The Cosmopolitics of Withdrawal
by Adam Robbert
Michael of Archive Fire continues our debate over the ontological status of withdrawal in THIS fine post. I am very much appreciating the tone and complexity of Michael’s thoughts and continue to view his position (which we can now call a kind of “contingent withdrawal”) as a valid thesis that deserves further attention; though finally I still disagree. I see two major points of disagreement that are setting us apart: 1) Michael is arguing for a materialist postion, whereas I see materialism as being only a subset of actuality (i.e., an abstraction); and 2) Michael sees the position of absolute withdrawal as being a problem of human knowledge and cognition, where I see the problem of human knowledge and cognition as an example of problems which face relations in general.
On the first point, I can’t see materialism as providing a complete ontological account (sorry Levi!) of the cosmos. Here I, like Michael, follow Whitehead’s notion of the actual occasion though my interpretation differs from Michael’s. For Whitehead, the actual occasion is not an entity that exists in simple location (no actual entity does for Whitehead); instead an actual occasion consists in three “moments” integrally present within the occasion itself: a subject prehending, a feeling prehended, and a subjective aim by which the prehension occurs. Each of these moments are simultaneous occurrences within each occasion (the outside is always-already “in” in the inside, as it were).
So here’s the rub on why I think Whitehead is not a materialist even though his philosophy is entirely compatible with materialism (its a kind of radical empiricism if you want to go Jamesian). Whitehead is careful to point out that while “stubborn facts” (what the materialist or empiricist would consider as the really real) are a necessary feature of our cosmology, they are finally abstractions that exist in the past as constitutive features in the emergence of new actual occasions (“the universe becomes one and is increased by one” as the famous saying goes). The point is that what is “matter” or “material” is only ever retrospectively defined as such. And here I mean “defined” in a cosmological sense that we can distinguish from a smaller anthropocentric gesture where humans get to “define” what is actually real. In other words, for Whitehead, the material universe qua universe is always the past, historical universe flowing into the present and on into the future. When we think of it this way, materialism is only a temporal subset of actuality.
On the second point Michael writes:
So, the take-away here is that structural encounters are direct by virtue of their causal efficacy, but ‘translations’ of such encounters are necessarily “selective”, obscure and partial: direct but partial. And I believe the notion of “absolute withdrawal” is predicated on conflating the limitations of cognition and representation with embodied experience and causality in general. But intentionality and conceptuality are not identical to contact and experience [I will comment more on this in my next post]. The so-called “rift between essence and appearance” applies to generally to symbolic operations but not necessarily to material relations and structural causality as such.
For myself (and for Whitehead) there is no ontological distinction between those modes of relations that are symbolic in nature and those that are non-symbolic in nature. Relations of any kind have what one could call a semiotic component. This is precisely what Whitehead means by prehension, though he doesn’t appeal to semiotics to make his case. In this sense I follow Harman and Morton in thinking that the rift between essence and appearance is not a feature of a human cognitive deficit, and is instead a feature of all modes of translation regardless of scale or complexity. Here I break with Whitehead (who I think qualifies as an advocate of contingent rather than absolute withdrawal — though of course he never uses this language)
At the end of the day Michael and I largely agree and are almost certainly applying these theoretical constructs towards similar aims: social and ecological justice are most definitely at the fore for both of us. In this sense we are in alliance in a larger cosmopolitical terrain that surpasses our differences here. While we both agree that relations are always contingent insofar as the onto-specific character of any particular set of enacted entities will always be of central importance, we disagree in that I still don’t think that if we added up all the onto-specific relations possible for any entity that that entity would then be *finally* revealed in its totality; there would still be a remaining surplus lurking within each finite, historical moment. Thus it seems to be the case that entities can be fully destroyed (or eaten as in Michael’s example) without be fully revealed. Another strange state of affairs…
I’ve just read Michael’s piece, and I agree with your assessment of the shortcomings of materialism. Materialism, as you’ve defined it (following Whitehead), only acknowledges the settled past of the universe, ignoring the ongoing process of evolution into the future. What is matter, anyways? Is it quarks? Is it atoms? Is it stars, cells, or animals? In one sense, it is all of these things, each of which has emerged at a certain point in a still ongoing irreversible evolutionary process. In another sense, it is none of these things, since materiality in general must be the creative process underlying the emergence of each of these specific forms. As such, we can never finally know what matter “is,” since it is impossible to predict what specific forms it will take in the future. Nonetheless, matter certainly is something; perhaps it is this “something” which withdraws from every attempt to finally know it. Granted, this is a notion of withdrawal unlike Harman’s, since it points to something general underlying the appearance of any object, rather than something essential to an individual object.
