Shinings: A brief note on Manifestations, or Appearances

Levi Bryant's blue cup perhaps best illustrates profane 'local' manifestations of objects. Beginning in the materiality of the
 cup whose essence shines forth from its substance or 'powers' in various contexts, the thing might show itself as itself through the evanescent mode of manifestation. Moreover, Bryant's notion of physical intentionality lends itself to distinguishing the substance and existence of objects that can make an appearance, yet it is distinctly unclear that things that possess 'virtual proper being' need to be existent actualities at all; but to clarify the possible phenomenological dimension of powers and manifestations, we might note that the 'powers' reflect the givenness of things, and the 'manifestations' to their intentionality (in the case of simple objects, their physical intentionality). However, the converse can also be the case, where powers reflect intentionality and manifestations reflect givenness, or better, the degrees of givenness: the latter case might especially highlight the phenomenality of the 'moment' when the thing appearing is potentially a recipient of the other (the crossed gaze).

In this regard, the asymmetrical laterality of the phenomenological moment plays off the phenomenality on either side of the 'moment.' Of course, Levi's general hostility to unbridled phenomenality resists a phenomenological reading of his essentially metaphysical analysis, but if we do not reduce the substance of the thing to its 'manifestations' as he eschews and decries, we need not torture his thesis. Nonetheless, we can agree with him that "the irreducibility of objects to their local manifestations also entails that objects contain within them a reserve or excess."

This very "reserve of excess" inform the dynamics of givenness in phenomenology. This "breaking of the regimes" of the intuition underscores the manner in which some phenomena (all phenomena?) might overwhelm intentionality with their essential uncontainability. These realities in no way disable us from speaking about them, or, certainly experiencing them methodologically within the epoche and reduction. Givenness itself guards against the belittling of objects/things to their local manifestations: but here we must part company from Levi's terminology. the reduction to givenness is beyond substance and powers, beyond metaphysics, or better, otherwise than metaphysics, despite the obvious flirtation with a robust metaphysics in this brief note.

Levi Bryant on the Real and Monsters

I don't think I've ever done this before, but I simply want to direct readers to Levi Bryant's essay, "Ages of Monsters: Of Gods and Monsters," on Larval Subjects. On a personal note, I think Levi's thoughts resonate with some ideas floating in this blog, and I am sympathetic to his musings.


Enjoy.

A brief Note on [In]Dividuation: Levi Bryant in the Folds (Falling in Love with Deleuze All Over Again)

Levi Bryant has presented an interesting turn on Deleuze's '[in]dividuation' in his Larval Subjects piece, "Of Folds and Vortices."


Though Bryant's experience of writing locates dividuation further downstream from where I located it in the liminal zone between the Real and the Imaginary, he describes something similar:




Where writing is a verb, the unfolding of a thought that she has not yet thought, the written is the dead letter, fallen into matter and now present in the world.  She has been dividuated by her writing.  The author is always two.  She is the writing, but also the written that persists after her.  She is responsible for and before the written, yet also not it.  She is responsible for what she has written, for she inscribed those things and made them actual in the world.






So if dividuation refers to the blurring within the transformation between registers, then the transformation or translation, neither fully actualized, deferred always in the hazy oscillations of their liminality, point to the dyadic essence of the phenomenological moment: the laterality inscribed by givenness and the recipient that saturates relationality. I agree with Bryant that dyadism is in no way a dualism. Laterality, as I have described it recently, has nothing to do with dualism.


These observations might come to bear on the blurring of horizons that have earned Marion much critique. If Marion's thought of the plasticity of horizons fits into, for example, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible, it would be in a 'fold,' a Cusanian wrinkle in reality. Marion, after all, is no stranger to Deleuze. And I wonder, how great a distance there really is between Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (October, 59, Winter, 1992) and Marion's flirtation with Agamben in Negative Certainties.

Again, Reshith: Analogy and Oscillation

Reshith has undergone some modifications since I first employed the term to respond to Catherine Keller's 'tehomic' creatio ex profundis---not a creation from nothing/no-thing, ex nihilo---but from ruach's oscillations over the deep (Face of the Deep). My concept of reshith maintains the otherness of God, maintains his freedom from a chain of being, from a causation in the scheme of things, from being merely another being among other beings. This is an admittedly anti-metaphysical gesture, one that I had hoped would operate in the spirit of Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being, which  seeks to avoid conceptualizing God within the category of being. The goal is admirable enough, to prevent dissolving God into a hapless idolatry of ontological difference. Still, causality grips God in the metaphysical causa sui, which Marion demonstrates to be a 'conceptual idol,' an idol that locks God into an impoverished likeness of being. Instead, reshith situates the eternal giveness of God on the horizon of Love, through which creation itself must pass before it enters the horizon of being. Just as God loves before he is, creation is loved before it appears.

