Tristan Garcia - Form and Object a Treatise on Things Speculative Realism - Part 1

Thing - No-Matter-What

1. What is everything composed of? What do all things compose? The first question concerns the nature, identity, or mere definition of what concerns principles, what is primary, primitive, or elementary, or the irreducible component of everything that is. What whole are they made of?

2. Understand the state of the composite of everything that may always act as a component. What form can account for the totality of everything that is?

3. The first question refer to the second, vice versa, but each question proves to be both condition and the reverse of the other. From the idea of a whole or world, one can only wonder what composes this whole or world. Each of the two questions presupposes the existence of concepts – either the concept of whole or the concept of things, element, or unity – that the other question renders uncertain, or at least transform into a problem, by establishing as certain what the first question holds up as a problem to solve.

What is very thing composed of?

What do things compose?

4. between these two questions an infinite series of intermediary questions is assembled regarding the membership of this or that is such and such body, idea, value, culture, society, history, and so on. If it is a question of knowing if such a thing is this way or not, if it can be, must be, or ought to act this way or not, then every possible question – the who, what, where, when, why, and how – consists in determining one (or more) ‘something(s)’ within a world, totality, horizon, or universe of reference. These questions and the responses they demand arise from a determination of things that matter to us; thus, what things matter to us. We limit everything to a sphere of belonging.

5. Most of existence consists in defining, paying attention to, and defending what matters.

6. These two questions/ problems admit a response if and only if one considers not merely what matters, but no-matter-what.

7. First question – it is necessary to not only take into consideration what composes the physical, natural, social, or psychological world, but every world. In other words, it is necessary to pay equal attention to everything that is something, whatever it is.

8. Take – or do not take – no-matter-what. We understand by ‘no-matter-what’ this as well as that, so that nothing is a priori excluded from it. Take into account equally each object and each of its parts, each word, each idea, each event, and each quality in the same way as the physical substrates to which this quality can be attributed, each moment, each possibility as well as each reality, each good, each evil, each truth, or each false proposition, the totality of things, and likewise a contradiction, an impossibility – it doesn’t matter. ‘No-matter-what’ is neither an entity nor the repository of some quality, determination, or particularity that would be established by way of a principle. ‘No-matter-what’ is nothing other than the expression of the refusal to attribute some importance, whether to what this is, or to what that is, or to what everything perhaps can be. ‘No-matter-what’ is not this more than that, and it is not this less than that. ‘No-matter-what’ is uninteresting; it is, in the end, only the possibility of not attributing importance to the ‘what’.

9. Something is never no-matter-what. I could not find something in the world which would be no-matter-what.

10. That nothing is no-matter-what means that there does not exist any object, event, god, or idea that would be ‘no-matter-what’. Something is in this way, something is systematically this, because this is not that. The characteristic property of something is to be incapable of being equally all that is. Without one knowing what it is, and without this determination mattering in any way. A thing which could be all things and which could have all qualities – a contradictory thing which could be this and the opposite of this – would fail to be no-matter- what. No-matter-what is not the totality of all things, but rather no-matter-what thing, anything.

11. To have access to no-matter-what, I can only think at the same time, or rather on the same plane, in the same relation, of all that is differentiated. the possibility of being indifferently this or its opposite, or yet any other thing than this or its opposite. No-matter-what is what can be indifferently this or something which is not this, or even this and something which is not this – nothing prevents no-matter-what from being a contradiction, but nothing forces it to be contradictory either; it doesn’t matter.

12. There is neither a reality nor a possibility that one could call ‘no-matter-what’, which would express this quality, which would act as a potential support for this identity.

13. No-matter-what is not nothing. On the contrary, no-matter-what – that is to say, ‘equally this or that or any other thing’ – is something. the possibility of being equally this or that or its opposite without this or that mattering; the radical unimportance of ‘that which it is’ – is not nothing. Moreover, it is the very proof that nothing is absolutely nothing, that nothing is never a non-being which could take on the deceptive appearance of a being, that nothing is never a groundless idea. Everything that is – even if it is vacuous, false, nothing, or groundless – is something. The problem is understanding in what sense it is something. To think of an object as complex and elusive is precisely to discover how to grasp it. In the second sense, the assertion that ‘no-matter-what is something’ marks the permeability of all the barriers by which one can claim to protect and limit the import of that which is something.

14. Give me something, and this will never be no-matter-what. However, you can give me no-matter-what thing. Nothing that you give me can avoid being something.

