Onticology, historical materialism, the virtual, morphogenetics
While many entities must certainly come to be, it does not follow from this that the being of entities can be defined by the process of which they came to be. Were this the case, then we would reduce entities to their history. However, as every parent knows, while they were certainly the efficient cause of their child coming to be, the child has a being independent of this morphogenetic process by which it came to be. The being of a being cannot be reduced to its efficient cause, but also has its formal or structural case.
Moreover, DeLanda seems to be at odds with his own thesis, for later, in the same text, he proposes a flat ontology that would be “one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status”. In formulating his ontology as a flat ontology, DeLanda’s thesis seems to work against his prior claim that the being of beings is to be conceived in terms of their morphogenetic processes. For here it seems that DeLanda takes the Aristotlean route of treating individual substances as what are primary. As Aristotle puts it, “anything which is produced is produced by something […], and from something”. In other words, individual substances are produced by and through other individual substances necessarily precede processes of production and are the condition of production. The point, then, is not that we shoulden’t examine processes of production. We should. Rather, the point is that substance ontologically proceeds production.
- Levi Bryant The Democracy of Objects p. 112-113
This was a particularly interesting passage to read today as one of the breaking points that Levi has with Deleuze’s ontology. Previously he made very clear that substance has to proceed the virtual, that instead of all objects rising out of the virtual of the pre-individual, the virtual rises out of substance, of objects themselves.
This passage is about DeLanda’s ontology, but I feel like this is an interesting way of helping me in understanding why I can’t get on board with historical materialism, which this is clearly a bit of right hook at. Marx’s, or maybe more accurately, Engels’ ontology rests almost entirely on the historical construction of objects, which results in objects being defined by their morphogenetic process of becoming. Suddenly a chair isn’t a *chair* anymore, but instead it is a commodity, one which could be replaced by any other, as it is the process and relations of production itself that define the ontological character of objects under capitalism. The first problem with this ontology is that it requires the correlate of human cognition to find its ontological status (otherwise it is just unindividuated substance). The second is that it reduces (here is the Latour coming out in me) the object entirely to capitalist relations, as it was these relations there were its efficient cause.
This is important to me because a lot of the political economy I read fetishizes relations or production, rather than focusing on the object itself and in the process ends up ignoring the character of the object itself. Instead it seems to me that the ontology of political economy should start with the chair as a solid, concrete, actual object. In one sense this means that we can accept the withdrawn “chairness” of the chair, the essence which it hides from us even as we tear apart its history of production and circulation. For it seems to me a disservice to the chair, and the person sitting on in the chair to tell them that it is only a commodity, only a dialectic of use and exchange value. Instead this relationship to capitalism is only one aspect of its being, one possible outcome of its virtual character.
