Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism 3031480279, 9783031480270

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Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, ObjectOriented Ontology, and New Materialism Brian Hisao Onishi

Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism

Brian Hisao Onishi

Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism

Brian Hisao Onishi Penn State Altoona Altoona, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-48026-3    ISBN 978-3-031-48027-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48027-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit line: ilbusca/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

About This Book

Chapter 1 argues that we must problematize the place of wonder in order to reorient it as an ontological concept. There I begin with a discussion of thaumazein, the Ancient Greek word for wonder. Plato’s claim in the Theaetetus that philosophy begins in wonder places thaumazein explicitly in the realm of knowledge. Ultimately Plato seems to argue that because knowledge cannot provide an accurate account of itself, we are left to wonder at our inability to gain absolute knowledge of the world. The very ground of knowledge itself is whisked from under our feet and we must begin the task of philosophy, which is to love wisdom without ever fully obtaining it. While Plato may have intended to indicate our lack of absolute knowledge, thaumazein is quickly appropriated by Aristotle as a way to initiate the desire for knowledge, thus setting the stage for wonder to be used almost exclusively as an epistemological concept. As an epistemological concept, philosophy has focused on defining wonder. That is, it has attempted to answer the question: what is wonder? But the task of defining wonder is also the task of rendering wonder a static tool used to guide our inquiries. I argue that reading the phenomenological and ontological work of Merleau-Ponty through recent insights from new materialism and object-­oriented ontology challenges not only our claims to knowledge, but also our conception of wonder as a static tool that can be easily disregarded. Both new materialism and object-oriented ontology argue that matter is more than a lifeless extended substance. Rather, matter is vibrant, quasiagential, and independent of human involvement. Because the world is full of non-rational, self-­ organizing entities, such as weather patterns, v

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brittle stars, economic markets, and landfills, we must re-distribute agency to include nonhuman, and even nonliving objects. If we grant that nonhuman and nonliving objects are capable of a quasi-­agency, then we can also grant them the possibility of actuating a kind of wonder. Both new materialism and object-oriented ontology work to challenge the idea that humans can gain absolute access to the world. The world is a buzzing, vibrating, swirl of self-organizing activity that iterates its own becoming and no amount of knowledge can overcome the gap between knower and known. Rather than reduce the world to our knowledge, new materialism and object-oriented ontology reveal that the world is incapable of being fully grasped. As such, our own sense of wonder cannot be disregarded by a knowledge that we cannot obtain. I end the chapter by placing wonder between objects. This is initially described in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh. Reading the concept of flesh through new materialism and object-oriented ontology allows us to think of flesh as a kind of communication system between objects, and thus provides a framework for speculating about objects and relations of objects beyond the limits of consciousness. Ultimately, this leads to the development of an ontological wonder that is actuated by objects (human or nonhuman), and which is developed in the proceeding chapters. Chapter 2 takes a step sideways and argues that we must account for the aesthetic treatment of wonder before explicitly developing an ontological wonder. Turning to aesthetics after introducing the project as one oriented toward ontology may seem strange. But by focusing on the aesthetics of wonder, I will be doing two main things: First I establish a need for a new conversation about wonder via the discourse on disenchantment and the politics of art and second, I bridge the gap between the focus on human subjects most prevalent in conversations about wonder, and an ontological view of wonder that displaces the distinction between subjects and objects. In the first half the chapter, I argue that aesthetics has contributed to the development of wonder by describing rare experiences or rare objects. I then appeal to the work of Jeffrey Kosky and Timothy Morton in order to broaden our experience of wonder beyond rarities and surprises. Specifically, Kosky argues that art can disrupt our scientific demand for absolute knowledge by demonstrating that mystery and enchantment are fundamental to our experience of the world. Enchantment is not a mark of a rare experience. Rather, it is a reorientation of our relation to the world such that our grip on the world slackens, and the view

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becomes fuzzy. We cannot rely on an absolute source of light (be it God or reason), and we must fumble around in the dark world of material mystery. Morton complements Kosky’s work by offering an object-oriented version of causality. For Morton, all causality is aesthetic. Because all objects recede from our grasp, what we experience as causality is an aesthetic presentation of causality. Rather than reduce such presentations to conscious representations, Morton argues that aesthetic causality is deeply rooted in materiality. Aesthetic causality expresses the inability for any object to gain full access to any other object, and opens up the possibility for agency to be distributed beyond living objects. More importantly, I argue that Morton’s aesthetic causality offers a framework whereby wonder can be attributed to nonliving objects. I then turn to the work of novelist Haruki Murakami in order to elaborate on the scope of ontological wonder and to expand the relationship between art and ontological wonder. Specifically, I look at the novel 1Q84 as a dramatization of both aesthetic causality and ontological wonder. I end the chapter by arguing that aesthetic causality leads us to the idea of operative wonder, a concept I develop fully in Chap. 3. In Chap. 3, I turn explicitly to the development of an ontology of wonder. I define ontological wonder as an operative wonder that grounds both our experience of wonder and the ability of nonliving objects to wonder. Building on the previous chapters, I work to more cohesively integrate the explicit ontology of Merleau-­Ponty with both object-oriented ontology and new materialism. I also take a more extended look at the connection between operative wonder and quantum physics. Reading object-oriented ontology and new materialism diffractively through quantum physics, I argue that we can apply concepts such as superposition, entanglement, and decoherence to articulate operative wonder more fully. On my account, operative wonder occurs prior to actual states of affairs, and acts as the generative component to relations between objects. In terms of quantum physics, operative wonder is a kind of superposition of all potential relations between objects, leading to the collapse of that potential into an actuality. This actuality is activated by the presence and withdrawal of the specific powers or qualities of each object in the relation. Operative wonder extends and radicalizes the result of my diffractive reading of Merleau-Ponty, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology.

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Chapter 4 provides an extended look at museums as a kind of case study for integrating operative wonder in a concrete setting. Wonder and museums have had a very long and rich history. I explore this relationship, beginning with the cabinets of wonder that were common in sixteenthcentury Europe. I then go on to describe how the museum has become an instrument of disenchantment rather than an instrument of wonder. The integration of entertainment in the museum, as well as our desire to provide historical or thematic narratives to “make sense” of the art found in museums leads to a consumptive, and thereby dismissive, attitude toward art that mirrors the epistemological disregard for wonder in the face of knowledge. I then turn to the garden as a model for the museum that lacks explicit borders, actualizes an enchantment that incorporates a whole environment, and plays on the tension between mystery and revelation that reveals operative wonder at work. While operative wonder, like quantum superposition, cannot be seen explicitly, the garden as a model for the museum demonstrates the agential activity of nonhuman and nonliving objects, and the wonderful, strange, and mysterious becoming of the material world. Chapter 5 extends the operative wonder established in the previous chapters by articulating it as a “Weird” wonder. Drawing from the theoretical claims made by Merleau-Ponty, new materialisms, and object-oriented ontologies, I claim that the world itself is weird. To show this, I explicitly appeal to “Weird Fiction” as a starting point and claim if the world is weird, then we need a weird philosophical toolkit to analyze how meaning emerges. In so doing, I situate wonder within an ethical context and argue that wonder can be thought of as a virtue. I argue that wonder is a balance between the deficiency of boredom and the excess of anxiety. This maps specifically onto an environmental virtue ethic and stresses that in the face of climate change, we must be equipped with virtues that embrace a new and strange understanding of flourishing. Focusing on an ethical approach to operative wonder narrows the focus somewhat to human experience, but ultimately expands back to what I call “Weirdspecies fields” which challenges boundaries between human and nonhuman communities, revels in a constructive ambiguity, and articulates the generativity of Weird operative wonder.

Contents

1 Placing  Wonder: Merleau-Ponty, New Materialism, and Object-Oriented Ontology  1 Thaumazein, Epistemological Wonder, and Ontological Wonder    1 Merleau-Ponty and an Ontological Wonder    4 New Materialism   6 Object-Oriented Ontology  14 Placing Wonder in the Flesh   20 References  26 2 Aesthetics,  Causality, and Operative Wonder 29 The Aesthetics of Wonder   29 Aesthetics of Wonder: Rare Experiences   30 Disenchantment and Re-enchantment: Why Art Matters   33 Aesthetic Causality and the Law of Noncontradiction   40 Language and the Dramatization of Aesthetic Causality   47 1Q84: A World That Bears a Question   52 References  56 3 Ontological  Wonder as Operative Wonder 59 Non-anthropocentric Wonder  60 The End of Phenomenology and the Case for Realism   61 Realism, Ontological Wonder, and Quantum Physics   64 Onto-Cartography and Operative Wonder   72 References  86 ix

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4 Museums,  Gardens, and the Possibility for Care in Operative Wonder 89 The Living Museum   90 Cabinets of Curiosities   92 Enchantment in the Museum   94 Wonder on Display and Enchantment Gone Wrong   96 Museums of Horror and Art Appreciation  100 Wonder Beyond the Museum  102 The Garden as Museum/Anti-Museum  111 References 118 5 Toward  a Weird Environmental Ethics121 Weird Environmental Ethics  121 Weird Fiction  122 Growing Things and Our Weird Departure  126 Eco-Weird Worlds  129 Speculative Eco-Weird Worlds  131 Climate Change as an Eco-Weird World  133 Trauma and the World of Climate Change  135 Weird-Species Fields  137 Weird Environmental Ethics  140 The Second Door and the Invitation  142 References 146 Index149

Introduction

In March of 2023 I visited my father’s hometown of Kahului on the island of Maui, Hawaii. We traveled from Central Pennsylvania, through Atlanta, and over the Pacific Ocean to get there. Flying over such a distance, while mundane in our technologically advanced world, is a wonder. My wife, three children, and I traveled the 4600 miles in 13 hours without significant setbacks or meltdowns. This too is a wonder. Early in the morning on our first day on the island, we made our way to a small beach, known locally as “Baby Beach” because the coral reef creates an almost waveless section of the coast that is highly suitable for children. Within five minutes we were met by no less than 10 sea turtles, some as close as 30 feet away from us. This too is a wonder. Even though we knew that there was a high probability of seeing turtles at Baby Beach, meeting them that morning felt like a bit of magic. At first, we weren’t sure if we were actually seeing turtles, their heads and shells popping up only momentarily. But as our eyes adjusted to the rhythm of the ocean and the light morning breeze, their presence became easy to notice. The bodies of the turtles silently broke through the surface of the ocean and revealed a whole world, so full of life, just on the other side of a mysterious plane. Here, on the shoreline of Maui, the new sun sparkling off the ocean surface, I was pulled in like the tide to investigate the limits of my access to the world on the other side. From past experience, I know that water is a surface that does not hold when I reach for it. I can easily break through it and sink into the depths of the other side. The water reveals that there is no firm boundary between the open air and the watery depths; there is xi

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only a concealment that also reveals. It conceals the life that lives underneath and reveals the sky above. It conceals the location of the turtles and reveals the wonder in my gasp as they surface. This tension between revelation and concealment is common in phenomenological analyses. But, as I will argue throughout this book, it is also present in new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and Weird fiction. And it will be important for developing what I will call operative wonder. Speaking to my father, who had not been to Maui for over a decade, I realized that there was a gap between my experience and his. He brought us here several times as kids. We would visit with family, eat his childhood meals, and listen to stories about the island. In those visits, I was stuck between a tourist and a local. I was in an unfamiliar land but had to act as if my access to the island was deeper than my experience. I now realize that my father was in a similar position. He too was now a visitor to his own home. His memories and his experiences growing up gave him an intimate understanding of the vibrancy of Maui. But it took time for him to catch the rhythm of the island and to re-acclimate to the place he once lived. Watching him navigate this balance between memory and perception, I realized that the Maui he experienced and the Maui I experienced were different. This gap was not exclusive to us. The Maui experienced by those who have stayed their whole lives on the island and the Maui experienced by my father, who left when he was 18, were also different. The island of Maui activated specific qualities, memories, and stories differently to different communities. In that sense there were a multitude of Mauis existing simultaneously. And yet, there is a common experience that grounds a single Maui for all. This tension between identity and difference, between one and the many, is a problem of gaps. For Graham Harman, determining how to treat those gaps is “one of the most important decisions made by philosophers” (Harman 2012, 2). It is a problem that I will attend to via the concept of wonder. I see our flight from Pennsylvania to Maui as a wonder. And I view the experience of seeing sea turtles on the beach in the early morning as a wonder. And I think of the pull of the ocean to investigate the tension between revelation and concealment as an experience of wonder. While there is merit to thinking about objects of wonder and experiences of wonder that call us to enthusiastically investigate the world, in this book I want to argue for a different approach, which I will call operative wonder. In my view, wonder is operative in between the object and the subject, and the way that objects orient themselves to other objects and to themselves

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involves a kind of ontological wonder. In so doing, I push against an Anthropocentric wonder that locates it as an exclusively human experience. Ultimately, all objects wonder within the limits of their own capacities and qualities. The main goal of this project is to develop an ontological wonder rooted equally in speculation and phenomenology. While this calls to mind the treatment that Heidegger gives to Thaumazein in Basic Questions of Philosophy, I do not want to focus on the Being of beings or a new beginning for being. Rather, I focus on the way that meaning emerges through the relations of various kinds of agencies, including human, nonhuman, and even nonliving agencies. Ultimately, I will argue that wonder is a fundamental component of the world that helps to bring about meaning via those relations. In that sense, I will argue for an operative wonder that is operative prior to any kind of cognitive projection or rational meaning making. The meaning of the world is already constituted among the relations of various agencies, thereby making our own inclusion one of many. As a project that tries to elaborate on the constitution of meaning, I draw heavily from the phenomenological tradition, with a particular emphasis on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I also make a significant appeal to new materialisms and object-oriented ontologies. Attempting to combine these three approaches is not an easy task given that they express fundamental differences with each other and articulate explicit rejections of each other. Many object-oriented ontologies rely on a critique of correlationism and claim that phenomenology falls within this critique. That is, phenomenology is limited by its insistence on the consciousness-­world correlation and is inherently concerned with the way that the world appears to consciousness. If this is the case, then phenomenology is necessarily an idealism that fails to get beyond intentional objects of consciousness. The “real” things under investigation are always imminent to our consciousness so that their reality is based on human experience. Any claim, therefore, about the material world beyond consciousness must be made apart from the phenomenological method. I do not think that this argument is ultimately compelling enough to reject the phenomenological project as a whole. If we take the practice of bracketing the natural attitude seriously, then the claim that phenomenology falls into either realist or idealist categories begins to fade. However, I do take the problem of correlationism as a kind of challenge to phenomenology to embrace more radical approaches to the experiences of the

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material world. And given this challenge, it seems at least worth questioning if phenomenology can attend to experiences of wonder if it only deals with the realm of imminence. The phenomenological tradition has attempted to offer a few responses. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, for instance, Merleau-Ponty claims that the reduction itself, a foundational piece for any phenomenological investigation, is a kind of practice in wonder: “[t]he best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant, who spoke of ‘wonder’ in the face of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xv). While this sounds like a way to treat wonder in terms of our encounter with the material world, there remain lingering worries that phenomenology cannot get beyond the bounds of consciousness. As I see it, there is a way to argue that both object-oriented ontology and new materialism extend the work of phenomenology by radicalizing its conclusions. In part, this is because within both new materialism and object-oriented ontology, objects become agents in the material becoming of the world. Agency gets distributed among various entities, including but not limited to humans. The critique that phenomenology is merely a correlationist philosophy does not account for the already latent idea that meaning is constituted across a distribution of actors. Merleau-Ponty, in particular, identifies an operative intentionality that is not solely located within the conscious subject. Intentionality does not rely on a singular source or subject but is already distributed and already involves other nonhuman actors. As such, I argue that the project of phenomenology contributes to the ongoing development of object-oriented ontologies and new materialisms insofar as these newer philosophical developments take the radical approach of extending operative intentionality and agency by explicitly appealing to the nonhuman world as actor in the constitution of meaning. Instead of abandoning phenomenological insights, I want to expand them. Following Karen Barad’s method of diffractive reading, I wish to read phenomenology, and specifically the phenomenology of Merleau-­ Ponty, through both object-oriented ontology and new materialism. Rather than critique phenomenology using new materialisms and object-­ oriented ontologies, I want to attend to the new ripples created by their engagement. This is a creative process rather than a destructive one, and it means that we cannot leave phenomenology, object-oriented ontology, or new materialism unchanged. In Barad’s words, diffractive reading is “a cutting together-apart, where cuts do violence but also open up and rework” the limits of scope and possibility (Barad 2007, 52). I want to

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extend the scope of phenomenology and develop a kind of wonder that relies upon an engagement with the material world and that highlights the weirdness of the material world. I want to go “back to the things themselves,” while leaving room to speculate about how those things wonder apart from human involvement. A few years back, while working on this project, I went to visit my brother at his remote cabin near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. At one point I stepped outside to gather my thoughts and to take a break from reading; I was immediately struck by the silence of the place. I could hear every movement of the trees and almost feel the impact of every object that fell from them. At the time I was working my way through Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway and had just read her description and analysis of the brittle star, a brainless organism that looks very similar to a sea star and has the ability to detach a part of its body if it senses danger. Sometimes this detachment forms into a new and independent brittle star, while other times it merely acts as a distraction to potential threats. For Barad, the brittle star challenges the idea that bodies are static bits of lifeless matter because it has this ability to develop in dramatically different ways. The example of the brittle star has broader implications for both epistemological frameworks and embodiment. Like the brittle star, if we look closely at the world using quantum physics as a methodological guide, it becomes very difficult to articulate an object’s independence from other objects. Barad uses this insight to argue for an ontological primacy of phenomena such that no object is ever completely independent of its discursive-­material context. Further, the example of the brittle star should give us pause when we consider matter to be a lifeless extended substance. Each detachment, separation, and new relation signals the possibility for new actions, directions, and agents of the becoming of the world. We can scrutinize the conditions required for a brittle star fragment to become either a new brittle star or an instrument of escape. But the conditions themselves arise out of a complexity of relations across massive spatial and temporal scales and work as an example of what I will later identify as quasi-agency or distributed agency. The world becomes as an emergence of new formulations of relations, an emergence that I argue relies on an ontological wonder. Returning to the Blue Ridge Mountains, as I stood on the porch of my brother’s house listening to objects fall from trees, I was confronted by the constant birth and re-birth that is the world. Like the brittle star, the

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branches that fall from the trees enter or give birth to new phenomena. It is the world’s continual process of birthing new phenomenal, discursive, and material situations, that reveals what I call an ontological wonder. In this view, wonder occurs between objects as an operative mechanism of becoming, that it is not exclusive to humans, and that it is fundamental for the orientation of reality. In order to argue this last point, I will look to quantum physics as a guide. While Merleau-Ponty, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology provide the theoretical framework for a kind of “weird realism,” concepts from quantum physics, such as superposition, entanglement, and uncertainty, strengthen the arguments made from more (explicitly) philosophical positions and articulate the material basis for this persistent birth of the world. More often than not, wonder maintains little significance beyond the initial motivation to investigate the surrounding world. At least since Aristotle, wonder has been thought of as a means to knowledge. As we will see, in the history of Western thought, wonder has almost exclusively been considered an epistemological concept. It aids us in directing our attention to scientific inquiry, it provides guidance for recognizing the presence and judgment of God, or it offers insight regarding our noetic faculties and failings. I have two problems with the epistemological framing of wonder. The first is that it too easily becomes boredom in the face of knowledge. Wonder is taken as a mechanism for beginning our search for answers and is quickly discarded. Second, treating wonder as strictly epistemological limits it to the realm of human experience. Even Heidegger’s version of Thaumazein requires that we understand wonder in relation to Dasein’s ability to think Being. By contrast, the wonder that I will argue for exceeds the human realm, will challenge traditional ontological frameworks that are grounded in a Platonic/Cartesian dualism between spirit and matter, and offer a radically ecocentric ontological framework. To do this, I want to move the question from “what is wonder?” to “where is wonder?” and work toward placing wonder rather than defining it outright.

References Aristotle. 1979. Metaphysics. Translated by Hippocrates G.  Apostle. Grinnell. Iowa: The Peripatetic Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Washington, DC: Zero Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge Classics. Plato. 2004. Theaetetus. Newburyport: Focus Publications.

CHAPTER 1

Placing Wonder: Merleau-Ponty, New Materialism, and Object-Oriented Ontology

Thaumazein, Epistemological Wonder, and Ontological Wonder There are many comprehensive histories of wonder as a philosophical concept.1 We can imagine wonder as a passion like Descartes, as a seed of knowledge like Bacon, or as a capacity/orientation like Martha Nussbaum.2 Or we can locate wonder alongside the fear of God in the Old Testament or use the term to indicate a kind of medieval awareness of the work of God in miracles which exceed the laws of nature (Parsons 1969, 84). Or we can follow an etymological path from the Old English wundero to the German Wunde, which would closely tie wonder to the word wound (Parsons 1969, 85). This would indicate that wonder creates an opening into our conceptual framework by piercing or wounding that framework. Wonder as wound is especially attractive as it maps onto the project of offering a “Weird” wonder that departs from the historically rooted understanding of wonder. As I develop in Chap. 5, Weird wonder partially embraces Weird as a destined departure from the familiar. In many ways, wonder as wound requires that we not only reorganize our orientation and understanding of the world, but that we also reorganize our  See Lloyd (2018) for a brief but comprehensive historical overview of wonder.  See Bendyk-Keymer (2020) for an insightful analysis of Nussbaum’s treatment of wonder.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. H. Onishi, Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48027-0_1

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orientation and understanding of wonder itself. As such, my development of a Weird wonder requires a departure from the familiar senses of wonder that surfaces from what I will identify as a diffractive reading of wonder through Merleau-Ponty, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism(s). Thus, while I will periodically situate wonder within that historical context, I do not want to recount that history here. Instead, I will begin with wonder as thaumazein. Thaumazein refers to a wonder that is aroused by that which is most familiar. According to Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “thaumazein arises when the understanding cannot master that which lies closest to it—when, surrounded by utterly ordinary concepts and things, the philosopher suddenly finds himself surrounded on all sides by aporia” (Rubenstein 2008, 3). Thaumazein, unlike astonishment or surprise, is not merely an experience or feeling when engaging a state of affairs that is out of the ordinary. Wonder as thaumazein requires that the familiar and the everyday act as primary motivation for wonder. The concern for the familiar found in thaumazein marks it as a close ally to the kind of wonder that I want to develop. However, I understand thaumazein as primarily an epistemological form of wonder, which is what I will ultimately challenge through the concept of operative wonder. Thaumazein prominently emerges in Plato’s Theaetetus as a mirror of the Socratic problem of knowledge. The dialogue is largely aimed at describing the epistemological gap between the physical world and the world of forms. We find the character of Theaetetus swept up in the dizzying activity of thaumazein because of “the collapse of the perfectly sensible premise that nothing can be anything other than what it is” (Rubenstein 2008, 4). A rock is both big and small depending on the context in which it is judged, and the physical effects of aging will soon make Socrates, who is taller than Theaetetus at the time of their conversation, shorter than Theaetetus. In Genevieve Lloyd’s words, “Socratic wonder brings thought to a halt. In confronting the unknown—bewildered at conflicting possibilities—the mind finds itself with nowhere to move” (Lloyd 2018, 22). Wonder, then, motivates the interrogation that would lead to the closing of this aporia in pursuit of knowledge. At one point in the Theaetetus, Socrates is horrified at himself for offering a concrete theory about knowledge too hastily (Plato 2004, 195c). He retreats from his position and seems to favor remaining in the open strangeness of wonder at the most familiar.

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Despite Socrates’ retreat, in the development of the western philosophical tradition the epistemological nature of thaumazein quickly leads to a desire for knowledge rather than the dizzying experience of wonder. Lloyd sees this as a move from Socratic wonder to Aristotelian wonder. Aristotle, for instance, repeats Socrates’ claim that philosophy begins in wonder, saying in the Metaphysics that “it is because of wondering that men began to philosophize and do so now.” Yet, he continues: “a man who is perplexed and wonders considers himself ignorant, so if indeed they philosophized in order to avoid ignorance, it is evident that they pursued science in order to understand and not in order to use it for something else” (Aristotle 1979, 982b13–982b21). Thus, for Aristotle, wonder is the beginning of philosophy but only insofar as wonder leads to knowledge. This move to knowledge is not exact or absolute. Or, as Lloyd puts it, “the wondering mind passes from ignorance to knowledge, but it is not a direct flight” (Lloyd 2018, 25). Regardless of the indirect path, Lloyd firmly claims that for Aristotle, wonder “has no end or purpose, other than the alleviation of wonder” (Lloyd 2018, 25). The epistemological nature of thaumazein and the specific meaning provided by Aristotle sets up a long tradition in western philosophy of treating wonder as merely a beginning that must ultimately lead to knowledge. Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Hegel all appeal to a sense of wonder that leads to or must be overcome by knowledge. Jan B.W. Pederson highlights that for Francis Bacon, “wonder is the ‘seed of knowledge’” (Pedersen 2019, 29). It is not until Heidegger takes up thaumazein in his 1937–1938 Freiburg lectures that the epistemological meaning of thaumazein is questioned (Heidegger 1994). There Heidegger returns to the beginning of philosophy to avoid the path of representative thinking and claims that wonder is “the basic disposition compelling us into the necessity of primordial questioning” (Heidegger 1994, 143). According to Rubenstein, Heidegger had to return to thaumazein because “finding another beginning for thinking depends on thinking through the first one” (Rubenstein 2008, 29). Thus, thinking had to “go back—and forward” in order “to attune itself to” the “unconcealment of wonder” (Rubenstein 2008, 28). Regardless of the fact that Heidegger explicitly desires to uncover the ontological nature of wonder, he does so within the context of thinking and in terms of Dasein’s ability to think Being.

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Merleau-Ponty and an Ontological Wonder In contrast to Heidegger’s ontological wonder that demands a new beginning for thinking, I will argue for an ontological wonder that moves beyond the necessity of human involvement at all. To do this, I will employ the phenomenological and ontological insights of Merleau-Ponty as a theoretical framework. In this section, I will provide a brief justification for employing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. In a widely cited text, M.C. Dillon argues that Merleau-Ponty offers two major theses in the Phenomenology of Perception: an epistemological thesis of the primacy of perception and an ontological thesis of the primacy of phenomena (Dillon 1997, 51). Both theses are grounded in the world of pre-reflective bodily engagement. For Merleau-Ponty, the body and the world are not two separate entities that meet at some given time, but the body as body-subject is always-already in the world. In the Phenomenology of Perception, he makes this explicit in terms of intentionality: “What distinguishes intentionality from the Kantian relation to a possible object is that the unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is ‘lived’ as ready-made or already there” (Merleau-Ponty, Perception 1962, xix). Here Merleau-­ Ponty sets up an implicit distinction between knowledge which requires a reflection of the transcendental consciousness, and a phenomenological knowledge that occurs via the body and is not fully reliant upon consciousness. This phenomenological knowledge, I argue, can be described in terms of operative intentionality. According to Merleau-Ponty, operative intentionality is “that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life, being apparent in our desires, our evaluations and in the landscape we see” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xx). Further, operative intentionality does this “more clearly than in objective knowledge,” and furnishes “the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xx). Operative intentionality, and the kind of phenomenological knowledge that follows, identifies a gap between the lived world and the world as known; between the body-­ subject and absolute knowledge. This gap offers the first light for a sustained wonder by revealing a world that always recedes from the grips of absolute knowledge that “consciousness” strives for. Philosophy, for Merleau-Ponty, is not the movement from initial wonder to absolute knowledge as a “reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, [is] the act

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of bringing truth into being” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xxii). Philosophy is the act of interrogating the most familiar to reveal it as the most strange. But the form of revelation that Merleau-Ponty strives for is one where the world is left to express itself. That is, in order to accomplish its will for radicalism, [philosophy] would have to take as its theme the umbilical bond that binds it always to Being…it would have to no longer deny, no longer even doubt; it would have to step back only in order to see the world and Being, or simply put them between quotation marks as one does with the remarks of another, to let them speak, to listen in. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 107)

A second aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that I will draw heavily upon is his explicit ontology developed in The Visible and the Invisible. Perhaps the most important and the most difficult concept within this ontology is the notion of flesh. According to Merleau-Ponty, “flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another, and there is no anteriority of the percipere to the percipi, there is simultaneity” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 123). The flesh works to dissolve the hierarchical organization of humans as separate and superior to the nonhuman world by folding the human body into the same flesh of the world. It does so without reducing the world to a simple monism. The world as flesh is a generative unity in difference. For Graham Harman, a proponent of object-oriented ontology, flesh is a kind of “electrified medium in which all entities, as elusive styles generate surfaces of qualities that fuse together or signal messages to one another” (Harman 2005, 58). It is through flesh that diverse objects are able to come into contact with each other. Harman goes on to say that “there is nothing specifically human about the flesh, which functions as a general communications medium rather than as a narrowly perceptual one” (Harman 2005, 54). This concept of flesh, though not fully developed, offers a path to an ontology that is both wondrous and radically ecological. In this vein, Fred Evans describes flesh as achieving a “pluralized identity, a unity composed of difference, such that each visible is at once part of the identity and the other of the rest. Because of this particular type of unity, the affirmation of any one visible is immediately also the valorization of the others. Thus, no visible is granted natural superiority over the rest” (Evans 2010, 144). What I will argue is that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh allows for a relation and communication

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between objects that does not require human involvement or human access and enables wonder to take place in between those relations. On a more practical level, promoting an ontological wonder that remains significantly active beyond epistemological interrogation can have an important influence on at least two major ongoing discourses: (1) the philosophical engagement with environmental issues, and (2) the re-­ enchantment of the world after modernism and the enlightenment. These concerns, I argue, are intimately linked, and will be developed as a part of the ongoing theme of this project. Recent developments in new materialism offer an opportunity to introduce both of these concerns within the conversation on wonder.

New Materialism The ongoing development of new materialism(s) has brought together a variety of disciplines including quantum physics, biology, feminism, phenomenology, post-structuralism, and post-Marxism. According to Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, authors of New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, new materialism has been gaining traction since the late 1990s (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 13). Coined separately by Rosi Braidotti and Manuel DeLanda, new materialism (or neo-­materialism) stresses “the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 21). Focusing heavily on feminist issues of embodiment, Dolphijn and van der Tuin work to extend discussions of bodies beyond the human context. That is, the bodies at stake in new materialisms are not limited to human bodies, but include nonhuman animals, plants, rocks, weather patterns, computers, and throw rugs. In one of the interviews conducted by Dolphijn and van der Tuin, Manuel DeLanda claims that “neo-materialism is based on the idea that matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 43). For DeLanda, matter is not merely passive stuff waiting for humans to form it into something meaningful. There is a sense in which matter is capable of a kind of organization. Matter, therefore, must be accounted for within political, social, historical, geological, and meteorological processes, not as a passive, accidental actor, but as an active, quasi-agential participant. For DeLanda, this has radical effects for the way that we understand self-organization. Looking at weather patterns as an example,

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he states, “[i]t is absurd to think that complex self-organizing structures need a ‘brain’ to generate them. The coupled system atmosphere-­ hydrosphere is continuously generating structures (thunderstorms, hurricanes, coherent wind currents) not only without a brain but without any organs whatsoever” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 43). Granting the possibility of self-organization to nonhuman and non-animal objects negates consciousness or thought as a necessary condition for active engagement and challenges the Cartesian understanding of individual subjectivity. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad explicitly and thoroughly supports this challenge using similar insights as DeLanda. Here Barad develops what she calls “agential-realism,” which she describes as an “epistemological, ontological, and ethical framework that…provides a posthumanist performative account of technoscientific and other natural cultural practices” (Barad 2007, 32). Barad’s agential-realism is deeply influenced by the physics/philosophy of Niels Bohr, and is founded on the concept of intra-activity. Unlike interaction, “which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-­ action argues that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action” (Barad 2007, 33). Important for Barad is the idea that there are no individuals outside of intra-action. On an ontological level, the basic units of reality are phenomena, which she describes as “neither individual entities nor mental impressions, but entangled material agencies” (Barad 2007, 56). In one move, scientific atomism and Cartesian individualism are denied. It is not possible to “find” atomic particles just existing out in the world, nor is it possible to encounter individual agencies separate from their social, historical, biological, and cosmological contexts. Atoms are only found by subjects that are constituted by the specific material practices currently ongoing. Both atoms and individuals emerge from such intra-action. Further, matter is not merely passive stuff, waiting for an active, self-moving agent, such as the rational human being, to move inert objects. In Barad’s agential-realism, matter and objects have the same motivating capacities of movement as humans do. Thus, agential-­ realism also radically challenges traditional notions of causality. It is not difficult to draw some initial parallels between Barad’s “agential realism” and Merleau-Ponty’s ontological thesis of the primacy of phenomena. For both, it is not possible to describe individuals prior to inter/intra-action. Rather, objects are constituted by the mutual engagement that occurs within phenomenal unities. However, unlike the

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theoretical scope of the Phenomenology of Perception, Barad takes such insights beyond the context of human experience. What is radical about Barad’s view is that, grounded on quantum physics, she argues for an almost complete eradication of boundaries and divisions between objects. Based on the presence of diffraction in certain quantum physics experiments, Barad concludes that each object always-­ already merges with their surrounding objects. At stake is a fundamental assumption regarding representation and reflection as means of access to the world. Reflection often requires that we attempt to step back and separate ourselves from the world to observe and analyze it via some critical distance. For Barad, however, there is no world to be found that can be accurately reflected because the act of separation and the critical distance required are impossible. Rather, the world is continually articulated by an ongoing performance of difference. While reflection “reflects the themes of mirroring and sameness,” diffraction “is marked by patterns of difference” (Barad 2007, 71). At the heart of Barad’s agential realism is the principle of quantum entanglement. Quantum physics has altered ideas about space and the way that objects affect each other over distances. Barad takes quantum entanglement and extends it into metaphysics. The world and all the objects found in it are intimately entangled to the degree that individual objects are no longer the building blocks of reality. Rather, phenomena, which are materially and discursively produced, count as the ontological foundation of reality. On this account, matter, humans, bugs, bird nests, microscopes, fountain pens, and glass sculptures equally count in the production of phenomena. Barad’s philosophical insights provide at least two major clues to thinking about wonder in ontological terms. First, humans and nonhumans must be thought of on an equal ontological level. Humans, while distinct from animals, rocks, tumbleweeds, and bath robes, are not more ontologically significant. All objects are always-already entangled with their surrounding objects, creating phenomena rather than individuals. The second clue, built on quantum physics, is that entangled objects (including humans), take part in the ongoing performance of the world as a continual articulation of difference. For Barad, this articulation of the world “is not a human-dependent characteristic but a feature of the world in its differential becoming. The world articulates itself differently” (Barad 2007, 149). Further, and perhaps most importantly, humans are radically part of the world, intra-acting and entangled to the degree that it is very hard to

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tell where the human ends and the world begins. As we will see, this claim by Barad comes very close to the ontology developed by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible. As Barad, DeLanda, Dolphijn, and van der Tuin have indicated, new materialisms are, at least partly, motivated by the desire to provide a new ontological and ethical status to nonhuman objects by arguing for something like material agency. Matter is not passive but participates in self-­ organization and the constitution of phenomena via intra-action and entanglement. In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett argues for a vitality of matter whereby things have the capacity “not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett 2010, viii). Bennett contends that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (Bennett 2010, ix). It is not sufficient to place all active power within the human subject given that objects and groups of objects (or “assemblages” as Bennett, following Latour, calls them) seem to act and react indifferently to human agents. Bennett offers a pile of garbage as an example. When various pieces of trash interact with each other, they become more than those individual pieces. They form an assemblage that produces consequences unforeseen and unintended by any human agent that placed them together due to their capacity for self-organization. Further, objects like trash interact with one another in a way that often requires a response from humans (e.g., by odor or chemical emission). Thus, garbage must be taken as a quasi-agent or actant within a political context. There is a sense in which Bennett’s project is aimed at highlighting the strangeness and wonder of the world via our engagement with objects. She claims that “enchantment points in two directions: the first toward the humans who feel enchanted and whose agentic capacities may be thereby strengthened, and the second toward the agency of the things that produce (helpful, harmful) effects in human and other bodies” (Bennett 2010, xii). There is a continued focus on the human subject in relation to wonder and enchantment even while there is a theoretical move to displace “humans at the ontological center or hierarchical apex” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things 2010, 11). Bennett continues:

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“Vital materialists will thus try to linger in those moments during which they find themselves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that they share with them. This sense of a strange and incomplete commonality with the out-side may induce vital materialists to treat nonhumans—animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and commodities—more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically. (Bennett 2010, 17–18)

There are two things that I find extremely helpful and interesting in this appeal to human experience. The first is the strangeness of the world that is found in objects. It is the experience of such strangeness that first prompts us to wonder about the world and thus to pay attention to it. Therefore, I do not completely leave the tradition of wonder informed by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. This is because of the second insight from Bennett’s appeal to humans which provides an explicitly political context in which to treat wonder. When we begin to wonder about the world because of its strangeness, because we find in objects and phenomena the ability to self-organize and act semi-autonomously within a political milieu, we must make political and ethical decisions that include matter and objects on the same ontological level as humans. In Bennett’s terms, we could describe this ability to make political actions that more thoroughly incorporate matter as an ontological equal in terms of thing power (Bennett 2010, 10). While I concede that we must continue to talk about the ethical and political consequences of vibrant matter in terms of humans, I argue that there is a distance between humans and wonder that I do not find in Bennett. That is, for Bennett, wonder remains an affect, response, emotion, or passion that can be firmly located within the human. The tension between focusing on humans and focusing on objects and matter is one that I find in Merleau-Ponty as well as in many new materialisms. It is by developing the relationship between the two, and reading them alongside object-oriented ontology, that displacing wonder from the human becomes possible. Overall, the project of new materialism maps nicely onto Merleau-­ Ponty’s explicit ontology. Diana Coole, editor and contributor to a collection of essays on new materialism, appeals to Merleau-Ponty, claiming that “Merleau-Ponty’s aim [in The Visible and the Invisible]…is to explain a generative, self-transformative, and creative materiality without relying on any metaphysical invocation of mysterious, immaterial forces or agencies” (Coole 2010, 93). Coole’s appeal to Merleau-Ponty leads her to argue

