Entities and Relations

Preamble: A whale of a deal.

6.1

Object-Oriented Ontology tells us that a neutron, a fictional character, a corporation, a hammer, and a constitution may all count as objects. Yet once admitted into the realm of objecthood, they are asked to wear substantially the same metaphysical uniform. Treating artificial, social, and fictional entities on the same footing is a significant achievement against physical reductionism, but the question remains why making institutions, technologies, planets, and trees genuine objects should require them to share a homogeneous architecture of being.

Irreducibility is the common reason why even an object like the US Constitution exceeds the configurations and interpretations of 1789, 1868, and 1954. Its “virtual proper being,” in Levi Bryant’s terms, retains capacities that exceed its various manifestations; otherwise, as Graham Harman likewise insists, it would be reducible to whatever courts, legislators, citizens, or historians presently make of it. Withdrawal makes a strong case for entitative irreducibility—the object is not identical to its interpretations—but the Constitution may persist less through a metaphysical reserve than through recurrent usage and enactment. It is difficult to imagine it continuing to exist in any meaningful political sense if American courts, legislatures, citizens, and institutions permanently ceased to recognize it. Nor would the parchment step in with its reserve if officials, schools, and archives stopped citing, interpreting, and enforcing it. The singular document would not preserve the integrity of the constitutional object if oaths, elections, amendments, jurisdictions, and legal practices no longer regenerated the constitutional relation.

The same distinction appears in the Bill of Rights. There is the parchment and the textual sequence, but there is also the legal-institutional field of rights, interpretations, precedents, and political claims. If the original parchment vanished, the Bill of Rights would survive. If every copy vanished while institutional memory and practice somehow remained, some significant part might still survive. But if every practice of recognition, citation, interpretation, and normative recurrence permanently ceased, it becomes difficult to say in what meaningful political sense the Bill of Rights would continue to exist.

Now consider the whale. A flat ontology may give it equal metaphysical weight, but its irreducibility is of a different order. Removed from one environment and placed in another, within the limits of its viability, the whale remains itself. Its metabolism, body, organization, and capacities give it a locus, while its relations affect it without constituting every aspect of its existence. If no one observes, invokes, or recognizes it, like the proverbial tree that falls without a witness, it goes on swimming regardless of recognition.

The asymmetry between the irreducibility of the whale and that of the Constitution or Bill of Rights deserves ontological recognition. Theoretical economy offers obvious advantages: a univocal ontology dispenses with separate metaphysical rules for physical, social, and fictional things; it protects objects from reduction; and, most importantly, it refuses to place humans and their cultural products in a privileged metaphysical realm. But theoretical economy slips into legislation when one architecture, however elegantly, becomes the presumed structure of all reality.

Religion, the history of philosophy, love, friendship, and constitutional order suggest another mode of persistence. They endure through recurrent enactment across the support of multiple objects. What distinguishes them is not simply a lack of physicality—many may possess entitative condensations or hybrid forms—but that their identity is maintained less by a withdrawn reserve than by patterned recurrence distributed among other relations and entities. Their irreducibility is not necessarily weaker; it may simply be differently constituted.

Reality may therefore be poorly served by a single metaphysical denominator. There is little reason to assume in advance that it cannot sustain objects with partially overlapping architectures and different modes of persistence. Once entities and relations are considered together, the salient question is no longer merely whether relations should count as objects, but why the heterogeneity of beings should stop at the univocal nomenclature and ontological designation of objecthood.

Entities and Relations.

