Materialism Expanded and Remixed

Timothy Morton

Now is a very good time to rethink what we mean by matter, as Jane

Bennett's highly engaging study argues. The time is ripe for several reasons.

The current ecological crisis, far from imminent but rather fully underway,

has given rise to predictive and mapping instruments that can measure

climate in real time. Being a very complex derivative of weather, real time

climate mapping requires terabytes of RAM per second processing speeds,

which means that it quite a way beyond the capacity of an individual human

brain. This would explain a lot about global warming deniers, no? Climate is

not a palpable thing but it will kill you just as surely as a train with a

constant momentum will kill you, even if it slows down, if you're tied to the

tracks. Wet, palpable stuff like snow is now less real, in quite an obvious

sense, than something you can't see or feel. Something that affects

everywhere all at once.

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The creation of what I've called hyperobjects also causes us to rethink

materialism. Hyperobjects are things that massively transcend human

historical time scales. Plutonium, for example, has a half-life of 24 100 years.

This means that it will remain dangerously radioactive for longer than all of

recorded history thus far, doubled. Thirdly, developments in quantum

theory—finally an ontological view is beginning to emerge from the welter

of pragmatism, seriously addressing at last the issue of nonlocality—require

us to rethink matter at the most profound scale we have yet imagined,

outside of esoteric religion. I could go on—you could easily come up with

fourth and fifth (and so on) examples of disturbing new materials in our era.

The three phenomena I've sketched are in the newspapers, let alone

in the academy. The humanities can probably ignore science, as it often

does, and some humanists can turn a blind eye to philosophical

developments such as the Deleuzian rapprochement with Leibniz and

Spinoza (and so on). But global warming and hyperobjects, not so much—

and nonlocality, which is the quantum issue, means that you don't have to

go to a Tibetan monastery to find out this kind of stuff. Someone down the

block from you on campus is thinking about it, right now. My colleagues in

my wing of the university tend to be sticks in the mud, for whatever

reason—in particular the ones who say they are materialists. This has
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something to do with an institutional anxiety, and a fascination for things

that seem more “real” than literature and art: humanities scholars can be

far more scientistic than scientists. But it also has to do with a phobia for

subjectivity as such, masquerading as a disdain for “religion” and “religious

experiences.” At a Marxism seminar at Oxford in the late 80s I remember

one rather belligerent fellow guilting us out for even thinking about

deconstruction—“Reality as I see it is like a boring painting, but you make it

sound like an acid trip.” The funny thing is, the current state of physics

means that the view of matter as shiny pingpong balls, with a separate self

viewing them, is the hallucination.

In any case, these developments are 1) Real, 2) Pressing and 3) They

severely limit (or in the case of nonlocality, profoundly undermine) a

materialism consisting of little shiny pingpong balls, bundled with the

attitude of subject–object dualism, in particular, the mind–matter manifold

that has done some damage (shall we say) in its rather brief historical run.

Of course, the devil is in the details, and how human beings progress to a

point at which they are ready to drop the shiny pingpong balls might look

paradoxically like a walk through the darkness of the valley of dualism—of

which more later.

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All such developments have been tracked by art, consciously or

unconsciously, such that there exist in contemporary art forms numerous

examples of the kind of expanded, remastered materialism that we require.

Art can help us to think more clearly and in a greater number of

experiential dimensions about the matters at hand—and, in a sense, art is

philosophy by another means and has its own theories to lay out. In this

paper I'll be discussing some of the ways in which art deals with expanded

materialism, but first some words about the implications of the three

phenomena I've sketched: climate, hyperobjects and nonlocality.

What these phenomena have in common is interconnectedness. Each

phenomenon makes us think deeply about how absolutely everything is

absolutely related to absolutely everything else. Each one poses deep

challenges to our ways of thinking about identity, selfhood and what is

called Nature. Global warming means that what humans have taken to be

the background of their world, against which socioeconomic events took

place has dissolved: nature, typified by the weather, actualized in those

redundant phatic conversations with strangers that you can now no longer

have, because at least one person is thinking of global warming. What

emerges in its place is the outlines of what elsewhere I am calling the mesh:

a total interconnectivity that goes beyond normative vitalist images of the

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web of live to include, for example, non-living beings, or beings that do not

easily fall on one side or the other of the life–nonlife boundary, such as

viruses and artificial life.

Plutonium means that future beings are implicated in our decisions,

future beings to whom we have no meaningful obligation in any ethical

theory based on self-interest, no matter how openly or loosely defined.

Some of these beings include myself in the future, who in this view might as

well count as a different person. So, among their many effects, hyperobjects

eat away at the person–nonperson boundary in highly disturbing ways. We

are connected intimately with beings who are not related to us in any

meaningful sense, yet we owe them an enormous obligation.