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that, rather than seek an absolute knowledge of the world typically found in scientific investigation, we ought to “plunge” into the world, “watching with wonder as new meanings emerge and striving creatively to express, indeed to emulate, the formative process before it is overwritten by reifying discourses and performances” (Coole 2010, 101–102). As Coole sees it, it is through the concept of flesh that Merleau-Ponty is able to argue for an intimate contact and engagement with the world without overpowering the world with dominating and reductive appeals to knowledge. It is by recognizing “that bodies and objects are simultaneously seeing and seen…all jostling together and intersecting to gestate and agitate the dense tissue of relationships that constitute the flesh” that the philosopher is capable of being “everywhere and nowhere” (Coole 2010, 106). New materialisms, then, are a varied, transdisciplinary attempt to challenge traditional understandings of matter, agency, political activity, bodies, gender, and race. I have not dealt with the strong feminist writings found under the new materialist umbrella. Rather, for my project, new materialism’s challenge to traditional conceptions of matter, agency, and ontology, open the possibility of extending the discourse on wonder beyond the limits of epistemology. Most importantly, new materialism demands that we take seriously the idea that we as humans are not separate and distinct from the rest of the world. But more than just levelling a kind of ontological or ethical status of humans and nonhumans, this radically changes the way that we should understand politics, physics, biology, sociology, meteorology and so on, because of the way that matter asserts itself actively within these contexts. Therefore, the nonhuman world that we find at our fingertips or in the purview of our gaze cannot be thought of as inert, passive res extensa capable of revealing an exhaustive knowledge of our physical surroundings. The possibility that matter is capable of self-­organization and active participation demands that we not only view the world with an initial sense of wonder, but that we ought to remain in wonder over the inexhaustible mysteriousness of the world. This mystery of the world, though, is not a metaphysical mystery at the dualistic division between spirit and matter. It is not the contemplation of an otherworldly realm that mystically manifests itself here in the physical world. Rather, it is the realization that physics and magic have much more in common, that the world is filled with a strangeness that is inexhaustible because its depth is inexhaustible. If, as Merleau-Ponty and new materialisms indicate, there is no possibility of separating humans from “nature,”

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then there is no possibility of exhaustive knowledge because humans will always affect and rearrange “nature” from within. There is no stopping point at which to peer in on “nature” from the outside and find it in a pure state. This is directly opposed to a traditional scientific framework that treats separability, or the exterior perspective of the observer to the observed, as a necessary condition for objective investigation (Barad 2007, 184). In the account of the world provided by new materialism, “there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming” (Barad 2007, 396). Like Barad, Merleau-Ponty held that the basic units of reality are phenomena. While this becomes much more explicit in The Visible and the Invisible, it is implicit in the earlier Phenomenology of Perception. According to M.C. Dillon, along with the more widely known thesis of the primacy of perception, Merleau-Ponty held to an ontological thesis of the primacy of phenomena (Dillon 1997, 51). Based on this second thesis, Merleau-­ Ponty promotes the principle of autochthonous organization, which according to Dillon, means that “the Gestalt organizes itself and generates its own internal coherence; the perceptual meaning, the configuration of parts within the Gestalt contexture, is intrinsic to the sensuous content” (Dillon 1997, 81). I point this out here, not only to indicate the similarities between the self-organization of new materialisms and the autochthonous organization of Merleau-Ponty, but also to develop and congeal an ontological framework built on the science studies of Barad, the political philosophy of Bennett, and the phenomenological insights of Merleau-Ponty. Much has been made about Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the body. And rightly so. But according to Dillon, there is an ontologically rich reason that motivated Merleau-Ponty to spend so much time on the body. Dillon explains: The body is important for Merleau-Ponty, because it is a prime exemplar of flesh. And flesh is important because it is the element that unlocks an ontology: it is the element that Merleau-Ponty, before his death, thought would allow him to resolve the ontological problems he had been working on since he first encountered them underlying fundamental issues in psychology. (Dillon 1997, 35)

Merleau-Ponty’s conception of flesh allows him to explore an ontology that lies between immanence and transcendence. This ontology is very

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similar to Barad’s in that both demand that we understand humans as intimately interwoven, intertwined, or entangled with the world. According to Barad, “Bodies are not situated in the world; they are part of the world” (Barad 2007, 376). Or again, “we are of the universe—there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming” (Barad 2007, 396). Barad comes to this conclusion by way of Niels Bohr’s philosophy/physics, as well as insights drawn from contemporary quantum physics. Her point is that, on a physical basis, there is very little separating humans from the rest of the world, and that boundaries dividing objects are constituted by cuts in phenomena rather than by exterior lines of individually and autonomously existing objects. Merleau-Ponty comes to this conclusion as an escape from the limitations of empiricism and intellectualism. Surprisingly, however, there is a common example between Bohr and Merleau-Ponty that helped them to reach extremely similar ideas. According to Barad, Bohr made a distinction between instruments of observation and objects of observation by appealing to the use of a cane by a blind man (Barad 2007, 358). Barad explains: Bohr’s discussion focuses on two possible complementary practices: on the one hand, the man can hold the cane tightly so that it functions as an instrument of observation (an extension of the person trying to negotiate the room); on the other hand, he can hold it loosely so that it becomes an object of observation. The cane is neither inherently part of the object nor the agencies of observation. The line between subject and object is not fixed and it does not preexist particular practices of their engagement, but neither is it arbitrary. Rather, object and subject emerge through and as part of the specific nature of the material practices that are enacted. (Barad 2007, 158–159)

Again, for Barad the insights of physics lead to the disruption of the subject and object as preexisting relations. It is only in the contact between the person and the cane that each is constituted. This echoes a similar point made by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. Here Merleau-Ponty describes the blind man’s cane as becoming a part of the body’s engagement with the world through what he calls habit, where “[h]abit expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments” (Merleau-Ponty, Perception 1962, 166). While Barad’s is an explicitly ontological point, Merleau-Ponty is describing the role of the body as the “general medium

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for having a world” (Merleau-Ponty, Perception 1962, 169). The body is how we experience the world, how we take up our desires and projects within the world, and thus, to an extent, how we know the world. One limitation to Merleau-Ponty’s project at this point, a limitation acknowledged by him in The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 200), is that the focus is too narrowly placed on the human subject. It is as if he could not escape the anthropocentric language of Cartesian thought to describe the world beyond human experience. It is here that the insights of object-oriented ontology can aid in thoroughly extending Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy beyond the description of human experience.

Object-Oriented Ontology Object-oriented philosophy properly begins with Graham Harman. Throughout his career, Harman has developed a unique approach to ontology through novel readings of Martin Heidegger’s “tool analysis” and Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory.” On Harman’s account, object-oriented ontology requires that we understand objects as the most fundamental bits of reality, where objects are “anything that has a unified reality that is autonomous from its wider context and also from its own pieces” (Harman 2011, 116). Partly motivating this focus on objects is the desire to eliminate a hegemonic ontological framework. That is, following Heidegger, he wants to move away from “the sort of traditional philosophy which holds that one type of entity can explain all the others— whether it be atoms, perfect forms, the apeiron, mental images, or power” (Harman, The Qaudruple Object 2011, 85). While Harman does not explicitly follow this train of thought, given the anti-hierarchical foundation of his theoretical output it is easy to imagine how an ontology focused on objects can lead to a more ecologically oriented framework. For Harman and other object-oriented philosophers, one barrier to be overcome is the insistence that “the human-world gap is the privileged site of all rigorous philosophy” (Harman, The Qaudruple Object 2011, 136). Harman labels this “philosophy of access” and sees it as a particular limitation of phenomenology. He explains: “the problem [of phenomenology] is that human and world remain the only two poles of this philosophy, both of them participants in every situation of which one can speak” (Harman 2011, 139). Harman’s critique of “philosophies of access” distances object-oriented ontology from the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

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because, according to M.C. Dillon, “For Merleau-Ponty, the real world is the perceived world is the phenomenal world” (Dillon 1997, 156). It is not possible to abandon the perspective that I have in order to examine “what Being can indeed be before it be thought by me,” for “there is no Brute world, there is only an elaborated world” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 48). Even the “not-knowing of the beginning” of perception is a not-­ knowing for the perceiver (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 49). While Merleau-Ponty’s ontology does not fit easily into the general scope of object-oriented ontology, I argue that the similarities between the two make them possible allies. One overlap occurs with Merleau-­ Ponty’s concept of flesh. At one point in The Quadruple Object, Harman claims that “If I perceive a tree, it can probably perceive me in turn. But this must occur as part of a different relation, not as the reverse side of the same one” (Harman, The Qaudruple Object 2011, 75). For Harman, there are no subjects, only objects with varying capacities to relate to other objects via their qualities.3 This seems, prima facie opposed to Merleau-­ Ponty’s notion of reversibility, whereby the thing touching and the thing touched overlap and pass into each other based on a single flesh (Merleau-­ Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 123). But if, as Dillon claims, Merleau-Ponty’s “paramount goal” was “to carry Western philosophy beyond the dualism of subject and object,” then there are no subjects in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology either because that binary setup breaks down (Dillon 1997, 155). Rather than reduce everything to coincidental objects, Merleau-Ponty places each thing into a relationship of reversibility that is based on the fecundity of flesh. Dillon goes on to explain that the “essence of the reversibility relation” is “not that the tree I see sees me, but that I am visible from the standpoint of the tree as it is from mine because we are both made of the same stuff: the flesh of the world” (Dillon 1997, 170). Harman is sympathetic to thinking about the world in terms of flesh. As mentioned previously, Harman describes Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh as a kind of “electrified medium in which all entities…generate surfaces of qualities that fuse together or signal messages to one another” (Harman 2005, 58). In Harman’s terms, it is possible to read the flesh as a way to reject established ontological hierarchies where one kind of substance/ 3  It should be noted that for Harman, objects never relate to other objects. This is due to the fourfold nature of objects such that the reality of the object is not identical with its qualities. Thus, the real object always recedes from possible access, while the qualities that it presents or manifests relate to the qualities of other real objects.

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thing/object is superior over another. If this is the case, then the flesh itself cannot be an object that determines the value or the existence of other objects and can thus avoid the hegemonic tendencies of phenomenology that worry object-oriented philosophers. Harman leans towards this reading of the flesh when he claims that “[f]lesh cannot be absent when two pieces of plywood, abandoned in a ghost town, smack into each other in a windstorm. Even for these stupefied objects there is an intertwining of the visible and the invisible, given that they fail to exhaust each other’s depths through their causal interaction” (Harman 2005, 54–55). For Harman and for object-oriented ontology, no interaction ever exhausts the object’s being. There is always some aspect of the object that recedes from every interaction because no object is capable of gaining full access to any other object. Both Merleau-Ponty and object-oriented ontology reject a position of idealistic absolute knowledge. For object-oriented ontology, an object has two poles: it is both a real object and a sensual object. The sensual object is the focus of most traditional phenomenological analysis. It is that which presents itself via perception. The real object, however, always exceeds relations, is not accessible via perception, and is rarely, if ever, fully known. A real object has no reliance on human perception or consciousness for its reality. Thus, object-oriented ontology rejects idealistic absolute knowledge because it fails to allow for real objects that evade human consciousness. For Merleau-Ponty, the sensual object pole is the visible aspect of The Visible and the Invisible. According to Dillon, what is not revealed by perception is “an invisible that stands in a tensed relation of identity-and-­ difference with the visible” (Dillon 1997, 157). The invisible is the ideal “that is expressed in language, constituted in thought, and projected by culture” (Dillon 1997, 157). Perhaps most important here is that within the framework of object-­ oriented ontology, real objects always recede from absolute access, and thus maintain a necessary sense of mystery. It is in this sense that object-­ oriented ontology promotes wonder as a fundamental mode of engagement with the world. Ian Bogost, a video-game developer, philosopher, and proponent of object-oriented ontology, claims that “to wonder is to suspend all trust in one’s own logics, be they religion, science, philosophy, custom, or opinion, and to become subsumed entirely in the uniqueness of an object’s native logics” (Bogost 2012, 124). While I appreciate Bogost’s enthusiasm for both objects and wonder, the ethical and political conclusions he gleans from this sort of realism are problematic, if not

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troubling. For Bogost, embracing genuine wonder means that we ought to “leave rigor to the dead,” “trade furrows for gasps,” and “rub our temples at one another no longer. Let’s go outside and dig in the dirt” (Bogost 2012, 133). But if we are to truly take objects as ontologically independent from human perception and thought, then rigor does not threaten wonder. That is, if we agree with Bogost that the alien is everywhere, that knowledge never truly permeates objects, and to wonder is to suspend our human logics, then rigor can promote wonder just as much as it can stifle it. Research provides a more intimate familiarity with the objects being investigated, but it can also promote an intensification of strangeness. Taking wonder seriously does not require that we give up on the practical aspects of science and philosophy but that we reorient our attitudes towards them. Levi Bryant’s approach to object-oriented ontology can be helpful here. As mentioned, for a very long time, wonder has been described as residing almost solely within the human subject. As a result, wonder has been spoken of most often as a means to an end. Aristotle’s claim that philosophy begins with wonder only to end in knowledge highlights this point. However, despite Aristotle’s own view that wonder should be dismissed by knowledge, his ontological insights provide a possible clue to discovering a wonder that does not reside solely in humans or within the limits of human experience. If we return to the Theaetetus, we find that the claim that philosophy begins in wonder arises from the dizzying and disturbing elusiveness of knowledge. That is, it seems possible to know that something is other than it is. At the most basic ontological level, we can say the same thing about objects (as substances) and their qualities. According to Bryant, “if a substance is always one then this is because, while a substance might be compounded of many parts or other objects, qua substance the substance is still one substance” (Bryant 2011, 75). For Bryant, there is a supposed tension that lies at the heart of an object’s relation to its component parts, including its qualities. If we take as an example a computer, it is clear how a single object can be thought of as both one and many. The computer is one computer. Yet it is made up of many parts including keys, screens, motherboards, memory slots, wires, and fans. Where exactly does the computer end and the fan begin? It is here that objects become wonderful in two ways. The first is that we can experience them with a sense of wonder. Harman captures this experience of wonder nicely when he says that

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there is something permanently strange about the manner in which an enduring sensual object can appear in countless incarnations depending on the viewer’s angle, distance, and mood. Perhaps children still appreciate this strangeness; in adults, strenuous exercises may be needed to recapture the atmosphere of mystery that ought to surround the merest rotation of a wine bottle or the shifting of a light behind a mountain. (Harman, The Qaudruple Object 2011, 98)

It is not only possible to arouse wonder at the sight of something beautiful or shocking, or in the realization that the same horizon appears blue just before dawn and a dazzling orange just after sunset, but the fact that the dull leaf of a fake plant is also buzzing with the activity of electrons and microscopic organisms, or that the computer is at the same time a single unit and a conglomeration of component parts and complex processes can likewise evoke an experience of wonder. This first sense has been thoroughly identified and described throughout the western philosophical tradition and analyzed in epistemological terms. The second way that objects are wonderful is ontological in nature and has largely been ignored in the western tradition. Although Bryant does not provide an extended discussion of wonder, his version of object-oriented ontology provides an opening to include wonder as part of the ontological makeup of objects. One way that Bryant does this is to read Aristotelian ontology through the work of Roy Bhaskar. While Aristotle did not locate wonder in objects, reading Aristotelian insights through Bhaskar’s position makes it possible to talk about wonder as a quality of objects. According to Bryant, if we begin “with ontology and note that substance is such that (1) it can actualize different qualities at different times (Aristotle), and that (2) it can fail to actualize qualities (Bhaskar), we can now argue that the very essence or structure of substance lies in self-othering and withdrawal” (Bryant 2011, 85). Bryant’s main point here is that there is something in objects that continually withdraws from interactions or relations with other objects. Important for Bryant is the idea that Bhaskar considers objects as containing qualities or powers that must be activated. Specific qualities or powers of an object are activated depending on the qualities of other objects that the first object encounters. For the most part, we only see a very limited set of qualities for each object. This limited set of available qualities is due to the fact that we relate, as humans, in a specific way to specific objects, and that we often find objects within similar states of affairs. Scientific experimentation offers

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us the chance to induce the activation of qualities we don’t often see. Scientific experimentation does not ever give us direct access to the object as such, but works to demonstrate that objects can fail to actualize their qualities under typical circumstances. For Bryant, this actualization is not causally determined by the qualities of other objects but is an object’s active engagement with other objects. According to Bryant, “if we had an ontologically accurate language, we would instead say that ‘the mug blues’ or that ‘the mug is bluing’ or that ‘the mug does blue.’ The blueness of the mug is not a quality that the mug has but is something that the mug does. It is an activity on the part of the mug” (Bryant 2011, 90). With this active ability to engage and relate to other objects via various qualities, Bryant brings us back to Jane Bennett’s thing-power and Karen Barad’s principle of intra-action. Both Bennett and Barad argue for a vibrancy of matter, which means that matter is an active participant, helping to constitute its surrounding environment and political milieu. Bryant continues this trend explicitly within the context of an ontology. For Bryant there is a kind of politics of objects where different combinations of objects result in different manifestations of qualities and events. This is not a reduction of events to formal causality. Rather, this is a radical inclusion of objects of all sorts within the realm of agency. According to Bryant, “if experimental activity is necessary, then this is because generative mechanisms” of objects “can be dormant, inactive, or veiled by the agency of other objects or generative mechanisms” (Bryant 2011, 48). It is this agency of objects in relation with other objects that places wonder beyond the limitations of human experience. Wonder is no longer restricted to the dizzying experience of the novel or the strange but can be found in the most ordinary of objects as a quality or power of that object. Thus, wonder arises as an experience for a sentient object when that particular quality or power is activated in such a way that the sentient object can access it. But because objects are active, quasi-agents, it is not the case that objects passively wait for a sentient object to access its power of wonder. Rather, it is the object that does the wondering in the sense that Bryant’s mug blues. We would then more accurately say that objects actively wonder. As such, it is not merely the strange or the novel that can motivate the experience of wonder, but every object. The most familiar objects and contexts are actively full of wonder even though some may appear more dormant than others. This appearance, though, is not only an appearance to the sentient object (either human or otherwise). Rather, the wondering

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that objects do can be actualized by relations and accessed by only certain objects within a certain context.

Placing Wonder in the Flesh By questioning the place of wonder I do not want to dismiss the perplexing nature of wonder, but to re-locate it. By locating wonder in objects, especially objects whose ontological status is not determined or conditioned by human access, wonder maintains its dizzying, unsettling nature while avoiding a reduction to knowledge. But it is not enough to merely locate wonder in objects. We must also locate wonder in a broader political and ethical context. For this, I will briefly return to Bennett before appealing to Merleau-Ponty’s explicit ontology. According to Bennett’s vitalism, objects ought to be given independent ontological status because their capacity to act is not necessarily tied to human agency. In Vibrant Matter, she appeals to Spinoza’s idea of conatus. For Bennet, “Conatus names ‘an active impulsion’ or trending tendency to persist,” (Bennett 2010, 2) which is shared by both humans and nonhumans. When placed together, a group of objects is capable of forming an assemblage. These assemblages are then capable of merging, shifting, and reorganizing to produce effects that are a result of no human (or superhuman) agency. Recognizing the possibility for objects to reorganize, and to thus internally produce independent consequences, Bennett claims that “American materialism, which requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products purchased in ever short cycles, is antimaterliaity. The sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter” (Bennett 2010, 5). As such there is a mutually constitutive relation between the ontological status of objects and our treatment of them. On one hand, if we treat objects like junk, then we conceal their autonomous quasi-agency. On the other hand, if we realize this quasi-agency, then we will more readily respect objects as more than junk. Importantly, this relationship to objects need not always refer to synthetic or artificial objects (like Bennett’s examples of trash, electrical grids, and metal chains) but can also be extended to natural objects, ecosystems, and watersheds. Part of the quasi-agency that Bennett offers is based upon the unpredictable nature of the relation between multiple objects. We have already seen that there is a kind of politics of objects (what Bryant will call a democracy of objects) whereby some qualities are activated and some

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qualities are dormant. This is a component of any relation of objects. That something continually escapes human knowledge regarding how assemblages of objects will act and react allows wonder to enter into a broader political discussion. The fact that objects are capable of an internal organization and politics requires human (or human objects) to react according to our qualities and powers. According to Bennett, a revitalization of wonder would counteract the tales of disenchantment that are often told about the contemporary world (Bennett, Enchantment 2001, 14). Because the world has become a utilitarian, calculated, mathematical projection without gods, monsters, or magic, we fail to be enchanted by it. The story that Merleau-Ponty tells (in both his phenomenological account of perception and his explicit ontology) is one of engaging the world in a way that the world is always new, always full of wonder, always enchanted. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims that the best formulation of the phenomenological reduction was provided by Eugen Fink when he likens it to a state of “wonder in the face of the world” (Merleau-Ponty, Perception 1962, xv). What Bennett offers is an enchantment that makes it politically and ethically relevant to engage with objects as having performative value independent of all humans. She does not, however, escape placing wonder within the human subject. In The Enchantment of Modern Life, she claims that wonder is a state that involves a “temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement” (Bennett, Enchantment 2001, 5). Wonder remains tied up with the response of the subject to the object. Object-oriented ontology, on the other hand, places wonder fully within the realm of objects. Ian Bogost goes so far as to claim that “wonder is the way objects orient” (Bogost 2012, 124). What I want to show is that there is a tension between the way that objects wonder and the way that humans experience wonder. We cannot reduce wonder to a human experience or power, yet we must also take into consideration the wonder of objects within the human political realm to gain perspective on how we ought to treat objects in light of their quasi-agency. Locating wonder in something like Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh may be helpful in revealing and alleviating this tension. For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy not only begins in wonder, but also leads to wonder. In The Visible and the Invisible, he claims that philosophy is a “past of experience and of knowledge that one day ends up at this open wondering” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 105).

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The question I want to pose is whether nonhuman objects have a similar quality or power of wonder. Here, in the initial stages of the argument that I will make throughout this book, I venture the claim that yes, there is a similar power of wonder in nonhuman objects. That is not to say that rocks and apples feel a sense of wonder when presented with a work of art or when placed on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Rather, the similarity resides in the sense that an apple and a stop sign are both red. The two are analogous in power but not in actualization. Like the power to red, wonder always works in concert with other powers and qualities within a particular object or in a particular milieu. The concept of flesh highlights this point in two ways: (1) it offers a reversibility between objects that does not require an identity of those objects, and (2) it allows for a communication and relation of objects without requiring that one type of object reign over all other types of objects. For Merleau-Ponty, the concept of flesh has “no name in any philosophy,” cannot be talked about in terms of substance, and is an “element” or “a concrete emblem of a general manner of being” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 147). The flesh is that which allows each object or visible to engage with other objects or visibles on the same plane of being. The flesh “lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another, and there is no anteriority of the percipere to the percipi, there is simultaneity” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 123). Even as Merleau-Ponty developed an explicit ontology that challenged the traditional understanding of subjects and objects, his analysis most often remains in the voice of the human sentient object. But this does not entail that the flesh only describes the relationship between humans and the world of visibles. In describing the engagement with the visible, Merleau-Ponty remarks that “[s]ince the total visible is always behind, or after, or between the aspects we see of it, there is access to it only through an experience which, like it, is wholly outside of itself” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 136). This sounds very similar to Levi Bryant’s claim in The Democracy of Objects that “the very essence or structure of substance lies in self-othering and withdrawal” (Bryant 2011, 85). For Bryant, this structure indicates that objects are not identical with their qualities, and therefore not absolutely accessible. Objects always recede and are thus never fully known. Likewise, Merleau-Ponty claims that because the visible is “wholly outside of itself” that “our body commands the visible for us, but it does not explain it, does not clarify it, it only

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concentrates the mystery of its scattered visibility” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 136). Paradoxically, the same self-othering that negates absolute access to objects also provides the condition for relations between objects via reversibility. According to Merleau-Ponty, he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it, unless, by principle, according to what is required by the articulation of the look with the things, he is one of the visibles, capable, by a singular reversal, of seeing them—he who is one of them. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 134–135)

At the most basic level, humans and objects are made of the same stuff. But rather than reduce humans to objects, this sets up a dynamic and generative interaction. Through this reversibility the flesh becomes a “thickness…between the seer and the thing” and “is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 135). Our interaction with things never fully exhausts either the subject or the object and the relationship between sensible-sentient and sensible is not dominated by one or the other. Instead, the two form “a couple more real than either of them” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139). When read in conjunction with new materialism and object-oriented ontology, this couple need not remain limited to sensible-sentient and sensible but can apply to all objects and their relations with other objects. Merleau-Ponty himself confirms this reading when he claims that “[e]ach landscape of my life, because it is not a wandering troop of sensations or a system of ephemeral judgments but a segment of the durable flesh of the world, is qua visible, pregnant with many other visions besides my own” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 123). Beyond the scope of vision, each object is pregnant with the potential to actualize hidden powers in different contexts and among different objects. Each object has the power to wonder beyond the limitations of human access. We can even talk about this in terms of assemblages if assemblages themselves become a type of object. This brings up questions regarding the constitution of objects and the limit to what can be counted as an object. Returning to Karen Barad’s agential realism, I argue that this problem is evidence of ontological wonder rather than an obstacle to its description. Barad’s focus on phenomena at times sounds very much like Merleau-­ Ponty’s notion of horizon. In the Phenomenology of Perception,

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Merleau-Ponty relies heavily on the figure/ground relationship developed in Gestalt psychology. Accordingly, he describes the world as an ever-­ receding horizon built on an ever-dynamic relationship of figure and ground. This takes place specifically in terms of attention. For Merleau-­ Ponty, turning one’s attention to a new object makes what was previously an indeterminate horizon, or ground, into a determinate object, or figure (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 35). By so doing, a new horizon opens up for the newly explicit figure. This is a continuous process that demands a kind of fluidity between figure and ground so that each object has a horizon that can in turn be its own object with its own horizon. Thus, we have embedded in each horizon numerous other horizons and beyond each horizon is a greater and more extensive horizon. Karen Barad makes similar remarks in Meeting the Universe Halfway. According to Barad, a phenomenon is an entanglement of subjects and objects (or, perhaps, objects and objects) that are not the result of human practices (Barad 2007, 140). Phenomena are constituted by what she calls “agential cuts” made by apparatuses. For Barad, “apparatuses are not bounded objects or structures; they are open-ended practices. The reconfiguring of the world continues without end” (Barad 2007, 170). She sees this as particularly important for the laboratory setting insofar as apparatuses are not technical instruments used for measuring but are material-­ discursive practices that include measuring machines, scientists performing the experiment, the scientific method utilized, the building in which the laboratory is set, and so on. The “cuts” that constitute specific phenomena limit the set which is included in particular apparatuses within material-­ discursive practices. Like Merleau-Ponty’s horizons, such limits can be extended almost indefinitely depending on the objects and context involved. Further, such “agential cuts” need not rely on human involvement or human agency. This again leads to an understanding of matter as dynamic, generative, and self-organizing, for according to Barad In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is a substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity. Phenomena—the smallest material units (relational “atoms”)—come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-­ activity. (Barad 2007, 151)

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For Barad, this generative aspect of matter is fundamental to the constitution of reality. It is an ontologically primordial principle to the degree that matter engages “in an ongoing reconfiguring of the world” (Barad 2007, 170). While Barad denies that there are any truly individual objects existing in the world, her position is not far from Bryant’s object-oriented approach. Barad concludes that phenomena are the basic units of reality, and that as such, it is only via intra-action that the world is constituted. Bryant, however, sees individual objects pre-existing any kind of relation, even claiming that objects resist relations with other objects altogether due to the non-identity of objects and their qualities. Yet, Bryant also claims that the qualities of objects, which are more like active powers than passive properties, actualize differently in different contexts. On Bryant’s account, a mug “blues” differently with changes in the lighting that surrounds the mug. While there are clear ontological differences between Barad and Bryant, both positions lead to an active and vibrant world where objects (or matter in Barad’s terms) act as the source for this generative activity. At the heart of new materialism(s), object-oriented ontologies, and, as I will argue, Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, is the desire to rid philosophy of the binary logics that have dominated western thought since Plato. The world does not need humans to inject meaning into the world, or to provide categories and structures for its constitution. Humans are but one part of the active “congealing of agency” of matter, one object among objects, or one sensible in the flesh of the world. But where does this leave wonder? Where can we find wonder? In the following project I will develop two arguments. First, wonder remains a description of a particular experience had by humans. In this sense, wonder continues within the human “subject.” Yet, because the world is populated by self-organizing, quasi-agential, and vibrant matter, this experience of wonder ought to be a self-othering experience. We cannot wonder about the world, find concrete answers via scientific experimentation, and move on. That is, because the experience of wonder is generated by the vibrancy of matter and the reversibility of flesh, it can never lead to a knowledge that cancels out the initial dizzying experience of wonder. In fact, rigorous exploration of the world, rather than negating the experience of wonder, reveals a repetition of wonder motivated equally by the most strange and the most familiar. Our access to the world is always necessarily incomplete and thus built upon a foundation of

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sustained mystery, no matter how habit and cultural sedimentation conceal this fact. Second, wonder is more than an experience had by humans and can perhaps more accurately be described as an ontological quality or power of objects. Given that humans are objects this does not displace wonder from humans. Rather, it rejects the idea that humans are the only kinds of objects that wonder. Further, because various qualities are actualized in different contexts and there is a non-identity between objects and their qualities, I will argue that wonder resides in the relation between objects as a quality. This synthesizes the first and second argument and concludes that the experience of wonder by humans is the manifestation of the quality or power to wonder in relation to other objects. Thus, I will argue for an ontological wonder that is properly placed as a relation between objects.

References Aristotle. 1979. Metaphysics. Translated by Hippocrates G.  Apostle. Grinnell. Iowa: The Peripatetic Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy. 2020. The Politics of Wonder. In The Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach, ed. Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, Siddiqur Osmani, and Mozaffar Qizilbash, 227–244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Coole, Diana. 2010. The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 92–115. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dillon, M.C. 1997. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Evans, Fred. 2010. Unnatural Participation: Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Environmental Ethics. Philosphy Today 54: 142–152.

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Harman, Graham. 2005. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago, IL: Open Court. ———. 2011. The Qaudruple Object. Washington, DC: Zero Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lloyd, Genevieve. 2018. Reclaiming Wonder: After the Sublime. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge Classics. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. In Translated by Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Parsons, Howard L. 1969. A Philosophy of Wonder. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (1): 84–101. Pedersen, Jan B.W. 2019. Balanced Wonder: Experiential Sources of Imagination, Virtue, and Human Flourishing. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Plato. 2004. Theaetetus. Newburyport: Focus Publications. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. 2008. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Aesthetics, Causality, and Operative Wonder

The Aesthetics of Wonder On the road map toward developing an ontological wonder, turning to aesthetics may seem like a strange detour. However, aesthetics and ontology are not separated by a large gap in the world of object-oriented ontology. By appealing to the aesthetics of wonder, I hope to clarify how I am using objects and how such a discourse on objects manifests in the world around us. Specifically, I will focus on two general discourses surrounding the aesthetics of wonder. The first is the idea that because we have adopted a desire for absolute knowledge, both modern philosophy and modern science have left us with a disenchanted world. We have attempted to eliminate mystery, and with it, anything that falls outside the bounds of reason. By doing so we have created a world that is cold and sterile, lacking any significant value other than utility. It is argued, then, that what we need to do is to re-enchant the world.1 For new materialism, this means demonstrating that the world, at an ontologically material level, is much  It may be the case that most scientists do not actually hold this view and therefore do not contribute to the active disenchantment of the world. I make these claims within a historically situated discussion and rejection of modernity and the scientistic outlook adopted from the Enlightenment. This is borne out in the discussion of Merleau-Ponty, Barad, and Jeffrey Kosky. Barad’s physics-philosophy explicitly motivates a re-enchantment via a reorganization and valuation of scientific methodologies. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. H. Onishi, Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48027-0_2

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stranger than the version we have adopted from modern science. Matter is generative and quasi-agential so that mystery and wonder can be found in the very structure of the world we live in. Likewise, object-oriented ontology contends that objects continually resist absolute access and exceed the limitations of language, going so far as to challenge the law of noncontradiction. The second aspect of aesthetics I will focus on comes from the world of fiction. While a realist ontology seems like it would negate the kind of wonder found in fictional worlds, I will argue that imaginary objects are no less real than physical objects. This is because they both have qualities that are activated and qualities that recede depending on their context. Further, fictional objects are capable of producing effects in the material world. As such, fiction provides clues toward understanding what an ontological wonder might look like. To this end, I will turn to weird and speculative fiction, with special attention given to Haruki Murakami’s expansive novel 1Q84.

Aesthetics of Wonder: Rare Experiences In Wonder and the Rainbow, Phillip Fisher explicitly attends to the aesthetics of wonder. According to Fisher, this “aestheticization of delight” has been neglected since the rise of Modern Romanticism and his focus is on wonder as an experience of the unexpected and the rare (Fisher 1998, 1–2). For Fisher, wonder is explicitly tied to new and strange experiences that are encountered without an established category of reason. To this end, he claims that “wonder does not depend on awakening and then surprising expectation, but on the complete absence of expectation” (Fisher 1998, 21). He argues that wonder has disappeared from aesthetic discussions because “memory and expectation are so fundamental to the narrative arts and, usually, to music that wonder is ruled out, or is replaced, we might say, by mere surprise, as in a twist of plot” (Fisher 1998, 21). Wonder, for Fisher, is not surprise or curiosity but a passive encounter with the completely unexpected. Fisher distinguishes wonder from estrangement, where estrangement is the ability of art to make something familiar strange. Art is capable of reframing everyday objects to be viewed in a new, unfamiliar light. But this does not produce wonder because “estrangement has everything to do with the problem of boredom, with overfamiliarity, with the dull effects of habit” (Fisher 1998, 28). He uses the rainbow as an extended example to

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demonstrate why “wonder is not one more episode in the aesthetic history of boredom,” but something altogether distinct (Fisher 1998, 28). In the rainbow, Fisher finds a fitting example for wonder as surprise at a rare occurrence. His point is that even though the rainbow is a familiar object, it is always a sudden and unexpected experience. Further, people may understand the “cause” of the rainbow or be able to explain its appearance in scientific terms, but “this knowledge seldom lets us anticipate the experience. As a result, each experience of the rainbow is sudden, unexpected, and widely separated in time from our most recent instance” (Fisher 1998, 34). His intuition about our experience of the rainbow seems to ring true. Even though we know that rain or moisture in the atmosphere increases the likelihood of a rainbow, it is often the case that the exact conditions are unknown and thus unpredictable. What makes the rainbow truly fit Fisher’s argument is that they happen so rarely that they are not expected during or after every rain. They are not a causal component of rain like finding the grass or pavement wet. The rainbow is met, then, with a sense of surprise, delight, and a lack of expectation. While Fisher’s account of rainbows aligns with an ontologically oriented wonder that wonders at the most familiar, each possible instance of wonder generated by the rainbow seems to be concealed by habit and cultural sedimentation. That is, even though a rainbow is always an unexpected event, it rarely prompts any kind of dramatic reaction because I am, in a sense, used to the appearance of rainbows. For Fisher, aesthetic wonder “is part of the mobility of attention, interest, and delight,” and powers the “capacity to notice the actual details of” an object (Fisher 1998, 39). But it is unclear why or how this kind of wonder is prompted. Surely there are times that I am more affected by the appearance of a rainbow than others. When I am pointing out the presence of a rainbow to my children, for instance, I experience the wonder at the sight of the rainbow more easily and more dramatically than when I am mowing the lawn by myself. But if the unexpected is a mark of wonder, and the rainbow is always unexpected, then wonder should occur every time that a rainbow appears. The fact that it does not, however, makes Fisher’s account seem incomplete. In response to these worries, Fisher offers a few clarifying remarks. First, his description of wonder as aesthetic is directly related to scientific inquiry. Thinking about science from an aesthetic perspective shifts the burden of activity from the human inquirer to the object. That is, “we do not have to seek out the things that we ought to think about scientifically. They strike us, as the stars do. They call attention to themselves against a

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background of things that do not spontaneously, on their own, call attention to themselves” (Fisher 1998, 40). Fisher seems to be describing a world that actively calls attention to itself, demanding that we investigate it scientifically. But Fisher seems to confine the spontaneity of things to human thought. That is, it is not clear if the world actively calls to nonhuman agents. Do the leaves and twigs call out to the moose? Does the cattail invite investigation by the muskrat? It seems that it is only human thought that has access to the kind of qualities that the world is enacting at any given time. This leads to Fisher’s second point: wonder is specifically attuned to an inquiring human mind. He argues that “true wonder is a phase of the alert mind, of the mind in its process of learning” (Fisher 1998, 56). For Fisher, wonder need not be prompted at every appearance of a rainbow if the rainbow has already prompted us to inquire about the science behind that appearance. It may be unexpected and, at times, cause us to attune our attention to its appearance. But it doesn’t need to generate wonder every time it appears. Further, wonder carries on after knowledge fulfills the initial inquiry because new aspects of the rainbow are revealed. Fisher goes so far as to extend the idea that philosophy begins in wonder, stating that it “continues on at every moment by means of wonder, and ends with explanation that produces, when first heard, a new and equally powerful experience of wonder to that with which it began” (Fisher 1998, 41). The ebb and flow of wonder as continually contracting and expanding with the acquisition of knowledge sounds very similar to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that philosophy both begins and ends in wonder. But it remains likely that Fisher’s version of wonder is always explicitly motivated by knowledge. Ultimately, if we gained absolute knowledge, as unlikely or even impossible as that is, then wonder would cease. Fisher’s claim here is echoed by Jan B.W. Pedersen in Balanced Wonder. Pedersen defines wonder as “a sudden experience that intensifies the cognitive focus and awareness of ignorance about a given object. It is typically an unsettling yet delightful experience that makes one aware that there might be more to the perceived object than meets the eye” (Pedersen 2019, 1). While Pedersen’s definition offers some flexibility that Fisher’s does not, it remains focused on the cognitive abilities of human agents and a kind of drive toward scientific exploration. It may be possible to expand on Pedersen’s definition and demonstrate the possibility that nonhuman objects can become unsettled in a similar, though non-cognitive, way, and that this unsettling activity could generate new relations and new objects

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or assemblages of objects. To do so, however, would require some expansion of the idea of attunement and a diffractive reading through other philosophical positions such as object-oriented ontology, new materialism, or even Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Image (Nail 2019). While Fisher makes a strong case for a kind of wonder that continues on through the acquisition of knowledge, it remains to be the case that attaching wonder explicitly to learning, or in Pedersen’s case to awareness, limits wonder to an epistemological context. Doing so does two things: (1) it restricts wonder to human agents and (2) it would turn all objects into scientific objects that call to human observers to study them. While the second point has led to some astounding scientific breakthroughs, it has also ushered in an age of disenchantment. Moving beyond epistemological wonder, even in terms of aesthetics, requires that we work to re-­ enchant the world and challenge the restriction to knowledge advocated by Fisher.