6.2

The individual seeks an outlet but cannot find the exit sign. One cannot rendezvous with the collective at a certain place and time, nor does it carry a badge or an ID. It isn’t like the social is a body, as the two-word coinage has it, nor is it a building complex or shopping mall. An assembly is not a choreographed dance performance, and society isn’t a bunch of cushions on a canapé. Rather, the collective is an event that occurs within the individual and, understood as a relational object, promises a blissful condition. Relational objects are not always physically definable, but they affect the quality of the discrete objects they come into contact with. They are omnipresent but do not replace the entities they intervene with. The collective is a relational object that operates between individuals, affecting them in varying degrees without absorbing them. The journal, the pencil, the hand, and the body that extends behind it are discrete objects that do not owe their existence to each other but are brought together by relational objects, writing being chief among them. Thus reality may contain entitative objects that withdraw into a core independent of context or circumstance, and relational objects whose integrity consists precisely in their enactment. An entitative object reserves a remainder from any exchange or encounter it participates in, and what it does and how it appears to other objects never use up the reserves it keeps over every relation. Vicarious communication has been proposed as a mediating solution for withdrawn objects that cannot simply coincide with one another, but why must the mediator have the same withdrawn architecture as the entities it mediates? A relational object exists by being enacted and persists through recurrence. Its opacity is dispersed through the porosity of time, the diversity of participants, and the contingencies of consequence. Unlike the entitative object, whose depth opacity persists through reserve, the relational object’s distributed opacity is complex without concealing a metaphysical core. It persists like a melody, a language, a flame, or perhaps an umwelt or ecosystem, not because some identical nucleus remains hidden underneath its manifestations but because it maintains a pattern for the condition of its own recurrence. To ask how the individual becomes part of a collective issues from a formulation that already commits a category error because it treats the individual and collective as though they were objects of the same type at different scales. The individual is entitative and can potentially exceed every social relation it enters. The collective is relational and exists through the relations among individuals but cannot be localized in any one of them. The collective is not an enormous entity towering above its members, nor is it merely a mathematical aggregate of its members. Rather, it is produced laterally in a part-to-part relation that continuously produces the dimension experienced by the parts as a whole. Entitative and relational objects interact through transduction, and without conversion, in a repeated relational activity that can precipitate entitative objects, while they, in turn, generate and stabilize relational ones without trading place. Nor should the collective be confused with its entitative condensations. A religious community is relational while a church or mosque is entitative. Political solidarity is relational, while a state bureaucracy has entitative apparatuses. Law and order are relational, but courthouses, Merkava tanks, and fortifications are entitative. Thus, the collective is not a whole into which individuals are absorbed, but the object through which entitative individuals encounter one another as participants in an emergent dimension of the part-to-part relation.

6.3

One source of the dispute between substance and relation is the assumption that everything must be real in the same way. Wittgenstein would object to the demand that everything covered by a word must share one common essence. Two things need not share the same internal architecture to become contiguous within an assemblage, as a person and a war, a building and a religion, a body and an economic system may occupy the same field of consequence without being reducible to one another. Although the designation of “object” can function as a family-resemblance concept that covers heterogeneous modes of objecthood, semantic flexibility alone does not establish their reality. As misguided as the precedence of either substance or relation may be, the dispute nevertheless brings a bunch of knights to sit around the round table of the holy grail and ponder how the paraclete of the object has been divided between philosophies of becoming and those that insist upon irreducible persistence. The Heraclitean river gives one ancestral image of reality as change, while the Parmenidean insistence on what is, as resistant to generation and dissolution, provides another limit. Bruno Latour occupies the relational side, distributing agency among heterogeneous actants, mediators, networks, and associations. Graham Harman applies counter-pressure by insisting that the real object exceeds every relation in which it participates and withdraws from complete access. Between them lies the considerable nuance of Xavier Zubiri’s structured realities that are de suyo, real “in their own right,” while reality itself remains constitutively respective and open; Whitehead’s actual occasions that are discrete atomic processes of becoming whose concatenation produces continuity; and Deleuze’s assemblages that generate emergent consistencies while retaining the heterogeneity of their components. Although the withdrawn nature of Harman’s objects accounts for their irreducibility, and the genuine relations between them produce new objects, the question remains whether withdrawal is a mandatory condition for being real. In other words, withdrawal need not be a necessary condition of objecthood, but rather one possible mode of it. An entitative object may preserve its irreducibility through reserve, retaining an excess over every encounter. A relational object may preserve its irreducibility differently: through enactment, recurrence, distributed consequence and the capacity to enter further relations. Its excess need not conceal a metaphysical nucleus. It may instead be dispersed diachronically across participants, histories, effects and possibilities of recurrence. As ontological difference does not preclude contiguity, the distinction does not oppose real objects to unreal relations but proposes heterogeneous modes of reality joined by partial family resemblance. Both entitative and relational objects may possess individuation, causal efficacy, continuity and irreducibility while maintaining these qualities through different means. The entitative object persists through reserve, whereas the relational object persists through recurrence. What this proposes, instead of a homogeneous kingdom of withdrawn objects, and at the risk that the Pope of OOO may regard it as schismatic, is a partnership of non-exclusive heterogeneous objects committed to an ontological division of labor. Reality need not be submitted to a single architecture in order to remain real, as some objects may withdraw, while others circulate, mediate, recur, and perish in their enactment. For a speculative reappraisal of this arrangement, imagine Leibniz’s Windowless Monads stripped of their pre-established harmony but retaining the image of an interiority that cannot be transferred. Entitative objects would possess an analogous closure, while relational objects would arise through the situations in which such entities affect one another without exchanging their interiors. The encounter would not pass through an absent window but occur as a transduction whose effects reverberate within the mute integrity of the entitative objects without converting either participant into the other. Entitative and relational objects result in a meshwork that is not a substance beneath them but the topology generated by their contiguity and the pattern produced by their encounters. Such a meshwork may remain open to yet-undisclosed object types and testify to the polycentric nature of reality at the level of objecthood itself.

