gabriel yoran, the interfact: genesis & integration — review
217 years after kant's death we are actually arguing about the noumenal in less productive ways than even he did, and unlike harman who has clearly given up, yoran is still trying to make sense of it
i. the genesis problem in harman
in harman's ontology, relations only ever involve sensual objects. real objects are always withdrawn and cannot be accessed directly by other objects. harman argues that objects are not reducible to their pieces. even if an object depends on pieces to arise, it is not identical to them. in the introduction to "the quadruple object", harman explicitly says that objects include imaginary things like unicorns and centaurs. and the first problem immediately arrives: if i wanted the sensual object of a unicorn to become a real object (a real unicorn), how would that occur? what would be the objects that could make it happen? it would require a lot more than two "real objects" to cause it, it would come about through a myriad of existing relations. yet in harman, real objects only come about on accident when other real objects come into contact with it, and none of this stuff is actually visible to us in any way, nor relates to our activity. we can potentially create sensual objects (such as genetically modified horses that we can call unicorns) and yet, real objects involve both things that don't actually exist in the world or relate to it in any way, and very concrete things such as ourselves.
what's really happening in harman's view is that we are creating a unicorn as an object first, and only then it just so happens that it coincides with us becoming essentially aware of the existence of this already-having-been real object. its already-having-beeness also isn't definitive, but coincides with some process in the noumenal world that made it happen. and even though it is real, we only interact with it sensibly. so essentially, we aren't actually aware of the temporal manner in which real objects become generated in the noumenal world, or the exact logic that governs this relation. if we created a unicorn in a biolab it would require the scientists, the computers, the genetically implanted horse, the vacuumed room, the injection machine. yet, graham says that the real object of a unicorn is not constitutive of its parts. but unlike an apple, which we can clearly figure out the primary and secondary qualities and further relations of, a unicorn has no such counterpart since it doesn't exist as a real object just yet.
ii. haecceity and the identification problem
yoran’s book explicitly frames haecceity as the problem of referring to “this object” within an ontology that rejects anthropocentrism, however, the whole point of retroactive affect (historically known as haecceity: the interrelation between essence, identity and concept) in heidegger-husserl is that the "thisness" of the hammer is actualized in the hammer as a real object. one would be quick to assume that the sensual object of the hammer (the one we encounter) is actually contained or transmuted to the sensual object by the real object, if the identity of the hammer can somehow be confirmed to be related to the essence of the ideal hammer, or inversely, if through the concept of a hammer we can create a multiplicity of hammers (like in deleuze).
so then the natural next question is, shouldn't the real object of the unicorn naturally be connected, shouldn't it be involved in the animated "thisness" of the imagined unicorn? well in harman, haecceity exists ontologically, yet haecceity cannot be tested or fully described precisely because since real objects and real qualities are always withdrawn, there's no way to identify the thisness of a something — and at the same time, there could be a million similar "thisnesses" corresponding to ever-so-slightly different objects due to the existence of what harman says distortion (harman says that there is no floor — so perpetual object combinations can be infinite, but that there is a surface — there can be no pan-object). yoran himself even asks in regards to distortion and identifiability: "how can there be haecceity in something this vague?".
the problem is that since the thisness of anything is only postulated after its existence, nobody would question that a hammer's "real" object is the one we currently think of as a hammer in the sensual world, but since the unicorn as a cultural sensual object is the way it is in popular media, the "thisness" reflected by the real object (meaning, the new sensual qualities that result as a product of the real object) would then be retroactively compared with its sensual object, and people (maybe harman included?) would be confused about whether this is the same object or not, or whether the sensual object even has any relationship to the real object in a way that actually tells us if it's the same thing or not. "if it could come about by different things but end up being the same thing (retroactive causation)" doesn't actually answer whether there can be a multiplicity of unicorns or one grand unicorn (pan-object).
