Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

The Mystery of the Cinder Block

And so to business. There’s no way to break the object-oriented ontological news gently, so we must perforce commence with a rough and ready version. The proposition that begins the next paragraph says something that is given to me in experience. For this reason alone I find it hard to trust, because as an avid reader of poetry, I am liable to mistrust statements of all kinds. Yet as you read this book you will see that the following statement could not have been otherwise, nor could there have been another way to begin. Only insofar as you make it through the book, will you discover the remarkable, strange, totally non-given quality of the proposition.

There are objects: cinnamon, microwaves, interstellar particles and scarecrows. There is nothing underneath objects. Or, better, there is not even nothing underneath them. There is no such thing as space independent of objects (happily contemporary physics agrees). What is called Universe is a large object that contains objects such as black holes and racing pigeons. Likewise there is no such thing as an environment: wherever we look for it, we find all kinds of objects—biomes, ecosystems, hedges, gutters and human flesh. In a similar sense, there is no such thing as Nature. I’ve seen penguins, plutonium, pollution and pollen. But I’ve never seen Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality).

Likewise, there is no such thing as matter. I’ve seen plenty of entities (this book shall call them objects): photographs of diffusion cloud chamber scatterings, drawings of wave packets, iron filings spreading out around a magnet. But I’ve never seen matter. So when Mr. Spock claims to have found “Matter without form,” he is sadly mistaken, as is Henry Laycock, who asserts the same thing. [3] You can now buy a backpack that is made of recycled plastic bottles. But an object doesn’t consist of some gooey substrate of becoming that shifts like Proteus from plastic bottle to backpack. First there is the plastic bottle, then the production of the bag ends the bottle, its being is now only an appearance, a memory of the backpack, a thought: “This bag is made of plastic bottles.”

This is a book about realism without matter. Matter, in current physics, is simply a state of information. Precisely: information is necessarily information-for (for some addressee). Matter requires at least one other entity in order to be itself. Matter is “materials-for”:

Nature likewise is “discovered in the use of useful things.” [5] I take use here to apply not only to humans, but also to bees with their flowers and hives, chimpanzees with their digging sticks, slime molds with their wet pavements. This is not an argument about how humans impose meaning on mute things. It’s an argument about the fact that what humans call matter and Nature are ontologically secondary to something else. A sort of backward glance confers the material status of matter and the natural status of Nature: the backward glance not of a cognizing being, necessarily, but of a task accomplished. The key turns in the lock: “Oh, that’s what the key was for.” There must, then, be something “behind” or “beyond” matter—and object-oriented ontology (OOO) gives us a term for this: simply, what is behind matter is an object.

Instead of using matter as my basic substrate, I shall paint a picture of the Universe that is realist but not materialist. In my view, real objects exist inside other real objects. “Space” and “environment” are ways in which objects sensually relate to the other objects in their vicinity, including the larger objects in which they find themselves. Sometimes humans have called some of these sensual relationships Nature. Then we run into all kinds of difficulties and frankly ideological confusions. A snail is Nature, perhaps—but a cooked snail isn’t? Or a cartoon of a snail? Or an irradiated snail?

There is no space or environment as such, only objects. Moreover, in the succession of these objects, there is also no top object: no entity that lords it over the rest, whose reality is superior to or more powerful than theirs, one ontotheological object to rule them all. Although this may seem startling, the reason why is quite straightforward. If there is no space separate from objects, then a top object would imply either: (1) this object is unlike every other object and really is “space” for all the rest; or (2) this object floats or sits inside some kind of “space”—which on this view would simply be the inside of another object. When physicists try to think about the Universe as an entity in its own right, they soon run into the edges of this problem. Thus some physicists have suggested a bubble multiverse in which our one is simply one of many—which strictly pushes the problem back a stage further: where does this foam come from and in what is it sitting? God’s hot tub, perhaps. OOO is more comfortable with the implication of this assertion—a potentially infinite regress—than it is with ontotheological top objects.

For much the same reason, it’s evident that there is no bottom object, either, no smallest entity that subtends all the others, somehow more real than them. An object withdraws from access. This means that its own parts can’t access it. Since an object’s parts can’t fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can’t be reduced to its “whole” either. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. [6] A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn’t embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can’t find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can’t be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can they be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences.

