Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

The Play of Phenomena

Objects are forms of delivery, which means that objects are hypocrites—which in turn means that they are actors. The most comprehensive way to think causality is to think drama. Let us explore the difficult and surprising facts that this hypothesis brings up.

In the essay “Experience,” Emerson writes of the “evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch the hardest.” [99] Not only is this a description of how humans (fail to) know objects, but also it’s a rather elegant image for what happens between any objects whatsoever. In what now sounds like an OOO joke, Emerson says that this dynamic whereby our clutching objects causes them to slip from us is “the most unhandsome part of our condition.” There is a play on the notion of handiness (German, Zuhandenheit) that one can’t fail to miss if one is an object-oriented ontologist. In his tool-analysis, Heidegger draws a distinction between tools that are zuhanden (to-hand) and vorhanden (present-at-hand). Heidegger argues that when we just use a tool, it disappears into its functioning; it appears when some breakage (or our aesthetic framing of it) isolates it from its background. Harman develops this to apply not only to hammers and the like, and between humans (and the like) and hammers (and the like), but also between and within any and all entities. [100] Harman argues that in order to grasp the most consistent version of the tool analysis, we must accept that any event whatsoever—including the use of the hammer as a tool, the very example Heidegger excludes—is a translation of an object into a vorhanden parody of itself.

You are wandering around the Tate Britain art gallery in London with a friend. Both of you know something about art and you’ve studied art history and criticism. You come to the huge, extraordinary collection of Turner paintings. You stop in front of Rain, Steam and Speed, a painting of a train emerging from some mist. The train seems like a ghost, swathed in prismatic clouds of color. You have a conversation about the painting. Your friend says: “Turner celebrates ‘the Railway Age’ and the affirmation of progress embodied by the locomotive with an allegory developed from the Baroque, and in a style deriving from a study of Rembrandt.” But you disagree—you reply: “The painting is Turner’s protest against the machine despoliation of the environment, in this case a lovely section of the Thames long dear to the painter.” [101]

What is going on here? Are both of you correct at the same time? Wouldn’t this imply a contradiction, a dialetheia? Fans of Aristotle are wary of violating LNC. So you look for another reason to justify the contradiction. Maybe you should be relativists. Perhaps you belong to different interpretive communities, as the literary critic Stanley Fish has argued. [102] But this argument has two problems. First, it pushes the issue back a stage. Now you have to explain how these interpretive communities exist. Second, and more seriously, do you two really belong to different communities? You went to the same school, you’ve been friends for two decades, you studied with the same teachers, and so on. This is a common experience in looking at paintings, or reading poetry, or listening to music. The difference wouldn’t be possible if there wasn’t some basic agreement. So you rule out the Fish solution. After all, one of the pleasures of looking at paintings is informed disagreement.

It appears then that some art-critical contradictions are true. [103] Why? The OOO answer is that there is a profound ontological ambiguity in objects themselves. This ambiguity is reflected in relations between and within objects. We need to explore the nature of this ambiguity some more.

Let’s return to the meeting between you and your friend in the Tate Britain. You recall that Immanuel Kant makes some similar observations in his Critique of Judgment. The experience of beauty is paradoxical, because it appears as if beauty is emanating from the object, not from yourself. The experience is universalizable: it’s as if it should apply to everyone, anyone with a pulse should love what you’re loving. You want to send postcards of the painting to all your friends. Yet you realize that it would ruin their experience, if not yours, if you forced them to like what you like. It seems as if you are close to saying that taste is relative. But no—because of the first criterion, which is that beauty appears to emanate from the object. It would spoil it if you felt it coming from inside you. Then perhaps you could assess what neurochemicals were involved and make a drug that would give you the same experience, or double, or triple. Beauty also avoids relativism because of a third component, a nonconceptual quality. There is a je ne sais quoi about beauty: Kant argues that no element in the picture can be isolated, and labeled beautiful. I can’t find an “active ingredient” of beauty.

Doesn’t this mean that beautiful things are irreducible? We can’t reduce them to their parts because this would be isolating an active ingredient. We can’t “reduce upwards” to the whole, because this would mean that the parts of the painting were expendable components of a machine. This painting is beautiful, but the beauty is nowhere to be found in it. It is a strange, uncanny situation. We are having a powerful experience that gives us goosebumps, makes us cry. Yet when we look for the source of the experience, we can’t find it. Yet the source is just this painting, this piece of music, not that one. What is happening?

