Tim Morton on Withdrawal?

In relation to my recent obsessing on issues of withdrawal in object-oriented ontologies André Ling of Intra-Being is wondering if I'm getting it all wrong about Tim Morton's notion of causality (here). As André writes, "just wondering where Morton says that objects do not encounter each other and have real effects upon each other?"

I think André’s question is a good one. Although I have enormous respect for Tim Morton’s project and general trajectory, I’m not sure I can answer André question precisely if only because I often find myself quite confused by Tim’s version of ‘withdrawal’ (see here). In fact I’m feeling like I’d be groping in the dark even discussing Tim’s position on this issue at all. I still need to read his latest book. But for the sake of exploration let me try to articulate a few ideas with regards to André‘s challenge.

The initial problem I run in to is that just when I think Tim is talking about direct causality and how things have deep impacts on other things, in a more or less scientific sense, he shifts and starts talking about causation as primarily “aesthetic” – in the sense that all things only ever encounter the “qualities” of other things, and not the “essence” of the thing-themselves. I don’t understand how he can split these aspects without suggesting that rocks encounter other rocks phenomenologically?  How exactly does a hammer absolutely withdraw from a nail viz. the nail only ever encountering the hammer’s qualities? Where are those floating “qualities” registered if not in the “mind” of the nail? And why is all of this not still direct? The enactment of 'quality' is particular to entities with the capacity for phenomenal experience. What are the mechanisms involved in hammer phenomenology? If someone could answer those questions I would be in their debt.

As just one example take the following from chapter one of Realist Magic:

“Withdrawn doesn’t mean hard to find or even impossible to find yet still capable of being visualized or mapped or plotted. Withdrawn doesn’t mean spatially, or materially or temporally hidden yet capable of being found, if only in theory. Withdrawn means beyond any kind of access, any kind of perception or map or plot or test or extrapolation.” (Morton 2013)

Beyond any kind of access? Herein lies multiple dilemmas I believe.

With regards to those types of beings who are capable of recursive-reflection ('phenomenal experience') I completely agree that our knowledge of things-in-themselves withdraws. Concepts are never adequate to the things they attempt signify, and knowledge itself is slippery, undecidable and constructed. Our ‘understandings’ of things – our synthetic conceptualizations (manifest images) – are entirely abstract. So I agree with Tim fully in this regard, and I quite enjoy his comments on global warming and how humans are perceiving (or not perceiving) and coping (or not coping) with it and other hyperobjects. But as my last post (here) tries to parse out, there is an important difference that needs theorizing between thinking, coding and knowing about something epistemically and being directly affected by or affecting the substantial capacities of actual material assemblages structurally.

As a bit of an aside about 'structural access/relation', I should mention the work done by Ladyman and Ross (2009) in this regard. As Ladyman and Ross forcefully argue there are "real patterns" that have access to us, intervene upon and sometimes afford our powers of operation, and of which we are forced to work with (adapt/cope) in ways in excess of our representations of them. “From the metaphysical point of view, what exists are just real patterns” (p.121). And these real patters are invariant forces that directly impinge upon the being of other 'individuals' as patterned activities. “Individual things, then, are constructs built for second-best tracking of real patterns” (p.242), or “epistemological book-keeping devices” (p. 240). A key theme in their work is the dismissal of ‘neo-scholastic’ metaphysics and the promotion of ‘naturalised metaphysics’.

So I think it is important to think about just how assemblages (objects) not only have have access to each other's substantial being, but how the operational efficacy of things is interdependent upon multi-modal access between and among a multitude of materials and complexes, creating distributed fields of affordances and possibility. Reality is a mingled and uncanny mesh.

But to return to the point, although I don’t think Morton ever says that things don’t effect each other – at least he never explicitly says this - I wonder if his expressed adherence to Harman’s ontology doesn’t somehow lead to some serious contradictions in this regard? My working thesis is that I either don’t understand Morton’s approach well enough yet (very probable) or there are some unacknowledged contradictions and logical problems within the discourse. And I just want us to be clear about what we are being asked to assume in order to integrate an ontology of withdrawal with claims (coming from science and Tim himself) that humans have enough access to the world to know something about how the world actually works (realism?) to exist effectively within it.