Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Objects and Non-Objects: p ∧ ¬p

The demonic aesthetic and the demonic causal are just a whisper apart from one another in thinking. Descartes worries precisely about action at a distance: perhaps he is being controlled by demons. [13] His refusal to accept this possibility leads to the cogito. Descartes mistrusts the sense of being deceived, using the Law of Noncontradiction to eliminate it. Many philosophers reproduce the bright line Descartes draws here, including speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux, who separates reason from belief with a laser-like certainty. [14] This separation has to do with real things that are not just thoughts in the (human) mind. Meillassoux argues that the stability of the universe makes it appear (but only appear) as if it could not have arisen by chance.

Yet physics argues that the appearance of stability is a function of randomness. Random patterns are the ones that seem regular. Clumping is a feature of true randomness. Meillassoux seems to take the idea that randomness equals instability, just like those he is refuting. He decides to eject the idea of randomness, because it implies some order, some law—he is trying to prove that there is no reason why things happen. This is only the case with mechanistic systems, such as dice (Meillassoux’s example) and billiard balls (Hume). Quantum entanglement is truly random. What does this mean? It means for instance that in certain highly repeatable conditions the likelihood of a photon being polarized in a certain direction is totally uncertain before a “measurement” takes place. This is why quantum phenomena are incredibly good at generating random numbers.

“Totally uncertain” means that no matter how much information you have, you won’t be able to predict the state of the photon. This is patently not the case with dice and billiard balls. Totally uncertain means uncertain in itself, rather than when we measure. One explanation for this total uncertainty is that a photon is in two or three different orientations simultaneously. This violates what Meillassoux takes to be the fundamental law (the one law he chooses not to violate), the Law of Noncontradiction. What does this violation mean? It means that you sure can apply “probabilistic reasoning” to the universe, and that far from being “meaningless” (Meillassoux), this is how incredibly basic things seem to operate. [15]

What would it mean not to eliminate the demonic dimension from causality? I do not encounter patterns and relations that are resolved in my mind into paintings, mud and glasses. These things encounter me directly, as themselves. But more precisely, every entity throws shadows of itself into the interobjective space, the sensual space that consists of relations between objects, carving out its own version of Plato’s cave. It is like the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that provides one of this book’s epigraphs:

This myself has an uncanny dimension. Like the person who assures you they are being sincere, can we ever really believe that objects don’t play tricks with us? Again: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not.” [17] Duns Scotus speaks of the haecceity of a thing, its thisness, and Hopkins translates this into verse. [18] Yet the thisness is not imposed from without, objectively. It wells up from within. Hopkins himself says so explicitly: What I do is me. Quite so: it is a case of I versus me. In this difference between a reflexive and a nonreflexive personal pronoun, we detect archaeological evidence of the Rift (Greek, chōrismos) between a thing and its appearance. That concept, the Rift (I shall now begin to capitalize it), is highly significant in this book.

What Hopkins gives us then is not a brightly colored diorama of animated plastic, but a weird stage set from which things stage their unique version of the Cretan Liar Paradox: “This sentence is false.” To speak otherwise is to have decided in advance what things are, which contradicts the way the poem itself forces us to experience things. “Tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones” are felt and heard before we hear what they have to say for themselves against the walls of the well and in the deep water within: the first line is an invisibly hyphenated adjective, tumbled-over-rim-in-roundy-wells. The adjective takes almost as long to read as it might take for an average stone to hit the water. The adjective draws out the stone, just as the dragonflies “draw flame.” The stone becomes its tumbling, its falling-into-the-well, the moment at which it is thrown over the rim. Then splash—it’s a stone alright, but we already sensed it as a non-stone.