Disenchantment and Re-enchantment: Why Art Matters Although enchantment and wonder are not identical, there are clear similarities and plenty of connections between the two. Enchantment refers to a power or quality given to another object by a mysterious source. A magical genie might give the power of flight to an ordinary carpet or a wizard might give the power to make things invisible. Labeling something as enchanted implies that there is a certain mystery related to the cause of that power. How is it that the genie or the wizard can imbue ordinary objects with magical powers? Enchantment helps us to reconcile mysterious causalities that cannot be explained by science because it is not within the scope of scientific practice to do so. Thus, when we speak of an enchanted world, we are speaking about a world filled with a mysterious kind of causality. Wonder, on the other hand, has been relegated to a kind of human experience that is motivated by certain contexts or objects.2 Theaetetus begins to wonder because he is faced with a seeming contradiction that 2  As previously stated, this is not the only way to define wonder. Wonder has also been characterized as an emotion, a passion, a psychological state, or in Jan W.B. Pedersen’s case, a kind of virtue. I focus here on the epistemological sense of wonder because it seems to be the most enduring and the richest definition of wonder in the history of western philosophy.

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occurs in everyday life. Aristotle wonders because he is confronted by things about which he is ignorant. Wonder is thought of as a human capacity that powers our inquiry into things that we do not know or do not have a category by which to explain. Enchantment requires mystery that has no rational explanation, while wonder seeks to eliminate ignorance by finding answers to the unknown. Modern philosophy is frequently blamed for ushering in an age of disenchantment because modern philosophy and science desire to know the world with absolute certainty. Here wonder works to obtain knowledge, which thereby negates enchantment. Such certainty requires that objects act in predictable ways. In the words of Jane Bennett, “the disenchantment tale figures nonhuman nature as more or less inert ‘matter’” (Bennett 2001, 7). In Arts of Wonder, Jeffrey L. Kosky claims that this disenchantment follows equally from the modern philosophy of Descartes and Kant and the theological insistence on God’s providence. To quote Kosky: “It is as if a certain form of enlightenment (the principle of rendering reason) shared a common structure of bringing things to light with a certain form of religion (the God who shines a light on all things). This format or way of organizing our picture of the world is modern disenchantment” (Kosky 2013, 5). Kosky’s major concern is that there is a single explanatory element, be it reason or the providence of God, which flattens existence and renders the world completely calculable or conceivable. Because it was thought that only a disenchanted world could be investigated with certainty, this flattening disenchantment was once positively valued. Kosky claims that disenchantment acted as “a signal of healthy-­ minded autonomy” (Kosky 2013, XII). Modern science owes quite a bit of its method and effectiveness to disenchantment. A major problem with this view, like the one proposed by Fisher, is that it creates a very short hierarchical ladder of values. Humans are highly valued because they are capable of self-movement and purpose, while matter and nonhuman life are devalued because of their inert and inactive nature. In this framework, all things are “rendered to the I that knows” (Kosky 2013, 7) such that final causality justifies a disenchanted world. For Kosky, this means that “rational investigation can secure on solid grounds the order of the cosmos so that we can be certain of where things stand” (Kosky 2013, 7). For Bennett, the project of re-enchantment is one that imbues nature, matter, and, I argue, objects with a kind of vitality and quasi-agency. This is not, however, to overlay objects and matter with human generated meaning

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and purposiveness. Rather, this means relaxing our hold on the world in order for matter and objects to generate their own performative activity. Bennett challenges the division between nature and culture in hopes of generating an enchanted world that fosters ethical and political generosity. To quote Bennett: “I tell my alter-tale because it seems to me that presumptive generosity, as well as the will to social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence, and that it is too hard to love a disenchanted world” (Bennett 2001, 12). The kind of enchantment that Bennett describes is firmly rooted in human emotions and bodily comportments. According to Bennett, “enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter” (Bennett 2001, 5). Bennett extends the scope of enchantment beyond the mind and incorporates our bodily engagement with objects. When we encounter an enchanted object, our orientation to the specific object at hand, and the world in general, changes. We become wrapped up in the object and lose our sense of time because we adopt the object’s sense of time. One aspect of an aesthetic wonder, then, occurs when we interact with an enchanted object to the degree that we attend to the object’s sense of time as our own. The crucifix, for example, carries its own temporality by bringing the story of the crucifixion to the present. Likewise, smartphones and social media apps pull us into their own temporality, shrinking and expanding time on their terms so that we often look up from our screens unsure of how much clock time has passed. Like Bennett, Canadian philosopher Kenneth Schmitz also sees wonder as an ethically motivated project. In The Recovery of Wonder, he argues that there is a direct link between human freedom and the dignity of objects such that “wonder is the middle term that joins our freedom to the dignity of things” (Schmitz 2005, 11). For Schmitz, freedom can be acquired only if we venture beyond the limits of human subjectivity (Schmitz 2005, 95). He does not eliminate objects from his analysis, but includes them in the realm of being in order to let “the otherness of things come into play in a radical way” and thereby allow for a “radical transcendence” that can “be truly free” (Schmitz 2005, 95). Echoing Bennett and Bryant, freedom demands an ontology that includes objects as quasi-agential. This quasi-agency not only brings objects into play as a generative component of the world, it also scales back the position of humans as the sole agential actor. Thus, freedom requires an attention to objects because it is only

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when we do so that we embrace the full scale of the action and context involved. Schmitz’s secondary concern lies in our reduction of objects or things to atomistic terms. For Schmitz, providing an intellectual account of a tree only in terms of waves, particles, and processes neglects an important aspect of the tree, which limits our ability to act with it or in relation to it. When we attend to the tree itself, breaking with the Kantian prohibition to speak about the noumenal realm, we begin to break the spell of modern disenchantment and thereby offer an everyday world populated by wonder. Moving away from an atomistic presentation of objects leans into a kind of phenomenology of objects so that how objects appear intimately matters on an ontological level. Schmitz suggests that we attend to art, poetry, and literature to navigate this kind of ontological phenomenology of objects. These endeavors dramatize the interaction between objects and make the implicit narrative and aesthetic aspects of appearance and causality explicit. To be sure, Schmitz’s project is overtly a humanist project. He wants to reorient our thinking to pave the way for new ways of interacting with objects and with nature. His explicit aim is to change the attitudes and the actions of humanity while ascribing new values to nonhuman objects. While I want to avoid falling into a purely humanist discourse, there is something compelling about the claim that literature and poetry can dramatize the relations between the qualities of objects that are impossible to observe. This does not mean that such dramatization has any effect on these relations. Rather, it highlights the fact that objects do not need to be affected by humans to have both causal power and agential capacities. Thus, artistic activities hold the potential to establish the kind of ontological wonder that I am arguing for within the context of human discourse. Bennett’s project is also explicitly tied to human activity and ethical engagement while extending the powers of free action and a quasi-agency through a robust ontological framework that deepens the autonomy of objects. Using the tension between disenchantment and re-enchantment as a starting point, I want to expand Bennett’s and Schmitz’s insights to develop an ontologically oriented understanding of aesthetic wonder. Like Bennett, Jeffrey Kosky’s project is oriented toward re-establishing enchantment in a disenchanted world. In Arts of Wonder, Kosky details how the intersection of art and religion can help to re-establish enchantment. For Kosky, disenchantment arises from “the dismissal of the very notion of ‘mystery’ from our encounter with the world and with

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ourselves” (Kosky 2013, XII). Disenchantment results from our universal ability to microscopically investigate any portion of physical reality and provide a comprehensive and atomistic account of what we find. There is no mystery except the kind of mystery to be overcome. Likewise, there is no wonder except the kind that represents ignorance, and which leads to knowledge (either scientific or philosophical). Scientific and technological advances aside, Kosky laments that he is disenchanted with modern disenchantment and longs for a world of mystery and magic. To recapture the mystery of the world, Kosky fittingly ventures into the desolate New Mexico desert. A major obstacle to mystery can be found in the use of technology and its ability to manipulate the relation between cause and effect. According to Kosky, “cause operates reasonably in the world when the world has been altered by modern technologies. And inversely, technology alters the world when cause has been made to operate reasonably” (Kosky 2013, 12). The Lightning Field of Quemado, New Mexico was designed by Walter de Maria and seems to offer a counterexample to this theme. Although the field has been deliberately altered to produce a specific result, the technology employed by de Maria more closely resembles a Native American rain/lightning dance3 than a scientific laboratory. Here is Kosky’s poetic description of the field and its intended result: Strong conductors of electrical current, steel rods provide a path of least resistance through which a surplus of negatively charged electrons in the storm clouds overhead might discharge themselves to an area of excess positive charge. This discharge can result in momentary flashes here on earth of temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. When positive and negative connect, lightning flashes, joining heaven and earth, sky and ground, in an instant that is revealed as quickly as it disappears. (Kosky 2013, 51)

The Lightning Field offers an opportunity to explore unreasonable causality at work. That is, it allows for the mystery of lightning to unfold in terrifying fashion without the power to clearly predict when it will occur. Causality remains at play here, but a strange, almost magical causality that is explained as accurately by western meteorology and Pueblo traditions. Experiencing lightning firsthand is as far as one can get from the 3  While appeals to Native American traditions can be problematic, Kosky does so here because of the geographical (New Mexico) and cultural (Pueblo/rural New Mexico) context in which The Lightning Field is situated.

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representations of weather that we often consult on the morning news. Lightning strikes in patterns and with force that challenges our desire to capture information and reduce events to graphs and charts. In many ways, lightning is a more striking example of Fisher’s rainbow because it is both expected (a storm has been forecast) and surprising at the same time. Out here where “the lightning flashes in the desert darkling…there is no permanent place to rest or home to lay your head, nothing that abides permanently alongside you granting you the felt stability of an anchor on solid ground” (Kosky 2013, 20). With no stable foundation on which to stand, the dizzying and dangerous sense of wonder described by Rubenstein in Chap. 1 dramatically emerges. When connected to the lack of true predictive power of science, the fact that the poles do attract lightning, though not in a certain causal relation, points to the self-organizing relationship between the “weather” and the poles. Why doesn’t this always work? Is it just that our knowledge is limited or is there an agency here? Somewhere between Western science and the Pueblo lightning dance is the quasi-agency and vibrancy of weather patterns and the interaction between lightning and land. Epistemological wonder tries to take these aesthetic experiences and reduce them down to the knowledge that we can gain from them. Like weather science, which “provides a model of what causes the rain,” we replace the experience of something beyond our reason with a reasonable representation (Kosky 2013, 49). Like the Pueblo traditions, “the capricious, occult causes of extravagant effects (lightnings/serpents) have been banished from [our] world picture, replaced by law-abiding, calculable ones” (Kosky 2013, 49). The desire for rational explanation and predictability has pushed enchantment out of the door and left us with little attention for the fuzzy borders that challenge categorical organization. It is only when light can produce “clarity and distinctness” that the world appears reasonable, rational, and calculable. If reasonableness, rationality, and calculability are taken as conditions for knowledge, then the move from wonder to knowledge depends on a reliable form of causality that presents the world in a clear and distinct light. The problem is that causality does not always work this way. Beyond weather in general, lightning poses a particular problem for representation because it is not visible by another light. Rather, it is an object made of light. As such, it cannot be represented clearly and distinctly by another source and is even rendered invisible by technology designed to capture it as a representation (e.g., the flash of a camera). Proper lighting “clears a place for a world of

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reliable objects, ones that render themselves serviceable to the self-­assertive project of mastering nature and building a secure world” (Kosky 2013, 69). Because lightning disallows any sort of “proper lighting” its presence produces a layer of mystery that exceeds our grip of mastery. The lightning in The Lightning Field offers an explicit example of this because the poles that line the field do not cause the lightning to flash, but call it in the dark, seducing it away from other locations. The poles are not enchanted like the magic carpet or the invisibility cloak. Rather, the whole climate becomes enchanted, reserving and expending a magical power to light the sky and to produce an unrepresentable object. Through The Lighting Field, we begin to see how the whole world can become enchanted. When the world becomes enchanted, previously inert objects begin to resemble a swell of living entities. The world is then revealed to be much too complex for a simple distinction between living and non-living. In The Lightning Field, nothing is held in its place for very long because the field “comes alive and does something…undulating like flowing water, desert sand, or serpent” (Kosky 2013, 55–56). The Lightning Field provides a clue to understanding not only those rare occurrences where we are struck by something terrifyingly unfathomable or uncategorizable, but also to the wonder and enchantment of everyday life. When the atmosphere becomes enchanted, wonder is expanded beyond the rare experience of lightning in a strange desert field. The poles of the lightning field call to the sky to charge the land with electrifying light. And more often than other places, the call receives a response. But The Lightning Field does not generate a necessary chain of cause and effect. The call is often ignored. The Lightning Field is not modern science but art. And rather than seek to know the “causes” of this experience, we are opened to a strange world that “comes alive and does something,” an active world capable of self-organization and quasi-agential activity. Formulating a strange kind of causality, then, is an important component of building an ontological wonder, for such causality allows for the mystery of the world to necessarily exceed the grasp of certain knowledge. Here I turn to Timothy Morton’s version of causality to explicitly connect causality, aesthetics, and wonder.

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Aesthetic Causality and the Law of Noncontradiction In Realist Magic, Timothy Morton argues for an object-oriented causality, asserting “that causality is wholly an aesthetic phenomenon” (Morton 2013, 17). For object-oriented ontology, there is a fundamental and irreducible gap between any given object and its qualities so that the qualities of the object can never be identified with the object itself (Morton 2013, 27). Rather, objects “are both themselves and not-themselves” (Morton 2013, 27). Morton goes on to claim that this gap challenges the “Law of Noncontradiction” (Morton 2013, 27). To quote Morton: “In defiance of the Law of Noncontradiction…objects present us with the following paradox: objects are both objects and non-objects. All objects are open secrets, like the Liar: This sentence is false” (Morton 2013, 27). Whenever an object presents itself, be it to a human, a rock, or itself, it only presents itself via its qualities. The object is never fully accessible because it cannot be identified with the sum of its qualities or the sum of possible perspectives—an object cannot be reduced to its qualities or its relations. There is a distinct lack of access to objects themselves, which seems to align with the correlationist position that object-oriented ontology tries so desperately to avoid. By framing the issue as a “problem of access,” as Harman does, then the correlational trap starts to dissolve because the qualities that are on display and accessible are on display and accessible to more than just human categories. All objects have limited and varied access to other objects. Thus, Harman’s ontology expands beyond the human-­ object correlation and offers “a weird realism that shows the human-world circle to be indefensibly narrow” (Harman 2011, 62). In this ontology, objects never directly relate to other objects because they are always expanding and collapsing depending on their context and relation to other objects. But if objects never directly relate to other objects, then causality is in a bit of a bind. How can we say that one object causes another to do something if they are always receding from contact? This is especially problematic for object-oriented ontology because it claims to be a kind of (weird) realism. The objects being discussed are real, and therefore the interactions between objects, including causation, must also be real. A retreat to idealism is out of the question here. Morton’s response to these issues is to argue for an aesthetic causality. According to Morton, “if objects are irreducibly secret, causality must reside somewhere in the realm of relations between objects, along with things like number,

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qualities, time, space and so on” (Morton 2013, 30). Rather than derail object-oriented ontology as a realist philosophy, it is “precisely because reality is real—that is, encrypted against access by any object, including a probing human mind—[that] the aesthetic dimension is incredibly important” (Morton 2013, 31). Morton goes on to claim that “causality occurs in front of things,” which means that “causality is the way objects talk to one another, apprehend one another, comprehend one another: causality is the aesthetic dimension” (Morton 2013, 66). I argue that this aesthetic dimension that allows for contact and causality between two or more otherwise inaccessible objects is very close to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh.4 As such, Morton’s discussion of causality opens the possibility that flesh is more than some kind of ontological ether. That is, flesh is the aesthetic, a field of communication between objects that maintains the reality of objects while allowing for a dynamic and generative tension of identity and difference. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty assigns the flesh as an active conduit of communication. According to Merleau-Ponty, “between the alleged colors and visibles, we could find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things” (Merleau-Ponty, The 4  It is worth noting that Morton’s theory of causality has some obvious holes and is open to significant critique. C.J. Davies, for example, explores the plausibility of Morton’s argument for causality and makes a distinction between argumentative philosophy and non-argumentative philosophy, where the latter aligns more closely with art than deduction. Davies finds that object-oriented ontology typically aligns with the non-argumentative side of this distinction and contends that both Graham Harman and Timothy Morton offer a version of causality that does not hold up to argumentative scrutiny. Ultimately, Davies’ critique is that there is some kind of equivocation between kinds of interactions and that the argument from analogy becomes an argument of identity. Further, if looked at through the lens of deduction, this argument enacts the formal fallacy of affirming the consequent (Davies 2019, 102). Ultimately, Davies sees value in the kind of causality offered by object-oriented ontology, but it is a value that escapes the reach of purely argumentative philosophy. As such, Davies concludes that “If OOO is to be a conceptual framework worth adopting, perhaps the reasons can’t be the traditional ones—that it is true or supported by evidence—but instead that it is interesting, original, helpful, and so on” (Davies 2019, 107). Davies concession that this framework is helpful even though it does not stand up to the rigors of deductive logic may also apply to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of flesh. However, we may question whether deduction, which itself requires a great deal of translation to identify premises and structures of arguments, is the best tool for evaluating either set of ideas. The worry is that deductive logic is too narrow of an explanatory or analytical tool and thereby fails to capture what exceeds the limits of its use.

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Visible and the Invisible 1968, 132–133). The flesh is generative as a latent possibility of action and the ongoing becoming of the world. Merleau-Ponty goes on to claim that “the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 135). This claim by Merleau-Ponty is remarkably similar to the claim made by Morton that causality is how objects talk to each other. Causality is communication, generation, and constitution. It is not efficient causality where one object simply compels another object to move or change. Rather, causality on both Merleau-Ponty’s and Morton’s accounts requires an intimate entanglement of objects while still allowing for difference. Thinking about flesh in terms of causality also helps relieve the flesh of its own objectivity. That is, if the flesh is an object that mediates communication and sustains the visible world, there must be another object between the flesh and the world to mediate that relationship. The flesh is not a container in which objects relate or communicate with each other, nor is it an environment or world in which objects interact. The flesh is thus not an ontologically prior object that explains all other objects. In fact, the flesh is not an object at all but what Morton calls interobjectivity. According to Morton, “There is no world, strictly speaking—no environment, no nature, no background…there is simply a plenum of objects, pressing in on all sides, leering at us like crazed characters in some crowded Expressionist painting” (Morton 2013, 122). The flesh as the causal dimension, then, means that the flesh is not an object but “the uterus in which novelty grows” and that which “guarantees that something new can happen, because each sample, each spider web vibration, each footprint of objects in other objects, is itself a whole new object with a whole new set of relations to the entities around it” (Morton 2013, 122). A major theoretical goal for Morton is to refute the idea that scientific determinism accounts for the reality in which we live. Objects are intimately entangled to the degree that we cannot merely say that one thing causes another thing to occur. We cannot say, for instance, that global warming has caused the rain to fall on my head. Nor can we say that because global warming has not caused the rain to fall on my head, that global warming does not exist. Rather, we need a new causal theory that can account for “large complex systems” in the same way that it accounts for “quantum scale” systems; a causal theory that can account for the

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“indeterminacy” and the “irreducibly probabilistic” nature of reality (Morton 2013, 69). Reality is indeterminate and irreducibly probabilistic because objects are intimately entangled with one another. Morton supports this claim by appealing to the messy entanglement of quantum coherence, which entails that when an object gets close enough to another object, the two objects blend into one another thereby disallowing a clear distinction between the two (Morton 2013, 68). In some cases, such entanglement does not need to be generated by proximity. According to S. Gombar, et al., in quantum entanglement “Even though the particles may be separated by large distances, they share a so-called entangled state. None of the particles may be treated independently of each other” (Gombar et al. 2020, 209). At the quantum level, to measure an object “just is to hit it with a photon or an electron: hence to alter it in some way” (Morton 2013, 133). Quantum physics calls this measurement because of the intention to explore and describe such interaction. But because objects that are not concerned with the scientific goals of calculation also act at a quantum level, such measurement can be seen as a species of interaction. Thus, we can say that to interact at the quantum level is just to alter another object in some way by becoming entangled with it. At this level, reality is a mess. Interacting objects are both themselves and not themselves and causality cannot be localized at specific points given that all interaction is alteration of both objects involved. Returning to the language of aesthetics, Morton claims that “at the quantum level…every seeing, every measurement, is also an adjustment, a parody, a translation, an interpretation. A tune and a tuning” (Morton 2013, 33). Not only does each encounter between objects require alteration, both objects also must readjust their output of qualities to fit the new context. It is as if objects broadcast radio signals to surrounding objects, adjusting their frequency in order to communicate. This adjustment and tuning is a necessity because of the way that objects recede from other objects. No object is absolutely available to another object or to itself. They are only available in so far as they are tuned to the right frequency. What is available to other objects in interaction changes given the capacities and qualities of those other objects. Bacteria are available differently to humans than they are to other bacteria and the sound of my favorite song is available differently to me and to the ant crawling across my desk. The ability of one object to affect another object requires a specific tuning that corresponds with a kind of entanglement.

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At times both object-oriented ontology and quantum physics sound like idealism. If causality is aesthetic and fixed boundaries are negated by quantum coherence, then the encounters between objects seem to be limited to representation. However, Morton firmly denies that this is the case, for although quantum physics often leads to very strange conclusions, it is overwhelmingly a realist theory. It describes and measures real events and real objects but in a way that is foreign to other empirical sciences.5 To quote Morton: “far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything” (Morton 2013, 45). A mark of realism for Morton, then, is the openness to irreducibility. Morton takes this even farther, claiming that both quantum physics and an aesthetic theory of causality challenge the law of noncontradiction, which stands as a fundamental pillar of western logic. For Morton, objects are little miracles that are simultaneously themselves and not themselves. There is an infinite regress of miracles “inside” each object and an infinite progress of miracles “outside” each object (Morton 2013, 50). The world is fundamentally and performatively strange, weird, and magical—in a word, wonder-full. As such we require a new kind of logic that attends to this wonderful world by incorporating the contradictory. According to Morton, “because objects are themselves and not-themselves, the logic that describes them must be paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic: that is, the logic must be able to accept that some contradictions are true” (Morton 2013, 36). Č aslav Brukner, a physicist at the University of Vienna, confirms some of Morton’s intuitions. That is, prior to measurement, there seems to be a superposition of physical states. According to Brukner, if “quantum mechanical laws can be applied to causal relations, one might have situations in which the causal order of 5  It may be possible to make similar claims about phenomenology. For example, in The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims that “The synthesis of horizons” involves “an anonymous horizon now incapable of bringing any precise testimony, and leaving the object as incomplete and open as it is indeed, in perceptual experience” (Merleau-Ponty, Perception 1962, 80). Here, Merleau-Ponty’s description sounds very similar to Morton’s assertion that realism partially entails irreducibility. It is likely that Merleau-Ponty would deny the connection to realism, but would instead argue that this would support the claim that phenomenology is neither an empiricism or an idealism. For my purposes here, the similarity helps to demonstrate the potential compatibility between object-oriented ontology and some versions of phenomenology.

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events is not always fixed, but is subject to quantum uncertainty, just like position or momentum” (Brukner 2014, 259). This entails that “Indefinite causal structures could correspond to superpositions of situations where, roughly speaking, ‘A is in the past of B’ and ‘B is in the past of A’ jointly” (Brukner 2014, 259). Thus, there is a sense in which contradictions can no longer be relegated to the false. They are not marks of theoretical missteps, but possibly the mark of veracity. Unless a theoretical framework allows for contradiction, it must be lacking in credibility because it fails to account for both causality and quantum level activity. By this odd logic, the world is a strange community of objects that are locally hierarchical but ontologically equal. There are no “top, bottom, or middle objects,” only an “infinite non-totalizable reality of unique objects” (Morton 2013, 50). The infinite set of unique objects that make up reality do interact with each other. But when they do, something very strange occurs. Physically we can speak of objects interacting on at least two levels6—the quantum level, and the level of unaided perception. At the quantum level, when two or more objects get close enough, they begin to fuse together, or blur into one another creating a kind of contradictory event where the objects are both themselves and not themselves. On the perspectival level, however, objects seem to bounce off each other, or “resist” one another’s intrusion (Morton 2013, 72). In both cases the interface of objects creates a causal event. For Morton, the disconnect between these two levels leads back to the idea that causality is aesthetic. In this framework, causality “is like a magical display—there is no physical reason why it is happening. Rather, the reason is aesthetic (magic, display)” (Morton 2013, 74). Aesthetic causality reveals a deep and hidden mystery fundamental to all objects and their relations to other objects. It is only because objects are both themselves and not themselves that causality occurs at all. The paradoxical magic that leads to the dismissal of the law of noncontradiction, then, seems to stand as the engine that powers causality. Instead of explaining away the events of the world using mechanisms of cause and effect, causality as aesthetic demands that the mystery remains a mystery. If we negate the mystery, magic, and paradoxical nature of objects then we are left with a need for a single primordial cause that stands at the top of an ontological hierarchy. That is, if we eliminate the mystery of causality, 6  There may be an infinite amount of levels that we can talk about in this way. However, I choose these two in order to clearly demonstrate that interaction occurs differently, even contradictorily, at alternate levels.

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then we fail to see that causality is nonlocal, and thus necessarily multiple. To quote Morton, “causality is…distributed. No one object is responsible for causality. The buck stops nowhere, because causality means that the buck is in several places at once” (Morton 2013, 121). Aesthetic causality is not deterministic because it has no clear linear path from a primary cause to a specific effect and so on down the line. However, causality does seem to be narrative to a degree. We can tell stories about how one object moves another object to change. Objects become characters in a specific context that intermingle and bring about certain events. The events are often predictable but never fully determined or fully known. These stories and the events that are produced within these contexts can be called appearances. Thinking about events and causality in terms of narrative is another way of thinking about causality as aesthetic. The appearance of the event is seemingly different than what is occurring at the quantum level. This is not to say that the quantum level is more real than the appearance. Rather, this is to articulate that the difference between the two cannot be sublimated by explanation. It is not the case that quantum level measurements can make sense of the appearances, as if the appearance is a mere fiction in the sense of being false. Rather the reality of the appearance—here the fiction—is exactly why causality is aesthetic. Interestingly then, aesthetics is ontology and requires that we broaden the category of real objects to include fictions and fictitious objects. A major consequence of allowing such a broad category of real objects is that objects must have value independent of human intention. That is, objects do not rely on human judgment for meaning, agency, or dignity. Beyond the estrangement that makes familiar objects unfamiliar, art is capable of dramatizing the entanglement and aesthetic qualities of causality. Art highlights the narrative aspects of causality and allows us the opportunity to retune our attention. This is surely seen in Kosky’s treatment of The Lighting Field as a convergence of magic and causality that produces an enchanted climate and exceeds the utility of the enchanted object. But it can also be seen in the context of literary works of fiction and poetry. Paul Ricœur, for instance, argues for a “productive reference” of fiction that can “effect the metamorphosis of reality” (Ricœur, The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality 1979, 141). Ricœur collapses the “dichotomy between the sciences and the arts” to “extend the concept of fiction beyond language and the plastic arts, and to acknowledge the work of the analogies, models, and paradigms in the conceptual field of

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scientific knowledge” (Ricœur, The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality 1979, 140). Thus, art, fiction, and science converge to enact the becoming of the world and the difference between objects of fiction and objects of science begins to dissolve.

Language and the Dramatization of Aesthetic Causality To recall, Kenneth Schmitz’s main goal in The Recovery of Wonder is to resist the atomization of the world that occurs when the scientific perspective is taken as the only accurate view of reality. We recover wonder about the world when we can attend to objects as more than mere assemblages of particles or wavelengths. There is a “luminous depth” about the object that exceeds atomization and awakens wonder in us (Schmitz 2005, 49). Rather than demand knowledge from the experience of wonder, wonder transforms theory “into mystery, and knowledge into delight” (Schmitz 2005, 49). In order to motivate such wonder, Schmitz calls upon “those talented in the modern art forms, such as cinema, television, and the Internet, to dramatize the human possibilities awaiting a more open and respectful attitude toward things” (Schmitz 2005, 118). For Schmitz, things or objects awaken wonder in us and should therefore be attended to with respect and dignity. Art should draw our attention to the wonder motivated by objects, and thereby introduce new, fictional/real worlds. The tension between fiction and reality mirrors the distinction between appearance and quantum level interaction because neither negates the reality of the other. Objects described and created in fictional literature are real objects even though they offer a contrary account to “everyday” life. That is, objects in fictional narratives are not merely representations of objects in the physical world. When objects or even whole worlds in fictional narratives spark a sense of wonder, they call attention to themselves as objects and do not merely reflect how we ought to treat similar objects in the real world. Mark J.P. Wolfe calls fictional worlds “secondary worlds” and argues that they have varying degrees of completeness (Wolf 2012, 21). They are secondary because they mirror the primary (or material) world enough to be believable. But some secondary worlds differ enough from the primary world and are complete enough to take on their own “world logic” (Wolf 2012, 53). We become “saturated” in such worlds due to the enormity of details involved. They expand beyond the limits of

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the narrative, and we begin to take up a kind of residence in the world, assuming events and character development to which we are not given direct access (Wolf 2012, 49). Thus, even in fictional worlds, objects have the capacity for self-organization. While it may be more difficult to attribute agency to objects explicitly authored by a human source, it remains the case that those objects can have effects, both politically and culturally, that are distinct from the author’s intentions. In “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” Paul Ricœur distinguishes between reproductive and productive references. This distinction arises between the picture, as a reproduction of some existing object, and fiction, which doesn’t reproduce anything already given in existence. According to Ricœur, “because fictions do not refer in a ‘reproductive’ way to reality as already given, they may refer in a ‘productive’ way to reality as intimated by the fiction” (Ricœur 1979, 126). Ultimately, the production of reality extends meaning beyond the materially given world where “imagination is ‘productive’ not only of unreal objects, but also of an expanded vision of reality. Imagination at work—in a work—produces itself as a world” (Ricœur 1979, 128). Fiction, as productive reference, works to generate worlds and thereby draw a kind of reality out of them. Ricœur goes so far as to claim that because of this productive work, “images created by the talent of the artist are not less real but more real because they augment reality” (Ricœur 1979, 136). It is this production of reality through fiction that spurs on the generativity of fictional worlds and marks out fictional objects as a potential field for operative wonder. In fictional worlds, we both call and are called into reality. In fictional worlds, the world itself is enchanted by the tension between the author and the words, and between the reader and the worlds. Not only has the fictional object produced a kind of reality, but it situates the reader between the material and the imaginative. Fictional worlds thus pull at the author, the reader, the world, the characters, and other objects within this productive orbit and wonders them all by opening aporias and sustaining states of superposition. It is also possible that such worlds collapse meaning and generate rigid views of reality. But the potential to wonder the generative assemblage involved makes fictional worlds a part of how worlds (the world) wonder(s). In The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty offers a framework for understanding how objects in fictional worlds can be considered real and self-­ organizing. There, Merleau-Ponty makes a distinction between “sedimented language and speech” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 10).

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Accordingly, “we may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 10). The same distinction can apply to words that fill the page of a novel. There is a sense in which the sedimented language is available to everyone who understands that language. Anyone can pick up the book and encounter the same words. But there is also a sense in which each reading of the novel, despite the fact that the same words are present, is unique. The worlds of fiction uniquely emerge from the intra-action between the reader and the text, much like the meaning of Maui as a place emerged differently for me and my father. In the same text, Merleau-Ponty poetically describes the act of lighting a piece of paper with a match: “I bring the match near, I light a flimsy piece of paper, and, behold, my gesture receives inspired help from the things around, as if the chimney and the dry wood has been waiting for me to set the light, or as though the match had been nothing but a magic incantation, a call of like to like answered beyond all imagination” (Merleau-­ Ponty 1973, 11). Just like the chimney and dry wood form an assemblage that calls for action, so do the words of a novel form an assemblage with the context in which it is read, the mood of the reader, the time of day, the surrounding objects, etc. There is an active component of the novel that participates in the performativity of the world. Merleau-Ponty calls this speech, claiming that “speech is the operation through which a certain arrangement of already available signs and significations alters and then transfigures each of them, so that in the end a new signification is secreted” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 13). The words and the narrative are not owned by the reader, nor are they completely caused by the author. There is something that exceeds both the author and the reader as final cause, allowing the objects in the narrative, and even the words themselves as objects, to exhibit a kind of self-organization and performativity. This performativity of words is not limited to the interaction between reader and narrative. Objects seem to call for other objects, or change their availability given the presence of specific objects or assemblage of objects. Haruki Murakami’s expansive novel, 1Q84, begins with one of the main characters climbing down a stairwell on the side of an expressway. The act of walking down a stairwell is not overwhelmingly strange or significant, but because this particular stairwell is situated on the side of a freeway, a pedestrian exit amongst a fleet of semi-parked cars, it acts as an

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invitation to another, stranger world. As Aomame, a main character in the novel, leaves the cab for the stairwell, the cab driver warns her that her journey down the stairwell may alter her perspective on reality, telling her that “after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before…but don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality” (Murakami 2011, 11). It is as if the stairwell is enchanted, not by a wizard or magical genie, but by a mysterious unfamiliarity. Like Fisher’s rainbow, the stairwell is a familiar object that is altogether unexpected, thereby sparking a reorientation of time and space. Toward the end of the novel, Aomame returns to the stairwell hoping to exit the strange world in which she has found herself. However, by the time that she returns, the stairwell has disappeared. There is no construction equipment or evidence that the staircase was taken down. The staircase was not a threat that was discarded by the city or removed by the actions of concerned citizens. Rather, the stairwell simply vanishes, creating new interactions via its absence. It is here that the cab driver’s claim that there is only one reality becomes interesting. How can there only be one reality when something as significant as a stairwell just disappears? Is there really no cause? I argue that there is a kind of operative intentionality occurring here that is active among all objects. For Merleau-Ponty, operative intentionality is “that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life” which yields “the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xx). Prior to the application of logic, reason, and language to events and actions of humans, our bodies are motivated by the world and our ability to engage with it. Because operative intentionality is “antepredicative” and, in a sense, pre-rational, the distinction between human and non-human objects cannot be based on consciousness or reason. As such, I argue that we can extend the concept of operative intentionality beyond human engagement to include objects of all kinds, even objects born in literary fiction. In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes de Silentio, argues for a teleological suspension of the ethical, establishing that the existence of the individual exceeds totalizing reason. There he writes, “as soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal” (Kierkegaard 1986, 54). Silentio offers Abraham as a counterexample to the negation of the singular to the

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universal, arguing that his willingness to sacrifice Isaac cannot be reconciled with the universal. Rather, Abraham’s faith places him in an absolute relation with God that exceeds the universal and thus sets him outside the realm of reason. While I am not claiming that objects act by faith to establish an absolute relation with an overarching and absolute object like God, I am arguing that objects continually recede from and exceed the often-universal claims of efficient or final causality placed on them. Rather than form an absolute relation to God, objects form an absolute relation to themselves, which in turn leads to their excessive existence that exceeds even their own grasp. Further, I am arguing that objects found in literary fiction exceed the intention of the author and, by being real objects, obtain an autonomy evidenced by their capacity to self-organize. Merleau-Ponty echoes this sentiment in The Prose of the World when he writes, “One can have no idea of the power of language until one has taken stock of that working or constitutive language which emerges when the constituted language, suddenly off center and out of equilibrium, reorganizes itself to teach the reader—and the author—what he never knew how to think or say” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 14). Or again in Sense and Nonsense, he states, “the meaning of the work for the artist or for the public cannot be stated except by the work itself: neither the thought which created it nor the thought which receives it is completely its own master” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 3). Surely the author produces the words and puts them together to form a narrative. But, following the concept of operative intentionality, the words and the narrative are called forth by the previously established objects and actions. Thus, the author is not simply the final or even efficient cause of the narrative but is part of an assemblage that performs the becoming of a world and the world. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes an operative reason, or “a raison d’être for a thing which guides the flow of phenomena without being explicitly laid down in any one of them” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 57). I argue that this occurs in literary fiction with “fictional” objects whereby the object calls out for other objects. An operative reason is present in the constitution of the world as a mutual production of engagement between objects. But beyond the object’s self-organization, literary fiction, like other art mediums, is capable of dramatizing the aesthetic causality and aesthetic wonder that I have been arguing for. Such dramatization is distinct, however, from mere representation so that fictional narratives do not represent the ongoing wonder of

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the world but perform it so that the human component of narratives can provide a clue to the ontological constitution of wonder as an active power of objects.

