During the workshop on object-oriented methodology the past weekend Marcus Nilsson gave a nice introduction to the basics in Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy. I will not focus so much on the workshop itself or how Marcus summarized Harman’s main ideas but a brief outline of what this object-oriented object is may be in order. Basically, when two real objects interact they are never in direct contact since they both are withdrawn, both from each other but also from themselves. They only interact by forming a new third object with new qualities different from their parts. Only in their interior do they form relations (domestic relations). The sensual object is how one object prehends the other object within the new real object.
Marcus did not discuss the quadruple object and the various tensions that exist between the real object, the real qualities, the sensual object and the sensual qualities. However, as an archaeologist I want to stress the importance of chronology/temporality and spatiality in various contexts. In object-oriented philosophy time and space are not external containers for objects and events. Objects themselves create time and space. For Harman time is the tension between the sensual object and its sensual qualities. Time only unfolds on the interior of a real object. Time is therefore not a flow or a continuum a la Deleuze or Bergson. The “flow” is a sense of accidents on the surface of sensual objects. Since two objects only can relate on the inside there are infinitely many times that unfolds on the interior of the object. As time “moves on” the objects are recomposed and they can seldom be decomposed to their former objects.
Space is the tension between the real object and its associated sensual qualities. The simultaneous withdrawal of real objects from one another and their partial contact through sensual objects is what space is. Space is therefore not about relations but by tension between objects and their relations.
Now, in the actualist approach Harman proposes most objects lose their history. We do not need to account for an object’s emergence or becoming. The object just acts its own capacities. Water encountering fire will only execute some of its qualities such as extinguishing the fire, whereas when the water content in clay is removed by intense fire a ceramic pot is created. However, the new pot’s history of emergence is, in most cases, unimportant for its new capacity to contain or pour water. The object can also be a medium for some other object, such as pot in the case of pouring liquids into a smaller vessel.
The actualist approach is positive for an archaeological approach. Most of the artifacts or ruins archaeologists encounter are like snapshots, instant moments, of when they “finally” entered the archaeological context (“finally” is never final though, there are always disturbances by later activities). We can never see beyond the “archaeological event horizon”, the event when the past human activity most archaeologists are interested in ended in relation to the object. We can never know the intention, cosmology, ideology, discourse, etc. behind that final act and the sensual qualities the sensual artifact contained for past humans. Many archaeologists would say this is a problem but I see it as a positive thing because in my view archaeology is not primarily anthropology. We do not need to fill the “voids” in-between the instants with anthropocentric narratives grounded in the linguistic turn.
That said, there are problems in how I as an archaeologist should and can define an object. I can view the snapshots in the archaeological record as past actual states and see them as devoid of both temporal and spatial relations to other objects. Objects can merge and divide, creating new objects with new withdrawn qualities and so on. In any case, at each instant moment one has to keep a tremendous variety of scales in order to be able to contain all relations and processes on the interior of an archaeological object. This object must in all cases be greater than the single artifacts archaeologists encounter since each piece in the past formed a domestic relation of a human-artifact object. Where shall we draw the line in terms of scale?
Take my current research on caves and climate change in the Northern Maya Lowlands in southern Mexico as an example. If I go from local to regional scale in my study in our present, at this actual moment, I may have to include ceramic vessels, obsidian or flint blades, and petroglyphs in the caves, buildings surrounding the cave, bedrock itself, the Chicxulub fracture zone (the remains of a meteorite impact 65 million years ago), sedimentation records in Lake Chichancanab, meteorology, atmospheric circulation, etc. These objects, in our present, do not seem to form any greater real object. They seemingly only form aggregates of various objects. Only by following the history of the area from the Cretaceous period to present time do these objects show foreign and domestic relations (not at the same time and not with the same objects). If we look at the instants or actual states that can be detected in the archaeological and geological records the features may form objects that extend beyond the limits of earth itself. Before the impact 65 million years ago the Chicxulub meteorite had its origin further out in the solar system. Atmospheric circulation is also dependent on the heat from the sun. These are not unimportant past relations of a later present even though these relations no longer are actual in the real object. The archaeological discipline as a sensual object is encrusted with qualities that archaeologists translate into temporality and spatiality.
At some point it gets problematic to separate objects from one another even if we include Morton’s hyperobjects. Add to this the problem with dating. C14 dating, ceramic chronology and calendar inscriptions are based on quite different objects and how are we to relate them on the interior of the same great object? What object is this then? For sure not the “Maya culture” as the concept of “culture” has the same problem as “nature”. Is the object the archaeological discipline itself?