Nihilism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Metaphor in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
For the last sixty years, the dominant backdrop of the humanities has been the “postmodern” period, that lingering post-war epoch that vehemently denies the artist, philosopher, and scientist from ever accessing objective truth. Influenced greatly by Nietzsche’s forewarning that we must first become nihilists before we become honest, the postmodern period in many ways embodies a nihilistic clearing of assumptions, Nietzsche writing, “For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals — because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had. — We require, sometime, new values.” The 20th century has been one of moral, aesthetic, and ontological leveling and now that the clarity of social and ecological problems has become clearer than ever it is high time we create those values.
Near the turn of the century, the discoveries of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and economist Karl Marx ineluctably influenced all modernist thinkers, either through their incorporation or their rejection. The dismantling of assumptions was modernism and postmodernism’s legacy, a deconstruction that influenced everything from the visual arts and architecture to sociology and gender studies. But, could it be that our incessant questioning has bogged us down to our current existential quagmire? Could it be that we have appropriately dismantled enough and are now prepared to build Nietzsche’s new values, having passed through the 20th century’s quote-unquote modern thinking? Have modernism’s practitioners and followers become too nihilistic?
To answer this, I want to look back at what brought on our own century’s overriding defeatism before providing an alternative. Initially, modernism was a response to the waning confidence in a centralized meaning or purpose. When modernism faced the moral wasteland after the First World War, it screamed “Art!” and “The Individual!” as solutions that encouraged personal values; it rejected most institutional or societal beliefs as fallacious and mechanical processes. When postmodernism tackled these same quandaries of ethics and meaning after WWII, it remained mealy-mouthed when it came to solid solutions. Postmodernism only shrugged its shoulders quizzically and doubted modernism’s readiness to provide aesthetic answers, especially when they suited fascist tendencies to use aesthetics to obfuscate social problems. To be reductive, modernism emphasized aesthetic solutions as answers while postmodernism emphasized further questioning as a solution and an aesthetic unto itself.
Postmodernism’s leading philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, etc.) relied on apophatic methods, methods that work out what something is by figuring out what it is not, in order to suggest ways of not knowing or merely to critique the blasphemous comfort that anything can ever be known. In literature, postmodernism’s titans (Pynchon, Delillo, Vonnegut, etc.) equally suggest the impossibility of meaning with the occasional concession made for the “commonsense” ethics of love or the pursuit of pleasure as the final goal before either technological singularity or nuclear holocaust erases humanity. In their inability to provide answers, these aesthetics paint a morbid picture of humanity’s destined perdition.
But in a twist of irony, while postmodernism attempts to maintain some semblance of meaning-creation through its recognition of seeing meaning as artificially constructed, the movement’s very disdain for objectivity immobilizes its ability to counter hegemonic forces that strip-mine the earth of its resources - a planetary liquidation sale.
Modernism settled on aesthetics as the final bastion against governments, capitalism, and science, while postmodernism also “finally” acknowledged that aesthetics are systemically tied to hegemony and that only maieutic negation and ultimately a skeptic’s defeatism could make up for the failure of the modernist aesthetic project. The original intent of modernism was to exalt the role of creativity and individuality when faced with crushing systems of power that defined the early 20th century. Sequentially, postmodernism was modernism that dealt with old cataclysms, (the Holocaust, the spectre of totalitarianism, nuclear war) along with the new horsemen of the apocalypse: American imperialism, global poverty, climate change, and more recently, a regression into reactionary politics that stink to high heaven of conservative nationalism.
The problem with modernism and postmodernism is twofold. Each foreground anthropocentric precedence and each view the notion of objectivity as a dangerous one. But what if that objectivity can be had, what if it’s necessary in 2020 considering the empowered right, climate change, and mass poverty? The lofty “-ologies” of philosophy that inform the discourse of the left have failed to mobilize the people against their hegemonic oppressors, leading us to ask: “Does postmodernism lack the confidence to stand up to capitalism, patriarchy, and a white supremacism that suggests the conquest of the earth as a selective group’s birthright?” This is where OOO comes in.
