Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

Hamartia

While the aesthetic mode of beginning is horror–bliss, and the mode of continuing is comedy, the mode of ending is tragedy. This is because, like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, objects all possess an intrinsic flaw or wound, which, after the Greeks, I here call harmartia.

Somewhere out there, there exists at least one bullet with your name on it, could be a virus, could be your own DNA. Why? The truth is closer to home than a bullet burrowing into one’s flesh. Consider an explosion. An explosion is frightening not only because it threatens me. An explosion is frightening because it’s ontologically uncanny. This uncanniness underlies the physical threat. What uncanniness? Quite simply, an object that just functions in “my world”—a plane, a skyscraper—suddenly comes to life in a very different way. My world wavers for a moment—even collapses.

An object affects another object by translating it, as best as it can, into its own terms. A plane gouges a plane-shaped hole in a skyscraper. A perfect translation of one object by another object would entail the destruction of that object. Consider again the glass. When an opera singer sings a certain note very loudly, the sound stirs up the resonant frequencies of a wine glass. In slow motion, you can see the wine glass rippling. Then the glass explodes. Why? Of course we know physically, or we think we know. But how about ontologically?

The sound was able to reduce the glass to a pure appearance. There is an ontological Rift between essence and appearance. This has nothing to do with the spurious gap between substance and accidents. What is called substance and what is called accidents are both on the side of what this book calls appearance. The Rift is irreducibly part of a thing: a thing is both itself and not-itself. I call this double truth of a thing its fragility. The inner fragility of a thing is why a thing can exist at all. Fragility is also why anything at all can happen. Existence is incompleteness. This fragility is activated in what is called destruction. Somehow something interferes with the Rift between essence and appearance and translates the object so radically that the Rift collapses. Nothing can physically insert itself into the Rift. Since objects are enclosed, secret and withdrawn, interference with the Rift must be caused when the object in question aesthetically attunes to its translator, in a process resembling the manner in which my genome creates more viruses under certain conditions. The difference between immanent and external causation does not exist for this theory. This is more efficient than claiming that things are totally destroyed ontically, which would imply that objects are just lumps of blah decorated with accidents, or nothing but bundles of qualities, and so on. On the “ontic destruction” view, an object requires some other object to do the dirty work. Tracing the whodunit story of destruction via another object, we soon return to prime movers and first causes.

An explosion reveals the fragility of things. But it also reveals the strange inconsistency of things. Beginnings are anamorphic, while endings are beautifully symmetrical. Life is distortion; death is peaceful, as Freud argues concerning the death drive. To begin is to distort; to end is to become consistent. To kill or destroy is to reduce something to consistency: the theory advanced here is the inverse of Badiou, for whom to destroy is to make inconsistent. When I die, I become memories, some crumpled paper in a wastebasket, some clothes. I become my appearances. Yet there can be no perfect translation of an object, because the translator is also an (inconsistent) object. There would be no trace of a perfect translation. Thus there appear cinders, fragments, debris. New objects are uncanny reminders of broken objects. A culture of mourning might arise around them.

The Rift between essence and appearance is why an object has an outside. The Rift is why an object exists. The Rift is also how an object can die: its inner, irreducible fragility. Every object has some feature labeled “I am not part of this object.” A hamartia (Greek, “wound”). An inner silver bullet, like a physical version of a Gödel sentence. [31] The inner fragility of an object allows it to be destroyed by another object. Much more importantly, however, inner fragility means that an object can “die” all by itself.

Every object is wounded. A hamartia constitutes the object as such in its determinacy. Impermanence is an intrinsic feature of why an object is an object. When an object comes into phase with its own fragility, it is destroyed. Consider the Hawking radiation emanating from a black hole. Not everything remains caught within a black hole: even a black hole, the densest object in the physical Universe, is internally inconsistent. At some point, the black hole will expend itself. Its hamartia, its inner fragility, causes it to cease to exist. Hamartia is what Aristotle calls a tragic flaw.