yet harman does answer this, and he clearly states that real objects don't actually pair well with their sensual counterparts, you can never know what real object is being reflected by what sensual object or what type of relationships they have, all you can do is realize that you are speaking about/thinking of a real vs. sensual object by the fact of its existence in correspondence to you (its ability to do things without you having to imagine them first, or its interdependent existence). yoran himself also confirms this, arguing that in harman, this methodological problem is the point of arrival rather than a question to be solved. it is only true that relations can access partial aspects of objects, because every relation does distort the object involved in it, the example harman gives is that when fire burns cotton, the fire only encounters certain aspects of the cotton (its flammability) and not others (its color or smell).
harman says "after all, we have been speaking all along of how humans have partial access to hammers while using them, and have also reflected on how fire touches certain qualities of cotton despite not touching the cotton as a whole. the problem is that objects cannot be touched 'in part,' because there is a sense in which objects have no parts. it is not as if things were made of seventy or eighty qualities and there were a mere practical limit ensuring that five or six of the qualities would always be withheld from the organs of sense. for even if we were to perceive every quality of an object perfectly, we would still not reconstruct the thing in its reality. to be an object means to be itself, to enact the reality in the cosmos of which that object alone is capable."
iii. harman's response and its limit
yet, if there is no stable real object it doesn't matter whether there is a real object or only endless sensual objects. harman may even be said to be cheating in a sense, because he makes real objects prove their own self-existence by being the inaccessible property of self-emanating objects rather than just self-constructed wholes. but self-constructed real objects (the only form of real object in harman) don't have the ability to prove their real object status in the same way. there is nothing to the real object functionally in harman other than being an inexhaustible list of sensual objects, except for real qualities, which are simply a stand-in used to explain how real objects can continue to be the way they are without having to enter into or be shaped by relations. by denying the essence-identity confirmation process, harman cannot explain what happens to a real object once it's withdrawn.
ooo posits real objects as necessary to avoid relational reduction, but the theory provides no independent means of distinguishing real objects beyond the sensual appearances that supposedly distort them. harman gives birth to certain ontological postulates that get falsely re confirmed by empricial entities, and in this way, he gets away with easily defining one side of ro's and refusing to define another because empirical entities " secretly already confirm" the haeccity of something in its most common sense manifestation.
of course, this is only polemical, because clearly harman makes a good case for how the many qualities objects have truly don't ever get exhausted. the real issue is that he essentially fully preserves kant's noumenal realm, and not only that, but he makes multiple cases simultaneously for how difficult it is to describe what's involved in it. his methodology is rigorous and straightforward, but it leaves its own main transcendental term fully outside of its own mechanical reach. yet, the biggest problem is not regarding real objects we can interact with but the potentially infinite list of ones we can't. graham, since he has not posited any formal mechanism, suffers from having to retroactively justify every real object's supposed existence.
to give an example, a mythological concept of a "bunicorn" (a unicorn that is a piece of bread) that nobody knows cause everyone forgot about it isn't "ontologically surplus" in the same way that a country not being a nato member in yoran's example is still self-evident (its non-existence is clearly still impacting things). it doesn't matter if they say that it isn't doing anything other than being itself if it can be concluded that it potentially doesn't ever do anything. they can say that, but it could be something else if there is no mechanism to confirm it, since there is no minimal mechanism to confirm the existence of real objects if relations don't account for them.
simultaneously, the relations that an apple produces are so self-evident compared to the real yet non-existent object of a unicorn, that the very act of categorically fusing the reality of an apple and the fantasy of a unicorn in the same ontological "realm" is sketchy, especially since no noumenal mechanism is ever speculated by harman. harman, by attempting to solve both the overmining (every object is a set of relations posited by that thing) and undermining (every object is part of some pre-individual totality) problem, overdetermines the object itself to preserve it from turning into a metaphor, but underdetermines its causal mechanisms.
iv. yoran's attempt: the out-of-phase object
yoran's text does several things to solve several questions that harman (doesn't) raise that we've just gone over, which are problems that arise not because of harman's inconsistency but because of his intentional epistemologically narrow yet systematically complete thesis. the problems with object oriented ontology is that it is precise yet intentionally very restrained, which leaves several methodological questions in place. in the usual cases, the theorist already posits both causal mechanisms and interpretative lenses in their own ontology (leibniz, berkeley, morton, sloterdijk), and successive thinkers and researchers complete these ideas. but in yoran's case, his answers to graham already shift the theory in the only real direction it can go, one where relations and processes return back into the theory but only to explain the micro-causality behind how real objects are generated, identified, successively orchestrated and so on, but not to actually mess with the primary way in which they behave noumenologically in the world.
