Nathan Gale on hacking and allusion

An interesting post HERE from November 10, though I only have a moment to engage with it before heading out.

It’s a common complaint people make:

“I’m going to get back to this in just a bit, but I want to bring up something that’s always bothered me about Harman’s OOO—allusion… Therefore, even when the object seems to offer us a glimpse into its withdrawn nature, these are just allusions to the real object that lies beneath.”

Yes, and that’s the nature of the beast. It’s what philosophia means: love of wisdom rather than wisdom. People always want there to be some final moment of direct access to the things, even if it’s only “partial.”

But look… No matter how much you learn about a fire, this itself isn’t going to cause flames to burst out of your head. Becoming an expert on Napoleon does not make you Napoleon. The question is what the relation between these two things is. I’ve at least stated the problem honestly with “allure,” whereas I’ve not heard any objections to it that amount to anything more than personal distaste. The idea, for example, that flames and the knowledge of flames shares some “formal structure” never seems to be accompanied with much account of why and how the formal structure would ever become embedded in the non-formal, non-structural world. The “contact is direct but partial” camp, of which Nathan Gale seems to be a member, neglects the fact that an object is a unity, not an aggregate of particulars of which some things could be known directly and others not known at all. As if there were merely an obscure practical limit restricting us to 85% knowledge of a tree rather than 87%.

If allure is a “weasel word,” then philosophia is also a weasel word, and for precisely the same reason. If you hope to replace the love of wisdom with some form of wisdom, then you are betraying the very meaning of philosophia. What object-oriented philosophy has done is tried to turn the “love” part of this phrase from some vague epistemologcial notion into something bearing on the structure of things themselves.

You can take the other path, of course. This is done most bluntly by Bergson in Matter and Memory and James in Essays in Radical Empiricism (I just wrote a critique of the latter book at the request of Kronos, though it will only be in Polish translation initially). Bergson’s “images” and James’s “experiences” are designed to circumvent the whole problem by eliding the difference between image and reality from the start. However, their arguments for this aren’t very good, and succeed only if you share their distaste for the phenomenal/noumenal distinction.

Here’s another part of Nathan’s post that I find also interesting but also wrong:

“But what Tim [Richardson’s] post seems to get at is that perhaps a better way of understanding the relationship between the real object and the sensual one, or when the hammer breaks, is by way of hacking. Hacking allows users to get at parts of their objects that were meant to remain hidden, tucked away in code or purposefully disabled. What the hacker does, then, is never a physical modification but an action that allows the excess or withdrawn ‘reality’ of the object to come forth… Hacking, therefore, is a sort of non-linguistic way of alluding to a real object.”

But this assumes a difference between linguistic and non-linguistic access that I don’t see as valid in this case. I’ve made this point many times in connection with Heidegger’s tool-analysis. The reason this analysis can’t be read as a primacy of praxis over theory is that praxis falls short of the things themselves no less than theory does. If praxis were a sufficiently deep contact with the reality of equipment, then equipment would never break, because its reality would already be perfectly deployed in our use of it. There would be no surplus in the things driving the world towards change of any sort.

In other words, hacking is just a sort of deliberate broken hammer, probing software for unseen elements. But the point is this: the hacking of software is not itself the software. And even if hackers eventually uncover every last aspect of the code, the hackers themselves will not turn into software.

Yes, I realize that no one “really claims this.” That’s not the point. The point is that it’s a reductio ad absurdum of the view that thing and image can have any direct sort of isomorphic relationship.

Allure, withdrawal, vicarious causation… These are among the most difficult ideas of object-oriented philosophy, and sometimes you have to have the same argument for many years before people finally see what you were getting at, even if only to take a different path in the end.

But to repeat, “non-linguistic” access isn’t going to get us any closer to the things themselves than “linguistic” access. That’s too reminiscent of one frequent misreading of Being and Time.