It’s mistaken, then, to see:

1. Objects as solid lumps in a stream of time that gradually wears them down.
2. Objects as reifications of a temporal flux.
3. Objects as decomposable into parts (undermining).
4. Fragility/death as an occurrence that “happens to” an object from without.

Fragility is an ontological condition of objects. It doesn’t depend on non-objects. By contrast, (1) through (4) explain fragility by adding to or subtracting from the object. The fact of fragility is due to the simple yet counter-intuitive fact that objects are what they are, and not what they are, at the same time. They are dialetheic, double-truthed.

Objects have one foot in the grave. The fact that an object can cease all by itself is very satisfying from the standpoint of fundamental ontology. No other objects, let alone relations, are required for an object to “die.” This means that theoretically at least an object can die alone, unknown and unloved. All an object needs to cease existing is to coincide with itself. Once it does that, it evaporates. Reduced to sheer simplicity, the object dies, leaving behind only memories, cinders, sensual impressions. The Rift between essence and appearance collapses. The object evaporates into its appearance-for another object(s).

Let us delve into the question of fragility a little further. The intrinsic fragility of objects has to do with why we can derive time and space from them. For Kant, the experience of beauty is an object-like entity that seems to inhere both in oneself and the beautiful object: this is what makes it impersonal, or beyond ego. Beauty is universalizable, that is, the kind of interaction that beauty is could be extended to include any other object in the vicinity. If I find the Mona Lisa beautiful, the feeling consists in the idea that everyone should find it so. If I find a particular piece of dance music incredibly beautiful, I want to put speakers on top of the tallest buildings and embarrass my family by broadcasting it to the surrounding world, because everyone should be able to find it beautiful. Yet when I do this, when I threaten people with my beauty, I am no longer within the beautiful experience.

Why? Kant argues that it’s because beauty is also nonconceptual: it has a certain je ne sais quoi. As soon as I put my finger on it, it’s gone, like Eurydice disappearing back into Hades when Orpheus looks back at her. I grasp at the object as if the object in itself were beauty, and I lose beauty. Or I specify some aspect of the object. Nothing in the object can be specified this way: not the parts, and not the whole. Beauty then is irreducible. I can’t dissolve it into smaller components and I can’t dissolve it upwards (“overmining”) into some holistic vision. Beauty is unique and contingent. Beauty is unspeakable, which is why Kant’s beauty provides the conditions for Humean taste, and not the other way around. It seems as if nice colors and smells and sounds are the condition for beauty, but really the profound freedom glimpsed in beauty is ontologically prior to those things. Why would we even care about those things if it were not for this freedom? That beauty is irreducible is a clue that beauty might tell us something about OOO objects.

We are driven to the realist conclusion that beauty is evidence of the existence of 1+n objects: myself, the Mona Lisa, the dry air between us. Yet beauty is in none of these objects. What is uncanny and slightly frightening at times about beauty is that it can’t be located, yet it appears to emerge in interactions between things. Beauty then is a kind of lie that is told of an object when it interacts with another object: a beautiful lie. It is as if beauty is everywhere, everyone, for all time. Yet it emerges from a pure contingency. It is timeless only insofar as it is based on objects that seem to be fleeting.

The mysterious quality of artworks is a signal about the mysterious quality of objects in general. Beauty is a secret that we know exists but whose content we don’t know. When we share it with others, it’s as if we are in on the same secret. We look at each other in amazement or with a knowing look. But it’s impossible to specify what this secret is. Only the fact that there is a secret is of any importance. Beauty is based on the raw fact of the secret as such. The contours of the secret are felt like the coolness of a marble surface to a blindfolded person. Throughout this book I have been using the term secret to account for withdrawal. The secret then is simply the objectness of the object: the fact that objects appear, yet they withdraw from appearance, a double-edged quality that means that there is a permanent Rift in the universe, for any object whatsoever, not just sentient beings and certainly not just humans. This Rift happens both within and between objects. Or rather: it becomes impossible to specify whether the Rift is inside or outside an object. The Rift cannot be located ontically, that is, we can’t point to it anywhere on or inside the object. Yet there it is. This Rift accounts for what I call fragility.