Isn’t there an echo here of something a little bit object-oriented in Kant himself, the father of correlationism? Can’t we claim that beauty proves that reality is not solipsistic, or even at its core relativist, since beauty is evidence of the existence of at least one (other) secret object? Indeed, the experience of beauty is a kind of inner evidence of something in me that is not quite me. It seems to come automatically, and there is nothing I can do to manipulate it. For Kant, it is possible to have an experience that is not based on ego—the experience of beauty is precisely this, which is why perhaps he sees it as a crucial part of the Enlightenment project, and why Schopenhauer made a logical enough progression from Kant to Buddhism. The freedom discovered in beauty is profoundly impersonal and thus it’s “object-like,” if only we can separate “object” from “hard plastic ball” or whatever. It means beyond your ego.

Here it is, the beautiful painting, and I can’t quite tell you what is beautiful about it. Some kind of mind meld is happening, some kind of link between the object and myself. And the experience is universalizable, that is, I can share it because it’s based on the possibility that everyone could have it. Even though I can’t impose my experience on you, I can coexist with you nonviolently as we both experience our inner space. The aesthetic experience that we humans now call “beauty” is a naked experience of relations between entities: between the Turner painting and me; among the brushstrokes in the painting; between me and you, both having the experience; and so on. Why the je ne sais quoi? I propose a rather surprising Hegelian solution to this problem: because the significance of any set of relations is in the future. Significance contains a vital ingredient of not-yet, to-come. The meaning of an object is another object. [104]

A causal event is a set of relations between objects. All relations are aesthetic, not just ones between humans and objects such as Turner paintings. Thus we must carefully investigate aesthetics for what it says about the “meaning” of (art) events, since this will give us a clue as to how things work in reality. Perhaps one reason why it is so hard to catch causality in the act unless you hold some kind of vicarious or dialetheic view is that the one thing that cannot be done to relations between objects is catch them “before” or “during” the event of their relating. As every good humanities scholar knows, meaning is retroactive. No one ever stood furtively on a street corner in twelfth-century Naples, discussing how they were going to shake up the art world: “Let’s start this thing, right. Let’s invent perspective and travel round Africa, find the spice islands and rediscover Platonism. Let’s call it the Renaissance—that sounds catchy.”

If causality is aesthetic, then events only “take place” after they have happened! To say this is to make the Hegelian point that for something to happen, it has to happen twice. In scintillating prose, Percy Shelley describes poets as “the hierophants of an unapprehended imagination, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows that futurity casts upon the present” [105] A hierophant is someone who makes the sacred appear, perhaps a shaman rather than a priest. What this closing section of A Defence of Poetry claims is that the significance of an artwork is in the future. The poet is a kind of channel or medium who somehow beams the future into the present.

Now Shelley reaches this position from an opening that couldn’t be more physicalist, or materialist. Each person (perhaps even “all sentient beings”) is a kind of “Aeolian lyre,” a sort of wind instrument that is played by external stimuli, and modulates or translates these stimuli into its own unique timbre. Almost every fairly respectable home had one in the eighteenth century, just as now we have iPods with speakers. What are you hearing when you hear an Aeolian lyre? You are hearing the wind, modulated through the strings and the wooden body of the lyre. You are hearing two objects as they relate to one another. Now the lyre can only sound after the wind is interacting with it; and vice versa—and after you have heard the pressure waves created by the vibration, translated by a transducer in your inner ear that turns the pressure waves into electrochemical signals. The significance of the relation is in the future. In this sense, as strange as it sounds, relations are messages in bottles from the future. Their significance is not-yet, constantly.

Heidegger makes a very similar point about the wind: we never hear it directly, only in the doorway, the fireplace, the tree. [106] Direct seeing is not a guarantee of givenness. We tend to think that realness lies in what is obvious, but Realist Magic is arguing that realness lies in what is oblique and mysterious. There is no way to catch the wind in the act before it has been modulated by something. The sound of the wind is in its future. It should be possible to see how the seemingly materialist beginning of Shelley’s essay joins up with the seemingly idealist end of the essay. That is, if we drop the notions of matter and idea and instead adopt an object-oriented view, we can see that Shelley and Heidegger are only saying that in themselves, entities are withdrawn: what we think of as their “identity” is already a kind of parody of them. And this parodying process is precisely what causality is. Shelley’s Aeolian lyre image is wonderfully appropriate for our purposes, since it’s an aesthetic object. It seems that the significance of an aesthetic event is in its future.