15. Several anthropocentric strategies deny the possibility that no-matter-what can be something. The first strategy is logical. Consequently, a contradictory proposition can never have unity and be ‘something’. The second strategy concerns language and reflection on language. A long-standing poetic strategy; the means by which I say things (language, speech, meaning) are not themselves expressible by way of things said. The third strategy is epistemological. It unfolds via the transcendental concept. The transcendental concept is the condition of possibility of the knowledge of things, but which cannot itself be an object of knowledge of the same order, the knowledge of things. The fourth strategy is cultural. It consists in making taboos function. Taboos are relations to entities that cannot be named, that cannot be made to appear as something, and that can only be defined negatively as what is impermissible. The fifth strategy is religious. The idea of sanctity corresponds to the conception of entities that are more than something, or that cannot be grasped or aimed at by the heart or mind as things. These ‘more-than-things’ demand our care and respect. The sixth strategy is moral and political. It consists in establishing insurmountable natural differences between things and certain goods, sentient subjects, human persons, values, works, or ideas, which must not be reified or lowered to the level of things, like other things, without risking the irreversible collapse of all values and dignity.

16. Let us take an example borrowed from the logical strategy: the squared circle. This contradiction in terms, which cannot be an object of intuition or of knowledge, is not really a thing. It will never obtain an object which could be both circle and square, together, ‘at the same time [and] in the same respect’. In other words, even if I will never successfully unify the concept of the squared circle – which is not an idea, but the contradictory intersection of two ideas – I can determine what this intersection is not. I can always distinguish it from other things and not confuse it with other distinct contradictory ideas. How is it possible to think that completely identical things do not refer to an identical possibility in the same way – specifically, by preventing it? This does not invalidate the logical ‘principle of explosion. Now, if no-matter-what can follow from a contradiction, a contradiction is nonetheless neither no-matter-what nor no-matter-what contradiction. How could a contradiction remain contradictory if it was not determined, even in a minimal way? If a contradiction was itself anything, then it would also be something non-contradictory, and therefore cease being contradictory. A contradiction must have a determination a minima in order to remain the contradiction that it is. A contradiction cannot be identified with ‘no-matter-what’, and therefore anything. From this we can claim that it is incompatible to be something and to be no-matter-what. Everything which is not no-matter- what is something.

17. Every taboo is therefore different from others in such a way that a taboo is never no-matter-what taboo, but, rather, a very particular taboo. Nothing forms an object better than a long-standing cultural status of concealment and prohibition.

18. The case of sanctity is fundamentally different. What is sacred does not always precede sanctity: it is possible to begin by considering that ‘there is’ something sacred, namely, a system that is exceptional to the rule of things, until sanctity has itself become an object (of reflection, of meditation, of hope). Sanctity is clearly not no-matter-what, since it appears as ‘what matters more than any other thing’. However, not being no-matter-what, it must also be something. Sanctity is nothing other than the creation of an exception to the system of all that is something. If sanctity is not something, nonetheless it is not anything, since it is necessarily something (which must avoid this status to remain what it is).

19. The theory that it is the structure of language and the inexpressibility of non-things that makes possible the expressibility of things is the same in poetics as in formal, logical languages. The limits of a language are only ever the limits of things said.

20. As for the limits of my knowledge, or its conditions, it always seems that to know the limits of what I do know comes back to knowing the limits of what I do not know. Not only can I make something of what escapes my knowledge, but I cannot even avoid making something of it on the outside. I know therefore that which this property is, its form, without knowing that which is this property, namely, what is inside the residence. In other words, although I can never enter the mansion, I know at least that the mansion is something in the world, whatever it encloses. I must know that it is something, in the absence of knowing what is this something. ‘What I do not know’ is clearly something, neither all nor nothing nor any thing.

21. There is a strong belief that human persons, sentient creatures with values, works, and ideas, must not be considered as things. But how do I respect, protect, or control that which is not something for me? One must understand a human person as a thing like other things in order to be capable of respecting a human person. One must know how no-matter-what is something in order to perceive and defend objective differences between things. Reification – the reduction of our world to a world of things. But the precondition of a human understanding of the differences between things. A system of exceptions in the world of things is never an ‘ethical’ or ‘just’ system, but rather a metaphysical system of the determination of inequalities between things, of ‘more-than-things’, which cannot be elements of this system. To establish what distinguishes some things from other things and our possible actions towards them, we must still conduct the test and consider them all equally as things. by distinguishing what must not be something and by reifying it (the ‘human person’); second, by denying the possibility of placing all things on an equal footing, which is the very condition of their comparison and of their relative importance. It is, in the strict sense, a matter of interests. It is the question of knowing what matters to us, what matters to life, and to human life, because from the formal point of view of no-matter-what everything is equal.

22. No-matter-what is that which is something. We cannot prevent anything from being something. If one finds, conceives of, or imagines that which can be something then one will have access to no-matter-what. And it is this no-matter-what which interests us here.

