Realist Magic

Front matter

Realist Magic Objects, Ontology, Causality

Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality

New Metaphysics

Contents

Acknowledgments 9

List of Figures 11

1. Like an Illusion 40 2. Magic Birth 110 3. Magic Life 152

Introduction

Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear

Nature loves to hide.

— Heraclitus

I love the disturbing corniness of the P.M. Dawn song “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” and the accompanying video, in particular the extended mix that features footage from Spandau Ballet’s song “True,” which provides the backbone of the tune.' The corniness of the tune and the video is a little threatening, and it has a personal resonance for me. I heard it emanating over and over again from my brother’s bedroom, in the summer of 1992, while he was rapidly descending into schizophrenia.

It was so sad to watch Steve doing this: it was as if he was saying goodbye to his mind. He kept listening to it over and over. And of course, that’s what the song does: it attends to an affective state, memory bliss, over and over, as a way to say goodbye to someone—or to hold them in mind, not letting go. We just can’t be sure. It’s why the song works. It’s a hip-hop song, made of pieces of other songs, samples. The song is almost like something you’d sing over one of your favorite records, a cherished object you play over and over again. And of course these pieces of objects are also elegiac, also about holding on to the feeling of something slipping away, being faithful, being true, but knowing that you are losing something. Treasuring an illusion, while kissing it goodbye. I found this so poignant in my brother’s listening to this tune, my own cherished memory of my brother which I turn over and play again and again, reciting it to you now, like an ancient Greek rhapsode, the original rappers, the guys who memorized swathes of Homer and Hesiod and, as they say of musicians, interpreted them.

The song is a reading, an interpretation, of a Spandau Ballet song (“True”), which itself seems to be trying to copy or evoke something, to do justice to something, in the way that Number 1 hits so often do, as if they were busy quoting one another in some strange heaven for pop tunes. Prince Be certainly knows how to allude to everything, from Joni Mitchell to Wham!’s “Careless Whisper” to the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum,” quaintly renamed “Christina Applecake,” to his own song “Reality Used to be a Friend of Mine.” There is even a cameo shot of Julian Lennon, from his tribute to his father, “It’s Too Late for Goodbyes.”?

You could almost believe that the lost objects are right here—and they are right here, in the form of colors, sounds, words—one inside the other like Russian dolls: that inset piece of Spandau Ballet, corniest of New Romantic songs (there you go again: new Romantic), displaced amidst the strange psychedelia of P.M. Dawn, yet paid homage to at the same time. And yet those aesthetic forms are about absence and loss and illusion. Something is gone, and my fantasy of that thing is gone. Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality. Yet here it comes again, that chorus, endlessly sampled—at least for the six minutes of eternity that the song carves out. You feel set adrift in the periodic cycling of presence, of the present, of a present that is full of absence, hesitation, mourning. In this respect, Prince Be might be the reincarnation of William Wordsworth.

Things are there, but they are not there: “That’s the way it goes.” The line suggests how things function, how they execute, how they have already disappeared. They have withdrawn, yet we have traces, samples, memories. These samples interact with one another, they interact with our us, they crisscross one another in a sensual configuration space. Yet the objects from which they emanate are withdrawn.’ This doesn’t mean that in every object there are, say, subsections 1, 2 and 3 and then Mystery Subsection 4 (the withdrawn section). This thought assumes objects can be broken into pieces somehow. Withdrawal means that at this very moment, this very object, as an intrinsic aspect of its being, is incapable of being anything else: my poem about it, its atomic structure, its function, its relations with other things ... Withdrawal isn’t a violent sealing off. Nor is withdrawal some void or vague darkness. Withdrawal just is the unspeakable unicity of this lamp, this paperweight, this plastic portable telephone, this praying mantis, this frog, this Mars faintly red in the night sky, this cul-de-sac, this garbage can. An open secret.

The title of this book is a play on the literary genre of magic realism. Later in the twentieth century, writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez developed a writing that incorporated elements of magic and paradox.