Nothing speaks more to the futural quality of relations than the phenomenon of dreams. There is something profoundly ambiguous about a dream, often disturbingly so. Why? Because as Freud argues, dreams can be interpreted infinitely because the deep content of dreams is profoundly latent, unconscious. [107] Now dream interpretation is already happening while you are dreaming, for instance in the attitude you are having about the dream. Moreover, this attitude is one of the core meanings of the dream. The brilliance of Freudian analysis is that it decides not to hunt symbols (such as phallic ones), but to investigate the form of the dream, like a literary critic investigating the narrator: who is she, what attitude does she have, what is her mood, her attunenment? There is already a relation in the dream itself, a relation between the dream images and the dreamer. The deep content of the dream is latent, that is, it’s withdrawn. Like a good Kantian, Freud asserts that the deep content just can’t be accessed, because when you do, it becomes another kind of manifest content, and thus it’s relational: it’s a set of relations between a content and a content-holder, yet again.

What then if all relations between all objects were like dreams, not just sentient or just human ones between images and image-maker? Consider again two entangled photons. They “don’t know what they are” yet: they must be “measured,” that is one of them must be polarized in a certain direction, in order for their significance to be revealed. There really are two photons. Then they are “interpreted,” that is, physically adjusted. Physical adjustment, interpretation, causality, aesthetics: all these terms say the same thing. This is not an idealist world in which the photons aren’t real until they are perceived. No, it’s precisely the opposite, even more opposite than the usual materialist or realist account. That is, perception as such is a physical intervention in the world, which means that causality is profoundly aesthetic.

Kantian beauty is a relationship between entities. What Kant calls the sublime is the vertiginous irreducibility of one object to another object. For Kant, the sublime is provoked by another entity (such as mathematical infinite or the vast scope of the Universe), which acts as a trigger, a sort of irritant, that throws the mind back on itself. [108] When this happens, an abyss of freedom opens up. You experience the raw vastness of your inner space. This experience is as it were the quintessence of the nonconceptuality we glimpsed in the experience of the beautiful. The beautiful and the sublime are not so much opposites as they are related like the liquid center and brittle shell of a piece of chocolate. The beautiful is the basic aesthetic experience, whose essence is the unconditional freedom of the sublime. Would it not be possible to assert, then, that the transcendental freedom that Kant finds in the sublime is simply an echo of the essence of a certain entity or object, namely ourselves? And that if there is not very much difference ontologically speaking between ourselves and a cinder block, the Tardis-like openness of all objects is what manifests as the sublime in our particular human experience?

Since this openness is an irreducible aspect of an object’s realness, the only way to get an experiential foothold on one is to relate to it. Yet to relate to it is to be caught in an adjustment, an attunement, between myself and the object. This attunement is what Kant calls a vibration, a possibly violent oscillation between my inner space and the object. This vibration gives us the vertigo Kant describes as the sublime. Our relating with objects opens up the abyss of freedom because each relation is a dance on a volcano, an emission from the opaque void of an object. Relations are uncanny and hollow because they dance at the edge of volcanoes.

Time emerges from relations between things. The meaning of an object is in its future, in how it relates to other objects, including those objects that constitute its parts. Relations are hollowed out from the inside by the uncanniness of the objects between which they play. This hollowness just is time. To figure out what a relation is means to build another relation. Relations thus contain a nullity that collapses forwards as more relations are built onto them. This tumbling nullity is what is called time. Because they are to-come, relations evoke a feeling of process: hence the illusion that things are processes, that process relationism is the most adequate description of how things are. Yet because time emerges from relations we can never specify in advance what they will be. Process relationism is an ontic or ontotheological attempt to pin down exactly what things are, by way of what OOO sees as an inevitable parody of what things are: causal events. Process relationism tries to reduce the intrinsic ambiguity of relations between things. These relations are inherently contradictory, like the relations you have with a Turner painting in the Tate Britain, versus the ones your friend has.