in chapter 4, yoran does a few concrete things. first, he argues that there are three interlocking necessities that any object-oriented philosophy must satisfy: objects must be identifiable, generatable, and integrable, and also that these three conditions are not independent — identifiability requires integration, integration requires interfaceability, and interfaceability is a precondition for identifiability. when it comes to the problem we identified in harman regarding object genesis, he argues that the fourfold diagrams treat objects as if they could exist in isolation, which contradicts harman's own claim that sensual objects appear only when real objects confront each other. yoran therefore argues that objects are structurally integrated into other objects from the start. then, to explain how new objects arise, yoran borrows from simondon's individuation theory to coin a new concept he calls the out-of-phase object, the idea behind being that objects interact in a way that produces potential relations which flicker between existence and non-existence, and if they are compatible, the object "quantizes" into a stable object.
yoran also argues that objects cannot exist without being embedded in a fabric of relations that stabilizes them, and the relations have an amusing but mostly formally undeveloped term in chapter 4, an "interfact" (interface + fact, which itself is mostly treated in chapter 5). he then basically posits that a pan-object should exist as a totality of all these interfaces within its own network (which is something harman explicitly advised against, likely due to the way in which it can undermine objects). the way that yoran preserves the pan-object is worth noting. yoran argues that all internal relations among objects would appear as minor disturbances within the pan-object as a total entity. despite its encompassing nature the pan-object would still contain an inexhaustible surplus of potential, and this surplus would then preserve emergence and prevent total reduction, and as such, the pan-object doesn't eliminate individual objects but provides the background of their relations. this is in fact an ingenious way that yoran allows differentiation to occur within a monadization of objects, one that directly contests harman's idea that you cannot allow the haecceity of an object to take central ground if you collapse it into a pre-individuated totality, where clearly this doesn't have to be the case.
v. yoran's general reading
there is a weird irony in ooo's selective reading of simondon. simondon's "pre-individual state" doesn't actually have to do with genesis at all. the pre-individual state notes the way in which something is when fundamentally divorced from some aspect of relation. the phenomenal-noumenal relation is only one such relation, so therefore, the noumenal connection between two real objects doesn't actually require an explanation for genesis at all. the pre-individual state idea doesn't actually have to be reduced to the idea that objects are ontologically undermined in their existence, it could just mean that there is a pre-arranged state of some kind of certain objects that doesn't organize their basic ontologically diverse manifestations, but only that there is a general formal rule in the universe that certain mechanisms are already arranging certain things in the world before they ever become constituted by the new relations that define or generate them. this is a crucial difference, one where it means that ooo doesn't need to deny simondon's general theory whatsoever, not even when it comes to genesis. but it does mean that, as a consequence of believing it has to, ooo continuously avoids actually allowing sensually-mediated generation to influence the constitution behind real objects in any way.
all yoran basically does is posit that there is a potential pre-object that isn't fully formed at any point. this actually partially softens the noumenal realm because the concept of an essence then becomes an emerging phenomenon, which doesn't only involve ooo back into relation theory but also brings it back into process theory as well, since processes "develop" real objects rather than them emerging independently from anything that can be said to relate to the world. in this sense, yoran pushes object oriented ontology outside of the phenomenon vs. noumenon distinction, because the "noumenality" of real objects partially includes their totally undifferentiable account of temporality (and as such, of development, or of being "included" in any way in temporal/phenomenal processes).
