The Being of Analogy

Front matter

The Being of Analogy

New Metaphysics

Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour

Contents

Acknowledgements 9

List of Figures 11

6. The Dynamic Lives of Languages and Genres 196 7. Form and Knowledge 214

Chapter 2 Tricksy Things

Objects have been up to something. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of non-traditional objects like complex systems and what Tim Morton has termed hyperoljects. Like rabbits, they are tricksy things. They are tricksy because they do not present themselves within the normal spatio-temporal wrappings we have come to expect of our objects. We tend to conceive of traditional objects as bundles of qualities or data, and we’re able to do that because such objects appear to have definite and limited extensions in time and space. And if it is a requirement of an object that it be extended from an absolute time and an absolute space, then it makes sense that other qualities, such as red or round, would exist separately and prior to objects, even if those qualities exist only as discrete data given to the senses. From there, it is easy to assume that reality is structured predicatively. That is to say that the existence of objects is predicated upon qualities which are prior to and more real than the objects themselves, and that objects are just different combinations of the same predicative relationship with their qualities: The ball zs five inches in diameter, and the ball is round, and the ball is red. A non-traditional object—if you have the imagination for such a thing—is

so confounding because it escapes the predicative structure we impose on other objects. A non-traditional object might not extend in absolute space and absolute time in such a way that it can be bundled up to qualities we can sense with our eyes or any other apparatus as being somewhere or some way. A non-traditional object, such as an internet, a city, or a climate phenomenon, might bring with it its own space and time. The identity of such objects as objects, in turn, raises some interesting questions about the relationship between objects and their predicates in general, and so it is on the identification of non-traditional objects that this chapter will focus.

There is a profound connection between the notion that objects share in their own predication and the possibility for non-locality. The most obvious way to think about this is through the relativity of time and space to an object, the idea that the former two emerge as properties of the latter, rather than the other way around.!” The connection between self-predication and non-locality can also be seen in the metaphysics of presence, particularly in Heidegger’s tool-analysis, which has done so much to inspire Harman’s philosophy. And despite the language of functionality around the tool analysis, presence, as we shall see, is an aesthetic phenomenon. As it goes, we rely upon the existence of so many objects of which we’re not aware until they stop functioning as they had been doing. Harman is fond of the very simple image of the floor, which might only become present to us as something if there is an earthquake, and the floor gives out.!*° The floor’s being is obviously not born in the earthquake, but rather the earthquake alerts us to the fact that the floor has been up to something. But floors seem pretty local.

This works in non-local cases as well. My iPod, which is a relic of portable media player antiquity, crashed a while ago, and I lost all of the music I had stored in it over the years, most of which I hadn’t bothered to back up. This included my Radiohead albums, so I’ve just been listening to a compilation of hits on YouTube. Here, I have the familiar experience that one has when listening to a hits compilation, namely the uncanny sensation one gets when one goes through an unfamiliar song transition. In this case, when “Paranoid Android” crashes to a halt, the next thing I hear is the andante piano of “Karma Police” instead of the whirly first chords of “Subterranean Homesick Alien.” My head starts playing “Subterranean” before the album does, and in this case, the album doesn’t play it at all.

My conditioned response, from an easy empiricist standpoint, is caused by what appears as a process of transition. It could also be said that there are a number of neurological processes involved as well, which function in similar ways to my conditioned responses to other regularities I experience in the world. Here, we can see how incredibly easy it is to go from the notion

that all knowledge is process, to the notion that all interaction is process,

to the notion that all being is process. The alternative is that the process of transition between the two songs is an object that has presented itself by being broken by the hits compilation. Is it possible that the song transition had been up to something before it was presented in all of its many splendid brokenness? The abrupt turn that the course of OK Computer takes between “Paranoid Android” and “Subterranean” is one of a few that contribute to

a sense of caprice or even bipolarity in the album’s narrative. It could also just be a memorable point in my daily jog, the 11:06 mark which occurs roughly at the moment when I pass the house with the cruck-frame façade. None of this proves that the transition or the perception of the transition aren’t just bundles of processes, but it does tell us that the transition is more than just the final notes of one track, a short silence, and the first notes of the next track. On the hits compilation, we have the final notes of “Paranoid Android” and a short silence, but that doesn’t mean that we have 2/3’s of the transition. That would sound ridiculous even to the most supervenient among us. On the other hand, it can’t be said that the transition wasn’t there at all because the last notes of “Paranoid Android” and the short silence

did index the transition. The transition was there, but it was broken in a way that can’t be named in terms of regular units of time, amplitude, etc. Its brokenness, and therefore, its presence, is aesthetic. So, we can say three things about what the aesthetic presence of this transition-object is not: 1. It is not completely present. 2. Itis not completely absent.

