A Note On Translation: The Really
It's such a staple of object-oriented discussions, it could be a catchphrase: All relations are translations.
Cool, but are all translations the same? Of course not. To be is to differ, meaning that translation inheres processes of becoming. Even from an anti-materialist trajectory, objectal being is individualized and withdrawn, such that an object's 'sensual' profiles, to borrow Graham Harman's jargon, deploy their own terms. Perhaps something can be said about the similarity of terms deployed by categorically comparable objects, like books, but the being of my copy of The Quadruple Object, as it rests on my table in Starbucks, is agentially distinct from all other copies of the book distributed across the globe. While the relation between my copy of the text and the text sitting in, say, Timothy Morton's office exist under disparate spatiotemporal conditions, their relations with other objects differ because they are, in fact, wholly different beings. This would be true under any spatiotemporal condition, including situations in which the texts were relating to the same object. For the record, it is also true of beings relating to each other across time and space, as being, time, and space each undergo processes of becoming.
Thus, translations differ as being differs, a maxim that holds true if you're a proponent of Harman's vicarious causation, Bryant's systems approach to prehension, or any other theory of the encounter. That said, what can we deduce about the act of translating, which precedes any particular translation? First, if signifiers and the signified can be said to exist independently of one another, it follows that no logic of signification can replicate an 'original' being. Rather, if the signifier, itself, obtains independent being, then it, too, must engage relationally with the signified as a fully agential object. In this way, translation avoids universalization, as there can be no deep, subsuming experiential structure or pure nomenclature undergirding objectal encounters, contorting their agency to conform to its own qualia and occluding their independence.
Additionally, in contradistinction to language adaptation, objectal translation is a sequestered soliloquy. Many practitioners of linguistic translation, an admittedly admirable and necessary craft for intellectual exchange, contend that translation only becomes recognizable as such within the social parameters articulated by a given community. Gabriel Rockhill, for example, who first translated Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics into English, contends that:
These parameters need not necessarily impose a single model or method of translation, but they define the general coordinates within which translation can be distinguished from other discursive procedures. Each community establishes a logic of signification that presupposes a specific understanding of what meaning is, how it operates, the normative principles it should abide by, its function in social discourse, etc. Communities do, of course, come into conflict—both with themselves and with other communities—but the basic point remains unchanged: just as the translator never works in a historical vacuum, translation is never...condemned to a solitary encounter with the intractable original (Rockhill, Politics of Aesthetics, viii).
Thus, for Rockhill, textual translation involves not a mediation of meaning between signifying codes, but reconfiguration of meaning through socio-historically conditioned representational relations. Grounding specific semiotic utterances is a signifying logic that determines what meaning and language are for a given community, as well as how meaning and language interact. Yet, the idea of communal determination is anathema to the object-oriented ontologist, who holds that the withdrawn nature of objects prevents their inner being from being perfectly reformulated in the semiological realm, preventing epistemological exhaustion of one object by another. For OOO'ers, therefore, the question is: What is communicated in an encounter between objects, if not the thing-in-itself?
To begin, there's a Harmanian term for philosophies of absolute access that, concurrently, permit knowledge to completely, or dogmatically, model a world independent of the mind—naive realism—and it goes something like this: If I punch a naive realist in the face, the being of my fist directly encounters the being of the naive realist's face, with the two objects interacting as things-in-themselves in a violent burst of essential penetration that—and this is key—is completely replicable epistemologically. Following Kant's rejection of noumenal exhaustion by consciousness, naive realism has become a philosophical relic, more or less. Skip forward a few centuries to the age of object-oriented studies (damn right, it's an age) and you get the radicalization of this rejection to all objects, whereby, quoting Levi Bryant, "all communication is miscommunication," which is another way of saying that all relations are translations, if you view relation as a communicative act. Accordingly, all relations between entities implicate an ontological rift, whereby objectal encounters simultaneously affirm coexistence and finitude, without recuperating reality into any localized domain.
This rift, which I call the really, is differentiated from the principle of finitude by its insistence on the uncanniness of the encounter. Whereas finitude describes the distortion of relata by relations between non-transcendental entities incapable of complete presentation to themselves or other entities, the really magnifies the incertitude of encounters between objects that are, as I said in my previous post, neither reducible to signification nor instrumentality. The really can also be differentiated from Morton's mesh cartographically; while the mesh is the sum of all extant relations in a given spatiotemporal climate, the really is the gulf inhered in any given relation between objects. Furthermore, the really is not reducible to the mesh (a mini-mesh) or vice-versa, but, instead, connotes the space within which the relations comprising the mesh transpire. Just as Einstein's theory of general relativity demonstrated that gravity is the objectal warping and curvature of spacetime, so my contention is that objectal encounters involve a distortion of relational space, and that the constant motility of objects, or becoming, implies amplification of near perpetual distortion by agential actancy. For clarity, 'relational space' delineates a specific subset of general space, i.e. that in which objects relate to another, and operates at both the physical and conceptual level.
