on Bryant’s philosophy

You can read HERE a very thoughtful post by Levi Bryant in response to what he calls “David Berry’s rather unfair and ungenerous critique of OOO.”

I read Berry’s post yesterday too, and didn’t find it to be sufficiently useful to need a response. It’s all weak echoes of points made more forcefully by others. For example, if you think standard realism can be overthrown by the “performative contradiction” argument (“it is I who am thinking the unthought”) then there’s no need to read Berry’s carping, fruitless post, to which I won’t even link. Instead, you should read Meillassoux’s paradoxical defense of correlationism, or even just read Fichte. These are philosophically productive objections that are worth engaging with.

More worth engaging with than Berry’s post is Levi’s own philosophy. He refers to our philosophical differences. I’ve been planning to engage with those once Levi publishes a summary of them himself somewhere, but as I see it there are roughly three basic differences. There’s no need to argue them in full here, I’ll just list them to provide some basic orientation.

1. Vicarious causation. I spend a lot of time worrying about how two objects can make any sort of contact, whereas Levi sees no problem here at all. I’m not sure why not, since Levi already agrees that all objets translate each other rather than exhausting each other whenever they make contact. But translation is a starting point, not just a result. It’s not as if a bird and a tree make easy direct contact and only then does the bird translate it. Instead, from the very first, the bird only makes contact with an image or simulacrum of the tree. And that means vicarious causation. The real bird and real tree are always mediated in their link by a sensual object.

I realize that for many people, indirect relation is the weirdest aspect of my philosophy, and the one they are most willing to abandon while looking for things they agree with elsewhere. However, let me say that just as every galaxy is believed to harbor a black hole at its center, it seems to me that every worthwhile theory has a central paradox at its core. As I see it, indirect or vicarious causation is that paradox for object-oriented thought, and to eliminate that problem by viewing it as a pseudo-problem is to miss what is most powerful in the object-oriented position. If you think that objects translate each other, you should also be willing to concede that even their initial contact is just a translation.

2. Objects as capacities rather than as quality-laden units. Real objects for me are withdrawn entities that also have withdrawn real qualities. We can’t have direct access to the real qualities of an orange any more than we can have direct access to the orange as a real unified object.

For Levi, it makes no sense to speak of “qualities” at the level of the real. Qualities are only local manifestations that appear at the relational level; what exists at the sub-relational level are not qualities, but virtual proper being.

And I’m actually sympathetic to what motivates Levi here. What he is worried about in my position on this point, he has told me in the past, is that if a real tree is characterized by certain qualities, then it can never change those qualities without ceasing to be what it is. All change in the world would come from combinations of things, and have something superficial and accidental about them. This may not seem so important in the case of trees, but in the case of humans it becomes much more interesting. Can I actually change character over time, or do I merely undergo surface changes while preserving some deeply essential core?

My answer to that would be that we are stuck with an essential core, but (strangely) that that’s why our life isn’t about us as individuals, but about transforming into ever new selves through symbiosis with other things. In other words, for me, there is no personal development, but our lives are not just personal. Life is not a constant flux as some believe, but that also doesn’t mean that our life is about an unchanging soul observing mere accidental shifts atop its surface. I would say that a human life moves in jumps, or in punctuated equilibria (Eldridge/Gould).

But let’s leave that for another time, because it’s not central here.

3. When Levi distinguishes between virtual proper being and local manifestations, it seems to me that he loses what Husserl taught us. What Husserl taught us (and I think this is his most important insight) is that even on the relational level of human experience, there is a split between essential and inessential changes.

When I turn an apple in my hand or view it from different angles and distances, its various qualities obviously change. If you think that each of these changes constitutes a different local manifestation, then you are essentially agreeing with Hume’s “bundle of qualities” theory of what constitutes an object. Every time the qualities change in any way, you would have a different sensual object.

What Husserl saw was that even within the realm of sense experience, there are certain enduring unities that do not turn into different objects every time their qualities change. When my friend Hans raises his left arm a bit higher or happens to be wearing his red suit rather than his grey one, this is not a new Hans. It’s the same Hans.

And what is so fascinating about this is that Husserl does not use some subphenomenal real sphere to anchor the unity of Hans– after all, no such subphenomenal sphere even exists for Husserl. Instead, it is within the phenomenal that Husserl sees identities enduring through shifting accidental change. And in this way, he breaks the deadlock that left so many thinkers trapped in tacitly conceding that Hume was right that the sensual world was only bundles of qualities, no matter how much they disagreed with Hume’s metaphysics.

The danger is that we become trapped in a model in which the real is too indeterminate and the sensual is too determinate– a model in which the real apple has no qualities but just capacities, while the apple of experience is overly defined by all of its qualities, so that an added fleck of color as I rotate the apple is enough to constitute a brand new apple of experience.

In other words, the real apple would be undermined (by turning it into a capacity rather than an object) while the sensual apple would be overmined (by turning it into a bundle of qualities). This is, I think, one of the primary dangers faced by Levi’s philosophy as it goes forward, and I believe his lack of interest in Husserl (quite common among those of Deleuzian inspiration) will make him pay a price. For it is only from Husserl that we learn the flaws in the “bundle of qualities” theory of experienced objects.

It follows from this point that Levi doesn’t see the experienced world as itself split between objects and qualities, so there is no internal tension within the sensual realm for him.

And earlier, we saw that he doesn’t think real objects have qualities so there is no internal tension on that level either.

So, for Levi it seems that the “real” pole is all object, while the “sensual” pole (not a term he uses) is all qualities. Rather than a fourfold structure, he has a twofold structure. And I think this misses the brilliance of both Husserl (who splits the sensual world in half) as well as both Leibniz and Zubíri (who split the real world in half).

I’ll leave it there for now. Levi will probably post a response, but I hope he’ll forgive me in advance if I don’t post a further response to his response. I’ve learned from experience that I don’t like back-and-forth exchanges on blogs, finding them tiring. I would rather have my serious debates in a punctuated series of articles and/or books, giving everyone more time to digest the dispute, stage by stage. Other views are possible, of course, and Levi does in fact a better job than anyone of carrying out real debate in the blogosophere rather than in more traditional academic media.