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 An object is profoundly “withdrawn”--we can never see the whole of it, and nothing else can either....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.

[Edward theurj Berge]

That last post also references a book, Body, Language, Mind. See as but one example the chapter "Embodiment and social interaction" beginning on p. 129, which gives a good overview of EG and EM, Piaget and Vygotsky, language as EM tool etc.

[Edward theurj Berge]

And recall this post, wherein I quoted Clark's paper "Beyond the flesh":

"Words are...the concrete objects that structure new spaces for basic forms of learning and reason.... Language is thus conceived as primarily a form of environmental structuring rather than as an information stream requiring translation into and out of various inner codes" (2-3).

[Edward theurj Berge]

From Bryant's blog post "between us":

"Okay, so the debate between agency and structure.  You get a failure to think relationally when you go on and on about agents, as if they were little sovereigns that exist in a vacuum or void, unrelated to anything else.  There is both a left and a right version of this in the political sphere.  The right version, of course, consists in the thesis that there are only individuals and that society can be reduced to individuals.  Margaret Thatcher:  'society doesn’t exist, there are only individuals and families.'  This allows Thatcher and other conservatives to conveniently ignore anything like material conditions or social forces, pretending that we’re all self-made men that pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps.  The conservative can then morally condemn, for example, the poor person, he can treat the poor person as suffering from a moral failing and lack of will because, gosh darn it, he just didn’t try.  'La la la!  Sociological or material conditions had nothing to do with it!  No ecology here folks, move along, move along!'  Leftwing agentism and non-relationism is identical.  Where the rightwinger wants to morally condemn the poor person and minorities, the liberal (the sad excuse for leftism in the United States) wants to morally condemn businesses and politicians.  Like the conservative, the execrable liberal forgets ecology.  In his superficial mind, politicians and businesses act in a vacuum.  Consequently, if they do horrible things, the lame liberal says, then this is because they’re morally horrible people– they’re 'greedy' for example — who are just psychopaths.  While it’s true that there are many morally horrible capitalists and politicians, the problem with this whole theory is that it forgets that businesses and politicians too act within an ecology or in relation to other things and the decisions aren’t entirely up to them.

"I’ll, of course, take the lame, weenie liberal over the conservative any day, but the problem with them is that they seem to think that if we just scolded capitalists and politicians enough and morally edified them, they’d change their wicked ways.  In other words, they fail to recognize that it is the anonymous system, the ecology, that’s the issue, not so much the individuals.

"The point here isn’t that agency doesn’t exist.  That’d be stupid.  The point is that agents exercise their agency in a world or an ecology, and within that world sometimes it’s impossible to make a move at all and sometimes the only moves are bad moves.... Failure to understand that ecology, in its turn, leads to piss poor political strategy because one believes a scolding is sufficient to change things (individualist or agentist thinking), rather than understanding that it’s the network of anonymous ecological relations that more or less necessitates the decision.... The question then is one of how to effectively intervene in that ecology to disrupt the network of tendencies that lead to this exploitation, instability, and oppression."

[Balder]

Given some of my recent writings, I am interested to read his thoughts on pluralism here.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Bryant's recent blog post "between us" leaves me dismayed at his continual misrepresentation of so-called liberal political policy. His philosophical analysis is astute enough on how conservatives fail to take into account a systemic approach, thereby blaming the individual for his problems. But he thinks liberals are guilty of the same problem, just blaming the greedy corporatists with the hope that if we just shame them that they'll mend their ways. Whereas the problem lies in the systemic structural ecology, in this case the capitalist system.