One caveat would be that, like Levi, I admit the theoretical possibility of 'dark objects', or objects completely withdrawn from relations with other objects. As a theoretical construct, though, these entities simply circumvent the need to cap agency and, thus, function in a manner similar to strings in M-Theory—an inferred entity, whose existence is more explanatory than observable. At any rate, the truly trippy trait of the really is that if relations between objects are real, then the relational space between, betwixt, and around objects must also be real. In this way, the really is not simply a third object functioning as an intermediary during an objectal encounter, a la Harman's thesis of vicarious causation. In contrast, the really is intimated by contingency, by the severability of encounters and assemblages. Hyperrelationism disavows the really, grinding all objects into a single, inextricable, deified relation. Contingency, on the other hand, ushers in an era of fluid dynamics, an ebb and flow of independent objects encountering absence and uncertainty, even unto encounters with the self. The anxiety induced by such uncertainty is, I submit, both horrifying and sublime. And this paradox of sublime horror is, perhaps, the really's predominant physical and conceptual theme.
Categories: Politics
Tags: object-oriented ontology translation really
I've always been skeptical about Harman's theory of vicarious causation and I really, really like that you're making an effort to address the problems of finite relatonism in an alternate way. However, you didn't explicitly disdain vicarious causation. I know that it's Harman's baby and object-oriented ontology is his thing, he's the founder, but do you reject it as well? You would seem to, given your idea of the 'really' and more spatial/conceptual exploration of relationism, though I could also see an argument that the spatiality of the 'really' can accommodate the vicarious encounters because they posit a third "real" object as an intermediary, and all relating objects, including the third intermediary object, would then be contained within the 'really'. Sorry if I'm putting you on the spot by asking you to critique your king.
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I've been pretty suspect about vicarious causation too, and for the reasons I mentioned the other day. It's infinitely regressive. If you say that objects in relation encounter each other on the interior of a third object, and that the third object is also a real object, doesn't the encounter between the relating objects and the intermediary or "vicarious" object require another third object, or set of third objects, and on and on? I agree with Will. The work that you're doing here, which I'm guessing was partly inspired by Levi Byrant's post about the gravity of objects a while back, is much more palatable. And I'm also curious about your thoughts on vicarious causation, if you don't mind sharing.
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Hillary Thayer wrote:
"I've been pretty suspect about vicarious causation too, and for the reasons I mentioned the other day. It's infinitely regressive. If you say that objects in relation encounter each other on the interior of a third object, and that the third object is also a real object, doesn't the encounter between the relating objects and the intermediary or 'vicarious' object require another third object, or set of third objects, and on and on?"
Hillary, the short answer is no, and I deal with this point explicitly in Prince of Networks.
The infinitely regressive problem is Latour's problem, not mine. Why? Because Latour thinks all relations need to be mediated *and* he thinks that actors come in only one type. This creates the infinitely regressive problem you're mentioning. If Joliot is the mediator between politics and neutrons, then what are the mediators between Joliot/politics and Joliot/neutrons? It's a real problem for Latour.
But in my model, there are real objects and sensual objects. Real and sensual can make *direct* contact, whereas real and real cannot. Hence, there is nothing infinitely regressive, there just needs to be a sensual object mediating between two real ones. The interesting implication of this is that all causation occurs in the sensual rather than the real realm. Whereas Deleuze speaks of "sterile surface effects," I am forced to regard the depths as sterile, and causality as something that is triggered in the realm of perception.
Much of the other skepticism I see about vicarious causation seems to boil down to nothing more than "it's too weird to be true that there is no direct contact." Well, there are a lot of weird ideas that turn out to be true. If you're willing to accept that all relation is translation, it follows immediately that all relation is indirect. Translation isn't just an end result, but also a starting point. It isn't that I first make *direct* contact with a tree and then somehow spit out an indirect translation as a byproduct. No, my initial contact with the tree is with a translation of the tree, not with the tree itself.
I'm not spending much time on blogs these days. Not enough time. But I check in on Kris once in awhile because he explains things so well, and just happened to run across this.
Will, you're being a bit harsh in calling me the "king" of Kris. I think his position is closer to Levi Bryant's, actually.
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Okay, that's helpful! I think the conceptual problem I'm having is that in your article about vicarious causation published in Collapse II, you said that "intentional whole" must be classified as a real object, as it exists independent of its relations to an external reality. If that's the case, must it not also withdraw in some way? I guess that's the leap I'm struggling with. Sensual objects do not withraw, but "exist side by side in the same perceptual space" (p.195), but real objects, from my understanding of your work, do withdraw. So how can the intentional third object not be withdrawn, if it is in some sense a sensual manifestation? It would seem that the third object would also be withdrawn, as a real object, even if only from intending subject. And that's where I'm having trouble getting around the idea of "intending an intention," and the regression problem. I do apologize if this seems like an utterly brickish understanding of your work and sincerely - really, really sincerely - hope you don't take my comments as disrespectful!
