The debate over the ontological status of fictions can be summed up with the question of whether fictions are substances or fictions are qualities. A substance is that which exists in and through itself. My cat Tabby is a substance in that she is not a quality of anything else and exists in her own right as an individual entity. By contrast, the black, gray, orange, and brown of Tabby’s fur is a quality in that it doesn’t enjoy independent existence. In the debate over fictions, the question then is whether fictions have independent existences, whether they are substances in their own right, or whether they are always and only qualities of other objects. For example, we might wish to say that fictions can only exist in the mind, in which case they would be qualities rather than substances.
read on!
In the past, I have argued that fictions are real entities. My motive for this has had less to do with any particular fascination with fictions, but rather with peculiar properties of symbolic entities. Take the example of money. The value of money is, alas, not dependent on my mind. It has a value that transcends my will and intentionality, and which is therefore objective. I can’t make it have whatever value I wish it to have. Likewise with linguistic meaning and structure, as well as a host of social categories. In a response to one of Graham’s remarks in my post “Of Individuals, Ontology, and Politics“, Glenn Fuller drives this point home nicely. Graham had written,
the fact that someone might develop a criminal character over time that lurks there unseen even when no crimes are being committed (or even some weeks, months, or perhaps years before the *first* crime is committed) does not mean that anyone is born a criminal, with “an inherent taint in their soul.” Those are two completely separate issues.
To this Glenn responds,
How is this not subject to a basic Foucaltian critique? How is a ‘criminal character’ not a function of discourse, visibilities/subject positions/apparatus?
Even a more complex version of the constition of subjectivities, following Harman’s logic above, would have to rely on a definition of criminality external to the ‘object’. That is, at a minimum, the capacity to recognise ‘criminality’ in someone’s character.
Surely, in the current political climate of revolution and rebellion, this would be apparent? Maybe ‘criminal’ was a bad example to use, considering it is necessarily defined according to discursive regimes.
Does the same thing happen in dogs (as a random example)? When dogs attack humans, how should we regard the character or style of the dog?
If I understand Glenn correctly, his point is that criminality is not in the so-called criminal. “Criminal” is not a quality of a substance (the person), but is rather a category within which the person finds himself situated as if a fish in a net. To illustrate this point, let’s return to Twain’s Huckleberry Friend which I discussed in my prior post. The character of Jim the slave is a criminal in the sense that he has run away from his owner– as an aside, it’s interesting to note that there’s a question here of whether a slave can be a criminal as their agency has been stolen from them and they have been reduced to property.
However, if Jim is a criminal, what is it that makes him a criminal? We would look in vain for any particular quality (whether at the level of properties or actions) that makes Jim a criminal. Rather, in order for Jim to be a criminal there must be a set of categories that, to use a Badiouian turn of phrase, “counts him” as a criminal. Jim is “sorted” as a criminal by this system of categories. Were this category not to exist, then Jim’s actions would not have the meaning or valence they have.
The question is how we theorize something like this ontologically. These categories are very peculiar things. They are not properties of the substance (Jim) that can be discerned in the body or the action. Nor are they merely subjective or mental ideas. For Jim, the categories of slavery and criminality are every bit as objective as a wall he must avoid walking into. They are real constraints on his existence that transcend his intentions or thoughts and that structure his existence and action in a variety of deeply significant ways.
We need some way of talking and thinking about these things that acknowledges their objectivity. This is why I’m a bit hesitant when Graham proposes to treat fictions as what he calls “sensual objects”. Reviewing Graham’s terminology, a sensual object is an object that can only exist on the interior of a real object. Drawing on the classical language I outline above, a sensual object would thus be a quality of a real substance. It would never be a substance in its own right (this is why claims that Harman argues unicorns are real are so unfair).
My problem with Graham’s position is not so much the theoretical apparatus behind it (the real/sensual distinction) as the examples he uses. In a recent email (and I don’t think he’s mind me sharing this as it’s almost identical to what he writes in Guerrilla Metaphysics), Graham writes,
…in connection with my fourfold theory, even though sensual objects never correspond to or copy real objects, all sensual objects have real qualities. That is automatic, by my reading of Husserl’s eidos. For example, I invent a monster in my mind right now. This monster must still have real qualities that differ from the sensual qualities it has when I draw it, because the monster has an eidos: I can draw it from different angles in different stles, and none of these exhaust the eidos of that monster.
