I wasn’t sure how to proceed at first, but reading and re-reading,
four phrases kept jumping out. Here in reverse order from how they
appeared in your post.

Unfortunately, the only earnest approach is with regards to the specific relation, but things aren’t static there, either.
To be quite frank, a thing passes from object to subject and back again, or simultaneously exists in the two abstract forms too frequently to be adequately approached as one or the other.
Everything is real. Everything is material.
What good is the concept of object, if you don’t have faith in that “real thing” to which its revelations point?

Starting at the top, I agree 120%. Harman’s more recent work has been
pulling from Latour, whose actor network theory wasn’t really situated
as a metaphysical claim as much as a social one, but Harman finds much
to mine from Latour. All actors, all objects, all things, are
constantly in networks of relations. That means that they are
constantly appearing to other things, other actors, both human and
non, and yes, (to move down the list of quotes) they are constantly
reversing back and forth between object and subject, in a sense. What
the object-oriented thinker claims is that this constant passing back
and forth between object and subject is really best explained if we
assume there is a thing there, an object existing to be both object
and subject. Object-oriented ontologies are not saying everything is
objective as opposed to subjective, the claim is that they are always
both. They are real, they exist (although I’d quibble that not
everything is material, e.g. ideas or numbers, but we can leave that
aside) but when they interact, when they relate to other objects,
other things, they reveal only a part of themselves.

When I see a rock, I affirm that it exists, out there, in the world,
but I only see part of it, the part of it that is revealed to me,
which is not the same part that’s revealed to the grass it’s lying on,
or the lizard resting on it. It is both an objective rock, an object
in the world, and a subjective rock-appearing or whatever sort of
jargon-y description one might want to employ.

For me, object works because I do have faith that there is a thing out
there that is relating to me, whether it be a person, rock, coffeepot,
idea, etc. But it works as a shorthand, barely descriptive, definitely
not prescriptive, but a doomed pointing-towards. Disagreement over
language in this case doesn’t strike me as particularly interesting,
but disagreement over belief in the “out-there” does. For me, while
everything exists in relation(s) to other things, the things are still
there, and it does them disservice to only talk of relations, to
ignore the things, the objects, which are doing the relating.

A brief introduction:

Chora l Works serves as an assembled documentation of a collaboration between architect Peter Eisenman and philosopher/theorist Jacques Derrida on a project for Parc de la Villette, Paris.

Just as this project seems to take Plato’s concept of chora as its discursive base, this is my attempt to open up my own admittedly imperfect and incomplete understanding of these passages without any concept of a whole or complete reading to refer to for a semblance of coherence, presumably so they might make their way from ideal to sensible form in the process.

Transcript One
In the brief pages of the first interaction, the participants (Eisenman, Derrida and co-editor of the book and architectural theorist Jeffrey Kipnis) sometimes seem tethered to the classical approaches they attempt to escape – that familiar attempt at subversion that leaves the radicalized project forever tied to that which it is hoping to resist. The conversation repeatedly falls back onto topics of representation, telos and use.

The thought sticks with me through my reading of this first section – this project, from the intentional cut outs in the printed text, to the thought of an “anarchitecture” resisting representation while trying to serve the production of a functional garden and an expression, literal or not, of chora, seems so rooted in a certain thinking and practice of the discursive art from a particular time. Some portions read as the quibbling over such concepts as textual versus architectural structure attributed to deconstruction by its detractors. Hierarchical value judgments inadvertently emerge contrary to intent, and it’s hard to resist the eye rolling that I am wont to do in such self-involved discussions regarding artistic work.

Perhaps what I mean is a reading ineluctably influenced by precipitations of the work of these and similar thinkers and with nearly twenty five years of discourse and practice to modify the experience, I find it difficult to resist the urge to find this antiquated.

Of course… this particular type of experience serves to mark as an opening of chora – what their project has opened is a discourse that has allowed for such a critique of the original project. This thought is a bit bold to set the tone of an ongoing reading, but I pledge openness throughout, even if I’m continually passing judgments along the way.

Notes and quotes:
On Chora
The focus of the conversation quickly turns to Derrida’s introduction of Plato’s chora as read in Timaeus. This concept serves as a third, intermediary form between the ideal and the sensible; a space that opens and allows place for the transition from one to the other. Hilarity ensues when the group tries to imagine the architectural form this might take, as, in Derrida’s own words, “as soon as we describe it, we are anachronistically projecting onto it.(10)”

On Eisenman
Eisenman’s early concern appears to be conveying his critique of classical, anthropocentric architecture, and finding a mode of synthesis within deconstruction via the work of Derrida (Chora l Works, 7-8). An interesting tension for Eisenman is revealed in a wavering between an objective that seems quite teleological despite its deconstructive intentions. This is continually acknowledged by Eisenman, who continually handicaps himself for his classical training and tendency towards it. I wouldn’t disagree. He continually expresses an interest in liminality of center and decentered, presence and absence (the absent present, the present absence, etc.), but traces of telos linger in many of his explanations.