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I think we have to remember that 'vicarious causation' is probably the first attempt to describe objectal encounters, at least post-OOO creation. For that reason, it's the the de facto baseline against which future attempts will be judged, even if only in contrast.
I think Hilary is on to something, but I wonder if it's merely a terminological problem. For example, accounting for the space in which an object interacts with its prehension could be described not as a "real" third object, but an intentional space - I suppose, now that I think about it, my difficulty is in understanding why the intentional totality is an object at all. In the realm of signification, sure. But it would seem to beg the question of whether or not a relation is an object.
For me, the most interesting part of Graham's Collapse essay is his insistence that science hasn't come close to accounting for vicarious causation. I think he underestimates the uncertainty of quantum mechanics, in which we can never know the specific status of an event, but only probability of occurrences. To restrict causality to the sensual realm would seem to recuperate causality within "consciousness" in some sense. If that's the case, how can objects exist side by side in the sensual realm until something acts upon them. I suppose that's the answer - the action occurs in the sensual realm, not the realm of external reality. I have a hard time understanding how, like, a tsunami can destroy a city, though, if the waves never touch the buildings, but only the sensual profiles thereof.
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Graham is right in that he's nobody's "king." In fact, he'd be the first to say that you can critique someone, while holding them in the highest regard. Meillassoux is a prime example. His arguments are brilliant and we owe a lot to his anti-correlationist work, but you won't find an object-oriented thinker that agrees with, say, his historical analysis or rejection of causality.
As for vicarious causation, I'm speaking around it, not to it. I think Marisol is right to say that it's the first attempt to answer questions about objectal relations, and therefore must be taken seriously. It's also very elegant and workable for Graham's metaphysics. What you have to understand, however, is that the object-oriented movement is pretty plural, these days - that's why I refer to object oriented studies more than object-oriented ontology, viewing the one as a substrata of the other.
One of the fundamental differences between Graham's theories and my own - and this brings me closer to Levi, as he said - is my preservation of materialism. For Graham, materialism slips into idealism (see my interview with him on this site for a fuller explanation). I was intellectually raised by Deleuzeans and Foucaultians, though, and place a great deal of currency in ideas of material effects, the co-constitution of materiality, etc. It stands to reason, then, that my accounting of relations would differ from vicarious causation, in its accounting of materiality. Moreover, I'm unsure about rejecting directed access in relationality. I certainly reject naive realism, as I explained in the post, but also believe that material effects don't arise sans causation, a la Meillassoux's stance that anything can happen at anytime, and has.
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So are you accounting for the relational space between objects at the material level, as a fully material 'space', or a conceptual space with material effects, whereas Graham dismisses the material in his idea, arguing instead at the level of - to use a really bad phrase - directed perception (what is perceiving what and in what direction is the perceiver turning their gaze)? Is that sort of what you're saying?
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Er, I'm arguing that, as a materialist, the materiality of relations (as translations) must be explained, yes. Graham doesn't have this problem, since he views materialism as an idealist philosophy that undermines objects.
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In defense of vicarious causation, I haven't any other philosophy of the encounter that adequately encapsulates what Harman calls the 'asymmetry' of objects in relation to one another. That is to say, the idea that in any given relation a real object intends or prehends a sensual profile of another object, but the other object - the prehended object - does not exist as part of the relation because it remains withdrawn. I think it's important to keep in mind the 'black noise' of relations - the relation of a prehended object to other objects inhabiting the same prehension, the features of a prehended object that do not impact its being prehended as such, and most importantly the qualities required for it to be prehended as such by a prehending entity. In my perspective, the ability to account for both the prehension of an object and its withdrawal, so that the prehended object exists sensually as such for the prehending object irrespective of any real object, is vicarious causation's greatest strength. Note: prehension requires certain objectal qualities to qualify as a prehension of a given object, but these qualities are required only for the prehension, not for the real object withdrawn from prehension. And I think this can very much exist within the 'really' that Kris describes, which would become the space within which causation becomes vicarious (though this is admittedly a personal bias and not necessarily Kris's intent).
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I also don't think you can skip the obvious distinction between Harman and Meillassoux about causality, namely that Harman maintains it, albeit at the sensual level, where Meillassoux deliberately discards it. Harman isn't saying that causality doesn't exist, just that it's the product (and I use that term loosely) of object's interacting at the sensual level, that being the only level possible for objectal interaction. Objects can't fully know other objects because they can't fully "touch" other objects, but only the intention of other objects, that is to say the translation of other objects into their own terms. Therefore, any action between objects, or any consequence that occurs as a result of objects in relation to one another, is the result of objects reacting at the level of translation, and perhaps is itself a translation. I don't touch the wall when i lay my hand against it, but translate the intentional wall into conscious and hand-tactile terms. The resulting sensations are the result of my interaction with the imperfectly translated wall, not the wall as wall-in-itself. I think that's what Harman is saying, although I'm probably oversimplifying things a bit too much.
