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 An object is profoundly “withdrawn”--we can never see the whole of it, and nothing else can either....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 tried to listen to this at home last night, but the video was disabled.

[Edward theurj Berge]

You can hear it here.

[Edward theurj Berge]

P2P Foundation directly my attention to this article on Isabelle Stengers. She co-wrote Order out of Chaos with Prigogine as well as many other books and articles. She's also a recurrent reference in OOO and SR circles, in fact having a chapter in The Speculative Turn. The article provided some excerpts from her book Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. I've excerpted from the excerpts relative to OOO:

"We think that there is a great deal to learn from user movements; because the user is defined by use, a very interesting term because it can­ not be reduced to simple utilisation. An object is defined by its utility, whereas a thing can enter into multiple uses, and no user can as such claim to be in a defining position. Every use is, in fact, minoritarian....That is why they were able to bring together the most heterogeneous of protagonists: none could claim to possess privileged access to the truth...a truth able to situate all other versions."

[Edward theurj Berge]

We've compared Bryant's notions of an IMP with Wilber's. So how is Bryant's different in situating other methodologies while not simultaneously claiming privileged access to truth, which seems the case with kennilingus kosmic addressing?

[Edward theurj Berge]

Along the lines on my last question above, I was searching through The Speculative Turn on 'general economy' and came upon the following in Gabriel Catren's chapter, "Outland Empire":

"Philosophy therefore depends on what Badiou calls it systematicity, i.e., its capacity of globally compossibilizing the different local procedures--such as science, art or politics--in the horizon of a general economy. Local thought procedures are by definition...partial and unilateral.... Philosophy can be defined as a non-local procedure whose aim is to unfold a concrete and polychromatic experience of the real. If each mode of thought forces the mediation of a certain dimension of doxa and labors inside a given prismatic projection of the real, philosophy is endowed with a systematic or global degree of variation.... A philosophical experience depends upon a stereoscopic co-deployment of the complimentary intentional goals defined by the diverse local procedures....[which] exceed[s] that of which the local modes of thought are capable.

"Far from being an abstract survey, an 'empty transcendence,' an encyclopedic classification...the philosophical system opens up a polyphonic horizon of labor toward the effective production of diagonal or non-local forms of enacting and expanding experience.... In other words, each concrete mediator...is 'nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies or totalizes'.... Analogously, the idea of producing a total work of art capable of synthesizing all the existing arts brings forth nothing but a new artistic form among others, an 'operatic' whole which co-exists with the local arts and is 'contiguous to them,' a virtuous excrescence through which the set of artistic forms productively avoids its impossible totalization.... In other words, the philosophical system is a delocalized concrete machine capable of connecting and articulating the various local abstract machines...in a non-hierarchical way so as to set in place a generalized constructivism, a general musaic of thought" (345-6).

It seems that musaic is a neologism combing music and mosaic, quite nice, as in a musical composition that weaves various local themes and motifs, but is itself not an assholon composition of everything. I also like its characterization as a "virtuous excrescence."

[Edward theurj Berge]

Going back to p. 66, Bryant's alethetics grants plural frames/methods. The Borromean knot is used as a sort of meta-frame to organize the frames, in that any particular suobject will interpret (frame) another though its 'imaginary,' and communicate to another thorough its 'symbolic.' Here though Bryant contradicts himself from earlier posts on rhetoric, or what I call rhetaphor, since all suobjects, in communication, use 'signs' (frames) which are then interpreteted (framed) by another. And both of these aspects are entangled with a suobjects 'real' withdrawn, which itself is framed by what it is and is not based on its particular and unique endo-relations.

Also of interest is that this Borromean meta-knot is itself just one of a plurality, i.e., there is not one true meta-frame: “There is no one borromean knot.” Or as Catren said above, it “brings forth nothing but a new artistic form among others, an 'operatic' whole which co-exists with the local arts and is 'contiguous to them.” Holons, yes. Assholons, no. Emergent developmental levels, yes. Better developmental syntheses that organize local methodologies, yes. One best meta-methodology due to its privileged access to involutionary metaphysical essences, no. Involution as Edwards' and Levin's integration and downward causation-change of what came before, yes. Better metaphysical interpretations (frames, philosophies) as to what constitutes an integral methodological pluralism based on the foregoing polydoxy instead of monistic metaphysical dogma, absolutely (pun intended).

