Object-oriented ontology

[Edward theurj Berge]

In my research today I came upon this interesting article, “Here comes everything: the promise of object-oriented ontology” by Timothy Morton. (New link, old one broken.) It is of interest not only to speculative realism but also to some recent discussions on Caputo's ontology, modes of apprehension of such, and quantum theory. The article is 27 pages of text so I've culled some excerpts, lengthy in themselves.

 

Excerpts:

 

Speculative realism...asserts the deep mystery of a Non-Nature....object-oriented ontology (OOO)...goes further than this, rejecting essentialist Matter.... OOO is a form of realism that asserts that real things exist--these things are objects, not just amorphous “Matter”.... OOO extends Husserl's and Heidegger's arguments that things have an irreducible dark side: no matter how many times we turn over a coin, we never see the other side as the other side--it will have to flip onto “this” side for us to see it, immediately producing another underside. Harman simply extends this irreducible darkness from subject–object relationships to object–object relationships.... Causation is thus vicarious in some sense, never direct. An object is profoundly “withdrawn”--we can never see the whole of it, and nothing else can either.... We've become so used to hearing “object” in relation to “subject” that it takes some time to acclimatize to a view in which there are only objects, one of which is ourselves.

 

The notion of the “withdrawal” of objects extends my term strange stranger to non-living entities. Strange stranger names an uncanny, radically unpredictable quality of life forms. Life forms recede into strangeness the more we think about them, and whenever they encounter one another--the strangeness is irreducible....the uncanny essence of humans that Heidegger contemplates extends to nonhumans.... The more we know about a strange stranger, the more she (he, it) withdraws. Objects withdraw such that other objects never adequately capture but only (inadequately) “translate” them....This is what “irreducible” means.

 

Rhetoric is not simply ear candy for humans: indeed, a thorough reading of Plato, Aristotle and Longinus suggests that rhetoric is a technique for contacting the strange stranger....[it] amplifies imagination rather than trying to upstage it, and it revels in dislocation, not location.... Harman's imagery differs from ecophenomenological ecomimesis that confirms the localized position of a subject with privileged access to phenomena.... Harman's rhetoric produces an object-oriented sublime that breaks decisively with the Kantian taboo on noncorrelationist scientific speculation....ekphrasis is not about the reaction of the (human) subject, but about rhetorical modes as affective-contemplative techniques for summoning the alien.

 

The aesthetic, as we shall see, is the secret door through which OOO discovers a theory of what is called “subject”.... Melancholia is precisely a mode of intimacy with strange objects that can't be digested by the subject.... To lapse into Californian, OOO is so about the subject. There is no good reason to be squeamish about this. The more the ekphrasis zaps us, the more we fall back into the gravity well of melancholy. Sentience is out of phase with objects, at least if you have a nervous system. So melancholia is the default mode of subjectivity: an object-like coexistence with other objects and the otherness of objects--touching them, touching the untouchable, dwelling on the dark side one can never know, living in endless twilight shadows. If the reader has experienced grief she or he will recognize this state as an object-like entity that resides somewhere within the body, with an amortization schedule totally separated from other temporalities (in particular, the strict digital clock time of contemporary life). Through the heart of subjectivity rolls an object-like coexistence, none other than ecological coexistence--the ecological thought fully-fledged as dark ecology . The inward, withdrawn, operationally closed mood called melancholy is something we shake off at our peril in these dark ecological times.

 

Melancholy starts to tell us the truth about the withdrawn qualities of objects. OOO thus differs from theistic ecophilosophy that asserts, “There is a Nature.” It maintains no absolute distance between subject and object; it limits “subject” to no entity in particular. Žižek's suspicion of SR to do with the “feminine” self-absorption of objects: precisely what he doesn't like about Buddhism. Changing “self-absorption” to “withdrawal” or “operational closure” discloses what's threatening about Buddhism: an object-like entity at the core of what is called subjectivity. Like ecomimesis, Harman's passage affirms a real world beyond mentation. Unlike ecomimesis, this world doesn't surround a subject--it's a world without reference to a subject.