Now fragility shouldn’t be confused with the fact that things do break. While this is true, its truth is just a symptom of a deeper ontological fact. In other words, objects don’t exist in time like porcelain dolls on a conveyor belt: when they reach the end, they drop off onto a concrete floor and smash to pieces. No: the object is riven in order to be an object. Time as a succession of instants emanates from objects themselves. That is, linear time as we (and whoever or whatever else) experience it is a product of a certain set of interactions between objects, based on their fragility. We can think of physical analogues quite easily. Time emanates from the decay of a radioactive particle; or from the vibrations of a piezoelectric crystal; or from the massiveness of a planet. In a sense, the radioactive particle, such as the carbon used in carbon dating, provides the best example. All objects are isotopes of themselves, uncanny and unstable doubles. Theories of objects and causation that rely on faceless substances or bundles of qualities have trouble with isotopes—real isotopes, not just figurative ones—precisely for this reason. [32]

Fragility is what explains beauty. Kantian beauty is slightly sad, because it isn’t you. (I indulge here in a little anthropomorphism, since as Jane Bennett argues, this may be a net benefit to our understanding of things.) [33] It’s also a little bit scary because you can’t tell whether it’s pretense or not. It’s the same way with nonhuman and with nonsentient objects. In some sense objects are sad, because they contain kernels of not-themselves, in order to be what they are. Objects just can’t be consistent and coherent at the same time. It seems as if Gödel wrote the rules for existence. Objects could shatter into a million pieces—a million new objects that is—at any moment. Their possibility is predicated on their impossibility. In this sense, objects are not very different from what Heidegger calls Da-sein. [34] We should explore this.

Heidegger strongly influenced Lacan with his idea that anxiety is the emotion—or attunement as he puts it—that never lies. [35] Angst is a bottom line attunement of being that doesn’t “hinder and confuse” a person who is tuned to their authentic being (Da-sein). It’s what the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, echoing Heidegger, calls basic anxiety. [36]

Now this talk of Angst all seems a long distance from objects. But is it far away from OOO? Is it not because Da-sein is both potential and “impossible” that Angst appears? This is a slightly subtle argument, so we shall have to bear with each other for a few paragraphs to get it right. But we shall see as we proceed that what characterizes Da-sein, far from being a special human property—or worse, the special property of specific humans (Germans)—is a quality shared by all objects. This quality is dialetheic: double-truthed. Objects are themselves and not-themselves, p ∧ ¬p, as the Introduction argued.

Within objects are differences from themselves, which is why objects can appear: namely, why they can appear-to some other object. A star-nosed mole smells a thousand delicate perfumes emanating from the soil, because those perfumes are not the soil. The soil perfumes are “isotopes” of the soil, unstable bearers of soil-information to other entities, such as the receptors in the noses of star-nosed moles. This is precisely how Heidegger characterizes Da-sein, “being-there.” Da-sein isn’t objectively present, yet it manifests in all kinds of tunings such as fear and anxiety. In particular, anxiety is a clean attunement to Da-sein since it resonates only with the simple fact of Da-sein as such. In anxiety, the world becomes flat and meaningless. Objects seem to lose their significance for us: they have “nothing more to ‘say’ to us,” in Heidegger’s telling phrase. [37] That is, it is as if we are able to catch an impossible glimpse of their secretiveness.