As object-oriented ontologist (OOO) Timothy Morton points out, “If there is no metalanguage, then cynical distance, the dominant ideological mode of the left, is in very bad shape, and will not be able to cope with the time of hyperobjects.” Morton’s coinage of “hyperobjects” is vital. They are objects that exist, but are so large, abstract, and uncontrollable (climate change, plastics, radioactive plutonium) that they have no fixed locality in spacetime, but should be classified as unified objects in order for us to make sense of their impact. This terminology is vital when humanity creates new problems without the equipage of a vocabulary that conduces solutions. Just think about the debate between the terms climate change or global warming. While climate change is more accurate, Morton suggests calling it global warming to call attention to the urgency of the situation, even if the nomenclature makes a sweeping generalization of areas that are cooling. Both work effectively, but more importantly our awareness of these hyperobjects necessitates identifying the morphological changes in ecology through objective changes. How does postmodernism equip us to recognize the extent of environmental damage when the subject is always human and the world is considered a construct rather than a real, breathing thing?
We need to resist the apathy that postmodernism has instilled in both the public and intellectuals via the nihilistic conceit that everything is artificial and constructed. Instead, we should choose to assume objects are real enough and take responsibility for the way our activities impact them worldwide. The 21st century has positioned climate change as the biggest threat to life on Earth, a hyperobject that impacts not only the social spheres, but the world of objects. The social solutions of Foucualt, Butler, and Zizek have immense importance for politics and sociology, but they perpetuate the anthropological privileging of the human subject that excludes lichens, Monarch butterflies, and isotopes.
In light of these looming catastrophes, I would go so far to claim that postmodernism as a movement should be replaced. As an alternative, object-oriented ontology, or OOO, accounts for the anthropocentrism built into the most leftist of dispensations, moving about-face from the subject-oriented ontology of postmodernism. It is this subject-oriented ontology that presumes linguistic and sociological foundations, that amplifies nihilism and ironic approaches, and exacerbates the deterioration of a planet viewed as a social construct rather than an objectively real biosphere. OOO is an ecological and anti-anthropocentric philosophy that does not hierarchize subjects (humans) over objects (nonhumans), but places them side-by-side, horizontally rather than vertically.
The timeliness of the theory is incontestable. Rather than give an unconvincing “not theory of everything” theory of everything as Foucault and Derrida have presented, OOO attempts a new ontological position. Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything suggests that the immaterial, imagined, and fictitious are as real as any material thing: a brick, a school of herrings, or the motor oil stain beneath the underside of your car. As Harman admits, a 261 page manifesto can’t really summarize the project at large, so my attempt to do so in a paragraph will be a foolhardy, albeit necessary attempt.
A concise way to differentiate OOO from postmodernism is to say that OOO is proudly “non-modern” while postmodernism remains fixedly modern. By modern, Harman means that “Modern philosophy simply exchanged God for human thought, without giving up the notion that one extra-important type of being was so vastly different from everything else that it deserved to occupy half of ontology” (256). Modernism and postmodernism justify giving humans the lion’s share of attention because of the social conditions that determine the perceptions and status of our lives, and because humans are forced to use their strictly human senses when perceiving their environment. Ignoring this obvious reality would be foolish and probably further marginalize disenfranchised groups, but perceiving people, things, and ideas as real objects first and constructs second legitimizes their integrity while also admitting the contingency of objects.
When defining objects, Graham says they are “anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things” (43). It considers conceptual objects like the character Tom Sawyer, a floating coin in Super Mario, or the DOW Jones Industrial Average as real as the text you’re reading, the fingernail on your pinky, or the oxygen you’re breathing right now. Real doesn’t just mean physical, but that it exists in an objective form. We should not view objects as mathematically or scientifically objective, but as real in so far as they have qualities that are sensed by other objects (like ourselves), that “Objects act because they exist, rather than existing because they act” (Harman 260). It is not so much about becoming as it is about being. If one were to reduce OOO to its most succinct definition, it would be a system that does not privilege the perception of a thing (phenomenology), the conditions of what made a thing (historicism), or the reduction of a thing’s components (materialism), but the thing itself as it is sensed by other objects.
Harman consistently turns to Bruno Latour and his action-network theory (ANT) as a step in the right direction. Latour structures his ontology as flat or non-hierarchical to oppose the preference for the human in modernism. But unlike ANT, OOO understands that relationships between two objects are often unequal, or non-reciprocal. This means that something can be acted on but may not have the ability to act back. This is important because it makes humans somewhat responsible for their actions, they are not simply just waves of matter knocking into other waves of matter but the prime mover in regard to disrupting balanced systems. In light of our relationship to global warming, we are not the pond’s rippling wave but the arm that tosses the stone in the pond. OOO does not consider these differences as a hierarchy of value but an ontological method in locating influence over other objects. This permits OOO the ability to think ethically unlike the non-ethics of postmodernism’s dance with nihilism.