I find absolutely nothing to object to in Graham’s discussion of imagined monsters (I embrace all this without hesitation), but I do believe that talk of my mind and imagined entities is thoroughly inadequate as a way of theorizing something like the value of money, or categories like slavery and criminality. There’s an important difference between an entity that I imagine and a category like slavery or criminality. With my imagined monster I can mutate it in whatever way I might like. I can slay it in my imagination, flee from it, make it undergo all sorts of qualitative transformations (as Harman suggests), etc. The same is not true of categories like criminality. These befall me from without and constrain my existence in all sorts of ways that transcend my thought. There are thus important disanalogies between imagined entities and these sorts of symbolic entities.
Nonetheless, those who have criticized my view that fictional (and symbolic) entities are real entities (including Graham) make a number of valid points. Putting the matter crudely, there is a way in which fictional entities are not “detachable” in the way that other substances are, therefore entailing that they shouldn’t be treated as independent. I’ve come around to seeing the truth of these criticisms. For me that means that I need to find a way of navigating the Charybdis and Scylla of treating symbolic entities as mere imagined entities and treating them as what Graham calls “real objects”. I need an ontological framework that is capable of theorizing the objectivity and transcendence of things like categories that nonetheless avoids treating them as real substances. Put differently, how can I theorize these sorts of beings within the framework of Graham’s fourfold?
The issue can be resolved, I believe, by situating these questions within the framework of the mereology I’ve tried to develop through my onticology. It will be recalled, that mereology is the study of relations between parts and wholes. One of the central claims of my onticology, following Graham, is that 1) objects are composed of other objects, and 2) that objects exist at a variety of different levels of scale. Here it’s important to recall that for OOO objects are independent of one another, such that relations between objects are always external. Let’s take the second point first: objects exist at different levels of scale. The point here is that an atom is no more an object than a larger scale object in which it exists as a part. Likewise, a person is no more an object than an institution in which that person serves as a part. If there is a strange mereology in object-oriented ontology, then this is because smaller scale objects can simultaneously be parts of larger scale objects, while it is nonetheless the case that the smaller scale objects that compose a larger scale object are independent of that larger scale object and the larger scale object composed of the smaller scale objects is independent of the smaller scale objects of which it is composed. Such is the thesis of emergence.
Now Graham has compellingly argued that all objects caricature other objects to which they relate. They never directly relate to other objects as they are, but rather, to use Graham’s language, encounter them as sensual objects that distort the other object being related to in some way or another. In a very similar vein, I have argued, drawing heavily on Luhmann’s sociological autopoietic systems theory and cybernetics, that all objects are dynamic and operationally closed systems, that relate to other objects in terms of their own organization, distinctions, and codes. In other words, objects “process” perturbations from other objects in their own particular ways, producing events within themselves that are never identical to the perturbing object. Here then we get something very similar to Harman’s sensual objects (though he’s expressed differences elsewhere). My events taking place within object-systems are largely akin to Harman’s sensual objects and their qualities. It is difficult to articulate all of this simply as it requires reference to a lot of theory that doesn’t get much attention in continental circles. A much fuller elaboration can be found in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects which should be out any day now in its electronic form.
With these observations in mind, I think we begin to get a sense of how we can theorize the situation of Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Jim is an object caught in the orbit of another object. The object of which Jim is a particular part is a particular social assemblage. In the language of my onticology, categories such as slave, criminal, owner, fugitive, etc., would be codes or distinctions belonging to that particular social assemblage (which is a higher scale object). These codes, distinctions, schema (call them what you will) would be features of the organization of that object that serve as the condition for the possibility of the production of sensual objects (in my language, events) within the higher scale object. Thus, when we talk about Jim-the-slave or Jim-the-criminal, we’re not talking about Jim the person (who is an individual substance in his own right; or in Graham’s language, a real object), but rather we’re talking about a sensual object on the interior of another real object: the social assemblage of which Jim is a part. Jim-the-slave would be the way in which this larger scale object caricatures Jim the person (the real object) in relating to Jim as an element in its own ongoing self-reproduction.
