It is all too easy to say that Harman’s world is divided into two: a celestial plane of intentional facades masking a hellish realm of machinic forces, an open space of sensual contact concealing the endlessly churning reality that makes it possible. The truth is that these two sides of his cosmos are folded into one another at every opportunity: there is no straight line from one sensual point to another that does not pass through a real one, and vice versa. What we have here is a pluriverse of infernal engines that present themselves to one another only so as to hide their internal machinations. Like the many hells of Buddhist lore, each of these engines is a realm unto itself, composed of further layers of tortuous machinery; each part of which is available to its fellows only in outline, containing its own inexplicable depths, concealing further strange and sulphurous landscapes, ever more intricate and malicious economies of action yet to be explored. This is the world of real objects. It is a world to which we ourselves belong, along with everything that has any real effect upon us—or indeed, upon anything at all. This is the site of everything that really happens in the world.
It is important to distinguish between two kinds of happening, though: execution and causation. For Harman, a real object just is its execution, which is to say its being-whatever-it-is, or rather, doing-whatever-it-does. This is to say that each real object is defined by some inscrutable end for which it is the corresponding act. The relation between every real thing taken as a whole and the parts that compose it is to be understood in terms of functional relations, like the relation between a machine and its components. The real object consists in the unitary action of its parts deployed towards the given end: it is its execution insofar as it is a function in action. There is more that could be said about this, but for now it is important to recognise that although this action is certainly a happening of sorts, it is the occurrence of sameness, or simple persistence. The various machinic arrangements of parts and wholes that compose the real are essentially synchronic. For Harman, causation is the occurrence of difference, or change, and it emerges from diachronic relations of interaction between real objects. The paradox with which he closes his first book, Tool-Being,1 is that his characterisation of such objects as persisting unities seems to preclude the possibility that they could effect change in one another—implying an essentially static cosmic order, in opposition to the seeming reality of change that constantly assails our senses.
The reason for this is that the reality of persistence qua execution implies that real objects withdraw from one another, unable to affect one another at all. This withdrawal has two facets: the excess of everything over its presentations, and the independence of everything from everything else. Excess follows from the inscrutability of the end governing each object, which occludes the object’s internal economy of action (execution) and thereby the external capacities for action (causation) that emerge from it. Execution is a pure act of persistence underlying every actual interaction, and a pure actuality underlying every possible interaction. This means that it transcends both interaction and possibility. We can never know the sheer execution of the thing that lies behind every possible encounter. Insofar as ontological humility demands that we treat the way we grasp the capabilities of objects—through either theoretical or practical engagement with them—as just one more instance of an encounter between any two real objects, we must conclude that our inability to grasp an object’s veiled execution through any particular possible interaction is a deeper fact about the metaphysics of encounters. This is the fact that the world also contains sensual objects. Our own experience of the world is phenomenologically constituted by intentional relations directed at unitary objects, and this implies that objects’ experience of one another is metaphysically constituted by something similar. If objects encounter one another as unities, and yet fail to encounter one another directly, then encounters must be mediated by unitary intentional facades or caricatures entirely distinct from the executant realities that project them. Independence follows from this, insofar as every real object is protected from every other by an honour guard of distinct sensual objects, forever precluding access to it, at least by default.
Finally, it must be emphasised that withdrawal does not merely occur between isolated real objects, like a non-aggression pact between the many hells; it also occurs within them, in the form of mereological isolation. It is easy to see how this involves the mutual withdrawal of the parts of an object from one another, insofar as they are real objects in their own right; but it also consists in the withdrawal of parts from the wholes they compose, and wholes from the parts they contain. Of course, the whole is dependent upon its parts, insofar as it cannot subsist without them, but at the same time it is independent of them, in two senses: (a) it is entirely possible for its parts to be replaced without significantly altering its internal economy; and (b) this economy produces capacities which exceed the capacities of the parts taken in isolation. Similarly, although the parts may be reciprocally dependent upon one another to some extent (insofar as they require certain conditions in which to function), they are equally independent of their context in two senses: (a) it is entirely possible for them to be transplanted into a different whole without dissolving their own distinct unity; and (b) new contexts may reveal hitherto unexpressed capacities that were previously suppressed. A real object considered as a whole is a specific arrangement of parts that both transcends and fails to exhaust their specificity. Despite the fact that the real object consists in transcending this excess of specificity, it nevertheless plays an additional role, insofar as the whole draws upon it in generating the sensual objects it hides behind. The various inessential features of a real object’s parts become resources for producing the phenomenal accidents that cloak its executant reality.
1. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2002, §25–6.