Of Houses: Object-Oriented Ecology, Continued

If there is no top object and no bottom object, it means that we have a very strange situation in which there are more parts than there are wholes! This is what Levi Bryant calls the strange mereology of objects (Ian Bogost's exploration of this is also great). Objects are like Doctor Who's Tardis: bigger on the “inside” than they are on the “outside.” This makes holism of any kind totally impossible.

This really means what it says folks. So now we'll go on to explore how, even if you bracket off a vast amount of reality, you will find that there is no top and bottom object in the small section you've demarcated.

Yes, that's right. Even if you select only a sector of reality to study, like they do in ecological science (the mesocosm), you will also find no top or bottom object, even as pertains to that sector alone. There are not even quasi-top and quasi-bottom objects, then!

It's a bit like a magnet. If you cut it, the two halves still have a north and a south pole. There is no such thing as “half” a magnet versus a “whole” one (an analogy David Bohm makes in a similar argument, which I'll discuss below).

I'm writing about this some more, since the commenter whom I'd addressed in a post about holism has now asked another highly pertinent question:

So the holism that you guys critique is an either/or version—either parts or the whole must be greater? I guess I'm wondering if there could be other possible holisms that adopt some version of both/and thinking so that neither the parts nor the whole--whatever the whole might be—are greater. I'm wondering about a relational holism that draws from thinkers like David Bohm, Emerson, and William James, so that the parts are not necessarily lesser than the whole but exist in some both/and synergistic fashion; you could have—simultaneously—“withdrawn” objects and something else (an open-ended, perhaps always-expanding something else). The latter is synergistically in addition to (and possibly partially generated/created by these objects); it doesn’t replace the objects.

First, some semi-related points about this particular series of questions. It sounds like good value to have “both–and” rather than “either–or,” to our somewhat consumerist minds (buy one get one free). But I'm afraid this is a case of either–or: holism or not.

As for the “open-ended” “something else,” for OOO this is just another object. Or it doesn't exist except as an appearance-for another object. Let me explain.

But first, in another sense the part–“whole” model OOO deals with is indeed a kind of both–and. This is the sense in which the parts are not replaceable components of the whole. The more we open up the Russian doll of an object, the more objects we find inside.

Far more than the first object in the series, because all the relations between the objects and within them also count as objects. It's what Lacanians call a not-all set. Objects in this sense are fundamentally not subject to phallogocentric rule (yay).

(Commercial break: If you're having trouble with “object” at this point, why not try another term such as “entity”?)

What we're dealing with in OOO is a Badiou-like set theory in which any number of affiliations between objects can be drawn. Strictly the contents of these sorts of set are bigger than the container. (This affects a political theory of objects as I'll show in a future post. Levi is the MC of this line of thinking so expect more references to him as we proceed.)

I often find children's books come to the rescue for explaining objects. Those of you who've heard my “Sublime Objects” talk will remember my references to Slinky Malinki. Now meet A House is a House for Me. The title couldn't be better for my argument. The text is a wonderfully jumbly plethora of objects, otherwise known as a Latour litany:

Cartons are houses for crackers.
Castles are houses for kings.
The more that I think about houses,
The more things are houses for things.

In this story a dizzying array of objects is presented. They can act as homes for other objects. And of course, in turn, these homes can find themselves on the inside of other “homes.”

“Home” then is purely “sensual”: it has to do with how an object finds itself inevitably on the inside of some other object. A “house” is the way one object experiences the object on whose interior it finds itself. So then these sorts of things are also houses:

A mirror's a house for reflections...
A throat is a house for a hum...
...
A book is a house for a story
A rose is a house for a smell
My head is a house for a secret,
A secret I never will tell. [nice withdrawal there...]
A flower's at home in a garden.
A donkey's at home in a stall.
Each creature that's known has a house of its own
And the earth is a house for us all.