That said, he provides a number of interesting thoughts. For instance, when Derrida raises the question of referring to the intent of the client, implying that this, under then(and still)current market conditions, is a necessary constraint, Eisenman notes that the idea of this anthropocentric resistant “anarchitecture” is to transcend use, and not allow it to generate and/or represent the project’s value. To compensate for his wavering he acknowledges the source of his difficulty – his interest is in a practicable architecture that overcomes the urge of flight, the dependence on architectural projects relegated to text and image because they are not sensible as constructions.

Another interesting dimension in this early interaction is the architect to philosopher interaction. Just as Kipnis and Derrida reign in Eisenman when he tends toward the classical, there is a compelling moment, coming from a place of complete reverence for Derrida, when Eisenman comments on Derrida’s idea to use sand or water to impress the idea of chora. In more polite terms, Eisenman suggests they consider materials less obvious, and without such strong allusions to the sacred. I wonder if there was a flush to Derrida’s cheeks…

Kipnis, provocateur
Kipnis, with whom I am unfamiliar, has taken an interesting role in these early proceedings. As liaison, he suggests, at a crucial moment, the Eisenman and Derrida attempt to dissolve their respective identities as architect and philosopher (7), and generally serves as unifier in moments where the distinction between architect and philosopher is a bit strained. For now, I want to leave his contributions as a delight to discover in one’s own reading of this book.

The problem, dear Bee, is the Metaphysics with a capital M. It requires a certain abstraction that I simply cannot reason. I don’t think there exists an abstract approach that can account for the ceaseless transition all things undergo. To be quite frank, a thing passes from object to subject and back again, or simultaneously exists in the two abstract forms too frequently to be adequately approached as one or the other.

And to add to it, I am one of those rhetorical sticklers, who strives for a language better suited to the thought. Object simply feels dishonest. It is rather metaphysical, removed, abstracted, distant. Linguistically, it has been kidnapped from that real to which it points. This is where the language thing does me in. It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like a total asshole, without descending into newly minted (and thus unintelligible) jargon. How to concisely undo all of metaphysics in a blog post, and not use conflicting terminology in the process, right?

See, this is the world as my mind has shaped it:

Everything is real. Everything is material.

Unfortunately, the only earnest approach is with regards to the specific relation, but things aren’t static there, either.

Sites and locations and subjects also don’t work. Events and Others are closer but still lacking.

What is to be done?

Thinkers are too often viewed as prophets instead of someone with some insight worth running with. The approaches alternate between attempts to argue that Descartes was RIGHT, or it becomes a navel-gaze-y attempt to work out every intricacy of every word Descartes has ever written. Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger, etc. are Authorities in that they came first, but they’re not sacred. And I tend to think this applies to everyone, contemporary or historical. We read the theorists and philosophers and critics we do because they have things to say, interesting, exciting and revolutionary things, but “their” insight is “theirs” only in that they first stated it. They don’t own it. And we as readers have no obligation to go where they go, or do what they do. One way in which the speculative realists and the object-oriented folks excite me is their willingness to not read history as IMMUTABLE TRUTH. In Harman’s case this means taking Heidegger’s concepts of tool and broken-tool and radically exploding its usefulness in ways that Heidegger may or may not have liked, which nicely leads to discussion of objects proper.

I understand the resistance, and the worry that object-talk is an attempt to objectify, or to freeze ideas and things, making them static. Talk of objects feels concrete. Things, objects, even tools, these are all words we use for concrete entities that are out there and for us, but that’s a failure of language, a problem that crops up frequently when I try to explain object-oriented philosophy to people. It’s crucial to keep in mind that object-oriented philosophy is intended as Metaphysics, with that capital M. The use of words like object and interact is problematic because there’s cultural baggage there, and that’s unavoidable really; but this is a constant problem for philosophy, especially when theory and philosophy meet. Philosophy sees language as an imperfect tool where as some theory takes our language as a starting point for analysis. So all I want to do here is try and show what an object-oriented philosophy is doing with these terms.