 

If OOO construes everything as objects, some may believe that it would have a hard time talking about subjects--indeed, Slavoj Žižek has already criticized SR in general along these lines. This subjectivity is profoundly ecological and it departs from normative Western ideas of the subject as transcendence. Thus we see off Nature and its correlate, the (human) subject. I argue that OOO enjoins us to drop Matter just as we must drop Nature, and that this means that it can save the appearance of the most coherent and testable physical theory we have, namely quantum theory.

 

Let's turn our attention to... things....how far “down things” does OOO really go? Are these things made of some kind of substrate, some kind of unformed matter? Does “withdrawal” mean that objects are impenetrable in some non-figurative, nonhuman sense? Do objects have a spatial “inside”? Surely they might. But the principle of irreducibility must mean that this inside is radically unavailable. It's not simply a case of the right equipment passing through it, like a knife through butter. Even a knife through butter would not access the butter in all its essential butteriness. The proliferation of things that ecology talks about--from trees to nuclear power--do not compromise a holistic Nature. Nor yet are they comprised of some intrinsic, essential stuff. To dispatch Matter, we must explore the most rigorous and testable theory of physical Matter we know: quantum theory.

 

Unlike some thinkers who discovered OOO in spite of deconstruction, I backed into OOO through deconstruction. SR tends to mistake deconstruction for nominalism, subjectivism and Meillassoux's correlationism.... Contemporary physics concurs with a principle tenet of Lacan and Derrida: there's no “big Other,” no device, for instance, that could measure quantum phenomena without participating in these phenomena. All observations are inside the system, or as Derrida puts it, “There is nothing outside the text” (or, in Gayatri Spivak's alternative, which I prefer, “There is no outside-text”). Arkady Plotnitsky has traced the affinities between deconstruction and quantum physics. People commonly misconstrue “there is no-outside-text” as nominalism: we can only know things by their names. Far more drastically, the axiom means: (1) Any attempt to establish rigid boundaries between reality and information results in unsustainable paradoxes; (2) Language is radically nonhuman--even when humans use it. It would be a mistake to hold that (1) is correlationism. “There is no outsidetext” occurs in a passage in which Derrida is analyzing Rousseau's position on Nature, so it's worth pausing here since this issue is directly relevant to ecocriticism. Derrida tacks close to the text he’s analyzing, which is why he appeals to close readers in the first place. He is not making a sweeping generalization about reality. Derrida is only saying, “Given the kind of closed system textuality that Rousseau prescribes, there is no outside-text.” That is, Rousseau can’t go around making claims about nature, not because there is nothing out there, but because the way he models thinking sets textuality up as a black hole....[but] Derrida abstained from ontology: he considered it tainted by the generalization-disease. Unfortunately this defaults to various forms of antirealism. Derrida's is a sin of omission.... OOO shares one thing at least with deconstruction--refraining from assertions about some general essence or substance at the back of things that guarantees their existence.

 

OOO is troubling for materialisms that rely on any kind of substrate, whether it consists of discrete atoms or of a continuum.... Certain uncontroversial facts, demonstrable in highly repeatable experiments, shatter essentialist prejudices concerning Matter.... Quantum phenomena are not simply hard to access or only partially “translated” by minds and other objects. They are irreducibly withdrawn.

 

OOO is form of realism, not materialism. In this it shares affinities with quantum theory. Antirealism pits quantum theory against its opponents, since quantum theory supposedly shows reality is fuzzy or deeply correlated with perception and so forth. In fact, quantum theory is the only existing theory to establish firmly that things really do exist beyond our mind (or any mind). Quantum theory positively guarantees that real objects exist! Not only that--these objects exist beyond one another. Quantum theory does this by viewing phenomena as quanta, as discrete “units” as described in Unit Operations by OOO philosopher Ian Bogost. “Units” strongly resemble OOO “objects.” Thinking in terms of units counteracts problematic features of thinking in terms of systems. A kind of systems thinking posed significant problems for nineteenth-century physicists. Only consider the so-called black body radiation problem. Classical thermodynamics is essentially a systems approach that combines the energy of different waves to figure out the total energy of a system. The black box in question is a kind of oven. As the temperature in the oven increases, results given by summing the wave states according to classical theory become absurd, tending to infinity.