All the things by which we specify the object are not the object. By we I mean humans, lavatory brushes, quasars and durum wheat, and the object in question itself. We have a very strange situation then, in which there are objects, and there are qualities and relations between these objects and other objects. There is a chōrismos, an irreducible gap. Qualities and relations are much the same thing, since they are born in interactions between the object and 1+n other things. A cinder block is hard and cold to a fly, it’s stubbly to my finger, it’s fragile to a well-placed karate chop. It’s invisible to a neutrino. Think about a zero-degree dark object, some object that may or may not be behind a red curtain. It strictly has no qualities for us, yet this very lack of relationship is itself a kind of relationship, as if the dark object radiated some kind of energy that passed through us.

The qualities of the object are not the object. Objects then are both themselves and not-themselves. In defiance of the Law of Noncontradiction—a law that has never been properly proved—objects present us with the following paradox: objects are both objects and non-objects. All objects are open secrets, like the Liar: This sentence is false. Or like Russell’s set paradox: the set of things that are not members of themselves.

We are now in a region of thinking traversed by logicians such as Graham Priest, who work on things that can be self-contradictory, in violation of the supposedly universal Law of Noncontradiction (LNC). The Liar, the Russell set paradox, and Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem all point to the possibility that this law does not always hold. For instance, Gödel establishes that for every logically coherent system, there must be at least one theorem that the system cannot prove, in order for that system to be true on its own terms: something like “This sentence cannot be proved.”

Such entities seem to stretch the limits of thought, limits that some philosophers want to keep brittle and rigid—or else they insist that some things in reality just aren’t logical at all. Let us suppose that we can voyage beyond these limits without departing from logic. What kind of logic would we need? Priest and Jay Garfield imagine that “Contradictions at the limits of thought have a general and bipartite structure”:

The first paragraph describes well the phenomena catalogued by OOO: things withdraw, which means that they limit what one can think about them. Things also contain other things that are not strictly them—just as a zebra is not reducible to its atoms, from an OOO point of view, and yet a zebra is composed of just these particular atoms. Objects are thus inclosures in Priest’s and Garfield’s terms. They are “closed”—a zebra is not a giraffe—and yet not closed—they contain things that are not themselves. When we study beings, we find at least one thing in them—this is Priest’s and Garfield’s delta—that are “both in and not in” them. To be a thing, on this view, is to be riddled with contradiction.

Consider the well-known Sorites paradox: what constitutes a heap? One grain of sand doesn’t constitute a heap; neither do two; nor do three; and so on. If we go on like this, we have ten thousand grains of sand that do not constitute a heap. Or consider a bald man’s head. Adding one hair means that he is still bald; two hairs, ditto; three, ditto. We discover there’s no magic number in which bald flips into hairy.

These paradoxes occur in the real world. Consider being in a doorway: are you inside or outside the room? Consider the status of a poem’s title: is it the beginning of the poem or outside of it? Consider a frame: is it where the picture stops, or still part of the picture? Consider a first person narrative. Is the narrator who is telling the story identical with the narrator about whom the story is being told? In many cases, authors or stories play with the irreducible gap between these two I’s. Every object says “myself.” But in saying “myself” the object is also saying “I am at this very moment lying,” “This sentence is false.”

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is based on paradoxes that involve dialetheias—contradictions, “double truths.” You just can’t specify when one species ends and another begins, just as you can’t specify the first little old lady who said the word “shizzle.” [20] In fact, so dire is the paradox of evolution that Darwin should have used some kind of wink emoticon, had one been available, and scare quotes: The “Origin” of “Species” ; ). The punchline of Darwin’s book is that there are no species and they have no origin. Yet every day we see skinks, kiwis and sheep, not to mention slime molds, viruses and mushrooms, uniquely themselves. These lifeforms are made of other lifeforms, which in turn are made of non-living entities, all the way down to the DNA level and beyond. Yet they are unique and specifiable as this actual slime mold, this little patch of bright yellow looking like a spot of dog’s vomit at the end of my cul-de-sac. [21] A slime mold is a non-slime mold, or as one philosopher puts it, a rabbit is a non-rabbit. I take this to mean not that no rabbit exists, but that there is a real rabbit whose essence is withdrawn. [22]

