An Ontology of Agents

https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/an-ontology-of-agents/

As I mentioned in my last post, Nate over at An Un-Canny Ontology

is doing some interesting stuff attempting to splice my onticology together
with Burkes pentad. In the Grammar of Motives Burke develops the pentad
as a way of talking about what motivates people. The pentad contains five
dimensions: act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose. Moreover, these five
dimensions exist in different ratios with one another. Marx, for example, is a
scenic philosopher. According to Marx, it is the scene or milieu that
motivates people to act as they do. By contrast, philosophies like
existentialism or Kants moral philosophy are agent based philosophies.
Motive arises not from scene or milieu, but rather from the agent and the
agent alone. In Kant, for example, the categorical imperative arises from
reason alone and is completely determined by the spontaneity of the agent.
Indeed, Kant goes so far in this that were even to ignore any pathological
influence in our formulation of the categorical imperative (bodily
inclinations, passionate attachments, etc). If this is so, then it is because such
motives are scenic in character (for Kant, at any rate).
Nate has been kind enough to read the ms of The Democracy of
Objects. In this connection, one of his formulations gave me pause, revealing
a dimension of OOO that hadnt occurred to me before. In his most recent
post, Nate writes:
I realized that my last post might be read as if I see the
receiving object as having the choice to translate however it
wants. This is not so. Instead every object exists in an
environment for Onticology. And this environment constitutes
the scene of the objects act of translation.

In many respects, this is the exact opposite of what I am arguing.

Objects, as I theorize them, cannot be said to exist in environments. Were
this the case, objects would be relational and it would be impossible for them
to be withdrawn. Indeed, in a sort of pseudo-Lacanian aphorism we can say
that the environment does not exist. As a consequence, environments, as
understood within the framework of onticology, cannot be understood as
equivalent to Burkes concept of scene.
Following the thought of Niklas Luhmann, I argue that the most
basic distinction is the distinction between system (object) and environment.
Initially it thus sounds as if we have objects on the one hand and
environments on the other, such that objects are in environment. However,
the crucial point is not that theres a distinction between system and
environment, but rather that it is each system or object that draws this
distinction. In other words, environment is not something an object is in.
Rather, an environment is something an object constructs. It is system/object
that produces environment. Environment is not something that is already
there.
When I talk about objects constructing their environment, I mean
that the structure of the object determines how it is open to the world. Nate
cites an example that I give from The Democracy of Objects:
Just as other substances in a substances environment
can only perturb the substance without determining what
information events [or translation] will be produced on the
basis of these perturbations, the most the substance can do is
attempt to perturb other substances without being able to
control what sort of information-events are produced in the
other substances. And these attempted perturbations can
always of course fail. My three year old daughter, for example,
might yell at her toy box when she bumps into it, yet the toy
box continues on its merry way quite literally unperturbed.
Everything spins on recognizing that while objects construct
their openness to their environment they do not construct the
events that take place in their environment. (224)

In his post, Nate discusses how my daughter responds to bumping

into the toy chest, i.e., how she translates this perturbation. However, the
point of this example pertains not to my daughter, but to the toy box. The
point of this example is not that my daughter translates this bump into yells
of anger, but rather that the toy box is not responsive to speech. As I continue
in the passage Nate cites, unfortunately for my daughter the toy box is quite
wooden (yes, I know, a bad philosophy joke). Put more precisely, speech does
not belong to the environment of the toy box. For the toy box, speech does
not exist, and therefore speech is incapable of producing information-events
(events that select system-states) for the toy box.
As an aside, theres a methodological point worth making here.
Although I often give human and social centered examples, it is worthwhile
for the object-oriented ontologist to begin developing a stockpile of examples
of nonhuman objects and to think about the world from their perspective. In
the example above, Im trying to think about the world from the perspective
of the toy box. In a recent post, I thought about the world from the
perspective of grass. In my debate with Vitale over how frogs are perceived, I
thought about the world from the perspective not of humans perceiving
frogs and amoebas, but in terms of how frogs and amoebas experience the
world. Jared Diamond asks us to think about how disease bacteria perceive
disease. And so on.
Apart from the fact that this sort of second-order observation or
observation of how objects observe just is what it means to practice
onticology, this way of shifting perspective also reveals all sorts of implicit
assumptions that mark our anthropocentric bias. Consequently, by resisting
the urge to focus on how humans translate the world we begin to redraw the
distinctions that underlie the manner in which we pose our theoretical
questions. In a number of respects, this perspective shifting functions in a
manner analogous to Husserls phenomenological epoche.
Shifting away from the world of toy boxes back to the world of the
human, however, I believe that the manner in which onticology conceives the
system/environment relation has profound implications for both rhetoric
and how we pose political questions. In response to my last riff on Nates
OOR, the poet John Bloomberg-Rissman expressed despair over how the
media functions. To this I responded by pointing out that it is not merely a
question of simply accepting the way in which this system functions, but
rather that we must find ways of creating resonance within this system so as
to have our aims represented.
Resonance refers to the ability of one object to perturb, irritate, or
stimulate another object and therefore refers to the sort of openness an object
has to its world or environment. In a gorgeous editorial comment responding
to my chapter on mereology, Morton expresses this point beautifully:
It might be interesting to think about resonance a bit
I cant help as a music guy (by birth, both parents were pro
violinists) that this is a very precise word for how objects affect
one another (c.f. Heideggers remark about hearing the wind in
the door, never the wind as such); it also suggests something
wavelike (with amplitude and frequency).

