I think that this gets to the heart of my disagreement with my OOO friends.

Levi Bryant quotes Bruno Latour as follows:

…what should appear extraordinarily bizarre is, on the contrary, the invention of inanimate entities which would do nothing more than carry one step further the cause that makes them act to generate the n + 1 consequence which in turn are nothing but the causes of the n + 2 consequences. This conceit has the strange result of composing the world with long concatenations of causes and effects where (this is what is so odd) nothing is supposed to happen, except, probably at the beginning– but since there is no God in those staunchly secular versions, there is not even a beginning… The disappearance of agency in the so called “materialist world view” is a stunning invention especially since it is contradicted every step of the way by the old resistance of reality: every consequence adds slightly to the cause. Thus, it has to have some sort of agency. There is a supplement. A gap between the two. (10)

 Then Levi goes on to remark:

What is interesting in these remarks are Latour’s references to a gap or a supplement in interactions between objects. This characterization of objects as entities capable of producing effects in excess of whatever perturbs them stands in stark contrast to Latour’s relationismwhere actants just are their relations. Indeed, here Latour sounds like a subtractive object-oriented ontologist. Perhaps he’s beginning to come around and recognize that you can’t simultaneously get novelty in the universe and reduce objects to their relations.

 But here I think that Levi is wrong. It is not the case for Latour (or for Whitehead) that according to their relationism, “actants just are their relations.” It is rather the case that actants constitute themselves by how they respond to (or how they manage, or how they “translate”) their relations. The actants do not precede their relations, but neither are they reducible to their relations. So when Latour speaks of a gap or supplement in which there must be some sort of agency, he is not contradicting his relationism, but precisely expounding its consequences. Nothing exists except insofar as it has relations or defines itself in terms of its relations; but this has never meant, for Latour or for Whitehead, that anything is “nothing more than” its relations. 

I’m not sure about Latour, but Whitehead pretty much says (rightly, in my opinion) the opposite of Levi (and of Graham). If objects actually existed withdrawn into isolation, then there would be no way to account for them ever changing, and novelty would be impossible. It is only because of relational encounters that change and novelty are possible. The argument that if things are defined by their relations then they are predetermined and cannot change is only true of what Manuel Delanda calls “internal relations,” which are the kinds of relations one finds in Hegel. Change arises neither from internal relations nor from isolated objects, but only from what Delanda calls “external relations,” which are the sorts of relations James, Whitehead, and Deleuze, among others, are talking about. (See the opening chapter of Delanda’s A New Theory of Society, and my commentary on it here).

The trick about external relations is that things cannot exist except insofar as they arise out of their relations, and yet at the same time these things are not simply defined by their relations, because they are creative (Whitehead says) in their responses to these relations (or, in Latour’s terms, because they have a certain degree of agency in how they entertain, or respond to, these relations). The whole thing doesn’t work if you add, as Levi proposes, a subject-as-substance as fourth term to Whitehead’s triad of prehending subject, prehended datum, and “subjective form, which is how that subject prehends that datum.” It’s precisely the insistence that some substance has to be behind the subjective form, that the deed needs a doer that transcends it, that a noun is needed in order to ground a verb (an action) and an adverb (a how or manner of action), that I don’t accept from OOO.