The concept has a long and varied career. As a word, it comes from the Latin noun obiectum, referring generically to a tangible thing that’s perceptible by the mind or the senses, to “something that occurs in front of,” or, more abstractly, to “that which is placed before” (i.e., before a perspective or a vantage point). In this regard, obiectum derives from the verb obiciō, meaning “I oppose” or (most literally) “I throw against,” which illustrates its original use: accusation, charges, reproach. It’s interesting to contrast this active, oppositional sense of the word with the grammatical sense that emerges fully in the modern period. The object of a sentence, after all, is the grammatical element acted upon by the subject. Objects cannot act (or else they become subjects); they are passive recipients of action.
In the history of Western philosophy, the subject-object distinction also figures quite prominently. For a philosopher like Johann Fichte, the subject (das Ich) refers to the active principle of intellection embodied by consciousness or the mind, and, according to Fichte, subjects bootstrap themselves into existence by overcoming objects (das Nicht-Ich). Less abstractly, on this account, human subjects implement themselves and realize their intentions or projects by dominating an object world. Indeed, for Fichte (and many others), a subject becomes a subject in the first place – or individuates itself – precisely by means of enacting and enforcing this distinction. Hence, objects are characterized as materially or metaphysically passive, as “dead matter” or inert stuff that functions deterministically or mechanically until a subject actively intervenes.
You can find a similar disdain for objects explicitly articulated by many philosophers. For example, Francis Bacon, the so-called father of empiricism, aims “to generate and superinduce on a given body a new nature” that exceeds its natural aimlessness or wasteful exorbitance. Likewise, René Descartes, one of the founding figures of modern rationalism, argues that all material objects function as clockwork or hydraulic mechanisms, animated by minds if they are lucky enough to be human bodies but, otherwise, shoved along by vortical eddies. For Bacon and Descartes, the fundamentally inert or passive nature of the object corresponds inversely to the dexterity of the subject – that is to say, to the subject’s innate capacity for administrative direction and manipular control. Dexterity here refers to the power of the subject to command and conquer the objects that populate its object world. The disdain attending such dexterity, perhaps, can be traced back to the almost pathological aversion of the ancient Greeks to any form of dependence or passivity, which was almost always perceived as subordination and weakness.
It is worth noting, however, that objects are not always characterized in this way. For example, in “The Thing” (1971), Martin Heidegger endeavors to subtract the object’s autonomy (or “thingness”) from its constitution as an object. He does this by introducing yet another distinction, the distinction between the object and that which he calls the thing (das Ding). On his account, objects are always relations or representations. They exist relative to a subject, so an object is always functionally or phenomenologically subordinated to its appearance or use. By contrast, the thing is “the cautious and abstemious name for something that is at all.” The thing is independent and self-supporting, he writes, and, while the thing “may become an object if we place it before us,” the thingness of the thing is its autonomy or mute, worldly ipseity, apart from all perception or purpose. Heidegger’s take here is questionable, not because objects can be afforded no autonomy, but because he effectively reduces their autonomy (i.e., the autonomy of das Ding) to the status of an allusion. In other words, Heidegger’s distinction between object and thing appears more to evidence his aversion to the instrumental dimension of objects – that is to say, he voices his antipathy for subjecting objects to any kind of use – than it attends to their manifold or multimodal forms of existence. A horse is a horse, of course, of course; a jug is a jug is a jug. But horses and jugs both embody and inhere in a lot of modes and orders other than their sheer ipseity, as Heidegger’s own reflections ironically testify. In this regard, it’s Bill Brown who picks up Heidegger’s distinction between object and thing and does something rather more interesting with it, by focusing on object failure as an opportunity of sorts: “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”
Excursus 1: OOO
In contrast to the foregoing accounts (although hopefully without being incognizant of them), let’s try approaching the object again.
Definition: An object is an intersection, or a nexus, of various ontological strands. Think of it like a knot consisting of various strands complicated or entangled in a certain way. “Strands” here refers to articulations of the different modes and orders of existence. For example, objects can have a material composition, like an automobile or a tree, consisting of metal and plastic parts or else bark, leaves, and wood. But an automobile or a tree always consists of more intersecting strands than just the physicalist specificity of its material composition. In this regard, automobiles are also products of the history of technics, and their material composition necessarily implies and relies upon complex, temporally extended industrial networks and machinic ecologies. Likewise, trees, in addition to being leafy, execute an ecological function, both as components of forests, which exist at a different ontological scale than any individual tree or group of trees, and as air purifiers, arboreal habitats, carbon sinks, water filters, and much else besides.