I disagree with Michael’s account, specifically when he uses the example of digestion. When I eat an apple, the apple itself is not what interests my stomach. What interests my stomach are the nutrients necessary to maintain my body’s metabolism. Everything else that went into the apple is discarded as waste. And this is just the physical level; on the psychical level, the sweetness of the apple is only relevant to my tongue, the redness of it only relevant to my eyes, the smoothness to my skin, etc. These qualities are not “touched” by my stomach or the process of digestion. They are withdrawn from it. This is much like Harman’s favorite example of fire not burning cotton. It is a really compelling example of the meaning of withdrawal in the case of particular entities.
I remember when I first started reading Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics I was seeing Plato’s notion of forms everywhere. I’ll have to go back and do my homework to substantiate this, but it does seem to me that the eternal “form” of an apple is something like what Harman means by its withdrawn substance. Plato thought we had more than aesthesis when it comes to building up knowledge of a thing; which is to say that, though we cannot know the real apple using our senses, we can intuit its essence using the higher faculties of the soul. The soul, as Aristotle said, is potentially all things. So though the essence of the apple withdraws from our senses, we still know it intuitively by becoming it, by psychically participating in its form. This is how the pre-Kantian ancients would have thought of it, anyway.
Some highly speculative reflections after reading the first few pages of Guerrilla Metaphysics again:
I’m reminded that we must deal with more than the absolute difference between objects and relations, but that between an object and itself. Objects withdrawal not just from other objects, but from themselves.
“Objects withdraw absolutely from all interaction with both humans and nonhumans, creating a split between the tool-being itself and the tool-being as manifested in any relation. And along with this rift between objects and relations, objects are also split in themselves between their sheer unity as one object and their multiplicity of traits” (p. 5).
He goes on in ch. 6 to talk of the “ether”/”solar wind”/”vicar” connecting objects with each other. Despite the withdrawal of their “inner life,” they continue to “nurture or damage one another in every instant” (p/ 73).
What does it mean to say an object withdraws from all of its relations if that same object withdraws also from itself? What, in the end, withdraws?
“In the sensual sphere, there is a difference between the banana as a single intentional object and the banana as a set of sensuous qualities. But there is also a lower floor of being, where we find a difference between the real banana as a single private reality, and that same real banana considered as a multitude of real attributes, quite apart from any relation that other entities may have with it” (. p. 77).
So there is an apparent banana, the appearance of that banana, a real banana, and a bundle of real banana qualities. This is Haman’s quaternity, a structure he admits may at first seem “bizarre.” With the second duality between the real banana and its many real qualities, he aims to describe “vacuous actualities,” objects never fully deployed in the world. This is a metaphysical, and not a physical, description. Which is to say that he of course realizes that the physical banana would be destroyed by digestion, or at least its matter transformed into something else, but nonetheless argues that the metaphysical banana, the idea/form of the banana, withdraws from digestion. It withdraws because many of its real qualities are not at all touched by chemical processes in the stomach. What does the dark stomach care about the pale white color of banana flesh?
Harman’s difficult to understand “vicarious cause” needs to account for more than just relations between one object and other objects, but the relations between an object and itself. The inner life of an individual object is itself some kind of dynamic “ether” that is never quite completely what it is (more like a power, as Iain Hamilton Grant might say). Harman calls this ether the “glue of the universe,” that which “binds macrocosm and microcosm alike” (p. 93). It provides this glue despite the fact that nothing ever really touches anything else, since all anything else can touch and feel is the pain or pleasure of the bleeding wound crucified by the quaternity.