6.4

A room knows when a wedding banquet has ended. The event hall has recently been vacated by its patrons and a hasty cleaning crew. A monogrammed handkerchief, an unstrapped black bow tie, and the lost half of a pair of earrings lie strewn across the reflective marble dance floor. Snippets of the bride’s iridescent dress flash beside the now-shadowy groom, fading into a receding ring of clapping and foot-stomping family and friends. The meticulously planned seating arrangement has reached its final stage, with islands of round tables, disorderly covers and loosely gathered chairs. The tablecloths are half-cleared, with random stains among the few leftover items, including the forgotten wedding favors, the personalized cookie in its shiny wrapper, and the familiar strike box with the words Perfect Match above the date and name of the celebrated couple. Here and there, a chair sits turned away from its place, and lipstick clings to an empty glass, save for the shallow pool of diluted ice or sedimented wine at its bottom. The centerpiece bouquets of lush foliage and white flowers, placed on high pedestals at the center of each table, enter into a pattern with the rows of crystal chandeliers that hitherto witnessed an unrehearsed choreography of gestures, counterpoised by the cadence of overlapping conversations. While more things may be hiding under the tables, behind the opaque, pleated tablecloths, the air still carries mingled traces of perfume, alcohol, roasted food, music, and exhausted celebration. None of these things is a ticket back to the reception, and piling them together would not resuscitate it. The wedding lingered somewhere between bodies and objects, passing through the ballroom without ever settling in any one of them. It rearranged furniture, altered voices and gestures, drew strangers into temporary intimacy, and then disappeared, leaving its entitative accomplices to testify that something more had taken place. Relational objects are like this: difficult to point to, impossible to isolate, yet unmistakable in their effects. Love cannot be placed beside the newlyweds like another guest, nor can hospitality be located in the silverware, the tablecloth, or the seating chart, though each may bear its imprint. They have consequences without occupying a corresponding volume. One discovers them less by locating them than by noticing what they have made possible: the mood of a room, the nearness of bodies, the memory that persists after the music stops. The collective, too, is of this order. It does not hover above individuals like a giant body, nor does it reside in any single person. It takes shape laterally, in the relay of encounters, until an atmosphere becomes durable enough to act back upon those gathered within it. A relational object can therefore remain latent without withdrawing, persisting in memory, obligation, affection, rhythm, and the possibility of recurrence. It has no fixed address, yet it is real precisely because things are no longer quite the same once it passes through them.

6.5

The dystopia of subsuming everything in relation goes farther than total surveillance. Its negative force operates through both the red-hot insignia of the branding iron and the act of casting the unwanted out, such as banishing undesirable elements from an otherwise normative group, depriving them of the safety and privileges of membership, or, like the proverbial scapegoat, sending them to perish in the desert. It can assume the sinister form of economic exclusion as well, as in US sanctions, which one cross-national study estimates have contributed to 38 million deaths since 1972. The dystopia of the relational object begins when everything must be connected on prescribed terms and whatever cannot comply must be cast out. Surveillance imposes transparency and a classificatory degree of legibility that succeeds when the Panopticon is internalized by those being observed. Yet this distorted collective also preserves itself through expulsion, ostracizing whatever threatens its normalized unanimity. A religious community reverses its promise of communion through excommunication, withdrawing participation from the offending member, while many ancient traditions displaced their internal contradictions onto the demonized pharmakos. Banishment and exile turn geography into an expulsive weapon, and perhaps the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft remains the most virulent example of the collective as a pathological relational object, in which inclusion and exclusion operate as two pistons of the same engine that casts out whatever cannot be made fully compliant. The entitative object nevertheless maintains its characteristic distance from relation, whether it acts as a magnet for multiple trajectories of attention or is only visited by an episodic caravan of events. Each relational field it enters recalibrates that distance, provoking an active response to the demands of the encounter. When opacity becomes suspicious under total surveillance, the entity searches for modes of interference to jam scopic penetration. When its singularity is continually pressured toward equivalence, it still never quite coincides with the corrected and reformatted version demanded by normalization. Relational amputation may leave the entity intact while severing its ties to kinship, belongings, civic participation, and livelihood. Scapegoating makes the entitative object bear contradictions that do not originate within it. Banishment and exile tear it from the ecology of home, language, ritual, territory, and relation that helped sustain it. When relational pathology reaches the extreme of totalitarian violence, however, transparency and exclusion are no longer sufficient. If the entity persists outside the tyrannical relation, its continued existence can become the target of extermination. Throughout this trajectory, the entitative object enters relations, is altered by them, and generates new ones, until the unyielding reserve it retains when alive becomes what the exceptionalist death squad is commissioned to eliminate.

The Ritual Field.

6.6

Ritual is the behavioral pattern that arises upon the encounter of entitative and relational objects. It is the causal weave and contrapuntal frequency of their engagement. There is a rhythm and cadence to the intervals that regulate their manifestations, not a substance that can be traced back to the primacy of either, but a mesh or fugue that holds them in a continuous, co-dependent current. A moiré of displaced correspondences appears when multiple relational objects gather around an entitative black hole that swallows them with the authority of a king’s divine right, or draws them into the hollow realm of the femme fatale. The pathology resides in neither the entitative nor the relational object, but occurs when their ritualistic exchange is converted into a ground reducible to one or the other, when the site of encounter ceases to mediate among all its participants and becomes the property of the person sitting at the head of the dinner table, arbitrating everyone else’s behavior. Relational objects, no matter how capable of instigating change, require entitative counterparts through which their effects can recur, just as entities cannot cross-breed without relata, as they would recede into complete withdrawal. Their patterned recurrence produces bonds through which relations become durable without becoming entitative, and an entity remains irreducible while being partial and finite. That is how friendship is reinforced through greetings and returns, how mourning acquires collective duration through funeral rites, and marriage is precipitated through vows, witnesses, signatures, and subsequent anniversaries. Ritual, as a technology of recurrence, coordinates the frequencies of entitative and relational objects that do not move in unison, until the exercise of their coexistence acquires enough consistency and coherence to produce purpose and direction. It is a mode of contiguity in which a choreography of timing, permissions, protocols, and reciprocities allows difference to remain together. Within this ritual field, the distinction between sentience and sapience is one of degree rather than absolute kind, as the estuaries of entities and relations discharge into the same ontological sea, making awareness not an exclusively human boon but a silvery mesh of intelligence playing across the perceptual surface of the deep. Yet the ritual field is always vulnerable to capture. The entitative object can appropriate it by dictating the terms of relation, assuming the position of a sovereign that determines their permissible form. The relational object can appropriate it as well by only producing the kinds of entities required for its own recurrence, converting difference into a taxonomy that prepares the ground for hierarchical ordering. An entity may therefore monopolize the terms of relation, just as a relation may monopolize the terms of entity formation. However, the viability of the ritual field depends upon neither participant acquiring sovereignty over the conditions of their contiguity. This is why tyranny cannot be located in either the individual or the collective, as it arises from the deterioration of objecthood that triggers the capture of the interval between them, when difference hardens into hierarchy, and the ritual field is paved into a platform for taxonomic exceptionalism.

