Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

The Disco of the Present Moment

You can tell that you are in the middle of a classic realist story when the story seems to begin to circle. Again, note the difference between literary realism and ontological realism. My contention is simply that literary realism appears realistic because there is a reality—that realism in art is not simply a solipsistic human concoction. Realism simply exploits how humans anthropomorphize the real: there must be a real for this anthropomorphism to take place. So we can work backwards from the experiences granted to us in art to talk about reality as such. That this move seems counterintuitive is, as I have argued, a symptom of the problems that have beset modernity.

Narrative cycling, otherwise known as periodic structure, can be as simple or as complex as a storyteller wants it to be. But in general, the feeling of looping and cycling is achieved by introducing periodic forms: things repeat. Moreover, there is a feeling of being suspended: of moving while standing still, of stasis in movement. Somehow the storyteller achieves a feeling of relative motion, like being on a train waiting in a station, seeing another train beside you moving out, getting that feeling of movement even though your train is supposedly motionless.

How does our narrator achieve this? She introduces inverse ratios between the frequency and duration of events in the narrated sequence of events and the chronological sequence of events. What does this mean? Let’s call the narrated sequence the plot, and the chronological sequence the story. For our purposes, let’s make things easy and say that an “event” is anything in a narrative that has a verb attached to it. So “Humpty Dumpty decided to foment a revolution” is one event, the event “Humpty Dumpty decided.” We can assign numbers to these events. Now one easy way to turn a story into a plot is to rearrange the sequence. Say my story goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (it has to, because stories are chronological). But I rearrange it to obtain 2, 1, 5, 3, 4. You will see that I’ve introduced some flashbacks and forward jumps, little eddies in the recounting of the events.

So as a storyteller I can play with event sequencing. But I can also play with two basic features of narrating events: frequency and duration. [2] Frequency refers to how many times an event occurs. Duration refers to how long it takes. Now evidently an event that occurs just once in the story can be narrated many times, and vice versa. “Throughout the month of August, Humpty Dumpty kept on returning to that fateful square in Prague.” An event that occurs many times can be narrated just once. In this case, we don’t know how many times it occurs in the story, so let’s call it n. The frequency is always expressible as a ratio, in this case 1/n. Or we can have an event that only occurs once in the story being narrated many times. “Humpty Dumpty polished his gun … He picked up his gun and polished it … He cleaned his gun …” (he is something of an obsessive). Here the ratio is n/1.

The same goes for duration. An event that takes a very short time in the story can be stretched over many pages in the plot, and vice versa. We have already explored how aperture, the feeling of beginning, is a feeling of uncertainty. We can apply this to the rhythm of how events unfold in a story. The beginning of a story is marked by the coexistence of a chaotic flux of frequencies and durations. Aperture is the feeling that we don’t know which end is up yet. In that case, what is typical of the middle of a story—that is, the feeling of being in the middle‚ in a realist story at any rate? It is a settling into a regular rhythm, a periodicity. Now the very core of the middle, which we shall call development, is like the development section in a sonata, in which all the themes and key signatures of the first movement are played out to their logical conclusions. This core of the development section immerses us in periodicity. How does a narrative achieve this?

It is through the exploitation of ratios between frequency and duration. In the middle of the middle of a realist novel, the frequency and duration ratios are in some kind of inverse form. That is, they take the form 1/n and n/1. What does this do to us readers? Time seems to dilate and compress. Days go past in a single sentence. Minutes go past like years. Thousands of repetitions become available in a single phrase. A single event is seen a thousand times. The reader loses track of time, not because there is no time, but because a host of crisscrossing rhythms is playing out. Time is suspended.

In cartoons, the effect of “being in the middle” is often achieved through a mechanical repetition that resembles what has just been described. Characters seem to be suspended in their actions, and these repetitions exude a comedic mechanical quality. [3] A joyous, disturbing repetition occurs. Beginnings are blissful or horrific, anamorphic distortions of existing appearances. But continuation is comical, as Bergson noted: acting like a machine is intrinsically funny. A dominant human aesthetic exploitation of “being in the middle” is found in many varieties of comedy. With their constant rapid rotation of characters and openings and closings of doors, farces arouse humor by prolonging suspension. In a romantic comedy movie, a pop song signifies being in the middle, accompanying the action with its regular verse-chorus-verse periodicity. The song says, “These events are carrying on for an unspecified time, many times more than this movie is now narrating them.” In music, suspension is a technical term for an effect that resembles the narrative effect I’ve just described. A single note or chord, the pedal point, is held underneath or above a shifting melody. The melody constantly recontextualizes the pedal point. An affect of moving while standing still manifests. Disco music is famous for using such suspensions all over the place, since its aim is to keep us on the dancefloor for as long as possible. Dancing, which is a form of “walking while standing still,” is itself an embodiment of suspension.