Objects are non-objects. I do not mean a non-object in the sense that for François Laruelle there is an unspeakable, radical immanence that no philosophy can speak—nay, that philosophy must actively exclude in order to exist, hence his invention of “non-philosophy” to account for this radical immanence. [23] An object is a non-object not because it is “really” something else, a void or some featureless lump or a moment in my reflective process—but because an object isn’t something else. The “selfness,” the Duns Scotus-like haecceity, of a thing baffles everything around it with its radiant, barbed identity. Blake wrote about seeing infinity in a grain of sand. [24] He was technically correct: this is a very OOO insight. And he precisely means not that some abstraction underlies a grain of sand, but, as he puts it, this “minute particular” is irreducible to anything else at all. Reality, on the OOO view, is a dense thorn bush spiked with diamond tipped thorns that dig into my flesh from every angle—that are my flesh. To find oneself in an OOO universe is to allow the thorns to sting you, a little more each day.

But wait, there’s more. There are objects and non-objects. In other words, there is an object and there are all the things that are not that object; some of those things are the relations the object is caught in with other objects; some of those things are straightforwardly other objects. Mathematical objects, for instance, on this view, are unreal objects that have to do with the qualities and relations of real objects. “Two” does not exist outside the countability of some objects as two. Two means countably two—two is computable two, not some Platonic two floating in some beyond. We can describe two by describing what some objects, for instance a counting machine, do when they encounter objects that are countably two.

If objects are irreducibly secret, causality must reside somewhere in the realm of relations between objects, along with things like number, qualities, time, space and so on. This is congruent with the last century of physics. For Einstein, space and time are also emergent properties of objects: objects don’t float in a neutral void but emanate waves and ripples of spacetime. Clocks run faster in orbit above Earth than they do on Earth’s surface. This congruency is a good sign that an object-oriented theory of causality is on the right track. But it’s not strictly necessary: if anything the necessity goes the other way around. In other words, quantum theory and relativity are valid physical theories to the extent that they are object-oriented.

Causality floats in front of objects, figuratively speaking. It doesn’t lie underneath them like some grey machinery. Another way of saying this is that causality must belong to the aesthetic dimension. To study the aesthetic dimension, then, is to study causality. Art students and literary critics have a reason for celebrating. Not because reality is a construct, but amazingly, because it isn’t. Precisely because reality is real—that is, encrypted against access by any object, including a probing human mind—the aesthetic dimension is incredibly important.

Objects withdraw, yet they appear: p ∧ ¬p (p and not-p). And objects can contain beings that are not themselves, thus exemplifying Russell’s paradoxical (and for him, illegal) set of things that are not members of themselves. Now to some people, this means that objects can be anything, since anything can result from a contradiction (ex contradictione quodlibet, ECQ). There are good reasons for supposing that ECQ doesn’t hold just because LNC doesn’t hold. [25] The fact that contradictions can be true doesn’t necessarily imply that just anything can be true (triviliasm). The fact that baldness is vague doesn’t imply that being bald could manifest as sprouting azaleas from the top of your head.

Any attempt to reduce the dialetheic properties of objects—they are both themselves and not-themselves at one and the same time—is doomed. Such attempts to smooth out the terrain of things are rife in metaphysics: objects are made of atoms; or they are substances decorated with accidents; or they are components of a machine; or they are instantiations of a process; and so on. The very attempt to introduce consistency creates more drastic inconsistencies, as if objects were viral, sneakily upgrading themselves in the face of the attempt to make them behave. If we started with p ∧ ¬p we wouldn’t need to specify some originary entity outside the universe, some kind of prime mover or causeless cause (God) that makes it all work. There is enough dynamism in p ∧ ¬p already for things to start working all by themselves. If you really want to be an atheist, you might have to consider dropping mechanism and relationism in favor of the object-oriented view.