In magic realist narratives, causality departs from purely mechanical functioning, in part to resist the seeming inevitability of imperialist “reality,” in part to give voice to unspeakable things, or things that are almost impossible to speak according to imperialist ideology. Realist Magic argues that reality itself is not mechanical or linear when it comes to causality. Indeed, causality is a secretive affair, yet out in the open—an open secret. Causality is mysterious, in the original sense of the Greek mysteria, which means things that are unspeakable or secret. Mysteria is a neuter plural noun derived from muein, to close or shut. Mystery thus suggests a rich and ambiguous range of terms: secret, enclosed, withdrawn, unspeakable. This study regards the realness of things as bound up with a certain mystery, in these multiple senses: unspeakability, enclosure, withdrawal, secrecy. In this book I shall be using these terms to convey something essential about things. Things are encrypted. But the difference between standard encryption and the encryption of objects is that this is an unbreakable encryption. “Nature loves to hide” (Heraclitus).

The title Realist Magic is also meant to provoke thoughts about philosophical realism, the idea that there are real things. Realism is often considered a rather dull affair, with all the panache and weirdness on the antirealist side of the debate. We shall see that this is far from the case. The trouble with many theories of causality is that they edit out a quintessential element of mystery. Moreover, this might be a defining feature of theories of causality. It seems elementary that a theory of causality should put “understanding” in the place of mystery. Causality theories are preoccupied with explaining things away, with demystification. A theory of cause and effect shows you how the magic trick is done. But what if something crucial about causality resided at the level of the magic trick itself?

To think this way is to begin to work out an object-oriented view of causality. If things are intrinsically withdrawn, irreducible to their perception or relations or uses, they can only affect each other in a strange region out in front of them, a region of traces and footprints: the aesthetic dimension. Let us explore an example.

P.M. Dawn’s song “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” is disturbingly sweet, yet a strange sound cuts through the sweetness. A high-pitched glockenspiel sound, a periodic sound. A cycling sound, like the sound of a musical box. A slightly maddening sound. The notes are strange, pitched oddly, dissonantly, in relation to the soothing sway of the Spandau Ballet sample. Like a broken children’s toy, something slightly mad, something slightly threatening. Sparkling as it rotates, a cold sliver of death, an absence of affect. No warm blood in that sound, it’s a broken object stuck in repetition, atonal, slightly reminiscent of the beginning bars of Pierrot Lunaire.

That musical box rotation is the secret of the whole song—a sense of being stuck, of coexisting with these cycling processes. Grief is the photograph of an object buried deep inside you: every so often it releases some of its photons into the bloodstream. Grief is the footprint of something that isn’t you, archaeological evidence of an object. Freud said that the ego is the record of abandoned object cathexes.* Like a petrified slab of ancient mud with a dinosaur’s footprint in it. Like a glass whose shape was molded by blowers and blow tubes and powdered quartz sand. Every aesthetic trace, every footprint of an object, sparkles with absence. Sensual things are elegies to the disappearance of objects.

That sound, that broken musical box coldness, is the echo of a nonhuman world. A little fragment of the nonhuman, embedded in the soft warmth, indigestible. As if you could wipe away all the other sounds on the record and you would just be left with that. It intrudes. Yet it’s so much more delicate, so much more childish, so much more just pure twinkling, than anything else.

Doesn’t this tell us something about the aesthetic dimension, why philosophers have often found it to be a realm of evil? The aesthetic dimension is a place of illusions, yet they are real illusions. If you knew for sure that they were just illusions, then there would be no problem. But, as Jacques Lacan writes, “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not.” You can never know for sure, never know if it’s an illusion. “She was right though, I can’t lie.” Yet Prince

Be is so tuned to the possibility that he could be seduced by the memory: “An eye for an eye, a spy for spy, / Rubber bands expand with a frustrating sigh ... I feel for her, I really do.” I know this much is true. Reality is like an illusion, with the stress on that ambiguous Jike.