The time of hyperobjects is the time during which we discover ourselves on the inside of some big objects (bigger than us, that is): Earth, global warming, evolution and so on. That's what the eco in ecology originally means: oikos, house. The last two lines of A House is a House for Me (above) makes this very clear.

Now the ruse of this story seems to be that to display its effortless brio, a lot of silly, fun “houses” are presented in the penultimate section as we hurry towards the conclusion, which then sets the record straight by talking about a “real” house, the Earth. But I shall argue that this is not the case.

This house idea is how I'd interpret David Bohm's implicate order: I'm happy to talk about it since the commenter mentions it. Bohm hypothesizes a gigantic object, comprising the entire universe, inside of which all kinds of objects such as quarks and lizards discover themselves. This object somehow “unfolds” as electrons and so forth, hence the term “implicate.”

Bohm is adamant that the implicate order, a sub-quantum level of reality, is not a holistic model. There's a simple reason for this: nonlocality. At this level objects just are other objects: they sort of bleed into one another irreducibly. So nothing is separate.

To have a holistic whole, you need separate components. Bohm's argument on this score is identical to mine. He sees holism as a form of mechanism for this reason.

Yet there are obvious ways in which Bohm's implicate order, which he thinks is a real entity, is a form of what OOO calls overmining, though not holism. Electrons are manifestations of a deeper process. This process is more real than electrons. This process is everywhere, while electrons are just local manifestions of it. Overmining would be why the implicate order is popular with those who want to posit a universal mind, or something like that.

OOO doesn't claim that any object is “more real” than any other.

But it does discount some objects, which it calls sensual objects. (Or at least my version and Harman's version do; Bryant's and Bogost's may differ on this.) If OOO ever did any work on the implicate order, it might argue that it was a sensual object, not a real one.

What is a sensual object? A sensual object is an appearance-for another object. The table-for my pencil is a sensual object. The table-for my eyes is a sensual object. The table-for my dinner is a sensual object. Sensual objects are wonderfully, disturbingly entangled in one another. This is where causality happens, for OOO, not in some mechanical basement. This is where the magical illusion of appearance happens. A mirror's a house for reflections.

(I've tested this following insight to destruction, and now is a good time to share it. And while it's not necessary if you're just following these posts, it's pretty cool if you've been following the way my thinking has developed since I wrote Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought. Yes, the mesh (the interrelatedness of everything) is a sensual object! Strange strangers are the real objects! Stay tuned for more on this.)

Some very important entities that environmentalism thinks of as real, such as nature, are also sensual objects in my book. That is, they appear “as” what they are for a certain experiencer or user or apprehender (or whatever). They are manifestations of what Graham Harman calls the as-structure.

Here's the kicker: they are as-structured even though they appear to be some kind of deep background to (human) events.

This confusion of sensual and real, in the terms of A House is House for Me, is like thinking that bread really is a house for jam, and jam alone. Rather than simply an idea that occurs to me, and perhaps to the jam, when it finds itself slathered in there.

Marmalade wants in on the bread? Too bad, marmalade is an artificial, unnatural parasite! Peanut butter? Illegal alien! Only jam is “natural,” i.e. bread is only made-for-jam. See the problem with nature?

In OOO-ese, reification is precisely the reduction of a real object to its sensual appearance-for another object. If you want to be poetic about it (or maybe more than poetic), reification is the reduction of one entity to another's fantasy about it.

Nature is a reification in this sense. That's why we need ecology without nature.

In the next post on this topic I'll argue that emergence is a sensual object. And thus it's in danger of reifying—strangely enough, given its reputation as an unreified, flowy sort of a thing. This is despite its popularity as a replacement for terms such as nature. Emergence, I shall argue, is always emergence-for.

In this slight hostility to emergence I differ from De Landa, for whom emergence is a criterion for realness, and perhaps therefore from Harman. Not sure, and I'm sure I haven't thought it all through.

But this would be why I must in the end also reject the kind of holism that argues for emergent properties. It's a little bit tangential to this post so I'll stop here.