The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining. Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with a particle accelerator, or with the ravages of time or heat—will not get at the encrypted essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism. This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can’t grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. Feminism, anti-racism and queer theory are justified in assaulting this kind of essence by any means necessary.

In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining. [7] The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. On this view, only when I measure a photon, only when I see a coral reef, does it become what it is, in a kind of “upward reduction.” But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception (aisthēsis), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything. [8]

So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That’s quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz’s monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne). [9]

The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We shall discover that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things.

There are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Again, since objects can’t be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object. There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we wish about them, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson’s theory of consilience. [10] Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object. Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. OOO wants to return at least to one of Aristotle’s four causes (the formal), but it might be keen to drop two others (final causes, telos). If there’s no top or bottom object there just is no final cause. If one has modified telos to be “goal-like” rather than “actually final” one has lost what is special about final causes. “Goal-like” behavior is only “goal-like” for some other entity, not a deep property of things. Suppose there were a god. In an OOO universe even this god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) matters little for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. God is irrelevant. She or he just as well might or might not exist. There is no problem either way. With some Buddhists, one could call this position non-theism to distinguish it from theism, but also from atheism, which still has some skin in the theism game.

Why? Reductionism and eliminative materialism are locked in eternal combat with their theistic shadow. Mechanism distributes the “hot potato” of telos throughout reality, endlessly passing it from one entity to another, shuffling it under the carpet of as many entities as possible like hash browns on a plate of eggs. [11] A mechanism is always a mechanism-for. A spoon is a machine for holding a piece of boiled egg. Holding is a mechanism of the hands for grasping things like spoons. The hands are machines for holding, writing and countless other tasks. They are made of bones, which are machines for … Thus intelligent design theology is the permanent shadow of mechanistic biology. The only difference is that intelligent design is explicit about teleology: there is a designer. Mechanistic biology, by contrast, is duty bound not to be honest about its teleological impulse.

Scientism is a symptom of a certain anxiety that is released in modernity. The anxiety that thinks a telos or a top or bottom object is a resistance to that great discovery of modernity, fueled by democracy, philosophy and by the emergence of consumer capitalism: nothingness. There is no top being in a democracy, no king or emperor—there is an uneasy, ideal equality between you and me. In modern philosophy, there are no metaphysical givens. And in capitalism, I have a supposedly free choice between these two different types of shampoo, and my factory might as well make shampoo bottles or nuclear bomb triggers.

Since Kant, modern philosophy has been preoccupied with where to put the nothingness that seems to ooze out everywhere. Kant puts the nothingness in the gap that opens up between the real and the (human) known. For Hegel, nothingness is an inert blankness that must be overcome—OOO considers this move to be a regression from Kant and not helpful. For the object-oriented ontologist, nothingness is not a blank void or simply the gap between (human) knowing and what is real. It is what the theologian Paul Tillich calls a meontic rather than an oukontic nothing. [12] This meontic nothing is what Heidegger talks about, constantly.

Nothingness, rather than absolutely nothing: and this nothingness pervades things like myriad cracks in the shell of a boiled egg. Because a thing withdraws, it disturbs us with an excess over what we can know or say about it, or what anything can know or say about it—this excess is a nothingness, not absolutely nothing, but not something to which one can point. If we could point it out, it would be right there, and we would know it—but the withdrawal of a thing cannot be located anywhere on its surface or in its depth. I break a piece of chalk to find out what it is. Now I have two problems where previously I only had one. [13] Nihilism, which argues that the void is more real than anything that appears, is perhaps a way to cover up this more anxiety provoking nothingness with an absolute nothing: a defense against the key discovery of modernity. Nihilism wants to empty its pockets of everything, including the space in the pocket—as if one could pull the nothingness out of the pocket itself, to rid oneself of the inconsistency of the thing. “Believing in” nothing is a defense against nothingness, a metaphysics of presence disguised as a sophisticated undermining of all presence.