Intense yet tricksterish, the aesthetic dimension floats in front of objects, like a group of disturbing clowns in an Expressionist painting or a piece of performance art whose boundaries are nowhere to be seen. Prince Be has a very fine sense of this when he says “I think it’s one of those déja vu things, / Or a dream that’s trying to tell me something ... Reality used to be a friend of mine.” It’s a maddening dimension for my brother, who finds it hard to look at pictures of smiling Buddhas, because he thinks they are enjoying the confusion too much. They aren’t quite sincere, there must be something wrong with them, that Mona Lisa enigma could conceal a void, absolutely nothing at all, or a meontic void, a nothingness. Just a smile. If there are only objects, if time and space and causality, as I shall argue, emergent properties of objects—if all these things float “in front of” objects in what is called the aesthetic dimension, in a nontemporal, nonlocal space that is not in some beyond but right here, in your face—then nothing is going to tell us categorically what counts as real and what counts as unreal. Without space, without environment, without world, objects and their sensual effects crowd together like leering figures in a masquerade.

With their claustrophobic intimacy, this crowd of Expressionist things prevents anything like an “ideology of the aesthetic” from forming. In this book the aesthetic just isn’t optional candy on top of objects, nor is it some dating service that bonds them together (since they are ontologically separated). As part of the project of object-oriented ontology (000), the philosophy whose first architect is Graham Harman, this book liberates the aesthetic from its ideological role as matchmaker between subject and object, a role it has played since the days of Kant.

Realist Magic is an exploration of causality from the point of view of object-oriented ontology. I argue that causality is wholly an aesthetic phenomenon. Aesthetic events are not limited to interactions between humans or between humans and painted canvases or between humans and sentences in dramas. They happen when a saw bites into a fresh piece of plywood. They happen when a worm oozes out of some wet soil. They happen when a massive object emits gravity waves. When you make or study art you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality. The aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension. It still astonishes me to write this, and I wonder whether having read this book you will cease to be astonished or not.

The advantages of such an approach are manifold, but perhaps the best is that this approach to causality can include all kinds of phenomena that other theories have trouble with. An 000 theory of causality can, for instance, include shadows and fear, language and lipstick, alongside billiard balls and photons.

The reason why art is important is that it’s an exploration of causality, which as we know since post-Newtonian physics involves a lot more than just little metal balls clunking one another ... entities interact in a sensual ether that is (at least to some extent) nonlocal and nontemporal.° That’s how objects can influence one another despite the fact that they are enclosed from all forms of access, as my argument will outline. So when old fashioned art criticism speaks of timeless beauty, it is saying something quite profound about the nature of causation, not about spuriously universal human values.

Even if we rule out plausible causal sequences like “His anger made him hit the irritating old man” and focus only on “physical” causation, there are some mysterious things that seem to manifest in the causal realm that an 000 approach can explain quite well. Aesthetic-causal nonlocality and nontemporality should not be surprising features of the Universe. Quantum physics notwithstanding, even electromagnetic fields and gravity waves are nonlocal to some extent. At this moment, gravity waves from the beginning of the Universe are traversing your body. Maxwell and other pioneers of electromagnetism imagined the Universe as an immense ocean of electromagnetic waves. And then of course there’s the real nonlocal deal—the quantum mechanical one. Consider the aesthetic shape of an electromagnetic field (how birds navigate, using tiny quantum magnets in their eyes).’ Since at this level matter just is information, theoretical physics is already in an aesthetic conceptual space. Even the atomist Lucretius imagined causality working through aesthetic “films” emitted by objects.’ But the arguments in this book go beyond a fanciful exploration of theoretical physics. They can be applied to any sort of entity whatsoever, not just the kind the physicists study.