The very giveness of beings is democratic in precisely the manner Levi Bryant has suggested in his Democracy of Objects. Objects enjoy their being prior to their becoming known to sentient beings. While it is the very nature of the human mind to interpret objects ontologically, that has no effect onticologically upon them. Causality is an irrelevant category for the way things are in themselves, and the way God is in itself.  God's own giveness, his infinite nature, creates as love loves, bringing things into existence from absolutely no-thing. Love always already has its object, which makes its appearance ex nihilo as a new creation.

Creation ex profundis is a shaping; wonderful as it is, it binds the lover into causality: shaping through the hovering above the deep. What a tehomic creation has got going for it, is its self-evident relationality. But this relationality is also and already in reshith. Analogically speaking, reshith is there already, anterior, before (a temporal adverb, but meant atemporally) tehom, which is simply there to be acted upon to become what it will become. Analogically, God is the observer of the no-thing, giving appearance to the material world in an erotic reduction of pure will, act and love. God, therefore does not act within the created order upon some pre-existent substance, but a true creation from pure thought, yet in an image and likeness. This creation is one whose origin is in relationality apart from a causal nexus, not an origin in causality: creation without causality.

As reshith comes into focus, so does a creation that is itself atemporal and one in which conservation and concurrence is already a part. While the theory of rapid expansion of an occurrence in time 14 billion years ago is appealing for its suggestion that the beginning of the universe can be extrapolated to a singularity, that beginning is not reshith, which disabuses us of a God at the head of a moment, the first cause in a series of causes. Causation, like spacetime, is a function of the category of being, which in a strange way, tends to relocate, metaphysically, the notion of causa sui away from God and into the plane of existence.

Reshith, then, trumps tehom in the gentlest of ways. Analogically, it is the condition for the appearance of the there-ness of tehom that establishes the relation of ruach to matter. Indeed, analogy itself is the very oscillation between ruach and tehom. As Karl Rahner has noted in his Foundations of Christian Faith (57-80), analogy is the hovering (is hovering) that constitutes the finitude of creation. And, analogically again, Rahner identifies this hovering/oscillating (Schwebe) with the human creature itself, as the thing that oscillates between spirit and matter. As image and likeness, the human creature is already the analogy of God, and this event is the revelation of the first lines of Genesis. And though Rahner would not countenance a creatio ex profundis, he would likely marvel at the transformational and generative quality of Keller's 'tehomic' theology, and quite possibly delight in the shape his Schwebe has taken in her theological turn in general. Certainly the centrality of relationality and dialectical method to his entire theological project links him to the apophatic entanglements in the Cloud of the Impossible.

Men, Horses and Blue Mugs: Onticology of Substance

Levi Bryant's rather elegant elaboration and rehabilitation of Aristotelian substance in his Democracy of Objects ("The Paradox of Substance" and "Virtual Proper Being") lays an interesting foundation for understanding objects that entail autonomy and independence from phenomenality. Lately, Levi has loosened his notion of materiality from that of substance, and might be abandoning substance altogether in his revisiting (repetition) of Lacan's Borromean knot. Though I anticipate some clarifications from Levi, I do not hesitate to speculate on what that might mean for a system of objects as 'difference generators' (what Levi now calls 'machines') vis a vis what's going on in the Genesis texts. What follows in this post is not so much a critique of Levi's theses as it is my own reflection on how Levi's work might come to bear on theological gestures (all page numbers appearing in this post refer to Democracy of Objects and will be given in parentheses).

Levi embraces the 'archaic' Aristotelian term for its application to objects whose equality is at the level of substance: therein lies the democracy of objects--not that all objects are of the same substance, but that all objects have substance. This principle subverts any possibility that one object can be the ground of another. (73). The ground rules of Levi's system of objects entail several axioms which are in turn contextualized within [his debt to] Roy Bhasker's fundamentally religious question (A Realist Theory of Science [New York: Routledge, 1998]) on the condition of the world that makes science possible (42ff):

1. Because difference engines or substances are not identical to the events or qualities they produce, while nonetheless substances, however briefly, endure, the substantial dimension of objects deserves the title of virtual proper being. (69) .