3. What is present of the transition-object cannot be regularized into units of 1s (whatever the anterior of 1 might be) which would be predicated on their relationship to 0.

127 present or absent, and if

If we cannot say that the object is completely there is not even a location for all of the parts of it that are either present or absent, and if the object has been up to something, then we’re dealing with an object that exists non-locally.

Again, in his Realist Magic, Timothy Morton offers the wonderfully evocative image of “Causality as Sampling,”!?8 which includes the croak of a frog being sampled by a passing mosquito as a “fluctuation in the air,” and then by another frog as a hormonal signal, and then as a disturbance at the edge of a spider’s web, and then as an inscription into an MP3 recorder’s memory, and then as a sound in a human’s ear.!”° The obvious way of describing such events is to say that a wave of kinetic energy compresses mediating particles together while leaving spaces of rarefaction in between the compressions. This process of alternating compression and rarefaction passes through different media, such as the near-limpid tympanic membrane, but it’s essentially a single, linear repetition of cause and effect. But Morton calls this sort of conventional description “clunk causality,” which he claims is “fetishistic reification”! because it presupposes that linear time precedes objects as the blank canvas onto which reality is painted. Instead, Morton notices something very profound about the simple fact that ears hear as ears, and digital recorders hear as digital recorders, and so on and so forth. To put it less-than-simply, “The ears otomorphize; the recorder recorder-morphizes.”!3! This is aesthetic causality. The ears and the digital recorder have already been up to something. They already have a hidden symmetry and an identity when they encounter the frog’s croak, and so they identify the croak in their own ways, which means the croak, if it moves, is part of all sorts of asymmetries. Or, in Morton’s terms, “Causality is...distributed.”!*? This is true of both space and of time, hence the expansion of the idea of non-locality beyond the examples we already have in the quantum world (i.e. entanglement).!*?

The objects Morton has in mind are what he calls “hyperobjects,” and they are characterized by viscosity, non-locality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity. The most prominent example of such an object in Morton’s thinking is global warming. Global warming is viscous, in that it sticks to other objects and creates stickiness, such as the Atlantic Ocean swelling over Miami’s shoreline. Global warming is obviously non-local, and it exists in the future as much as it exists in the present. All of those things are easy enough to imagine about global warming, but the claim that global warming is an object at all—and not a process—claws at the intuition just a bit more. It’s the attribute of phasing that reveals global warming’s objectness. Phasing refers to all of the possible states of a system, and it can be illustrated in the butterfly-shaped Lorenz Attractor model,!** which was first used to describe the dynamics of weather. Phase space

is a kind of space, but not one we are attuned to seeing, given our threedimensional constraints. However, as Morton argues, “A high enough dimensional being could see global warming itself as a static object.”!*

He pushes this even further, claiming that any “process is simply an object seen from a standpoint that is 1+n dimensions lower than that object’s dimensionality.” Imagine being able to see a drop of water, a puff of vapor, and a snowflake as a single object, and you’ll get some idea for what kind of magnificent weirdness we’re dealing with. A hyperobject is an object whose underlying symmetry is so obviously withdrawn that we have to trade in our binocular vision for some sort of time-lapsed x-ray panorama just to get a concept of its identity.

Non-traditional objects cannot be identified by synthetic thinking

If global warming is indeed an object, then it is surely one of the most important objects we can think of. For Morton, global warming seems to be paradigmatic of objects that are non-local, phased, etc., but he never says it is the only such object. The Internet would be an obvious example of another one of these extraordinary objects. But how are we to identify new objects of this type as they come along?

Certainly, we can take things that have already been identified as processes, and then begin to think about how they behave as objects, as Morton has done with global warming. But not all unconventional objects are identified as processes first. For instance, although the Internet is not a typical object in the sense that a train or a can of snuff may be, it actually stretches the intuition more to think about the Internet as a process than it does to think about it as an object.” Why do we “go surfing” on the Internet for information instead of “internetting” for information? We could speculate that this is because when the Internet first took off for the general public, the vast majority of users were purely consumers of information and not producers. They were taking from something that was already there, something that was up to something. There are, no doubt, a few senior citizens whose first encounter with the Internet came relatively late, when they were introduced to Facebook or Skype. Their first experience of the

Internet, therefore, would have been of both consumption and production of information. What if these elders had been the first to get there? What sort of metaphors would they have circulated to identify the phenomenon? There’s a good chance that those metaphors would have evoked processes instead

of objects. Had the Internet been more give-and-take when it reached

the public, we might have thought of it as a game or indeed as a second

life. But as it is, we integrated this totally new type of experience into our intuitions by analogies to objects like spider webs and highways. This is why it’s hard to think of the internet as a process, and why it’s so hard to think

of global warming as an object, even though we can make pretty persuasive ontological arguments for both being objects or both being processes.

