Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Bardo 1

The interobjective space is the aesthetic dimension in which the appearances of objects interact in what we call causality. There is no way to determine the boundary of this space in advance. The space can’t be thought as being “in” something in the way that a jack-in-the-box features a jack inside a box. The space has no center or edge that we can determine in advance, because to do so would have been to exert some kind of causal influence, within that very space. When we delimit a region of interobjective space, even if we just think of doing so, without police tape or calipers or GPS, we do so within that very interobjective space itself. The interobjective space exceeds any particular grasp of it, precisely because it is the possibility space of causality as such. It is strictly not possible to visualize the interobjective space, so instead we must use metaphors: “interobjective space” itself is a metaphorical term.

One metaphor we might use is abyss. Schelling’s philosophy of nature (for Schelling nature just is everything, whatsoever) posits a whirling abyss of dynamism below the products we encounter such as stars, Earth and speculative realist philosophy books. [48] By contrast, object-oriented ontology locates this abyss not behind or before but out in front of objects. When I reach for the toast, I plunge my hand into an abyss of causality. When a stranger smiles at me in the street, her smile opens a whirling vortex in the abyss of things: the abyss floats in front of her smile. The human tendency to reduce objects to “things over there,” the ersatz definition of objective presence, may simply be a defense mechanism against the surging abyss that confronts us at every turn. Just talk to someone who has a major mental illness such as schizophrenia. The slightest causal event is experienced as a disaster. Threads seem to tie the schizophrenic to the objects in his world, abolishing the illusion of distance. [49] What if this semblance were actually the case, so that what is called causality—the dull clunking of billiard balls on a smooth green baize surface—is the hallucination? It’s not called the schizophrenic defense for nothing.

What I’ve been calling the interobjective abyss in which causality occurs—the aesthetic dimension—is what Buddhism calls the bardo. Bardo means in-between. Traditionally there are six: the bardo of this life, the bardo of dying, the bardo of the moment of death, the bardo of luminosity, the bardo of dharmata, and the bardo of becoming. Each of these interstitial spaces is configured according to the mind of the person in them. These spaces are causal. In other words, what you do in them affects what happens next. And what you have done affects what happens in them, now. But like in a nightmare, the causality is aesthetic. What happens to you is an aesthetic event that you take to be real because of your conditioning.

In the bardo, you are blown around by “the winds of karma,” the patterns that you have accumulated. Where do those patterns reside? In the interobjective abyss itself. On this view, what is called mind is simply an emergent property of interobjective relations. Mind is thrown into the abyss, it discovers itself there. Mind is not some special demon or transcendental vapor lurking inside the “cabinet” of self. [50] It is simply produced in interactions between objects. This view of mind is highly congruent with enactivist theories of intelligence, for which mind is a retroactive positing of a certain quality of “mind-ness” on a sequence of actions. A baby doesn’t simply have language imposed on her, but engages in a physical back-and-forth with others that is already charged with meaning. [51] I look clever when I walk over the surface of a moraine glacier: but perhaps I’m just trying not to fall. [52] Such a hypothesis accounts for the evolution of the brain as a kluge of devices held together by projects of lizards, mice and apes in an interobjective space. What are called subject and object, “inner” and “outer” existence, are simply retroactive positings of relations between events in the abyss of causality.

The bardo of this life is like coexisting with seven billion people, all having slightly different nightmares. We affect one another across these nightmares. The view is not solipsism or idealism. These nightmares are happening in a shared space and they happen because we exist. And what happens in them is real. It affects you. Now OOO argues that what nonhumans do is not all that different from what humans do. And “nonhuman” can mean frog, pencil or electron cloud. So the bardo now includes the dreams of trillions of entities.

As I walk across my dream of the lawn, the lawn is dreaming about me. When I drink this Diet Coke, I’m drinking my fantasy Coke, while the Coke is sliding down its Coke-fantasy of my throat. It’s like that moment in Alice Through the Looking Glass in which Alice wonders whether she is a character in the Red King’s dream. [53] It’s as if every entity in reality—salt crystals, the Sombrero Galaxy and Take That—are hooked up to Inception-like dream machines. It’s scary and complex. There is no one single stable background “world”—not just because there is a plenum of entities dreaming, but also because such backgrounds are only ever artificial constructs that delimit the interstitial space, the bardo.

The bardo, the in-between in which objects inevitably find themselves, is a space in which the formal properties of objects—strictly, what happened to them in order for them to end up that way—determine their fate. Objects dream. Think of a footprint. It’s sand’s dream of a foot.

First, let’s revisit some aspects of the OOO view:

1. There is very little ontological difference between what we call a mind does when it’s thinking and what a pencil case does when it’s holding pencils.
2. Objects are what Harman calls “vacuum-sealed” from one another. They never touch each other ontologically, only aesthetically.
3. What goes on inside an object are all kinds of sensual impressions of other objects. Bryant has revised Jakob von Uexküll’s worlds in this regard.

Now let’s consider what we know about the unconscious. Freud argues that it’s some kind of inscribable surface. He uses the analogy of the mystic writing pad. Derrida has a marvelous, McLuhan-like essay on it (“Freud and the Scene of Writing”): Freud is in effect admitting that the unconscious is what Derrida calls arche-writing, namely, a technological device that subtends meaning. [54] When you use a mystic writing pad, you erase the wax paper, but the impression of the writing stays on the wax tablet beneath. Script is inscribed in an object. Think of your hard drive, which works in a similar way.

There are some interesting physiological theories of memory to throw in here. Perhaps memories are distributed holographically, that is nonlocally, in interference patterns. [55] Or perhaps memories are inscribed directly into discrete locations in the body. Dylan Trigg explores how these memory traces go beyond the lifespan of the body in question. [56] It’s beginning to be quite well accepted in contemporary medicine that we store traumas in our bodies. So what do we have so far?

