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Somewhere Inbetween Things and Nothing

April 26, 2011

My current thinking is stuck somewhere between Things and no-thing, between objects and what might on the one hand be called the void or nothing, and the virtual, flux, powers or a plane of immanence on the other. What follows is to a certain extent a kind of onanistic argument against myself in a step towards resolving this indecision one way or another. To a certain extent this comes down to a question of the One or the multiple as the most generally applicable concept regarding the ontological foundations or ground of reality, with the One naming a univocal proper being or a plane or pure immanence, difference in itself or ceaseless becoming, and the multiple naming a state of infinite and differentially discrete existential units.

To a certain extent this is a question concerning what, if anything, is at base and whether positing the irreducibility of Things—not in themselves but as Things rather than no-thing—constitutes of caters for phenomenological comfort more than ontological necessity or apriority—a point raised some time ago by Ben Woodward. The position according to which at base no Thing can persist—according to which each Thing or every thing must give way to unstoppable powers or forces of (de)composition, the constant ungrounding of ceaseless becoming—holds considerable allure where one observes the semblance of stability and consistency as such, where image and representation, identity and consistency are seen to mask, obscure and block access to the constant decay, confusion and composition of things in themselves. According to the latter perspective—that of the ontological validity or necessity of no-thing as a state of an-objective flux—constant deformation appears—and, I would argue, is—fundamental in contrast to the constancy of consistency, yet the transcendent and immanent status this processual deformation remains problematic, i.e., how valid is the assumption or positing of the virtual or immanent as an immanent plane of Being that constitutes a base, ground or rather ceaseless ungrounding?

Much of the dialogue within speculative realism requires that a choice be made between the ontological necessity of either Things or a diversely defined nothingness. It is between these two claims to ontological validity that I have recently found myself oscillating, between Things and no-thing, objects and powers, the multiple and the One—understood as a univocal materialism. More precisely, this indecision is sustained through the rhetoric of, one the one hand, OOO, and on the other, Iain Hamilton Grant’s ‘attempt to produce a “powers” metaphysics’, an indecision fuelled by what—within or amidst this philosophical, terminological and rhetorical confusion—seems like the incompatibility of the equally observable tenacity and affordances of Things, and their constant deformation, decay, confusion and composition, driven by an apparently underlying tendency towards (de)composition. These two positions or observable tendencies appear incompatible where on the one hand we have Grant’s submission to what Alberto Toscano refers to as the ‘sufficiency of the virtual’ and, on the other, Graham Harman‘s vicariously enforced objective discretion.

Towards some kind of resolution of this indecision, the ontological discomfort and irresolution it causes can perhaps be identified as arising from the search for what is at base or “at bottom”, i.e. from the suggestion that there is at some level a base, a fundamental plane or unit from which all becomes and which is in itself all and therefore no-thing—in the sense of a univocal and universal indiscretion constitutive of One, a univocal equality reached at the conclusion of every thing’s tendency towards disorganisation, a conclusion that establishes a univocal all synonymous with no-thing, not as a contemporaneously persistent and underlying inconsistency or virtual capacity for change understood as an alternate plane of equally real and immanent existence, but in actuality.

Perhaps we can maintain the assertion that there is no-thing at base because there is no base, no originary plane or particle—understood as ontological expressions of univocal powers and atomism respectively—from which all that is becomes, i.e., there is no plane of immanence. The search for what is at base, or for a base at all, entails a search for another plane of reality, a higher or lower (dis)order from which actuality is derived or emerges, from which it becomes and to which it returns. Perhaps a disservice is done to both history and difference in maintaining a base at all as any kind of return may posit an almost mechanistic reversibility or recurrent descent into the depths of proper Being. Perhaps few would suggest that a plane of pure immanence or virtual (dis)order necessitates, entails or even allows return to a proper or fundamental state of no-thing, yet where what Toscano refers to as ‘the sufficiency of the virtual’ is allowed to prevail, the actual appears as concrescence yet also problematically as congealed, petrified form, a secondary order of residual being floating atop a more fundamental order or depth of change and composition; such a position requires that change and composition be thought apart from actuality, as processes that occur only at a more fundamental depth, a position according to which it is thought that ‘suborganizational pattern is where things really happen’ (Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, 495).

Change, difference and powers should perhaps be thought otherwise as persisting in actuality—an actuality encompassing the real—thereby accounting for the virtual as a capacity for change within actuality that cannot be thought apart from Things, as existing independently as a plane of immanence in itself, as a plane at all. Thought in this way there can be no planes of reality apart from Things, but rather, differences within Things that give shape to capacities for differences. This is perhaps beginning to sound a little like Deleuze’s dyadic objectivity according to which:

every object is double without is being the case that the two halves resemble one another, one being a virtual image and the other being an actual image. They are unequal and odd halves’ (Difference and Repetition, 261).

Here we take a step away from the sufficiency of the virtual towards a dyadic and dynamic objectivity—what we might refer to as objectility after Deleuze’s account of the objectile in The Fold. This shift can be expressed diagrammatically as follows, in a shift from an ontological schema depicting the becoming of a waveform with Virtuality and actuality depicted as thresholds occupying the extremities of its oscillations or peak amplitude … :

… to a schema depicting the interaction of things as dyadic objects via their respective capacities for interaction:

Yet the problem with this diagrammatical formulation is that within Things there is not a dualistic, binary or dyadic composition of capacities for change and stasis, as each Thing is not simply double but multiple (if not infinite), and each element composing a Thing is only, or only becomes, a capacity for change within a particular relational state or situation. The Deleuzian dyadic object is in this way thought to lack resolution in its consideration of the composition of Things. Each element constituting a capacity for change in the meeting of two Things, between a+b, my be rendered dynamically incompatible, incapable of change, of making a difference, when the relational state is not that of a+b but a+n and b+t. It is not simply that ‘each object is double’ but that each object is multiple and incomprehensibly complex, composed of elements that cannot be universally or generally reduced to pertaining to the dyadic orders of virtuality and actuality, but rather an innumerable collection or actual particles or elements that are capable of becoming or dynamic interaction only within a particular relational situation or event. In this sense, change according to the dynamic interaction of Things is better expressed diagrammatically as follows:

Yet in the above schema objective interaction appears unduly vicarious due to the depiction of a mediating and becoming body between to objects that are not in direct contact. For this reason their interaction is perhaps better depicted as follows, where the interaction is direct, partial but nonetheless dynamic, producing a new thing through their interaction.

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