Thus, real objects, inaccessible, cut off by a “firewall," can enter relations only through sensual objects. In contrast, sensual objects can only touch through real objects. Harman refers to a “vicarious causality" to explain how the relationship between real objects is caused vicariously or where the sensual object is vicar of the real object. Further, the relationship thus formed forms a new object. The sensual object allows two real objects to relate, which forms the new object in which the sensual object and real object contact. For Harman, causation is alluring or affective at the point where real objects touch through sensual ones, and, as such, all objects may be alluring to all other objects, albeit some objects have a stronger allure than others.
I have emphasized Harman's posture toward objects because it turns attention toward the primary and secondary qualities of objects, given that the latter—color taste, or heat—are understood to be qualities of a subject's perception. In contrast, primary qualities belong to the object itself, such as length, width, and depth. But in questioning correlationism and relationism, the distinctions betweenprimary and secondary qualities are troubled. It is suggested that all qualities might be thought of as secondary, while being transformable in the relations objects have with each other, removed from the privilege of human consciousness. And yet in the withdrawal of the real object, as the sensual object allures other objects, there is a philosophical protection of the real object while its primary and secondary qualities are opened to profound transformation—let us say by a technoscience such as nanotechnology. After all, Parisiproposes that nanotechnology is turning attention to mathematical technologies that seem to be rendering curvilinearity, making extension in matter, or the prehension of eternal objects, operative and experienceable; nanotechnology means to neutralize the distinction between the physical composition of materials—atoms, photons, protons, electrons—and their properties, such as color, shape, smoothness, brightness, and so on, such that material can change their substance instantaneously.8
In such a situation, the tension between process philosophies and object-oriented ones might reveal a particular political, economic, and governmental configuration of labor, technology, bodies, and affect. While the process philosophies have enabled critics such as Parisi to keep an eye on technological transformation and the resulting capacity for the capture and manipulation of potential, thereby affecting life, labor, and matter, the object-oriented ontologies might be put to critical use as the investments of technoscience and capital keep seeking to capture every excess of measure; the object-oriented philosophies might give us philosophical ground when potential and virtualitó no longer have a positive valence or only a positive
The Digital, Labor, and Measure beyond Biopolitics
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