response to Levi on causation

A more fruitful discussion is possible with Levi Bryant, whose LARVAL SUBJECTS blog has been home to a frightening level of productivity recently.

I’m being a bit lazy by reposting blog comments here, I know, but it’s been a really draining week, and will only get worse next week as all the Dean candidates come to town.

“I think Graham has gotten some of the issues with bi-directional causality right in a way similar to what you seem to be alluding to here. If A and B, in your example, are nothing but this relation, the two terms seem to drop out altogether such that we get nothing causing nothing. That is, if A is caused by B and B is caused by A, don’t the two terms simply fall out or disappear into nothingness? Graham’s strategy, in response to this observation, has been to argue that there is a kernel of the object that is always in excess of all of its relations and which is completely irreducible to its relations. I’m still working out my own position on this matter, though I do think it is one that has to be responded to.”

Yes, and this is actually stated more succinctly than I’ve done it, too. It’s always odd when that happens, but it seems to be a fairly frequent experience (that other people can fire back our own ideas in clearer form than we can do it ourselves; Zizek said that about Johnston’s book, and Latour said it about the first half of Prince of Networks).

But there’s another twist to my position, which is that not only is there a kernel of both A and B outside the interaction, but there’s also an asymmetry to the interaction. Real A comes in contact with the sensual B, but the reverse is not necessarily the case. There really is an active term and a passive term in all relations (though there might be a simultaneous relationship the other way in which the active and passive roles are reversed, as almost always happens between two people, this is not true of all relationships between entities– it is possible and even normal for A to be in relation to B without B standing in any relation to A at all; this will be a major theme of my upcoming project).