Skip to main content

Object-oriented ontologies vs materialism: what is at stake 3 (Ontogenesis)

Been reading Le Clézio's essay on L'extase matérielle (Gallimard, 1967). It is a big praise on the powers of matter beyond what is merely actual. He pictures matter as reminiscent of a time with no struggles - where there is nothing to hate and yet nothing to understand. No object. No crystallised being. A time, that is not an archaic moment but rather an epoch to be claimed, where everything was at stake and nothing had beginning or end. Yet this is not a time gone, he goes. It is rather a time always present. He says there is a world of objects, the world where he finds himself being one of them, a subject. But there is a simultaneous world of matter - a piece of heaven or hell that lies about. It is like sleep where the objects are the objects of dream. Le Clézio insists that he is talking about matter, about a material substract to all objects.

The issue concerning ontogenesis is whether objects need something else to provide for their origin. Hamilton Grant claims that somatism is blind to ontogenesis. Object-oriented approaches could reply that there is no origin beyond objects (no origin of contents beyond concepts, when we move to the ontology of thought). The claim is that there is no space between objects, no space for interaction - nothing acts but objects, nothing is acted upon but other objects. So, for an object-oriented approach, either objects come from objects or they come from nowhere (either objects can provide an ontogenesis or ontogenesis as a question would have to go).

The issue of ontogenesis has political implications. Jonathan Kemp, in an essay of the forthcoming book Submidialogias 2012 takes objects to be a product of a crystallisation by capital. Underneath the objects - under the surface of the produce of capital - lies rougher materials to be uncovered in order to unveil hidden potentialities. Kemp claims that the struggle around capital is the struggle between informed objects and the non-crystallised matter, from where other objects can arise. From crystallised objects no object will follow but those that are blessed by capital. Matter is a political way out.

Comments

  1. Tomás Cardoso1 February 2012 at 04:15

    These are interesting problems and there really seems to be some sort of isometry going on between them. Attempts to characterize matter and content without appealing to objects and concepts fall short of criteria of identity, leading us to alien territories; an undifferentiated one, in one case, and an unintelligible one, in the other. At the same time, attempts to conceive objects and concepts without explaining them in terms of matter and contents seem to lead us to all too human lands, where the notions of objects and concepts, while having many theoretical functions, have no real explanatory grounds. We are trapped between renouncing a meaningful theory and surrendering to a blind one. This sounds as a very familiar problem, that of an impossible but necessary ground: That which should be a transcendent ground to the immanent experienced can only be grasped as (and thereof can seemingly only be) immanent to us.

    I like the idea of thinking objects as products of a crystallization by capital. But then we should be careful to think matter positively as a political way out of the problem, since it is also (or can also be seen as), negatively, the very way into it, as the great object of objectification by labor, that whose essence is to be a mere receptacle of our will. From this negative perspective, perhaps the way out of these aporiai is a critique of its distinctions themselves.

    Just one more crazy, oversimplified thought. If we are to think the distinction between matter and object in some sort of a Marxist key, where objects equal matter plus labor, maybe we can bring about a Freudian critique of the distinction content-concept, where concept equals content plus repression. In the first case: No capitalist labor over matter, no individual commodified object, no alienation. In the second one: No paternal-social repression over libidinal content, no meaningful sublimated concept, no guilt.

    Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hilan Bensusan4 February 2012 at 13:00

      Yes, I see the issue as one concerning the realm of the un-individuated, the indifferentiated, the non-distinct - Hamilton Grant's Unbedingte, the unconditioned and the un-thinged. Is there anything preceding individuals? The child in Wittgenstein's 257 cannot really make up a word for toothache because toothache is non-distinct, the conditions for its individuation would have to come in a grammar that precedes the introduction of the word (a grammar that the child lacks). Surely, one could then talk about objects beyond concepts. The general issue is close to that related to Gunky worlds: can we find objects as parts of objects ad infinitum?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more