Yet the OOO universe is to be discovered “beneath” nihilism, as if the deep water in which modern thought swims turned out to be hiding a gigantic, sparkling coral reef of things. Nietzsche and Heidegger insist on the importance of overcoming nihilism thoroughly, by traversing it—but both were unable to detect the sparkling coral reef. OOO thinks at a depth that is by definition difficult for humans, to say the least. Much of what it can say must be said by analogy or by metaphor, just as Heidegger intuited that poetic language gave some hesitant glimpse of things. Gone since Kant are the metaphysical islands of fact lovingly worked and reworked by the scholastics. Below the shoals of phenomenological fish—thoughts, hopes, loving, hating, proposing—studied by Husserl in the wake of Kant and Hegel, glides the U-Boat of Heidegger, making its way through the dark waters of Angst-ridden nothingness. But Heidegger’s sonar only returns an anthropocentric beep from the universe of things. OOO is like a bathysphere that detaches from the Heideggerian U-Boat to plumb the depths at which the sparkling coral reef is found. At the end of the journey, this coral reef is found not to be under an ocean at all. The entire ocean, with all its darkness, its fish and its floating islands of metaphysical facts, is just a projection of one of the things in the coral reef—the human being. OOO is a Copernican turn within the supposed Copernican turn of Kant, who argued that reality was correlated to (human) acts of synthetic judgment a priori. The crack in the real that Kant discovered—I can count but I can’t explain directly what number is, for instance—is only a (human) mental crack among trillions, such as the crack between a polyp and the ocean floor, or between a polyp and itself.

Let us continue to explore the coordinates of the non-theistic universe of OOO. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object. That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature. There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together. [14] All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, perhaps even a certain scale of object larger than say 10^-17cm. [15] Objects don’t sit in a spatiotemporal box. It’s the other way around: space and time emanate from objects.

To reiterate, if there are no top, bottom, or middle objects, then it is possible that there is an infinite regress of objects within objects, and an infinite progress of objects surrounding objects. This possibility seems less objectionable to OOO than the notion that there is a top object or a bottom object. Thus we must very seriously revise our commonly held theories of time and space, bringing them at least up to date with relativity theory. The mereological properties of objects are startling. There are more parts than wholes, as Levi Bryant argues. [16] An object is like Doctor Who’s Tardis in the popular BBC television series: the time-and-space-traveling, shapeshifting craft of Doctor Who. The Tardis is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This startling intuition is just one way in which OOO escapes correlationism, reductionism and holism in one fell swoop. If you like, it means that a feature of the Kantian sublime—inner space is bigger than outer space—is extended to all entities. This means that an object can contain things that are not it—an example of the kind of set discovered by Georg Cantor, but ruled illegal by Russell and the logicians of brittle metalanguage. The Kantian sublime is an aesthetic way to detect the nothingness that Kant discovers, the “Unknown = X” that pervades (human) reality. [17] As I have just suggested, this is just one flavor of nothingness, one crack in a universe riddled with cracks.

To reiterate once again: there can be no “top object” that gives meaning and reality to the others, such as a certain kind of God. And there can be no “bottom object,” some kind of fundamental particle or ether from which everything else is derived. Likewise, there is no ether or medium or “middle object” in which other objects float. Such a medium has been given many terms and explanations over the years: periechon (“surround”), world, environment, Newtonian space and time, Nature, ether, ambience, circumambient fluid. [18] Even the pot of gold at the end of the Standard Model rainbow, the Higgs field, might be an example of an ontotheological “middle object” that gives meaning to other subatomic particles, like a symptom that supplements a set of behaviors, thus undermining their coherence and giving away their inherent absurdity. [19]

How does this happen? OOO finds an explanation in objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal explanation would rely on just one single object—a rather cheeky fact, in a world where interconnectedness is the standard issue of the day in so many areas of life. There are very good reasons for this brazen cheek. If we can’t explain reality from just one single thing, we are stuck with a scenario in which objects require other entities to function, and this would lead to some kind of undermining or overmining, which OOO rules out. We shall see that we do indeed have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality.