But the liberal position is anything but a mere complaint that regressives are greedy bastards. It is that too but the entire point is to create policy (law) that enacts very real material changes in the economic ecology that ameliorate injustice and provide just tax laws and equal opportunity, etc. He must be so insulated from actual political reality in his little academic world that he only sees liberals as ineffective whiners like this. And/or ideologically attached to his own theories that he doesn't see the very real material socio-economic policies that progressives are busy trying to enact for the social good by using systemic approaches to the chagrin, and ferocious opposition, of the regressive greedy bastards.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Bryant needs to among many other things read the Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget for All. Here we have real material changes suggested to redress capitalism's abuses, like:

•Immediately allows Bush tax cuts to expire for families earning over $250K

•Higher tax rates for millionaires and billionaires (from 45% to 49%)

•Taxes income from investments the same as income from wages

•Ends corporate tax bias toward moving jobs and profits overseas

•Enacts a financial transactions tax

•Reduces deductions for corporate jets, meals, and entertainment

This does a whole lot more than just bitch about greedy bastards; they try to enact law into the systemic ecology. If he can't see that then academia and its ecology have completely blinded him to obvious realities.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Bryant has further thoughts on dark ontology. It's quite a rambling post so I'll focus on this:

"Ideological critiques are of very limited value in challenging capitalism.  They might serve a valuable role in helping people to see how contrary to their own interests this system is, thereby encouraging them to organize so as to engage in forms of action that might combat that system or seek alternatives, but I don’t think they do much beyond that."

Hmm, helping people to engage in organized activism to challenge the system and seek alternatives is of limited value? And despite his constant ranting about academic theory being ineffective that is exactly what he proposes more of, only from his more material-based ontology which just so happens to be long on suggestions and bereft of organized action? Again, I'll stick with Rifkin on this one, since he acts on his ideas with heads of State, not with theoretical academics. Same with the CPC. It's better to be an actant than a fricken machine.

[Joseph Camosy]

Reading his blog, Bryant writes:

I want a neo-paganism....

WTF!  Perhaps he's looking for what some of us here are exploring - A postmetaphysical, recontextualized Esoteric Tradition.

Perhaps we should reach out to him?

Joe

theurj said:

Bryant has further thoughts on dark ontology. It's quite a rambling post so I'll focus on this:

"Ideological critiques are of very limited value in challenging capitalism.  They might serve a valuable role in helping people to see how contrary to their own interests this system is, thereby encouraging them to organize so as to engage in forms of action that might combat that system or seek alternatives, but I don’t think they do much beyond that."

Hmm, helping people to engage in organized activism to challenge the system and seek alternatives is of limited value? And despite his constant ranting about academic theory being ineffective that is exactly what he proposes more of, only from his more material-based ontology which just so happens to be long on suggestions and bereft of organized action? Again, I'll stick with Rifkin on this one, since he acts on his ideas with heads of State, not with theoretical academics. Same with the CPC. It's better to be an actant than a fricken machine.

[Balder]

Hi, I see you did reach out to him...  Cool.  He's not open to the term, spirituality, though -- which I can understand.  Perhaps he would appreciate Sam Harris' defense of the term (which theurj linked earlier, I believe).  Or perhaps (given his background in Deleuzian studies) he might enjoy Joshua Ramey's book, The Hermetic Deleuze (which also talks about a postmetaphysical form of spirituality).  I'm reading it now and am quite enjoying it so far...

[Joseph Camosy]

Yes, and he responded to my posting as well, indicating (as you noted)  a resistance to the term "spirituality."  He seems to prefer the term ontological nihilism instead.  Not sure what that term implies.  Any ideas?

Joe

Balder said:

Hi, I see you did reach out to him...  Cool. 

[Balder]

I think he spells out what he means in some of his earlier blog posts on "dark ontology."  Much of his description sounds, to me, like a rehash of standard atheist-materialist ideas -- not attractive or compelling to me at all.  He approaches more interesting territory, IMO, when he talks about passing in and through nihilism towards a radical immanence, which I think could open to a deep participatory sort of view -- which would be resonant with some of Ramey's description of Deleuze's hermeticism -- but otherwise, much of what he has said so far falls short of this.

[Joseph Camosy]

Thanks Bruce!

Given that Bryant mentions paganism and Buddhism, perhaps the place to engage with him would be philosophy and psychology.  The "gods" of paganism can also be seen as James Hillman saw them - as phenomenal forces within the psyche.  I'm currently engaging with Layman on the IL forum on this topic right now as well, under the title:  The Complex New Gods. 

Also, "The Hermetic Delueze" sounds interesting.  I'm adding it to my reading list.  Thx!

Balder said:

I think he spells out what he means in some of his earlier blog posts on "dark ontology."