 

By seeing the energy in the black box as discrete quanta (“units”), the correct result is obtained. Max Planck's discovery of this approach gave birth to quantum theory. Now consider perception, for the sake of which antirealism usually cites quantum theory. What does quantum theory show about our mental interactions with things? Perceptual, sensual phenomena such as hardness and brilliance are at bottom quantum mechanical effects. I can't put my hand through this table because it is statistically beyond unlikely that the quanta at the tip of my finger could bust through the resistance wells in the quanta on the table's surface. That's what solidity is. It's an averagely correct experience of an aggregate of discrete quanta. This statistical quality, far from being a problem, is the first time humans have been able to formalize supposedly experiential phenomena such as solidity. What some people find disturbing about quantum theory (once in a gajillion times I can put my finger through the table) is precisely evidence for the reality of things. (This is a version of an argument in Meillassoux, AF 82–5).

 

Quantum theory specifies that quanta withdraw from one another, including the quanta with which we measure them. In other words quanta really are discrete, and one mark of this discreteness is the constant (mis)translation of one quantum by another. Thus when you set up quanta to measure the position of a quantum, its momentum withdraws, and vice versa. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that when an “observer”--not a subject per se, but a measuring device involving photons or electrons (or whatever)--makes an observation, at least one aspect of the observed is occluded (QT 99–115). Observation is as much part of the Universe of objects as the observable, not some ontologically different state (say of a subject). More generally, what Niels Bohr called complementarity ensures that no quantum has total access to any other quantum. Just as a focusing lens makes one object appear sharper while others appear blurrier, one quantum variable comes into sharp definition at the expense of others (QT 158–61). This isn't about how a human knows an object, but how a photon interacts with a photosensitive molecule. Some phenomena are irreducibly undecidable, both wavelike and particle-like. The way an electron encounters the nucleus of an atom involves a dark side. Objects withdraw from each other at a profound physical level. OOO is deeply congruent with the most profound, accurate and testable theory of physical reality available. Again, it would be better to say it the other way around: quantum theory works because it's object-oriented.

 

Probing the quantum world, then, is a form of auto-affection. Bohr argued that quantum phenomena don't simply concatenate themselves with their measuring devices. They're identical to it: the equipment and the phenomena form an indivisible whole (QT 139–40, 177). This “quantum coherence” applies close to absolute zero, where particles become the “same” thing.

 

Implication and explication suggest Matter being enfolded and unfolded from something deeper. Even if it were the case that OOO should defer to physics, in the terms set by physics itself objects aren't made “of” any one thing in particular. Just as there is no top level, there may be no bottom level that is not an (substantial, formed) object.

 

To this extent, “object” (as a totally positive entity) is a false immediacy. Positive assertions about objects fail because objects have a shadowy dark side, a mysterious interiority like the je ne sais quoi of Kantian beauty. Is this nothing at all? Is there a path from the carnival of things to a bleak nothingness? Nihilism, believing that you have no beliefs, maintains that things emerge from an impenetrable mystery. Nihilism, the cool kids' religion, shuns the inconveniences of intimacy. We have objects--they have us--under our skin. They are our skin. OOO can't be a form of nihilism. It's the opposite view (relationism) that tends towards nihilism. Relationism holds that objects are nothing more than the sum of their relations with other objects. This begs the question of what an object is, since the definition implies a potential infinite regress: what are the “other objects”? Why, nothing more than the sum of their relations with other objects--and so on ad obscurum. At least OOO takes a shot at saying what objects are: they withdraw. This doesn't mean that they don't relate at all. It simply means that how they appear has a shadowy, illusory, magical, “strangely strange” quality. It also means they can't be reduced to one another. OOO holds that strangeness is impossible if objects are reducible to their relations. Since relationism is hamstrung by its reluctance to posit anything, it tends towards obscurantism. Relationism is stuck in a Euthyphronic dilemma: objects consist of relations between other objects—and what are those objects? An object as such is never defined. So while ecological criticism appears to celebrate interconnectedness, it must in the end pay attention to what precisely is interconnected with what.