What are these objects, then, that claustrophobically fill every nook and cranny of reality, that are reality, like the leering faces in an Expressionist painting, crammed into the picture plane? On what basis can we decide that there is no top, middle, or bottom object, that objects are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, that they generate time and space, and so on? It’s time to proceed to a concrete example. Come to think of it, let’s use something made of concrete.

Think of a cinder block—the more gray and mundane the better. (In English English, this is a breeze block; in Australian English a besser block.) A butterfly alights on the block. She has a butterfly’s eye view of it as her wings brush its stubbly exterior. I feel along the sharp sandy surface of the cinder block. My hands encounter hand-style impressions of the block, testing their slightly careworn softness against the rough texture. An architect makes an exploded view of a cross section of the block. But a cross section of a cinder block is not a cinder block. A finger’s impression of a cinder block is not a cinder block. A butterfly’s touch on a cinder block is not a cinder block.

Now imagine that the cinder block for some reason has a mind and some rudimentary sense organs, perhaps a nose and a mouth and a crude pair of googly eyes like the talking vegetables on The Muppet Show. The block extrudes its tongue and gets a lick of its cool, rough, grainy hardness. Does it know the cinder block as such? It has the taste of itself in its mouth. But the taste of a cinder block is not a cinder block. Imagine the cinder block develops telepathic powers. In a single instant it knows its blockness in its entirety. But knowing a cinder block in a single instant of telepathic communion is not—wait for it—a cinder block!

Perhaps the problem is that I need to see the block as a process, not as some static lump. These days processes do generally seem more charming to more people than seemingly rigid blocks. Perhaps I will get further if I include the way the block was formed from Portland cement and sand in a cast, and the ways the block will be used in building, and the socioeconomic conditions that produced the block. But if I see it this way, I am left with the exact same problem. All I have done is swap the term process for the term object. Now the process, however I see it, has the same problems as the original block. How can I comprehend this process itself, without translating it into some other form—a discussion, a book, a painting, a series of measurements? Changing the term object for the term process is only a matter of aesthetic nicety. We are still stuck with the problem of fully grasping a unit: the cinder block as such, the process as such. [20] If we imagine that objects are inherently self-consistent—being “static” is an aesthetic defect, too, according to modern taste, though that is very much moot—then we may perforce feel the need to supplement our view with some kind of process philosophy that is able to think change and motion (Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze). We have thus performed an ontotheological trick. We have arbitrarily decided that some things (processes, flows) are more real than other things (objects). In Chapter 3 I shall revisit the notion of process in considerably more depth. For now we shall have to leave it at that.

Perhaps the problem is that we are three-dimensional beings trying to understand objects that exist in a temporal dimension as well as the three spatial ones. [21] Perhaps if I add another dimension to my description I will “see” the real cinder block. Let’s give it a whirl. The approach solves quite a few problems. For instance, I can see that the block has distinct temporal parts that compose is, just as it has spatial ones. This seriously dilutes the problem of the block’s persistence: the problem of whether I’m seeing “the same” block as I saw a few minutes ago, or last year. Now the block-last-year is a temporal part of an object that also has the temporal part of the block-a-few-minutes-ago. If I could really see in four dimensions, I suppose that I would see the block as a tube-like structure that consisted of all kinds of fronds and tentacles that depicted how it was made and how it was used. I would see the concrete being poured into the cast at one end of the tube, and the block disintegrating into dust at the other end.

We are, however, left with some significant problems concerning persistence. What demarcates the temporal boundary of the block—its beginning and end? What constitutes the boundary between one temporal segment and another one? Let’s imagine that this view is wildly successful: what would the Universe look like if so? The entire Universe is now a single lump of something or other, distributed like some crazy trillion-tentacled octopus throughout spacetime. The block would be one region of this tentacled mass, but in the absence of a successful way to distinguish between the block and the non-block, we are left with a vast sprawl of Cartesian extension. We can see the past and the future and the present as a single sequence—at the cost of losing the specificity of the block altogether. On an extreme version of this view, there are no cinder blocks or mountains or trees or people, because those objects are too inconsistent for the view to handle. [22]

But that’s not the really big problem. The real trouble is, none of the temporal block-segments would be the block! The block from last week to next week is just a segment of a world-tubular block. [23] The very attempt to introduce consistency has spawned a nightmare. The more we study the block as a “hunk” of four-dimensional matter, the less we can see it as a block. We are no longer dealing with a block, but what in relativity theory is called a world tube that is a mere tendril of a Universal extension lump, segmented into various parts. [24] It doesn’t seem as if this way is a great method for getting to know the block either. So if there are any four-dimensional beings out there, I’m afraid their chances of knowing the full block are slim to none, just like the rest of us.