Meillassoux rules violations of LNC out of court totally. Then he lets them back in a little bit, via a consideration of paraconsistent logics—that is, logical systems that employ seeming paradoxes but in a relatively constrained way. Meillassoux constrains their constraint even further by policing paraconsistency—he holds that they have only to do with databases and other software entities. [26] Meillassoux is afraid that if LNC is breached, philosophy opens the door to belief and restrains thinking. The fundamental difference is that I hold that contradictory beings exist—that this is what existence is in some deep sense. In other words, violations of LNC such as the Liar paradox (“This statement is false”) exist as archaeological evidence of something in the ontological realms. The fact that consistent systems are also incomplete (Gödel) is also compelling, despite what Meillassoux says about logical systems and inconsistency. There are plenty of paraconsistent theories that pertain not to software but, for instance, to the way hydrogen atoms behave, and the way waves propagate.

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

An ontological insight is engraved onto the passenger side wing mirrors of every American car: Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear. What we take to be the object “behind” its appearance is really a kind of perspective trick caused by a habitual normalization of the object in question. It is my habitual causal relationship with it that makes it seem to sink into the background. This background is nothing other than an aesthetic effect—it’s produced by the interaction of 1+n objects. The aesthetic dimension implies the existence of at least one withdrawn object. To put it another way, in order for anything to happen, there has to be an object in the vicinity that has nothing to do with the happening in question. For instance: the pixels out of which these words are made as I type them on my Macbook don’t care what you are reading right now. That’s why you can read these words (or at least, it’s one reason why).

And now here is Professor Morton’s handy shoplifting advice. Always do it in front of the camera. Don’t try to hide what you’re doing. The only time I got caught (I know of what I speak) is when I tried to hide it. Why? If you do it in front of the camera, no one watching will be able to believe what she is seeing. Do it slowly, deliberately, right in front of security. The sense that causality must be happening “behind” objects is a phenomenological illusion. When one object (for instance me) transitions from a certain set of objects to another set, it briefly undergoes the uncanny realization that not-at-homeness is always the case, that sensual relations are never the real thing. What we call causality, say when a finger depresses a light switch, is an uncanny moment that happens in front of the encrypted objects, when a strange object perturbs a domain that has achieved a necessarily, structurally false ontic familiarity. The thorn tips of reality are hiding in plain sight, right in front of the camera.

Causality is already happening: the light switch rests on the wall, the wall supports the switch, electrons are flowing in the wire, the wall is part of a house. All these are causal statements from this point of view. What we call causality is just an uncanny disruption of a metastable system of entities that only appears to be real because it lasts longer than the moment of the “cause.” Mechanistic and other forms of “behind the scenes” theories of causality must therefore be seen as a desperate attempt to normalize this uncanny state of affairs.

The weird clownlike demons that float in front of objects are up to all kinds of tricks. Think about radiation. A unit of radiation is some kind of quantum, such as a gamma ray. It’s very hard to see a gamma ray in itself. You have to cause it to be deflected in some way, or to mark some inscribable surface such as a photographic plate. So you can see gamma rays when they illuminate a body, like in an X-ray photo. Gamma rays tune to us, gamma ray-pomorphizing us into a gamma ray-centric parody of ourselves. Radioactive materials are wonderful for thinking about how causality is aesthetic. At the quantum level, to see something just is to hit it with a photon or an electron: hence to alter it in some way. Every seeing, every measurement, is also an adjustment, a parody, a translation, an interpretation. A tune and a tuning.

Now scale this up to think about nuclear radiation from plutonium, the entity that exists distributed over Earth for 24.1 thousand years. This entity is nothing but the sum of all the gamma, alpha and beta ray inscription events occurring throughout the 24.1 thousand year period. It is the living history of plutonium. The dust in Nevada. The dust of Bikini Atoll. Bikinis. All the glass-like substances created when nuclear bombs explode. The sound of the bomb radiating out into the atmosphere. The shock waves that produce seismic effects. The half-life of plutonium and uranium. That monstrous pool of melted uranium at Chernobyl, which you can only look at in a photograph unless you want to die quickly. Photons striking the uranium record it on a photographic plate or in the memory of a digital camera. Software samples this image at a certain rate, creating a jpeg that you are now seeing. The jpeg introduces gaps in the image because of its unique sampling rate and its lossy compression. Everywhere we look, aesthetic–causal events are occurring.