Resonance, for example, might refer to how two violin strings affect
one another through their vibrations creating a diffraction pattern.
Now clearly theres a very real sense in which the question of
resonance is ground zero in rhetoric. The first question the orator should ask
herself is whether she or what she says and how she says it exists in the
environment of her audience. Lacanian analysts are very sensitive to this. The
entire theory of Lacanian interpretation is premised on the idea of resonance
or the opportune moment (kairos) where a speech act can finally resonate in
the unconscious of an analysand. The analyst doesnt have this power at the
beginning of the analysis, but only acquires it gradually over the course of
analysis. Just think about the difference between a sleight or insult from a
loved one as opposed to a sleight or insult from a stranger for whom you
have no respect. There are different degrees of resonance here.
Likewise, the other day I watched a documentary on heroin. At one
part in the documentary they discussed a doctor who passes out clean needles
to homeless heroin addicts, who provides them with anti-overdose serums,
who provides medical treatment, and who never lectures them about kicking
their habit. This doctor has been extremely successful with the people he
treats, building up a high degree of trust with them. What accounts for this?
Part of it has to do with his appearance. He always has a five oclock shadow,
he has tattoos up and down his arms, hes generally dressed in dirty jeans and
shorts, as well as ripped and faded t-shirts, etc. His appearance contributes to
his existence in the environment of the addicts that he treats and therefore
contributes to establishing resonance with this audience. Unlike my
daughters encounter with the toy box, his words can have an impact on this
audience.
This leads to the second question every rhetorical theorist and orator
should be asking. If one does not exist in the environment of the system they
are addressing or if the content of what they say does not exist in that
environment, how can it come to exist? In other words, how is it possible to
create resonance? This is not simply a question of rhetorical theory, but a
political question as well. We saw this in graphic and despair filled detail
during the WTO protests in 1999, as well as the various protests against the
Iraq war. As passionate as these protests were, they failed to create resonance
with either the media system or the government they sought to persuade.
Indeed, the protests largely worked against the aims of the protesters. The
media system, for example, seldom reported why people were protesting the
WTO, but rather instead just showed the spectacle of a chaotic mass of
colorfully dressed people screaming that they were against the WTO. For
the television audience witnessing these protests, the overwhelming reaction
was identification with the WTO rather than the protesters Despite the
fact that the grievances of the protesters were to the benefit of most people
making up the television audience. In short, this spectacle further entrenched
the power of capitalism rather than diminishing it.
It does no good to complain that the media is biased or owned by
corporations. Such a complaint might be satisfying, providing one with the
pleasures of the beautiful soul, but such complaints do not solve the problem
of resonance. This complaint gets us no closer to creating resonance with a
public whose collective action is needed to produce these changes. In this
regard, the key question of politics is not so much that of how it is possible to
commit an act or how a truth-procedure is possible. No, if one is really
serious about producing change, the key question of politics is the question
of how to produce resonance among the various systems and social systems
that populate the social world.
Setting all this aside, what Nates remarks bring forcefully before me
is that OOO is resolutely an ontology of agents. Here, I think, my approach
to Burke is somewhat different than Nates. Nate seems to want a place for
all five elements of the pentad. I see Burkes thought as a meta-philosophy that
allows us to discern the structure of philosophies or those elements that hold
pride of place. The theory of the last few decades has been predominantly
scenic in character. Whether were talking about the inflated place given to
language, social forces, discourses, or economics, the dominant trend in the
world of theory has been the primacy of scene over agent. In this regard, it
comes as no surprise that Graham arrives at his ontology by way of
phenomenology, which is primarily a philosophy of agents. And here, above
all, I do not think it would be out of line to claim that OOO in general is an
ontology of agents. The major difference here is that for OOO all objects are
agents, whereas within the phenomenological orbit it tends to be humans
alone that are agents.