it is true that harman is wrong to strictly tie identification with methodology (or a lack thereof) instead of noumenology, but the very term identifiability is a categorical-cybernetic term staunchly within epistemological grounds, you can't solve it by positing that it exists as ontologically separate from objects by proposing that they're instead expected, since expectation (yoran's example of a painting only visible in peripheral vision: something in between haecceity and non-existence) is itself phenomenological and not noumenological, even if it serves as an analogue to a non-phenomenal subject, the analogy isn't supposed to be allowed without being further built up in its own formal form. yoran essentially disposes of the most noumenological concept graham gives us, dormancy. the dormant object is the very noumenological state required for something to preserve any sense of essence it has, and the real qualities it presents are only the background effects of a more primary dormancy.
this dormancy idea is almost theological in nature, stretching all the way back to neoplatonism. graham even has his own concept for essence, titled the "zero-person". yoran does actually help object-orientation decenter from the human perceiver even more, but the account still explains how appearances arise rather than how the withdrawn core is constituted. the redistribution does not resolve the deeper problem of specifying the real object beyond relations. furthermore, yoran inherits harman's conceptual structure wholesale and builds the out-of-phase object as a probabilistic loosening of sincerity, but sincerity in harman is already defined as the only case of non-distorted contact, in the sense that it is an intra-object, not an inter-object. yoran's probabilistic flickering between fourfolds is still operating through distortion instead of sincerity, by essentially making distortion gradational.
yoran argues that his newly proposed intermediate state behind real objects resembles probabilistic interactions in quantum mechanics. relations between objects may therefore resemble overlapping waves rather than binary contacts, and sometimes these overlaps crystallize into stable objects, whilst at other times they dissolve into non-objects. the quantum phasing analogy yoran gives here doesn't necessarily help his overall topic, although it does at least behave like a formal explanation even if it isn't one. on one side, it does help preserve a certain level of noumenality in real objects (phasing in and out does protect their status as temporarily non-existent yet still in surplus to themselves) but on another hand, objects basically need a world of non-relations and specific mechanisms to be speculated, not only is this kind of structurally necessary but also something that is historically rewarded in continental philosophy, even if object-oriented ontologists still want to remain fundamentally kantian in nature.
vi. the cost of kantianism
in fact, the kantianism runs so deep due to meillassoux's influence, that researchers in ooo like yoran would rather bring in harman's greatest philosophical enemies in the discussion rather than simply do the more interesting whiteheadian/bergsonian maneuver of actually speculating on the noumenon directly (due to their false belief that since we cannot approach the noumenon, it wouldn't be useful to speculate on it since it wouldn't directly benefit our phenomenology, an idea that, albeit true, is entirely irrelevant to the speculative question itself, given that it very much can lead to indirect, generative benefit).
on a side note, yoran does also extend the causal chain of fourfold formation / causal genesis by arguing: "as was shown in the description of the out-of-phase object, this tension of essence (ro-rq) cannot be the exclusive source of new objects; the sq-ro and the so-rq relations can bring forth new objects as well. this is in line with ooo, as 'the primary meaning of cause is to create a new object. only secondarily does it mean that an object has an effect on others or retroactive impact on its own parts.' harman already alludes to 'a mereological view of causation — objects as parts always generating new objects as wholes.'"
naturally, harman would not accept that real qualities can cause real objects, since real qualities themselves are properties that consequentially arise from real objects. they actually serve to stabilize the identity of real objects instead of stretching it. it isn't necessarily entirely unable to fit into ooo — clearly — but the way yoran frames it is that ooo would gladly accept this to be the case and not find it much more queer than its current postulations if it meant it could causally explain itself better, which is hardly true on its own, given ooo slightly requires its own self-mystification to function without contradiction, as was previously noted. it is true, as yoran notes, that compatibility is a shared plane of existence and is separate from relation, and that compatibility actually assumes that object relations are not equal, but this doesn't naturally follow that causal relations can swap formal places, at least in harman's vision.
and the more general problem with any theory that corresponds to ooo-style thinking is that by depreciating relations, it depreciates ontological generation. in a sense, you can actually see graham and his affiliates as precisely the preservationists of the transcendent, philosophers that had to give away almost everything else that has to do with essential forces precisely to preserve transcendent categories as unreachable from human will. the irony of kant himself is that by positing the noumenon as the unreachable, it not only fractured every transcendent category except for the transcendental itself, but it both distanced transcendent realms, and collapsed them into a giant empty category.