2. ...substances are not predicated of anything else, it follows that substances are not in anything else in the sense that qualities are in substances. As Aristotle puts it, “[i]t is a characteristic common to every substance not to be in a subject. For a primary substance is neither said of a subject nor in a subject”. Substances are not something in an individual thing, but are rather what individual things are. (74)

3. ...objects are always in excess of any of their local manifestations, harboring hidden volcanic powers irreducible to any of their manifestations in the world.(70)

4. The substantiality of objects is never to be equated with the qualities they produce.(70)

The blue mug sitting on Levi's desk illustrates the system of objects presented. The substance and virtual proper being of the mug secures for it its rights in this democracy. "The virtual proper being of an object is what makes an object properly an object. It is that which constitutes an object as a difference engine or generative mechanism. However, no one nor any other thing ever encounters an object qua its virtual proper being, for the substance of an object is perpetually withdrawn or in excess of any of its manifestations" (88). I understand Levi to be asserting here that the substance, or materiality of an object is only encountered through its local manifestation of which phenomenality is a subset (a special case)--when the object's materiality presents itself in the experience of a human object--when a subject encounters the local manifestation of another object.

So, in order to say something onticologically true about the blue mug, we must stipulate that "it would be inaccurate to suggest that the mug is blue or that the mug possesses the quality of blue. Rather, if we had an ontologically accurate language, we would instead say that “the mug blues” or that “the mug is bluing” or that “the mug does blue”. So for Levi's democracy, an object may or may not exert its power, but it might under certain circumstances. That is, the object's qualities are acts of being predicated of its substance.
The genius of this system is in its generative and coherent explicative strength. Such a democracy is a very big tent, as it admits all objects as objects that make a difference. Famously, there is no difference that does not make a difference, and if a difference is made then the being is.

Things really get interesting when Levi rewrites (repeats?) his democracy into Lacan's Borromean knot of the relation among the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary. In short, The Real now becomes the domain of materiality (substance); the Imaginary becomes the domain of phenomenology, and the Symbolic becomes the domain of (meta)narratives. Of course, Lacan's RSI has always had more than aleatory implications for theological gestures, if for no other reason than for its superficial trinitarian structure. Levi's own Borromean Critical Theory may have its own appeal for trinitarian reasons, but also for the play of objects in the predicament of entanglement(s), as Catherine Keller implies in her own recent work, but also, of course, in its appeal to the recent themes of this blog: reshith, the event in/of creation, and the reality of God and liturgical process.

Any process theology, tehomic or ante-tehomic (the latter my own inclination), would understand Borromean critical theory within a democracy of objects as essentially metonymic, and not paradigmatic. Given his commitment to a flat ontology, I can anticipate Levi's agreeing with this idea, namely, that the relation between the 'rings' is linear and syntagmatic, not paradigmatic, with its inherent risk of hierarchy. Any relationality in the knot traces itself on the string itself, not in the spaces that overlap or not.

The condition of the world that renders science (e.g., theology) possible is its transcendental intelligibility. That intelligibility need not be grounded in the Logos, or divine intelligence, but in its mere substance, and its manifestations, and eventually as its phenomenality (by phenomenality I am respecting the primacy of manifestations). From the perspective of Genesis, we can locate, in solid time, a materiality of reshith, of beginning. Since the qualities of any materiality are what it (substance) does, there is a real distinction to be made between the creating object and the created. Reshith generates secondary substances, that are not of itself, but manifestations of itself, through the action of its qualities, what materiality does. It is the very being of some objects in reality to simply do. Being as doing without diminishing substance, without breaking a piece off of a substance. The qualities are predicated of materiality, until and when they, as secondary substances, become primary substances, and therefore enter the horizon of being without grounding in what originary objects do. What Elohim is doing in reshith, he does because he is doing, not grounding. Elohim is not the ground of heaven and earth, he is their doing, their creating into the horizon of substantial democracy. Elohim, God, is not the ground of being, but the condition, the transcendental reality that makes intelligible intelligibility, and theological gestures possible. This is what we mean when we say that God loves before he is, where 'before' is an artifact of language rather than the event within the actual horizon of love.

Entanglement answers the question of sustaining the world. The autonomy and independence of objects from grounding remain coherent only in radical freedom in responsibility. Now these terms might seem particular (peculiar?) to a certain kind of object, a sentient object, or human object, but if science is to remain possible, then the world must adopt a conformation that is a viable condition for science, which is entangled only if its possible. That is why the scientific gesture will always be a religious one.

It does not matter that the blue mug is techne. In reshith, arche and techne stand in the same solid space-time:  they are one and the same. The blue mug is an object quite independent of its final cause (if I may say such things), as is its 'bluing.' The (very) local 'geopolitic' of a mug bluing, is anchored into its materiality in a way that drives its phenomenality and its untold story (semiosis). The very condition for the blue mug to be, accounts for all its manifestations, whether they present to the experience of Dasein or not. Indeed, if we are to take the very excess of objects seriously, that they cannot be contained in local manifestions or any category of qualities, then the release of the event of object qua object must occur on the horizon of democracy.