“But wait!” you might interject, “Who are you to say that the Earth is deteriorating? What is a system? How do you know you aren’t preaching the same anthropocentrism when you’re trying to preserve things that might simply be going through a larger process beyond human recognition?” You might also be so bold to point out, “How can you define what an object is when you’re trapped in your subjectivity, your distinctly human faculties?” The answer to this last question is that all imagined, potential, and physical objects are objects. To the other queries, it will require the use of metaphor, the tool that Harman upholds as the most successful method for probing reality.
Enter Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, a 2015 novel replete with Pynchonian paranoia and Orwellian superstructures that tackles everything from climate change, anthropology, corporate culture, casualty, aerial forensics, stealth Starbucks, information theory, and the return of grand narratives. Satin Island follows the protagonist named “U.” who is a cultural anthropologist, not studying a tribe or ancient civilization, but the contemporary zeitgeist in toto. The company he works for (suspiciously referred to as the “Company”) entrusts U. with writing a document called the Great Report that is to be the new anthropological assessment of humanity. The difficulty of such an incomprehensible task takes him across an encyclopedic journey into every topic under the sun with the goal of somehow finding out how everything is connected - or is it?
Written entirely in the first-person, U. opens the novel by acknowledging the distance between human subjects and the images they take to be objective truths, saying: “We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquids in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that’s discernable, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming, even if it isn’t reality, if it’s all just ink-blots” (3-4). These ink-blots parading as truths parallel with the oil spill that U. obsessively watches on TV. Much of the novel revolves around the meaning of the oil spill, the Great Report, and the suspicious death of a parachuter that U. studies with a compulsive curiosity. U.’s quest for truth is as consuming as the Great Report’s need to be objective, but neither seem destined for their eureka moment. Rather, the Company’s mission is not after unattainable truths but a convenient narrative: a fiction. U.’s boss, Peyman, explains to him, “The city and the state are fictional conditions; a business is a fictional entity. Even if it’s real, it’s still a construct. Lots of the Company’s projects have been fiction that became real...the facts, in this case, followed from the fiction. Fiction was what engendered them and held them in formation. We should view all propositions and all projects this way” (48-49). Peyman’s description is overtly postmodern but also strangely prophetic considering Satin Island’s publication a year before Trump’s subversion of established truth and fact.
But should we view everything this way? Is everything a fiction, a story molded by desire and power? The answer is a soft yes and a hard no. Peyman has subverted postmodernism (much like Trump) to bend reality to his will and justify his actions, an “anything goes” mentality that profits from the mutability, disbelief, and subjectivity that governs reality. Yet if everything is seen “shoudedly,” and if fiction is all we can rely on, what’s a post-post-modernist to do?
Rather than get bogged down in the epistemological labyrinth this short novel stages, I want to focus on one key chapter two-thirds of the way in the book. U. has given a talk on the subject of The Contemporary at a corporate conference with those in attendance giving a lukewarm response. In the following chapter he imagines “the presentation that [he] should have given back in Frankfurt” (110). He compares The Contemporary to the metaphor of oil spills as an example of how change occurs subtly without a superficial difference. U. explains,
When we encounter, then, as we do often after spills - click - an oily sea, a sea whose body, while it still performs the functions and ceremonies of a sea - flowing, lapping, breaking into waves and the like - has become dark and ponderous, what we’re in fact encountering is not a sea at all. It’s oil that has ousted the sea, usurped it, packed it off into exile and assumed its position. It’s a putsch, a coup d’état. (112-113)
Throughout the novel, U.’s analyzes our era as one of incremental shifts that occur beneath the surface, imperceptible to the eye, concealed by a boring bureaucracy that uses a smokescreen of lengthy documents and dry office jargon. In the case of water and oil, it is oil that replaces the water without removing it, like a parasite that takes over the brain but keeps the subject operating. Nothing and everything changes in The Contemporary. Because water and oil do not mix, they are diametrically opposed from the other, “Where one is, I’d tell them, the other cannot be” (112). Just like the ink-blots referenced earlier on the novel’s first page, the oil represents man’s toxic attempt to make the world in his image, a consideration of objects as imperfect until altered. The oil of the spill represents anthropocentric meaning in a world that resists fixed meaning at every turn, the water representing presence without human’s inky smear of value and function. For the conference’s audience of assembled delegates, an object is beautified when it is physically altered by humankind. The truth however, is that altering the human viewer’s perspective is what beautifies existent objects.
