Realist Magic Objects, Ontology, Causality Timothy Morton Realist Magic Objects, Ontology, Causality Timothy Morton Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality New Metaphysics Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys- ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic- continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel- lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter- est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Timothy Morton Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2013 OPEN HUMANITIES PRES S www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at MPublishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2013 Freely available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13106496.0001.001 Copyright © 2013 Timothy Morton This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Design by Katherine Gillieson Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2011, used under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY). ISBN-13 978-1-60785-202-5 Contents Acknowledgments 9 List of Figures 11 Introduction 15 1. Like an Illusion 40 2. Magic Birth 110 3. Magic Life 152 4. Magic Death 188 Conclusion 222 Permissions 231 For Simon Acknowledgments First and foremost, Graham Harman brought this book into being in almost every sense. He compelled me to become an object-oriented ontologist, through the ingenious device of brilliant, seductive prose. And as series editor he has been a most helpful, generous partner in putting this book together. Ian Bogost, one of the founders of object-oriented ontology ( ), gave me the title at a highly spiced brainstorming session in Los Angeles in December 2010, and since then has shared his thinking in the most generous ways possible. There many people whose more than inspiring ideas and kind words have helped me on this project, including but not limited to: Jamie Allen, Jane Bennett, Bill Benzon, Paul Boshears, Rick Elmore, Paul Ennis, Rita Felski, Dirk Felleman, Nathan Gale, Bobby George, Thomas Gokey, Joseph Goodson, Peter Gratton, Liam Heneghan, Eileen Joy, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Douglas Kahn, Ken Reinhard, Tom Sparrow, McKenzie Wark, Cary Wolfe, and Ben Woodard. This book is dedicated to my son Simon. Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children. List of Figures Figure 1: Emergence Figure 2: Genesis of an “Achievement” Everything profound loves the mask. – Friedrich Nietzsche What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not. – Jacques Lacan 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. – Gerard Manley Hopkins 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. 1 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. 16 Timothy Morton 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.” 2 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 3 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 Introduction 17 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 García Márquez 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 18 Timothy Morton 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. 4 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.” 5 You can never know for sure, never know if it’s an illusion. “She was right though, I can’t lie.” Yet Prince