Time to start again, from scratch. Consider again Yukultji Napangati’s painting Untitled, 2011, which resides in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, highly commended for the 2011 Wynne Prize. At a distance it looks like a woven mat of reeds or slender stalks, yellowed, sun baked, resting on top of some darker, warmer depth. A generous, relaxed, precise, careful yet giving, caring lineation made of small blobby dots. The warmth reminds you of Klee. The lines remind you of Bridget Riley. As you come closer and begin to face the image it begins to play, to scintillate, to disturb the field of vision. It oscillates and ripples, more intense than Riley. This is a painting about, a map of, a writing about, a lineation of women traveling through the sandhills of Yunala in Western Australia, performing rituals and collecting bush foods as they went. The painting is a map of an event unfolding in a two-dimensional rendering of a higher dimensional phase space.

Then something begins. What? You begin to see the “interobjective” space in which your optic nerve is entangled with the objects in the painting. The painting begins to paint right in front of you, paint the space between your eyes and the canvas. Layers of perception co-created by the painting and the field of vision begin to detach themselves from the canvas in front of you, floating closer to you. This “floating closer” effect is associated with the phenomenology of uncanniness.

The painting gazes. Intersecting shards of patterns within patterns, patterns across patterns, patterns floating on top of patterns. A constant mutagenic dance between the levels of patterns. The painting is a device for opening this phenomenal display. It comes lurching towards you, hypnotizing you and owning you with its directives of sandhill, women, rituals, bush food, walking, singing, lines. You feel gripped by the throat with the passion of the imagery. All the hairs on your arms stand up and the painting has you in its electromagnetic field. The painting dreams. Causality begins.

What does this mean? I do not access Napangati’s painting across a space. The image is not a mute object waiting to have its meaning supplied by a subject, nor is it a blank screen; nor is it something objectively present “in” space. Rather the painting emits something like electromagnetic waves, in whose force field I find myself. The painting powerfully demonstrates what is already the case: space and time are emergent properties of objects. For Kant, “space is the pure form of sensible intuition”: what must be given in advance in order for objects to be intuited. [27] Relying on Newton, Kant thinks space as a box. But in this book, space is emitted by objects.

That this fact is common to relativity and to phenomenology should give us pause. Perhaps just as remarkable is the fact that relativity and phenomenology arose roughly synchronously towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Just as Einstein discovered that spacetime was the warped and rippling gravitational field of an object, so Husserl discovered that consciousness was not simply an empty limpid medium in which ideas float. Consciousness, as revealed by phenomenology, is also a dense, rippling entity in its own right, like the wavering water of Monet’s contemporary water lily paintings: the water that is the true subject of those paintings.

The aesthetic form of an object is where the causal properties of the object reside. Theories of physical causation frequently want to police aesthetic phenomena, reducing causality to the clunking or clicking of solid things. [28] It is not the case that a shadow is only an aesthetic entity, a flimsy ghost without effects. Plato saw shadows as dangerous precisely because they do have a causal influence. [29] When my shadow intersects with the light sensitive diode, the nightlight switches on. As stated above, when a quantum is measured, it means that another quantum has intersected with it, altering it, changing its position or momentum. [30] Aesthetics, perception, causality, are all almost synonyms.

When the light-sensitive diode detects my shadow, it perceives in every meaningful sense, if we only accept that objects exert an aesthetic influence on one another (aisthēnesthai, Greek “to perceive”). When I am caught in another’s gaze, I am already the object of causal influences. Causality does not take place “in” a space that has been established already. Instead, it radiates from objects. The gaze emanates from the force field of a Napangati painting. It gathers me into its disturbing, phantasmal unfolding of zigzagging lines and oscillating patches.