6.7

Entitative and relational objects are the yin and yang of the ritual field in which they operate. Their metaphysical contiguity is such that a gap opens up between them, an almost imperceptible fracture, like the thing that does not quite correspond but makes motion possible. This rift is the clearance in which difference can appear, triggering change in the heart of plenitude. Lucretius called this interval the clinamen, the minute, indeterminate swerve of atoms departing from their parallel descent. Just as there would be no collision, no combination, and no world without that deviation, the non-coincidence qualifies how an entitative object exceeds the relations in which it participates, and the relational object exceeds any one of the entities it brings together. This opening is the fracture that allows for the alluring sliver of sentience between being and time, the moment of awareness that brackets itself in the midst of the most gripping circumstance, yet also abides by the condition of partiality shared by all entities, no matter their level of animacy. Relational objects are the exo-partners of their entitative counterparts and operate as the hiatuses between them, responsible for how they come into contact with each other while keeping to themselves. The relational double is not subject to the regimes of visibility or presence produced by mind-body dualism. Rather, it is ensconced in a full spectrum of hybridization that does not privilege the physical over the invisible. Entitative and relational objects do not communicate conventionally but through a process of transduction that hinges on the simultaneity of their transmission and response. While the relational object is an entity’s social manager, the translator is the custodian of the ritual field generated by their patterned interposition and attends to the fabric of their sustainability. The translator is perhaps more aptly described as a transductor, since it is not exactly a language being bridged, but modalities of being. The critical task is to allow exchange while ensuring each keeps its particular mode of irreducibility. Entity and relation may pass into one another without the collusion of their identities or the confusion of one with the other. Thus, the master of the ceremony becomes a player in an alternate ludology whose aim is the health of the behavioral pattern, ensuring it perpetuates itself by conserving the rift between entitative and relational objects, preventing the absorption of the one by the other, thereby guarding their ritual field and the integrity of the ontological loom that weaves them in the perpetuity of a fugue-like interpolation.

6.8

In De rerum natura, Lucretius offers an account of sight that makes vision strangely intimate with touch. Bodies perpetually emit simulacra, delicate skins that cross the intervening space and strike the eye. The observer does not reach out and take possession of the object. Something must depart from the object and undergo a process before the observer receives it. Sight occurs through contact without claiming full coincidence, as what arrives is neither the entity itself nor a sign standing in its place, but a surface translated into a film, a film into an impact, and an impact into vision. Something similar occurs with entitative and relational objects. The entity and the relation pass through each other as the travel between them is transformed at every threshold. A gesture becomes an invitation, an invitation grows into a friendship, and the friendship returns to inform the gestures of those who sustain it. In this transduction, the production of continuity hopscotches through differences rather than proceeding through an impartial channel to convey equivalent content. A remainder persists at every passage, reinstating the irreducible core of the entity, the recipient, and the relation. It comes as no surprise that Ocular hegemony begins by denying this remainder, turning sight into a fantasy of complete availability. Lucretian vision, on the other hand, suggests an alternative to the image that becomes a universal currency into which bodies, territories, desires, and events are traded. An eye touched by the skins of things, dependent upon an interval it cannot abolish, makes the appearance of things neither a possession nor a copy, but the permeable membrane of an encounter. There is a correspondence and resonance between the ritual field and the realm of appearance that permeates interobjective interactions. Appearance is not a forensic trace but an ontological one in which objects continuously extend traces into one another, for ecology to happen, politics to begin, and economies to emerge. Those traces are where love, predation, cooperation, exchange, memory, and language all become possible. The entitative object withdraws but the relational radiates, the former holding itself back while the latter produces an appearance that invites further relations. Appearance as the aspect taken by the ritual ground is the commonality of reality, in the sense that it belongs to everyone but is also a shared field in which singular objects meet without ceasing to be irreducible. If universalization, visual or otherwise, is the attempt of one object's mode of access to annex the whole world, then appearance is its opposite—not because it is pluralistic in an ideological sense, but because it is irreducibly relational. On the ritual field, very appearance belongs to at least one encounter, and no single encounter can exhaust the object that appears.

