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Every Thing is an Iceberg

March 29, 2011

Against a kind of phenomenological sufficiency wherein the synthesis of intentional objects–phenomenological essences–in perception constitutes the totality of what we consider to be the ontological constitution of objects and events, it is necessary to consider objects in excess of our sensory relation or perceptual correlation with them, thinking that which is (in) an object yet remains imperceptible despite our interaction with it. This position sets itself apart from positions wherein not only what can be known of a thing or object is limited to our sensory correlation or interaction with it, but its ontological constitution is equally constrained, a position wherein the in-itself remains a sensory correlation. This latter position, specifically orientated towards a notion of sound-itself, is clearly expressed in Salomé Voegelin‘s statement that:

Between my heard and the sonic object/phenomenon I will never know its truth but can only invent it, producing a knowing for me. This knowing is the experience of sound as temporal relationship. This ‘relationship’ is not between things but is the thing, is sound itself (Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, 5).

The position I wish to occupy is one that seeks a dissolution of the sensory constitution of the in-itself towards a notion of infraesthetics. It is only by directing our attention to that which remains in excess of the constitutive thresholds of perception that we can grasp the infraesthetic implications of objective intensities. There is always something of the object that remains in excess, beyond the thresholds of perception, a position that requires an object to be thought as being primarily in excess, in-itself anterior to its being for-us. It is this point of excess that I have previously tried to express in the notion of a non-cochlear sound object, that which remains in excess, in-itself and inaudible within a sound.

Where the sound object is considered to be primarily in excess of its audibility, in-itself anterior to its being for-us, audition concerns itself with those impacts that ‘poke through’ or leave an impression within the ‘phenomenal realm’. Graham Harman nicely describes the phenomenal realisation or rendering of objects in this way: ‘we must discover how real objects poke through into the phenomenal realm [...] the various eruptions of real objects into sensuality’ (Harman, Vicarious Causation, 181).

Where the sound object is thought in excess of its audition, its phenomenal rendering can be thought as a kind of subtractive synthesis, only those quantities within the complex sound object that find or excite a resonance within the ear are rendered audible, and those within the flesh haptic; there are components of this auditory event that remain both inaudible and imperceptible, that which remains sound in-itself. Perhaps counter to the object orientated ontology put forward by Harman, at this point I’m inclined to assume the position of a recursive dissolution of objective consistency whereby the sound object is in-itself nothing–but the particular exposition of this point can wait for another time. That which is heard is only part of the object or event (or perhaps objectile), that which–as a minimum or base requirement–excites a receptive capacity, it is that which crosses not only the threshold determined according to a refined listening practice or audile technique, according to which background noise is determined as such, but that which lies anterior to this decidedly subjective technique and determines the initial subtractive conditions and potentials of audibility. It is thinking of the phenomenal appearance of an object, auditory or otherwise, as a crossing of thresholds, a means by which the object or event itself makes an impression or constitutes the ‘eruption’ of a real object within sensuality, that lead me to think of every thing as an iceberg, hence the title and diagram above. That which crosses perceptual thresholds, breaks the surface of perceptibility or makes an impression within the phenomenal realm is only a part of object which itself remains in excess of this perceptual or sensory relation, and therefore below the surface. That which crosses a threshold of perceptibility becomes qualitatively determined in the act of audition or perception–hence the shading. That which persists in excess constitutes a potentially unrealisable potential or ‘intensive quantity’.

While finding Harman’s article on ‘vicarious causation’ (.pdf) particularly useful in re-thinking the sound object, it is this thinking of things or objects as always persisting in excess that leads me to question the necessity of this vicariousness, along with the notion of withdrawal that seems so fundamental to followers of object orientated ontology. For Harman, direct contact between things remains impossible, or at least unthinkable: ‘given that real objects never touch directly, their causal relations can only be vicarious’ (Harman, Vicarious Causation, 177). This aversion to direct contact, as understood through my limited reading of Harman’s work, remains a peculiar symptom of the necessity of withdrawal, whereby relations can never be thought to be totalizing (as where this is the case and a thing maintains relations at every point, alterity breaks down along with identity in the absence of excess). For Harman, relations and interactions always take place in an intermediary space forged between two things, this being the space of vicarious causation. Yet is it not possible to think of this ‘vicarious’, intermediary space in terms of interactive (de)compositions, as a point of confusion that defines direct if not total interaction. Why, within the amorphous and fluctuating vicarious channel created between two objects can this interaction not be considered direct? Harman’s own description of vicarious causation sounds direct enough to me, despite his assertion to the contrary: ‘forms do not touch one another directly, but somehow melt, fuse, and decompress in a shared common space from which all are partly absent’ (Harman, Vicarious Causation, 174).

To what extent is this interaction necessarily vicarious, as this melting and fusing sounds like a suitably direct, if not total, interaction and confusion of objects? The necessity of withdrawal is perhaps to ward off any inclination to think of relations as totalizing, within which an object would be grasped in its totality by another object, a conception of relations that dissolves objective excess in a kind of totlaizing vision that simultaneously sees an object from every angle while also comprehending the various resonances of its internal cavities, its chemical composition and so on. Despite sympathising with the extent to which withdrawal preserves ontological excess, I presently find this notion problematic, partly for the extent to which it seems to invoke objects that are somehow shy or secretive. Withdrawal seems to functioning as an animation or weirding of objects, as if they are something that actively and consciously shies away from connections in the manner of a turtle retracting its limbs within its shell. It is not the agency of objects that I take issue with here, but the way in which withdrawal seems to render objects unnecessarily shy of direct interaction and relations. If we can adequately think of objects as existing in excess or their relations what need do we have of either withdrawal or vicarious causation? It would seem that we can maintain excess without need of withdrawal and therefore also maintain direct contact and interaction between things, retaining a notion of causation that need not be vicarious.

What I remain fond of in Harman’s vicarious model is the sense that objective interactions happen within a common space inbetween, a channel for their interaction in which they ‘melt, fuse, and decompress’. Towards a maintenance of direct interactions–that are neither total not constitutive of complete relationality–within an intermediary spatial production, I often find myself thinking of such a space as a ‘point of confusion’ rather than vicarious causation, as this suggests a similar interaction of objects–melting, fusing, etc.–without the need for their respective withdrawal from this particular interaction. The idea of a point of confusion maintains direct contact without need of a vicarious intermediary maintaining and mediating withdrawal.

It is this point of confusion that is depicted in the diagram above, showing the meeting of two icebergs. The point of confusion is shown as an intermediary spatial production within which the two ‘melt, fuse and decompress’, yet the exact details of this interaction, exchange and (de)composition remains obscure from the outside–even to those parts of the icebergs that remain outside or in excess of the point of confusion–appearing merely as noise, yet not necessarily remaining so. Within the point of confusion there is a direct physical and chemical intermingling, interaction and exchange constitutive of a connection between each object. Areas of each object, thing or, in this case, iceberg–both within and beyond the thresholds of perception–remain outside of this point of confusion and resist the changes happening therein towards the maintenance of respective consistencies and individual discretion, not so much as a case of withdrawal, bit rather as a resistance that is entailed by the fact that they meet as two individuated bodies that necessarily maintain an internal and constitutive tension that binds their respective elementary composition.

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Addendum: here is Graham Harman’s response to this post: Direct but Partial Contact.

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