There is no such thing as a phenomenologically empty space. Space is teeming with waves, particles, magnetic seductions, erotic curvature and menacing grins. Even when they are isolated from all external influences, objects seem to breathe with a strange life. A tiny metal tuning fork thirty microns long rests in a vacuum. To the naked eyes of the observers outside, it is breathing: it seems to occupy two places at the same time. [31] There is already a Rift between an object and its aesthetic appearance, a Rift within the object itself. Causality is not something that happens between objects, like some coming out party or freely chosen bargain into which things enter. It pours constantly from a single object itself, from the chōrismos between its essence and its appearance. The chōrismos gives rise to “blue notes” that both do and do not “express” the object in question, just as a blue note is pitched exquisitely, infuriatingly, impossibly between harmony and dissonance. [32] Objects are blues singing femmes fatales in the seedy cocktail lounge of reality.

An object is therefore both itself and not-itself, at the very same time. (“What is the difference between a duck? One of its legs is both the same.”) If this were not the case, nothing could happen. The uncanniness of objects, even to themselves, is what makes them float, breathe, oscillate, threaten, seduce, rotate, cry, orgasm. Because objects are themselves and not-themselves, the logic that describes them must be paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic: that is, the logic must be able to accept that some contradictions are true. [33] Objects are dangerous, not only to themselves, but even to thinking, if it cleaves to rigid consistency. If thinking refuses to accept that objects can be dialetheic, it risks reproducing the dualisms of subject and object, substance and accidents, dualisms that are unable to explain the most basic ontological decision—the one that insists that things are objectively present, as they are. The thing becomes imprisoned in a philosophically constructed cage, a mechanism or in some kind of ideality that falsely resolves the dilemma by shunting everything into a (human) subject. Moreover, thinking itself becomes brittle. The more rigorous the metalanguage, the more susceptible it is to more and more virulent contradictions. [34] Thinking should learn from Antigone and bend, like a willow: “Seest thou, beside the wintry torrent’s course, how the trees that yield to it save every twig, while the stiff-necked perish root and branch?” [35]

Phenomenology, then, is an essential cognitive task of confronting the threat that things pose in their very being. Without it, thinking is unable to break through the traditional ways of philosophizing that Martin Heidegger calls “sclerotic.” [36] After phenomenology, we can only conclude that a great deal of philosophizing is not an abstract description or dispassionate accounting, but only an intellectual defense against the threatening intimacy of things. Moreover, since there is very little difference between what happens to a light sensitive diode and what happens to a human when they encounter a shadow, we can only conclude that there is a strange kind of nonhuman phenomenology, or, as Ian Bogost puts it, an alien phenomenology. [37]

The reader will find that the phenomenological approach requires a cycling, iterative style that examines things again and again, now with a little more detail here, then with a little more force there. It’s like turning a curiously shaped stone around in one’s hands. There are good reasons for this outside the general scope of phenomenology. For a start, thinking objects is one of the most difficult yet necessary things thinking can do—trying to come close to them is the point, rather than retreating to the grounds of the grounds of the possibility of the possibility of asserting anything at all, as Harman puts it in his first outline of OOO. [38] The difficulty lies in the nature of objects themselves and in the two-hundred-year—within a five-hundred-year—within a two-thousand-year—cycle in which thinking has been caught. Moreover, since the OOO view is new in the world, and since the theory of vicarious causation is its most counter-intuitive aspect—though, as I hope to establish, the theory is also one of its most satisfying aspects—the chapter that follows this introduction must reiterate in greater detail some of the themes that have already emerged, in order to lay a foundation for setting out the scope of book as a whole. I shall thus reserve a detailed outline of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 for the end of the first chapter, where it will make much better sense. Before we proceed to the alien phenomenology, Chapter 1 will revolve again around the reasons why the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension.