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Realist Magic Objects, Ontology, Causality Timothy Morton

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Realist Magic Objects, Ontology, Causality Timothy Morton Realist Magic Objects, Ontology, Timothy MortonTimothy Causality Timothy Morton Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality Ontology, Objects, Realist Magic: In this book Timothy Morton, the prominent ecologist, literary theorist, and object-oriented philosopher, lures us into a magical night of objects. If things are intrinsically withdrawn, irreducible to their perception or relations or uses, they can only affect each other in a strange region of traces and footprints: the aesthetic dimension. Every object sparkles with absence. Sensual things are elegies to the disappearance of objects. Doesn’t this tell us something about the aesthetic dimension, why philosophers have often found it to be a realm of evil? OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Cover design by Katherine Gillieson · Illustration by Tammy Lu 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 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2013 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 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 www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org 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.
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