Returning to the themes of my post “Of Individuals, Ontology, and Politics“, we get the interesting result that the sensual object (Jim-the-slave) and the sorting codes that render that object possible present Jim the real object with choices that face him. Entangled as Jim is within this larger scale object (the social image), Jim the real object finds that these categories, distinctions, schema, codes, etc., are like the walls of a labyrinth or maze that he must navigate just as he and Huck must navigate the perils of the Mississippi river. This is the objectivity of these distinctions and codes, the manner in which they transcend him.
Here, then, I’m in a position to revise my position on fictions and symbolic entities. With Graham I’m able to agree that fictions and symbolic entities are not real entities, but rather are sensual objects. They are entities that only exist on the interior of a real object analogous to the manner in which Graham’s monster only exists in the interior of his mind. A fictional text such as Harry Potter cannot exist independently of the social assemblage (larger scale object) in which it occurs. A meme cannot exist as a substance in its own right. The value of money cannot exist as a substance or real object. All of these entities are sensual objects belonging to real objects– the social assemblage in which they exist. Nonetheless, through the mereological claims of OOO I am able to make a place for the objectivity and transcendence of these entities with respect to individual persons. These are sensual objects belonging to larger scale objects such as institutions and social assemblages, not individual persons. Because we are entangled with these larger scale objects, these sensual objects become constraints on our existence that we must navigate, just as we must walk around large boulders when taking a leisurely stroll in the forest.
Larval Subjects . 
March 11, 2011 at 6:17 pm
Does this mean that a novel or poem only comes into existence as it enters or becomes a part in a larger social & cultural structure? That it is, in a sense, created as a real object only when it ceases to be the private creation of its author and is heard & read in public? Or at least, becomes a significantly different object on publication… (however you define publication)? That the novel, Huckleberry Finn, and the character, Jim, acquired a different ontological status on entering the public sphere than they had as a MS in the private possession of Samuel Clemens? If so, how does that square with the problem of corelationism?
March 11, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Maybe we’re all splitting hairs on this! It seems a fiction is an intentional object for the simple reason that it exists not in the real world as a material thing, but is a human made object that exists in and for consciousness.
And, even a fiction, never exists alone within the mind as a singular object, but is a nexus or tension or achieved anxiety (Bloom) of all those other fictions that preceded it of which it is current event (i.e., it is a temporal event within the mind ). Once shared outside that mind with another it enters into relation in a different object (i.e., the materiality of books, tv, movies, plays, paintings, etc.) even if still related to the parent.
The question seems not to ask whether such objects exist, but how do they work and relate? If objects execute force (algorithms) in the real world, then what kind of force is a fiction that it can be shared in the consenual object of the assemblge we call politics? And, what kind of relation is this? If one opts out on the idea of emergence, then how explain the relations that create these objects we call fictions? Fictions come and go, and in each generation certain fictions, even philosophy as a fictional algorithm that exerts force in the real world exerts its brute force against all those other philosophical fictions in a war for survival. Fictions continue because they are used, they are tool-beings just like other tools. They serve us as tools just like those ficitions we call cars that get us from point A to point B. Even a car was a fiction in someone’s mind at one time until the day it was related to those assemblages of material production and enmeshed in the layer of being that became a new type of event: a car event.
Seems all intentional ideas: ideas in consciousness can be through relation made into new objects or events in the real world. Maybe I’m all wet but this all seems so straight forward to me, and it seems many of you are just complicating the matter with more and more rhetoric instead of elminating all the extraneous verbiage until you hone in on the the thing itself: the temporal event that is an object. In stead of talking about objects as fictions or real, one should be talking of objects as events; and, events can be mental or physical.
