“direct but partial contact”

Over at Archive Fire, Michael both agrees and disagrees with me about something.

The agreement:

“Hey, at least I agree with Graham Harman on something! All assemblages or objects are specific entities of a determinate nature – exactly. And this is precisely what I call onto-specificity. Like Graham I also think topology is ‘derivative.'”

The disagreement:

“Now if I can just get Harman to commit to direct-but-partial causation, all will be right with the world… ;-)”

In fact, I’ll be dealing with both of these issues in Treatise on Objects, once I finally have ten free minutes to think again. That book, as I’ve said before, will deal with about 12-16 objections that are made at various times to my position.

The “agreement” part here is the one where Levi and I are in disagreement, and so you can expect a chapter where I’m talking about Bhaskar, DeLanda, and Levi’s own forthcoming book The Democracy of Objects (which is a really great read). They all have something in common, which is a dislike of “actualism,” their term for the idea that what really exists are specific entities of a determinate character here and now. Plenty of people have thought that, but Whitehead and (the early) Latour are the recent examples relevant to me.

As for the “disagreement” part, that will also be in the book. The quick response is that the reason we can’t make direct but partial contact with objects is that objects are essentially unified, and if you make contact with the parts of the unity then it’s not a contact with the unity itself. Each of those parts, in turn, is a unity if it’s an object, meaning that you can’t touch those parts either. That’s why the sensual realm is the only place where direct contact is possible, and it can happen only between a real object and a sensual object, just as only the opposite poles of a magnet can touch, and just as only the opposite sexes can procreate. Causal contact is not between two real objects or two sensual ones, but only between one of each type. And this can occur only on the interior of a larger object. It may sound weird, but there have been plenty of weirder ideas that were eventually accepted– and moreover, philosophy should never be the flattery of common sense, including scientific common sense.

Nonetheless, the topic is worth a chapter of its own in the new book, once I actually have some free time to write a book again.