Perhaps Maurice Merleau-Ponty was correct. [25] Perhaps if I can somehow see every single possible angle, every single possible configuration of the block, I can know the block as block. Maybe the ultimate exploded view diagram of the cinder block is available. Imagine that some godlike version of Richard Scarry has written a gigantic children’s book called What Do Cinder Blocks Do All Day? This marvelous book contains diagrams of every aspect of the block. As fun to read as this may or may not be, it’s not the cinder block.

So perhaps we need to get a little tough with our poor block. If somehow I were able to assess every particle of the block, every hole in the block; if I were able to evaporate it and then bring it back to its original state, or drench it with water, shoot it into the Sun, boil it in marmalade—if I were able to do everything imaginable to it, wouldn’t I know it for what it was? Imagine a wondrous machine, created by an insane genius, a machine that allows me to see every possible aspect of the cinder block, not simply as illustrations or diagrams, but as actual configurations of the block itself. I use the machine. The machine does everything to the block.

As I sit there, grinning happily while the machine does its thing, a thought starts to nag at me. In using the machine, I have automatically excluded the one single accidental encounter that the janitor has with it when, cleaning away the cigarette butts and plastic cups after the party to celebrate the machine’s successful functioning, he carelessly stubs his left big toe against one corner of the cinder block and shuffles away, not paying much heed to the ontological cataclysm that has just occurred. Having every single possible encounter with the cinder block rules out only having had one encounter with it. “All” experiences of the block are reduced to “not-all.” [26] Why? Because neither the machine’s billions of encounters, nor the janitor’s unique toe-stubbing incident, are the block! The reason: because there is a real block. There is no view from nowhere from which I can see the entire block, no sub specie aeternitatis. [27]

In this sense, even God (should she exist) has a partial view of the cinder block. I once had a friend who said he wanted to do everything. I seem to remember “killing a man” was somewhat high on his rather late adolescent list. Even if you could do everything, I replied, wouldn’t that rule out only doing some things? If you could do everything, you would never have the experience of not having done something. Should she exist, an omniscient omnipresent God would envy the most meager and partial knowledge of a few routes around a dull suburban neighborhood. [28]

The three approaches I outlined have some significant family resemblances. The main one is the attempt to iron out inconsistencies in our picture of objects. Throughout this book I shall argue that all attempts to iron out inconsistencies are destined to fail in some way or other. I shall offer an explanation for this—objects themselves just are inconsistent. For now, let’s continue to do some ironing and see what happens.

Maybe I took the wrong approach. Maybe I was too brutal. Perhaps I have been a Baconian sadist, destroying Nature in order to know it. Maybe if I just sit here and wait patiently, I will see the real block. I wait. I become impatient. I develop all kinds of contemplative practices to stay there looking at the block. I become enlightened. The block still refuses to spill the beans. I train a disciple to take over from me when I die. She sees nothing of the real block, which now has a large crack across the top, inside of which you can see right through it. She starts a religious order that carefully transmits my instructions about how to monitor the block. For tens of thousands of years, cultures, peoples, robots study the block, which is now looking pretty gnarly. A hundred thousand years later, a fully enlightened robot sits monitoring the faint traces of dust hanging in the air where the block used to sit. Still no dice. Even Buddha doesn’t know the block in the sense of “know” as “grasp as a definite concept whose reality can be checked against a definite, given thing.” When it comes to knowing about cinder blocks, Buddha is just as badly off as God.

