[This essay is a response to Timothy Morton's "Waking Up Inside An Object," for a forthcoming issue of ELN]
– Georges Bataille
Nature is much greater than what a man can
perceive through the ordinary senses of his physical body. The hidden aspects
of nature consist of finer matter and forces. There is no unbridgeable gulf
separating the finer aspects of nature from its gross aspect. They all
interpenetrate one another and exist together.
– Meher Baba
To preserve a place is to preserve
distinction. Therefore I pray God to make me free of God, for my essential
being is above God, taking God as the origin of creatures. For in that essence
of God in which God is above being and distinction, there I was myself and knew
myself so as to make this man. Therefore I am my own cause according to my
essence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is temporal.
– Meister
Eckhart
In response to the many points addressed in Timothy
Morton’s exuberant and phenomenologically faithful description of what the
subject, among other things, is, I will try to develop the one idea which I
consider to be its most important possibility. This idea, which Morton’s
thinking both entertains and occludes, is best expressed in the negative: the subject is not a product of the universe.
Or, as the American sage Vernon Howard expresses it, “A body came into the
world, but it wasn't you.”[1]
Morton’s essay moves towards this principle insofar as it understands the
subject as deep, that is, profoundly
complicit and secretly constituted with the nature of everything. Neither a
secondary emergence from things nor a transcendental precondition for them, the
subject is universal and found everywhere as “the withdrawn strangeness of
objects as such.” At the same time, Morton’s essay moves away from the idea of
the non-produced nature of the subject insofar as it understands the subject as
flat, as everywhere ontologically the
same and essentially inessential, something that consists in nothing other than
its own withdrawnness or impotentiality to be exhausted by events and
appearances, a pure locality. Neither a self nor not a self, the subject is not
at all a real or substantial ground of anything (not a soul), but only the
hyper-situational core of that which exists in a “crowded bunch . . . of
strange strangers all the way down and all the way up,” a contingent weird
thing whose “quintessence” is the “irony” that you are hopelessly enmeshed in a
universe with no outside, drowning in “the ocean of the story.”
Staying within this flat depth or deep
flatness (depending on your perspective), Morton’s vision of the reality of the
subject hovers between mysticism and mystification, and with a correlatively
ambivalent aesthetic affect: “Infinite coexistence. The thought of it should be
truly horrible and depressing, as well as strangely funny and ironic.” On the
one hand, there is the assertion of a fundamental absolute reality, a manifold
endless all to which every individual is intimately and mysteriously bound. On
the other hand, the intimacy and mystery of this binding (of the individual to
the universal) is totally insignificant or without truth in that it marks only an
inviolable absence of access to the all. There is a deep, mystical or hidden reality,
a secret that encompasses all things, but that reality is itself mystified, a
hyper-secret that is not even negatively knowable and may well be empty or
banal: “Everything in the Universe from goldfish to intergalactic dust clouds
hides the rules of its game from all comers, including themselves.” The truth
of the subject, then, lies in its being the silent term of an inverted
tautology: the secret of everything is that everything is secret. Where
traditional mysticism is grounded in faith or intuition of an unspeakable yet subjectively
realizable absolute secret (more or less, that the self is God), Morton’s
postmodern installation of a self-secret subject is rooted in a species of
mystical identification with the sensation of being, the felt predicament of
subjectivity, such that mysticism, far from being an ultimate relation to the
universal, becomes the mystifying domain of things themselves, an uncannily
ontological world of disoriented objects: “this shared sensual space in which
objects smack, insinuate and burst into one another.” This intellectual
procedure is wholly in keeping with the way object-oriented ontology (OOO) in
general tries to realize phenomenologically
the speculative impulse as defined by Meillassoux: “we must transform our
perspective on unreason, stop construing it as the form of our deficient grasp
of the world and turn it into the veridical content of the world as such – we must
project unreason into things themselves.”[2]
In doing so, OOO effectively explodes the self-world correlation into the
manifold cosmos itself, giving paradoxical birth to a philosophically regular
endless universe composed entirely and essentially of manifest hiddenness.
