Says:

September 30, 2012 at 6:10 pmI know this is more of a discussion about internal/external relations, but I was interested inBarad’s ideas of relata not preceding relations… Your statement: “The real issue is not whetheror not whether or not it is possible to move beyond correlationism or whether being can onlyever be thought in relation to thought and whether thought can only ever be thought in relationto being, but rather whether or not relations are internal or external.”

Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action is key to her agential realism, which seems to be about theboundary rather than the gap between the internal/external relation. I think it is here that yourthought and hers seem to be in partial agreement in the sense that it is this entaglement betweeninternal/external relations at the boundary that is the question. The difference is that she does notaccept the OOO concept of the real/sensual distinction, instead she seems to fall within thetranscendental empiricists tradition in which only phenomenon exist. As she state it:

“The notion of intra-action is a key element of my agential realist framework. The neologism

“The notion of intra-action is a key element of my agential realist framework. The neologism“intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to theusual “interaction,” which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede theirinteraction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but ratheremerge through, their intra-action. It is important to note that the “distinct” agencies are onlydistinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to theirmutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements.(33)”

Unlike OOO she does not affirm a fully deployed universe of objects. She affirms Phenomenonbut leaves any sense of a noumenon (real object in Harman’s sense) out of the equation. And,yet, I wonder if she is not collapsing the real into the sensual with her use of diffraction? Sheseems to be moving back into a transcendental empiricist tradition in this. As she says: “Aspecific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the “apparatus”) enacts anagential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut-an inherent distinction-between subject and object),effecting a separation between “subject” and “object.” That is, the agential cut enacts aresolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy.(334)”

It’s not about the marking of a distinciton (in the Luhmanian sense or Cartesian sense) thatproduces a gap between observer/observed, etc.; instead, it is the agential cut that is productiveof a resolution – both ontological and semantic – in the inederminancy of the object(phenomenon) itself. It’s about the production of boundaries instead. It seems that for her what isneeded is a method attuned to the entanglement of the apparatuses of production, one thatenables genealogical analyses of how boundaries are produced rather than presuming sets ofwell-worn binaries in advance.(29) And it is in this sense that the central metaphor of ‘diffraction’is at the heart of this agential realism: “I argue that a diffractive methodology is respectful of theentanglement of ideas and other materials in ways that reflexive methodologies are not.(29)”

Does Barad know of OOO? If so what does she think of the real/sensual distinction? For me atleast I agree with Henry E. Allison and his use of the two-aspect theory of thephenomenon/noumenon concepts as being a distinction between what we as humans candescribe (appearance/phenomenon) and what we cannot (noumenon). Kant according to thisdid not see phenomenon/noumenon as two separate objects but as one object for-us(phenomenon) and for-itself(noumenon).

15. larvalsubjects Says:

September 30, 2012 at 6:59 pmAlex, exactly!

16. Paul Bains Says:

September 30, 2012 at 9:34 pmLevi wrote : ” There’s an increasing body of research ranging from developmental psychology topedagogical theory (you’ll see some of it in the forthcoming issue of O-Zone) that suggests thatthis is how children learn as well. Children learn not by simply looking and listening, but byacting on entities in their environment and by varying their relations to other objects, to see whathappens when these relations are varied.’

Yes indeed!:

Yes indeed!:’1. Genetic epistemology is generally considered a branch of psychology, chiefly de-veloped inthe last three quarters of the 20th century by the efforts of the biologist-psychologist Jean Piaget ,and many collaborators. Their work shows that minds achieve intellectual development throughbehavioral probing of reality, not through its Platonic contemplation. The focus of the minds’description thus shifted onto the origination of probing actions, or initiatives, a featuredistinguishing minds from non-minds and discussed below. Whatever it is that senses, itproceeds as if en-closed in a supple bag: in this case, only by taking initiatives, i.e. by palpatingthe bag’s wall, can it recognize what is invariantly conserved outside and, so, build a mentalmap or picture of the surrounding happenings.’ (Mario Crocco, On Minds Localization’,http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/localization_of_minds.htm

17. What Differences Make a Difference?– Relations Again « Larval Subjects . Says:

October 2, 2012 at 1:12 am[...] response to my last post, Alex Reid of Digital Digs posts a great comment summarizing whatis at stake in the external/internal relations debate. Alex writes: I think I [...]

18. Jake Says:

October 3, 2012 at 3:40 amI propose that objects and relations correspond to nouns and verbs, which we use to describe avery real reality that cannot be reduced to either one. All human languages, according to what Iam told, have nouns and verbs–usually organized into a syntax that uses subjects, objects, (bothnouns) and verbs (that often describe relations of two nouns–subject and object).

Why are these two parts of speech so primary and universal? Why not three? Why not one?Why “parts” of speech at all? Why not speech as a continuous heterogenous onomatopoeiacflow of some sort? Does our world really consist of objects and actions/relations? Maybe, but thething is, that which is described with a verb in one instance can be made a noun in another, andvice versa. “Dogs tree squirrels.” can be a list of “objects” or a subject-verb-object sentence.

Before OOO came along I was happily convinced by Heraclitus and Nietzsche. If I had to putmy money down I would bet that the world is a verb, and nouns are an expedience of language.“Objects” are just slow events. (And events can be slow enough to make possible assemblageswith discrete recombinable parts, like words or DNA base-pairs, which admittedly are veryobject-like.)

But whatever the world turns out to “really” be, I do think it is important to consider thepossibility that the nature of our language–the fact that we use nouns and verbs–is neitherreflective of nor determined by what the world is. I find Deleuze’s phrase apropos here: “doublearticulation.” We have two parts of speech because the double articulation it makes possible inturn makes possible a shareable language that can reference a world that is complex in the wayours is complex. We have nouns and verbs–i.e. we sort events roughly into slow and fast ones–simply because we need two parts of speech to have speech that is really useful. Maybe we areonly arguing about “objects” and “relations” because of the same ontologically inconsequentialeccentricity of language? Well, I would put that forward for consideration in any case.

One thing that gives me pause about OOO is that it seems that there is no noun that is not anobject. I wonder, are gerunds objects? Is running an object?

19. The Externality of Relations | Struggle Forever! Says:

October 4, 2012 at 3:58 pm[...] relations again, this time mainly in reference to Karen Barad’s statement that “relata do notprecede their relations.” This is another one of those philosophical discussions that, for me,makes a difference [...]

20. Karen Barad: Quantum Entanglement and Relations | social ecologies praxis Says:

October 7, 2012 at 1:30 pm[...] Bryant recently argued against the notion that “relata do not precede relations” as KarenBarad (1) in [...]

21. Karen Barad: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement ofMatter and Meaning (2007) — Monoskop Log Says:

February 14, 2013 at 11:37 am[...] (Beatriz Revelles Benavente, Graduate Journal of Social Science) commentary (Levi R.Bryant) commentary (Steven Craig [...]

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