One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things. The basic quantum level phenomenon of action at a distance happens all the time. Thinking of a black hole is far safer than being in the vicinity of one, yet somehow thinking links us to it. Bertrand Russell denies physical action at a distance, arguing that causation can only be about contiguous things. If there is any action at a distance, he argues, then there must be some intervening entities that transmit the causality. In a wonderful passage

Russell argues thus:

[W]hen there is a causal connection between two events that are not contiguous, there must be intermediate links in the causal chain such that each is contiguous to the next, or (alternatively) such that there is a process which is continuous.”

Yet isn’t this an elegant definition of the aesthetic dimension? Action at a distance happens all the time if causation is aesthetic. What is called consciousness is action at a distance. Indeed, we could go so far as to say that consciousness-of anything is action at a distance. Empirical phenomena such as mirror neurons and entanglement bear this out. Thus to be located “in” space or “in” time is already to have been caught in a web of relations. It is not that objects primordially “occupy” some existing region of spacetime, but that they are caught in the fields of, and otherwise “spaced” and “timed” by other entities. Minimally, what physics calls action at a distance is just the existence-for-the-other of the sensual qualities of any entity—an argument this book shall elucidate as we proceed.

Now in Plato’s time they used to call action at a distance demonic. It was the action of demonic forces that mediated between the physical and nonphysical realms of existence. This is what Socrates says about art in the Ion: he compares art to a magnet in a string of magnets, from the Muse, goddess of inspiration, to the artist, to the work, to the performer, to the audience, all magnets linked by some demonic force.'° We call this demonic force electromagnetism, but it’s remarkably similar to Plato’s insight: the electromagnetic wave transmits information over a distance; a receiver amplifies the information into music coming through the speakers of the PA system so you can hear P.M. Dawn. In an age of ecological awareness we will come again to think of art as a demonic force, carrying information from the beyond, that is, from nonhuman entities such as global warming, wind, water, sunlight and radiation. From coral bleaching in the ocean to the circling vortex of plastic bags in the mid Atlantic.

The trouble is, all this art is a translation, a metaphor for something. There is a profound ambiguity in the notion of interpretation, which Socrates notes. What is a just interpretation? What is justice, when it comes to a work of art? Socrates decides that a work of art isn’t an accurate picture of something. It’s a performance of something, some inner demonic force. And when the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra interprets a Mahler symphony, it doesn’t mean that they tell you exactly what it means. They just play it. Yet within interpretation as performance and delivery we encounter a further ambiguity: between spontaneity, something emerging seemingly from nothing and reading, skill, expertise. Improvisation, as Derrida pointed out, is a kind of reading in which reading and writing are not so easy to distinguish. “The camera pans the cocktail glass, Behind a blind of plastic plants ... ” (“Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”). Why this deep ambiguity? Because the aesthetic dimension just is an ambiguous self-contradictory, tricksterish, illusion dimension; any theory that edits this out isn’t worth the candle.

You start to read yourself, as a performer. Miles Davis asserted—at least this was attributed to Miles Davis, perhaps it’s simply one of those sayings that float around in the demonic aesthetic dimension—that you have to play a long time to sound like yourself. Improvisation is music that listens to itself. It tunes. Art is a tuning, a Stimmung. And in an age of decisive awareness of nonhumans—that is, in an age when even instrumentalists such as Richard Dawkins and Republican Congresspeople have to mop their brows when global warming causes a heatwave—ecological art is going to be more and more about this kind of tuning.

That’s the trouble with tuning. It’s not about correct or incorrect interpretation, though surely some interpretations are better than others, since there are real objects. Like in jazz, a better solo would reveal something about the metal and the curvature and the size and the spittle of a trumpet; a good solo is when the instrument takes you over.'! When the audience applauds an incredible solo, they are trying to touch the inside of a trumpet. The fact that trumpets can be manhandled in this way—or are they trumpet-handling humans?—to release what Harman calls their “molten core,” tells us something about objects in general.'* Because this never works absolutely—no solo ever exhausts the trumpet—there is that feeling that there is always more of the object than we think. One object—say an oud, a lute—can be attended to, attuned to, in different ways that bring out strange hidden properties of that object. In this sense playing an oud is like doing phenomenology. You are attending to the inner structure of the object, allowing yourself to be taken over by it. An oud is roughly the same object as a lute. How come you can get such different sounds from it, such different translations? The answer is the way things withdraw from total access. And this would be why Le Trio Joubran kills with their ouds, while a good player of Dowland is merely exquisite. Because there are real ouds, real lutes, no matter whose fingers are sliding up and down their necks.