U.’s Company wants him to justify ecological catastrophes as aesthetic events, to belie them as opportunities to see nature aestheticized into an iridescent spectrum, sea birds memorialized into hardened monuments like Greco-Roman statuettes, U. speaking, “Ask the sculptor: to recast even the dullest object is to celebrate it, to align it with its essence at the very moment this emerges, becomes manifest. Has oil not done this to these rocks? Of course it has, with a panache that is more brilliant for its simplicity: it has made them rockier” (115). This ability of tarry oil to fix and ossify rocks, seals, and plants into place mirrors how language similarly creates human meaning by placing static signifiers for dynamic things, the stain of the pen bleeding falsehoods. U. is often on the right track when he emphasizes aestheticizing the oil spill as a part of a larger phenomenon: he regards it as one of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects in doing so. U. delineates it not as a diffuse series of accidents but as a singular event, U. speaking, “the Oil Spill - an ongoing event whose discrete parts and moments, whatever their particular shapes and vicissitudes (vicissitudes! I’d susurrate the word time and again), have run together, merged into a continuum in which all plurals drown.” (111). Along with oil’s ability to subtly change the perception of the sea, it is the drowning of plurals that the oil also pursues - sameness. It is inconsequential whether the oil represents material change or the change of perception because the novel suggests both are occurring. The modification of perceptions and literal things work in tandem to accelerate modernity’s obsession with singularity, repetition, and mass-production, all of which are symbolized by the oil suffusing water, shore, and life.
U.’s fantasized Frankfurt speech elucidates how epistemology and even aesthetics have always been a method of the dominant class to ensure they are perceived in a way that ensures their manipulation of society’s structure. Because ecological disasters are caused by a ruling class’s objectification and greed, U.’s pandering gives the millionaires in attendance not a report of the world itself, but a justification of their treatment of the world. When a lone man in the audience yells “Shame, sir! Shame!” (115), U. responds with a grotesque and warped conception of postmodern aesthetics:
The truth is, that these people’s (for behind this man there lay a much larger constituency: they’d be there, too, dotted about the streets around the conferencing center, and in homes throughout the city, and in other cities, purchasing ecologically sourced products, sponsoring zoo animals and so forth) - these people’s entire mindset is a product of aesthetics. Bad aesthetics, at that: misguided and ignorant. They dislike the oil spill for the way it makes the coastline look ‘not right,’ prevents it from illustrating the vision of nature that’s been handed down from theologians to romantic poets to explorers, tourists, television viewers: as sublime, virginal and pure. Kitsch, I tell you (here I’d thump my fist onto the podium, three times in quick succession): kitsch, kitsch, kitsch! And wrong: for what is oil but nature? (115-116)
What makes this section so very postmodern is its use of obfuscating ethical judgments and the emphatic disbelief in romantic beauty as stable. It’s also what’s so wrong about much postmodern literature and philosophy. The Oil Spill and oil as metaphors regard inky presence (be they linguistic signifiers or chains of specious epistemology) as knowledge beautified, that aesthetics originate not in objects but in our manipulation of objects - that something is made aesthetic once an agent adjusts/disrupts it.
Aesthetics are central not just to Satin Island but are the cornerstone for OOO. Harman’s ontology registers that objects exist, objectively, but that all a human being can detect are the qualities that originate in the object. For example, a tangerine might appear to be orange, spherical, and have a sweet taste, but we don’t really have a way to say what an object might be in an objective sense. To say that it is objectively these things would ignore how an earthworm, sparrow, or mushroom might perceive the tangerine. The spherical, sweet, and orange tangerine is all of these things to some people but only contingently. Our perception of an object is an aggregate of cognitive biases to what that object might appear to be. A pair of glasses, a sand dune, and alpha centauri are only amalgamations of bizarre qualities we associate to an object, making it comprehensible for our survival.
