I’m not sure that it’s fair yet to start in on couples and their third object because latent correlationism hasn’t been fully explored and disseminated by all couples. The thing here feels premature (!). Going off on couples and how they talk NOW doesn’t mean that we can conclude with certainty that the couple’s third object is the couple itself. I really do think it’s premature. After all, the ROOM itself could be the third object. the candle or a passing truck could be (but not likely). The idea of family or security might be the third object with privilege over “the couple qua couple”. Like I said, I think it’s a bt premature. We know couples become strange to each other (it is common to say, although this hides more than it reveals) , I think its more likely that the two families are what is in contact with a couple. The two objects, Castillian on one side and English on the other, say (in a brokered marriage) bring only into contact lightly in this view. that’s what I think. If there’s a third object, with the couple, then there are four not three whenever two people in couple form. .I think this is right because FAMILY as the objects moves swiftly to ancestrality, because where those two couples sit, behind it and inside it is their ancestrality…it’s a bit like when people talk about the United States (it can still be united and admit it has ancestral links and components that cross quarter the globe).
Ancestrality argues that we are embedded in those assemblages and objects, like nutmeg is in the sea of Spice; or Italy and decisions made in Genoa in 1493 are part of the object United States, and the couple there sat in discourse over this or that. I think GH would say, at least ancestrality would be more interesting than the regress into more human-world stuff (how the couple sees the world, we now know, never “concurs” ever!
the same would I think therefore be true of social systems; it is tempting to call em objects, but at best i think they are sensual objects and that’s that. Sensual objects, quite possibly, don’t get entangled either. Who knows. Much of this may be premature, as I keep saying. First root out all the latent correlationism (Levi may well have done this in himself, I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t hazard a guess), but as I know its not “sorted” in myself, I’ll hang fire with cotton and just remind myself of a point that Jung made in Alchymy, the Philosopher and the Stone speak as one”….anyway, here’s Levi’s full post, as much for my notes as anyone elses…. cheers.
Three: Strange Mereologies « Larval Subjects .: “When confronted with a couple we can thus ask how many objects there are. Our common sense answer would be that there are two objects, to wit, the two people related to one another. However, the object-oriented ontologist would beg to differ. A couple is not two objects, but rather three objects. There are, on the one hand, the two people, but the couple itself is a third object. In other words, the couple is a third object over and above the two people entangled in the couple.
Support for this thesis can be found first and foremost in how people talk about their relationships. People talk about how their relationship is going well, or how it is suffering, or how they need to work in their relationship, and so on. Moreover, when we talk about other couples we talk about inviting the Doucet’s over for dinner or about how irritating a particular couple is. In all of these cases, couples are talked about as an object distinct from and independent of the persons that compose the couple. Additionally, couples have powers over and above those involved in the couple. When two people get married or enter into a contract, their legal standing changes. They are recognized by the law as a distinct entity. As a consequence of this, the persons entangled in this third object, the persons that make up subsets of the couple, find that they must navigate the couple. For example, if a man decides to breach a contract in some way, he must now make all sorts of arrangements to ensure secrecy because of the legal standing of that contract. The secrecy here is not simply directed at the other party in the contract, but at this third entity, the contractual aggregate.
In my view, this strange mereology of objects, where parts are independent of the objects to which they belong and where aggregates are independent of the parts that compose them, is one of the most overlooked ontological phenomena of social and political theory coming out of the Althusserian school of French thought. If Althusser can argue that subjects or individuals are effects of ideological structures, then this is because he treats higher level objects or aggregates as all there is, ignoring the autonomy and independence that belongs to the parts of social objects. This subsequently generates a whole set of riddles that will be taken up again and again by thinkers like Ranciere, Zizek, Badiou, Balibar, and Laclau as we’re left wondering how change is possible. It becomes necessary to search for an ‘empty square’, a form of ‘mana’ (as conceived by Levi-Strauss in An Introduction to Marcel Mauss, a void, a part of no part, etc., to explain how any change is possible because the social structure has been treated as a complete system of relations with no outside. And if this move is so problematic, I think it’s because it leads to a complete absence of any sort of decision procedures. Zizek’s ‘act’, for example, is detached from all grounds and is an absolute abyss of freedom. How is such a thing possible?