March 11, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Jacob,
Those are really tough questions. In the past, one of the reasons I’ve been so emphatic on the reality of fictions or the thesis that fictions are real objects has been precisely because I’ve wanted a robust place for objects such as novels, movies, songs, poems, works of art, etc., etc., etc. My aphorism, for some time now, has been that language isn’t simply about something, it is something. A novel is not simply about something, it is something. It circulates throughout the world independent of both authors and readers and is often an object that people must navigate. A good example would be Michael Crichton’s disgusting novel State of Fear. This work of fiction circulates about in the world becoming something that even environmental scientists and pro-environment politicians have to contend with. What a pain in the ass. There are a few questions here. First, would a novel be a novel if all human beings and societies– including alien species and other intelligent species that might evolve –ceased to exist? Somehow it seems not as there would be nothing and noone to animate it with meaning. This seems to suggest that a novel is an instance of a sensual object in Graham’s sense of the word. Yet a novel also seems to have features of real objects as well. Graham argues that sensual objects have real qualities. Whenever he uses the term “real” he means “withdrawn”. So when he says the monster in his head has real qualities, I take it he means that there is something inexhaustible about it. The sensual object before his mind (the monster) is never fully present in all its qualities. A novel seems a little different. Novels themselves seem to be inexhaustible, not just for me or a reader. Does this mean that we should treat novels as real objects? I waver back and forth. Take a song. In Stanley Kubrik’s Clockwork Orange we get all sorts of variations on Beethoven’s 9th: electronic club versions, classical versions, etc., etc., etc. There is something withdrawn about Beethoven’s 9th such that it can be Beethoven’s 9th in all these instances, yet nonetheless is not present in any of these instances. I’m honestly not sure where to go here. The diary above can hold, but it might be– and is even likely –that distinct ontological work is to be done for the status of things like novels, poems, songs, and so on.
March 11, 2011 at 6:39 pm
Craig,
I like this:
This is exactly right, I think. One of my major gripes with philosophers is that they have a tendency to focus on truth. “Does x represent or correspond to reality?” In my view, this is the wrong sort of question with many classes of entities. The question is not so much whether or not they are true but, as you put it, how they work and relate. This is why I adopt the aphorism that language is not merely about something, but it is something. Treating language primarily in terms of what a proposition, theoretical text, work of fiction, etc., is about focuses us on questions of truth and representing, leading us to ignore how these things act, work, do, and so on as components in assemblages.
March 11, 2011 at 7:33 pm
Moyalle-Sharrock’s take is that:
“The two main problems of native language acquisition are: the problem of learning (explaining our grasp of the meaning of words); and the problem of productivity (explaining our ability to understand and produce novel, correct sentences, when the linguistic data we encounter is flawed and limited). Fodor’s and Chomsky’s solution to these problems is to posit a mental linguistic structure (universal grammar or language of thought) as the framework that obviates the need for learning and makes an explanation of productivity possible. Ironically, Wittgenstein’s solution is not as far removed from Fodor’s and Chomsky’s as might be supposed. For, he too posits a framework at the basis of our language-games – indeed a partly grammatical framework which includes a universal grammar. But the commonality stops here, for Wittgenstein’s universal grammar is neither innate nor inner; it is rooted in our primitive reactions and transmitted socio-culturally. Wittgenstein’s account of how we come to language can be counted as a social theory of language acquisition: it is in social practices, not in the mind, that we come to language.”
but I see no reason to limit these aspects of our being-with to “outside” the mind.
Click to access 903547.pdf
March 11, 2011 at 8:01 pm
Yes, exactly… if you ask the question ‘about’ then you are looking at the outside of the object as if you could surmise the ‘truth’ of the object through an analysis of either all its manifestations; or, through our understanding of the conceptual matrix of judgements that make claims of the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of this objective outside entity.
And, the problem is that this misses the hidden depths that always allude such linguistic or scientific reductions either to judgements of true/falsity or empirical description.
Instead, if we give up the idea that we can ever have all the mental or physical data necessary to describe or represent an object, whether it be true or false then we begin to open up a another series of questions: What is an object that it can have effect/affect in the world? How does this object interact or withdraw from relation? What does it mean that an object can destroy or create another object?
In other words instead of an ontology of description we get an ontology of events: one can no longer reduce the things of the world to either physical or mental things, but to events (i.e., temporal entities with a history). An event based ontology is based upon contingency and movement, not a static reduction to the physics of particles or mental cognition.
