Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/12

Rh always exceed their external relations. No specific relations can either capture or exhaust any real object. Indeed, in order to clarify this, Harman draws a distinction between the real object and the sensual object. The real object is what might be referred to as the object-for-itself. The real object is never accessible, either to us or any other object directly. Interactions only take place with sensual objects, and these interactions occur via the specific external relations into which a real object might enter. By way of example, consider multiple interactions with a road-side shrine – a real object. The passage and ritual contact of human travellers will inevitably touch on certain sensual qualities of the shrine ; the contact of passing pigeons, foxes and insects will engage with others, just as the contact of rain, snow, wind and photons will interact with yet others. But all of the contacts are with the sensual object. The real shrine is withdrawn behind all of the interactions. It is never fully deployed in any of them. There is the shrine for the devout pilgrim, the shrine for the questing ant, the shrine for first snowflake of winter, but the real shrine recedes behind these sensual encounters. No total description can capture the real shrine.

All of these points can benefit from further elaboration and warrant defence against rejoinders. Harman, for example, has four poles in his account of the nature of objects, encompassing the aforementioned real and sensual objects, in addition to real and sensual qualities, and ten linkages or tensions between them. Systematically he has worked outwards from this quadruple structure of objects toward intriguing and provocative accounts of causation, space and time. The debates about these objects, though, are ongoing, encompassing such topics as the precise nature of change and relationality and the ethical and political upshot of the metaphysic. Levi Bryant’s Democracy of Objects explores some alternative approaches to the principles introduced above. For example, Bryant champions different allies than those favoured by Harman, such as Roy Bhaskar, Gilles Deleuze and Niklas Luhmann, and dedicates more space toward theorizing complex and negentropic systems as objects. However, the anti-correlationist, object-oriented and realist commitments remain the same. The Kantian imposed cycle of critique, with its antirealist closure of metaphysical speculation, is viewed as neither necessary nor a source of philosophical virtue. The object-oriented ontologists might applaud some insights generated by the Copernican Turn, particularly with regard to social phenomena, such as the gendercritical turn, but they argue that new models of reality are required, 55