Luhmann was closer to the truth. For Luhmann social systems are themselves objects. As Luhmann argues in Social Systems, societies are not composed of persons, but of communications. Here it seems that we’re in an even worse situation since social systems, being autopoietic systems, produce their own information and are not open to an outside. Yet it is necessary to read carefully. For Luhmann, individuals belong to the environment of social systems. That is, they’re treated as independent and autonomous from these social systems, rather than mere nodes or effects of these social systems. As a consequence, with Luhmann it becomes possible to think entanglements of different types of objects and the conflicts that emerge between these different sorts of objects. The very nature of the questions change, for it is now no longer a question of how it is possible to avoid social systems merely reproducing themselves– the question the plagues all members of the Althusserian school leading them to contemplate the possibility of angels which everyone recognizes to be plot devices that are employed when an author gets himself in a bind that’s impossible to escape –but rather a question of how one assemblage entangled with another assemblage can strategically disrupt the functioning of that assemblage. Paradoxically this is much closer to the Marx of Capital despite Luhmann’s protestations to the contrary.
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7 RESPONSES TO ‘THREE: STRANGE MEREOLOGIES’
Scu Says:
May 1, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Is the sort of thing that will be worked out in Democracy of Objects, or will I have to wait for even farther in the future works for this in more detail?
Regardless, good stuff.
larvalsubjects Says:
May 2, 2010 at 12:01 am
Thanks Scu. Yep, a good deal of DO will be about these points, although I always worry that they’re too dry and border too much on formal ontology to be of great interest to readers.
John Bloomberg-Rissman Says:
May 2, 2010 at 6:02 pm
I don’t think you need worry about how interesting this stuff might be, if it’s interesting to me, and I’m not a philosopher.
At first, when I read your ‘Insofar as all objects are necessarily aggregates of other objects, it follows that objects cannot exist without their parts. However, …’ I had a but wait a minute reaction to this (to the ‘however’, wondering whether that was really the word, how both sides of the ‘however’ could be the case). I thought but if all citizens of the USA died there would be no USA, if one member of a couple left there would be no what I call a ‘we’, and therefore no ‘however’ … but then I thought: well, there were no more citizens of the western Roman Empire after the 7th century, but the empire continues (!) to have an effect, therefore there’s still a Roman Empire, at least as a haunting … and it’s obviously when dealing with someone even years after the breakup of their important relationships that the relationships continue to have effects (e.g. perpetual distrust of love, or more concretely, alimony), therefore the ‘we’ continues to exist, at least as a haunting …
Therefore both sides of your ‘however’ can and do indeed coexist.
Am I ‘getting you’ at least reasonably?
John Says:
May 2, 2010 at 8:59 pm
I agree with JBR, this stuff is interesting. This post had me pick up Coldness and Cruelty and wonder what a mereology of Masoch would look like. How helpful mereology would be in allowing Masoch’s autonomy from Sade as well as illustrating how disavowal and coldness is present as autonomous parts interact in a whole. To fuse into a seamless entity would resist any perversion and the tension of disavowal or coldness would not be seen in lieu of a binding contract. Masoch’s work seems based on a mereology in some sense?
Film theory as a form of procrastination « CineMadison Says:
May 2, 2010 at 9:04 pm
[…] on working because right now my mind is, as always, elsewhere. Earlier today I read these two extremely worthwhile posts by bloggin’ philosopher extraordinaire Levi Bryant, and I encourage […]
Notes Towards an Object-Oriented Theory of Love: Conditions of Philosophy « Larval Subjects . Says:
May 8, 2010 at 12:45 am
[…] of language in love that highlights this split, that brings it into relief, alluding to the three real objects involved in this non-relation. What nonsense talk does is undo the reduction of the object to […]
Exo-Qualities (I Really Need a Better Term!) « Larval Subjects . Says:
May 13, 2010 at 2:25 am
[…] If fire-cracker-cat is a distinct entity in its own right, then OOO would claim that there are three objects in Joshua’s example: The cat, the fire-cracker, and fire-cracker-cat. (Here for the sake of […]
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