The point is that for relations to be ambiguous, they don’t have to be anything at all. We don’t have to imagine that an elephant might sprout flowers all over itself when it squirts water over its back. This is our old friend ECQ (ex contradictione quodlibet), otherwise known as explosion: the idea that if we accept that (some) contradictions are true, then anything could happen. It’s clear for instance that our two readings of Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed are better than this one:

Though causality is aesthetic, my argument means that the occurrence of just anything at all is not inevitable. [109] The trouble is, we will never be able to specify a causal chain in advance without resorting to ontotheology or smuggling in ontic prejudices about what counts as an object or a causal event. As Harman puts it, “a pebble can destroy an empire if the emperor chokes at dinner.” [110] If we are prepared to do away with noncontradictory causal relations we should be open to the possibility that anything could happen.

When we subtract the Kantian correlationist distortion, we see that the Kantian experience of beauty is possible simply because a relation between objects has as its basis a strange nonconceptuality, a je ne sais quoi. This nonconceptuality requires another relation, an interpretation, to make sense of it, which in turn requires another relation. Since all relations are physical interventions, all aesthetic interpretations are like what psychology calls acting out: they do not know what they are about. Causality is like a play or a mime. Imagine a mime who doesn’t know what she is miming. She is frantically gesturing to you, asking you to make sense of what she’s doing. This is the nature of causality. As Emerson writes, again in “Experience,” “There is a certain magic about [a man’s] properest action, which stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before you, you wist not of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not be exposed.” [111] OOO simply generalizes this observation to all entities whatsoever. Accounts of causality, among the many different sorts of philosophical accounting for things, frequently wish to strip the mystery from the world. I am arguing that this mystery is a crucial component of causality as such, so crucial that to eliminate it is to fail to understand how causality functions. Why? Because the significance of any action is to-come. Time, space and other aspects of causality happen because of a deep ambiguity in things.

Causality is like a drama. It is no wonder that drama simply means “things that are done” or “doing” (Greek), just as opera means “works”; and opera and drama both have “acts.” Consider again the default positivism of clunk causality. There is a further problem with clunk causality. Its adherents seem hell bent on excluding precisely the aesthetic dimension, identifying it for instance as a realm of “pseudo causation” (Wesley Salmon). This is deeply symptomatic of an uncanny awareness that the aesthetic dimension contaminates the positivistic materialism we have come to accept as the default ontology. At a small scale, aesthetic phenomena just are physical, and vice versa: to measure is at some stage “to hit with a photon,” as is “to see.” The sorts of things that clunk causality wants to rule out are shadows, sounds, lights and electromagnetic phenomena: a goodly portion of reality.

Not only this: it seems often as if what clunk causality theories want is to catch causality in the act without having to interfere with it, a fantasy that quantum theory has totally disabled. It seems as if the ideal causal event would be a totally invisible and inaudible one. Yet we know from phenomena such as entanglement and superposition that such events, strangely and ironically, refute clunking in other ways, for instance by producing so-called action at a distance. Before they are measured, two photons can be entangled as they emerge from a certain laser: they are capable of acting instantly based on the other’s spin and momentum, and so on. [112]

The ideal conditions for clunking to occur are precisely those conditions in which all kinds of spooky non-clunking occurs. I can’t mark the photons with some special x (as for instance Salmon wants) to prove that they are the same when they emerge from the laser as when they are entangled. To do so would be to alter them in a very significant way. There is an irreducible uncertainty here: indeed the fact that “marking” is causality is the basis of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: “measure” at the quantum level means “alter (momentum, position) by means of another quantum.” [113] We can go up to the level of medium-sized objects and find all sorts of parallels. Certainly, I can mark a cricket ball with an x to show that it’s the same ball when I toss it across the pitch. Salmon gets tied in knots trying to distinguish this kind of mark from a causal interaction. Would it not be more efficient simply to admit that I have already causally tampered with the ball by marking it? Even at this macro level, the ideal cricket ball would just spontaneously land in Salmon’s hand and say “Hey, you know I am the same ball you threw from the other side of the pitch, really, I am—trust me.” Or perhaps the ball is able to convey its identity over time by telepathy. Somehow Salmon might just spontaneously know that the ball was the same. Which begs the question: a whole area of clunk causality is to account for how things appear to remain the same over time.

