Several postings today that get at Graham Harman’s theory of vicarious causation, that I just want to note here for future reference:

• Michael Austin’s explication of Harman’s theory
• Levi Bryant’s response
• Graham Harman’s own response

For what it’s worth, I think that I am more in accord with Levi’s position than with Graham’s. Levi says that “for me causation is not really a problem…I can understand the epistemological problem of causality, but I have a hard time understanding the metaphysical problem of causality. I more or less take causality as an ontological given.”

In my terms, causality becomes problematic when it is conceived in the mode of what Whitehead calls “presentational immediacy”; but it is not a problem in the sense of what Whitehead calls “causal efficacy,” rather in this latter case it happens all the time, and must be presupposed in order for our experience of the world to be possible in the first place (here I am again following Levi, by giving a Whiteheadian version of what Levi expounds as Bhaskar’s version of the transcendental argument).

Causality, for Whitehead, is just one version of relation, or of prehension, or of being-affected. Entities are always being affected by other entities (by prior entities, more strictly speaking). To say that A prehends B means alternatively either that A perceives B, or that A is caused/produced (in part) by B (i.e. that B is a partial cause of A) — and I think there are other ways to describe this as well, or other possibilities, since relations are not uniform but come in many modes. At the same time, of course, A never perceives all there is of B, but only partially; and B does not altogether determine A, but only partially. An entity is always to some extent self-determining, so that it cannot be reduced to the sum of its influences, or the sum of its causes, or the sum of what affects it. [This is my way of according with Harman’s requirement — which I entirely accept — that no object can ever grasp another object in its entirety; i.e. that the engagement of any object with any other can ever be all-encompassing or totalizing; while at the same time seeing objects as continually jostling up against and touching and interacting with other objects, in opposition to Harman’s vision of objects as vacuum-sealed from one another).

This means that for me — or as I understand Whitehead — Harman’s vicariousness need not be a problem. What it is, instead, is one particular (and especially powerful) mode of aesthetic apprehension (I am not sure what phrase is the best here: I was tempted to write either “aesthetic relation” or “relational aesthetics”, but neither of those seems precisely right). Vicarious causation makes sense to me, not as a basic metaphysical problem, but in terms of the aesthetics of allure (which Harman discusses at greatest length in Part II of Guerrilla Metaphysics).

PS: Harman further comments on Bryant on causality here. I agree with both Harman and Bryant that contact, or prehension, or perception, or causality — in short any form of being-affected — involves “translation.” But I don’t accept Harman’s further claim that therefore causality must be “vicarious.” It seems to me that saying that all prehension is partial, and that further it involves a “subjective aim” or decision on the part of the prehending entity, is enough to account for translation; and is also enough to avoid the threat of an infinite regress of mediators (which is what Harman sees as the problem in Latour’s account of translation).