 

This radical finitude includes a strange irreducible openness.

[Balder]

I've listened to the first fifteen minutes of the talk or so, and am generally enjoying it.  There are aspects of what he is saying that strike me as just a reiteration of a postmodern sensibility, but there are aspects that are also fresh and new seeming.  I do like his emphases on music and asymmetry, being an afficionado of experimental and Asian artforms, but of which have elements that tend towards asymmetry.  There's also a shade of Zen, perhaps, in what he's saying: describing a return from the 'not-mountains' mode, to 'mountains' again. 

 

(This is only a vague, unformed intuition at this point (it's one I've felt but haven't followed before), but I think there is something in Dogen's Shobogenzo that may be illuminating for the OOO and postmetaphysical projects.  I will look into this...)

[Edward theurj Berge]

From the opening of Timothy Morton's recent talk on The Age of Asymmetry:

"Modern life presents us with a choice. 1) The essence of life is elsewhere...evolution, the cosmic order [etc.].... 2) There is no essence.... Yet there is a third option. There is an essence and it is right here in the object...yet withdrawn.... Thinking past the meta-mode will bring us up to speed with the weirdness of things."

You're not in Kansas (kennilingus) anymore Dorothy (or Toto).

[Edward theurj Berge]

"Hyperobjects...are nonlocal...if there is a sub-quantum level, if space-time is actually an emergent property of objects that are larger than 10 to the -17...and everything below that doesn't have space or time, and everything below that is everywhere" (26:45).

[Edward theurj Berge]

The difference though is that hyperobjects are "a very large finitude but not infinite" (27:50).

[Edward theurj Berge]

"God is a hyperobject...one among many...but God might not be very relevant to our universe" (31:32).

[Edward theurj Berge]

"There is no flux, everything is a unique entity. There is no flux that subtends anything" (42:32).

[Balder]

I think he's just starting to make things up, now.

[Balder]

I'm wanting to think more about a possible interface between OOO and Integral.  OOO may offer perspectives which will help Integral to think more robustly about ontology -- for instance, I see OOO as an invitation to better consider the question, "Given Integral's epistemological commitments, what must ontologically be the case for these (enactive, postmetaphysical) commitments to be valid?" -- but OOO's "scope" is narrower than Integral's, dealing primarily as it does with ontology.  I admit I'm still a little wary of OOO's thing-first focus.  From an Integral perspective, for instance, this seems like a privileging of 3-p over other languages and perspectives.  OOO, of course, would likely fire back that such a concern privileges epistemology over ontology.  And that's a fair response, but I still think Integral's concern with (the consequences of) subtle or gross forms of perspectival absolutism is valid and shouldn't be lightly dismissed or dropped.  So I'm wanting to think through an approach that does justice to both sets of concerns.  I ended up purchasing Harman's book this weekend, so hopefully this will help...

[Balder]

Let's take this often-discussed paragraph by Wilber:

 

"Subjects do not perceive worlds but enact them. Different states of subjects bring forth different worlds. For AQAL, this means that a subject might be at a particular wave of consciousness, in a particular stream of consciousness, in a particular state of consciousness, in one quadrant or another. That means that the phenomena brought forth by various types of human inquiry will be different depending on the quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types of the subjects bringing forth the phenomena. A subject at one wave of consciousness will not enact and bring forth the same worldspace as a subject at another wave; and similarly with quadrants, streams, states, and types... This does not mean that the phenomena are not objectively there in a meaningful sense; it means the phenomena are not there for everybody. Macbeth exists, but not for my dog. Cells with DNA exist, but they can only be seen by subjects using microscopes (which did not exist until the orange wave, which is why cells did not "ex-ist" or stand out for magic and mythic worldviews; you can find no account of DNA in any magic or mythic text. This does not mean DNA wasn't there, just that it did not "ex-ist" in those worldviews)... Phenomena ex-ist, stand forth, or shine only for subjects who can enact and co-create them."