The point is that if we want to think of a way of identifying unconventional objects that, like global warming, could have great interest and/or consequence for us, we can’t simply look for previously identified processes and then analyze them as objects. To do so would be to remain tethered to synthetic thinking—that is to say, thinking of objects only in relation to given and naturalized domains of objects. Synthetic thinking works perfectly well to make explanations and predictions from given phenomena, but it is seriously limited when it comes to identifying new phenomena altogether. For instance, when I ask what the next event on the scale of global warming might be, I’m asking for an analogy, not for a phenomenon that could be analyzed from the domain global warming.

But if I did ask it as an analytical question, I might come up with a couple of domains at first: physical qualities and social qualities. In the domain physical qualities, I could come up with a near-exhaustive list of elements, such as droughts, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and so on. I could further analyze those elements as subsets and start loading those subsets with elements. I could do the same with the domain social qualities, such as population movements, economic instability, etc. If I wanted to find the next global warming analytically, I could not start with the thing itself. I would have to choose from one of its subset domains. So, I would need to decide that I’m looking for the next global warming as either a physical or social phenomenon (or whichever domains take the primary domain as predicate).

Let’s say I decide on the domain social qualities. From there, I would need to decide upon which elements in the domain are the most important to look for in my next global warming (let’s call it GW,). Fine. Pve decided to look for population movements and sectarian conflict. As soon as I

have identified another phenomenon (GW) that contains the identical elements—population movements and sectarian conflict—I will have to climb back up the analytical ladder and see if GW, is not just another element of global warming. If it is not just another element of global warming, then it has to be an element of something more primary than global warming, of which global warming is also an element. Perhaps I decide that GW, along with global warming, belongs to a more primary domain that has already been identified, such as capitalism. From there I just need to climb back down the analytical ladder and deduce the elements of GW, from capitalism, at which point I haven’t really identified a new phenomenon at all, but only a new element or quality of capitalism.

If, however, I decide that GW, (which shares elements of global warming) belongs to something more primary than global warming but that it doesn’t belong to a more primary domain that I have already identified, such as capitalism, then there must be something totally unknown out there to which both GW, and global warming belong. Badiou describes this type of situation in terms of the difference between nomination and signification.

He explains:

A signification is always distributed through the language

of a situation, the language of established and transmitted knowledges. A nomination, on the other hand, emerges from the very inability of signification to fix an event, to decide upon its occurrence at the moment when this event [...] is on the edge of its disappearance. A nomination is a ‘poetic’ invention, a new signifier, which affixes to language that

for which nothing can prepare it. A nomination, once the event that sustains it is gone forever, remains, in the void of signification.’

Here’s another way of getting at it, furnished by Bob Dylan: You raise up your head

And you ask, “Is this where it 1s?”

And somebody points to you and says

“Tt’s his”

And you say, “What’s mine?”

And somebody else says, “Where what 1s?”

And you say, “Oh my God

Am I here all alone?””°

In the event of the nomination, something is happening, but you don’t know what it is (do you, Mr. Jones?). You might have identified the multiplicity of elements or qualities (e.g. the elements of global warming and GW) but the multiplicity itself (i.e. the domain) is unnamed and unready to circulate as a signifier in a system of knowledge.

Similar to Foucault’s empirico-transcendental doublet, once named, this new multiplicity-thing bestows significance on its elements; it becomes a subject of knowledge just like other previously identified domains, such as global warming or capitalism. In other words, we could make new explanations and predictions from the new domain, just as we can now study capitalism and global warming for their effects. Whereas new knowledge (explanations and predictions) is predicated from the nominated domain, the domain itself is predicated from the multiplicity of the “there is” (back to the singleton of the Void).

To name a revolution

Understandably, one of Badiou’s favorite examples of a true event of a nomination is the French Revolution. “Of the French Revolution as an event,” he writes:

[I]t must be said that it both presents the infinite multiple of the sequence of facts situated between 1789 and 1794, and, moreover, that it presents itself as an immanent résumé and one-mark of its own multiple. The Revolution, even if it is interpreted as being such by historical retroaction, is no less, in itself, supernumerary to the sole numbering of the terms of its site, despite it presenting such a numbering.!*° (No exegetic Dylan quotation to follow.)