I posit that what is really at stake here philosophically,
what is dramatized in the intellectual hovering between mysticism and
mystification, is a conflicted need (a mix of desire and fear) to finally let
go of, or fatally reinvent, creationism. By creationism I mean not the
religious variety, although the theology of creation is certainly relevant to
the question, especially in light of the idea of divine creation as an event of
ur-withdrawal, a withdrawal of God.[3]
I mean instead the more generalized and harder-to-shake-off sense that oneself,
along with everything else, is somehow an effect or product of a broader
expansive universe, a grand ‘out there’ whose reality is prior to and
fundamentally independent of one’s own. This belief in and perspective towards
the world as an autonomous Real which is and must be whether one is or not, as
it were, is inseparable from the general concept of subject as an individuated
entity that is subject of world and
its own event within it. The subject on this view is something produced or
created by and within the universe in an uncanny event of oneself that is typically
identified with birth: “To be born is both to be born of the world and to be
born into the world.”[4]
Thus, despite the apparently absolute, blank unintelligibility of this event,
the radical capacity of consciousness both to ignore and reject it, and the problematic
intellectual status of the creationist principle, a species of fundamentalist
creationism continues to be maintained at the level of the subject (and in the
service of identity as such) by philosophy and thinking in general. Let’s call
this subject-creationism, the idea
that the subject (and superiorly the ‘thrown’ philosophical subject as someone
who is aware of this) is a pure secondary product of the universe. What
accounts for this idea? Many would answer that it is simply patently true, a
brute and inarguable fact that one’s being oneself is an ex nihilic event or
real absurdity, a pure creation of things. I think that thinking so is only a
way of numbing and normalizing a rather amazing and ultra-dynamic phenomenon, one
that inherently demands intellectual and scientific investigation, and that
accepting that ‘it is as it appears’ is comparable to ‘knowing’ the earth is flat.[5]
Like any other anomaly, the individuated event of being requires speculative
and empirical investigation, rather than relegation to a putatively purely
metaphysical domain of mysterious final causes. My point here is not to promote
any specific alternative to this subject-creationism (e.g. metempsychotic
evolution), but to insist on the necessity and wisdom of refusing it, of
wielding thought in revolt against any closure-by-contingency of the subject’s
event. This means holding onto, as a kind of holy trinity of individuation, all
three seemingly contradictory principles indicated by the epigraphs above,
juggling or maintaining simultaneously in circulation that: 1) one is an
absolute alien; 2) everything is coexistent and differentially touching in the
all; 3) oneself and the universe are equiprimordial. Among the many related obstacles
and acrobatic deficiencies this task presents, two deserve special comment:
history and philosophy.
The problem of subject-creationism obviously concerns
postmedieval developments in the idea of the subject, the shift from cosmo-centricity
to cosmo-eccentricity, for example, as well as the broader insidious
institution of temporal history, human and otherwise, as the prime location or stage
of the subject. Of this, the topical transition from place to time in Petrarch’s
mountain summit meditation is a suitable icon: “Hence a new thought occupied my
mind, one which shifted my focus from place to time.”[6]
This shift is also foundational for later forms of cosmic horror that explore
the essential impossibility of the subject, as indicated by Lovecraft’s
definition of time as “the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing
in the universe.”[7] Yet
to historicize the subject, to treat it as itself a matter of time, also risks/intends
evading and repressing the problem, disserving its ungraspable real immediacy
in the name of a contextual understanding that only defers the real of
subjectivity, its now, into a hallucinatory future-present. Whence Nietzsche’s
critique of the “noble faith” of philology, “that for a sake a few who always
‘will come’ but are not there, a very great deal of painstaking, even unclean
work needs to be done.”[8]
The contradiction inherent to this dynamic of temporal avoidance is symptomized
in the present age’s conjunction of historicism and escapism. The more the
unitary fact of being-subject is coopted by the story of a singular-multiple we, the more intense the imperative to
escape, precisely as a negative means of experiencing that fact, given that
escape is an intimate exponent of the negativity of coming-to-be: “escape is the need to
get out of oneself, that is, to break
that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi]
is oneself [soi-même]. . . . It is being itself or the ‘one-self’ from
which escape flees, and in no wise being’s limitation. In escape the I flees
itself, not in opposition to the infinity of what it is not or of what it will
not become, but rather due to the very fact that it is or that it becomes.”[9]
A particularly sneaky philosophical form of
escape, or pseudo-escape, one that is also proper to historicism itself, is to maintain
categorically that being has no summit, no position wherein it is perfectly
disclosed to itself, that all being is a being-within something else, and that
to behold and attempt a summit is a dangerous and irresponsible delusion. Stay where you are, this exile is home.