This should alert us to the fact that the aesthetic dimension, the dimension of light and sound and vibration and, moreover, their apprehension by all kinds of entities from ears to loudspeakers to photographic plates to human neurons, not to mention the knife that makes the x on the cricket ball, is an irreducible aspect of the causal dimension. Indeed, as I shall continue to stress, the aesthetic dimension just is the causal dimension.

Thus there are drastic problems for positivistic clunk theories of causation. Some phenomena such as moving lights, shadows and so on can exert real causal effects, yet these are what positivistic clunk causality tries to rule out. [114] This is evident, since they are the effects of certain causes themselves, and we should expect them to act on things in their turn. A shadow can hit a light sensitive diode and turn on a nightlight. Why this is ruled out as a causal event beats me. Why it isn’t even mentioned in the mainstream literature is symptomatic of a stunning blind spot. A spotlight hits a surface—say, the frayed red curtain of some slightly degraded cabaret in a small town miles from the metropolis. The audience’s pupils contract to take in the brilliance of the bright red circle of the illuminated piece of curtain. Why is this not a causal event? Never mind whether we cross the light with another light or change the filter or the other kinds of example that the clunkers want to use. The stunning thing is why they don’t see the simple spotlight’s action as a causal event in the first place. [115]

In order for light to hit the curtain, the electric filament or halogen in the bulb has to reach a certain temperature so that the atoms are excited enough to release photons. Light at this scale is particular as well as wavelike: it just does clunk and splash around. In order to illuminate the curtain, the photons must not all be absorbed by the quanta on the curtain’s surface. This sounds ever so causal to me, but again, clunk causality wants to rule it out. It’s baffling.

Phil Dowe gives the example of someone running alongside the moving spotlight, holding up a red filter so that the light is “marked” like the cricket ball. [116] Yet this marking is not definably “on” the light. Yet if there is no mark, we can’t be sure that it’s the “same” light as it moves across the curtain. Dowe admits that with this example, the assumption of a fundamental difference between real versus pseudo causality breaks down. Isn’t this the real problem—the compulsion to reduce inconsistency results in yet more inconsistencies. Why? The whole discussion seems absurd, down to the example itself: as positivism struggles to police the boundary between physical and aesthetic events, it produces the clownish aesthetic demons that confound its principles. Freudians would take note of the precisely aesthetic, dramatic counterfactuals that positivism produces to police itself: the Sydney Opera House, a light show, a shadow. [117]

I suggest that the reason more inconsistencies appear the more you try to nail down physical versus pseudo causation is that there is an irreducibly aesthetic aspect of causality. To try to catch causality in the act without this aesthetic dimension produces significant paradoxes and aporias in positivistic theory. It seems to come down to the fact that aesthetic phenomena require some 1+n extra entities—a field of energy, dilating and contracting pupils, inscribable surfaces, all kinds of mute yet significant entities that are neither inside nor outside the causal process that clunk causality tries to isolate. The 1+n suggests a region of entities that we can’t account for directly. Again, this tells us something deep about causality. Even more fundamentally, the trouble arises when philosophy tries to smooth out the intuitively obvious Rift between an object and its properties, so as to avoid logical and set-theoretical paradoxes that seem to violate the Law of Noncontradiction (LNC). [118] Consider this: if an object were totally different from its sensual object, we would have a nihilistic situation where an apple could be grasped as an egg or a toaster could be an octopus. Conversely, if an object were totally the same as its sensual object, then we would have an identitarian ontotheology on our hands, and nothing could arise, and moreover, we would have a situation in which beings are ultimately determined by some form(s) of what I’ve called top object.

On the view proposed in this book, LNC can’t hold for objects, because there is a radical cut between an object and its sensual qualities, and this takes the form of a contradiction, p ∧ ¬p. If we can only accept that these paradoxes are all right, we will have less of a problem accounting for causality. Of course, this will mean showing that the existence of contradictoriness at this level doesn’t imply just any old thing at all—trivialism, or ex contradictione quodlibet (ECQ). Fortunately, as argued above, there are good reasons for supposing that ECQ doesn’t necessarily hold if we let go of LNC. [119] A cut between an object and its manifestation to other objects doesn’t mean that the manifestation can be anything at all.