The novelty of the Revolution emerges from an undecidability between the Revolution as the thing composed of all of its elements or its matter (the storming of the Bastille, the sans-culottes, etc.) and the Revolution as a form “supernumerary” to its own composition.

It’s a Buridan’s Ass kind of situation. The thing is new because it is in a metastable state between its nomination and its signification. If the Revolution is simply boiled down to the interactions of its stuff, then there is no reservoir of being for it to be a novel event, and thus the stuff of the Revolution will belong to an already-identified domain. If, on the other hand, the Revolution were just a name given by people who wanted a revolution, it would be a sign without substance, a desire mortgaged on the future. In Buridan’s thought experiment, the ass, who can’t choose between the piles of hay on either side of the road on which it is standing, starves to death. Badiou’s Revolution is a little more fortunate than the ass because, at some point, something—a revolutionary subject—recognizes it, adopts it, and feeds it, becomes its caretaker. This is called an interpretive intervention. The interpretive intervention “consists...in identifying that there has been some undecidability, and in deciding its belonging to a situation.” !! To put it another way, if the ass hadn’t been standing in the middle of the road in a state of indecision, its future caretaker would not have been able to see it.

Thus, Badiou’s event, as a metastable phenomenon identifiable by an asymmetry of its matter (its elements) and a self-similar symmetry of its form (a single multiplicity of its elements), is consistent with the general identity of objects that I have argued for. But the problem of how exactly the phenomenon/event/object is identified by another remains. Metastable symmetry explains how a thing can endure enough to be capable of being identified by another, but in the terms of Badiou’s example, how does the revolutionary subject identify the Revolution so that it can remain faithful to the Revolution? Once again, it is not always enough to identify the parts of a process and then analyze it into an object or an event.

First of all, what evidence do we have that something like an interpretive intervention in the French Revolution was projected upon the evental site, France? Here, we’re not talking about the site France as a thing contained by its hexagonal boundaries, but about “that historical situation that we call France.”!? In other words, the site of the event is itself a named multiple; it is the clutching roots that grow from the stony rubbish of an event. Indeed, if we compare England as the site of the English Revolution to France as the site of the French Revolution, it is all the more easy to see the latter

as anamed multiple, for despite the concerted efforts of the Bourbons to consolidate France as a political, linguistic and religious entity, it always struggled to achieve the island sense of identity that the English had enjoyed since even before William the Conqueror put on the crown at Winchester.'!” That the Bourbons never properly set the stage for a French revolution is evident both from 1793 counter-revolution in the Vendée and from the Republican reaction to it.! It was not enough for the Republicans to simply defeat the royalist forces there; the Comité de salut public had to destroy the region altogether (which they did with startling efficiency). The point is

that in very important ways, France as the site of the event of the French Revolution emerged coevally with the event itself. And thus, the location of an event and the site of an event remain open to one another, just as the site of an event remains open to the event itself.

The openness of the site to location seems to be what Benedict Anderson has in mind with his contention that the French Revolution became a template for nationalist revolutions thenceforth. Like Badiou, Anderson sees a universalist quality about the French Revolution that cannot be reduced to the revolution’s philosophical priming alone. Anderson, whose gesamt thesis is that the modern nation-state was made imaginable by the rise of vernacular print capitalism, attributes the universality of the French Revolution to the fact that, unlike major ideological uprisings of the past, this one occurred in print just as much as it did on the streets of Paris: “Like a vast shapeless rock worn to a rounded boulder by countless drops of water, the experience was shaped by millions of printed words into a ‘concept’ on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model.”!* The site of the event was a pure mediation, which lifted it out of its location and its historical moment. A further argument vis-a-vis Badiou could be made that the fact of the revolution’s mediation in print was the supernumerary of the multiple elements of the revolution (something that was novel about the event), but whose novelty could only be named retroactively. Whether it was the event of an interpretive intervention into the event of the Revolution or a model indurated by the printer’s press, both Badiou and Anderson seem to believe that the French Revolution became a sort of autochthonous abstraction, something totally outside the concrete instances of revolution, but to which the revolutions in France, as well as in Russia and elsewhere, referred.

Perhaps print mediation is what made the French Revolution durable enough to become a model for revolution in general; however, that is not the same as saying that print mediation made the Revolution universal, and it doesn’t account for the actual modeling of the Revolution. I would argue—and I’m far from original in doing so—that both the universality of the Revolution as well as its modeling happened outside of France. Both the modeling and universalizing began instead in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Without the Haitian Revolution, which led to the second independent republic in the Americas, the French Revolution might have been a slightly more radical species of the English Revolution, and subsequent revolutions of national liberation in the 19% century would have been perhaps less radical versions of the American Revolution.