Let’s give up. Imagine the cinder block all on its ownsome. A scandalous thought perhaps, maybe even impossible to think. The block is not just a blank lump waiting to be filled in by some “higher” object (overmining). The block is not a blob of something bigger or an assemblage of tinier things (undermining). The block is not made real by some medium (the “middle object”). The block is itself. It is specific. It is unique. We might as well think it as a specific, unique real thing. The block already has qualities, such as front, back, and so on. Yet these qualities are only ever aesthetic appearances, no matter whether there is any other “observer” around to see. Yet these appearances are real aspects of the block: it isn’t a pyramid, and it doesn’t have a swan’s neck. The object itself is riven from the inside between its essence and its appearance. This can’t simply mean that the cinder block is a lump of substance that has a certain shape and color and that those are its accidents. We have already ruled that out. It must mean that in itself the block (essence) is also a non-block (appearance).

The conclusion seems magical, but it’s a very ordinary kind of magic. It requires no special features, no supervenient soul or mind or animating force of any kind. It requires that our cinder block have no hidden material squirreled away inside it, no extra folds or hidden pockets of any kind. It only requires that the block exist. There is a block, whose essence is withdrawn. Withdrawn doesn’t mean hard to find or even impossible to find yet still capable of being visualized or mapped or plotted. Withdrawn doesn’t mean spatially, or materially or temporally hidden yet capable of being found, if only in theory. Withdrawn means beyond any kind of access, any kind of perception or map or plot or test or extrapolation. You could explode a thousand nuclear bombs and you would not reveal the secret essence of the cinder block. You could plot the position and momentum of every single particle in the block (assuming you could get around Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) and you wouldn’t discover the withdrawn essence of the block. Ten of the world’s greatest playwrights and film directors (let’s say Sophocles, Shakespeare, Garcia Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Akira Kurosawa and David Lynch just for starters) could write horrifying, profound tragedies and comedies and action movies about the block and still no one would be closer to knowing the essence of the block. The block itself could evolve a godlike intelligence in which it had omniscient knowledge of itself. The slightest rat dropping, falling from a rafter above the block in the warehouse where I keep it to remind me of the obdurate persistence of things, comprehends the block in an absurdly limited way that rules out the possibility that the omniscient block knows everything about itself.

This blasted cinder block is beginning to get on my nerves so perhaps we had better change the subject. But before we leave it there in the warehouse, let’s just reflect on what an elementary yet wonderful discovery we’ve just made. We live in an infinite non-totalizable reality of unique objects, a reality that is infinitely rich and playful, enchanting, anarchic despite local pockets of hierarchy, infuriating, rippling with illusion and strangeness. In this reality, objects are perfectly straightforward, with no transcendental or hidden aspects. Yet precisely because of this very fact, objects are completely weird: they hide out in the open, under the spotlight. Their very appearance is a kind of miracle.

We could go so far as to suggest the possibility of what Bryant calls a dark object, an object that has no relations with any other entity whatsoever. These objects are strictly unthinkable, because if we try, we have already forged some kind of relationship with them. Our theory must allow for the existence of unthinkable objects. But even to talk about this is to involve oneself in a play of contradiction. It’s like looking at a red theater curtain, swaying gently, illuminated by spotlights. Is there anything behind it?

Since there is no top object from whose VIP lounge we could survey everything perfectly and properly, no object is properly what it is—not even for itself. [29] The OOO universe is a universe of impropriety, of the improper. Yet we know this because in another sense objects only are what they are, nothing more or less, since there is no bottom object to which we could reduce them. Objects are sternly irreducible, yet marvelously improper at one and the same time. Since no object is exempt from the uncanniness we have just discovered in the cinder block, no object is the Philosopher’s Stone that will transmute everything into perfect, obvious, well ordered straightforwardness.

This is a Shredded Wheat world (“Nothing added, nothing taken away” was how it was advertised in the 1970s). But a humble bowl of this sort of Shredded Wheat makes the most coruscating psychedelic lightshow look pale and boring. This is a reality in which the realness of things is in direct proportion to their weird pretense, the way in which things wear perfect replicas of themselves, so that everything is a masquerade, yet absolutely, stunningly real—and for the very same reason. If this isn’t enough of a miracle, wait until you have considered how causation works in this reality. This is the main topic that this book explores.