Nonlocality means that phenomena are far more deeply

interconnected even than the mesh concept I've just outlined. In the mesh,

things are deeply contiguous and symbiotic. In nonlocality things directly are

other things. This has to do with what physics calls entanglement. Physicist

Alain Aspect and others have established that the Eisntein-Podolsky-Rosen

paradox concerning quantum theory is not only valid, but empirically the

case. When two particles become entangled, you can separate them as

much as you like, and they will respond to information about the other one

as if that information had been sent instantaneously. Not many physicists

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like the idea of breaking the speed limit of light—an instantaneous message

would break this cosmic speed limit. Please be clear that “separate the

particles as much as you like” means by a few feet, or by a few hundred

yards, or by a few thousand miles, or by a few million miles, or by as many

light years as you want. It actually means that. Little shiny pingpong balls are

decidedly located in space and time. So nonlocality means that something is

profoundly wrong with atomism.

Now there are various ways to proceed. One is the standard model,

derived from the Copenhagen synthesis spearheaded by Niels Bohr.

Copenhagen is basically saying that wondering about why nonlocality is the

case makes no sense. Quantum theory is extremely good as a heuristic

tool, but don't ask it to tell you what it all means. Questions about what it

all means are impossible and absurd. The other possibility is the one

advanced by David Bohm and others, which some call (wrongly, I feel) the

“ontological interpretation,” for reasons that I trust will become clear in a

moment. In other words, nonlocality is telling us something about reality.

The speed of light is still the cosmic speed limit. The reason why the

message appears to be instantaneous is that the “particle” doesn't truly

exist—it's only an abstraction of a deeper reality that Bohm calls the

implicate order, “implicate” in the sense that everything is folded into

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everything else. We are not really observing two particles—we are seeing

an unfolding of the implicate order, which in a sense is “one” thing in that

it's undivided, but not a thing or “one” in a more precise sense, since for

“one” to exist there must always be an other. We are indeed at a point in

the argument at which words become difficult, which might have something

to do with the way our mind works—as Bohm, who likes thinking things to

the end, goes on to say. After all, standard quantum theory shows how

mind is implicated in the reality we observe—this is what Heisenberg's

Uncertainty Principle means. Now I know what lots of you are thinking—

oh my God, it's only x am and Professor Morton has already gone off the

deep end into woo-woo land. I put it to you that you might be thinking this

because of academic rituals of exclusion, of course, but also, and this is a

deeper reason, because it's just not very gratifying not to have words or

concepts for things—or at any rate, something you can hold on to—

especially if fixating on things, which is basically what academics do, is what

you get paid for. I know, I'm in the same boat.

Like some interpretations of deconstruction, the Cophenhagen

synthesis sets an arbitrary limit on what thinking can do. The trouble with

this view is that it's self-defeating. First of all, the view is a view—even

though it proclaims itself not to be one. In the Heideggerian–Lacanian sense

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that “there is no metalanguage,” that is, one can never jump outside of

one's universe to make statements that do not themselves have an implicit

view hardwired into them, saying “Move along, there's nothing to see at the

quantum level” is saying that there's something to see. Lacan and Derrida

point out that all statements with grammaticality of some kind, that is,

statements that are consistent, must also be incoherent in at least one

sense, because grammar as such always contains implicit metaphysical

systematizing. The language in which you say something is already a

philosophical view—of course, there is a softcore nominalist version of this,

but I'm talking about the hardcore one, which is really saying that signs and

the ideas and attitudes they code for are not like icing and cake: like if we

could ice the cake differently, it might taste better. In this respect, Lacan

and Derrida are repeating in linguistic terms what Gödel's Incompleteness

Theorem states in mathematical terms. Funnily enough, this is to the

chagrin of the same kind of person—the Whiteheadian (and subsequently,

Deleuzian) totalizer who thinks that she or he has done an end run around

the metaphysical, that is, totalization.

The view of no-view, then, is like the Cretan liar paradox: it says

things at once, because statements have two levels (the statee and the

stater as it were). And this brings up the second self-defeating fact about
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Copenhagen, which has to do with the attitude or subject position that the

no-view view implies. If you throw in the towel and say “Ho hum, can't

make anything of that, never mind, pass the salt,” shouldn't it be okay for

others to keep trying? Why do you have then to police what others such as

David Bohm say, decrying it as love and lighty? Wouldn't it be more

efficient to let them get on with it, since reality as such is an impossible,

unthinkable, unspeakable affair? After all, these guys are only making

themselves look stupid, according to you. Why should you be so scared of

them?