Tuned to Da-sein itself, Angst has one foot in the sensual ether and one foot outside of it, in some impossible no-space. This is a point at which language breaks down unless we are willing to admit that (some) things can be dialetheic, both p and not-p at the very same time. For instance, Hegel explains motion, as we saw in the previous chapter, by supposing that objects are here and not-here simultaneously. We could explain being in a doorway like this: we are both inside and outside the room. It becomes impossible to specify, using objectively present, reified measuring devices such as tape measures and stopwatches, just what “being inside the room” is as opposed to “being in the doorway.” If we do, all kinds of Zeno’s paradoxes arise that tempt us to say that nothing is happening, or that there is no movement. The trouble is, we are so habituated to imagining beings existing “in” time that it becomes hard to see how time and therefore events as such flow from objects. This flow occurs when objects emit isotopes of themselves, riven from within by fragility. In this sense, death is all around us. Since the universe just is a huge object, we exist inside death, just like in the Buddhist paintings of the Wheel of Life, in which the whole of samsara takes place within the jaws of Yama, god of death.

“It was so beautiful I almost died.” Is there more than metaphorical truth in this statement? Is beauty an experience of death, or near-death? Adorno writes that the shudder of beauty shatters the encapsulated subject. [38] When an opera singer sings just the right note, at just the right pitch and volume, the sound waves resonate with the wine glass in such a way as to destroy it. On slow-motion film, we can see how just before it is destroyed, the glass undergoes a shudder. The resonant frequency matches the glass perfectly.

From the perspective of the alien phenomenology of the glass itself, might this indeed be an “experience” of suddenly losing a sense of boundary? And isn’t this what beauty is? In the event of beauty, a non-self part of my inner space seems to resonate in the colors on the wall, in the sounds pouring into my ears. Hugely amplified, might this resonance actually kill me? “A beautiful way to die”—to be destroyed by vibrations that removed myself from myself.

For beauty to work, then, there must already be a surface capable of receiving the wound. It seems that the knife of beauty is able to insert itself into the slit between an object’s essence and its appearance. Beauty “works itself in” to the already existing Rift between an object and that same object, the fact that objects are dialetheic, fork-tongued. This Rift is an inconsistency in the object that enables the object to end. When an object is entirely sundered from its appearance, its hamartia gets the better of it: that is called destruction or death.

Beauty, then, is a nonviolent experience of near death, a warning that one is fragile, like everything else in the universe. Beauty is the shadow of the threat to objects, the threat that is objects. Objects as such carry an inner threat, because of the Rift between essence and appearance. Beauty is the call of the vulnerable flesh and the fragile glass. This explains perhaps why beauty is associated with experiences of love, empathy and compassion, themes that preoccupy pre-Kantian theories of aesthetic affect such as Adam Smith, and that also preoccupy ethical theories based on the Buddhist view of anatman (no-self). It is the reason why we can articulate an ethics of nonviolent coexistence based on beauty. This ethics cannot truly be grounded in the cool Kantian version of aesthetic experience, with its rigid anthropocentrism and sadistic shadow side. It must instead be founded in the project of coming as close as possible to our already shared, disturbing intimacy. Let us begin to explore this.

When I experience beauty, I resonate with an object. The object and I attune to one another. Kant describes beauty as a tuning process. “Beautiful” is what I say to myself when an impersonal, “object-like” cognitive state arises that seems to emanate from the object itself. It is as if the object and I are locked together in inseparable union, beyond one’s ego. In common prejudice, one supposes that having no ego means not being able to brush your teeth. But according to this argument, you brush your teeth all the time without an ego. That’s happening already. It’s perfectly possible to have a non-ego experience. You are having one now.

The beautiful object fits me like a glove. Kantian beauty, however, is unlike Aristotelian and Horatian decorum, the traditional way in which the aesthetic is said to be like clothing. [39] Decorum provides objective rules for what a beautiful thing should wear, an external, systematic set of criteria for what counts as beautiful, a checklist. Kantian beauty, by contrast, is a symptom of something more disruptive. Kant thinks this discovery as the transcendental subject, but OOO thinks the discovery as the withdrawal of objects. Yet there is an affinity between these thoughts, because they both imagine some kind of transcendental crack or Rift to be intrinsic to reality. Beauty is not a glove fitting a hand, but more like Death taking you by the hand.

