“direct but partial contact”

Here’s willscrimshaw with AN INTERESTING POST.

He raises the objection that many have raised: why can’t contact between objects be direct but partial, rather than indirect?

This objection is based on the notion that an object is a sum total of qualities or of objects. Rather than a dog withdrawing from contact completely, it is held, why can’t we make contact with 58% or 74% of the dog?

The answer is this: an object is a unit. You don’t make an object by piling up a bunch of qualities or a bunch of pieces. If you don’t make contact with that unit, but only with a medley of qualities or pieces said to belong to it, then you’re not making contact with the object itself, but with indirect representatives of it. And that is the very problem that OOO is designed to address.

willscrimshaw also says in the post that I end up seeming to argue for direct contact anyway. Well, yes, but it’s not a direct contact between two real objects. The sensual medium is the only place where direct contact occurs.

What you end up with is relations between objects, of course, since such relations do occur. But it’s a far more uncanny process than people believe when they argue for direct but partial relations. That simply eliminates the problem, but it’s a genuine problem that can’t be eliminated.

I’m also getting tired of the term “withdrawal.” It’s used only to mark the Heideggerian origins of my standpoint; it’s a blatantly Heideggerian term. But it seems to have connotations for some people of a something that runs and hides in a spatial sense, and of course whatever does that can always be found. Real objects, however, can’t be found in that sense; their inaccessibility to direct relation has nothing to do with a temporary spatial hiddenness.

More generally, I’m not sure why there should be discomfort with the need for indirect contact, except that “immanence” is one of the dominant philosophemes of the era, just as “relationality” is. But what I oppose to immanence is not “transcendence” in the usual sense, but rather a secular, earthly inaccessibility of the things to relation of any sort, and not just to mental probing.

But I still enjoyed willscrimshaw’s post.