March 11, 2011 at 9:14 pm
i’ll be honest, haven’t been following the OOO stuff much. while i followed your blog because your coverage of D&G/Foucault and related thinkers partially overlapped with my project, that time time has long passed.
at risk of being hopelessly uninformed, and butting into a conversation without being very informed, may i humbly suggest returning to D&G a bit? in particular, i think massumi’s intro to “Shock to Thought” entitled “Introduction: Like a thought” covers the emergent status of expression and thought quite well.
March 11, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Anarchist,
I write about Deleuze and Guattari all the time. My variant of OOO is deeply inflected with their thought and is perpetually making references to them.
March 11, 2011 at 11:13 pm
[…] writer. Today at staff meeting I had to tell my characters that, as of this morning, they are no longer real. They are in denial, refusing to return to work until their full ontological status has been […]
March 12, 2011 at 6:54 pm
Levi,
AGHHAAAA! This is driving me crazy already! I think a big portion of the problem on these debates, especially between you and Harman and Deontologist is the terminology. Harman uses the word ‘Real’ in contrast to ‘Sensual’ and thus whatever falls into the realm of the sensual is probably presumed by some to be, by extension, ‘non-existent’. This is clearly a misreading. When you and Deontologist debate, you are clearly talking past eachother because you are discussing two different uses of the term ‘real’. I agree with you 100% that fictional objects are real objects. Why? If what you say about Deleuze is true, then utterances do not correspond to referrants, but are rather repetitions of facts in the world. Some statements such as “the cat is on the mat” do sync with a cat sitting on the mat, but some statements such as “Spider-Man ate my lunch” or “the current King of France is bald” do not refer to flesh and blood objects. Whether something refers to something or not is entirely irrelevant, obviously, because such entities are objects in their own right. Indeed, it would seem to be impossible for contradictory or false statements to be possible in the first place if every word had to correspond to something else. Bottom line, I understand what Harman is saying, but I don’t like the use of the terms ‘Real’ and ‘Sensual’ because I feel they are misleading.
March 12, 2011 at 7:04 pm
Levi,
“There is something withdrawn about Beethoven’s 9th such that it can be Beethoven’s 9th in all these instances, yet nonetheless is not present in any of these instances. I’m honestly not sure where to go here.”
Based on what you’ve said in the past, Beethoven’s 9th symphony would be an object that translates other objects and thus brings about local manifestations. Each manifestation is, as you say, a charicature of the object, BUT each local manifestation produces new objects. Thus I feel it makes sense to say that each version of Beethoven’s 9th is a different object PRODUCED by the original object. To imply otherwise would seem like a weird appeal to Platonic forms and name-as-identity.
March 13, 2011 at 3:23 pm
There are places in W.C. Williams, Spring and All, that read like a poet’s premonition of Speculative Realism (see the prose passages in IX in particular).
March 14, 2011 at 6:02 pm
Ah, and then just a week later you move away from me again. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. :) I think the ‘realism’ in speculative realism compels you to make this move.
Oh, one quick thing: probably best not to use the term ‘meme’… as far as I can tell, you can’t possibly gain anything from using this term, but you can open yourself up to all the philosophical criticisms that have been levelled against it.
*waves*
March 16, 2011 at 3:13 pm
“Would a novel be a novel if all human beings and societies– including alien species and other intelligent species that might evolve – ceased to exist?”
Isn’t this like the mouse shot into outer space? Assuming the novel still existed physically or as patterns on a hard drive. It would exist uselessly, sure – but surely usefulness can’t be a criterion for existence.
March 16, 2011 at 3:29 pm
What about a novel that is simply lost, unread and forgotten for centuries? Does it pop back into existence when found? Or take the as-yet undeciphered Linear A script found in Crete. Is that text an arbitrary sequence, and not a text? If the former, how does it become a text again when it is eventually deciphered? It doesn’t – it always was one.
June 11, 2011 at 3:28 pm
[…] should be a kind of science fiction, and perhaps more loosely the recent discussion on ‘the ontological status of fictions‘—a kind of science fiction in the present, a science fiction without futurity, that […]