It’s not about adopting some position outside of the universe, some perfect meta position, some perfect attitude. That is just impossible, in an object-oriented universe, and in the current ecological emergency, just unfeasible. Even if you go to Mars, you are going there in relation to the emergency on planet Earth, as Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels make so painfully clear. No, when you tune you are making another object. Tuning is the birth of another object: a tune, a reading, an interpretation. A rhapsodic rap about listening to Spandau Ballet and remembering your ex-lover. Every tune becomes an elegy for the disappearance, that is, the fundamental ontological secrecy, of an object or objects.

Yet when you tune, real things happen. You are affecting causality. You are establishing a link with at least one other actually existing entity. You are painting a black hole—the black hole is here, its horrifying opacity is right here, in the painting, yet not here. You are doing a drip painting: you are dripping about paint, like the way writing about music is like dancing about architecture. In 000 terms, this is what all objects are doing with each other. After all, no object truly contacts another one. They really only share what Harman calls their “notes.” So architecture columns (or whatever it does) about human relationships. And dogs sniff about trees (nicely, “about”

can also mean “around”). And pencils pencil about pencil sharpeners. The storm storms concerning the chimney it blows through. The calculator calculators concerning the bank balance I’m anxious about. The birds bird about the BP oil slick, telling us about it in bird metaphors. The train trains about the flash of lightning. The camera on the side of the track cameras about it. The photon photons about the electron. And weather weathers about global warming. And writing writes about music. Just like dancing about architecture.

Paintings have always been made of more things than humans. They have been made of paint, which is powdered crystals in some medium such as egg white or oil. Now when you put the painting on the wall, it also relates to the wall. A fly lands on it. Dust settles on it. Slowly the pigment changes despite your artistic intentions. We could think of all these nonhuman interventions as themselves a kind of art or design. Then we realize that nonhumans are also doing art all the time, it’s just that we call it causality. But when calcium crystals coat a Paleolithic cave painting, they are also designing, also painting. Quite simply then, the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension, which in turn means that it is also the vast nonlocal mesh that floats “in front of” objects (ontologically, not physically “in front of”).

You are working directly with people’s optic nerve and field of vision, as in a Bridget Riley painting. You cause the optical system to vibrate, creating interference patterns. Your painting is a device, a machine, an object that has causal effects. In reality. Aboriginal Australian painter Yukultji Napangati makes devices that scintillate in just this way, that lurch towards you in front of the painting, that threaten your sense of propriety. Napangati was one of the nine people who walked out of the Outback in 1984, some of the last Neolithic humans on Earth. This is what she makes: devices to talk to the spirit world, to allow the demonic force to assault you. In the flesh, not so much in a jpeg, they act like a dozen superimposed Bridget Rileys: the patterns just interlock and suggest layer upon layer of movement and hypnotic scintillation. They are frightening. And they are also paintings of where a small group of women wandered over some sandhills, doing a ritual here, digging for some roots there. An interpretation.

Objects and Non-Objects: p A =p

The demonic aesthetic and the demonic causal are just a whisper apart from one another in thinking. Descartes worries precisely about action

at a distance: perhaps he is being controlled by demons.’ His refusal to accept this possibility leads to the cogito. Descartes mistrusts the sense of being deceived, using the Law of Noncontradiction to eliminate it. Many philosophers reproduce the bright line Descartes draws here, including speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux, who separates reason from belief with a laser-like certainty.'*, This separation has to do with real things that are not just thoughts in the (human) mind. Meillassoux argues that the stability of the universe makes it appear (but only appear) as if it could not have arisen by chance.