23. No-matter-what is neither real nor abstract, nor both of these at once. It concerns the possibility of being either real or possible, or real and possible, or neither real nor possible, either constructed or given, either natural or artificial, or natural and artificial, either true or illusory, of not being all of these at once, but of equally being able to come under (or not) one of these determinations, any determination.

24. That no-matter-what is something indicates nothing other than the possibility of a flatness: that by which everything is equally.

25. Every logic, knowledge, and human action has opposed a certain depth to this flatness: the most and the least important of things, for and through life. To Matter

A thing that matters is a thing to which some value is attributed. Now a value, any value, positive or negative, always appears as a means of forcing a thing to be what it is more than another thing. To value a thing is to transform the strictly extensive character of everything into an intensity. In this way, a beautiful thing – more beautiful than another thing – is a bit more of a thing than an ugly thing; a true relation between two things is a bit more of a relation than a false relation. A value is what affects the being of a thing by fundamentally making it intensive. The importance of a thing is always accentuated or attenuated by its own value; what is beautiful is more something. There is more between two things which maintain a true relation than between two things whose relation is false. What is good augments the world more than what is bad. To matter, for a thing, is therefore to have either more or less value. It is more this and it is less that. They expand and contract they are elastic and comparable with each other – through the relations that objects maintain between each other. In fact, we act with things, appreciate them, perceive them, and think about them insofar as they matter to us and they matter to something other than us (to our environment, to the future, to other species, to our ideas, to a god, and so on). But the world of important things lacks the flat world in which each thing is neither more nor less than a thing. In order for some things to matter more than others, whether they are more beautiful (for us or in relation to some idea that we have of them) or more ugly, more true or more false, better or worse, it is necessary that a plane exists on which no thing is either more or less a thing than another. The flat world, where no thing is more important than another, supposes neither an abstraction nor a reduction, neither asceticism nor critique, neither genealogy nor deconstruction, but a simple levelling. This is the flat world of the no-matter-what.

That No –Matter – What Became Something

If the twentieth century passed on to us one lesson, it is that no- matter-what could be something. Material objects were shown joined together by ideas, qualities ,or values, parts overtaken by their whole, wholes by their parts, the aristocratic by the popular, profane things by sacred things. Before, one denied making something of them. The hierarchy that ordered the scale of differences between a thing and its qualities, for example, was reduced to nothingness. The various qualities of a thing became things in the same way as the thing that they were qualities of. A quality, a word, a concept, a judgement, an opinion – the more nothing is nothing, the more nothing is everything. The more nothing is a less-than-thing, the more nothing is a more-than-thing, and everything is simply something. Everything that created an order separating things from what is not completely a thing, or from what is a more-than-thing, has disappeared. As a general rule, everything which was a more-than thing, everything that constituted a ‘totality’, like God, the world, the soul, man, life, being qua being, history, or society, were in one way or another objectivised. In other words, one made an object of them, and one deconstructed the claim of each to be non-reifiable. Something, not everything and not nothing. One could argue that consciousness is not something because all things are given to us in consciousness. But society and history made consciousness a something like other things. One could argue that history wasn’t something because all things took place in history. Society had a beginning, conditions of appearance, limits, and therefore the status of a finite object. But in modernity, all these more-than things saw their claim humiliated. Something other than themselves always reified them, exposing their limits, determinations, and particularities, before subsequently reducing them to the rank of a particular thing, in an infernal chaos of thought. Everything that made things was made a thing, as if the executioner was condemned to be executed by an executioner, forced to be subjected to the same fate. On the one hand, what was considered a less-than-thing – what appeared to depend on substantial things or on material things – ended up acquiring a status independent of a mere ‘something’. On the other hand, everything that seemed to be a more-than thing was lowered to the rank of thing hood. The twentieth century left us what could be called a flat world, in which any criterion of a thing seemingly no longer subsists, and in which this thing is no longer constructed by different ordered degrees that a metaphysics would be in the position to infer and absolutely justify. This observation remains: no-matter-what can be something. It is the characteristic feature of our world – a world of things.