Beauty is nonconceptual. Nothing in the object directly explains it: not the parts, because this would be sheer positivistic reductionism; not the whole, because that would be another kind of reduction (the parts are now expendable). Yet beauty seems to emanate from this thing. Just this particular, unique thing, is the locus of beauty. Everyone in their right mind should find it beautiful, I think, yet if I were to impose this on others, it would ruin the experience. I know my particular experience of beauty is not shared, but I know that you know what beauty is. A certain unconditional freedom opens up, along with a certain coexistence without content. No wonder Kant considered the experience of beauty to be an essential part of democracy. Beauty is an event in being, a sort of gap, a gentle slit. Beauty allows for a cognitive state that is noncoercive and profoundly nonviolent. [40]

But what are the conditions of possibility for the experience of beauty to occur? What, as it were, are the phenomenological physics of beauty? As we explore these conditions we uncover a remarkable body of work. The name of this body of work is Alphonso Lingis. Kantian beauty tacitly presupposes a being that can be wounded by colors, sounds, smells, textures and tastes: affected by them, so as to resonate such that the tuning process of beauty can commence. This being is what Lingis explores, in a series of remarkable studies. This is not simply a realm of mere appetite, as Kant suggests, because that would reproduce a difference between humans and nonhumans (animals, for instance) that is untenable and problematic. [41] Moreover, in appetite I roam like a hungry wolf over the carcass of things—it seems as if powerful objects at the very least suspend this aggressive craving, always already suspend it before the event of beauty takes hold. And stranger still, as Lacan noted well, there is a symmetry between Kantian beauty and sadism, a cold lust concerning an infinitely opaque object. [42] Before the gentle slit of beauty is made, then, the knife must be ready and the arm must be in range. It is this dimension, a dangerous and uncanny dimension of “levels” and “directives,” that the thinking of Lingis addresses. [43] Since ego just is the formal cause of an object, what we are talking about when it comes to beauty is an aesthetic resonance with the Rift between essence and appearance. What Lingis shows is that experiences that are beyond our ego do exist, and are profoundly physical. The insights of Lingis inform many of the proposals made in this book.

Since beauty doesn’t depend on ego, it must be incredibly default to human cognition. OOO argues that this default-ness is present in any interaction between any objects, not just humans and other things. Let’s walk through this rather startling idea. A sample of an object is not the object. An attunement is not the object. Yet it can dial itself very close to the object. If an object were to tune itself perfectly to another object, at least one of them would be destroyed. Think again about the glass. An opera singer sings a note of a certain pitch. The pitch vibrates with the resonant frequency of the glass. The sound is like the glass, but not the glass. The pitch is tuned to the glass. The glass begins to dance, it has a little glass orgasm—don’t they call it the little death?—then it explodes into non-glass. Again: sound waves attuned to the resonant frequency of the glass fit the glass so perfectly that it is destroyed. A tune shatters an object.

Art can create and destroy things, quite literally. Causality is an illusion-like play of a demonic energy that has real effects in the world. Perfect tuning of an entity to that which is not the entity means destruction: this is what happens when you die—you become your environment. Enveloped perfectly by the soundwaves, does the glass itself experience a kind of beauty? A sudden dissolution of boundaries between the glass and the not-glass, an experience Adorno calls the core shattering that makes the ego disappear? For Kant, beauty is a nonconceptual experience of coexisting with an object. It’s a virtual experience, as if my inner state were emanating from the object. In this experience, it’s as if the object and the subject suddenly fuse, like the space inside and outside a vase. What if the agency comes from the object, from the not-me or the not-glass? What if the as-if quality that Kant sees as a projection of my inner space into the object is indeed an emanation of the object, or based on such an emanation? What if beauty is when an object tunes to our vulnerability? When you hear that deathly musical box sound in that P.M. Dawn song we explored in the Introduction, you really are hearing the possibility of your own death. That beautiful, uncanny musical box, wound up and playing over and over, executing itself. The tip of an iceberg. Beauty is how objects end. Beauty is death.