Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/11

Rh and subsequently the primary concern of philosophy. Whether atoms, angels, chairs, choirs, elephants, epistles, galaxies or gods, all of these are to be understood as objects. This is not to suggest, to cite Harman, that ‘all objects are equally real, but that they are equally objects. It is only in a wider theory that accounts of the real and unreal alike that pixies, nymphs, and utopias must be treated in the same terms as sailboats and atoms.’ The task of the object-oriented philosopher is to deliver this wider theory. Second, objects exist at all scales and sizes, and no scale or size is to be privileged. To oppose either of these first two principles is to be committed to the undermining and/or overmining of objects. The history of philosophy is replete with such attempts. Undermining may move from pre-Socratic postulates of an apeiron, or primary element, through to contemporary scientific and physicalist reductionism, with the positing of particles as the basic blocks of reality, or even recent continental metaphysical concepts, such as Deleuze’s ‘virtual plane’. Overmining, in turn, is best represented by the correlationist ensnarement of objects in the human-world correlate, although it may also be explained as any position that sets up the experience or manifestation of the object in the mind as that which is of primary significance. Empiricists, for example, may overmine objects as bundles of qualities that are brought under concepts in the mind.

Third, the human-world relation loses all priority. That is, ontologically, there is nothing particularly special or interesting about the human-world gap. To cite Harman, ‘the interaction between cotton and fire belongs on the same footing as human interaction with both cotton and fire.’ Human encounters with other objects are no more special than those of bacteria or household furniture with those objects. Fourth, objects are external to their relations. This is perhaps one of the stranger premises of object-oriented ontology. Many people’s intuitions and many theories suggest that the objects of the world are constituted through their relations with other objects. The object-oriented response to this is that it leads toward a veritable ‘hall of mirrors’, in which the being of objects is infinitely deferred. Ultimately, everything dissipates and vanishes beneath any such totalizing relationism. This is not to say that objects do not enter into relations with other objects. They frequently do. But real objects 54