For all the exclusionary products of modern nationalism (with which we continue to grapple), it is still clear that modern nationalism was the first ideology of the universal since the advent of Christianity, Islam, and at certain points, Buddhism. We can put ideologies of the universal into the following framework:

1. Christianity and Islam are particular universalisms. That is to say that although they wish to remake the world in their images, the world outside of Christendom or Dar el-Islam still serves a useful purpose, since proselytism is fully integrated into their identities and practices. A world without non-Christians or non-Muslims still needs particular institutional or textual authority in order to keep evil or heresy at bay, since the complete conversion of humanity does not abolish original sin or the Devil.

2. Communism (particularly with the addition of dialectical materialism) is an example of a universal universalism, in that a world without non-communists does not need a particular authority to prevent backslide. The authority of the state, which ensures its survival against non-communist systems, falls away like a spent booster rocket. Just as it seems like an impossibility for developed capitalist societies to return to feudalism or for viviparous mammals to become monotremes, once communism is universal, it does not revert to its antecessor.

3. Modern nationalism is a universal particularism. The difference between nationalism and other ideologies of the universal, as Anderson makes clear, is that “The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all members of the human race will join their nation...”!*° What nationalists do profess to believe is that every particular people should be sovereign. (Problems of course arise when there are Germans living in Czechoslovakia, Serbs in Bosnia, or Russians in Ukraine...and this is to say nothing about the contradictions of colonialism.) The particularism of nationalism, it goes without saying, did not need to be invented in Modernity, since sovereignty was already a well-developed concept. What did need to be invented in secular terms was the universality of particular nationalist sovereignty, or the idea that all of humanity is entitled to civic identity. Credit for this invention in practice is given to the French Revolution.

The traditional narrative of the Haitian Revolution, fashioned after the Carlylean Great Man thesis, focused on Toussaint L’Ouverture. L’Ouverture was styled as a sort of black Washington or Napoleon who seized his historical moment, which was presented to him in the wake of the instability caused by the revolution in France. The great Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James almost singularly overturned that narrative with his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins. In it, James argued that the revolution in Saint-Domingue was in fact a key element of the French Revolution itself, and the expulsion of Napoleon’s troops in 1804 meant that neither the Thermidorian Reaction nor 18 Brumaire were the beginning of the end of the Revolution. James saw the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (which began before 1791) as an integral part of a dialectic that allowed the revolutionaries in France to identify the spirit of their own cause. Indeed, Robespierre himself articulated what was new and universal about the Revolution by acknowledging slavery as its chief contradiction.'*” Had the Constituent Assembly acted on Robespierre’s 7 April, 1791 address (or perhaps had Robespierre suspected for a second that they would act), it would have been in the running for the most Hegelian moment in history. As it was, slavery wasn’t abolished until 1794, by which time the white planters had made alliances with the British, and the Jacobin governor, Sonthonax, had already taken it upon himself to abolish slavery in Saint- Domingue. What we see between the years of 1791 and 1794 is not a spontaneous invention and subsequent spread of nationalist universal particularism from the site France, but the emergence of a modern nationalism by way of analogy, between France and Saint-Domingue, and between revolution and revolt.

The social structure of Saint-Domingue at 1789 was both as rigid as Apartheid South Africa and as labyrinthine as post-Civil War Lebanon. The hierarchy was very much after the Spanish colonial style. At the top was the equivalent of the Spanish peninsular, the European-born administrator. 1*8 Below that were two classes of creole: grands blancs (the while planters) and petits blancs (white overseers and laborers).!*? Below that were the gens de couleur'*° or free people of mixed race. Though, mind you, the economic power of the gens de couleur often rivaled, and sometimes exceeded, that of many grands blancs, let alone petits blancs. The French had a spectacularly elaborate flow chart for the classification of gens de couleur, based on precisely 128 shades.'*! If you do the math, that works out to a record of seven generations. There were separate names for you based on just about any amount of black or white contribution to your lineage, from your parents to your 5x great-grandparents. At the bottom, of course, were black slaves, but there were also the maroons, or slaves who had escaped inland, many of whom mixed in with the remnants of the native Taino people. Take all of those strata and multiply them by the three provinces (North, West, and South), each of which had their own interests and power structures, and you might just be close to grasping the socio-political architecture of Saint- Domingue in 1789.