There is something strange about the disco of the present moment. The music seems to be emanating from the dancers themselves. To this extent, time is a verb: a clock times, in the way I might dance about architecture. On this view, clock time is a sensual effect, a play of periodicities that requires the existence of 1+n objects: an interobjective system. Clock time is an emergent effect of the time emitted by objects themselves. To time is intransitive, having to do with the Rift within the object itself. Moreover, dancers far away enough in the disco might not be dancing to anything like the tune in our neighborhood at all. The emergence of time from objects is just a physical fact. This fact puts severe constraints on the idea of a universal clock. Since the speed of light is strictly limited, even for a single photon, every event in the universe has a “light cone” within which events can be said to happen in the past or in the future, over here or over there. Events outside the light cone cannot be said to happen in the future or in the past or in the present, over here or over there.

This means that for every entity there is a future future—a radically unknowable one; and an elsewhere elsewhere—also radically unknowable. The notion of time as a universal container is a reification of a human sensual object, as if the whole universe were dancing to the same ABBA record. Even in our own vicinity, some objects have a much vaster present moment than we do. The German cartoon Das Rad presents the formation of a human road from the point of view of two sentient boulders by its side. Over the course of ten of thousands of human years, the rocks observe a few moments together, seeing wheels, cities and post-apocalyptic landscapes come and go. [4]

The disco of the present moment is a gigantic set of transductions. A record needle (magnetic cartridge) converts mechanical vibrations from vinyl into an electrical signal. A loudspeaker converts this electrical signal into sound waves. The piezoelectric effect transduces mechanical pressure into high voltage electrical energy, a jet of electrons. This jet of information is amplified further by butane, resulting in a flame. Electrons flow through a wire. A fluorescent bulb converts their energy into light. An electromagnetic wave propagates through space. An antenna focuses the wave and converts it into electrical signals. A transducer converts one kind of energy into another kind of energy.

A transducer is an object that mediates between one object and another, such that a transducer is an essential logistical component of vicarious causation. Input into the transducer is treated as information, which gives the energy in the transducer a specific form. The transduction energy then acts as a carrier wave for this information. On this view, “clunk causality” (mechanical causation) is a small region of the configuration space of transductions. Mechanical energy in one system is converted into mechanical energy in another, thus giving rise to the illusion for mechanical-scale objects (such as humans) that causality is only mechanical and that information is only ideal, not physical. Also, on this view, perception is just a small region of transduction space. Hearing, for example, depends on pressure cells in the cochlea. (Incidentally, these are the only plant cells in the mammal body.) Thus in any causal event we have two series, depending on whether we are thinking from the point of view of the transducer or that of the transduced. From the point of view of the transduced, the transducer is irrelevant (nonsensual, enclosed). This is in line with the reality of real objects. Reality doesn’t “look like” anything.

Thus we have an asymmetry, an OOO asymmetry. It matters not one whit to the transduced whether it is picked up or amplified or whatever by an aerial or a microphone or a piezoelectric crystal. The electromagnetic waves go on propagating around the aerial, despite it. The aerial might as well not be there. Sign theories such as structuralism only deal with the point of view of transducers. To a transducer, everything looks like information. Rather than ignoring it or regressing from it (by substituting some form of new material for instance, such as a flow), OOO encapsulates linguistic turn theory in a wider configuration space that includes the physical. The era of the linguistic turn thought of information models such as signifiers and signified (structuralism). These were subject to various different kinds of analysis, such as deconstruction, which argues that there is no genuine signified, just an infinitely deferred chain of signifiers. When it makes this observation, what deconstruction implies, though this is not stated as such within deconstruction, is the presence of a withdrawn object (1+n objects, precisely), outside the signifying system. The letters on this page don’t care about the pixels they’re made of, but without them the letters wouldn’t exist. Thus to signifiers and signifieds, OOO introduces their mysterious twin brothers, the transduced and the transducers.