When we’re forced to articulate what an object is, Harman believes that the aestheticizing of metaphor is the closest we can get to defining an object - though of course, a stable definition is always impossible. When the epic poet Homer called the ocean, “the wine-dark sea,” we have a far more accurate representation of reality because metaphor does not say what something is, it says what it is like. Fiction and metaphor encourages us to sense an object and describe it as something compared to something else, rendering it neither of those things. A wine-dark sea is not just a sea, nor is it wine. Rather, it is some other object that the perceiver senses, the object internalized by the perceiver and made something else entirely new in their mind. This may appear as a justification for U.’s disturbing aestheticizing of pollutants (which can, and are inescapably aestheticized - just look at a sunset in a city rimmed by toxic haze) but it is U.’s recognition of how corporations think that incentivizes the subversion of a postmodern truth. The corporate aesthetics U. lauds in the excerpts above suggest that by distancing ourselves from an object - slowing it down, injecting it with anthropocentric expectations - we make it richer, more real even. U. saying:
Oil has more consistency than water: it is denser, more substantial - and thus brings the latter into its own more fully, expressing the sea’s splendour in a manner more articulate, more something. In a manner more poetic. No, more lyrical: the sea’s splendour in a manner far more lyrical than that in which the original ever did. When you watch the swell and surf rolling through a sea that’s turned to oil, is it not like watching the whole process in slow motion? (113)
This need for more, for supposing that maximizing something makes it more meaningful, this is the subtext that the Company’s Great Report requires. If we are really after beauty, we do not alter things to make them beautiful, we look at them more closely to realize their pre-existing beauty. As OOO theorist Ian Bogost writes in Alien Phenomenology, “The alien isn’t in the Roswell military morgue, or in the galactic far reaches, or in the undiscovered ecosystems of the deepest sea and most remote tundra. It’s everywhere” (133).
As one cover of the book suggests, Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island is the Great Report itself: the novel a metaphor for how truth is fiction, fiction truth. The cover has words scattered and crossed out like one of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poems - a treatise, a confession, a report, an essay, a manifesto - all of these titles suggestions of non-fiction, some kind of factual text. The disturbing suggestion is that fictions are all we can rely on to navigate the world, the same maze of myths the Egyptians, Hindus, and Greeks relied on before science posited that truth can be known through empiricism. Yet, the knowledge of metaphorical truths is a knowledge unto itself. As Harman clarifies, “But from this point forward, while retaining ‘truth’ as a pejorative term for false claims to have direct access to reality, let’s partially rehabilitate the word ‘knowledge’ in order to refer to a positive phenomenon that unmistakably does exist: the superior expertise that can be found to a greater degree in some human masters, places or historical periods than in others” (186). It may sound elitist, but what Harman means is that instead of seeing ourselves in a post-truth world, he concedes that some doctors are better at identifying and treating a cancer than most people. This knowledge has real legitimacy, though it doesn’t mean that it is an absolute truth about oncology.
Such knowledge counteracts the oft-cited nihilism of postmodernism. Rather than surrender to the void, we can admit that some options are better than others even if they are contingent. The preference for pleasure that dominates the post-war and post-truth era of what I hope is the new non-modernism can’t continue unabated. If we are to recognize the big issues of modernity, it means rejecting the sandy soil of postmodern cynicism and opting for the stability of skeptical but steady processes that amend the mistaken thinking of the past.
When Morton called for an ethical metalanguage earlier in this essay, it was to cope with our increased awareness of hyperobjects. OOO achieves this because it considers objects as legitimate and aesthetic when we do not necessitate our affecting of objects as compulsory for aestheticizing. When Harman originally stated that an object is “anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things,” (43) he means that when we want to understand an object we shouldn’t explore it by zooming in to figure out what it is nor should it be explored by zooming out and seen as part of a bigger system. If we are talking about an object we consider it for what it is and do not alter it physically in an attempt to further aestheticize it. Metaphor never lets us say what a thing is, only what it is like, so why would we change something to make it more beautiful when its beauty is already present. OOO’s privileges the description of things more than a justification of actions, forcing a study of objects rather than a disruption of them. U.’s aestheticizing does not draw us closer to objects but forces us deeper into our own egos, our own opinions about the object in question instead of the object itself. The divide between subjects and objects is not the chasm we make it out to be. Yes, each of us is an object, but we are linked to objects around us and are also components of bigger objects like a family, a community, a conversation. No man is an island, and U.’s aesthetics distorts the objects affected by the Oil Spill as phenomenological playthings rather than undergoing an existential threat.
Want more Mindless Pleasures??? Delve into the full catalog of entries here.
Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.