1Q84: A World That Bears a Question I am arguing that aesthetics is an important component of developing an ontological version of wonder. First, art calls attention to the fact that objects are capable of enchantment. This is not an enchantment that is based on the utility of objects, but one that recasts the world—or environment, or background, or horizon—as enchanted, thereby reintroducing mystery into the world. Second, the discourse on aesthetics offers interesting insights to the notion of causality. This is especially true from the perspective of object-oriented ontology, where all objects maintain a sense of autonomy and are never exhausted by any relation to another object. Morton’s account of an object-oriented aesthetics collapses aesthetics and causality to generate an aesthetic causality that relies on a resistance to the law of noncontradiction. I am also arguing that objects created in literary fiction follow the same rules as physical objects and are thus capable of a kind of self-organization. Finally, art, and specifically literary fiction, dramatizes this kind of aesthetic causality, providing a unique insight and force to the activity of objects as quasi-agential. A particularly clear example of such dramatization occurs in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. The world of 1Q84 is remarkably strange. The novel focuses on two people (Aomame and Tengo) who spend a lifetime finding each other without ever explicitly looking for each other. But it is also about a novel that has real effects on the “real” world, a dyslexic girl who opens passageways to alternate worlds, a staircase, an extra moon, a cult, and a dowager who seeks justice for abused women. All these aspects of the novel work to dramatize some possible quality of objects. But Murakami does not simply anthropomorphize objects to display human qualities of speech or consciousness. Rather, 1Q84 highlights the connections, relations, self-organization, and quasi-agency of objects through specific narrative arcs and activities. Many of the events in 1Q84 revolve around the writing and publishing of a novel titled Air Chrysalis. Tengo, a math instructor and amateur novelist, is presented with an opportunity to rewrite Air Chrysalis after Fuka-­ Eri, a young dyslexic girl, submits it to a writing competition. Because Fuka-Eri is dyslexic she is incapable of writing the story down herself.

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Tengo, therefore, must translate the novel to articulate what Fuka-Eri cannot. Tengo’s role as translator mirrors humanities continuing attempts to express the activity of the world in calculable and reasonable language. Instead of allowing Fuka-Eri to tell the story in her own words, Tengo takes her story and forms it into a readable narrative. Like the rewriting of the novel, Tengo and Fuka-Eri’s relationship demands translation. Tengo continually translates what Fuka-Eri says into “reasonable speech,” even going so far as to mentally add punctuation to the end of her sentences. But it is clear that Tengo’s translation never fully captures what Fuka-Eri is trying to say. Fuka-Eri is honest yet remains a mystery to Tengo. She is a kind of walking contradiction whose enigma is more dramatic and more explicit than the basic limitations of language that keep us from knowing other humans. It is as if she cannot be adequately represented by a fictional version, which then reveals the quasi-­ fictional representations of other people and other objects that ground everyday interaction. She makes others realize that something always recedes from access and reveals a crack in the ground of communication that, if dwelt on too long, will ultimately lead to the disintegration of casual interaction as such. Of course, such disintegration never occurs because we cannot dwell in the gap for too long. We always (re)translate the untranslatable to cover over the impossibility of total access. But just because we manage to ignore the gap, does not occlude or negate the gap’s existence. As with all translation, Tengo’s work with Fuka-Eri’s text changes the original story. But more than that, Tengo’s story changes the physical world of 1Q84. Tengo adds a second moon to the sky of Air Chrysalis, a second moon that then appears in Tengo’s sky. It is ultimately unclear why the second moon appears, or even why Tengo thought to include it in the first place. It is possible that the second moon was in the original story, and ultimately in Fuka-Eri’s primary world of experience. This would make Tengo’s version of the second moon another translation. But it is only when Tengo includes the second moon in the story world of Air Chrysalis that a second moon materializes in the sky of Tengo’s primary world. This does not mean, however, that we can attribute a kind of efficient causality to Tengo’s words even though they generate a change in Tengo’s primary world. Rather, it is as if Tengo’s words have acted as an accidental incantation, calling forth a change via the power of magic. But this magic is not directed by Tengo alone. The causal chain does not lead directly to Tengo’s mind such that he holds the primary position in a

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hierarchical latter. He has no explanation as to why he added the second moon. Rather the sky calls out for the inclusion of a second moon. Here we can see the dramatization of what Merleau-Ponty has called operative intentionality or operative reason. Air Chrysalis enchants the world, producing an unexplainable, completely unexpected event. Rather than operative reason, I argue that such a mutual enchantment (the calling of the world for a second moon and the “production” of the second moon through the publication of Air Chrysalis) demonstrates an operative wonder. At times it is unclear if the moon is actually new or if it had always been there, revealed by Tengo’s accidental incantation. Whether materially new or newly revealed, the act of telling the story is, as Ricœur claims, productive. But it is productive in the sense that it attunes those inclined to see the world, or at least a world with two moons, anew. The world wonders, through fictional chains of entanglement, and opens new aporias and new possibilities for those retuned objects and assemblages. Wonder operates at a level that is distinct from both reason and intentionality. It is built into the relation between objects and in the relation of an object to itself. Objects always hold something back and are only available via their qualities. This leads Morton to claim that causality is fundamentally aesthetic given that causality is both real and always a matter of interacting qualities. Wonder often manifests in human subjects through encounters with the unknown or during unexpected experiences such as those described by Fisher. But wonder as ontological requires that it exceed the limits of epistemology and psychology. It is present in the everyday because it is present in every interaction and every causal event. 1Q84 dramatizes this operative wonder by allowing for an enchanting power and agential activity to reside in the relation between Tengo and the sky. The sky’s seduction of Tengo does not merely produce a romantic mood, as in the starry-eyed lover gazing at the heavens, but gives birth to a second moon. Here, as in our primary world, causality is strange, unlocalizable, and messy. The world of 1Q84 bears the weight of a question asked of it, while at the same time bearing a question in the sense of giving birth. 1Q84 therefore dramatizes the world as pregnant with possibilities, potentialities, and aporias not fully accessible to what Husserl might call the “natural attitude.” We can say, following Barad, that the novel matters. It is an active member of a world that is full of self-organizing and quasi-agential objects. It performs and dramatizes the iterative becoming of the world, creating new contexts, activating new qualities, and organizing new assemblages

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that demand new agential cuts in the aesthetic display of causal reality. Beyond the appearance of another moon, we can look to the treatment of memory and temporality as an example of such dramatization. Both Tengo and Aomame have significant, yet mysterious, memories that come to them uninvited or unintentionally and both memories deal with the trauma and fecundity of birth. At one point, Tengo is said to be floating in the “amniotic fluid of memory” (Murakami 2011, 118). He is fully enveloped in an experience that is paradoxically both now and in the past. The presence of his physical surroundings fades, including the temporal present, as he is immersed in the unsettling and ecstatic experience of memory. He floats in amniotic fluid, which both nourishes and prepares him for birth back into the present. When he reenters the present, he is shaken, unsteady, and vulnerable. Aomame’s memory of a symphony that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, comes to her as she initially enters the world of 1Q84. As mentioned, the Q in 1Q84 stands for question, in that it is “a world that bears a question” (Murakami 2011, 138). Aomame enters a new, strange world like a baby being born into the chaos beyond the womb. Her birth into a world that “bears a question” dramatizes the birthing of objects and the birthing of questions. We can directly parallel this to the kind of wonder that motivates or gives birth to philosophy since it is this strange experience of traveling down the staircase that initially introduces a world so full of questions. Aomame’s experience of the misplaced stairwell not only transports her to a new version of 1984, but she is given a new perspective on the everyday. She breaks from the “natural attitude” and begins to “philosophize” through the wonder induced by the stairwell. The experience of these memories dramatizes a kind of memory that nonhuman objects possess as well. We can, for instance, think about the uninvited and formative memory that is left by the interaction between fire and cotton. In this case, the interaction with fire exhausts cotton by erasing all cotton-like qualities in the process of combustion. Likewise, Tengo’s memory envelopes him so deeply that it exhausts his attention so that he is incapable of engaging with the present. Unlike the cotton, he is able to return to the present, reborn in a way from the womb of the past. Tengo’s memory delivers him, like the stairwell does for Aomame, into a world that is (re)filled with wonder. Both give birth to new attitudes, moods, and engagements. Even in the exhaustion of cotton, a new assemblage is formed, a new activity is generated, the fire loses fuel and goes out, the atmosphere cools and the climate is again enchanted.

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Objects wonder. The novel 1Q84 wonders. It is an object because it exceeds its qualities. It is distinct from the ink typed on physical pages, bound, and sold. It is a cohesive entity capable of affecting other objects yet irreducible to either its effects/relations or its qualities. The novel is more than its physical manifestation, more than its representations, and more than its words. Perhaps most importantly, it is capable of dramatizing the kind of operative wonder that I have described here. Wonder operates at a level distinct from reason and therefore requires metaphor, representation, and translation to manifest in language and appear in the realm of reason. But wonder does not need human involvement to operate. Rather, operative wonder works below the surface of language and meaning, swelling up and erupting into view when the fragile grasp of human knowledge is disrupted, and the world is revealed as a contradictory mess of entangled matter. It requires a new framework for thinking about causality as fundamentally connected to and grounded on aesthetics. But such an aesthetic is deeply tied to ontology, requiring an explicit expansion of wonder into the ontological realm, a theme I take up in the next chapter.

References Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brukner, Č aslav. 2014. Quantum Causality. Nature Physics 10: 259–263. Davies, C.J. 2019. The Problem of Causality in Object-Oriented. Open Philosophy: 98–107. Fisher, Philip. 1998. Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gombar, S., P. Mali, M. Pantić, M. Pavkov-Hrvojević, and S. Radošević. 2020. Correlation between Quantum Entanglementand Quantum Coherence in the Case of XY Spin Chains with the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya Interaction. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics 131: 209–219. Harman, Graham. 2011. The Qaudruple Object. Washington, DC: Zero Books. Kierkegaard, Soren. 1986. Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio. Translated by Alastair Hannay. New York: Penguin Books. Kosky, Jeffrey L. 2013. Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity-Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge Classics.

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———. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort and Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1973. The Prose of the World. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Murakami, Haruki. 2011. 1Q84. Translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. New York: Vintage Books. Nail, Thomas. 2019. Theory of the Image. New York: Oxford University Press. Pedersen, Jan B.W. 2019. Balanced Wonder: Experiential Sources of Imagination, Virtue, and Human Flourishing. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ricœur, Paul. 1979. The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality. Man and World 12: 123–141. Schmitz, Kenneth. 2005. The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power. Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Wolf, Mark J.P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New  York: Routledge. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ rpi/detail.action?docID=1211703.

CHAPTER 3

Ontological Wonder as Operative Wonder

I have so far been arguing for an ontological reorientation of wonder. A major motivation behind such a reorientation is that, for the majority of its philosophical life, wonder has been confined to an epistemological context. Within this epistemological context, wonder has been at times extremely useful and at times derided as a mark of ignorance. While I side on viewing wonder as more than a mere lack of knowledge, I argue that placing such epistemological limits on wonder is both too restrictive and too reliant upon an outdated anthropocentric position. An ontologically oriented wonder, on the other hand, is open to embracing the possibility that nonhuman objects are capable of a kind of wonder. That is, wonder plays a fundamental role in the way that objects orient, both to themselves and to other objects. This chapter deals explicitly with wonder as an ontological concept and moves to differentiate ontological wonder from epistemological wonder while maintaining a continuity with the historically rich relationship philosophy has with wonder. I will do this by again appealing to the phenomenological and ontological writings of Merleau-­ Ponty, the new materialisms of Jane Bennett and Karen Barad, and the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton as guiding frameworks for developing an ontological wonder. Specifically, I will argue for a broad form of realism that extends the phenomenological tradition. I will use this discussion of realism to explicitly connect phenomenology and the more recently © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. H. Onishi, Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48027-0_3

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developed new materialisms and object-oriented ontologies. A major component of this argument will be to demonstrate that objects are both real and independent from human consciousness, and that objects are never fully available to humans or any other object. In Graham Harman’s terms, objects recede or withdraw from complete access. I want to reframe this discussion of access in terms of an operative wonder that is generative for the material becoming of the world.

Non-anthropocentric Wonder While discussions of anthropocentrism are varied and broad, my desire to move away from an anthropocentric model of wonder is twofold. First, my aim is to break from the correlational necessity between thought and being, which I understand as a problem rooted in human consciousness and epistemology. Second, I want to claim that nonhuman objects wonder alongside humans. The goal is not to strip humanity of a place at the table, but to demonstrate that activities undertaken by human individuals, and communities are already deeply entangled with nonhuman objects. While the “common meaning” of anthropocentrism is “an ideology that roots all value in humanity,” (Kopnina et al. 2018, 115) the desire to problematize anthropocentrism entails that meaning and value emerges only via the iterative becoming of the world through entangled activity. There are, of course, objections to the claim that anthropocentrism is a problem requiring philosophical maneuvering. As Kopnina, et  al. show, environmental ethicists have attempted to reframe anthropocentrism as a necessity. This entails that anthropocentrism, at its root, is articulating the trivially true claims that a) humans necessarily pursue their own goods and b) that not all activities that pursue specifically human goods are destructive. Appealing specifically to the work of Tim Hayward, they show that one worry is that “criticism of anthropocentrism can be counterproductive in failing to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate human interests” (Kopnina et al. 2018, 111). While the concern has some legitimacy, Kopnina, et al., argue that this is largely a redefinition of anthropocentrism away from the common meaning, which includes both “speciesism and chauvinism” (Kopnina et al. 2018, 114). Important here is that the move away from an anthropocentric wonder does not devalue human interests or worth. Rather, the goal is to show that operative wonder occurs at a level that engages with nonhuman objects, and that nonhuman objects can wonder without humans. In line with broader post-humanist

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goals, as well as Crist and Kopnina’s claim that “questioning anthropocentrism…is a fertile way of shifting the focus of attention away from the problem symptoms of our time to the investigation of root causes,” (Crist and Kopnina 2014) operative wonder refocuses on a broader scale that includes both humans and nonhumans in the activity of wonder and thus requires a non-anthropocentric framing. While my argument is not ethical in nature, the shift to a non-anthropocentric, operative wonder helps to support the claim that moving “beyond anthropocentrism” is a necessary project for seeking ecological justice (Bhakuni 2021). Instead of negating any specific attention to human concern, I work to show that describing the human experience of wonder is not mutually exclusive to a non-­ anthropocentric wonder.

The End of Phenomenology and the Case for Realism In The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism, Tom Sparrow argues that the end of phenomenology has been marked by two things: (1) its lack of a coherent and consistent method, and (2) its inability to escape the idealism that has plagued it since Husserl’s initial formulation. While I will not touch on the first claim about method other than to clarify the limits of phenomenology, the second claim about realism is extremely salient to my discussion of ontological wonder. If it is the case that phenomenology cannot produce a form of realism or cannot confirm the existence of a world beyond consciousness, then we must call into question Husserl’s famous charge to get back “to the things themselves.” What does it mean to return to things if those things are limited to the immanence of consciousness? For Sparrow, the real problem lies in the primacy of phenomena in phenomenology. Ever since Husserl’s epoché, phenomenology has been delimited to describing and analyzing that which appears to consciousness. Whether or not phenomenology wishes to affirm the existence of a mind independent reality, or if it merely wishes to escape the question altogether, it remains the case that any phenomenological analysis must limit its scope to phenomena. As such, phenomenology “cannot be realist because its method prohibits the kind of speculation required for grounding realism in philosophical argument” (Sparrow 2014, 3).

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I argue that realism is important for the project of ontological wonder for at least two reasons. First, I do not wish to dismiss the historical role wonder has played in philosophy, and therefore do not dismiss the epistemological claims about wonder. Wonder can rightly be connected to surprise and therefore speaks to a world independent of the mind. We are surprised and sometimes wonder about that which is not us, or not our consciousness. To quote Sparrow, “this is not the feeling of anxiety or dread that accompanies our experience of the uncanny, but the shocking encounter with the absolutely other who makes contact with us” (Sparrow 2014, 57). Perhaps more importantly, a separation between thought and being allows surprise and wonder to account for the presence of mystery and withdrawal that occurs between any two objects. Realism demands that the gap between thought and being is real and thus enables wonder to be a fundamental ontological concept. If there is no gap between thought and being then it is difficult for wonder to survive the collection of knowledge, thereby limiting it to an epistemological tool. Second, and more broadly, realism breaks from the anthropocentric position that Being can be reduced to the human thinker. The idea that we can access only that which we can think, or that anything that exists outside of consciousness is transformed into some component of consciousness, al la Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, is fundamentally anthropocentric. I therefore adopt realism as a basic ontological framework, within which I find an operative ontological wonder. Some accounts of phenomenology claim to have done away with the split between realism and idealism altogether. If this is the case, then ought we to worry about questions of realism at all? Sparrow rightfully rejects this dismissal as unwarranted and generally unhelpful. At the basic level, phenomenology requires that we bracket the “natural attitude,” which in turn “drives a correlationist wedge between the world as it is represented in consciousness and the world as it stands outside of consciousness” (Sparrow 2014, 36). More basic to the phenomenological project is the reduction of objects to meaning. In phenomenological analysis, objects become intentional objects and are therefore limited to the realm of immanence. Even if in the case of Merleau-Ponty, this meaning emerges through a “dialogue” between the subject and the object, this meaning can still only be disclosed by a conscious subject. Or, as Sparrow puts it, “whether we are talking about Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology simply cannot get us to the real unless we are willing to concede that the real is nothing other than what appears as real to human

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consciousness” (Sparrow 2014, 50). Whether or not phenomenology can rightfully dismiss the distinction between idealism and realism, the phenomenological project is necessarily concerned with meaning that is disclosed to consciousness, thus firmly establishing it as a correlationist philosophy. As a reminder, correlationism is the idea that philosophy is limited to the correlation between consciousness and the world. The contents of this correlation make up the stuff of philosophical analysis. Put another way, correlationism is the idea that once we attempt to think something outside of human thought, we are already thinking it, revealing an almost infinite grasp of thought that Graham Harman calls “Philosophy of Human Access.” It is the commitment to correlationism that demands either an acceptance or a rejection of a commitment to realism. For, according to Levi Bryant, “all realisms are committed to the thesis that it is possible to know something of beings independent of their being-for-thought, yet this is precisely what is precluded by the correlationist gesture” (Bryant 2011, 37). To be clear, Bryant’s claim is not that we can know, with clarity, the content of beings independent of their “being-for-thought,” but just that we can know of them. While this may or may not commit the object-­ oriented ontologist to a Kantian noumena, given phenomenology’s commitment to the epoché, it surely threatens the possibility that phenomenology can lay claim to anything other than idealism. That is, “if the epoché entails a suspension of ontological realism, then any phenomenology that takes the epoché seriously cannot subscribe to ontological realism without covertly importing a metaphysics into the heart of a metaphysically neutral methodology” (Sparrow 2014, 60). To argue it another way, if phenomenology is a correlationist philosophy, which it seems to be, then it is also an anthropocentric philosophy. The emergence of meaning is always meaning for consciousness. Objects encountered are always intentional objects for-consciousness. Even Merleau-­ Ponty’s phenomenology gives us the qualified version of an in-itself, rendering it an in-itself-for-us. To quote Bryant: “the anthropocentrism of correlationism is metaphysical through and through despite its protestations to the contrary or its characterization of itself as a critique of metaphysics” (Bryant 2011, 40). Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to avoid this issue by appealing to the body-subject that is “always-already” in-the-world and which negates the subject-object dualism, remains trapped in the correlationist and anthropocentric snare.

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But does this mean that we must abandon Merleau-Ponty altogether? I argue that we should not. Sparrow makes a simple, yet important distinction between phenomenology as a method and phenomenologists as those who employ the method. This distinction highlights the simple truth that not all philosophical claims made by phenomenologists (even self-­ described phenomenologists) are, in fact, phenomenology. As such, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s later work in The Visible and the Invisible may not qualify as phenomenology, and at least hints at the possibility of a non-­ correlationist perspective. Further, I argue that the diffractive reading of Merleau-Ponty through Karen Barad’s philosophy-physics yields a fruitful bridge between phenomenology and the realist position of object-oriented ontology. As I’ve argued, Barad’s commitment to phenomena and agential cuts sounds very much like Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology. Yet, Barad maintains a claim to realism not afforded to phenomenology. Following Bohr, she is committed to the Copenhagen view of quantum physics which asserts that the reality of the event depends upon the act of quantum measurement (Lindley 1996, 73). However, because what is eligible to count as quantum measurement is so vaguely defined in this view, the possibility for measurement to occur beyond the bounds of human consciousness remains open. If we allow that nonhuman objects can conduct quantum measurement of some kind, then phenomena on Barad’s account, can be constituted by objects and assemblages of objects that involve no human whatsoever. I will speak about this possibility in more detail later, but it is important to note that reading Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology through Barad’s philosophy-physics yields some strange insights that exceed Sparrow’s critique of phenomenology.

Realism, Ontological Wonder, and Quantum Physics To return to the issue of wonder, introducing wonder to the context of object-oriented ontology and new materialism demands that we consider how a broad realism reorganizes our understanding of wonder. The historically rich philosophical treatment of wonder attests to the fact that the experience of wonder reveals something profound. It opens us up to the experience of otherness via surprise. But as Sparrow remarks, surprise “does not necessarily indicate an ontological rupture in immanence. It could just as well indicate a failure of our imagination about what will arrive in the future” (Sparrow 2014, 59). The experience of wonder, then,

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is not a sufficient ground for accepting realism. But put the other way around, accepting a broad realism offers a space to think about wonder ontologically. That is, embracing ontological wonder does not negate the experience of wonder by humans or any other conscious entity, but radicalizes it. Rather than dissolving the grip of correlationism through an experience that exceeds categories and limitations of consciousness, ontological wonder supports the claim that objects recede or withdraw from access. Wonder does not stop at the conscious observer’s uncanny experience of the other. It is also the other that wonders. Wonder is operative in any encounter, regardless of conscious capacity or noetic faculties, and accounts for a gap in access between objects that need not be limited to epistemological concepts. In epistemological terms, wonder marks the gap between ignorance and knowledge. It calls us to investigate the world and to seek new techniques with which to unveil the truth of our reality. As an epistemological tool, wonder evolved from “the beginning of philosophy” to “a prelude to divine contemplation, a shaming admission of ignorance, a cowardly flight into fear of the unknown, or a plunge into energetic investigation” (Daston and Park 1998, 14). It is almost as if wonder was the answer to Meno’s paradox; it provided a clue to what we were looking for without divulging the content of our inquiry. Philip Fisher echoes this sentiment when he claims that “wonder drives and sustains the defective rationality that gives us intelligibility under conditions where we will not even know that we have reached certain knowledge when and if we have” (Fisher 1998, 9). Fisher goes on to claim that “wonder is a boundary line between the obvious, the ordinary, and the everyday, on the one hand, and the unknowable, the inexpressible, the unformulated, on the other” (Fisher 1998). “Traditional” or epistemological wonder in the most robust form marks the motivation behind philosophical and scientific inquiry and is constantly renewed by the need to know more. Philosophical and scientific inquiry reveal a world filled with wonder that can never be fully conquered by the reach of reason, even if that is the ultimate goal of both disciplines. In this view, wonder is not vanquished by the acquisition of knowledge but continually spurs on new investigations of the world around us. However, it remains the case that even with this robust form of wonder the only reason that we can continue to wonder about the world is because we do not have all of the information. If we were to someday gain access to every bit of information, if we were, so to speak, to finally find the last

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piece of the puzzle, step back and gaze at the full picture of the world and know it fully and completely, then wonder would vanish, and we would reach the highest pinnacle of scientific glory. Epistemological wonder, then, still has its end in knowledge. Even Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception leaves room for absolute knowledge in this sense when he claims that “the house itself is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed object is translucent, being shot through from all sides by an infinite number of present scrutinies which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden” (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 79). Merleau-Ponty would likely argue that seeing any object from “everywhere” is an impossibility given our bodily limits. But the true nature and reality of the object remains rooted in a framework that would permit such a possibility more broadly construed. Ontological wonder, on the other hand, survives knowledge, even the threat of absolute knowledge, because it is a fundamental aspect of the way that objects orient to both themselves and to others. Objects cannot be reduced to perception, even given the possibility of perception from everywhere. Interestingly, quantum physics, on which, it is argued, all the other sciences rely, provides a story and a theoretical framework that supports the kind of ontological wonder I am arguing for. Since its inception, quantum physics has called into question the orderly world we encounter on an everyday level. It invokes an “uncertainty principle” that claims that “at the most fundamental level, the world is not wholly knowable, and not wholly dependable” (Lindley 1996, xii). Einstein fought hard against this development in physics because the uncertainty principle undoes the claim science has on knowledge about the world. Prior to the development of quantum physics, it was assumed that the world was knowable and that the limitations we encountered were due to the lack of proper instrumentation or tools of measurement. That is, if we only had the right tools and mathematical equations, then we would be able to know the world absolutely. Like Merleau-Ponty’s house, Einstein’s hope was that science could gain access to every possible viewpoint of reality to know it as intimately as possible. Ultimately, the goal was to obtain absolute knowledge. While most scientists, Einstein included, may not have been able to predict how or when such knowledge would come about, or even if it would ever come about, there was confidence that the world was absolutely knowable given the right circumstances. Quantum physics blew this view apart and ushered in a strange unknowability about the world.

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In Where Does the Weirdness Go: Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not As Strange As You Think, David Lindley explains the fundamental difference between classical physics and quantum physics: In classical physics, we are accustomed to thinking of physical properties as having definite values, which we can try to apprehend by measurement. But in quantum physics, it is only the process of measurement that yields any definite number for a physical quantity, and the nature of quantum measurements is such that it is no longer possible to think of the underlying physical property (magnetic orientation of atoms, for example) as having any definite or reliable reality before the measurement takes place. (Lindley 1996, 14)

Lindley goes on to clarify that this uncertainty is “not a consequence of our technical limitations” but is a fundamental aspect of reality (Lindley 1996, 51). The indeterminacy of quantum physics is more than an epistemological claim; the uncertainty principle is an ontological claim about the basic stuff of reality. While there are many variations and interpretations of quantum physics, a dominant theory holds that the act of measurement is a creative act that plays a fundamental role in the constitution of reality. This is the Copenhagen view previously mentioned in relation to Karen Barad’s philosophy-­physics. On this view, two major points stand out. The first is that science is only concerned with what it can know. This is an important point because, again, for quantum physics not everything about reality can be known. So, if we cannot know something, then we ought not be concerned about it. That which is unknowable lies outside the realm of science and therefore should be ignored. The second point both qualifies and extends the first point and claims that quantum action is real only when it is measured. Note, this is not a claim about possibility so that a quantum particle or quantum action is real if it can be measured. Rather, this is solely concerned with when it is measured. Building off the first point, if something cannot be measured or known, then it is no concern of science. Further, if something can be known but has yet to be measured, then it cannot be said to be real. Because we cannot say anything definitive about that which has not yet been measured, then we cannot say anything at all about it, including giving it any positive claim to reality. The most radical scientists that hold to this position, such as Niels Bohr, would go so far as to claim that quantum action and quantum particles can only be said to exist once they have been measured (Lindley 1996, 15). To

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quote Lindley, “in quantum mechanics, unlike classical physic, measurement is not simply the passive ascertainment of a preexisting property, but the production of a definite datum through the active involvement of measurer and thing measured” (Lindley 1996, 96). This conclusion greatly concerned practitioners of classical physics. According to Lindley, “[t]he idea that physical quantities don’t take on any practical reality until someone measures them hugely offended Einstein’s sense of how physics ought to work” (Lindley 1996, 87). At stake is the fundamental knowability of the world, and the weirdness of quantum physics that renders the material world mysterious has been clearly demonstrated through scientific practice. What is particularly striking about this new direction of physics, and consequently science in general, is how closely the development of scientific knowledge resembles the development of wonder in an ontological context. As we have seen, wonder has often been considered to be a mark of ignorance. According to Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, even Aristotle’s claim that philosophy begins in wonder relies on a wonder “which arose from ignorance about the causes of natural phenomena” and ultimately “led people to search for those causes and was therefore essential to the process of philosophical inquiry” (Daston and Park 1998, 111). Likewise, in the world of classical physics, “indeterminacy always means ignorance” (Lindley 1996, 111). When an experiment fails to provide adequate answers or results, the experiment must be adjusted to produce better data. The problem is located in the one asking the questions and/ or the tools with which those questions are asked. Quantum physics rejects the idea that indeterminacy is ignorance, and instead fully accepts the idea that the problem is not with the scientist nor is it with the tools. The problem is not a problem at all. It is rather a fact of reality that we cannot fully know all aspects of quantum activity at the same time. This is most famously demonstrated in the concept of wave/particle duality discovered in the famous double slit experiment.1 In regard to this duality, Lindley claims that “asking whether objects are really particles or really waves is simply not a meaningful inquiry” (Lindley 1996, 55). Even though quantum physics has made indeterminacy a fundamental part of reality, it remains the case that it has no use for what it cannot say with certainty. Quantum physics demonstrates that the world is, in part, unknowable. Again, this is not a matter of our lack of  For more on the double slit experiment, see Lindley (1996).

1

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information, rather it is a product of measurement as such. Or as Lindley has put it, it is a part of nature. However, scientists, within the scope of their discipline, do not want to dwell on this aspect of “nature” but are content (or even dutifully driven by their discipline) to seek out other research questions and experiments that can yield more “meaningful” results. It is therefore easy to tuck away the wonder that constitutes the orientation of Being to better focus our attention only on the knowable even when the weirdness of the world has been clearly demonstrated. Barad’s philosophy-physics is one attempt to embrace the uncertainty principle as both ontologically important and politically motivating. As previously mentioned, Barad offers a theory of matter she calls “agential realism” that is supported by the Copenhagen view of quantum physics. For Barad, matter is more verb than noun. Matter is not a static substance or thing that can be located in traditional space-time, but “is a substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-­ activity” (Barad 2007, 151). Barad pushes quantum physics in a post-­ human direction with the specific goal of recognizing that “nonhumans play an important role in naturalcultural practices, including everyday social practices, scientific practices, and practices that do not include humans” (Barad 2007, 32). Even with the explicit desire to formulate a post-humanist framework by imparting agency to matter, the question remains whether Barad escapes the correlationism found in phenomenology. That is, her analysis remains focused on apparatuses and the ability of those apparatuses to create new phenomena, much like quantum physics relies on measurement as a mark of reality. Barad makes this connection explicit when discussing the influence of Bohr on her own thinking. To quote Barad at length: The lesson that Bohr takes from quantum physics is very deep and profound: there aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess the complete set of properties that Newtonian physics assumes (e.g., position and momentum); rather, there is something fundamental about the nature of measurement interactions such that, given a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinate, while others are specifically excluded. Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus. (Barad 2007, 19)

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Barad clarifies two things here. First, she separates the results of the experiment from the will or desire of the scientist. What things exist or what counts as real are not dependent on the will of humans. Second, measurement makes that which is indeterminate determinate. This is a notion in quantum physics called superposition. The basic idea is that prior to measurement the particle cannot be said to be in any determinate position. Rather, it contains all possible positions or outcomes and cannot be reduced to any determinate state (Lindley 1996, 170–171). Once a measurement is made, all possible positions collapse into the position that is determined by the measurement. In Barad’s terms, the properties of the particle become determined, and are thus constituted by the act of measurement. In some sense, this claim by Barad can be seen as a radicalization of Merleau-Ponty’s claim about the house viewed from everywhere. When Merleau-Ponty claims that the house in- itself is the house seen from everywhere, he seems to contradict the idea that phenomena are ontologically primary. The house is not determined in any way by observation from a single perspective. It is only the perceiver who is determined. Or, more accurately, it is only the relation between the perceiver and the perceived that is determined. When we are viewing a house, only a single perspective can be determined as the perspective from which we are currently viewing the house. So, although it is inaccurate to say that the specific perspective from which we view a house determines a quality about the observer, we do have to ask for whom this relation changes. The answer, it seems, is that it is only for the conscious observer. As such, the issue is limited to epistemology, and therefore consciousness. All that is determined for Merleau-Ponty is a quality of consciousness, thereby maintaining a correlationist stance. Barad, on the other hand, maintains the ontological primacy of phenomena, but moves beyond the realm of consciousness and epistemology by appealing to the realism of quantum physics. In quantum physics, and especially the Copenhagen view of quantum physics, reality is constituted by the act of measurement. Yet, quantum measurement is shrouded in ambiguity regarding what kinds of things are allowed to act as measurer. The problem is so tricky that David Lindley goes so far as to claim that “measurement, in the Copenhagen interpretation, is…a magical, unexplained happening, if not an act of God then certainly an act of Niels Bohr” (Lindley 1996, 167). Barad never explicitly attends to this question, but she does open the possibility for non-­ conscious subjects to take on the role of measurer. According to Barad,

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apparatuses “are not merely assemblages that include nonhumans as well as humans. Rather, apparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-­ time-­matter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming” (Barad 2007, 142). If, as Barad seems to hold, apparatuses can be made up of nonhuman objects, then nonhuman objects configure or constitute reality. That is, nonhuman objects seem to be capable of something like quantum measurement. The idea that apparatuses are “material reconfigurings of the world” is not a radical claim in the context of quantum physics. In David Lindley’s more conservative language, in quantum physics, “measurement is not simply the passive ascertainment of a preexisting property, but the production of a definite datum through the active involvement of measurer and thing measured” (Lindley 1996, 96). What, then, differentiates Barad from the correlationism of both phenomenology and quantum physics? While Barad may not provide an adequate or satisfying answer, her theory of agential realism and intra-action provide a way forward that both relies on material realism and enables measurement to occur apart from human consciousness. She mirrors Merleau-Ponty’s desire to weaken the border between the human who observes and that which is observed by focusing on the entanglement of all matter, including human consciousness. She rightly points out that “[t]he point is not simply to put the observer or knower back in the world (as if the world were a container and we needed merely to acknowledge our situatedness in it) but to understand and take account of the fact that we too are part of the world’s differential becoming” (Barad 2007, 91). The entanglement of observer and observed constitutes “differential becomings” or what Lindley would call “definite datum.” Like objects lined by Merleau-Ponty’s flesh they are made of the same stuff and are thus ontological equivalents. Yet the tension remains between observer and observed, and the results of Barad’s radicalization of quantum physics and phenomenology continue to be results for-us. While I think Barad’s insights have more to offer, I want to detour through Levi Bryant’s version of object-oriented ontology to find a firmer ontological footing.