The real subjects of an object-oriented approach are things that exist, both material and immaterial in all their mystery and withdrawnness. At base, an object-oriented approach is committed to a few ideas. First, that objects, things, etc. exist, out there in the world. It is a realist metaphysic. Second, that those things don’t exist FOR humans. Every object is partially revealed through its interaction with other objects. Things aren’t FOR any single observer or actor, and things aren’t fully revealed through their multitude of interactions. To say a cup and a human and Harry Potter are all objects is not to fix them in any way, it is simply an attempt to point, even if briefly, at that real thing out there we’re interacting with.

There are different takes on how the objects should be understood, how they interact, the degree to which immaterial and material things are “real” etc. Even so, universally (as far as I’ve read I guess) objects really can’t be understood as fixed entities. Every interaction with another object reveals a new part of every object. It gets murky here because at some point you have to start taking into account the different approaches of different thinkers, but all objects (things, ideas, people, cups, etc.) are always and forever both withdrawn and inscrutable (tool) and constantly revealing new parts of themselves to other actors in their various networks (broken tool). We may never (for Harman will never) know the cup in its most private cupness, but we sure as hell know it as that thing that cracked when I tried to make tea in it.

This is preliminary, very much so. And I have no idea if it starts to assuage some of the worries about the terms, but here’s one last direct response to this bit in particular.

Mind, Being, Time. It’s all restlessness (thanks, Hegel!), it’s all shifting, so why do we settle on these objects, these ideas as bricks that leave gaps and give our lives the consistency of a game of Tetris? Even those oddly shaped bricks are dynamic once they’re fit together and changed/broken apart as time and the game proceed.

The way object-oriented philosophy views what it calls objects (i.e. every thing that is) assumes that the game of Tetris will constantly change. At any given point we could take a snapshot and the world would resemble a game of Tetris with blocks and gaps, but as we reveal more and more is revealed to us by other objects, the blocks shift, and the game changes. Objects are static only if we talk about them at a specific time or in a specific relation. With every new relation the objects reveal more, we reveal more. Objects are in some sense full to bursting with potentiality.

I’m thinking of authority (Authority) as that which makes the concept immutable, turns thought to thing, thereby placing it in the domain of the consideration of object.

In his Pocket Pantheon, I read about Alain Badiou being asked “what is a thing?” during his exams at Ecole Normale Superieure. My heart sank as I thought about how I could never adequately respond to such a prompt.

The thing is an object, and an object is a thing which makes me feel a bit sick to my (mind’s) stomach.

I guess I’m really rejecting the idea of object and the idea as object, and the tendency to regard both of those concepts with a certain laziness. Let’s make that clear from the outset.

Philosophy tends to catch itself in such totalities. Even though continental philosophy seems to have spent the last few decades breaking every-thing down and nesting in the open spaces and ambiguities and internalized thinkings-of’s that resulted, current thought still concerns itself with the Institutions of Capital and Material and Writing and all these Other Great Ideas That Become Things And Symbols That Require Initial Caps. Despite being things that are thought, these all become objects, external, and at some point, inscrutable.

I think back to a(n admittedly drunken) conversation with someone about Judith Butler on Hannah Arendt and the concept of (ZOMG!) “thinking with,” and while trying to undermine both brilliant thinkers, the best the critic could muster was that their understanding of the idea was wrong because they hadn’t correctly read Heidegger (but he has, of course.)

If the way Heidegger or whoever reads an idea becomes the Authority on that Concept, and that thought is, as such, closed to critique and minor/major adjustments as humans continue to live and be in the world, then we’re fucked. Yeah, there IS Being and Time* (ok, Time is debatable, but let’s go with it…) but there also exists the foundational being that begets Being and the time that intercedes and reshapes that being-Being so frequently as to require Time as a concept that shall also be reshaped as we think new Beings and modes of being and all the time-Time that reshapes those things, too. We can’t be so fascist as to rely uncritically on so-called Authority.

Mind, Being, Time. It’s all restlessness (thanks, Hegel!), it’s all shifting, so why do we settle on these objects, these ideas as bricks that leave gaps and give our lives the consistency of a game of Tetris? Even those oddly shaped bricks are dynamic once they’re fit together and changed/broken apart as time and the game proceed.

I guess the difficulties I face when thinking “object” come from my own desire to talk in potentials, our speech and our actions as relentless explorations rather than determinate conditions. Bee, please help me with this – I feel like I’ve started us off on about 5 different conversations.

*This is only a play on the title of Being & Time. I’ll take full responsibility for the ignorance exposed therein.