The trouble is, you don't believe me because I'm a humanities guy, so

if I say reality qua me and you and this cup of coffee over here doesn't

really exist, I'm some kind of nihilistic deconstructor or (worse) a New Age

whacko in academic drag, while my colleague in the physics building can get

away with saying that basically the Universe must be a three-dimensional

hologram projected from an inscribed surface, possibly inside a black

hole—that the extent to which we exist is not unlike the extent to which

the image on your credit card exists. Bummer.

Why holograms? Bohm uses the analogy of a hologram to describe

the implicate order. Images taken with a lens give us a sense of single, solid,

independent things that can be “captured,” as they say, separate from other
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things. A hologram can't be seen directly: it's simply a mesh of interference

patterns created by light waves bouncing off the object to be imaged and

light waves passing through a beam splitter. When you pass light through

the interference pattern, a three-dimensional rendering of the object

appears in front of the pattern. Weirdly, you can cut a little piece of

hologram out—or shine light through a little piece of the pattern (same

thing), and you will still see a (slightly more blurry) version of the whole

imaged object. Every piece of the hologram contains information about the

whole thing. Bohm argues that this must be the case with reality as such—

every piece of it enfolds information about the whole. Bohm means the

hologram to stand metaphorically for something far less reified, though it is

interesting to see how current physical models also think about holograms

more literally. Recent results from gravity wave detectors have revealed a

suspiciously regular pattern emanating from the cosmic background

radiation, as if at some level reality were pixilated—made up of regular little

“dots” of information: exactly the kind of information you'd expect to see if

you really were a projection of an actual hologram.

Take a moment to mull over what this means. Nonlocality means

that “Here” and “there” are superficial labels. Thus “myself,” located here

and now in spacetime, is a rather abstract generalization, like “weather” as

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opposed to “climate.” In truth, then, we are “in” something (if “in” has any

meaning here) that has no center or edge. We are certainly not pieces in a

jigsaw puzzle that's larger than all of us put together. This kind of view,

known as holism, means that there is a whole greater than the sum of its

parts. This holistic whole remains separate from its parts in some sense.

The holistic jigsaw puzzle view depends upon an outside and an inside, and

jigsaw pieces whose external edges are related to one another like

cogwheels. Both of these requirements are only superficial ways of

generalizing about phenomena.

Let's just pop the love and light balloon right here. The trouble with

the holographic view is that it's bad for holism as well as for atomism. You

are not part of a larger whole: you are that whole, directly. This means that

there is, again, no background against which our thinking makes sense. This

is it, folks. The holographic view, or implicate order, is not a view of

oneness or harmony—there's nothing to become one, nothing to

harmonize. Since the whole is undivided, there is nothing to compare it

with: it is utterly singular, which means that it can never violently express

itself as One, as the One (Derrida, Archive Fever). Everything is enfolded in

everything, which means that at this level (if “level” is the right word here),

everything is “flowing movement” as Bohm says.

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The difficulty faced by holographic models of matter strictly

resembles the difficulty facing deconstruction. Isn't it the case that

deconstructors and anti-deconstructors set limits on what deconstruction

can do, limits that Derrida himself did not respect? Derrida didn't say, late

in life, “Oh well, ho hum, might as well throw in the towel; nothing means

anything.” Despite popular caricatures, this is the absolute opposite of how

Derrida proceeded. Meaninginfulness multiplies in Derridean thinking—it

doesn't wither and die. Deconstruction discovers all kinds of entities

appearing between or beyond or within existing metaphysical categories.

Deconstruction is not destruction. It would likewise be a big mistake to

throw in the quantum towel and go “Ho hum, can't make anything of that,

never mind, pass the salt,” like the physicist who said that his experiences in

the lab were hermetically sealed from his everyday experiences of life. The

“ho hum” attitude conceals a profound taboo, and a policing of boundaries

on numerous levels (academic—who gets the grants and who doesn't;

personal—the difference between “my ideas” and “my life”; philosophical—

the refusal to think beyond a certain limit, and contempt for those who

try). It's been my general experience that you can say almost anything in the

academy, but if you say something love and lighty, you get creamed. My

question as to why the left dropped the ball on ecology in the 60s was
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regularly answered with “Well, ecology was a hippie thing” (and thus

beneath contempt).

Now a conference on non-Marxian materialism should take this very

seriously, because the left argued themselves into a box by reproducing—

perhaps accidentally—the attitude that comes bundled with the normative

materialist software. Deconstruction is not claiming that nothing means

anything; deconstruction is claiming that meaning only arises because of a

play of difference, not because of some intrinsic meaning. The sub-quantum

level that Bohm hypothesizes is very much this play of difference. It would

be a mistake to associate Bohm with say a form of negative-theological

hyperessentialism (see Derrida's essay on negative theology), let alone with

holism, which Bohm directly critiques as yet another conceptual box. Bohm

is always tentative and subjunctive about the implicate order; but let's

assume that he isn't, or that this tentativeness isn't relevant (it is relevant, in

fact, because Bohm, having discovered the implicate order, realizes that at

this level how you speak of it drastically affects our (mis)understanding of

it). The “it is unspeakable” is not a taboo against speaking of something that

is so essential that words slip off it; you can speak of it all you like, just

remember that words risk putting it in a box.