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Onto-Cartography and Operative Wonder Bryant’s Onto-Cartography aims to reframe object-oriented ontology in terms of machines rather than objects. His project takes into consideration the critique that object-oriented ontology’s focus on objects immediately invokes thoughts of a subject, thus continuing a tradition of both correlationism and anthropocentrism. According to Bryant, shifting to machines allows him to develop a philosophical framework that concentrates on the fluctuation of inputs and outputs rather than on the tension between subject and object (Bryant 2014, 38). Thinking in terms of machines requires that we think in more active terms. As such “far from being a static lump that just sits there, machines are processual through and through” (Bryant 2014, 38). This is particularly salient to Barad’s analysis, given her concern for the way apparatuses propel us toward post-human conclusions. Further, Barad wants to push the limits of what counts as measurement in the context of quantum physics. Bryant’s exploration of machines explicitly frames this conversation in ontological, rather than epistemological, terms. Like Barad, Bryant begins with a concern about the anthropocentric limits placed on our ontologies. That is, his goal in developing a machine-­ oriented ontology is to broaden our ontological theories to include the nonhuman in radical and speculative ways. Echoing Barad’s discussion of our intimate entanglement with matter as a part of the “differential becoming of the world,” he claims that we must attend to how “we are both embedded in a broader natural world and how non-human things have power and efficacy of their own” (Bryant 2014, 4). Thinking about the basic units of reality as machines accomplishes this goal by highlighting both the productive nature of relations and the fact that distinct entities both constitute and are constituted by other distinct entities. Complex machines are made of simpler machines, which in turn both make up more complex machines and are made of up even simpler machines. Thus, Bryant “begins with the premise that worlds are composed of units or individual entities existing at a variety of different levels of scale, and that are themselves composed of other entities” (Bryant 2014, 6). He calls “these entities ‘machines’ to emphasize the manner in which entities dynamically operate on inputs producing outputs” (Bryant 2014, 6). Much like earlier iterations of object-oriented ontology, Bryant contends that reality is made up of autonomous individual units. Thinking about these units as machines enables Bryant to explain how these

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autonomous units interact with, relate to, and “cause” change in other autonomous units. Distinct from Graham Harman’s concept of vicarious causation, which is causation that occurs on a surface level of perception but not on the deeper level of real objects, Bryant claims that “being is an ensemble or assemblage of machines” (Bryant 2014, 15). Like Barad’s apparatuses, Bryant’s machines are unhinged from human desire or will and work together to bear change, motion, and what Barad calls the “differential becoming of the world.” It is easy to imagine that Bryant’s machines are like gears in a clock, grinding together to maintain the workings of the material world. However, Bryant makes clear that his use of machines should invoke thoughts of agency rather than some predetermined cycle of clockwork. Like Barad, Bryant wants to extend agency beyond the confines of consciousness. Objects, or in Bryant’s case, machines, have agency because they are independently capable of working on other machines. More explicitly, a machine has agency when it is “able to initiate action from within itself,” and when it has “the capacity to act otherwise than they do in initiating an action or in response to a stimulus” (Bryant 2014, 220). These criteria are important to distinguish agential machines from other theories of efficient causality. Agential machines receive inputs from external machines which in turn leads to an output of influence and adjustment to other machines, all of which is contingent upon the machine to allow both the input and the output. But it is not enough to merely claim that individual machines have agency. Rather, Bryant argues for what he calls “distributed agency.” Distributed agency is the manifestation of “qualities,” “properties,” and “actions” that result from “many machines interacting with one another” (Bryant 2014, 180). Distributed agency is only possible when we allow multiple objects to unite in a new object. Barad would call these “phenomena” produced by agential cuts. New objects arise from the union of two objects resulting in qualities or actions that cannot be attributed to either object alone. Bryant gives the example of a car-person assemblage (Bryant 2014, 223). Neither the car alone nor the person alone can drive across the city bridge. Only the car-person assemblage has the capacity or power to perform this action. As such, “the person plus the car is a distinct agent from either the person or car, leading to distinct forms of action that would not be found in either taken alone” (Bryant 2014, 223). The concept of distributed agency can be applied to much more and much less complex assemblages from government institutions to little league baseball teams to a giant pyrosome, a

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sea creature literally made of thousands of animals. Pyrosomes, strange worm-like sea creatures, are a striking example of distributed agency. A single entity is made of thousands of other entities. The smaller individual zooids are not attached to a larger creature like a parasite or cleaner fish but combine to constitute a larger entity. Together they perform actions and have qualities or powers that the individuals do not have. That is, they can initiate action and act otherwise in ways not available to the single zooids. Likewise, government institutions are assemblages of tables, chairs, employees, internet connections, paper forms, websites, and many more individual objects. While they have specific qualities and actions of their own, together they are capable of performing new actions and affecting external objects in new ways. The concept of distributed agency brings us back to both Merleau-­ Ponty and Barad. Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of habit in the phenomenal body speaks to the kind of assemblage that Bryant describes. For Merleau-Ponty, the car becomes an extension of the phenomenal body through habit so that I can “enter a narrow opening and see that I can ‘get through’ without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body” (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 165). Likewise, Barad’s apparatuses perform agential cuts and constitute new phenomena that are embedded in larger and smaller layers of other phenomena. Instruments, scientists, and universities work together to produce insights, knowledge, and objects that they would not be able to produce alone. While Barad does attribute agency beyond human consciousness, Bryant’s concept of distributed agency organizes and clarifies how agency emerges through interactions and relations. Specific inputs can only be processed by certain assemblages that are, in turn, constituted by a multitude of relations and entities. Some of these machines are agential and some of them are not. This is an important point. Bryant is not arguing for any kind of panpsychism and does not attribute agency to all machines. Rather, and as previously mentioned, agential machines must be able to both initiate action and act otherwise than it did. The result of this limitation is that there are millions of actions and events that do not directly result from agents. But if we do not want to rely on a crude form of Cartesian efficient causality, whereby objects merely clunk together and spin off in random directions, then we must attend to these accidental actions. Bryant’s answer is to appeal to the machinic nature of objects. Objects are machines

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that receive inputs and excrete outputs. Attending to objects as machines provides us with a clue for finding another type of causality and reveals how and why surprise continues to be an important component of reality. Even when machines do not meet the criteria for agency, they can still act as subjects. For Bryant, subjectivity means the ability to organize the actions of other objects around them. Subjectivity, then, is “a functional role that a machine plays in an assemblage under particular conditions” (Bryant 2014, 225). Subjects, thus, act as “catalysts that assemble other machines into relations with one another in assemblages” (Bryant 2014, 225). This means that for most of a soccer match, the ball is the subject, and the players are objects. Or, the people in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) are objects in relation to the forms and procedures that organize them into the line. Institutional procedures become subjects around which both humans and nonhumans organize. But how is it that certain actions are performed, or certain formations of organization are enacted without appeal to either some greater organizing principle, or absolute randomness via efficient (clunk) causality? I argue that at the base of such interactions and organization is what I call “operative wonder.” I have argued that the world is fundamentally stranger than it initially seems. Phenomenology asks that we bracket the natural attitude in order to analyze the structure of experience and to slacken our absolute hold on the world so that we may watch “the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire” (Merleau-Ponty 2006, xv). But this talk of transcendence belies the idealist scope of phenomenology so that the world that appears to us through phenomenological analysis is a world secretly trapped inside the realm of immanence. Even so, the gap between the two objects ensnared in this correlational prison (consciousness and intentional object) is ripe with wonder activated by the epoché. The gap is not confined to phenomenology nor to the epoché. Rather, the gap is operative in every relation between two objects. Object-oriented ontology and new materialism characterize this gap by claiming autonomy for each object so that no object can be reduced to its relations (object-oriented ontology) and by extending agency to matter so that matter is active in the becoming of the world (new materialism). This gap is supported not only by philosophical arguments but by quantum physics as well. The world is deeply unknowable, and the activity of nonhuman or even non-agential objects cannot be explained by appealing to efficient causality. If we could appeal to efficient causality, then the world would be absolutely knowable granted that we had the right tools and theoretical framework. The gap

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that creates this fundamental uncertainty is where I wish to place operative wonder. This gap, though, is not a physical gap like the gap between a London underground train and the station platform, or the gap between skewed teeth. Nor is it a gap in knowledge or understanding, such as a gap between two philosophers locked in argument, the gap between representation of a person and the “actual” person, or a gap in a child’s grasp of mathematics that keeps them from solving for x in an algebra problem. This gap is ontological and concerns the orientation of objects to themselves and to other objects. Though it is not a transcendental or ontotheological explanation for the why of Being, it is a way of describing the orientation of Being. There is a gap between objects, which is to say, that objects wonder. Object-oriented ontology, in all its various forms, relies on the idea that objects are independent and autonomous. No single object, be it God, Higgs-Boson particles, or some anthropomorphized Being determines the ontological status of all other objects. Surely there are more active objects that, like Bryant’s subjects, work to organize other objects. But this is dependent upon a certain context and a certain relation. Regardless of the current activity of any given object, or any intensity of subjectivity that object displays at any given time, the ontological status of that object remains the same. Graham Harman refers to this as a flat ontology, while Levi Bryant describes this as a democracy of objects. Regardless of what we call it, the basic claim is that objects are ontologically equal no matter how they manifest or how actively they organize other objects. Or, as Ian Bogost puts it, “all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally” (Bogost 2012, 11). Because all objects are independent from each other, no object can be reduced to another object. Beyond claims about ontotheology that would place a single object above or in some way determinate of all other objects, the claim that no object can be reduced to any other object also means that no object can be reduced to any representation of the object. Put another way, no object can be reduced to its qualities. If it is the case, as I argued in Chap. 2, that objects are distinct from their qualities, then objects cannot be reduced to their qualities. For Graham Harman, this fact leads him to claim that objects necessarily recede from access, leaving a “rift in the cosmos [that] lies between objects and relations in general: between their autonomous reality outside all relations, and their caricatured form in the sensual life of other objects” (Harman 2011, 119). This creates problems for causality given that

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objects never seem to touch but only relate via qualities. In Harman’s case, this means that relations between real objects never actually occur, and we are left with his theory of vicarious causation. Qualities orbit around real objects, relating and impacting other objects via their own qualities. For Bryant, vicarious causation is dissatisfying because it evaporates the materiality of the real (Bryant 2014, 2). This is partly why Bryant focuses on machines. Machines engage with other machines materially through communication of inputs and outputs. Machines touch other machines generating what Bryant calls gravity. Bryant explains that in terms of classical physics, gravity “is not a force that attracts and repels other objects, but rather is an effect of how the mass of objects curves space-time” (Bryant 2014, 186). Bryant appeals to gravity to explain how nonhuman machines “capture human lives in their gravity” (Bryant 2014, 255). That is, machines create a curvature in space-­ time, which affects the way that other machines encounter and process inputs. What is unclear is how gravity differs significantly from Bryant’s previous use of the word subject. Subjects, as mentioned, are machines that organize other machines around them, be they human or otherwise. Gravity seems to do the same thing, though with an added rhetoric that alludes to materiality. While gravity may help to avoid Harman’s vicarious causation, it also seems to suck the life out of nonhuman subjects. While I appreciate Bryant’s attempt to find language that applies equally to humans and nonhumans, I argue that wonder may be better equipped to explain the activity of the world in its material becoming. Both object-­ oriented ontology and new materialism argue for an understanding of matter that is more active. Further, both explain how the gap between objects can help to demonstrate this activity. Ontological wonder, or operative wonder as I call it, fulfills both of these goals. Objects wonder, which makes them active participants in the ongoing material becoming of the world. Such activity is motivated by the gap between presence and absence such that the way objects relate is directly proportional to the ratio of presence and absence between two objects. Objects wonder. This manifests in human consciousness when we encounter something surprising, or something for which we do not have a rational category. It pulls us to investigate, to realize a gap between us and the world. Throughout the history of philosophy, we have attended to wonder by closing this gap. This gap was considered a mark of naiveté or stupidity that needed to be overcome. The problem, as we have found most explicitly in quantum physics, is that this gap can never be fully

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closed. Rather than calling us to investigate or igniting the passions of the soul (as in Descartes), wonder motivates us to action we would otherwise not take. It promotes activity in objects through limitation and negativity, absence, and presence. The generative possibilities of wonder have been alluded to as far back as Socrates. Socrates’ initial discussion of wonder occurs within the context of knowledge, leading to wonder’s epistemological categorization and limitation. But as Mary-Jane Rubenstein points out, the problem with knowledge is “that that which stands under every investigation is precisely what investigation cannot understand. Knowledge is presupposed by every philosophical examination, yet, as Socrates and [Theaetetus] repeatedly discover, it recedes like a ghost when confronted directly” (Rubenstein 2008, 2). Here, at the very beginning, knowledge is motivated by wonder, not to negate wonder, but as a way of attending to the gap in access to knowledge itself. Wonder generates the desire for knowledge, but is not itself satisfied by knowledge, especially given recent insights that the world is fundamentally unknowable. But more than concerns about knowledge, I argue that our experience of wonder translates to other types of experience. Namely, nonhuman objects actively wonder, which in turn generates the movement found in Bryant’s machines. Bryant labels his project onto-cartography, which is “the investigation of structural couplings between machines and how they modify the becomings, activities, movements, and ways in which the coupled machines relate to the world about them” (Bryant 2014, 35). Machines receive inputs and excrete outputs, which in turn accounts for the movement of the material world. Machines attest to Timothy Morton’s challenge to the law of noncontradiction—that is, they seem to be both single units and assemblages of other units. They are both A and –A. Because no single object determines all other objects, there is no ontological top or bottom, no single machine that can be said to be absolutely singular. Every machine is always already within the context of, and part of an assemblage built on other machines. Some machines work to amplify other machines so that it becomes a medium for another machine. According to Bryant, “[a] machine functions as a medium for another machine not only when it amplifies or extends a sense-organ, but also whenever it modifies the

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activity or becoming of any other machine” (Bryant 2014, 33).2 I would argue that this modification happens in every relation, including relations of objects to other objects and objects to themselves. We could call this quantum measurement without human consciousness. The important point here, though, is that each intra-action or relation contributes to the becoming of the world. But as argued, no object can be reduced to any other object, so even in these relations, a formative and generative gap remains. Knowledge does not close the gap of wonder but may require a reorientation toward a new balance between presence and absence, which in turn motivates activity. Such activity recalibrates agency across a distributed plain. Agency is not merely granted at the “birth” of an object, nor is it something that is consistently manifest throughout the duration of an object. While humans have been said to possess agency, it is something that can fluctuate in levels or even leave altogether. A sleeping person has less agency than someone wide awake. Or a person in a coma may be said to lack agency altogether because they cannot seem to initiate action or act otherwise than they are, which are two criteria for agency given by Bryant. Bryant uses the example of company scrip to demonstrate how agency is a matter of circumstance and context. Company scrip was tender paid to employees that could only be used at the company store. It was not transferrable to other forms of currency and therefore disallowed employees from shopping wherever they wanted. It is easy to see in this instance how “[a] person paid in company scrip seems to have less agency than a person paid in federal tender” (Bryant 2014, 222). Here, a human’s degree of agency is deliberately constrained by another object, which interestingly is nonhuman. Not only can we see that agency manifests in degrees, but that nonhumans often demonstrate greater degrees of agency than humans. This is, perhaps, most clearly seen when we appeal to powerful assemblages such as a government agency. Governments are capable of awarding citizenship to certain people who meet specific criteria, thus limiting or delimiting them from manifesting smaller or greater degrees of agency. Such agencies are 2  Ultimately, I do not find Bryant’s argument for machinic language compelling enough to adopt, in part because they remain too linguistically close to the deterministic mechanisms that he attempts to avoid. The idea that objects are always-already in the process of acting on other objects with the help of other objects is very similar to the language of entanglement used by various new materialisms, language I more readily adopt throughout the text. While I agree that better options should be explored, I do not think that “machines” better describe the ontological concepts better than “objects”.

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capable of initiating action (granting citizenship) or acting otherwise (denying citizenship) based not on a single person’s will, but upon the agency of the institution itself. The agency of a government institution or corporation demonstrates that agency can be distributed across multiple objects. Further, agency need not be limited to human agents. Rather, nonhuman objects often exhibit greater degrees of agency than humans. This kind of distributed agency occurs at larger and smaller scales, from quantum entanglement to global political action. What I hope to demonstrate with this discussion of agency is how it motivates change and contributes to the material becoming of the world. If agency is distributed, then it depends, in varying degrees, on relations between objects. Objects interact and become entangled in new objects (e.g., car-person assemblage). But even as new objects emerge, the smaller units (the car and the person) remain independent and autonomous on some level because they cannot be fully exhausted.3 Further, each object never gains full access (in terms of presence) to any other object but is connected based on a tension between presence and absence. The car person assemblage performs differently as the car-person assemblage than either object independently. Yet, the assemblage demands that both objects remain independent so that neither object exhausts the other, or that the assemblage exhausts either. The DMV, as a government agency, only works because the women taking identification photos at the window remains a mother, or spouse, or friend independently of her role in the agency. She would not function properly within the assemblage if she were absolutely present in any role. Rather, each set of qualities required by each specific role is activated depending on the machinic milieu in which she finds herself. Like the experience of wonder that fades with the collection of knowledge, wonder is manifest differently in firmly established assemblages or complex machines. The DMV, as a government agency, leaves little room to investigate gaps that produce activity. This is not to say that these gaps are not there, but that they are more easily seen during the formation of assemblages and in unfamiliar intra-actions between unfamiliar objects. Through habit, the gaps become invisible, like the gap between railway station and train becomes invisible to the seasoned underground traveler. 3  This is somewhat slippery. Designating a thing to be a “car” initiates a collapse of possibility. The “car”ness of the thing does not exhaust the object. So while the “car” may dissolve, the object that exceeds “car”ness may remain at some level.

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Further, when we talk about established assemblages, we are always referring to what things are rather than what they are not. It would be extremely difficult to talk about the DMV in terms of everything that it is not. But the single possibility enacted is less generative than the multiple possible scenarios that could have occurred. Surely in experimentation we see the positive results and the productive effects those positive results can have. Medicines are developed, predictive equations are discovered, and microprocessors are made on ever smaller scales. This is, for the human object, knowledge that attempts to close the gap of wonder. But if we remember that for quantum physics (and more specifically the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics) what is unknowable is beyond the bounds of experimentation, then we light on the possibility that the unknown is the generative component in experimentation. All that we fail to have access to generates by limitation that which we do have access to. Operative wonder, then, is the idea that the closure of one object to another is just as generative, if not more generative, than the opening of one object to another. Karen Barad argues that the scientists and their equipment together make up an apparatus. Further, Barad claims, following Bohr and other quantum physicists, that what you get out of an experiment is what you put into it. I argue that the connections that are rejected and the qualities that are inaccessible, what Harman calls withdrawal, is the generative mechanism of material becoming. If we look at quantum superposition as an example, we can see how such generativity is not based solely on the negative outcome of interactions, or a denial of access by objects, but a wonder that is operative prior to determination. As stated previously, quantum superposition occurs when the state of a particular object or assemblage of objects is undetermined prior to measurement. Once measurement occurs, all the potential states collapse into the actual state. This is not to say that the particle was in a particular state and we didn’t know it. Rather, the particle was in no particular state prior to measurement. JohnJoe McFadden extends the concept of superposition to language, demonstrating how quantum superposition works. McFadden asks us to think about the word ‘note.’ Without knowing its context or the way it is being used, the meaning of the word note can mean anything from something musical to a kind of currency. For McFadden, what is interesting about this is that “before you have time to decide which meaning is more appropriate, ‘note’ has something of each meaning. In a sense they are all there as a kind of superposition: musical note + written note + banknote” (McFadden 2000, 175). Once you

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understand what kind of note is being discussed, all meanings collapse into the intended meaning, knowledge is obtained, and we respond appropriately to the decided meaning. But just prior to the collapse, when the “true” meaning is undetermined and all possible meanings swirl around the object in question, there is an operative wonder that orients the objects involved. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes operative intentionality as that which makes Husserl’s “intentionality of act” possible (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 486). More specifically, operative intentionality is intentionality that is “at work before any positing or any judgment” (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 498). In terms of understanding, operative intentionality allows Merleau-Ponty to break the transcendental framework provided by Kant that describes our engagement with the world as one of synthesis. According to Merleau-Ponty, “when I understand a thing, a picture for example, I do not here and now effect its synthesis, I come to it bringing my sensory fields and my perceptual field with me, and in the last resort I bring a schema of all possible being, a universal setting in relation to the world” (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 498). The last sentence in this quotation bears a striking resemblance to McFadden’s description of superposition. Here the subject brings “a schema of all possible being,” that collapses into knowledge allowing active intentionality to take over for operative intentionality. Operative intentionality underlies active intentionality as the foundation for all possible actions available and works to orient the conscious object toward possible intentional acts. But operative intentionality is a phenomenological concept and therefore deals with the production of phenomena in consciousness. It orients the relation between the two poles of correlationism. While I grant that operative intentionality may offer a bridge beyond the pure immanence of phenomenology, it remains guided by the strict relation between consciousness and the world. Operative wonder, on the other hand, need not rely on consciousness at all but is an ontological orientation of all objects to both other objects and to themselves. Operative wonder resembles operative intentionality by underlying other more explicit activity. It occurs in the relation between objects while in the state of superposition so that all possible relations between two objects are suspended before any definite state or relation becomes locked in. When an object encounters another object, it orients itself based on the qualities activated by the relation it enters into. Each object expresses itself differently when presented with another object. If we think in terms of

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machines, a printer can only receive specific types of inputs for it to produce the desired output of a printed manuscript. Surely a rock and a printer can relate to one another, but the output of that relation would be very different than the way computer software relates to the printer. In the moment when superposition collapses into a relation with a specific set of qualities activated on either side of that relation, the outputs of that relation begin to manifest. What allows for this relation, for the opening up to a relation with another object that results in manifest qualities and powers, is operative wonder. If it is the case that no object is ever absolutely present to any other object, if it withdraws from total access, then no object can have all of its qualities activated in any given relation. The gap between two objects closes, though not totally, when specific qualities appropriate to that relation are activated and specific qualities inappropriate to that relation are made dormant. Prior to this partial closing both objects exhibit a kind of superposition, what I am calling operative wonder. A problem with describing operative wonder in terms of quantum superposition is that quantum physics occurs at the smallest of scales. We rarely see superposition as it occurs. That is, dogs, houses, big screen TVs, and even cats are not experienced as undetermined states of superposition. Quantum physics, then, must deal with questions about why superposition works at quantum scales but not at macro scales. Likewise, the description I have offered of operative wonder is rarely if ever witnessed at macro scales. Is it the case that operative wonder only functions at certain scales of size or temporality? I argue that like operative intentionality, operative wonder underlies and grounds the explicit experience of wonder. That is, operative wonder is implied by the explicit experience of wonder and is often hidden by habit, tradition, or other more practical concerns. But, like quantum superposition, operative wonder does affect the workings of everyday life. One way that physicists have attempted to explain the lack of superposition on macro scales is through the concept of decoherence. According to Lindley, “Decoherence is essentially a process of randomization, and in any kind of a large system with complicated inner workings, the sort of randomization needed to make decoherence work tends to occur of its own accord, whereas maintaining coherence takes special care and careful setup” (Lindley 1996, 207). The experiments that have discovered and confirmed quantum superposition occur in very controlled environments where coherence is maintained through simplicity and linearity. When causality, motion, or action occurs at macro scales, coherence decreases as

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complexity and randomization increases. So, while “constant shuffling among internal quantum states” (Lindley 1996, 208) occurs in macro level objects, we cannot experience superposition because measurement occurs when linearity and coherence is lost. That is, there are other objects that constitute measurement and thereby collapse superposition states into actual concrete states. Like the effect of decoherence, I argue that operative wonder is not experienced at a macro scale because relations between objects are always already collapsing operative wonder into concrete relations built on the ratio of presence to absence, between two or more objects. When objects relate, their relation is in some way motivated by operative wonder, or an ontological gap that object-oriented ontology calls withdrawal. Why recast withdrawal in terms of wonder? The experience of wonder in humans is most often felt through a specific lack of knowledge or category of reason. It stuns us, immobilizes us, and renders our intentional activity dumb. Wonder arrests our reason, makes us gasp for breath because the ground of our rational outlook has been challenged. Our knowledge has failed us, which results in a desire to overcome such failing. But during the moment of wonder, when we are immobilized in awe, we engage the world in a way that is similar to any other object’s engagement with the world. We are met with a moment of superposition where possibilities are yet to be defined and where relation is marked by confusion. We are then required to choose a path of relation, which, at least most often, ends the experience of wonder. Every relation to every object begins the same way. Objects encounter other objects and must choose, in the slightest moment, how to make themselves present, or if they can make themselves present, to the other. Objects wonder by generating sparks of resistance and attraction. Note that such resistance and attraction occur after the moment of wonder. Wonder is an orientation of Being, it is ontological through and through even though we have only been able to experience it, or at least describe it, in terms of our consciousness and noetic faculties. There is an operative wonder that grounds our experience of epistemological wonder, an orienting gap that is covered over by habit but never closed completely. Admittedly, this sounds very similar to ideas born in the phenomenology of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Habit or tradition has closed us off to the possibility of thinking Being, which in turn requires a new orientation of our thought and action. I argue that operative wonder is a non-phenomenological concept, albeit one that is aided by phenomenological analysis. As such, operative wonder may help salvage

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phenomenological inquiry from the trap of correlationism. While phenomenology may be confined by idealism, operative wonder deliberately extends our discussion beyond the interactions between the two poles of correlationism—consciousness (thought) and world (Being). Thinking in terms of what Ian Bogost has called “alien phenomenology” can help to bridge the gap between phenomenology and realism while also providing another way of describing operative wonder. For Bogost, the goal of “alien phenomenology” is to describe how objects experience other objects, or how objects are able to appear to objects that lack consciousness. Bogost appeals to Thomas Nagel’s famous article, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” to describe that which we do not have immediate access to. Bogost’s analysis helps us to preserve phenomenology by demonstrating how it can be helpful as a tool within a larger theoretical framework. Returning to Sparrow’s distinction between phenomenology and phenomenologists, we can say that phenomenologists do phenomenology while maintaining the freedom to make non-phenomenological claims. This is because these claims are reliant upon another philosophical framework, be it expressed or unexpressed. The question becomes, then, how to transition between doing phenomenology and making non-phenomenological claims based on that phenomenological “data.” Following other object-oriented ontologies, one of Bogost’s most basic goals is to establish that human consciousness is not the only way of accessing or relating to the world. As such, he claims that “if we take seriously the idea that all objects recede interminably into themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate. To put things at the center of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us” (Bogost 2012, 9). Bogost’s approach is to extend phenomenology beyond human consciousness, which goes against Sparrow’s argument that phenomenology is necessarily an idealism. Bogost attempts to accomplish this task by embedding phenomenology within a larger ontological setting—namely, object-oriented ontology. We gain valuable insights from phenomenology even though this may not describe the whole of reality. That is, phenomenology is a descriptive tool that also enables an allusion to the world beyond the limits of thought, a bridge between phenomena and real objects. We must take this allusion, take these insights drawn from our own experience, and apply them elsewhere. We can say that we engage with or relate to other objects via our own set of logics—be they perception, reason, or categories of consciousness. Likewise, “Objects try to make sense of each other through the

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qualities and logics they possess” (Bogost 2012, 66), even though such logics are distinct from our own. In any case, wonder perplexes these logics and opens objects to the logics of other objects. Such operative wonder creates a kind of generative superposition, which collapses into concrete actions and causality. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty develops the idea of optimum distance. According to Merleau-Ponty, “For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen” (Merleau-Ponty 2006, 351). Merleau-Ponty is specifically talking about the optimum distance for a human, but the concept can be extended beyond human experience. Optimum distance occurs between two non-conscious objects when the superposition of operative wonder collapses, and the two objects enter into a relationship. Operative wonder orients objects in their relation by suspending their individual logics, thereby enabling them to form a new logic based on their relation or based on the constitution of a new assemblage. Merleau-Ponty articulates his concept of optimum distance in the context of the museum, describing the way an art-object calls to be seen by the art patron. I now turn to the museum to provide an extended case study demonstrating the generativity of operative wonder.

References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bhakuni, Himani. 2021. Beyond Anthropocentrism: Health Rights and Ecological Justice. Health and Human Rights Journal 23 (2): 7–12. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. ———. 2014. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Crist, Eileen, and Helen Kopnina. 2014. Unsettling Anthropocentrism. Dialectical Anthropology 38 (4): 387–396. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. 1998. Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books. Fisher, Philip. 1998. Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harman, Graham. 2011. The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books.

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Kopnina, Helen, Haydn Washington, Bron Taylor, and John J.  Piccolo. 2018. Anthropocentrism: More Than Just a Misunderstood Problem. Journal of Agriculture and Environmental Ethics 31 (1): 109–127. Lindley, David. 1996. Where Does the Weirdness Go?: Why Quantum Mechanics Strange, But Not as Strange as You Think. New York: Basic Books. McFadden, Johnjoe. 2000. Quantum Evolution: How Physics’ Weirdest Theory Explains Life’s Biggest Mystery. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2006. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge Classics. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. 2008. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press. Sparrow, Tom. 2014. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Museums, Gardens, and the Possibility for Care in Operative Wonder

Since at least the sixteenth century, when cabinets of curiosities and cabinets of wonder provided patrons with the chance to experience an entire world of strange objects at a single glance, museums have had a rich relationship with wonder. While the definition of wonder and the way that museums evoke wonder has changed, there has been a common tension between reason and mystery. This tension between reason and mystery both displaces the art piece as material object and promotes a traditional Platonic/Cartesian dualism by favoring the reality of ideas over the reality of objects. This tension, in turn, encourages the felt distance between observer and observed as a relation between subject and object. In this chapter, I will argue that the museum offers an opportunity to push against this binary relationship and to offer a more dynamic ontology of wonder. To do so, I will highlight the tension between subject and object through the lens of Weird fiction by analyzing Grady Hendrix’s Novel, Horrorstör. Using the novel, I will demonstrate the relationship between edutainment, the commodity of wonder, and museums as places of consumption. I will then look to Merleau-Ponty to argue that an ontology based on the reversibility of flesh, found most prominently in the unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, can orient the museum experience towards an intra-action of mutual constitution between museum patron and art-­ object. I will then read the concept of flesh through the philosophy-­physics of Karen Barad and work in object-oriented ontology to extend its reach © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. H. Onishi, Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48027-0_4

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beyond the limits of human involvement. I will end the chapter with a discussion of gardens, specifically looking to Robert Harrison’s book, Gardens: an essay on the human condition, as a way of rethinking and reorienting the institution of the museum toward an attitude of care and active wonder.

The Living Museum In Dearborn, Michigan there is a place called Greenfield Village. It is the outdoor component to the Henry Ford Museum and is often referred to as a “living museum.” The term “living museum,” at least as it applies to Greenfield Village, indicates that the exhibition of a certain historical period is not merely represented in pictures or stories, but is re-enacted by employees. Here, people and historical artifacts like houses, pots, Model-T Fords, and rocking chairs create a kind of time-warp to an era or decade and become living exhibits. The living status of the museum also refers to the fact that Greenfield Village happens to be a working farm. The workers tend the crops using farming techniques available in the early part of the twentieth century. The vegetables from the farm are cooked on coal burning stoves by women in historical costumes for the employees of the museum. At first, calling Greenfield Village a living museum seems strange or corny because, even though there are people dressed in old clothes, using old farming techniques, and playing baseball using arcane rules, the fact remains that there is an available Wi-Fi signal, paved roads, and an overly expensive gift shop. But the living status of Greenfield Village need not be limited to the fact that people dress up like it is the 1920s, or that the corn in the field is grown using outdated farming techniques. Rather, Greenfield Village is a living museum because all museums are living museums. At Greenfield Village, the lived aspect of the museum is explicitly accessible because people act as living exhibits. Some of them act like specific characters, telling stories and demonstrating habits from a specific time, place, or historical figure. In many cases, those who are rooted in a specific exhibit must stay away from exhibits that do not correlate to their time period. This keeps an 1870s farmhand from encountering a 1920s automobile driver. Others can maintain their own personas, cooking food for colleagues or detailing the creation of certain technologies like the printing press. Interestingly, the production of Greenfield Village is dependent upon the exchange between people. Because these people have their own

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personalities, habits, and psychological makeup, the result is an extremely dynamic sort of museum that can change from day to day, hour to hour, or even minute to minute depending on who is working. But as already stated, I want to draw attention to the fact that all museums are, in a sense, alive. Every new object in any exhibit and every new exhibit creates new tensions, new relations, and new objects that closely resembles the dynamic that makes Greenfield Village a “living museum.” This claim about living museums can first be identified historically in so-called cabinets of wonder. Christine Davenne describes a modern-day cabinet of curiosities in East London called the Malplaquet House. The collectors and keepers of the house, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan and Tim Knox, confess that because the house is full, they can only buy what they can live with (Davenne 2012, 80). As such, the house is “Constantly shifting” so that “the home nearly imposes itself on its owners, who devote all their time to it and respect its every whim, like the vine branch that has been permitted to enter a window and grow up to the ceiling of one of the sitting rooms” (Davenne 2012, 80). Here there is a kind of enchantment. But every enchantment also harbors the potential for horror. The lightning that strikes The Lightning Field enchants the atmosphere but charges the air with deadly outbursts. Imagining a living house that demands the full attention of its occupants easily and quickly becomes a story about suppressed family secrets or historical atrocities like we find in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) or Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020). In the Malplaquet House, we seemingly have enchantment without horror. Each new item is added to the collection and placed according to “the overall aesthetic” of the house (Davenne 2012, 75). In this living cabinet of wonders, objects call to the collectors, not necessarily as individual objects but as a desire of their collection. It is as if the collection has a kind of agency that requires more objects as nourishment to aid its growth. Henri Cueco, another contemporary artist and collector, describes the marvels of “small, sharpened pencils that have become tiny” (Davenne 2012, 200). While it may seem strange to consider such mundane objects as marvels, the fact that these tiny, sharpened pencils are utterly singular makes them suitable for cabinets of wonders. It is not the case that objects need to be strange or rare to be included in modern day cabinets of curiosities. Rather, it is a matter of attending to objects as intimately and fundamentally wonderful. It is in this sense that museums are alive. Objects enter a new space and, almost immediately, properties that were once

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ignored or concealed are now able to manifest, constituting not only a change in the singular object, but in the objects already found in the collection. Like new branches on the tree that grows in the Malplaquet house, each new object in a museum reorganizes the internal structure of both time and space in its newfound context.

Cabinets of Curiosities According to Davenne, cabinets of curiosities first became popular in Europe around the sixteenth century (Davenne 2012, 13). Private collectors meticulously gathered seemingly heterogeneous stuff in private homes and displayed them to visitors and guests in hopes that their collections would motivate feelings of wonder. Each item was categorized and catalogued to build a comprehensive view of the world in a single room. Collectors allowed visitors access to their cabinets and provided them detailed “tours” of the objects that made up their collection. In these collections, there was a tension between the rareness and singularity so that each object justified its inclusion in the cabinet in terms of how it could be folded into a larger story. Cabinets worked to produce wonder in two distinct, though seemingly paradoxical, ways. First, the individual objects, being rare and singular, caused the observer to wonder at the strange marvels of the world. Second, the cabinet, taken as an object in whole, opened a miniaturized representation of the universe, prompting the observer to wonder at the elegant connectedness of creation. It should be noted here that the first kind of wonder, wonder at the singularity of objects, involves surprise, curiosity, and, perhaps, naivety. Once the object is explained in terms of the rest of the world or given a category by which to understand its existence, this kind of wonder fades and the object is flattened and rolled into a broader story, losing its importance as a singular object. I argue that this type of wonder aligns with the epistemological mode of wonder found in philosophical discourse discussed in previous chapters. The second kind of wonder, wonder at the mysterious connectedness of the world, is much more complicated and allows for a wonder that remains open to the ongoing mystery of the world. I argue that both types of wonder have been present in the museum since the cabinets of curiosities, but that only one of these kinds of wonder is sustainable within the institution of the contemporary museum.

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Early cabinets of curiosities celebrated the tension between the mystery of the world and knowledge about the world. Patrick Mauries sees this tension as emerging from the connection between the cabinets and the relics found in medieval churches (Mauries 2002, 7). The focus of these early cabinets was geared toward developing a grand narrative that involved a creator and designer of a world filled with secret meaning. The collectors of cabinets attempted to reveal the mystery of creation and the connections between each object by providing them with “a special setting which would” reveal “that reality is all one and that within it everything has its allotted place, answering to everything else in an unbroken chain” (Mauries 2002, 34). While the influence of Christianity faded, the mysterious quality of the objects found in these cabinets did not. Rather than reveal a unified design by a single creator, the goal of these cabinets of curiosities began to align with the progression of natural science, offering not monsters and strange creatures but a methodical categorization of objects that allowed science and philosophy to flourish (Davenne 2012, 145). The focus on categorization also demanded a separation between objects of art and objects of science that led to the contemporary division between types of museums (e.g., natural history, scientific, contemporary art, modern art, etc.). In cabinets of curiosities, we begin to see the scientific treatment of objects as things to be known, the explicit separation between nature (natural objects) and culture (artifacts), and the modern demand for certainty. In fact, it was this demand for certainty and the rule of reason that ultimately led to the mockery of collectors and their cabinets by scientists and scientific institutions. According to Mauries, “there was no place for the inexplicable or the bizarre in a culture that demanded, then as now, a reality that was on the way to being explained, a reality with no parts left over or superfluities” (Mauries 2002, 193). Thus, there was no longer any “room for exceptions, just as the ‘mediocrity’ demanded by society left no room for gratuitous excess” or wonder in the face of singularly strange objects (Mauries 2002, 193). It can be argued that this reduction of the world to scientific observation and measurement contributed to a disenchantment with the world of objects, a disenchantment that is currently being questioned and challenged by scientists, philosophers, and artists.