one of the most interesting things yoran posits towards the end of the chapter is that compatibilization is what makes an object's haecceity while its identity stays inaccessible. this phenomenologization of the noumenon basically enables the factors of its appearance to tie directly into its concept whilst bypassing its identity. this means that certain objects compromise in appearing in certain ways over others, and these appearances constitute and confirm your experience with the object itself and thus allow you to register it in a certain way. even though this breaks a large part of what makes a real object inaccessible, it inadvertently gives almost a eugenical vision of objects as "folds within space" that organize along certain ways of appearing over certain other ones depending on the "level" of the object.
vii. yoran's individuation
when explaining how yoran attempts to solve the object genesis problem by turning every fourfold into a network, we encounter this pre-emptive statement "it is alluded to already in tool-being, where harman agrees with heidegger and whitehead “that an entity is determined by the systematic attachments into which it enters. in other words, there is no absolute line in the sand between monad and global machine. every entity displays both aspects.". in a sense, this implies that yoran is far more of a universalist about whether a certain object gets to maintain itself in comparison the whole, as opposed to graham.
this would mean yoran is far less protective of noumenalism than harman, but this actually leads him back to a more phenomenological view, which is the opposite of where ooo should be heading. there are also two common problems that arise out of this, the first is that real objects have to be stuck in perpetual relations (that may cascade into undermining their essence), and the second is that this then means that real objects dont actually get to develop outside of chains of ontological influence, which has massive downstream effects for the entire theory.
take a common example, a dollar bill in harman’s model would remain a real object even if every economic relation collapsed, because it would still withdraw beyond the relations that normally define it (both literally "withdraw" as in the harmanian concept, but also quite literally, it would have the function of "a withdrawal of money" as a basic property of its existence, even if money doesn't exist in that world anymore). in yoran’s integration model, however, the identity of the dollar depends on the web of financial institutions, conventions, and transactional relations that stabilize it, and if remove the network, the object could dissolve into some more primary relations (not to say its primary qualities, since its qualities remain pre-built from its influence, but most definitely the way in which certain relations actually causally influence its behavior as an object).
the problem with objecthood having to be maintained by relational compatibility is a broader concern, and may not necessarily apply to yoran, especially if he figures out a way to fix this issue, but a more local concern is that object generation itself depending on relations means that no real object could possibly generate independently from everything that has already been generated, which, problematic on its own, is definitely something that competes with the concept of essence quite heavily, and would surely brush up against harman's own theory. in other words, the problem in yoran is not that objects maintain themselves through relations, but rather that new objects can only emerge through relational compatibility.
even though this review only targets chapter 4 as central grounds for yoran's main proposal, chapter 5 does push way past harman's theory in a way that is no longer reconcilable or even assimilable into the existing ooo framework. the most extreme development appears near the end, where yoran suggests that the pan-object exists in a way where all object relations are retroactive effects of compound objects, and ultimately of a total compound object encompassing everything. this prevents real objects from having any novelty in their generation entirely, and furthermore, prevents real objects from being inaccessible in the many ways they previously were, because it centers all their productive power around the relations they produce rather than in the realities they help cultivate through their withdrawal.
what yoran is essentially doing in this chapter is that he's trying to translate simondon into graham without undermining objects by positing relations as primary, whilst at the same time not allowing the genesis of objects to remain mysterious like in graham. he tries to do this by removing genesis from time, saying "objects in ooo seem to be justified only in hindsight: once they have proven their independence and stability, they are granted object status. and what made them an object has retroactive effects on what were once separate objects. but if objects became objects only retroactively, would this not grant their relations ontological priority?"
yet, even if he removes genesis from time, he still accepts simondon’s basic insight that objects require other realities to persist and individuate. that pulls the ontology toward a network or field structure anyway. fortunately, the important step of not allowing the object to be shrouded in mystery has been achieved, however, his additional conceptual developments (interfact, pan-object, relational field, fourfold intersections) essentially turn the real object into some sort of leibnizian fold parable, they empty it all of that was originally worthwhile in the concept.