Yet physics argues that the appearance of stability is a function of randomness. Random patterns are the ones that seem regular. Clumping is a feature of true randomness. Meillassoux seems to take the idea that randomness equals instability, just like those he is refuting. He decides to eject the idea of randomness, because it implies some order, some law—he is trying to prove that there is no reason why things happen. This is only the case with mechanistic systems, such as dice (Meillassoux’s example) and billiard balls (Hume). Quantum entanglement is truly random. What does this mean? It means for instance that in certain highly repeatable conditions the likelihood of a photon being polarized in a certain direction is totally uncertain before a “measurement” takes place. This is why quantum phenomena are incredibly good at generating random numbers.

“Totally uncertain” means that no matter how much information you have, you won’t be able to predict the state of the photon. This is patently not the case with dice and billiard balls. Totally uncertain means uncertain in itself, rather than when we measure. One explanation for this total uncertainty is that a photon is in two or three different orientations simultaneously. This violates what Meillassoux takes to be the fundamental law (the one law he chooses not to violate), the Law of Noncontradiction. What does this violation mean? It means that you sure can apply “probabilistic reasoning” to the universe, and that far from being “meaningless” (Meillassoux), this is how incredibly basic things seem to operate."

What would it mean not to eliminate the demonic dimension from causality? I do not encounter patterns and relations that are resolved in my mind into paintings, mud and glasses. These things encounter me directly, as themselves. But more precisely, every entity throws shadows of itself into the interolyective space, the sensual space that consists of relations between objects, carving out its own version of Plato’s cave. It is like the poem by

Gerard Manley Hopkins that provides one of this book’s epigraphs:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself} myself it speaks and spells,

Crying, What I do is me: for that I came.'®

This myself has an uncanny dimension. Like the person who assures you they are being sincere, can we ever really believe that objects don’t play tricks with us? Again: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not.”’’ Duns Scotus speaks of the haecceity of a thing, its thisness, and Hopkins translates this into verse.!® Yet the thisness is not imposed from without, objectively. It wells up from within. Hopkins himself says so explicitly: What I do is me. Quite so: it is a case of I versus me. In this difference between a reflexive and a nonreflexive personal pronoun, we detect archaeological evidence of the Rift (Greek, chorismos) between a thing and its appearance. That concept, the Rift (I shall now begin to capitalize it), is highly significant in this book.

What Hopkins gives us then is not a brightly colored diorama of animated plastic, but a weird stage set from which things stage their unique version of the Cretan Liar Paradox: “This sentence is false.” To speak otherwise is to have decided in advance what things are, which contradicts the way the poem itself forces us to experience things. “Tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones” are felt and heard before we hear what they have to say for themselves against the walls of the well and in the deep water within: the first line is an invisibly hyphenated adjective, tumbled-over-rimin-roundy-wells. The adjective takes almost as long to read as it might take for an average stone to hit the water. The adjective draws out the stone, just as the dragonflies “draw flame.” The stone becomes its tumbling, its fallinginto-the-well, the moment at which it is thrown over the rim. Then splash— it’s a stone alright, but we already sensed it as a non-stone.

All the things by which we specify the object are not the object. By we I mean humans, lavatory brushes, quasars and durum wheat, and the object in question itself. We have a very strange situation then, in which there are objects, and there are qualities and relations between these objects and other objects. There is a chérismos, an irreducible gap. Qualities and relations are much the same thing, since they are born in interactions between the object and 1+7 other things. A cinder block is hard and cold to a fly, it’s stubbly to my finger, it’s fragile to a well-placed karate chop. It’s invisible to a neutrino. Think about a zero-degree dark object, some object that may or may not be behind a red curtain. It strictly has no qualities for us, yet this very lack of relationship is itself a kind of relationship, as if the dark object radiated some kind of energy that passed through us.