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Enchantment in the Museum One major source of disenchantment in the museum stems from the increase in information we have about exhibits and artworks. As we approach each artwork, we are confronted not only with the work on display, but with information about the work. This tends to split our attention between viewing the piece of art and reading about the art. Here, information acts to separate rather than connect the observer and the observed. In an article on silence in the museum, Didier Maleuvre laments that because we have become a culture accustomed to instantaneous knowledge, we no longer take the time necessary to appreciate art. Instead of working to slow down its patrons, the art museum has become complicit in the speedy disbursement of knowledge (Maleuvre 2006, 167). The use of headsets and audio guides have given the museum patron too much knowledge too soon, and have thus stolen the possibility of surprise that comes through the encounter with art. To quote Maleuvre: Surprise is the opposite of the theoretic, knowing, confidently expert attitude sibilating in the headset of the audioguide. Surprise comes to whomever does not shy away from bewilderment, which means anyone unafraid to walk without prejudgment. This open disposition assumes the silencing of the inner and outer voices that warn about the encounter even as it is happening. The art museum fulfills its duty by making clear that some objects are important; it does not need to expatiate upon how to verbalize their importance (that is the business of universities). (Maleuvre 2006, 174)

While I agree that this lack of surprise is exacerbated by the speed with which we acquire information, I do not think that the dissemination of knowledge is new to the museum. In fact, we can trace this kind of knowledge guide back to the cabinets of curiosities of the sixteenth century, with private tours given by the collectors themselves. As such, I argue that the tension between knowledge and mystery, between narrative context and enchanted engagement, is fundamentally and ontologically rooted in the way that we understand and interact with objects. Further, it seems that surprise only delays the inevitable accrual of knowledge about the piece of art being observed. Surprise at an artwork is a fleeting experience that eventually gives way to familiarity. While education remains a central concern for most museums, focusing on surprise fails to allow the tension between mystery and knowledge to remain a tension. Mystery soon loses its grip, and the tension is lost. Rather than emphasize the need for

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surprise, I argue that the museum ought to promote a kind of wonder that is not displaced by knowledge, regardless of whether it comes before or after the initial encounter with the work of art. But how can the museum accomplish this goal? A major hindrance to the museum as a catalyst for a re-enchantment of the world is that it is often undercut by economic pressures, which leads to a demand to mirror more economically efficient institutions. According to Corrine Kratz and Ivan Karp, museums now find themselves competing with theme parks, which has altered their approach to exhibition and driven them to mirror their competition. As such, many museums have adopted the mixed goals of education and entertainment (Kratz and Karp 1993, 32). On the one hand, the push for edutainment stems from simple economic need on behalf of the museum. They need to bring in more patrons to remain economically viable. On the other hand, strategies of edutainment are used to produce a feeling of enchantment in hopes of raising interest from a younger population. Thinking again about Greenfield Village, I have often felt a startling similarity between my experience in “the living museum” and my experience at Disneyland. What is it that separates Greenfield Village as a museum from Disneyland as an amusement park? Both offer a kind of entertainment, with train rides and elaborate costumes, but there is a sense that Greenfield Village is offering a more “real” or “authentic” version of the past. A major concern with this trend, however, is that the “authenticity” of experience and the educational value gained by these strategies is overshadowed by introducing a consumptive attitude into the space of the museum. That is, once the lines are blurred between museum and theme park, it becomes difficult to distinguish between consuming entertainment and appreciating art. The connection between institutions of consumption and museums is not completely one sided. Rather, institutions explicitly aimed at generating greater consumption of products have deliberately worked to create a feeling of enchantment. According to sociologist George Ritzer, places like Disneyland offer a “new means of consumption” often represented by what he calls “cathedrals of consumption.” These cathedrals of consumption “are structured…to have an enchanted, sometimes even sacred, religious character” (Ritzer 2005, 6). For Ritzer, these “cathedrals of consumption” increasingly attempt to generate “magical, fantastic, and enchanted settings in which to consume” (Ritzer 2005, 7). But as expected, the feeling of enchantment gained in consumptive practices is

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often followed closely by a feeling of disenchantment. This is because “cathedrals of consumption” are required to produce a feeling of enchantment on demand, and thus require “rationalization” (Ritzer 2005, 9). But rationalization often works to counteract enchantment because “it is difficult to reduce magic to corporate formulas that can be routinely employed at any time, in any place, and by anybody” (Ritzer 2005, 8). The demand to combine the education of museums and the entertainment of theme parks thus results in a demand to produce a repeatable, but short-lived, sense of enchantment that often leads to a greater feeling of disenchantment. If, as Joerg Fingerhut and Jesse Prinz argue, wonder is a mechanism for engaging new ideas and opening one up to “new possibilities” via a loss of self (Fingerhut and Prinz 2018, 116), then edutainment seems to fail to produce a lasting sense of wonder. That is, edutainment works to re-enforce the status quo rather than to challenge it. As such, I argue that the kind of enchantment promoted by edutainment reduces works of art in museums to consumable commodities, which results in an experience of wonder that is too quickly exhausted and generally unsustainable. I therefore look to other modes of enchantment in the museum to promote the kind of ontologically oriented sense of wonder that I have been arguing for. Leaning too heavily on the role of enchantment and the desire to re-­ arrange expectations and notions of what is possible can challenge the breadth and role of wonder as a generative process. While wonder is largely associated with pleasure or delight, thinking of wonder as transformative also invites experiences of displeasure and even horror. We can see the tension between the commodification of museums and the experience of horror in large furniture store displays. An obvious and prominent example is the showcase floor of IKEA, and the following section is a description and analysis of a visit to one of their stores.1

Wonder on Display and Enchantment Gone Wrong When entering IKEA, I am immediately struck by the similarities to Greenfield Village and the idea of a living museum. The displays of fully furnished rooms are intended to immerse you in an experience that stretches both time and space and enter the fantasy space on display. You are pulled into this fantasy living room, imagining yourself with legs 1  These are notes and experiences taken while visiting an IKEA store in Westland, Michigan in 2022.

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stretched out on a couch and surrounded by books written in Swedish. The customer is thus not only being sold furniture, but an image of how life could or should be. The showroom works as a kind of enchanted space, pulling at a tension between past, present, and future. This temporal tension comes forcefully to the fore as you imagine taking home the furniture that you see, touch, smell, and even hear. This could be your home right now. But that fantasy requires a discount of the time and frustration involved in getting the furniture home, building the pieces, and re-arranging the existing furniture. It discounts the lighting and the deliberate lack of clutter. It discounts the way that objects work to orient other objects, including ourselves, via the power of operative wonder. Space, too, is distorted and manipulated, casting a strange spell on consumers. Like Greenfield Village, each new section represents different areas of the household that are meant to be kept separate by a cosmic rift of time and space. We travel through portals and magic hallways to access different iterations of the same structural representation of desire. We can experience the fantasy of multiple living rooms, and then find ourselves in a land of bathrooms, or bedrooms, or kitchens. The space is not like a house and so the fantasy is not one of house but of an imagined house, pulled apart and reconstructed. There are stairways to nowhere, toilets that do not flush, and televisions that do not work. The distortion of space and time make the showcase level more like a gallery of idealized rooms to fit every mood and to generate a sense in which the home also acts like a museum. Like the Malplaquet House, each IKEA customer begins to act like a curator and the home becomes a gallery of personality. Like Greenfield Village, IKEA is a kind of living museum that generates pockets and styles of living. The home becomes a curated gallery where living happens. It is a lived museum. But ultimately, IKEA is a store that sells a product. Here the product is the lived museum, the virtual quality of one’s home museum. The objects on display are there to be bought, they are mass produced and sold to millions of people that will place them in millions of homes. At the same time, each object multiplies and amplifies the curated collection of one’s home while also collapsing the possibilities of one’s style and living space. Each object on display enacts operative wonder by pulling us into a fantasy time and a fantasy space that is founded on our qualities and their powers of generativity. The displayed object and I become one assemblage, generating a paradoxically mass-produced sui generis experience.

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The experience of IKEA as a kind of gallery maps onto two other narratives. The first is the idea of bad taste and bad art in so called “Chambers of Horrors.” The second is in Grady Hendrix’s Weird horror novel, Horrorstör. I am not claiming that IKEA serves as a display of bad taste, but that it offers a kind of strange curation that acts as an educational mechanism of good taste. According to Suga Yasuko, the “Chamber of Horrors” arose out of the desire to improve the quality of taste in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century. In “Designing the Morality of Consumption” Yasuko identifies a trajectory from the discussion of social taste to the “Chamber of Horrors,” which was “arguably the first attempt to control the consumption of commodities not by any written law, but through display and discourse on the morality of consumption” (Yasuko 2004, 44). Housed in the Museum of Ornamental Arts (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London, the “Examples of False Principles in Decoration,” was known as the “Chamber of Horrors” and used to educate the public on good taste by displaying instances of bad design. Like IKEA, the “Chamber of Horrors” was explicitly oriented toward curating a home that matched a measure of good taste. Unlike IKEA, the “Chamber of Horrors” attempted to do so negatively rather than positively by showing what not to do. While the relationship between the “Chamber of Horrors” and wonder is not immediately clear, a few points of intersection emerge. First, the “Chamber of Horrors” was explicitly used as an educational tool for the public, with the goal of generating better taste among British citizens. This established an early form of edutainment on display in museum spaces that often attempts to elicit produced experiences of wonder. Second, because the objects on display were housed in a museum, many patrons took them as pieces of art and treated them as objects of beauty. Here the space of the museum acts as a generator of beauty rather than as a nuanced story. Again, the curator becomes the artist, which leads to the possibility of an art-like feel to curated collections in stores like IKEA. Finally, we see the way that objects work alongside each other to generate new assemblages and activate new powers among human observers. Hendrix’s novel, Horrorstör, also acts as a connection between the museum, IKEA, and the “Chamber of Horrors.” The novel takes place in a fictional IKEA knockoff called ORSK, where employees get random “help” text messages, find strange graffiti in bathrooms, and are asked to stay overnight to help find the people leaving human waste on the carefully displayed products. When Amy, a smart but directionless salesfloor

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“partner” realizes that spirits from the abandoned prison site are haunting the store, the analogy between U.S. labor and incarceration becomes overwhelmingly clear and not altogether very compelling. Beyond the social critique of Horrorstör, the discursive and phenomenal generativity of operative wonder is dramatized simultaneously through the “scripted disorientation” of the shopping experience and the horror of an empty American “big box” store. Matt, another ORSK “partner,” uses the Gruen Transfer to explain how he and Amy could get lost in a store in which they have spent hours and hours of their time. Criminologist Theo Kindynis describes the Gruen Transfer as a “theory of retail behaviour [that] holds that consumers can be overwhelmed by their surroundings, and drawn, unconsciously and continually, to shop” (Kindynis 2019, 623). The Gruen Transfer, “named after Victor Gruen, the father and philosopher of the modern shopping mall—refers to the moment when an individual with a specific purchase in mind responds to the retail environment’s ‘scripted disorientation’, and is transformed into an impulse shopper” (Kindynis 2019, 623). The familiar space of the store becomes unfamiliar through deliberate manipulation of objects, including the shopper. The effect is so strong that even seasoned “partners” can feel themselves getting lost in their home away from home. Karl Kullman elaborates on the experience of the Gruen Transfer, stating, “as we progress deeper into the arcade, the immersion and disorientation of the space coerces a transition. Our resistance to external distractions dissolves and we become primed to indulge in spontaneous purchases” (Kullman 2017, 19). The “increasingly elaborate floor plans” enact a disorientation for the shopper, pulling them into a state of consumption that exceeds the initial impetus for the trip. Not only do we reoreint ourselves toward objects as a result of the Gruen Transfer (from invisible objects in the background to visible objects of need/want), we are pushed into a state of consumptive wonder. Our intentions become fuzzy and the allure of the objects becomes too strong in the context of manipulative architectures. For Kullman, the disorientation experienced in the shopping mall or in a place like ORSK translates beyond the bounds of the store. According to Kullman, “Leaving a dis/orienting landscape, the Gruen Transferred visitor carries with them a set of perceptions that unexpectedly interact with the everyday experience of the wider landscape” (Kullman, 2017, 21). This dis/orientation acts as a kind of mechanism for wonder that opens objects to visibility. Used in retail spaces, the Gruen Transfer motivates

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excessive consumption. But, as Kullman argues, “If we leverage the ancient entwinement of gardens and cities, and conceive of dis/orientation machines as gardens within the city, this transfer becomes particularly potent (Kullman 2017, 21). Ultimately, Kullman claims that “The garden machine becomes a perceptual training ground for negotiating the accelerating, disorienting and immersive qualities of the contemporary global urban condition” (Kullman 2017, 21). In the experience of IKEA, “scripted dis/orientation” works to pull you into a fantasy. The stretching of time and space is a kind of enchanted consumerism that requires a momentary drop into awe and wonder. But this easily becomes horrific when the twists and turns seem to become endless, or when the shortcut from bathrooms to kitchens becomes a mechanism not only for disorientation but for feeling lost. And once you find an object you want to purchase, you must anticipate the basement maze below, full of its own twists and turns, strange noises, and enchanting objects. Horrorstör explicitly draws on the tension between museum and enchanted consumption to show the potential terrors in the retail-­ store-­as-museum. It also highlights the way that enchantment is put to work in the name of consumption so that we return again and again to the store because it is one of the only places that makes us feel a calculated sense of wonder.

Museums of Horror and Art Appreciation In “Museums of Horror,” Ralph Rugoff frames the museum as a kind of technology that “has become a model not only for the hyperreal displays of Las Vegas themed mega-resorts, where New York itself is now a museum showpiece, but even for humble urban parks” (Rugoff 1997, 22). Like the shopping mall, the museum creates a kind of “scripted disorientation” so that we wind our way through a labyrinth of alluring objects that cast spells on visitors. But unlike the shopping mall or furniture store, the objects on display are kept at a deliberate distance from their observers. For Rugoff, this distance “effectively isolates an objects materiality” and renders “the object under glass…a metaphysical entity existing in a virtual time zone” (Rugoff 1997, 22). From the Ackermuseum, a home-run display of science fiction artifacts, to the Museum of Tolerance, a Holocaust museum in Los Angeles, Rugoff argues that museums ought to foreground the materiality of objects on display and take on the title of “living museum.” For Rugoff, it is “only by emphasizing its materiality can the

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museum stop reeking of the mausoleum” (Rugoff 1997, 25). It is only by manifesting the material engagement of objects that the wonder of the museum is oriented toward life and liveliness rather than death and decay. While I generally disagree with limiting wonder to emotion, Joerg Fingerhut and Jesse Prinz offer a helpful analysis of the emotion of wonder as it relates to art.2 In “Wonder, Appreciation, and the Value of Art,” Fingerhut and Prinz argue that “the emotion that best captures artistic goodness is wonder” (Fingerhut and Prinz 2018, 108). They arrive at this conclusion after providing an analysis of other potential options, including beauty, interest, pleasure, and “being moved” among others. Ultimately, they argue that “wonder involves appraisals of perplexity” (Fingerhut and Prinz 2018, 116), and this engagement with perplexity allows us “to embrace cognitive challenges, invites sensory play, and requires us to re-­ evaluate ourselves by allowing the work to take reign over us for a moment” (Fingerhut and Prinz 2018, 123). Wonder as an emotional experience of art deepens our appreciation and incorporates the other candidates for art appreciation. Not only can wonder account for beauty, pleasure, interest, and so on, it can also incorporate feelings of horror or terror. As Fingerhut and Prinz claim, “some great art is disturbing, harrowing, and even horrific” (Fingerhut and Prinz 2018, 118). Because wonder works in the face of other terrifying experiences like natural disasters, wonder “evokes a sense of our own smallness, [and] can arise in the face of the tragic and the catastrophic” (Fingerhut and Prinz 2018, 118). While wonder is largely associated with delight or positive feelings, Fingerhut and Prinz offer some reason to think that it can also be situated within the context of horror, terror, and the Weird. I have argued that there is some significant overlap between the architecture and organization of centers of consumption (malls/furniture stores) and the architecture and organization of centers of appreciation (museums/art). This similarity draws out discussions of influence for both kinds of institutions. On the one hand, the influence of centers of consumption has led to an edutainment model of museums that promotes a kind of wonder alongside a propensity for boredom.3 It has generated 2  In fairness, Fingerhut and Prinz offer justification for limiting their treatment of wonder in terms of emotion. Specifically, they are looking at recent empirical evidence about causal relations between emotions and art appreciation. It is not the case that they necessarily view wonder as always strictly an emotion. 3  Which, we will see in Chap. 5, is a significant mechanism for the distortion and dissolution of wonder.

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Gruen Transfer-like designs that engineer disorientation and ultimately consumption. What is not clear is how the museum as a technology of wonder can manifest beyond the bounded walls of institutional buildings and promote a lasting and generative wonder. Later in this chapter, I turn to the garden as a possible model for how this might be achieved conceptually. But first, I turn to Jeffrey Kosky’s treatment of wonder and art beyond the bounds of the museum architecture.

Wonder Beyond the Museum In Arts of Wonder, Jeffrey Kosky details five exhibitions that he claims evoke a sense of wonder and break through the disenchantment that we have inherited. For Kosky, much of the disenchantment that we still deal with stems from the demands of absolute knowledge arising from a scientific attitude toward the world. According to Kosky, The world of modern disenchantment is founded on the exclusion of clouds, fog, mist—anything that, by resisting the clarity afforded by light, would result in blurred edges and hazy borders, indistinct places and insubstantial things. Seen in the clearing made by such light, the world of modern disenchantment includes only objects of a particular character. More specifically, objects seen in the clear light will be distinct and well-defined such that they appear solid and stable. (Kosky 2013, 64)

Interestingly, four of the five exhibitions that he discusses occur outside of the conventional museum in some sort of “natural” space. This fact introduces two interesting ideas to the discourse on art and wonder. First, it may be the case that art that is situated outside the context of the museum has a better chance of motivating a sense of wonder that eludes the grasp of absolute knowledge. Second, we ought to challenge the distinction between natural objects and art-ificial, or human made, objects that we often find in the museum setting. The last chapter of Kosky’s Arts of Wonder focuses on the work of Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy is known for creating art in natural spaces using objects he finds in a given landscape. He then leaves the artwork to melt, fall apart, or float away, highlighting the creative and destructive qualities of the world. According to Kosky, “in Goldsworthy’s world, we dwell not on solid ground but nevertheless profoundly in a place, alongside things that do not stay permanently and are often far from stable, in

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flux and fluctuating because engendered or created with the waters and the winds” (Kosky 2013, 133). Goldsworthy traverses a strange balance between intimacy and surprise. Because his works are fleeting, he leaves little opportunity to intimately know the works he produces or be surprised by their appearance. Rather than surprise, there is a slow realization of the beauty that Goldsworthy generates from sticks, ice, leaves, rocks, wind, and the rushing waters of a river. His work challenges the conventional understanding of how to view and appreciate works of art because knowledge is not a part of the encounter. As Kosky tells us, “We dwell there with created things that are not secure but adrift; we abide with things-made that do not stay but float; we reside with thingly works that come to be by scattering themselves in the world with which they are created” (Kosky 2013, 133). Without the opportunity for knowledge, there is little to cover up or conceal the wonder that is motivated by Goldsworthy’s work. We are left haunted by the swift loss of the work and confronted by the explicit presentation of how objects withdraw from our full possession of them. But, as I have argued, this withdrawal need not be limited to instances where objects literally float away or dissolve in front of our eyes. Rather, such withdrawal happens with every object, even works of art that hang in museums. Beyond his focus on place-based nature-art, Kosky’s implicit critique of the museum is further supported by the fact that the one example he uses from a proper museum disrupts the conventional space of the museum. Throughout Arts of Wonder, Kosky uses light as a metaphor for absolute knowledge and scientific inquiry. Continuing with that theme, he praises James Turrell’s three permanent exhibitions in Pittsburgh’s The Mattress Factory. These “viewing chambers,” as Kosky calls them, “present themselves to us as light that is itself a revelation or presentation; in this sense, they embody a movement of drawing near. But this revelation or presenting does not ensure their ultimate availability for the eye, mind, or hand that seeks to lay hold of what is revealed or presented before it” (Kosky 2013, 104). Unlike artwork that is hung under spotlights for total access to an object, Turrell’s work draws you in but never allows complete access. Light in Turrell’s work does not make another object available. Rather, light is the object and thus plays on the tension between revelation and mystery that was found in the cabinets of curiosities. For Kosky, the “viewing chambers” present a challenge to the rule of reason by refusing to offer a clearly defined and distinctly available object for investigation. Clarity and distinctness, at least since Descartes, have

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been the measure of human access to the world to the degree that “the opening of a world in which objects appear distinctly…becomes the correlative of a way of human being that can advance with certainty” (Kosky 2013, 91). By closing this world of clear and distinct boundaries between viewer and object, Turrell’s works reintroduce a wonder and awe that is not dependent on surprise, but rather dizzying confusion, as if the ground on which one usually stands in relation to art objects (or any object for that matter) is removed. It is as if Turrell’s viewing chamber exhibits the tension between fascination and repulsion, astonishment and horror that Mary-Jane Rubenstein sees as the defining characteristics of wonder (Rubenstein 2006, 13). It is not possible to claim absolute access to an object if the object has no clear boundaries that distinguish it from the rest of the world. A particularly interesting aspect of Turrell’s exhibit is that it calls into question what Merleau-Ponty labels optimum hold or optimal distance. As discussed in Chap. 3, Merleau-Ponty argues that “for each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen, a direction viewed from which it vouchsafes most of itself: at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a perception blurred through excess or deficiency” (Merleau-Ponty, Perception 1962, 351). But if light is the object, as in Turrell’s viewing chambers, is there still an optimum distance from which to view it? Further, does the description of optimum distance commit Merleau-Ponty to a position of absolute access that betrays his phenomenological commitments? I answer no to both questions. Although it may seem contradictory at first, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of optimum distance can help to reframe the discourse on museums and the art that is found there. To do so requires that we accept that the concept of optimum distance is necessarily contextual and thus dependent upon a matrix of relations among objects. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty claims that the optimum distance for any object is determined by the context in which that object is found and the intention behind our engagement with the object (Merleau-Ponty, Perception 1962, 351–352). M.C.  Dillon, agreed with this reading, claiming that optimum distance should “be understood in relation to the phenomenon of contextualization. It is not the case that the tree manifesting itself under optimal conditions reveals all its secrets. It is rather the case that the privileged perception is the one that is most adequate to the nature of the interrogation directing the perceptual inquiry” (Dillon 1997, 100). Thus, the same object can be seen

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optimally from various distances depending on the intention of the observer. Viewing a painting as a painting requires that I observe it differently than if I were viewing it as an item of evidence in a crime. As evidence I might need to view it under a microscope, which changes the distance required to view it optimally. Likewise, the optimal distance will vary if we are looking at an impressionist painting or a Duchamp readymade. While this may seem like an algorithm for establishing clarity and certainty for specific objects, reading this insight through Merleau-Ponty’s ontological concept of flesh and recent insights from object-oriented ontology demands that objects be understood as withdrawing from the gaze of the observer, and concealing full access at any given time. While his comments on optimum distance seem to commit Merleau-Ponty to a correlationist position that requires human access, reading this idea through object-oriented ontology allows us to think about a kind of optimal distance that occurs between nonhuman objects. While it is true that we can never “know” what optimum distance might be between any two objects, this does not negate the possibility that there is an optimum distance for objects. Reducing all access to human access commits what Bryant calls the “epistemic fallacy” and thereby translates ontological claims into epistemological ones. According to object-oriented ontology, real objects exist and “difference, deferral, absence, and so on are not idiosyncrasies of our being preventing us from ever reaching being, but are, rather, ontological characteristics of being as such” (Bryant 2011, 61). If this is the case, then all objects that can be said to “be” participate in a context, relate to other objects, allow access to other objects, but fail to ever provide full access or gain full access to other objects. As such, there is an optimum distance for objects to activate specific qualities. This can be seen as the equivalent to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that optimum distance is really about the context in which we find an object and the actualization of determinate states that occurs after the superposition of operative wonder. Further separating Merleau-Ponty from a position of absolute access is the idea that the boundaries that often separate objects are less concrete than they seem to be. That is, reading Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh through Karen Barad’s philosophy-physics, we begin to see how boundaries between objects are not set prior to their interaction, but emerge from their interaction, or what Barad calls intra-action. Both lines of reasoning will ultimately intersect, resulting in an argument for a kind of wonder

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that is both sustainable and, contrary to Kosky’s implicit critique, able to be located within the walls of a museum.4 There are two basic insights that I want to draw on from Merleau-­ Ponty’s ontological concept of flesh. The first is that we are so intimately embedded and intertwined with the world we live in that we must radically call into question any separation between humans and the world. Second, the world is not available to us as outside observers. We are always-already inside the context in which we live. As such, it seems possible, if not likely, that our relationship to other objects closely mirrors the way that other objects relate to each other. We are, thus, like any other object in the democracy of objects in Bryan’s flat ontology. In many ways, the transition beyond the limit of human experience is implicit within Merleau-Ponty’s thought. In the Visible and the Invisible, he seems to be questioning the privileged place of humans when he claims that “when we speak of the flesh of the visible, we do not mean to do anthropology, to describe a world covered over with all our own projections, leaving aside what it can be under the human mask” (Merleau-­ Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 136). It has been well documented that Merleau-Ponty was unsatisfied with the work in the Phenomenology of Perception and wanted to escape the perspective of human consciousness. As such, the concept of flesh is built on a reversibility that demands an ontological equality among objects. Humans can no longer claim absolute knowledge, or even the right to control or dominate other objects, because we do not stand outside or above non-human objects. For Merleau-Ponty, the reversibility of flesh not only allows for communication between objects but requires a sustained mystery between objects. That is, the reversibility of flesh is “always imminent and never realized” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 147) and “as soon as we examine and express its absolute proximity, it also becomes, inexplicably, irremediable distance” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 8). This tension between access and withdrawal mirrors the tension found in the cabinets of curiosities between mystery and knowledge. 4  It is here that we can begin to pull apart the critical project of Barad’s new materialism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. If we accept phenomenology’s claim that it is disregarding the imminent/transcendent or realism/idealism divides, then we have to accept that it is avoiding any kind of ontological claim about phenomena. Barad, on the other hand, seems to take up this phenomenological claim and situate it deeply within a physics-oriented ontological structure.

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Merleau-Ponty explicitly addresses art, and specifically painting, in Sense and Non-Sense. There he praises Cezanne for “giving up the outline” and “abandoning himself to the chaos of sensations” (Merleau-Ponty, Sense 1964, 13). According to Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne made a “basic distinction not between ‘the senses’ and ‘the understanding’ but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences” (Merleau-Ponty, Sense 1964, 13). The human organization of ideas wraps itself around objects, often concealing the object and rendering it as mere representation. It is here that Maleuvre’s worry about our technologically driven access to knowledge prior to an encounter with art can be addressed via Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh. I argue that this spontaneous organization of things described by Cezanne helps to explain how the borders between a human observer and art object begins to dissolve in a meaningful encounter. In an important sense, a new object appears that is made up of both art and observer. We can see this at work when Kosky describes his encounter with Turrel’s “viewing chambers.” There the goal is not to find the optimum distance by which to gain access to the art object, rather, it is to be enveloped by the light and the mystery, to relieve the boundaries between body and light so that it is unclear when one ends and the other begins. Similarly, we can see this on a broader scale in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh, whereby the body and the world are described as exhibiting a chiasmatic relationship. The human body is treated as a sentient-sensible, able to perceive objects only because it can be perceived by objects. For Merleau-­ Ponty, this relationship is not one of mere closeness but is one of mutual interiority; it is only possible to make sense of the world by being of the same stuff that constitutes the world. In the Nature Lecture Notes, Merleau-Ponty describes this mutually constitutive relationship as Ineinander (in-one-another). The relationship between the body and the world can no longer merely be described as a body in-the-world (as it is in Phenomenology of Perception) but must entail a world that is in the body. The mutual constitution of the body in the world demands that they are intimately in one another, not like “that of a thing in a thing…but rather one ratified by our lived, perceived Ineinander” (Merleau-Ponty, Nature 2003, 208). Looking to Karen Barad, we can extend the concept of flesh further, finding support in the realm of quantum physics. As discussed in previous chapters, Barad argues for something called intra-action, which she distinguishes from interaction. The most significant component of intra-action

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is that it denies that objects precede their involvement with other objects. Rather, together they “emerge through, their intra-action” (Barad 2007, 33). As such, Barad holds that objects do not bring inherent boundaries to their encounters with other objects. Rather, boundaries are produced within the “differential becoming” of intra-acting. On her account, “matter is produced and productive, generated and generative” (Barad 2007, 137). There is a kind of agency attributed to matter because the constitution of phenomena that mark the boundaries present in any given context do not rely solely on human agency. Matter itself, as generative, motivates the emergence of properties and boundaries in phenomena, independent of human involvement. Most important here is the idea that “‘things’ do not have determinate boundaries, properties, or meanings apart from their mutual intra-actions” (Barad 2007, 147). Barad’s insights about the lack of boundaries between objects plays out not only in the physical work of art, but in the relation between observer and observed. Heidegger claims that the work of art emerges most prominently or most truthfully, when its thingliness no longer presences itself (Heidegger 1994, 42). Taking a painting as an example, we can say that the art object, when approached as art, is no longer limited by the frame or the lines of the drawing that mark the borders between figures. Rather, we enter into the painting and take up the space of its existence, not as a representation, but as an ontological coupling. The observer and the art-­ object become unified in a new object. But this is not merely an insight about the imaginative engagement with the painting. Instead, we must continue to attend to the art as object. Further, the analysis of this coupling must acknowledge the way that surrounding objects affect and, in a sense determine, the presentation of the work of art. It is here, just as the human observer becomes ported into a new object that is not completely human, that the second aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh becomes apparent. As stated earlier, one consequence of the reversibility of flesh is that we as humans no longer have an ontologically privileged position from which to observe, manipulate, and engage with other objects. We are objects just as much as every other object. The light of Turrels’ “viewing chambers” invites me in, reflects off my skin, and wraps around my body, negating the boundaries that separate me from it. We become a singular phenomenon, intra-acting and generating small movements in the differential becoming of matter. But this is not limited to Turrel’s “viewing chambers,” nor is it limited to human involvement. The emergence of new objects occurs when we encounter paintings,

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sculptures, light fixtures, entryways, and gift shops. It occurs when a light fixture encounters a sculpture, when the uniform of a security guard encounters a painting, or when the flowers of a garden encounter a gust of wind. Bruno Latour offers a simple and extremely helpful analysis of the way objects display their agency in situations that are often considered to be fully determined by social relations. According to Latour, “if action is limited a priori to what ‘intentional’, ‘meaningful’ humans do, it is hard to see how a hammer, a basket, a door closer, a cat, a rug, a mug, a list, or a tag could act” (Latour 2005, 71). For Latour, what determines something as an agent or as displaying agency, is that it affects the action of some other agent. Following Latour, then, we might ask how the frame of the painting, the direction and intensity of the lighting, and the texture of the floor all affect the ability of the work of art in a museum to act on us or to affect us. Put another way, if we imagine the same piece of art on display in a grocery store, surrounded by packages of toilet paper, cereal boxes, deli meats, and the dull glow of florescent lights, we begin to realize how important these often-invisible objects are for the artwork to act as artwork. That is, we begin to feel the quasi-agency of these seemingly insignificant objects. Latour’s view complements Barad’s agential realism by providing concrete and everyday instances of how nonhuman objects can generate agential cuts without requiring human involvement. As an example, Latour challenges the idea that you can, with a straight face, maintain that hitting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling water with and without a kettle, fetching provisions with or without a basket, walking in the street with or without clothes, zapping a TV with or without a remote, slowing down a car with or without a speed-­ bump, keeping track of your inventory with or without a list, running a company with or without bookkeeping, are exactly the same activities. (Latour 2005, 71)

On Barad’s view, “agential cuts…produce determinate boundaries and properties of ‘entities’ within phenomena” (Barad 2007, 148). When the museum is closed, and no human-patron is left to observe or view the work of art, phenomenal objects are still constituted by the relations between objects. Cold light fixtures, smooth floors, and dusty air continue to matter because they perform the ongoing iteration of the world. For

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Barad, “matter is a dynamic expression/articulation of the world in its intra-active becoming. All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, come to matter though the world’s iterative intra-activity, its performativity” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 69). This does not level off every object to a lowest common denominator but maintains an ontological equality, while allowing for performative difference. All objects interact differently with other objects so that the effect of light on canvas can be measured by human instruments, but this measurement reveals little of the relation between the light and the painting. Again, we see the tension between access and withdrawal, knowledge and mystery that was present in the cabinets of curiosities, developed in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh, and extended by the philosophy-physics of Karen Barad. In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates claim that philosophy begins in wonder. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty claims that philosophy not only begins in wonder, but also leads to wonder (Merleau-­ Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 105). When the ontological privilege and absolute access to the world that we once thought we had is lost and the world is revealed as one that is built on mystery and withdrawal, not only are we able to regain our sense of wonder at the unknown, we no longer remain the only kinds of objects that can wonder. Rather, all objects wonder because no object is ever afforded complete access to any other object. Wonder is no longer a human capacity, a human property, or exclusive to humans in any way. Rather, the world is an open wondering, a swell of self-organization independent of any single causal agent. To be sure, the ontological framework that I have developed is not limited to the context of the museum. But the museum plays an important role as an institution that is built on the cultivation of wonder. There are concerns that the museum’s ability to motivate wonder has been negatively affected by economic pressures and the dulling of experience by the projection of knowledge over the art object. In an article on wonder and museum organization, Ruud Kaulingfreks laments that “The modern museum shows how much our view of the world has changed and how much series, plan and order have formed our worldview. Only in the series does everything have its place and that is how we find safety and order…wonders are banned to a place outside the series, a place that is considered to be less sophisticated, confused and even infantile” (Kaulingfreks et al. 2011, 324). Kaulingfreks goes on to argue that what we need is a re-introduction to the dangers of the singular object over the calming organization of the series. In a similar vein, Jean-Paul Martinon

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mourns the fact that, unlike cabinets of curiosities, “the museum follows a dialectical model that sees its collections either organized chronologically (narrative) or thematically (image)…in order to make sense of the art or the objects it houses” (Martinon 2006, 62). While I do not have organizational or administrative answers regarding how to change the current situation, I argue that if the museum is going to continue to promote wonder, it ought to do so in such a way that it can be sustained beyond its walls; that the wonder motivated by the contents of the museum not be negated by the organization found in the museum as a way to demonstrate that wonder ought not be negated by the organization found outside the museum. If it is to do so, then the museum must emphasize the tension between knowledge and mystery in its presentation and exhibition as an instance of the active wondering of the world in general. In the final section of this chapter, I turn to gardens as a possible model for museums to invoke an ontologically oriented wonder. Gardens explicitly demonstrate the living aspect of museums that I have described and work to incorporate a necessary sense of rootedness that is often missing in museum exhibitions. This sense of rootedness highlights the ambiguity of boundaries and calls into question the ability to fully know when one object ends, and another begins.

The Garden as Museum/Anti-Museum In Gardens: an essay on the human condition, Robert Pogue Harrison offers an extended conversation about gardens. Following Heidegger, Harrison begins his treatment of gardens by recounting the myth of care and points out that the embodied life of humans is constituted by care (Harrison 2008, 6). At death, the soul returns to Jupiter and the body returns to Earth, but during life, “the ensouled matter of homo belongs to Cura, who ‘holds’ him for as long as he lives” (Harrison 2008, 6). While I have attempted to move away from the limits of human access, Harrison’s concept of care as it relates to cultivation offers an interesting aspect of wonder that directly relates to objects and their exhibition in museums. Because we find care at the center of the garden, we also find the practice of cultivation, where cultivation is the activity of care over time. Wonder, like a garden, needs to be tended to and cared for if it is expected to grow. This is especially true if the wonder we desire is one that survives an encounter with knowledge. Thinking about wonder in this way presents museums with an opportunity to offer a wonder-full experience while

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inviting others to take up the activity of cultivating wonder. As such, we can begin to imagine that the wondering care given by patrons is generative for the museum and for finding a maximum hold on the objects housed there. According to Harrison, the act of gardening “brings about a transformation of perception, a fundamental change in one’s way of seeing the world” (Harrison 2008, 30). He calls this change a “phenomenological conversion” (Harrison 2008, 30). The care required in tending a successful garden demands that the gardener pay attention to more than the surface. Rather, she must experience the garden in its paradoxical existence as both unified object and as constituted by a number of separate objects. Each plant or flower blooms both separately and altogether. The logic of the world must recede as the mystery of life and growth takes root. If we can marvel at tiny, sharpened pencils, then what can we say about soil? Each granule of soil is singular by itself and works to construct a larger object. The soil of the garden is already a cabinet of curiosities. The museum also acts as an agent of “phenomenological conversion.” If patrons care-fully attend to the objects present, then they may begin to see the world differently, and begin to look “to the depths in which they stake their claims on life and from which they grow into the realm of presence and appearance” (Harrison 2008, 30). If the political, spiritual, and material existence in which the patron exists becomes explicit, the world can begin to unfold and reveal, like the garden, “an opening of worlds—of worlds within worlds—beginning with the world at one’s feet” (Harrison 2008, 30). Thinking about museums in terms of gardens also motivates a turn to the elements and to the elemental. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-­ Ponty refers to the flesh as an element and “as the concrete emblem of a general manner of being” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 147). Here Merleau-Ponty reminds us that we ought “not think the flesh starting from substances, from body and spirit,” but that we must first attend to its non-coincidental reversibility (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1968, 147). The garden is not the product of the gardener, nor is it a random assortment of plants, flowers, or rocks. Rather, the garden emerges through the relation of the gardener to the elements. As such the gardener is never gardener outside the garden but is always-­ already constituted by the garden. Likewise, the garden is constituted by the gardener so that it never fully exists apart from the relation. The garden/gardener relation is one of mutual constitution and reversibility that

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speaks to the generative mattering of the world that Barad describes. Prior to the gardener, the world was already a garden of sorts, but not so named. The arrival of the gardener merely continues, in a new set of practices, the differential becoming of the world and the generativity of flesh that was already active. Or, to quote Harrison, “the human gardener with rump in the air is a latecoming participant in, as well as a beneficiary of, this chemistry of vitalization” (Harrison 2008, 32). It is clear that Harrison would be uneasy with my treatment of his garden analysis for two reasons. First, he considers care to be a specifically human characteristic, and would not “ascribe care, in the human sense, to primitive organisms” (Harrison 2008, 33). Second, he does not want to treat gardens as works of art because they do not—or should not—act as memorials nor do they “immortalize their makers” (Harrison 2008, 39). While he does go so far as to say that “care, in its self-transcending character, is an expansive projection of the intrinsic ecstasy of life,” thereby including nonhuman life-forms, he also claims that life is distinguished from “inanimate matter” by its continuous self-excessiveness. That is, life “ecstatically maintains itself in being through expenditures that increase rather than deplete the reserves of vitality” (Harrison 2008, 33). I have argued that this is true of nonliving matter as much as it is true of living matter. In fact, it is difficult to differentiate in a living organism where “living matter” might end and “non-living” might begin. This may be what Marjolein Oele calls “e-co-affectivity” where things always happen in a milieu, and “the influence of place and community cannot be tightly distinguished from the happenings of affectivity as such: they are rather aspects of one phenomenon in which they participate: e-co-affectivity” (Oele 2020, 5). Activity, movement, and meaning occur as a generative process, one powered by an ontologically operative wonder. According to Harrison, gardens should not be considered art because they do not memorialize their makers. Instead of pointing directly to an artist, Harrison claims that gardens work to “reenchant the present” (Harrison 2008, 39). While it may be difficult to separate the art from the artist, this is not necessarily the case with museums. Surely there are instances of museums with specific names attached. The Getty Museum, for example, immediately brings to mind J. Paul Getty, the founder and benefactor of the museum. But the Getty, like other similarly named museums, is not the work of a single author or artist. It has been constructed and constituted by the hands of thousands. Individual artists, like the species of plants, flowers, or stones in gardens, provide the content of

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the museum, but are not the museum. If an exhibit leaves the Getty, it does not become any less Getty. Instead, the museum shifts and changes to reveal new qualities activated by new relations. New exhibits, pieces of art, or even animals promote new wrinkles in conversations and open new cuts in material-discursive phenomena. Like objects embedded in other objects, the museum is never the artwork it houses but always exceeds— and recedes from—its constitutive parts. While individual art-objects may not “reenchant the present,” I argue that museums do. Not all would agree with this notion. Jean-Paul Martinon believes that “everything ends in the museum” (Martinon 2006, 61). He goes on to compare the museum to a mausoleum, claiming that museums are now where “carcasses of bodies that were once alive” are sent to memorialize past cultures and cults (Martinon 2006, 61). Thinking about museums in this way turns the objects found there into ghosts, undead monuments that haunt the present and deaden the possibility of wonder. Museums, in this sense, are more like Grady’s ORSK than cabinets of wonder. The silence of the museum becomes the silence of the graveyard, holding vigils for the dead rather than celebrating the vitality of life. Thinking about museums in terms of gardens, however, reinserts life into exhibition and calls for participation. Doing so transforms the silence of the museum from a requiem to the hum and vibration of the world becoming in wonder. If museums are thought about in terms of gardens, then they require a special kind of care. Curators—reestablishing the cura or care in their name—become gardeners, displaying exhibits in a way that orients attention toward the life and quasi-agency of objects and assemblages. Something that takes away from the liveliness of exhibits is the fact that they are abstracted from their “natural”5 setting. Portraits from sixteenth-­ century France often feel old and dead, stripped of their vitality, and provided with only a brief description as a stand in for its rich history as an object. Curators as gardeners would not only arrange objects in exhibits but would attend to the roots of those objects. Like the hidden roots of the garden, curators would be called to play on the tension between revelation and mystery that was found in the cabinets of curiosity, caring not only to organize objects in terms of a unifying narrative (be it science, time, or ideology), but to plant deep roots in the space provided, adopting 5  I am aware how problematic it is to describe any setting as natural. However, here I only wish to indicate that the objects in museums are taken from both times and places that are distant from the ones in which they are displayed.