[Balder]

Harman's proposal for an IMP, recall, is similar to Bryant's but uses a slightly different approach.  His is based on his four types of objects and qualities (real objects, real qualities, sensual objects, sensual qualities), each of which can be correlated with different disciplines.  Because thoughts and agreements and teams are also "objects," in his sense, all disciplines are democratized in that all can be seen as dealing with objects. Those that deal with the same quadrant of his fourfold model cannot be reduced, either, in that all obects have emergent qualities that cannot be reduced to those of constituent objects (so "physics" cannot undermine "biology" or "geology").

[Edward theurj Berge]

So what aspect of Harman's framing describes the meta- "non-local procedure whose aim....exceed[s] that of which the local modes of thought are capable?"

[Edward theurj Berge]

This notion of a meta-paradigm, and how to frame it, is key to what might be called an integral worldview. The above polydox examples are not akin to the more generalized, abstract universals inherent to the kennilingus and/or model of hiearchical complexity. The latter indeed posit something like transcendent, absolute realms that clearly define how the messy world of relativity must fit within its strict, mathematical categories. Yet the polydox crew see this as more an embodied rhizomatic structure from the ground up, with no ultimate defining ideal. Even emergent, higher order meta-events are not any kind of final defining structure by which all can be measured, like some sort of absolute consciousness per se.

Stengers gets at this too in her TST chapter. She examines scientific reductionism in that it claims privileged access to truth on matter, but it does so only by thoroughly eliminating the heart of matter, its own inherent capacity for self organization. Matter is, like in kennlingus, the inert outside that is filled up with the abstract universals (or Platonic essences) of some involutionary, top-down methodology of defining it within a set of parameters deemed as true.

Stengers though, like Byant, sees that this too is but another frame among others, not the one true and defining frame. And all frames not only reveal but conceal and eliminate important data. Hence the latter seems to agree that we need to examine a multitude of frames, and even have some means of connecting them, seeing the confluences, even positing some temporary unifying principles so that they loosely cohere. But they do not posit this temporary way-station as some king of Platonic essence, or even some kind of final general category, that determines the matter once and for all.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Perhaps the above is a legitimation battle for how to define the epitome of Commons' et al. most current, final stage, cross-paradigmatic? According to him it has this description:

"The fourth postformal order is the cross-paradigmatic. The objects of cross-paradigmatic actions are paradigms. Cross-paradigmatic actions integrate paradigms into a new field or profoundly transform an old one. A field contains more than one paradigm and cannot be reduced to a single paradigm. One might ask whether all interdisciplinary studies are therefore cross-paradigmatic? Is psychobiology cross-paradigmatic? The answer to both questions is 'no'. Such interdisciplinary studies might create new paradigms, such as psychophysics, but not new fields."

According to this definition (accepting it for the moment and not dealing with my substantial criticisms here), is what Bryant and Stengers suggesting ( and polydoxy more generally) merely interdisciplinary or creating a new field?

[Edward theurj Berge]

One possible answer is in this thread, where Wallis said:

"Metatheory (as the study of theory) may be conducted in at least two ways. It may be integrative (where multiple theories are combined). It may be deconstructive (where theories are parsed into their constituent components for analysis and/or recombination). Either way, the process leads to the creation of a metatheory, metatheorum, or a 'theory of theory'” (78).

Granted it is still debatable whether metatheory is systematic, metasystematic, paradigmatic or cross-paradigmatic according to Commons.

[Balder]

I quoted a passage from Sex Ecology Spirituality on Layman's blog post this morning.  I wanted to share a link to the whole chapter here, since I am finding it illuminating to go back and read Wilber's 20 tenets from the POV of OOO.  A less idealistic reading of Wilber's postmetaphysical perspectivism/enactivism could be situated within the holonic model outlined here, it seems, to make for an metaphysics relatively compatible with OOO and speculative realist aims. (In any event, I'm reading it with that sort of possible translation in mind.)  Here's a copy of the chapter.