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I get that, but I think you're overlooking the question being asked, which about how a real 'third' object can both exist as the intentional sphere of relation and withdraw, as real objects are said to do. If it does withdraw, how can it not do so from the real intending object? I don't think it's a matter of parsing parts and wholes, though if it is, then the real object and third object withdraw from one another, so that the third object is also interacted with solely at the sensual level, right? There's just something conceptually tricky in understand the 'third' object as real, but totalizing (for the intending and intentional objects involved in a relation) and non-withdrawn.
Also, I think you're glossing over the discussion of observable relations. When I wash my hands, I see my hands moving beneath water coming from a faucet. So, I'm seeing objects relating, manifesting certain properties in a given situation, or what Levi Bryant would call a 'regime of attraction'. The point is that relations can be observed. I fully agree that this view is intentional, or prehended, or whatever term you want to use, but if causality redounds solely to the sensual realm, then how is it that anything can impact anything else? It would seem that we could only affect the sensual profile of a real object, not the object itself, especially since the sensual profile of an object need not correspond qualitatively - at all - to the real object with which it's associated, if such an object even exists. A hallucination is sensual, and I grant that a hallucination could exhibit certain behaviors deemed 'consequential' in that they seem to be linked to actions taken by the hallucinating entity. At the same time, a hallucination is purely fictive, so what of prehensions of objects that do exist? I would be much more comfortable saying that we have some access, direct or indirect, to a prehended object, fictive or real, and can impact its motility. But I'm a materialist like Kris, owing to the fact that we come from the same department.
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Ooh! this little object is sucking me in! No, I am receptive to its allure, therefore it (as a sensual object) touches me really on my withdrawn interior. But wait! How can I be doing this? How can I possibly have an encounter with this other real object if we are so fundamentally separated? Well. For one, the keys on my laptop (sensual objects for me) have a funny susceptibility to being tapped by fingers (sensual objects for the keys), almost welcoming the impact of my fingers on them (their allure). That's all well and good. The impact is clearly asymmetrical. What then is the problem?
Two questions jump up at me: (1) how is it possible that these two objects are in a relationship with each other; (2) why is it said that these objects can only meet on the interior of a third object (the relationship) which is also a real object? The answer to the first question, as I understand it depends vitally on the little (not) detail that Matzuzaka raised: black noise. The relating of any two objects is only possible on the interior of a third. I can only touch your hand because you are with me in my class, in this room, on this ground, on this earth, because the director of the institute told us to attend this meeting (and we didn't crash our cars on the way in), etc., etc., etc. The black noise is the vast web of objective contingencies that are peripheral but still a vital part of any causal interaction. This keeps notions of contingency forever in between the foreground and the horizon. A is not affected by B because of B but because of everything that connects A to B in the way that makes it possible for A to succumb to B's allure. For the second question, it may be helpful to think that relations between objects always exist between parts of another (often called, albeit problematically, 'larger scale') object. Of course, parts are always partial parts (they are withdrawn objects) and so no relation is totally determining of any part. At the same time it is through their joint status as parts of another object (which withdraws... into black noise?) that they have any basis for being in any kind of relationship to begin with. There is nothing mysterious about the reality of that 'larger object' any more than there is a mystery to the idea that you and your parents are connected because you are parts of a family, share the same house, are parts of a global communication network (the internet), etc. (no doubt there are many other reasons you are connected to your parents too).
Please dissect.
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I think you're misunderstanding Harman's idea of 'black noise'. It's not just that two objects only relate on the inside of the third "world" of some sort, but that they meet on the inside of third object contingent to the relation. This is one of the problems I see. If real objects must be able to exist apart from one another, how can the 'third' object of vicarious causation be called a real object, since it can't be said to exist apart from the relation?
Also, to say that relations always exist as parts of a larger whole overmines objects, in my view, as it would seem to infer that objects exists only insofar as their relations to the larger object, in contrast to what you suggest. If an object's basis for relationship only existed as part of its "joint status" within another object, then the object's powers or potential would be determined, in some sense, by the larger scale object, reducing the object's capacities, qualities, and essence to a relation to another entity, one "greater" than itself. In a way, this would exemplify Harman's caution against philosophies that simultaneously undermine and overmine objects.
What you're proposing, I think, ends up being either a process philosophy or a theory of radical interconnectedness. Either way, it's a theory that vitiates objectal independence.
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I have posted longer response to this over at my blog in case you're interested. Thanks for posing these questions.
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