The imperative is rhetorically powerful, and full of creative and contrary possibilities,
but it will never blind me to the inexhaustible unhomeliness of this life, the
literally essential error of ‘being’ a subject. On this point, Morton’s subject
appears to surf an exciting wave between terror and freedom that flows upon the
sea of an endless within, dancing to
gnostic jazz in a mood of mobile, nomadic claustrophobia. Waking up inside an
object is Lovecraftian – “I know not where I was born, save that the castle was
infinitely old and infinitely horrible”[10]
– but also liberating and fun because it takes place with the idea that there
is no outside, only an infinite enclosure whose extent ruptures enclosure’s
very possibility and meaning. Instead of the Nietzschean awakening to the
absence of a selfless outside and the sonic pleasure of forgetting so – “For me—how
could there be something outside of me? There is no outside! But we forget this
with all sounds; how lovely it is that we forget!”[11]
– we are presented its inverse: there is nothing that the self is not within
(in the restricted sense) and the truth of music is to awaken us to this
emergent fact – “A terrible signal, too weak to even recognize” (Talking
Heads). From the historical point of view, this is an interesting and
significant move in that it neo-medievalizes subjectivity, restoring it to
cosmic place and rescuing it from the blindness of anthropocentric history. Yet
by investing so much ontological capital in the within, the move inescapably betrays its own condition of
possibility, namely, that the consciousness of being within is proof of being
without. Or as Plotinus put it, “Soul is not in the universe, on the contrary
the universe is in the Soul.”[12]
Historicism’s
buttressing of subject-creationism is of a piece with what François Laruelle
has with ruthless eloquence criticized as philosophical
decision, the impure decision to philosophize, to treat reality as there
for philosophy, as its object, and thus also transcendentally ‘create’ the
philosophical subject. “The philosophical Decision is an operation of
transcendence which believes (in a naïve and hallucinatory way) in the
possibility of a unitary discourse on Reality. . . . To philosophize is to
decide Reality and the thoughts that result from this, i.e. to believe to be
able to order them in the universal order of the Principle of Reason (Logos).”[13]
The decision is hallucinatory in the sense that it forecloses the Real in the
name of philosophy, giving instead a World which is “a mixture of the
(hallucinated) Real and of the philosophical logico-real,” a World
constitutionally opposed to the real Real or “the One . . . the real insofar as
it forecloses all symbolization (thought, knowledge, etc.).”[14]
Philosophy is thus profoundly and significantly bound to the subject who thinks
itself away from, forgets to inherit, and abandons its own immanent and perhaps
infinite reality, who sees and identifies itself as created in the image of the world. This is precisely the substance of the quarrel
between philosophy and mysticism, as Laruelle articulates: “Philosophy is this
organon, this a priori form which, giving us the World, forecloses the
mystical experience which intrinsically constitutes humans and which is a
question of rediscovering, not in its reality which has never abandoned us, but
on the mode of thought and by the non-philosophical force of the latter.”[15]
The
abandonment of subject-creationism thus opens itself as a proper avenue for the
application of non-philosophical thought, a way to newly exit and enter this
place around the pivot of an essential error, embracing, as Reza Negarestani
calls it, the folly of the impossible:
“averting the path of the state or capitalism is no longer a matter of treason
or disobedience but the folly of the impossible – trying to walk away from the
world. . . . only by
rigorously embracing this folly can we develop a genuine non-restricted
dialectical synthesis with the universal absolute and unbind a world whose
frontiers are driven by the will of the open and whose depths are absolutely
free.”[16]
Here one may take a hint from the mystic who, in desperate flirtation with
refusal of the ‘gift of being’,[17]
wrestles createdness to the ground and finds the summit where one is “neither
oneself nor someone else.”[18]
There is no
contradiction between embracing this folly and one’s neighbor, a not-so-strange
stranger.
[1] Vernon Howard, Your Power of Natural Knowing (New Life
Foundation, 1995), 164.
[2] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 82.
[3] For example: “The doctrine of tzimtzum, of God’s self-limitation,
states that the primeval act of creation by God was not one in which the
Infinite left its mysterious depths, an act of emanation from within to
without, . . . but that this primal step was in fact ‘the contraction of the
Infinite from Himself to Himself, an act of self-gathering and contraction
within Himself in order to create the possibility of the processes of the world”
(Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility of
Jewish Mysticism in Our Time [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,
1997], 151). The principle of divine withdrawal is also proper to the
emanationist model of creation: “[T]he very cause of the universe . . . is
also carried outside of himself . . . He is . . . enticed away from his
transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does
so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless,
within himself” (Pseudo-Dionysius, The
Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem [New York: Paulist
Press, 1987], Divine Names, 4.13,
p.82).
[4] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 527.
[5] Two promising lines of inquiry
that cannot be pursued here come to mind: 1) The question of a structural
analogy between flat ontologies and flat earth theories. What is the new
experience that would discover the real curvature behind OOO? 2) The question
of the analytical applicability of OOO to the fact of individuation. Is
individuation an object?
[6] Francesco Petrarca, Ascent of Mount Ventoux: the Familiaris IV,
I (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2006), 101.
[7] H.P. Lovecraft, “Notes on
Writing Weird Fiction” (1937), cited from Benjamin Noys, “Horror Temporis,” Collapse 4 (2008): 277.
[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine
Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99,
[9] Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003), 55. See also Nicola Masciandaro, “The Sorrow of Being,” Qui Parle 19 (2010): 9-35.
[10] H.P. Lovecraft, “The Outsider,” .
[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del
Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 175.
[12] Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson
Publications, 1992), 472.
[13] François Laruelle, Dictionary of
Non-Philosophy, trans. Taylor Adkins (n.p., 2009), 56.
[14] Ibid., 88, 86.
[15] Ibid., 53.
[16] Reza Negarestani,
“Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism,”
unpublished.
[17] As described, for example, in The Cloud of Unknowing: “Alle men
han mater of sorow, bot most specyaly he felith mater of sorow that wote and
felith that he is. Alle other sorowes
ben unto this in comparison bot as it were gamen to ernest. For he may make
sorow ernestly that wote and felith not onli what he is, bot that he
is. And whoso felid never this sorow, he may make sorow, for whi he felid yit
never parfite sorow” (The Cloud of
Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher [Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1997], 43: 1554-61, my emphasis).
[18] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, Mystical Theology, 1011A, p.137.
Posts