Harman outs himself as an occasionalist metaphysician, though he claims his recapitulation of this traditionally theological position can succeed without theology. Whitehead’s God function is, ultimately, what allows everything in the universe to touch. Whitehead assumes the cosmic solidarity provided by God’s Love is just as powerful, and metaphysically relevant, as the creative differentiation achieved by finite occasions. Finite occasions do withdraw from each other in Whitehead’s system, making them distinct individuals; but this private subjectivity is only a single phase in concrescence, a partial description of the fully crucified occasion known as a banana. For Harman, it is never just a banana, but a complexio oppositorum between a real banana, a sensual banana, a real banana’s qualities, and a sensual banana’s qualities. For Whitehead, the concrescence of any given banana-occasion into ONE banana always also includes God, whose Love transfigures the ongoing inner life of the occasion into something cosmic, lifting it from the deadly cross of private time and space into an etheric dimension of cosmic feeling. Harman leaves out God and so of course ends up seeing radiant vacuums everywhere instead of little Christs, but perhaps the difference is merely nominal.
Thanks for doing the leg work here, Matt. We should also consider that 1) contact between a real object and a sensual object is a kind of direct contact and 2) that contact between real/sensual objects always forms a third, real object within which the interaction occurs. Hopefully I’ll get some time to write more later today.
What is “contact?” That is, how does it operate?
Jason — I’m using contact in the same sense as we have been using “touch” to refer to the interactions between entities. Contact operates vicariously, that is, indirectly through the interior medium of the larger object formed by the interaction between the initial objects.
Could not I call that form of “contact,” the “subsumption of two moments of the dialectic into higher unity,” or a other less 19th-century terms? I’m trying to figure out of there’s a new mechanism here, or a redeployment. If it is the “higher unity” version, then the mediation is more real than the mediated. If not, then the mediated are ultimate, and perhaps the third is a structural or dynamic rather than substantial unity? I have read Harman’s “Vicarious Causation” article, but I know that he discusses it in other places that I have not read.
I suspect that a better answer to this question can be provided by the Hegelians in the thread (paging Matt Segall…) though my sense is that vicarious causality — though mediated by a third, larger object — does not constitute a Hegelian dialectic since the relations between objects, and any subsequent synthesis amongst them, are external to the objects themselves. In this sense the infinite withdrawal (infinite in the Levinasian sense) precedes the ‘totality’ of the subsequent dialectical synthesis. I don’t know Hegel well enough to answer though fully, but I’m certain that Harman isn’t arguing for a kind of sublation.
I have since gone through the basics of how “contact” works in Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics. I’m still mulling it over, but I also recently posted on it with help from Ian Bogost.
Yes, I knew that Hegel wasn’t it. But after having read Harman’s article explanation, and blogging about my first impressions, I’m now stepping back and asking if I missed something. I’ve read through the article again, and I can add that he claims that two objects “give rise to a new one” (Collapse II, 208). But it is still not clear to me how this has explained anything other than admitted creativity. Hence I ask, is there something in Guerilla Metaphysics or the Quadruple Object that would clarify this? Here’s part of what confuses me. A few weeks ago on his blog, Harman wrote “Object-oriented philosophy, by contrast, has a completely non-relational conception of objects:” I get it that objects function as relations (connections), in a complicated way, but are we just playing semantics here? I know that all relations are not objects: there are several terms describing “relations” and “objects,” but the distinctions appear almost ad hoc (cf 208-209). Why call these “objects?” I presume that this is all intentional, but I cannot see a reason to do it.
[...] over at Knowledge-Ecology has been in discussion with Michael at Archive Fire regarding the varieties of withdrawal in [...]
I second the point on materialism, and the point about the temporality of materialism is inspired,
[...] the discussion that begin on Knowledge-Ecology earlier today, here are some highly speculative reflections after reading the first few pages of Graham [...]
Adam,
“Relations of any kind have what one could call a semiotic component.” This is good – could you unpack it a little bit more? I think that we are on to the same track with something but would like to hear what you were thinking, first.
Oh, and I “third” the point about materialism.
Leon/after nature