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There is no attempt to establish, in the negative, some essence, like

shading around the outline of a form to make the form appear on paper.

There is a confusion because of Derrida's use of “ontotheological” to

describe a certain set of metaphysical gestures, and Bohm's use of

“ontological” to describe the implicate order; what if the implicate order

were not strictly ontological? There is a further confusion because of the

New Age appropriation of Bohm, and academic prejudices against New Age

(some valid, some less so): the naive optimism of New Age dies a death in

the bright fluorescent lights of academic mind—quite possibly a premature

one; the millenarian, manipulative and technophilic aspects of New Age

wither in light of Marxist critiques of the “dialectic of enlightenment.” I

wager that we should keep the optimism of New Age, if it helps us to

develop a view that is congruent with our ethical and political needs—we

can drop the manipulativeness, but on academia's side, the critical attitude,

which too often is only a legitimated form of cynicism, can also be dropped.

Now you may wonder, how come someone is opening a conference

on materialism by talking about attitudes—talking, in short, about mind?

Here's the issue. New theories of materialism seem eager to ascribe to

objects precisely those things academics have recently become nervous

about ascribing to subjects: agency, reflexivity, a complex, fluid relationship

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with one's environment, and so on. At the very moment at which it has

become uncool or even taboo to talk about subjects, we are beginning to

talk about objects in precisely the same way. I find this more than strange.

Is it simply a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic of dualism?

Or is this rethinking an opportunity to rethink what we mean by “subject,”

refraining, in effect, from throwing the baby of subjectivity or consciousness

or whatever out with the bathwater of essentialism or anthropocentrism

or whatever? In which case, wouldn't this conference be an ideal moment

to reflect on the nature of mind? Or are we so hopelessly caught in

subjecthood—or so afraid or guilty or ashamed of it—that this question

becomes either dangerous or absurd? And wouldn't this inconsistent mix of

danger and absurdity press every ideology warning light on your control

panel if you saw it with reference to something other than subjectivity as

such, say with reference to gender or race—viz. the standard homophobic

meme that being gay is ridiculous and threatening, simultaneously? Evidently

we would then be up against something like subject-phobia, and as is well

established, it is phobia as such that fixates on a phenomenon, reifying it

into an object. A specter is haunting new materialism: the specter of the

subject.
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This specter is precisely what emerges from a study of contemporary

art forms that give a sense of very large finitude or massive

interconnectedness, such as our emerging awareness of the half-life of

plutonium or global warming, or a sense of infinity on this side of things, not

in some beyond, such as our emerging awareness of nonlocality. I'm

thinking in particular of electronic music by the French composer Eliane

Radigue, and also of La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music, Dream

Houses, and works for “justly tuned” instruments. These works are very,

very long, very simple from the point of view of narrative—they have no

beginning, middle or end, but rather are just tones, and vocal or

instrumental tuning to those tones—and highly educational about the deep

implication of our nervous system and perceptual apparatus in what they

perceive. Such artworks are hyperobjects—massively larger and more

immersive than we are accustomed to perceiving. They also function as

ways to think the even greater interconnectedness of nonlocality. They

beam us directly into a nonlocalizable, vast ocean of interference patterns

like sonic Bridget Riley paintings or the raw materials of a hologram,

created by precisely tuned sine waves, using in Young's case whole number

values (instead of equal-temperament fudging) to achieve a maximum

spread of harmonic frequencies rather than a nicely rendered world of

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brown where brown things happen in a brown way to brown people—the

Romantic narrative or program music model, to which Adorno was

unfortunately too attached.

It's like going inside matter, as if the shiny ping-pong balls were hugely

amplified until they ceased to be spherical or shiny. They induce a sense of

wonder—“What am I hearing? Good heavens, so that's the limit of my

auditory system I'm hearing”—and boredom, simultaneously, a combination

evocative of meditation states, which could also be seen as an attunement

to materiality (of the breath and of one's body—in Sanskrit this tuning is

called yoga, which means yoking or joining). They demonstrate categorically

how subject and object are deeply entangled, just as, when one looks at

Bridget Riley, one is seeing one's own optical system. “Drift Study,” for

instance, is a precisely tuned pair of frequencies that change as you move

around them—you are hearing your ears. This kind of thing immediately

brings to mind the question of consciousness—what is it? Where is it? Like

any attempt to think outside the Marxist box, they land you in a hippie-

looking place. The question is, do we scholars then run away, like Scooby

and Shaggy?

The University of California, Davis