6.9

The ritual field is a fugue-like conjugation of entity and relation. It eludes formal conceptualization because it pronounces both entitative and relational objects in the same utterance. Relational objects are the exogamous partners of the entities they bring into contact; as mereological agents, they bring parts together into provisional wholes and break them up again into transmittable parts. Their engagement resembles a dance of bees pollinating the flowers that nourish them in return. It is a selective process that nevertheless occurs through random attraction, carrying the pollen from the stamen to the stigma of different blooms as the relational object feeds on the entities it inadvertently impregnates. The metaphysical contiguity of entitative and relational objects works like the single empty gap in a Rubik’s multi-colored slide grid, where individual tiles can temporarily occupy the gap so others can be strategically maneuvered around it, thereby instilling the absence that allows the grid's spatial rearrangement. Filling the hiatuses between entities, relational objects do not engage entities in polar oppositions unless seriously tampered with. Instead, when properly administered, they act as a preventive measure that wards off their dialectical dualism. A healthy ritual field resists its capture by either entitative or relational objects, since the behavioral pattern produced by their constant friction cannot be appropriated without impairing its character and frequency. It functions like a tuning fork that averts the instrumentalization of cognitive arrangements, thereby assuring their consistency. As a testament to the world’s givenness, it is already populated by algae, bacteria, and black holes, for what separates the envelopes of distinct beings is saturated by the intersecting and overlapping patterns that authenticate their sustainability. It is the before and after that causality subsequently comes to conquer. The human prerogative may be to plant the flag of mastery on a terrain that exceeds its perceptible materiality, binding it with principles and anchoring it down with substance. But the ritual field is not a substrate nor a resource that can be substantiated, as its essence is not of the order of Aristotelian substance. It is not a ground that becomes more familiar the more it is stomped upon, as it escapes its capture in the shopping mall, the sports arena, or the state assembly. It is not the economic savannah of the predatory state nor the Sahel of geopolitical attrition, not an evolutionary flooring to be excavated, nor a blueprint that can be retrieved as some archetypal continent that surfaces now and then, like some forsaken Easter Island that cradles obscure myths of origins. Its appropriative capture into a geology of evolutionary strata or layers of interpretations always seeks to establish a fictitious precedent and found a paradigm when its proper functioning consists in its dynamic co-production. Turned into an acreage of monocultural rows or the battleground of international waters, it becomes a terrain that is always in danger of being co-opted and annexed into a ground of conquest. And yet, the ritual field is a lunar surface that cannot be landed upon. Despite the role-model scarecrows that punctuate arable and cultivated terrains, and unconfined to the underground rhizome or the mycelial network of the Wood Wide Web, the ritual field cannot be emulated by a paradigmatic scheme or set of maneuvers. It extends beyond perception, not as a noumenal concept, but as the condition of perceptibility. That is why its concatenated manifestation, no matter its interpretive appropriation, cannot be corrupted, for whatever seeks to replace it ends up eluding it altogether. The ritual field is unalienable in itself but not immune to parasitic interference. When measures of appropriation constrain its non-closure, it has already disappeared from cognition and been replaced by the parasitic assessment of its condition.

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