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the kind of uncertainty that comes with the “soil, weather, and elements” of a garden (Harrison 2008, 39). If the distance between a museum and a botanical garden seems too far, we can look to non-conventional gardens as a closer model. Harrison takes time to describe gardens that are found on the streets of New York city, carefully organized yet allowed to grow in a semi-wild manner. These gardens “are made of diverse, largely random materials: toys, stuffed animals, flags, found objects, milk cartons, recycled trash, piles of leaves, at times a simple row of flowers” (Harrison 2008, 41). What makes these gardens so special is that they motivate dialogue where “the interlocutor is whoever takes the time to notice and wonder at them. That is why the transitory gardens evoke even more starkly and more poignantly than do community gardens the distinctly human need that went into their making, namely the need to hold converse with one’s fellow humans” (Harrison 2008, 46). Harrison goes on to claim that these gardens are like speech acts. Although he limits language and conversation to the humans involved, I argue that the conversation should be expanded to include the gardens, objects, and contexts. Appropriating Merleau-Ponty’s description of reversibility, it is possible to say that we can only speak because we are capable of being spoken to. We can only offer up our part of the dialogue because we engage in a larger conversation that involves more than human speech. This is not to say that objects, assemblages, or gardens speak to us like other humans speak to us. Rather, this speech is a result of the self-­ organization that occurs as a result of the quasi-agency of objects. Harrison explores something like self-organization when speaking about Kingscote Garden on the Stanford Campus. Kingscote, a garden that Harrison calls his own because of his familiarity and affinity for it, both “opens itself up to full view” and holds something back (Harrison 2008, 53). The garden is never fully available at any given time because it wears various “guises” depending on the time of day, the strength of the wind, or the force of the weather. To quote Harrison again, “The garden’s potential for appearance is never realized all at once, any more than a lyric’s meaning and sentiment are exhausted by a single reading” (Harrison 2008, 53). The intimate description that Harrison provides of “his own garden” speaks to a kind of self-organization that originates in the garden itself as an object. The garden’s qualities shift and actualize differently given different weather patterns, times of day, or even moods of human observers. The fact that the garden gives itself differently, or organizes itself differently depending on

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surrounding objects, indicates that the garden always recedes, always holds something back and is never available as something to be accessed or known completely. The mysterious aspects of the garden do not work to close the garden off, rather, “gardens like Kingscote seem like gateways to other worlds or other orders of being: not gateways for you to pass through but through which you may be called upon or visited, without moving from where you stand” (Harrison 2008, 54). A major obstacle for thinking about the institution of the museum as a mechanism of sustained wonder is that it is clearly defined as an institution. One knows when they are entering a museum, crossing over into an intricately organized presentation of objects. The very inclusion of an object into a museum display changes the value of that object. The strangeness of the world is abstracted so that the world outside the museum remains a bland landscape of everyday habitual activity. The museum works to make the “outside” world seem more boring. In direct contrast, the boundaries of the garden are almost always unclear. The hidden roots of the plants make it difficult, if not impossible, to tell where the garden begins and the “outside” world ends. However, this is not to claim that gardens do not have or adhere to boundaries. According to Harrison, “Almost all the words for ‘garden’ in world languages have etymons linked to the idea of fence or boundary. A garden is literally defined by its boundaries” (Harrison 2008, 56). Rather than closing off, the boundaries that define the garden are boundaries that open up new worlds and, like quantum physics for Barad, question the rigidity of boundaries as such. Harrison goes on to claim that the boundaries of a garden “are for the most part relative. By that I mean they keep the garden intrinsically related to the world that they keep at a certain remove” (Harrison 2008, 56–57). Because the boundaries that define the garden are unclear, the world becomes involved in the gardens effective power. The position of the sun and the weather are included in the garden’s anatomy. To an extent, the whole world becomes a part of the ongoing growth of the garden as the wind bends the branches of the plants and disperses seeds that will literally impregnate the earth. Harrison views the garden as a way to “relearn the art of seeing and reaccess the deep time folded within their forms. The visible world, after all, has not vanished. It has merely become temporarily invisible” (Harrison 2008, 124). Like Kaulingfreks and Martinon, Harrison argues that for the garden to “help us rescue its visibility,” we must provide it “ample space and time to show themselves” (Harrison 2008, 124). Unlike the critiques

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of the museum, the garden has very little history of technological mediation. There are few audio guides or historical blurbs about who put this flower here or pruned that plant over there—the garden is not a monument, memorial, or mausoleum but a vibrant example of the active becoming of the world. Harrison’s desire for “ample space and time” is not driven by a respect for famous works or artists but is actuated by care. The care required from the gardener allows the garden “to become fully visible in space” (Harrison 2008, 117). Gardens grow without any intervention by humans; we can speak of the care of the Earth by worms, weather patterns, and sunshine. But for Harrison, the “phenomenological” conversion motivated by gardens requires a different temporal engagement with the garden. Harrison uses the garden to discuss the human condition because gardens require care, which is a temporally invested means of engagement. I argue that this emphasis on care needs to be expanded to include the museum. Rather than think of the garden as a special type of museum where flowers are on display, we should think of the museum as a species of the garden, where works of art, animals, or other narratively connected objects are cultivated and cared for. Certainly, there is a sense in which curators of museums are charged with caring for their collections. The real challenge, however, is getting the patrons of museums to care so that they too participate in the cultivation of the museum collection. The kind of wonder that I have described does not spontaneously pop into the habits of a community based on theoretical concepts. Rather, like a garden it takes careful preparation and ongoing cultivation. Although it lacks a certain intentional activity or deliberateness that is found in the care of human actions, the active wondering of nonhuman objects cares for the becoming of the world by powering cycles of life and decay. Wonder as an active quality of objects extends the work of care to all objects—the wonder of objects cultivates the mattering of the world. Museums can—and should—play an important role in promoting an attention to the wonder of the world. By looking to the garden as an example, it is possible to think of the museum as an institution that not only guards and amplifies the treasures of a culture but encourages the care of objects within and without its walls. The claim that objects actively wonder means that different qualities manifest in different contexts and therefore manifest a continually changing world of differential becoming. The cycles of life and decay motivated by this active wondering mark the world as a garden, teeming with more life below the surface than can be witnessed by any given

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perspective at any given time. The museum, if allowed the opportunity, can activate an attitude of care that would allow humans to fully recognize both the mystery and the beauty of this world, so full of wonders, that always eludes our grasp.

References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Davenne, Christine. 2012. Cabinets of Wonder. Translated by Nicholas Elliott. New York: Abrams. Dillon, M.C. 1997. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Fingerhut, Joerg, and Jesse J. Prinz. 2018. Wonder, Appreciation, and the Value of Art. In The Arts and The Brain Psychology and Physiology Beyond Pleasure, ed. Julia F. Christensen and Antoni Gomila, 107–128. Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, Elsevier. Harrison, Robert Pogue. 2008. Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jackson, Shirley. 1959. The Haunting of Hill House. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books. Kaulingfreks, Ruud, Sverre Spoelstra, and Rene ten Bos. 2011. Wonders Without Wounds: On Singularity, Museum and Organisation. Management & Organizational History 6: 311–327. Kindynis, Theo. 2019. Persuasion Architectures: Consumer Spaces, Affective Engineering and (Criminal) Harm. Theoretical Criminology 25: 619–638. Kosky, Jeffrey L. 2013. Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity-Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago University Press. Kratz, Corinne A., and Ivan Karp. 1993. Wonder and Worth: Disney Museums in World Showcase. Museum Anthropology 17: 32–42. Kullman, Karl. 2017. Dis/orientation Machines: Journeys into Labyrinthine Landscapes. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 38 (1): 1–23.

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Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maleuvre, Didier. 2006. A Plea for Silence: Putting Art Back into the Art Museum. In Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hugh G.  Genoways, 165–176. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Martinon, Jean-Paul. 2006. Museums and Restlessness. In Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hugh H. Genoways, 59–68. Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press. Mauries, Patrick. 2002. Cabinets of Curiosities. London: Thames & Hudson. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge Classics. ———. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort and Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2003. Nature: Course Notes from the College de France. Evanston, IL: Norwesther University Press. Moreno-Garcia, Silvia. 2020. Mexican Gothic. New York, NY: Del Rey. Oele, Marjolein. 2020. E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ritzer, George. 2005. Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption: Enchanting a Disenchanted World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. 2006. A Certain Disavowal: The Pathos and Politics of Wonder. The Princeton Theological Review 12: 11–17. Rugoff, Ralph. 1997. Museums of Horror. ANY: Architecture New  York 18: 22–25. Yasuko, Suga. 2004. Designing the Morality of Consumption: “Chamber of Horrors” at the Museum of Ornamental Art, 1852–53. Design Issues 20: 43–56.

CHAPTER 5

Toward a Weird Environmental Ethics

Weird Environmental Ethics I have so far offered an approach to wonder that firmly establishes it as an ontological concept. Wonder, as I have argued, affects the way that objects orient to other objects and to themselves. It is the open and generative possibility that stands at the superposition of relation before collapse. It is also the possible opening for new avenues in sedimented relations. In that last rendering of wonder there is an opening for an ethical approach that engages and incorporates wonder. If we can imagine wonder as a mechanism for new directions, for opening borders to new ideas, for igniting sparks to fly from a loosened grip, then we can begin to imagine wonder as a component of an ethical framework that disrupts traditional modes of thinking and charts new pathways forward. I have stressed the separation between anthropocentric wonder and non-anthropocentric wonder, focusing on an ontology that removes hierarchical categories. In this chapter, I will clarify how I am using this distinction to envision a Weird1 wonder. Further, I will situate this Weird wonder within a broader ethical framework. Specifically, I look to environmental virtue ethics as a model  I capitalize “Weird” to distinguish it from the colloquial use of the term to describe something that is strange or out of the ordinary. Specifically, I will capitalize Weird when it pertains to either “Weird fiction” or “Weird wonder,” and include “Weird-species fields” in the latter category. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. H. Onishi, Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48027-0_5

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for thinking about wonder as a virtue situated between the excess of anxiety and the deficiency of boredom. Finally, I will locate this Weird wonder-­ as-­virtue within two contexts. The first is what I call “Weird-species fields,” which articulates Barad’s intra-active framework in ecological terms. The second is in Weird fiction. I have already established fiction as a possible context for Weird wonder, including Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör. Here I make the connection between Weird wonder and Weird fiction explicit. Ultimately, I will argue that the ambiguity and uneasiness associated with Weird fiction generates a feeling of wonder that is both closely aligned with operative wonder and has potential impacts for flourishing in a drastically changing/changed (i.e., weird) world. As we will see, Weird fiction does not provide the content of our future worlds, but prepares the way by enacting a departure from the world we know, or think we know, as normal. If the world is weird, then we need a weird ethic to help us navigate through the new possibilities generated by that weirdness. Not only have I introduced the weirdness of quantum physics, but the very foundation of new materialisms and object-oriented ontologies call for a radical shift in thinking about agency. Taking operative wonder as an extension of those ideas, diffractively read through the phenomenology and philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we can begin to think of operative wonder as a Weird wonder. And if we think of operative wonder as Weird, the next task is to understand what that means for the ideas presented here. To begin that process, I establish a better sense of what I mean by the Weird by appealing to Weird fiction.

Weird Fiction Weird fiction has its most significant foundation in the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, commonly referred to as H.P. Lovecraft. For Lovecraft, the Weird is about generating “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces” which is found in the “suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (Lovecraft 1973, 15). The unknown is important for Lovecraft’s conceptualization of the Weird and leads him to ultimately claim that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (Lovecraft 1973, 12). While this has (rightfully) been discussed in the context of his racism, sexism, and

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antisemitism,2 we can also read this as an introduction to wonder and the Weird. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft worries that the realm of the unknown is shrinking and that science has diminished the enchantment of the world, a worry that partially echoes claims made by Merleau-Ponty, Kosky, and Bennett. And like Merleau-Ponty, Kosky, and Bennett, Lovecraft seems to see a way out of our disenchantment through the experience of the world via our bodies. That is, according to Lovecraft, more than the “infinite reservoir of mystery [that] still engulfs most of the outer cosmos… there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder” (Lovecraft 1973, 14). Our old instincts and habits still hold sway in an operative way beneath the projection of knowledge, and wonder is still capable of manifesting in the face of the unknown, even when known. In the telling of Weird tales, Lovecraft seems to appeal to the way that the tension between the known and the unknown pulls at the orientation of the world. The Weird tale, full of dread and the unknown, partly dramatizes the operative wonder of the world. In light of Lovecraft’s widely identified racism, sexism, and antisemitism, it is easy to read this as an operative response to the non-white “other.” What is normal is sedimented into our practices through habits and evolutionary progression. What is “other,” and frightening is so because of this history. But we can also read this as an open possibility that fundamentally rejects any ontological judgment about difference. Instead of leading to closed minds due to the fear of the other, the Weird is generative of new avenues of exploration and new understandings of reality as such. In his recent genre study of Weird fiction, Michael Cisco characterizes the Weird as a “deterritorialization of ordinary experience, insofar as the ordinary is fetishized as reality” (Cisco 2021, 7). For Cisco, Weird fiction pushes the boundaries of our own reality. In many ways his analysis lines up with other claims about the distinctions in genre fiction. For example, 2  This is a complex issue with a lot of analysis and nuance. S.T. Joshi, for example, has contended that claims about Lovecraft’s racism have been exaggerated at the least (Joshi, Why Michel Houellebecq Is Wrong about Lovecraft’s Racism 2018), while Jean Sébastien Guy claims “that Lovecraft was a racist is easy to prove and cannot be denied or even toned down” (Guy 2020). Looking at many of his letters to friends and confidants, Guy’s position seems accurate. Brian Matzke has shown that a recent trend in literature and criticism is aimed at highlighting the dangers of Lovecraft’s racism in the horror and Weird fiction tradition (Matzke 2022).

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in The Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carrol claims that the distinction between fantasy and horror is that horror takes place in our world. In horror, “the monster is an extraordinary character in our ordinary world,” whereas “in fairy tales and the like the monster is an ordinary creature in an extraordinary world” (Carroll 1990, 16). For both Carroll and Cisco, Weird fiction and horror manifest specifically within the reality we accept as normal. For Carrol this makes the emotional project of horror, where the emotional state of the audience aligns with the emotional state of the fictional characters, more compelling (Carroll 1990, 17). For Cisco, rooting the Weird in our own reality is fundamental to the Weird project. More than generating an emotional alignment with characters, the project of Weird fiction is to generate an affect through atmosphere. It is thus through “the maintenance of the involvement with this world…that the reader is brought into the jeopardy which is the key affect of the weird fiction” (Cisco 2021, 57). Two important ideas emerge from Cisco’s claims about affect and deterritorialization. First is that the reader is brought into a kind of jeopardy through the interaction with the Weird text. Second, it is in this tension between the normal everyday experience and the generativity of the Weird that Cisco finds a kind of “re-enchantment” of the world through the departure from normalcy. The sense of jeopardy Cisco identifies is tied specifically to what he calls a “departure from familiarity as such” (Cisco 2021, 31). The point of the Weird tale, however, is not a departure to somewhere. This, he claims, would make for fantasy rather than Weird fiction. Instead, the departure found in Weird fiction is the destiny of each character, and subsequently, of the reader. The emphasis is not on the destination but on the weirdness of the unknown. According to Cisco, “The whole point of the story is establishing to the satisfaction of the reader that reference to that weird destination, or destiny, which tends to point towards something that cannot be described, is not a cop-out, but a thrilling, if alarming, discovery” (Cisco 2021, 59). The Weird is an open call to question the “normalcy” of our reality and to depart towards the unknown. By questioning the normalcy of our everyday lived world, we can begin to re-enchant the world as Weird. The general assumption is that the everyday world of experience is fully known, leaving little room for fundamental changes or exploration. In an alternate analysis, we could locate the Husserlian epoché within the Weird’s challenge to familiarity. On that reading, the natural attitude is confronted by the deterritorialization of the Weird departure, and we embark on the phenomenological adventure.

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In Cisco’s terms, however, this is what he calls a closed world. In a closed world, every new development or new discovery leads us back to the foundation of normalcy on which those everyday experiences rest. In contrast to something like science fiction, which re-establishes the familiar and proceeds into a future world using unchanged logic, Weird fiction operates in terms of openings. According to Cisco, “the question in weird fiction is whether an event genuinely throws a closed world open to the desires that demand more of the world” (Cisco 2021, 57). Like many experiences of wonder, something about the world breaks when we are confronted by the Weird. We depart from the reality we knew, only to come back to the same reality but fundamentally shifted, torn, and rendered—an apocalypse. And like operative wonder, the Weird disallows the previously established set of norms to reform and cover over the departure. Through the Weird, “the normal process whereby the object of wonder becomes familiar through the establishment of connections between it and other ideas is reversed” and “the bizarre event threatens or breaks established connections, and attacks connectedness itself” (Cisco 2021, 67). Through the Weird, the very ground on which connections stand are compromised and we are left to pull the world back together by new means. This is the generative process of Weird fiction, a process that echoes and dramatizes the generativity of operative wonder. It is not hard to find stories that depict a weird departure like the one described by Cisco. Even if we limit the search to Lovecraft’s oeuvre, we are left with a multitude of examples, including “Dagon,” At the Mountains of Madness, and “The Call of Cthulhu.” In these stories, the main character is drawn to some bizarre event or entity and is rendered mad by that encounter. In “Dagon,” for example, the narrator finds himself trapped on a slimy black island filled with “cyclopean” monoliths, “inscriptions and crude sculptures” (Lovecraft 2020, 24). Even though his stay is short, he seems to have departed the world he once knew for a reality so terrifying that the faculty of reason seems to have been expelled. At the end, the narrator laments that he “dreams[s] of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-­ exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium” (Lovecraft 2020, 27–28). Consistent with Lovecraft’s position on the Weird, the narrator’s lamentation marks his departure from the comforting world he once knew toward the dread of the unknown.

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Lovecraft’s story also leaves the reader with a sense of dread at the narrator’s departure and drives us toward our own departure. The last few lines assume that the narrator is either mad or under attack. “The end is near,” he says. “I hear a noise at the door, as if some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The Window!” (Lovecraft 2020, 27). There is little here to suggest a generativity that lends itself to new possibilities. Instead, the end is in sight for the narrator and for the world. But this lasting dread is not a necessary characteristic of Weird fiction. It is the departure from our reality, while also staying close to our reality, that is, at least for Cisco, a distinctive mark of the Weird. It is what Mark Fisher describes as bringing “to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, which cannot be reconciled with” the accepted normality of the world (Fisher 2016, 10–11). The narrator has departed our world. The ground of safety and the established sense of normalcy are no longer viable, and the narrator is forced to accept a world full of new, albeit horrifying, possibilities. Ultimately, this leads to what S.T. Joshi claims is the hallmark of Weird fiction: “the refashioning of the reader’s worldview” (Joshi 1990, 118). For my purposes here, what is interesting is the potential for Weird fiction to open new possibilities that allow for generative futures in the face of environmental disaster such as climate change. To do this, we can look to Paul Tremblay’s short story, “Growing Things” as another example of a Weird tale. But in Tremblay’s story, the nihilism of Lovecraft is backgrounded by the possibilities held in the stories we tell. I will argue that the kind of hope found in a story like “Growing Things” requires a sense of wonder. Further, I will claim that we can cultivate this kind of wonder to allow for a greater engagement with the opening of the world as Weird.

Growing Things and Our Weird Departure In the story, we are dropped into a post-apocalyptic world. At first glance, this seems contrary to Cisco’s claim that the Weird is about departure and deterritorialization. The work has already been done and we are left with a world that is largely distinct from our own. But as the story progresses, we see the development of the world as strange and the destined departure of the main character to a new reality. Merry, an eight-year-old girl, is left with her 14-year-old sister Marjorie, while her father scavenges for food. Even though the narrative is clearly post-apocalyptic (no reliable source of food, no routine access to what is outside of the house, a sense in which

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social habits have broken down), we are not given any clear evidence about what has happened to bring about this state of affairs. Merry and the audience are left without reliable information as the father regularly offers contradictory answers and Marjorie instigates “story time” whenever Merry asks her about why they are stuck in the house. This lack of information means that while the habits of the world are vague, we project the meaning and practices of our own world to fill in the gaps. What is lost in the apocalypse are the everyday experiences that generate what it means for the world to be “normal.” The ambiguity presented in the story calls us to identify the lack of a generalized feeling of normalcy. For instance, Merry changes her pajamas every day, while Marjorie doesn’t. This simple hygienic practice establishes Merry as normal, as aligning with our current everyday existence, and Marjorie as unusual. As Merry’s and Marjorie’s father leaves, he tells them not to answer the door because “knocking means the world is over” (Tremblay 2019, 7). Again, there is a kind of inversion of Cisco’s departure. Unlike the narrator in Dagon, who leaves us with a warning of some danger at the window, we begin with the warning. The world might be ending, and knocking, a figure of the unfamiliar as stranger, is the signal. Before their father’s exit, we learn that Merry’s and Marjorie’s mother also left. Marjorie tells Merry that their mother left because she was allegedly unhappy. Merry’s concern is that their father is also unhappy and that he won’t come back. The familial comfort of being cared for by her parents is immediately at stake and there is a kind of anxiety about losing one’s home while also remaining home. In environmental terms, we now call such grief and anxiety over losing one’s home while staying put, solastalgia.3 I will return to solastalgia later in the chapter, but highlighting it here helps us to see how “Growing Things” manifests and dramatizes our anxieties about climate change and the expanding gap between the world we knew and the world still to come. Anticipated by their father’s warning, soon Merry hears a soft knocking. And because “knocking means the world is over,” this small sound begins the slow violence of catastrophic change. But the mark of the end also opens the door to skepticism. Merry wonders if she is making up her own story about the knocking, generating meaning for a world she feels is just beyond the walls of her home. Perhaps she is more ready for the world to be over than she realizes and has begun to anticipate a world after the 3

 See Albrecht (2006).

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world. The insecure walls of her home are also the insecure walls of the world she has known her whole life. Along with the skepticism of the end, we also have the advent of a possible way forward. On one side of the story is denial that the world is ending at all, and on the other side is the destiny to depart the world once known. Merry’s attitude towards the growing things begins to change as she starts to engage in her own version of storytelling. She remarks upon the difference between her experience of the growing things and Marjorie’s description of them. Marjorie, she claims, has made them out to be scarier than they are. But now that she has seen them for herself, she realizes that “yes, they are real, but they are not city-dissolving, mountain-destroying monsters” (Tremblay 2019, 11). It is as if Merry has realized the potential danger of the growing things and the world that they bring with them but downplays the threat because they do not look like the monsters of her old stories. There is no world-ending knock at the door, there is only a slow and gradual destruction of her reality and her house. We can read Merry as a thoughtless person accepting the good of climate change because it brings warm weather in November, or we can read her as someone on their way to a new world with an open sense of wonder at the possible stories now available to her. Later, Merry tries an experiment and discovers an important fact about the growing things. She turns the flashlight on and off and watches (only via the difference) as they grow when the lights are turned off. Unlike other plants, the light restricts growth. It is as if when we look directly at the danger, it seems to stop. And while we continue to see the change via difference, we deliberately look away, pretending that this is a solution. Here, it is not the light of James Turrell’s viewing chambers that draws us near but the comfort of an unknowing darkness in its secretive nurturing. Strangely, Merry rejoices in the development of the growing things, embracing the world that is emerging underneath her feet but away from her gaze. Abandoned by her father and mother, she has begun to tell a new story that helps to welcome this change. She even goes so far as to water the growing things in the basement, tending to and caring for the cultivation of the new world. Merry becomes an apocalyptic gardener, the rip in reality taken as the thing under her care. She has not only embraced the changing world, but she helps it to grow, tending to it so as to promote its flourishing. In Donna Haraway’s terms, she is making “kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (Haraway 2016, 1). By caring for the

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growing things, even at the expense of her own dwindling water supply, she is throwing herself into the project of “composting” the future through new practices (Haraway 2016, 55). Unlike Merry, Marjorie laments that the growing things will ultimately expel stories. She cannot seem to imagine new stories in the new world made possible by their growth. And like knocking, if stories end, then the world is over. The story ends with a pounding on the door. The soft and subtle knock Merry heard previously is replaced by a loud pronouncement of the world’s end. As the growing things continue to ascend, the sound of the world’s end is like the thunder of extreme weather events that tell us in loud and explicit terms that the world has changed. The house her father built, built out of dead things like stone and wood, is no longer a refuge. The living world has now taken root and the meaning of the world emerges like the growing things. The new world is not safe for Merry, but neither was the old one. She has, at last, departed the world of the slow apocalypse to glimpse the new reality; a reality that questions the sense of normalcy that she used to tell stories. The final act for Merry is to tell Marjorie a new story. The role has flipped and Merry becomes the curator of meaning. She will decide whether it was or was not her father knocking at the door. She will determine the meaning of the world and the mode of grief they will observe. She will help usher in the possibility of flourishing because she has departed the old world; because, in Cisco’s words, she has “become weird.”

Eco-Weird Worlds Merry responds to her context by taking up the stories that were passed down to her. She has managed to participate in the generativity of the new world by reframing her story. Instead of merely surviving the apocalypse of the growing things, she has made it possible to think of herself as flourishing alongside them. Whether this possibility comes to fruition is not clear, nor, I would argue, is it important for Weird fiction. That is, it is not within the purview of Weird fiction to tell us about what will come, only to prepare a way forward into a departure from the old world. I have implied that we can read “Growing Things” as a climate change story and that the narrative is deeply situated within a historical context defined by climate crisis. If Weird fiction leads its characters and readers toward their destined departure, what kind of world are we departing for? For Cisco, this is not a major issue because spending too much time on the destination would make Weird fiction into Fantasy. But if we make the jump from

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fiction to reality, then we are left to deal not only with the destined departure, but the destination as well. It may be helpful, then, to construct an understanding of worlds and how those worlds work via departure and arrival. One way to do that is to articulate how Weird fiction relates to crisis because crisis helps to identify the world we are departing. Merry’s context is full of crisis, and it is hard to separate the danger in the story from the implicit anxiety about climate change. It is not a monstrous other that threatens our existence, but the very nature we have attempted to control for so long. In “The Weird in/of Crisis,” Tim Lanzendörfer claims that Weird fiction has historically operated as a kind of response to crisis. He divides his analysis between 1910 and 2010, and argues that H.P. Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy are each responding to historical crises. Lovecraft, for example, is writing within the crisis context of the First World War. This, claims China Miéville, is the “heart of the crisis…where mass carnage perpetrated by the most modern states made claims of a ‘rational’ modern system a tasteless joke” (Miéville 2009, 512). Lanzendörfer sees the issue of crisis as a tension between inside and outside, where Weird fiction challenges that “our perception of reality does not match what actually is real” (Lanzendörfer 2021, 75–76). This may be an epistemological claim, where we just do not know what is actually real or how we should organize our categories of thought, or this could be an ontological claim where each side is inaccessible from the other. In both cases, what is at stake is the possibility that there is some other side that is confronting our standard set of everyday experiences. In Cisco’s terms, realizing that there is some unknown thing (emphasis either on the unknown or on the thing/ world depending on the epistemological or ontological focus) deterritorializes the familiar and begins the destined departure to the Weird. The goal of Weird fiction, however, is not to understand or gain access to the other side. It is not even to make the crisis available for rational analysis. Rather, “in its malevolent Real, and protean new monsters, inconceivable and formless…Weird does not so much articulate the crisis as that the crisis cannot be articulated” (Miéville 2009, 512). Instead of offering crisis as an explicit object of thought, the Weird renders it as unthinkable and holds us in a sustained sense of unease. But while rational argumentation and scientific distance are incompatible with the Weird (after all, Lovecraft’s monsters attempt to bring us to the end of rationality and towards a kind of madness), the Weird is not bereft of a response to

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the crisis it is confronting. Lanzendörfer criticizes both Lovecraft and VanderMeer for avoiding a radical departure from the status quo. That is, he sees them as responding to crisis by reinforcing the structures of that crisis. For example, he reads At the Mountains of Madness as a kind of reiteration of historical narratives of power and rebellion through the mythology of the Old Ones. The struggle to hold off the rebellion by the shoggoths (a kind of slave class) and the “gradual decline” of their culture over “geological time” shows that Lovecraft’s “fiction registers finely the larger anxieties of the age” but only insofar as “what is ‘out there’ beyond the reality of everyday life turns out to be merely an extension of what we already know exists” (Lanzendörfer 2021, 81). Likewise, Lanzendörfer sees VanderMeer’s more recent Weird fiction as a response to the economic crisis of 2008 and the totalizing system of neoliberalism. And again, while the Southern Reach Trilogy conveys an “inherent promise of a destabilization of capitalist realism” the narrative fails to “imagine it lastingly in anything but capitalist realist terms” (Lanzendörfer 2021, 85). While Lanzendörfer’s argument is overtly political, it has ethical undertones. The outside imagined by Lovecraft and VanderMeer is supposed to be a kind of utopic challenge to neoliberal capitalism and the basic systems of society. The assumption is that neoliberalism is bad, and that thinking an outside to this bad system will lead us to a better option. The difference here is that a Weird operative wonder does not need to present or promote a utopic vision. It does not need to establish the outside as some better version. It merely presents the habitual process of remaining open to new systems and new possibilities. The starting point is that climate change has and will continue to render the world anew. We have already been overtaken by the outside. The question is how we respond to this new world and what habits, practices, and virtues we will take up.

Speculative Eco-Weird Worlds There is considerable overlap between speculative realism and the Weird of Weird fiction, especially as it relates to how we understand the concept of world and how we treat the distinction between inside and outside made by Lanzendörfer. Speculative realism has risen in response to the self-identified problem of correlationism, which, as we have seen, is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 2008, 5). In very broad terms, Meillassoux’s

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speculative project is an attempt to break through the correlational circle and attend to something like the in-itself; to get to “that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere” (Meillassoux 2008, 7). Meillassoux offers “ancestrality,” or the world prior to thought at all, as an example of something that breaks the correlational circle because it displays “a world without the givenness of the world” (Meillassoux 2008, 28). I argue that Weird fiction offers secondary examples, albeit fictional ones, which dramatize the potential breaking of the correlational circle by conjuring experiences beyond the possibility of givenness. Because these experiences of the impossible expressed in Weird fiction echo similarly weird experiences of everyday life, such as the uncanny intrusion of something ungiven, some strange feeling of catching meaning at the corner of one’s eye, or the present-absence of global climate change,4 I argue that the world of the Anthropocene is Weird and therefore needs a weird philosophical toolkit to analyze it. More than the content of their narratives, Weird fiction uses atmosphere to evoke a physical and emotional response. Much of this unease is generated through an encounter with that which fundamentally does not belong to the world in which it occurs. This is what Mark Fisher calls a “perturbation” or “wrongness” that “makes us feel that it [an experience or entity] should not exist, or at least it should not exist here” (Fisher 2016, 15). The mismatch of world and encounter is so basic, in fact, that a logical explanation for the events is either impossible or unhelpful, and madness ensues for those who experience it. As Graham Harman has pointed out, much of Lovecraft’s style is gestural in nature, only hinting at the actuality of the situation without ever explicitly describing the experience (Harman 2012). The reader is left with not only the terror of the monster, but the uneasy feeling of being failed by language. Here our logic haunts us, reaches out for us, but cannot seize us because it does not exist on the same plane of being. While most horror is driven by monstrous figures that are poorly veiled, marginalized human beings (Graham 2002), the monstrosities of Weird fiction are uncategorizable and unrecognizable. This leads Marianne Gunderson to claim that “The pages of weird horror are populated by nebulous figures of non-human creatures 4  To highlight the foundational shift that is occurring via climate change, Thomas Friedman has suggested the phrase “Global Weirding” as a substitute for global warming (Friedman 2010).

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whose alienness is described as irreducible, whose difference is total” (Gunderson 2017, 12). The uncanny in the Weird recognizes an almost complete ungrounding of the familiar by allowing for the possibility of an intrusion from an unknown and unknowable source. In Weird fiction we depart whole worlds, making the uncanny of the Weird global, not local. Or, at the very least, it is both global and local at the same time. I propose an even finer designation for those experiences that occur in nature or in response to nature. As such, I want to introduce the idea of the Eco-Weird.5 Like Weird fiction in general, the Eco-Weird can be characterized as the intrusion of our reality by something outside of the range of our possible experiences. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Meillassoux calls that which escapes correlation “the great outdoors” (Meillassoux 2008, 7). While the Eco-Weird mirrors Weird fiction’s emphasis on intrusion, it also works to invert that emphasis. That is, in the Eco-Weird, it is not that which is outside our reality that breaks in, but it is what lies underneath our surface experience that emerges. Rather than intrusion, then, the Eco-Weird focuses on a kind of extrusion, where reality is pushed to the surface through the veil of appearance. Here, we can think of the growing things as an example. Nothing that is fundamentally new is introduced from some distant reality or alien world. Instead, it is the fecundity of nature that extrudes the organization of the world (e.g., the foundation of the house) and generates a weird, new world for Merry to inhabit.

Climate Change as an Eco-Weird World It may be possible to think about climate change as part of the global weirding that speeds us to our own departure. In their article, “Climate Change Is Not a Problem,” Campbell, McHugh, and Dylan-Ennis have made similar connections between Meillassoux’s speculative realism and climate change. For them, climate change is not something that has happened, or something that will happen, it is the ontological organization of our world. Using Meillassoux’s concept of “World,” they argue that it “is everywhere and nowhere, present at all levels and yet absent as a distinct ‘thing’ we can point to” (Campbell et al. 2019, 734). Here “World” is an organizational construct and refers to the idea that “climate change cannot be subsumed into any existing organizational categories, and that organizational research in the future may be dedicated to finding the right 5

 This is a concept introduced and developed in (B. Onishi 2020) and (B. H. Onishi 2022).

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categories to account not for a superwicked problem, but for forms of organization without precedent” (Campbell et al. 2019, 727). Campbell, et al. conclude that climate change has ushered in a new world based on its lack of frameability or thinkability. According to them, “Once we cease to think of climate change as a problem that can be framed, we then explicate the consequence of recognizing it as the generative context from where problems emerge” (Campbell et al. 2019, 727). Because the available framing has failed to satisfactorily capture the scale of climate change, a new kind of “Copernican Revolution” needs to take place. Thus, climate change “is not a problem that can be framed, but something entirely different, a World that generates, but is not commensurate with, problems, and which no current organizational form can address” (Campbell et al. 2019, 735). Climate change is not a problem in our world, it is a world that generates problems. It has emerged from our world “first and foremost as an ontological threat” (Campbell et al. 2019, 727). In this sense, climate change manifests as a weird, new world that has emerged without us knowing about it. The feeling of incongruence with our supposed home is due to our thinking that we are living in a world that we are not living in, and we don’t quite realize it yet. When we do realize it, we are confronted not only by the strangeness of the world in front of us, but by a profound sense of loss for the world we thought we knew. Like Merry, we need new stories to deal with both the advent of a new world and the revenant of the old one. Solastalgia becomes a central affective point, a phrase which has been used to describe feelings of loss where we lose our environmental place while staying put. Coined by Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia “is a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (Albrecht 2006, 35). According to Albrecht, “The concept of solastalgia has relevance wherever there is the direct experience of negative transformation or desolation of the physical environment (home) by forces that undermine a personal and community sense of identity, belonging and control” (Albrecht 2006, 35). If we accept the claim made by Campbell, et al., then we are all dealing with a world in which we have stayed that has “experienced a negative transformation.” We are experiencing a kind of world encompassing solastalgia. For Warsini, et al., “solastalgia describes a profound homesickness suffered by people who remain in their territories or homes, although they are now unrecognizable as a result of damage to the environment” (Warsini et al. 2014, 88). Because it is the world that has changed, and because this is the only world we

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have, we are all those who have stayed and those who suffer.6 But recognizing that we inhabit a weird new world comes with new possible solutions. That is, “It means that…the advent of this new World will create novelty in organization that exceeds thinkability today” (Campbell et al. 2019, 737). Further, the loss we feel can act as a kind of grief that confronts and embraces what Haraway calls our “shared living and dying” (Haraway 2016, 39). One question that we must attend to is how the loss of the world we thought we were living in manifests in our activities. In part, the problem is realizing that the world is now a climate changed world. But the other part is confronting the loss of the world we had previously called home. Solastalgia, felt as a global phenomenon of world loss, already acknowledges that some of us have accomplished the first part to some degree. But it does not address the second. Phenomenologically speaking, we engage the world through our bodies. That is, the world shows up as meaningful in our practices, habits, and material engagements. The meaning of time itself is built, at least in part, on our bodily habits. But our bodies, as always-already alongside other bodies and other material agencies, build meaning through the inter-corporeal relation with the world at large. Time shows up as part of a given landscape, including how I cross that landscape, how the mountains obstruct the sun, and how the seasons change. When we lose a world, the resulting loss feels a lot like the grief we feel when we lose a loved one. We lose the meaning of the world because we lose the ability to reach out and practice our habitual engagements. Time slips away as new temporalities emerge. In this shifting of temporalities and in this feeling of loss, “there is only the relentlessly contingent SF worlding of living and dying, of becoming-with and unbecoming-­with, of sympoiesis, and so, just possibly, of multispecies flourishing on earth” (Haraway 2016, 40).