Contributing to what an object is, there is also the descriptive apparatus that attends it. The descriptive apparatus consists of semiotic strands, of the contingent, historical penumbra of signs that accompanies an object as it carries on through time, as it gets transacted, transfigured, and translocated. In the received ontological framework – that is to say, on the standard assumption, or how we typically think about these matters, at least when we’re using ordinary language – we tend to think of descriptions of objects as fundamentally separate, or at least separable, from the objects themselves: “A rose by any other name is still a rose.” By contrast, on my account, the descriptive apparatus attending an object is a full-fledged part of that object’s existence. Description is not a supplementary feature of the object. Note how this doesn’t imply that any instance or form of the descriptive apparatus takes precedence or priority over other ontological strands by default. We need to remain absolute particularists about precedence and rank-ordering. The relevant particulars of an object depend on where we are and what we’re trying to do. So we really don’t need to be as resolutely austere as W. V. O. Quine about our ontological commitments. To the contrary, see William Wimsatt’s absolutely outstanding work on precisely this – on levels, perspectives, and “causal thickets.” As he writes, “this is ontology for the tropical rainforest.”
Excursus 2: Peirce
So what does it mean to say that objects act?
First and foremost, it means that objects are what they do. This necessarily implies that any given object – an automobile, a tree, a typhoon, an affect, a god, or a revolution – takes place over time. “Doing,” or activity – that is to say, producing a regime of effects in multiple registers at multiple scales – produces causal multiplication, or ripple effects. This causal rippling refers to a property that obtains in sequences of multiple effects such that each effect to some extent both conditions and is conditioned by all the other effects in each sequence. This causal rippling is fundamentally characteristic of objects, because objects do not – indeed, they cannot – exist as closed or isolated unities. Think of it like this: objects are more like knots than they are like beads. Hence, an object is an intersection, or a nexus, of various ontological strands. Objects always hook into objects always hook into objects, ad infinitum. This doesn’t that everything equivocates, nor that objects don’t “really” exist. There is nothing illusory about a knot. But the right ontological question is never “Does such-and-such an object exist?” but rather “How does such-and-such an object exist?” For too long, philosophers have viewed existence as a kind of compliment one gives to favored object types or else withdraws from disfavored objects, which are then cast into the outer darkness of nonexistence. But objects don’t just sit there passively, waiting for subjects to intervene. Instead, by hook or by crook, objects proceed along their own sinister pathways, often confounding or testing all dexterity. They have a howness; they exist in a certain way. Without this howness, inquiry into existence (of whatever mode or order, or by whatever method) would be an impossible and quixotic task. Philosophy would collapse into ethnos, and the sciences would just manifest bad old power politics.
This is not to suggest that subjects and objects either cannot or do not interact. Nor is it to propose noninterventionism as the preferred or prescribed stance of the subject toward the object world. Indeed, on this account, it becomes unclear what such a noninterventionist stance could even look like. There is no away from the world of objects. To the contrary, the subject (or, rather, subjectivity) is an emergent or functional property we impute to a determinable, identifiable class of objects. In other words, subjectivity is a vast and storied descriptive apparatus we attach to a set of peculiarly motile objects. In this regard, as in the descriptive apparatus attending the concept of the object itself that’s under revision here, the subject-object distinction defamiliarizes. Objects act, which makes them subjects (on the mistaken standard assumption anyway, see above), and subjects are objects, because preserving the distinction in question stops mattering in the same way if the dark lives of objects are released from their mute consignment to static inventories awaiting mobilization by the dexterous. Subjects lose nothing on this theoretical approach, but they do gain plethoras of object worlds to explore and to map and in which to act, with which to interact. Likewise, objects become sinister (from sinistral, referring to the left-hand side, contrasting with the dextral, or the right-hand side), which is to say that they traverse the causal strangeways in a manner much their own.
Excursus 3: “The Malice of Inanimate Objects”
See “The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds” or go forward to Part 2 (“Freeing up the objects for use”).