Thing

In early twenty-first century global culture, what first comes to mind when talking about thinghood is the material thing, physical unity, or cohesion proper to a part of space-time: a concrete object. Other human cultures clearly put forward or had put forward the primary meaning of what it is to be a thing through other determinations. The ancient or classical things are substances. For many other peoples, things are or were primarily minds and inner things. In our own contemporary culture, by ‘thing’ we primarily understand the thing which obtains its unity in a part of matter. For us, a thing par excellence is a collection of matter which has some coherent qualities. A thing can then undergo spatio-temporal displacements and transformations without its identity being altogether affected by them. It is more problematic to consider the body of a living creature, human being, or animal as a thing. Some think that a person must not be reducible to a thing. A person has spatio-temporal identity, since, while changing form (from infancy to old age), it must nonetheless be considered as the same thing. Some normally think that a person is actually a bit more than a thing. But a human person’s action leads to the production of some things (ideas, words, movements) that we at the same time judge to be a bit less than things: secondary, constructed effects, which would have less objective reality than spatially identifiable and reidentifiable things. In our contemporary prejudices and commonplaces, we primarily recognise things, and, with difficulty, during the debates and disagreements we have, we then recognise sub-things and supra-things. Around this pseudo-concept of ‘thing’, we have what is greater than things, which merits respect, cannot be exchanged for other things, is valued in itself, and is incomparable. On the other hand, we have what is inferior, which is always an effect or construction by humans or other sentient beings and by their cognition of things of the least reality: not merely material things, but linguistic, computational, symbolic, intentional, chimerical, or virtual things. And our pseudo-concept of ‘thing’ remains that which has both spatial and temporal unity. A thing is primarily what has internal spatial consistency and is independent of that which it is not, such that one can move it without affecting its form. Only subsequently does the temporal unity of a thing, its capacity to seemingly remain the same as time passes, allow us to identify and re-identify it as something, a ‘very much thing’. Temporal identity strengthens a thing even more. On this view, the spatial identity gives it its thingly character, while the temporal identity gives it its thingly intensity. Whatever quickly loses its temporal form is a ‘very little thing’, though nevertheless a thing, while whatever endures is nevertheless a thing in that it retains an enduring identity. The schema inherited from ancient and classical views of substantiality still allow us to very vaguely classify things according to their spatial coherence and degree of corruptibility over time. In our eyes, the first problem that arises from the determination of things as spatially coherent and movable things (and not simply as substances endowed with qualities among other spatial qualities), is that we confusedly believe that spatial things are composed of smaller things. Our contemporary conception of matter thus leads us to think that things are always in things. In other words, the coherence of a spatial thing is always broken down into its component parts – if not in our eyes, at least in our at times scholarly and often vague tacit knowledge. Our consideration of spatial things is thus local, a function of the scale of our action at any given time. Second problem: where does a ‘concrete’ thing begin and where does it end? Not only are a material thing’s spatial limits not the same from one scale to another, but every material thing continually loses parts from one moment to the next. But unlike the classical belief, an idea is scarcely any more substantial. Scientific concepts also change from paradigm to paradigm. And even though, insofar as they do not correspond to every secondary reality, they may be the only true things in the world, they provide us with a world of very impoverished things, as the world is in general for every radical positivism. Nevertheless, from the impossibility of reducing a thing to a spatio-temporal thing, to an ideal thing, or to a concept, we must not conclude that it is impossible to make use of the term ‘thing’. Many things exist, and we cannot do without the concept of ‘thing’. In the absence of things, the world becomes undifferentiated: the world is a self-saturated whole in itself which knows no differentiation. To maintain such an assertion, one must, as certain philosophers do, proceed in one of two ways. We can push to its maximum the differentiation between the continuous world and the activity that produces differentiation, the artificial division by our actions. The dividable thing and the thing that divides things. Others who instead try to minimise the differentiation to account for it within the framework of a philosophy of immanence only manage to say that the same thing, since it is different, produces differentiation – but in reality the thing is identical. In both cases, one must presuppose either a minimal or a maximal difference between at least two things to account for the manifold differentiation of things according to all of their degrees. One never accounts for the fact that there are things other than by things. A ‘thing’ cannot derive from anything other than another thing. No philosophical magic trick will ever give us the appearance of things from a more fundamental principle of a non-differentiation or super-difference of things. Indeed, when something is, nothing can precede a thing but another thing. If one wants to redirect the something of an undifferentiated totality, an immanence, an in-itself, or anything that one claims is not a product of the thingly division, this principle will retroactively and immediately be reduced to the thing’s status as another thing. In this way, one cannot do without the concept of thing, but neither can one fix it at some determination; a thing will always be a material thing, an idea, or a concept. Something is contaminating in the thing. When a thing is, it is seemingly impossible to limit it to particular determinations alone. It is pointless to want to impose a quarantine on it. Instead of opposing the epidemic character of a thing, we by definition accept it. No-matter-what is something. Each barrier was erected to limit the range of ‘real’, concrete things to spatio-temporal objects, or to reduce them to mere well-formed ideas, concepts, or sentences. Historical attempts were made to self-saturate and define them as substances. But no limits are ever strong enough to resist the epidemic potential of a thing that no-matter-what can be, and that nothing manages to not be absolutely. Nonetheless, human thought always conspires to resist an epidemic of things, which carries in embryonic form the menacing potential of the no-matter-what.