1. Objects only comprehend sensual translations of other objects.
2. Memories are inscribed on an object-like surface, of the body or of some more general unconscious, either locally or nonlocally.

Doesn’t there seem to be something like a chiasmic link between (1) and (2)?

Now dreaming is a neurophysiological process in which memories are mixed with somewhat random neuron firings and a virtual experience of the world is lived through by the dreamer, who is often trying to make sense of the traumas (un-cathected objects) that have occurred to her. She feels her way around her interactions with other entities in a virtual space. You can call the unconscious a mystic writing pad, because mystic writing pads themselves hold memories and impressions in a meaningful sense. As tough to swallow as it might sound, then, I see no immediate obstacle to allowing for the possibility that objects—nonhumans, that is, including nonsentient nonhumans—dream in some meaningful sense.

Consider these lines of Percy Shelley:

The ocean is dreaming, writes Shelley. What is it dreaming of? A submerged city. The water laps around the sunken palaces and towers of Baiae. It tries to comprehend (OOO aspect [A]) these alien, encrypted objects (aspect [B]), in its ocean-centric, oceanomorphic way (aspect [C]). These human structures that now rest within its domain are strangers in the ocean’s world—Shelley conveys this strangeness by alluding to Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made.” [58] It’s a marvelous image of how consciousness is never simply a neutral container, a void. It’s colored; it quivers. Consider the typical Shelleyan inversion of “the wave’s intenser day.” More blue than the blue of the sky. More sky-like than sky. An image of phenomenological sincerity. (“Wherever you go, there you are.”) But this is also an image of an object wrapped in another object: the OOO universe is one of “objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects” (Harman). [59] An object that accesses another one by dreaming about it. In this way, an object suspends its Rift between essence and appearance relative to other objects. Persistence, life, periodicity, just is the suspension of a Rift between essence and appearance.

Perhaps I don’t seem to have given an account of the active work of dreaming and remembering. What disturbed Freud was his discovery that the unconscious actively edits incoming stimuli. Now this agency can perhaps be thought of in two distinct ways. The first is that some supervenient property such as imagination or will or creativity adds something to the mix. The second is that there is a physiological process that does roughly the same thing.

Two propositions are handy at this point:

1. The binary opposition activity–passivity is, according to OOO, somewhat overrated. OOO is predisposed to disregard the opposition, to some extent, since it seems to map onto human–non-human, or perhaps sentient–nonsentient. Or, looking to Aristotle, animal–vegetable (and mineral).
2. There are deeper reasons why OOO would be chary of the active–passive binary. If as Harman puts it, “free will is overrated,” I believe we’re signaling that what is called activity and passivity are both as-structured: they are both of them sensual phenomena that occur between objects. And there are reasons to suppose the binary is just spurious, as I shall try to demonstrate.

To return to the activity of memory and dreaming: we need to think these activities in such a way that ontologically subtends both the hypothesis of a supervenient entity and that of a physiological process. It is actually fairly simple, now that we have everything in place. If every encounter between every entity is a parody or a translation, we have all the fuel we need for the things that look like action, passion, imagination, memory and so on. So we are always dealing with an object’s dream of another object. The unconscious is precisely that: not what we call “subject.” It’s automatic. It seems as if we have all we need then for a theory of how objects dream.

An object is already dreaming about itself, even when it is “sleeping” (to use Harman’s term), unaffected by another object. This is because of the profound Rift between essence and appearance. This Rift provides the impetus for movement and continuity. Just persisting, just remaining the same, is a strange phenomenon in this regard. The real problem with non-OOO theories of objects—default lumps sprinkled with accidents or cooler flows—is that, as we’ve seen, they are unable to think movement or time without recourse to some non-examined concept that is brought in as a kind of patch. One way this works is that the interobjective space is taken as the actual reality of objects, when it functions more like the Lacanian concept of the Big Other: just as I am a person called Tim by others (in the Big Other in Lacanian terms), so objects are defined by their relations in interobejctivity. This gives rise to the illusion we call relationism. One reason OOO is hard to accept for some people is also the reason why psychoanalysis or ecological awareness is hard to accept: what is found is a profound lack in the Other, the realization that “the Other does not exist”: there is no Nature, no deep background of meaning—what we took as real is really a projection. What we assumed to be real is just a manifestation of the as-structure.

Belief in interobjectivity as the sole space of objective meaning gives rise to a further illusion that objects are consistent lumps of whatever, or just bundles of qualities. [60] But as we have seen, there are deep reasons why objects appear, and why they move. These reasons have to do with the fact that objects are never just lumps that relations paint into meaningful existence, or qualities floating around. If persistence is only “continuity of form,” it becomes difficult to explain how things change without getting involved in Sorites paradoxes. Exactly when does the continuity kick in? What counts as an iteration of a quality or a quality-bundle? [61]

There is no difference between stillness and movement, “stasis” and “process.” This is not a superficial lack of difference. Some contemporary philosophy is concerned about how you could tell the difference between a static disc and a “homogenous rotating” one, supposing for a moment that such a thing could exist. [62] These discs are totally uniform in color and to perceivers they appear to be still. On this view, something in the way science intuits objects must be flawed. But such arguments about scientific intuition are pitched towards appearances only, from the OOO standpoint. They think they are talking about the essence of things, but rotation and non-rotation are appearances.

There is a Rift between the substance and its appearance: this Rift is what makes the disc plausible or not, not whether it’s rotating or still (and the dilemma about whether you can tell the difference). What does this mean? Very simply, if you can destroy it, it’s real, because destruction intervenes in the Rift between essence and appearance. It is to this subject that we must now turn: how do objects end?