The Democracy of Objects

2.1. Introduction

From Roy Bhaskar's early work we have learned that, if experimental practice is to be intelligible, the world must be a particular way. First, objects must be capable of behaving differently in open and closed systems. For this reason, the being or substance of generative mechanisms cannot be identified with its actualized qualities, but must be located elsewhere. It is only in closed systems, Bhaskar contends, that constant conjunctions of events in cause and effect relations obtain. In open systems, by contrast, objects can remain dormant, producing no events at all, or the intervention of countervailing causes can either a) hide events produced by objects, or b) produce events different from those that the generative mechanism or object would produce in a closed system by virtue of how entanglements of objects are woven together. Consequently, second, objects or generative mechanisms must be distinguished from events or actualities. Objects or generative mechanisms are defined not by their qualities or events, but rather by their powers or capacities. An object cannot be without its powers or capacities, but it can be without its qualities or events. Finally, third, if it is possible to form closed systems where constant conjunctions of events can obtain, then it also follows that objects or generative mechanisms must be independent of their relations.

While I readily concede that objects can enter into relations—how else would open systems be possible?—it does not follow from this that objects are their relations. In short, if it is to be possible to form closed systems in which constant conjunctions of events occasionally obtain as they sometimes do in experimental settings, then it follows that relations cannot ontologically be internal to their terms or the objects that they relate. In other words, objects are not constituted by their relations to the rest of the world. While relations to other objects often play a key role in the precipitation of events or qualities in objects, we must here recall that objects are not identical to their qualities but are rather the ground of qualities. Accordingly we must distinguish between objects and their relations, or rather the structure of objects and the relations into which objects enter. I call the former “endo-relations” (or, following Graham Harman, “domestic relations”), and the latter “exo-relations” (or, as Harman calls them, “foreign relations” [49] ). Endo-relations constitute the internal structure of objects independent of all other objects, while exo-relations are relations that objects enter into with other objects. Were objects constituted by their exo-relations or relations to other objects, the being would be frozen and nothing would be capable of movement or change. It is only where relations are external to objects that such change can be thought.

Insofar as what Bhaskar calls generative mechanisms are the ground of events or qualities, they deserve the archaic, Aristotelian name of substance. Because substances have the power to produce events, I shall refer to them as difference engines, for the production of an event is the production of differences in the world. Because difference engines or substances are not identical to the events or qualities they produce, while nonetheless substances, however briefly, endure, the substantial dimension of objects deserves the title of virtual proper being. And because events or qualities occur only under particular conditions and in a variety of ways, I will refer to events produced by difference engines as local manifestations. Local manifestations are manifestations because they are actualizations that occur in the world.

To this list of the properties of substances we can add a fourth: local manifestations are not to be confused with manifestations to or for a subject, but are rather events that take place in the world regardless of whether or not any subjects or sentient beings exist to witness them. Consequently, local manifestation is not equivalent to the empirical or what is experienced by a subject. Experience is a subset of local manifestation, but the set comprised of local manifestations is infinitely larger than the set consisting of experience. In this respect, the category of local manifestation shares some affinity to Badiou's conception of appearance as appearing without a subject to which appearance appears or is given. [50]

If, by contrast, local manifestations or events are local, then this is because the qualities or events of objects are variable depending on internal dynamisms in the object or difference engine and the exo-relations into which the object enters. Consequently, we must not say that an object has its qualities or that qualities inhere in an object, nor above all that objects are their qualities, but rather in a locution that cannot but appear grotesque and bizarre, we must say that qualities are something an object does. The concept of local manifestation is here designed to capture the context dependency—whether that context be internal or external—of the events an object produces in its manifestations.

Finally, insofar as substances are not identical to events or their qualities—nor, moreover, their exo-relations to other objects—I refer to difference engines as split-objects. The characterization of difference engines as split-objects refers not to a physical split such as the idea that objects can always be broken in half or divided, but rather to the split between the virtual proper being of objects or their powers and their local manifestations or qualities. Here the point to be borne in mind is that objects are always in excess of any of their local manifestations, harboring hidden volcanic powers irreducible to any of their manifestations in the world. In this respect, the concept of split-object captures my version of what Graham Harman has referred to as the “withdrawal” of objects. As Harman puts it, “[t]here are objects [...] withdrawn absolutely from all relation, but there is also a ubiquitous ether of qualities through which these objects interact”. [51]

Harman defends the withdrawal of objects in a much more radical sense than I do here; however, there are strong points of overlap between our positions. Within the framework of onticology, the claim that objects are withdrawn from other objects is the claim that 1) substances are independent of or are not constituted by their relations to other objects, and 2) that objects are not identical to any qualities they happen to locally manifest. The substantiality of objects is never to be equated with the qualities they produce. Thus, as Harman goes on to remark,

Onticology finds much to admire in this passage. Like Harman's object-oriented philosophy, onticology argues that objects or substances are withdrawn from or independent of their relations to other substances. Like Harman's object-oriented philosophy, onticology rejects the thesis of holistic interrelations where objects or substances are understood to be constituted by their relations to other substances. Finally, like Harman's object-oriented philosophy, onticology holds that no relation ever deploys all of the forces contained within an object. The point where onticology and Harman's object-oriented ontology diverge is on the issue of whether the independence of objects or substances entails that objects never touch or encounter one another, or that objects, by virtue of their withdrawal, must be vacuums. Were this the case, it seems that it would be impossible for any object to ever unleash the forces of another object. Given that objects often do unleash forces in other objects, it thus appears that objects must somehow be capable of perturbing one another, while the virtual proper being of an object forever remains in excess of this encounter and is nonetheless closed.

In this chapter, my aim is to articulate the structure of substance and the relationship between virtual proper being and local manifestation in the production of qualities. However, before proceeding to this task it is first necessary to articulate some features of the concept of substance and respond to what Kenneth Burke has called “the paradox of substance”. If Burke’s discussion of the paradox of substance in The Grammar of Motives is here relevant, then this is because what Burke treats as a paradox, and therefore critique of substance, unwittingly provides us with a fundamental clue as to the ontological structure of substance and why it is necessarily characterized by withdrawal.