Take the basic phenomenon of motion. Positivistic causal theories have trouble with the simple fact of inertia: the way in which an object continues to move when it’s not interfered with, formalized in Newton’s First Law. [120] In Chapter 3 I shall argue that motion is much better thought as the result of an inherent ambiguity in objects. If we refuse to think this way, we risk being saddled with all kinds of unsatisfying “ontic” baggage—prejudices that we have smuggled in to our ontology from an unexplained elsewhere.

Causality takes place in an aesthetic dimension that consists of some kind of moving stage set, like a traveling theater. There is a whole media set up involving stages, curtains, props and lighting that produce the causal event—I use the term produce in its fully theatrical sense. Notice that I’m not arguing that there must be a human audience, or human producers. The audience might consist of fish or Martians or dust particles. The producers might be black holes or photons or the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. It might be one of those plays in which the audience is included in the drama.

What is the sense of threat and strangeness that grips you when you enter a circus or a theater? Is it really the case that this is a fantasy space where the normal rules are suspended? Or is it that you realize that the illusion is on the other side of the circus tent, in the outside world you took to be real, and that what you are witnessing when you watch drama (Greek: action) is the play of causality? Isn’t it the case that you took the world outside the tent to be real precisely because you treated its aesthetic qualities as secondary to its supposedly physical, causal ones?

There are many plays and movies that, after watching them, cause you to see the world that way, for a time. The rotoscoping graphics of A Scanner Darkly, for instance, force the audience to see the world outside the cinema that way, at least for a few disorienting minutes. [121] What precisely is the dynamic of this sensation wearing off? Is it that we return to real reality? Or that we superimpose a socially acceptable distance and normality on the world, having had it ruthlessly stripped away in the theater? Or rather, we have the illusion of depth and distance stripped away, the illusion that there is a mechanism underneath the display. Drama undermines the fake perspective that makes things appear to be really happening against some neutral background. You realize that causality is happening in your face, closer than breathing.

Let’s revisit the two main ways of avoiding OOO outlined earlier:

• 1) Undermining. Things are reducible to smaller entities such as particles. Or things are only instantiations of deeper processes.
• 2) Overmining. Objects are blank lumps with their appearances glued to their superfices, or added by some “perceiver.”

On both views, objects are basically blah until they interact with other objects. Instead I would rather locate a Rift between appearance and essence within the object itself. Objects on this view are quaking with vitality. But to achieve this we shall have to accept some kind of paraconsistent, possibly dialetheic logic, the kind of logic proposed by Graham Priest, a logic that allows things to be what they seem, and not what they seem, simultaneously. Otherwise we are back to default substances-plastered-with-accidents.

Now we can discern a third way of avoiding OOO. This would be to claim the inverse of (2):

• (3) There are no substances, and it’s all appearance-for, all aesthetics all the way down. [122]

I want to preserve the Rift between appearance and essence. Why? Because this preserves, paradoxically, the very aesthetic-ness of the aesthetic dimension. Look at it this way. If reality were “aesthetics all the way down” then we would know it was “just” an illusion: so it wouldn’t be an illusion. We would know that it was pretense—so it wouldn’t be pretense. We would have a kind of inverted ontotheology of pure affects without substances. Let’s quote Lacan once more: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not.” Until thinking is ready to accept that objects can be intrinsically unstable, both essential and aesthetic at the same time, we are stuck with options (1)–(3), all of which are ways of avoiding OOO.

Once we accept this inherent instability, the Rift between essence and appearance, we don’t need to have objects pushed around by processes or particles, or others’ perceptions of them. They can do just fine on their own. This seems to be the case with a single quantum, which appears visibly to occupy more than one place at once, to “breathe” in the words of physicist Aaron O’Connell. [123] In that case, as a rough and ready rule, let’s assume that causality happens in three acts, just like in a play—if we include the aesthetic dimension it might be appropriate to see aesthetic phenomena as distorted archaeological evidence of causality. [124] Act one is how things begin. So on with the show.