Trauma and the World of Climate Change The extrusion of a new climate changed World, where climate change is taken as an ontological marker, is often witnessed through experiences of trauma. As is the case with solastalgia, the manifestation is felt by the loss of the world, by the loss of meaning as it emerges in material practices and 6  We, of course, do not all suffer the same. Material conditions, class, race, location all play a major role in how that suffering manifests and how deeply or severely it is felt.

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landscapes. As such, there is room to connect the trauma of this weird extrusion with other kinds of place-based traumas. Roma Sendyka, for example, describes “sites of mass violence and genocide” as “non-sites of memory,” where “the recurring impression of things not fitting” and “topographical conflict” regularly occur (Sendyka 2016, 687). For Sendyka, these places of trauma are “hosts to a sort of chronotic tremor. The past tense is present; that which has passed has not been permanently eliminated from the horizon of experiences” (Sendyka 2016, 692). In Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene, Gan, et al. describe the ghosts of the Anthropocene as “vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present” (Gan et al. 2017, G1). Their focus on telling stories about the past charged present is meant to resist the forgetting pushed by “private owners and public officials” that want to “pretend that environmental devastation does not exist” (Gan et al. 2017, G1). The haunting described and developed by Gan, et al. articulates the way that each landscape holds horizons of temporality within it. Unpeeling these sedimented layers reveals the still present absence of what came before. In revealing these present absences, we must learn to “share space with the ghostly contours of a stone, the radioactivity of a fingerprint, the eggs of a horseshoe crab, a wild bat pollinator, an absent wildflower in a meadow, a lichen on a tombstone, a tomato growing in an abandoned car tire” (Gan et al. 2017, G12). While I agree that reflecting on the present absence in landscapes helps us to move forward without succumbing to narratives of progress, it is the stories that emerge from these haunted landscapes that I choose to focus on. It is the way that we reach for what is now lost that drives these stories on. If solastalgia is about grieving the world we have lost, and Weird fiction is driven by the opening of new worlds and new realities, then the two seem to have a strange, inverted relationship. Solastalgia marks a desire to hold onto the past, which may make the passage to new habits and new (weird) realities more difficult. Wonder, I argue, allows for the tension between solastalgia and the Weird to hold because wonder itself is a wound7 that opens. As a wound, it holds onto the past. It maintains the pain of a world newly opened. But it is also a pathway through, either to new worlds or to new habitual practices that incorporate the history of those wounds. Wonder, then, is a possible exploration of new worlds that 7  Howard L.  Parsons offers an etymological reading of wonder that explicitly connects wonder and wound (Parsons 1969, 85).

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does not forget the world we came from. It does not expel the grief and loss felt by solastalgia but builds new worlds and new stories through those traumatic wounds. I now turn to how this idea of wonder as wound allows for the tension between the loss of the old world and the embrace of the new world. This is a tension that requires ethical thinking and an understanding of something I call “Weird-species fields.” Ultimately, I argue that wonder is a virtue that can be cultivated for future projects within the field of environmental virtue ethics.

Weird-Species Fields In “Beneficial Relations Between Species,” Jeremy Bendik-Keymer formulates wonder as a kind of “positive anxiety.” For Bendik-Keymer, this wonder as positive anxiety is specifically a “biocentric wonder” that is “especially focused on the living (living beings or life itself)” (Bendik-­ Keymer 2021, 4). Two things arise out of biocentric wonder. First, is that wonder is about being “open to how something makes sense” (Bendik-­ Keymer 2021, 4). This claim echoes previous claims made by Rubenstein, Prinz, and Kosky about wonder as a mechanism for being open to new possibilities. But it also highlights the way that meaning is made via sense. Not only does this entail the perceptual undertaking of our bodies to sense the world, it also locates making sense as contextual. Second, biocentric wonder is non-anthropocentric and therefore, acknowledges that “other living beings have their own kinds” and “flourish in their own way” (Bendik-Keymer 2021, 6). This concern for nonhuman flourishing maps onto an environmental virtue ethic that takes wonder as a virtue (Treanor 2014, 48). The contextual nature of a wonder that focuses on life (both human and non-human) leads Bendik-Keymer to formulate what he calls “multi-­ species fields,” which “keep in view the relational nature and complexity of living interdependence” and acts as a “a moral heuristic as well as an ineliminable part of the logic of living beings” (Bendik-Keymer 2021, 11). What is interesting is how Bendik-Keymer navigates the connection between multi-species fields and wonder. Wonder is an openness to how things make sense as a positive anxiety that does not collapse possibility. Multi-species fields are a collective making sense of a given space and context. This relieves the human from the center and allows for wonder to be a fecund moral component of the activity of eco-systems.

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Bendik-Keymer pushes the boundaries of eco-centrism by establishing the excess of human projected boundaries, claiming that “wondering over multi-species fields keeps one focused on the living that exceeds the organization and understanding of the field” (Bendik-Keymer 2021, 14). He also clarifies that multi-species fields are not discrete objects with a clear beginning and end. Instead, “ecological wholes blend into each other, are relatable, and are subsumable in larger wholes, such as regional conditions” (Bendik-Keymer 2021, 9). There is a rich messiness to multi-­species fields that resonates with operative wonder. However, I want to take the idea further and better align it with Weird operative wonder. I therefore offer what I have called Weird-species fields as an accretion to Bendik-­ Keymer’s concept. In my 2022 article, “Weird Environmental Ethics,” I made the connection between multi-species fields and Weird-species fields, highlighting two specific things. First, multi-species fields seem to operate under the general assumption of interaction, while Weird-species fields operate under the general assumption of intra-action. As discussed in Chap. 1, this is a distinction made by Barad to articulate the ontological relationship between multiple objects. Interaction claims that objects are discrete and separate prior to relation. Intra-action claims that all objects discursively emerge without previously existing as discrete objects. While multi-species fields allow for the blurring of boundaries between ecological wholes, it maintains discrete objects within those fields. Weird-species fields, on the other hand, accept the blurring of ecological wholes but also posits the blurring of the content of those fields. Every animal, plant, river, rock, and human emerge via intra-action. Second, Weird-species fields are deeply messy and entangled objects. Entanglements are weird because entanglement requires intimate involvement. One is already entangled in the Weird-species field they are attempting to describe or analyze. In the introduction to their special issue on entanglement and speculative realisms, Pérez de Miles and Kalin highlight the benefit of visual essays to express entanglement from a new materialist and speculative realist perspective. They observe that “From a new materialist(s) perspective, the point of a visual essay is not to simply mirror or reflect reality but to diffract ideas, moments, events and actions in ways that can be read and experienced diffractively” (Pérez de Miles and Kalin 2018, 7). This kind of diffractive reading, a technique that forgoes hard boundaries between ideas and focuses instead on a wavelike generativity that motivates new discursive emergences, “reject(s) dualisms that

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separate nature/culture, facts/concerns, sciences/humanities” (Pérez de Miles and Kalin 2018, 7). By rejecting these dualisms that “elide diffractive readings” it becomes possible to pay “attention to the resonances and dissonances of difference that make entanglement visible (Barad 2012)” (Pérez de Miles and Kalin 2018, 7). The project of making entanglement visible is particularly compelling. By highlighting visual essays, Pérez de Miles and Kalin focus on art as a way to develop the visibility of entanglement. Along with art, I argue that Weird-species fields help to identify and make visible entanglement in process. Using Weird-species fields as a mechanism for making entanglement visible calls to mind Aldo Leopold’s use of food webs in his famous articulation of the “land ethic.” In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold claims that historically ethics has “rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” (Leopold 1949, 203). He takes this idea and develops it into the foundation of the land ethic, which “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include…the land” (Leopold 1949, 204). Clearly, Leopold’s land ethic is one oriented toward the flourishing of those who reside in the land. His oft-quoted claim that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” makes this clear (Leopold 1949, 224–225). More than biotic communities, the land ethic is a move to a deeply eco-centric view that extends ethical consideration to eco-systems. Beyond the biocentric wonder of multi-species fields, we may consider the wonder of Weird-species fields fully eco-centric in that ethical consideration is not limited to living entities. The connection to the visibility of entanglement is, perhaps, most striking when Leopold says that “an ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism. We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in” (Leopold 1949, 214). If we accept Leopold’s claim, and we desire to extend ethical consideration to Weird-species fields, then we must have some representation of them. But food webs and land pyramids will not do for Weird-species fields. It may not even be the case that we can apply an image directly to entangled Weird-species fields because anytime one experiences or attends to entanglement, they too are already entangled. The description of entanglement is always done from the inside, always-­ already a messy practice. It is not a description of entanglement but a habituation of entanglement, a creation of entanglement. Leopold’s

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images seem to imply a distance between observer and observed. Without such a distance in Weird-species fields, we must look for how creation occurs from within. To do so we may look at diffraction as a tool for thinking about the visibility of Weird-species fields and how it aligns with the general project of Weird fiction.

Weird Environmental Ethics Both Bendyk-Keymer and Leopold advocate for an ethical framework that pursues the flourishing of humans and nonhumans alike. Because he sees wonder as biocentric, Bendyk-Keymer’s ethical focus is on biotic communities. Leopold, on the other hand, develops a land ethic that expands ethical consideration to non-biotic communities, including mountains, streams, and chemical processes. The question that takes up the rest of the chapter is whether or not operative wonder can be situated within an ethical context, and how the Weird manifests in that framework. In my article, “Weird Environmental Ethics,” I argue that if Weird operative wonder has an ethical component, it is best situated within an environmental virtue ethic. Ultimately, wonder shows up as a kind of virtue between the excess of anxiety and the deficiency of boredom and is located specifically within a discussion about climate change. If we fail to wonder, even at the terror of climate change, then the stories we tell become stagnant. And like Marjorie in “Growing Things,” not only do we fail to maintain standard practices of self-care (e.g., changing pajamas), we also have no means by which to engage the extruding world emerging around us. But if we wonder too much, even in a colloquial use of the epistemological sense of wonder (e.g., I wonder what comes next), then our positive anxiety quickly becomes negative anxiety. Ultimately, I make the following claims: • Wonder is a virtue between the deficiency of boredom and the excess of anxiety • Wonder is a capacity that increases the possibility of flourishing as new worlds emerge • One way to cultivate a virtue of wonder is through fictional stories While I will not rehearse the full argument here, I want to build on these claims about ethical consideration, flourishing, and cultivation. Returning to the claim that we need a kind of image to proceed with ethical analysis, I look to Weird fiction as a potential source of that image.

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I am not claiming that Weird fiction is the only source, but that it does supply an image for thinking through the ethical implications of the weird world. That is, following Cisco, we can say that we are destined for a departure toward a new, impossible world. Or, if we have already arrived (like Merry at the beginning of “Growing Things”), then we need new stories to help navigate our entry into the Weird world that is both ours and not ours at the same time. It is likely that any technical deliberation about ethics is a uniquely human practice. As such, it is curious to locate a uniquely human practice within a text that argues for a non-anthropocentric wonder. However, I offer two counterclaims to this initial intuition. First, we maintain our own ability to wonder alongside other objects that wonder differently. That is, humans still experience wonder in a specifically human context, within the limitations of human reflection, and via the standard for human experience. Second, the uniquely human practice of wonder, and especially wonder as a virtue, empowers the flourishing of human, nonhuman, and non-biotic communities to flourish, which may also thereby promote operative wonder to manifest beyond the scope of human communities. The goal is to find images of Weird-species fields to populate an ethic that promotes the flourishing of both human and nonhuman communities. We can think of the museum or the garden as initial examples. Both attest to the entangled, intra-active communication of objects and qualities in recession and revelation while resisting strict borders. Consistent with Cisco, we can also look at Weird fiction as a source for images of Weird-species fields. Weird fiction offers stories that deterritorialize the ordinary as our taken for granted ground of reality. Taking up Weird fiction allows us to inhabit other worlds8 and to generate an imaginative re-­ enchantment of nature and the world. This is required due to the ongoing trauma of climate change that has explicitly opened the world as a wound. Brian Evenson’s short story “The Second Door” provides an example of a productive weirdness that resonates with our own world while deterritorializing the ordinary. 8  In “Narrative Ethics,” Richard Kearney articulates how narrative offers us the chance to take up another person’s perspective and live in their world. For Kearney, this has ethical importance because it allows us to extend a kind of empathy to others. Likewise, if we have narratives that can help us imagine Weird-species fields, nonhuman or non-biotic communities as quasi-agential, or a challenge to absolute knowledge via ambiguity, then narratives can enlarge our ethical consideration and imagination.

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The Second Door and the Invitation The structure of “The Second Door” feels eerily similar to Tremblay’s “Growing Things.” We are introduced to a pair of siblings, this time a brother and sister, who are trapped inside a dwelling place in what seems like a post-apocalyptic world. The title refers to two doors, set in the same hallway, opposite each other. The first door looks out onto a plain and can be “used in time of need” to gather food and supplies (Evenson 2018, 310). The second door, however, is never to be used because to use it “would be to invite the end” (Evenson 2018, 310). Like Merry, who awaits the knock that means the world is over, the second door is a mechanism for bringing about the destiny of the departure. In the middle of the story, the narrator attempts to leave the dwelling via the second door but is stopped by his sister. It isn’t clear why he wants to leave, or where he wants to go, but there is strength to the call from the other side. It is as if the narrator is a good phenomenologist attempting to navigate the epoché and to investigate the other side of the given. As in “Growing Things” the older sibling, here “the sister,” also tells stories. Instead of describing growing things, the sister uses puppets to tell stories about the parents that were previously lost. Again, we have the loss of a world in which the figures of care (the parents) are absent. The world as it was, is remembered through stories, and through these stories the imagined futures are filled. Perhaps this is what motivates the desire in the brother to open the second door. He wants to escape the limit of the stories he is given to generate new possibilities; to escape the old wound of losing his parents and open a new wound that leads to his Weird departure. Like in “Growing Things,” the stories told by the older sister start to wane. The sister begins to lose her language and she is no longer able to communicate with the brother. Unlike “Growing Things,” where Merry tends to her sister’s needs and begins to tell her own stories, in “The Second Door,” the brother concludes that the sister has been replaced by something from outside of the first door. He plans and executes the expulsion of the pseudo sister via the first door and turns his full attention to the second door, in which he has begun to see a ghostly face that closely resembles his own. The brother then becomes the storyteller, appropriating the dolls to represent himself and the face he sees in the second door. Is it him? Is it his sister? The dolls act out the confrontation at the second door, the ghostly (puppet) figure hidden behind a blanket; felt but unseen. The second door here becomes a rift in reality that conceals whatever is on

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the other side. The second doll cannot break through the blanket, just like the ghostly figure cannot open the second door. Ultimately, the story ends when the dolls act out an invitation to the end by opening the door. It isn’t clear if the brother (now stripped of that designation by the absence of his sister) will follow the sister, but he openly worries that he too will lose his language, and thereby, lose himself. We do not find out what is on the other side of the second door and the story leaves us with an open-ended mystery. For Cisco, this ability to make “reality ambiguous” is a mark of the Weird. It is a “radical ambiguity” that helps “to open the closed set of ordinary experience” (Cisco 2021, 28). It is easy to read the second door as a suicidal escape hatch. When things get bad, there is always the second door, in which we are embraced by oblivion. But there is also a reading where the second door is a kind of entryway to what is unknown. Instead of H.P. Lovecraft’s dread, here we get a kind of hopeful generativity. The impossible is not collapsed into the known and thereby leaves open pathways to new worlds. It leaves open the possibility of our destined departure. In “Growing Things,” we get a clear image of the two extremes of Weird wonder as a virtue. The father initially leaves because he is too “squirrely.” He paces back and forth, unsure of what to do. He enacts an anxiety over the end of the world that causes him to give up food and to give up his home; the wonder is too great. There are too many possibilities where the world will catch up to them, and their relatively safe home is overrun and ruined by the growing things or by some other force. At one point, Merry draws on the floor in hopes that her father will “catch her, and yell at her” because “maybe…it’ll stop him from being squirrely” (Tremblay 2019, 6). Generating anger in her father would collapse the possibilities into a singularity, reducing the anxiety about what is available as a course of action. But Merry’s father pays no mind to her disobedience and instead leaves the house to gather supplies. Marjorie, on the other hand, suffers from a deficiency of wonder and hurtles toward a life of inaction in the face of the apocalypse. Marjorie is said to “withdraw and fade” as she tells stories about the suburbs (what could be more boring than the suburbs?) (Tremblay 2019, 7). She continues to relay the stories without giving them any life or any meaning. She does not want to imagine a world in which they thrive and flourish. She has the stories but, in her boredom, they have no movement and no life. Like her father, Marjorie is also described as squirrely. But instead of leading her to pace the room or

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abandon the house, her squirreliness means that she keeps her book of stories closed. Merry, on the other hand, maintains a positive anxiety through the act of telling new stories that are constitutive and constituted by her new world. This is not to say that Merry is necessarily hopeful, or that her stories will always result in flourishing. But maintaining an openness to her stories is a condition for the possibility of flourishing in a new world. In Emplotting Virtue, Brian Treanor draws a clear path between narrative, identity, and virtue ethics, going so far as to claim that “virtue ethics is unintelligible without a clear account of identity, and identity is unintelligible without a clear account of narrative” (Treanor 2014, 111). The formation of narrative helps to shape who we are, and knowing who we are determines the ways that we flourish. While Treanor stays close to Aristotelian versions of identity and self, the idea that narrative is helpful for understanding how we flourish is important for thinking through how ethics and Weird-species fields relate. If we maintain the standard story of materiality, selfhood, interaction, objects, agency, and so on, then it becomes more difficult to navigate a Weird world because we are wedded to ineffective modes of flourishing. If, on the other hand, we take up a new identity that includes the messy entanglement of vibrant matter, distributed agency, flat ontologies, and operative wonder, then we begin to plot a new narrative that reshapes what it means to flourish. And in the anticipation that the climate-changed world is either in the process of fundamental change or already fundamentally changed, we must find new ways of habituating our practices to appropriately align with the Weird-­ species fields populated with intra-acting objects that actively wonder. Like Merry, the brother in “The Second Door” also maintains the act of storytelling. While the sister does not map as easily onto the excess of anxiety or the deficiency of boredom, she clearly loses her ability to tell stories and to keep open the possibility of flourishing in a new world. She is the keeper of the second door and does not allow her brother to open it. She tells him that it is like they are stuck “in two places at once” in a kind of “no place” (Evenson 2018, 312). I have described operative wonder as a superposition of states, which entails that wonder navigates being in “two places at once.” But wonder is not stuck in this place. Instead, it is fecund, open, and generative. The sister acts to keep them in superposition without the possibility of moving forward. In that sense, it is as if she is in a state of anxiety and boredom at the same time. Both options (the first door and the second door) are simultaneously available to them, and

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yet she does not want to embrace either one. The sister is a figure of survival rather than flourishing. And as we move forward through the crisis of climate change, an ethical question we have to ask is whether or not we hope to survive, or if we hope to flourish. I claim that Weird, operative wonder offers the possibility of flourishing in the face of an open wound, of flourishing inside that world and maintaining a balance between debilitating anxiety and excessive boredom. Using Barad’s diffractive reading, which she describes as a tool for “reading insights through one another in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter” (Barad 2007, 71), we can begin to see how Weird fiction and Weird-­ species fields offer “images” for ethical analysis. Unlike Leopold’s images, these are not visual aids, but do help us to encounter an emotional and affective response to an organized set of objects that always exceed their limitations. Left in ambiguity of the departure to the Weird, the worlds of Weird fiction expand into our own, creating habits of ambiguity, tension, suspension, and ultimately wonder that can be cultivated toward action, especially in response to crises. For Pérez and Kalin, diffraction marks a move from a “self-referential” ontology to a “relational, responsible and ethical…framework” (Pérez de Miles and Kalin 2018, 6) that disrupts an unproblematic relationship with epistemology by creating distance from the standard, universal rational agent offered in most western ethical frameworks (Lindemann 2019, 75). At the heart of this diffractive method is a reading that allows for a multitude of meanings to emerge. This is close to what Eileen A. Joy has called “weird reading,” which embraces “being open to incoherence…as one possible route toward a non-­ routinized un-disciplinarity that privileges unknowing over mastery of knowledge” (Joy 2013, 29–30). Weird, diffractive reading, then, may be a habitual practice that helps us to cultivate a sense of wonder, where reading entails not only the engagement with written texts, but with landscapes, city-scapes, nonhuman-scapes, ecosystems, flickering ontologies (Morton 2016), and Weird-species fields. A Weird environmental hermeneutics shows up as a generative practice and as an embodied habit of entanglement that challenges us to flourish in a climate-changed world. Through a practice of Weird, diffractive reading, knowledge is kept from collapsing into a single story and, via operative wonder, we are left to delight in the open wound of the world. Thinking about wonder as ontologically operative means that wonder is always at play. Locating Weird, operative wonder within an ethical

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context, highlights how humans and human communities can engage with wonder as a generative mechanism for opening new worlds and new possibilities. In short, it operates as a mechanism for navigating the world as Weird. Weird fiction provides a tool for imagining ethical practices in Weird-species fields and offers a kind of emotional residence that enables us to make entanglement visible. In doing so, we can cultivate wonder as a balance between the excess of anxiety and the deficiency of boredom to tell new stories, generate care for human and nonhuman communities, and to depart the world and become Weird.

References Albrecht, Glenn. 2006. Solastalgia. Alternatives Journal 32: 34–36. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy. 2021. Beneficial Relations Between Species & the Moral Responsibility of Wonder. Environmental Politics 31: 1–18. Campbell, Norah, Gerard McHugh, and Paul Dylan-Ennis. 2019. Climate Change Is Not a Problem: Speculative Realism at the End of Organization. Organization Studies 40: 724–744. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror Or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Cisco, Michael. 2021. Weird Fiction: A Genre Study. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Evenson, Brian. 2018. The Second Door. In The Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Five, ed. Robert Shearman and Michael Kelly, 307–317. Pickering, ON: Undertow Publications. Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books. Friedman, Thomas. 2010. Global Weirding Is Here. The New York Times, February 17. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/opinion/17friedman.html. Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. 2017. Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt, G1– G14. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Graham, Elaine L. 2002. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Gunderson, Marianne. 2017. Other Ethics: Decentering the Human in Weird Horror. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 26: 2–3. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf. v26i2-­3.110547. Guy, Jean Sébastien. 2020. Durkheim Meets Cthulhu: The Impure Sacred in H. P. Lovecraft. Journal for Cultural Research 24 (4): 286–300.

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Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Washington, DC: Zero Books. Joshi, S.T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2018. Why Michel Houellebecq Is Wrong About Lovecraft’s Racism. Lovecraft Annual 12: 43–50. Joy, Eileen A. 2013. Weird Reading. Speculations IV: 28–34. Lanzendörfer, Tim. 2021. The Weird in/of Crisis, 1930/2010. In The American Weird, ed. Julius Greve and Florian Zappe, 72–88. New  York: Bloomsbury Academic. Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac: Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press. Lindemann, Hilde. 2019. An Invitation to Feminist Ethics. 2d ed. New  York: Oxford University Press. Lovecraft, H.P. 1973. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover. ———. 2020. Dagon. In Macabre Stories, ed. H.P.  Lovecraft, 21–27. London, UK: Arcturus Publishing. Matzke, Brian. 2022. “A Hidden Race of Monstrous Beings”: Richard Wright’s Revision of H.P.  Lovecraft’s Ecological Horror. Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present 21(1). https://www.proquest. com/scholarly-­j ournals/hidden-­r ace-­m onstrous-­b eings-­r ichard-­w rights/ docview/2759877179/se-­2. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. New York: Continuum. Miéville, China. 2009. Weird Fiction. In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 510–516. New York: Routledge. Morton, Timothy. 2016. Weird Embodiment. In Sentient Perfomitivities of Embodiment: Thinking Alongside the Human, 19–34. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Onishi, Brian. 2020. Weird Ecologies and the Uncanny in The Happening. In Philosophy, Film, and the Dark Side of Interdependence, ed. Jonathan Beever, 157–173. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Onishi, Brian Hisao. 2022. Weird Environmental Ethics: The Virtue of Wonder and the Rise of Eco-Anxiety. SATS – Northern European Journal of Philosophy 23 (1): 33–53. Parsons, Howard L. 1969. A Philosophy of Wonder. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (1): 84–101. Pérez de Miles, Adetty, and Nadine M.  Kalin. 2018. Speculative Realism(s) Objects/Matter/Entanglements of Art and Design Education. International Journal of Education Through Art 14 (1): 3–12.

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Sendyka, Roma. 2016. Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-sites of Memory. East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 30 (4): 687–702. Treanor, Brian. 2014. Emplotting Virtue: A Narrative Approach to Environmental Virtue Ethics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Tremblay, Paul. 2019. Growing Things. In Growing Things and Other Stories, ed. Paul Tremblay, 5–16. New York: William Morrow. Warsini, Sri, Jane Mills, and Kim Usher. 2014. Solastalgia: Living with the Environmental Damage Caused by Natural Disasters. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 29: 87–90.

Index1

NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS 1Q84, vii, 30, 49, 52–56, 122 A Actor-network theory (ANT), 14 Aesthetic causality, vii, 40–52 Aesthetics, vi, vii, 29–56, 91 Agency, vi, vii, xiii–xv, 7, 9–11, 13, 19, 20, 24, 38, 46, 48, 69, 73–75, 79, 80, 91, 108, 109, 122, 135, 144 Agential cuts, 24, 55, 64, 73, 74, 109 Agential-realism, 7, 8, 23, 69, 71, 109 Anthropocentrism/anthropocentric, xiii, 14, 59–63, 72, 121, 137 Antisemitism, 123 Anxiety, viii, 62, 122, 127, 130, 131, 137, 140, 143–146 Aquinas, Thomas, 3 Aristotle, v, xvi, 3, 10, 17, 18, 34, 68 Arts of Wonder, 34, 36, 102, 103

Assemblage, 9, 20, 21, 23, 33, 47–49, 51, 54, 55, 64, 71, 73–75, 78–81, 86, 97, 98, 114, 115 At the Mountains of Madness, 125, 130, 131 B Bacon, Francis, 1, 3 Barad, Karen, xiv, xv, 7–9, 12, 13, 19, 23–25, 29n1, 54, 59, 64, 67, 69–74, 81, 89, 105, 106n4, 107–110, 113, 116, 122, 138, 139, 145 Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy, 137, 138 Bennett, Jane, 9, 10, 12, 19–21, 34–36, 59, 123 Bhakuni, Himani, 61 Biocentric, 137, 139, 140 Biotic communities, 139, 140 Bogost, Ian, 16, 17, 21, 59, 76, 85, 86

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. H. Onishi, Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48027-0

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INDEX

Bohr, Niels, 7, 13, 64, 69, 70, 81 Boredom, viii, xvi, 30, 31, 101, 122, 140, 143–146 Brittle star, xv Bryant, Levi, 17–20, 22, 25, 35, 59, 63, 71–79, 79n2, 105 C Campbell, Norah, 133–135 Carrol, Noël, 124 Cathedrals of consumption, 95, 96 Causality, vii, 7, 19, 29–56, 73–76, 83, 86 Chambers of Horror, 98 Cisco, Michael, 123–127, 129, 130, 141, 143 Climate change, viii, 126–137, 132n4, 140, 141, 145 Company scrip, 79 Conatus, 20 Copenhagen interpretation, 70, 81 Correlationism, xiii, 63, 65, 69, 71, 72, 82, 85, 131 Correlationist Circle, see Correlationism Crist, Eileen, 61 D Dagon, 125, 127 Daston, Lorraine, 65, 68 Davenne, Christine, 91–93 Decoherence, vii, 83, 84 DeLanda, Manuel, 6, 7, 9 Delight, 30, 31, 47, 96, 101, 145 De Maria, Walter, 37 The Democracy of Objects, 22 Descartes, Rene, 1, 3, 10, 34, 78, 103 Deterritorialization, 123, 124, 126 Diffractive reading, vii, xiv, 2, 33, 64, 138, 139, 145

Dillon, M.C., 4, 12, 15, 16, 104 Disenchantment, vi, viii, 21, 29n1, 33–39, 93, 94, 96, 102, 123 Distributed agency, xv, 73, 74, 80, 144 Dolphijn, Rick, 6, 7, 9, 110 Duchamp, Marcel, 105 Dylan-Ennis, Paul, 133 E Eco-centrism, 138 Eco-Weird, 129–135 Edutainment, 89, 95, 96, 98, 101 Embodiment, xv, 6 Enchantment, vi, viii, 9, 21, 33–36, 38, 39, 52, 54, 91, 94–100, 123 The Enchantment of Modern Life, 21 Entanglement, vii, xvi, 8, 9, 24, 42, 43, 46, 54, 71, 72, 79n2, 80, 138, 139, 144–146 Environmental hermeneutics, 145 Environmental virtue ethics, viii, 121, 137, 140 Epistemological wonder, 1–3, 33, 38, 59, 65, 66, 84 Epoché, 61, 63, 75, 124, 142 Evans, Fred, 5 Evenson, Brian, 141, 142, 144 Extrusion, 133, 135, 136 F Feminism, 6 Fingerhut, Joerg, 96, 101, 101n2 Fisher, Mark, 126, 132 Fisher, Philip, 30–34, 38, 50, 54, 65 Flat ontology, 76, 106 Flesh, vi, 5, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20–26, 41, 41n4, 42, 71, 89, 105–108, 110, 112, 113 Freedom, 35, 85

 INDEX 

G Garden, viii, 90, 100, 102, 109, 111–117, 141 Gestalt, 12, 24 Getty, J. Paul, 113, 114 Getty Museum, 113 Global weirding, 132n4, 133 Goldsworthy, Andy, 102, 103 Graham, Elaine L., 132 Greenfield Village, 90, 91, 95, 97 Gruen Transfer, 99, 102 Gunderson, Marianne, 132, 133 H Haraway, Donna, 128, 129, 135 Harman, Graham, xii, 5, 14–18, 15n3, 40, 41n4, 59, 60, 63, 73, 76, 77, 81, 132 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 90, 111–113, 115–117 Haunting, 99, 136 The Haunting of Hill House, 91 Heidegger, Martin, xiii, xvi, 3, 4, 14, 62, 84, 108, 111 Hendrix, Grady, 89, 98, 122 Hermeneutics, 145 Horrorstör, 89, 98–100, 122 Hume, David, 3 Husserl, Edmund, xiv, 54, 61, 62, 82 I Ikea, 96–98, 96n1, 100 Ineinander, 107 Intra-action, 7, 9, 19, 25, 49, 71, 80, 89, 105, 107, 108, 138 J Jackson, Shirley, 91 Joshi, S. T., 123n2, 126 Joy, Eileen A., 145

151

K Kant, Immanuel, 3, 10, 34, 82 Karp, Ivan, 95 Kindynis, Theo, 99 Kingscote Garden, 115 Kopnina, Helen, 60, 61 Kosky, Jeffrey L., vi, vii, 29n1, 34, 36–39, 37n3, 46, 102–104, 106, 107, 123, 137 Kratz, Corrine, 95 Kullman, Karl, 99, 100 L Land ethic, 139, 140 Lanzendörfer, Tim, 130, 131 Latour, Bruno, 9, 14, 109 The law of noncontradiction, 30, 40–47, 52, 78 Leopold, Aldo, 139, 140, 145 The Lightning Field, 37, 37n3, 39, 46, 91 Lindley, David, 64, 66–71, 83, 84 Lloyd, Genevieve, 2, 3 Lovecraft, H.P., 122, 123, 123n2, 125, 126, 130–132, 143 M Machines, 24, 72–75, 77–80, 79n2, 83, 100 Maleuvre, Didier, 94, 107 Malplaquet House, 91, 92, 97 Martinon, Jean-Paul, 110, 111, 114, 116 Maui, xi, xii, 49 Mauries, Patrick, 93 McFadden, JohnJoe, 81 McHugh, Gerard, 133 Measurement, 43, 44, 46, 64, 66–72, 79, 81, 84, 93, 110 Meeting the Universe Halfway, xv, 7, 24

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INDEX

Meillassoux, Quentin, 131–133 Meno’s paradox, 65 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, v–viii, xiii, xiv, xvi, 2, 4–7, 9–16, 20–25, 29n1, 32, 41, 41n4, 42, 44n5, 48–51, 54, 59, 62–64, 66, 70, 71, 74, 75, 82, 84, 86, 89, 104–108, 106n4, 110, 112, 115, 122, 123 Mexican Gothic, 91 Miéville, China, 130 Moreno-Garcia, Silvia, 91 Morton, Timothy, vi, vii, 39–46, 41n4, 44n5, 52, 54, 59, 78, 145 Multi-species fields, 137, 138 Murakami, Haruki, 30, 49, 50, 52, 55, 122 Museums, viii, 86, 89–98, 100–104, 106, 109–118, 114n5, 141 N Natural attitude, xiii, 54, 55, 62, 75, 124 New materialism, v–viii, xii–xiv, xvi, 1–26, 29, 33, 59, 60, 64, 75, 77, 79n2, 106n4, 122 O Object-oriented ontology, v–viii, xii– xiv, xvi, 1–26, 29, 30, 33, 40, 41, 41n4, 44, 44n5, 52, 59, 60, 63, 64, 71, 72, 75–77, 84, 85, 89, 105, 122 Oele, Marjolein, 113 Onto-Cartography, 72–86 Ontological wonder, vi, vii, xiii, xv, xvi, 1–6, 23, 26, 29, 30, 36, 39, 59–86 Operative wonder, vii, viii, xii, xiii, 2, 29–56, 59–86, 97, 99, 105, 113,

122, 123, 125, 131, 138, 140, 141, 144, 145 Optimum distance, 86, 104, 105, 107 P Park, Katherine, 65, 68 Parsons, Howard L., 1, 136n7 Pedersen, Jan B.W., 3, 32, 33, 33n2 Phenomenological conversion, 112, 117 Phenomenology, xiii, xiv, 6, 14, 16, 36, 44n5, 59, 61–64, 66, 69, 71, 75, 82, 84, 85, 106n4, 122 The Phenomenology of Perception, xiv, 4, 8, 12, 13, 21, 23, 44n5, 51, 82, 86, 104, 106, 107 Philosophy-physics, 64, 67, 69, 89, 105, 110 Plato, v, 2, 10, 25, 110 Positive anxiety, 137, 140, 144 Post-apocalyptic, 126, 142 Posthumanist, 7, 60, 69 Prinz, Jesse, 96, 101, 101n2, 137 Pyrosome, 73, 74 Q The Quadruple Object, 15 Quantum entanglement, 8, 43, 80 Quantum physics, vii, xv, xvi, 6, 8, 13, 43, 44, 64–72, 75, 77, 81, 83, 107, 116, 122 Quasi-agency, vi, xv, 20, 34–36, 38, 52, 109, 114, 115 R Racism, 122, 123, 123n2 Rainbow, 30–32, 38, 50 Realism/realist, xiii, 8, 16, 23, 24, 30, 40, 41, 44, 44n5, 59, 61–71, 85, 106n4, 109, 131, 133, 138

 INDEX 

Re-enchantment, 6, 29n1, 33–39, 95, 124, 141 Ritzer, George, 95, 96 Rugoff, Ralph, 100, 101 S A Sand County Almanac, 139 Schmitz, Kenneth, 35, 36, 47 Sendyka, Roma, 136 Sexism, 122, 123 Socrates, 2, 3, 78, 110 Solastalgia, 127, 134–137 The Southern Reach Trilogy, 130, 131 Sparrow, Tom, 61–64, 85 Supernatural Horror in Literature, 123 Superposition, vii, viii, xvi, 44, 45, 48, 70, 81–84, 86, 105, 121, 144 T Thaumazein, v, xiii, xvi, 1–3 Theaetetus, v, 2, 17, 33, 78, 110 Thing-power, 10, 19 Trauma, 55, 135–137, 141 Treanor, Brian, 137, 144 Tremblay, Paul, 126–128, 142, 143 Turrel, James, 103, 104, 107, 108, 128

153

U Uncertainty principle, 66, 67, 69 V VanderMeer, Jeff, 130, 131 Van Der Tuin, Iris, 6, 7, 9, 110 Vibrant Matter, 9, 20 The Visible and the Invisible, 5, 9, 10, 12, 14–16, 21, 22, 41, 42, 64, 89, 106, 110, 112 W Weird Environmental Ethics, 121–146 Weird fiction, viii, xii, 89, 121n1, 122–126, 123n2, 129–133, 136, 140, 141, 145, 146 Weird reading, 145 Weird-species fields, viii, 121n1, 122, 137–141, 141n8, 144–146 Weird wonder, viii, 1, 2, 121, 121n1, 122, 143 Y Yasuko, Suga, 98