Graham Harmon has helpfully outlined the problems with both what AN Whitehead called "substance ontology" and the lack of substances in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy and Saussarean Structuralism.  In most contemporary philosophy there are no essences or "natural kinds" as there once were in classical philosophy, but substances are hard to get rid of entirely, probably because the "natural stance" of our subjective experience categorizes the world, or divides it up into discreet objects, which seem to reflect "real" divisions of types of things. However, these "clear" borders between types are growing confused as the intrusions of the Lacanian "Real" cause the identities of things to fail. It is hard to ignore how traditional categories no longer work, as the particularly predominate example of gender shows. In the US a nostalgic longing for the return of easily identifiable types has played no small part in the return of authoritarian populism. The desire for the "Big Other" to tell us what we are is strong here, which is the desire for repression and control that is imagined as the return of the lost Eden of a once great America.

But this Eden in which "men were men and women and minorities knew there place," like all other fantasy, lost objects never really was. There has never been a time when the categories of the "Big Other" didn't encounter their failure in the Real. It is just that the repression of this failure has been more or less successful, and with the distance of time, it becomes easier to imagine through the lens of nostalgia that there was a halcyon time when the world knew what it was. But what about the a priori categories that Kant taught were necessary to have even our most basic perceptions? Do those internalizations of the natural laws also fail? Harmon shows that something is lost in what he calls the "overmining" of Structuralism and Process Philosophy, which is for him the withdrawal of the "thing-in-itself" from the relations of symbolic difference so essential for language users to make a world through the copulation of the signifiers and concepts of the Symbolic with percepts. The thing-in-itself also famously withdrew from the pre-conceptual, or intuitive, perceptions of Kant's phenomenal representation in the subjective intention, which he saw as the synthesis of the things that appear to us from the intuitive relations of the categories and the noumenal things-in-themselves. 

This "withdrawal" at the level of the natural laws had been the focus of much of Zizek's recent work on Quantum indeterminacy in which the causal categories of perception fail to determine the things-in-themselves. This failure at the level of the internalized natural laws is mostly due to the unavoidability of the most basic category of cause and effect and its basis in space-time for perception, which is sometimes described as the "observer effect." Quantum fields do not seem to be determined by causes in the same way that the macro level of reality is, which means that they do not seem to be in space-time in the same way either. How can observers totally dependent on causality to either perceive or conceive, know anything about a thing-in-itself that withdraws beyond the a priori categories of quantity, quality, mode, and relation? Let's get into it.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co