Aristotle remarks that dramas have a beginning, middle, and end. [125] When he says this, he means something more than the first page, the last page, and the total number of pages divided by two. Aristotle means that there are phenomenologically distinct qualities of beginning, persisting and ending. Likewise, I have divided this book into three subsequent chapters that correspond to the beginning, middle, and end of an entity. Why? I mean, is there any deeper fact that this arrangement accounts for, or is it just helpful in terms of formal organization? It does indeed seem that there is some kind of ontological cut between arising, persisting and ceasing. So much does this appear to be the case that I shall argue that it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to specify that the “same” entity is involved in arising, dwelling and ceasing. This is just one of the inconsistencies and double-truths that we shall have to get used to in an object-oriented ontological account of reality. Beginning, middle and end are after all different formal parts of a novel or a play or a movie. Hollywood directors talk instinctively about acts one, two and three of a movie. I argue that there is some reason for this talk: they are talking, in however distorted a way, about how causality really works.

Somewhat provocatively, and somewhat against my own intuitions, I have decided to call the phases of an object “birth,” “life” and “death.” This is not meant to suggest that objects are “alive” if by that you are to think of me as a vitalist. However, it seems to me that the common or garden understanding of what objects are is far too mechanistic and reified. I agree with Jane Bennett that it might be useful, if only for the sake of imagining things more openly, to inject a little bit of animism into the discussion. [126] For reasons I give throughout, it would be better if we had some term that suited neither vitalism nor mechanism. This approach seems quite congruent with what we know about lifeforms: that they are made of non-life. [127] And it seems congruent with what OOO holds about objects: they are not just lumps of dullness. The best I can think of is appending some kind of negation to life and death, so that objects become undead. But explaining this will take some time: so birth, life and death remain in the chapter titles.

The following chapter, “Magic Birth,” explores the origin of an object. This is done in two related ways: through a thought experiment that imagines a nursery for objects in the shape of the pond at the end of the street on which I live; and through an analysis of Cantor’s transfinite sets that restores the dialetheic paradoxes that some interpretations struggle to omit—most notably, in our time, the ontology of Alain Badiou that is based on the Zermelo-Fraenkel interpretation of Cantor. The chapter then moves to an alien-phenomenological account of the beginning of an object, drawing from aesthetic theories of beginning (aperture) and the sublime. (“Alien phenomenology” is Ian Bogost’s term.) Chapter 2 argues that how an object begins consists, in short, in the opening of a fresh Rift between essence and appearance. For Badiou, the existence of an entity means that it is identical with itself. In Realist Magic, however, the existence of an entity is the existence of a Rift within identity.

Chapter 3, “Magic Life,” accounts for the persistence of objects. Since time is an emergent property of objects, this persistence is not just haphazard loitering in a preexisting street called Temporality Avenue. Every object “times,” in the sense of an intransitive verb such as “walk” or “laugh.” The present moment, which many philosophical systems (such as Augustine’s) take to be more real than past or future, is here examined as a deceptive, shifting zone of suspensions. Musical and narrative theory is used to elucidate presence, which is never as objective and as given as some suppose. In turn, the fact of motion, and in particular inertia (continuing to exist in the sense of continuing motion), becomes explicable within the framework of OOO. The persistence of things, I argue, is the suspension of the Rift between essence and appearance that constitutes an object.

Chapter 4, “Magic Death,” is an account of how an object ends. The end of an object is simply the closing of the Rift between essence and appearance, and thus the reduction of an object to appearance only. This presents us with a startlingly counter-intuitive fact, that the appearance of an object is that object’s past, while the essence of an object is the future of the object. If the main term for the alien phenomenology of Chapter 3 was suspension, the principle term in Chapter 4 is fragility. I give an OOO definition of fragility based on an interpretation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which traces its ancestry to Cantor’s discovery of transfinite sets, explored in Chapter 2. Badiou supposes an object’s end to be the termination of its identity with itself. Because he cleaves to LNC, a plague of Sorites paradoxes threatens to arise: when something is nearly dead, how identical is it with itself? Where is the line? The view that ending is the closing of a Rift, a return to consistency—at least in a certain region of reality—is not afflicted with these paradoxes, because it does not imagine objects in what amounts to a positivistic manner.

Realist Magic ends with a brief conclusion about what it has accomplished. I conclude that what the book amounts to is a return to a weird non-theistic Aristotle, less preoccupied with final causes and the Law of Noncontradiction. This Aristotle is summoned at the moment at which humans become aware of their ecological impact on Earth.