 

In light of (my current understanding of) OOO, this epistemologically-tilted account of the enactment of phenomena does not need to be dropped, but can be held alongside (with some modification) something like an OOO account of ‘objects.’  The idea that phenomena exist, but don’t ex-ist equally for all subjects, is in general agreement with an OOO account of incommensurate object-worlds.  Bryant’s OOO wants generally to do away with epistemological determinacy, so Bryant would likely rather put this in terms of objects only:  some objects only ‘register’ or interact with or respond to certain other objects, while other objects remain outside of their ‘field’ of interaction or registration.  And whatever aspect of an object does register for another object, it never manifests itself fully; it always retains a withdrawn aspect, a dimension that never enters into that interaction, that never gets ‘registered’.  In other words, objects ontologically exceed any given registration-event.  Turning this back on Wilber’s account, for instance, we might note that states or structures of consciousness might themselves be described (in Bryant’s broad view) as types of objects.  For object-A (the sleeping brain, or a delta wave state), object-B (the photograph hanging on the wall) is outside of its field of registration or interaction.  Or, for object-C (a dog), object-D (the United States of America) simply does not register.  The two never interact.  For those objects that do interact -- object-C (a dog) and object-E (a bone) -- neither ontologically exhausts the 'essence' of the other in such an encounter.

 

I think it’s certainly possible to reframe Wilber’s basic argument in this way.  But I still think it remains useful, and valid, to describe the above also in terms of subjects (or suobjects?), or at least to use more ‘subjective’ terms such as experience, interpretation, understanding, etc.  At least for certain types of ‘objects’ (to which we feel we can legitimately ascribe sentience).  In this case, OOO could be helpful in providing an account of the nature of ‘what’ subsists quite apart from any subjective experience of it.  Here, it might be useful to differentiate between phenomena and ‘objects,’ the phenomenal being what ex-ists or stands forth or is ‘enacted, whether by subjects or even by objects themselves, when they encounter the ‘faces’ (but not the withdrawn depths) of other objects; and ‘object philosophy’ being a transcendentally deduced ontological account of what we believe must be the case for these sorts of partial-encounters and perspectival enactments to take place.  (Noting that the notion of perspective here also suggests ‘incompleteness’ in contact or registration).

 

At the moment, I’m just musing aloud.  What do you think?

[Edward theurj Berge]

Good job. One strength I see in the developmental model apparently missing from OOO is that a sentient suobject, particularly human, can grow to 'register' more. And that such registration seems to have a teleological progression. Granted OOO accepts autopoeisis, that objects actively maintain their structure, but how do they actively grow and expand that structure? Worldviews don't appear to be just 'different.' Same with skill development. It's not just a different skill set based on different contexts; it seems the concept of 'lines' handles that whereas within a domain or context the suobject grows. While it helps to keep in mind that a suobject is limited by its structure and is not infinite, it also seems OOO doesn't account for how that structure can and does expand itself, challenges and exceeds its structural limitations.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Another quickie. It seems an object's withdrawn reserve allows for it to 'change' depending on context, but what about 'growth?' Granted the latter is a type of change but it is not any change. Is there not some inherent, structural seed that in programmed into an object for its growth? This certainly seems the case in organic structures like humans; their DNA for example is programmed to grow into a human adult. Even non-organic objects like a society seem to have a memetic code that leads to 'progressive' views that are better than their forebears. For example, the notion of democracy, which is defended in Bryant's flat ontology, his democracy of objects. Granted one might go too far into if not Platonic forms but even involutionary givens like morphogenetic gradients. Still, it seems there is some seed held in reserve for growth.

[Edward theurj Berge]

From chapter 4.2 of TDOO:

"Because information is not a property of a substance, but rather an event that befalls or happens to a substance and which selects a system state,'[i]nformation [...] always involves some element of surprise.' For this reason, information plays a key role in the evolution and development of autopoietic systems, contributing to the formation of new forms of organization within existing autopoietic substances."