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We are now ready to turn to art. Although this book deals primarily with the visual arts, there are good reasons to start with a discussion of metaphor, which shows us the workings of art more generally in lucid form. How so? Because metaphor is easy to contrast explicitly with literal language, and it turns out that whatever else art may be, it cannot have traffic with any form of literalism. This is the point of closest approach between OOO’s theory of art and that of Fried, to be discussed in Chapter 3 below. This does not rule out considering, say, Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades as art, but merely requires that we find a non-literal element in them if they are really to qualify as art.

By aesthetics, OOO means the general theory of how objects differ from their own qualities. Given that there are two kinds of objects and two of qualities, there are four separate classes of aesthetic phenomena: RO-RQ, RO-SQ, SO-SQ, and SO-RQ. Generally speaking, RO-RQ is the tension at stake in causation of every type; the old philosophical topic of cause and effect is thus brought for the first time under the banner of aesthetics, where it rightfully belongs.¹⁷ RO-SQ is a less surprising aesthetic tension, the one that deals with our perception of objects under constantly changing appearances and conditions, of the sort that Husserl meant whenever he talked about adumbrations; we will soon see that this tension was noticed by Kant in the Critique of Judgment as well, under the name of “charm.” SO-RQ, which again owes so much to Husserl, concerns the tension between the objects that appear to us and the real qualities that make them what they are; it is here that we find “theory” in the sense of cognitive understanding. It is only with the RO-SQ tension that we find beauty, which I do not hesitate to insist is the domain of art, even if most artists today want nothing to do with beauty, but would rather sidestep that question in favor of some socio-political topic or other, given that emancipatory politics is the great intellectual piety of our era. On this score, the situation described by Dave Hickey in The Invisible Dragon has not significantly changed, despite his misleading mention of politics: “If you broached the issue of beauty in the American art world of 1988, you could not incite a conversation about rhetoric – or efficacy – or pleasure – or politics – or even Bellini. You would instead ignite a question about the marketplace.”¹⁸ For OOO, the meaning of beauty is not some vague appeal to an illdefined aestheticism, but is explicitly defined as the disappearance of a real object behind its sensual qualities. For reasons soon to be explained, this always has a theatrical effect, and beauty is therefore inseparable from theatricality – despite Fried’s understandable insistence to the contrary.

In any case, the OOO theory of metaphor owes much to an important but neglected essay on the topic by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who was more widely read during the heyday of existentialism than is the case today.¹⁹ Here I will not repeat my interpretation of Ortega’s essay, but will simply present the revised OOO theory that emerged from it.²⁰ In the past, I have always used metaphors from renowned poets; this time I will choose a homely anonymous example found at random in a Google search. It comes from a poem that most intellectuals would scorn as sentimental greeting card verse, though it works perfectly well for our purposes:

A candle is like a teacher

Who first provides the spark

That kindles love of learning

In children’s minds and hearts.²¹

If it helps the reader to take it more seriously, we can pretend that this is simply the first stanza of a morbid poem by the Austrian expressionist Georg Trakl, one that soon takes a darker turn toward cocaine, incest, and extinction. Let’s also simplify the exercise by limiting ourselves to the first line: “a candle is like a teacher.” Next, we should contrast this statement with the dictionary definition of a candle. When I enter “definition of candle” into Google, here is what comes up first: “a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns.” For good measure, let’s also use Google to look up the definition of “teacher.” This is the first result: “a person who teaches, especially in a school.” If we combine the two definitions to replace the original metaphor, the result is perfectly ridiculous. Namely:

A candle is like a teacher.

becomes

A cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns is like a person who teaches, especially in a school.

While somewhat amusing, the second statement is not only unwieldy, but utterly absurd. Yes, we might imagine a master poet of Dada who could pull off this line in a poem, and therefore we hesitate to exclude it from art for all eternity. Yet barring the rare appearance of such a master, there is nothing but sheer literality when we read “a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns is like a person who teaches, especially in a school.” Like every definition taken in isolation, this joint definition is structured as a literal identity. But since under normal circumstances the combined identity is patently false, we are not sure what to make of the statement. Though we mentally repel the second statement in the same way that we hold all nonsense at a distance, we do not do the same with the original poem, even if we regard it as cloying kitsch. “A candle is like a teacher” is somehow able to draw us into its atmosphere to a sufficient extent that we take it with at least provisional seriousness. We see immediately that this is not a literal statement of the sort we expect from scientific or other knowledge. But what makes the two cases different?

A literal statement treats objects, explicitly or not, as interchangeable with a list of the qualities it possesses.²² Imagine speaking with someone who had somehow managed to go through life without ever hearing the word “candle,” despite a relatively large overall English vocabulary. In such a case, we could repeat the dictionary definition and instruct this person that a candle is a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns. This definition gives knowledge about what a candle is. It does this by deflecting our attention away from the candle itself in two opposite directions. First, it undermines the candle by telling us what it is made of: “a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick.” Next, it overmines the candle by telling us what it does: “[it] is lit to produce light as it burns.” In the effort to instruct our ignorant acquaintance, the candle is treated as purely equivalent to the sum of its physical composition and its external effects on the world at large. The same holds for the definition of a teacher. If somehow our friend also does not know what “teacher” means, we can give him this knowledge by moving in the same two directions. Looking downward (undermining) we find that a teacher is “a person,” since human beings are the raw material from which all teachers so far have been made. We can also look upward (overmining) to learn that the teacher is someone who “teaches, especially in a school.” Here once more we gain knowledge, and knowledge always entails that an object is replaced by an accurate description of its components, apparent properties, or relations. No aesthetic effect occurs, and hence there is no beauty. We have nothing but paraphrase: nothing but literalism. There is no sense of any surplus in the candle or the teacher that goes beyond what we get from adequate definitions of them. Even if these definitions leave out numerous additional details about candles and teachers, we are already on the right track, and cease defining them further only because we have already conveyed enough information for the person to grasp what we mean.

Literal descriptions sometimes fail, of course. It is possible to define a candle or teacher incorrectly, however rare this may be with such widely familiar objects. Yet I remember a moment of youth when someone asked me the meaning of “concierge” and I gave them an incorrect definition: not as an impish prank, but because at that age I misunderstood what the word meant. When this happens, we have simply ascribed the wrong qualities to the object named. We saw this occur earlier in more bizarre fashion when the definitions of candle and teacher were absurdly combined: “A cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns is like a person who teaches, especially in a school.” Failure also occurs when we replace just one of the definitions and say either “a candle is like a person who teaches, especially in a school” or “a cylinder or block of wax or tallow with a central wick that is lit to produce light as it burns is like a teacher.” Such combinations fail because the literal similarity of candles to teachers is not especially compelling. But this is precisely what makes their metaphorical union possible, which leads to some important insights.

Consider the following three statements: (1) “A professor is like a teacher.” (2) “A candle is like a teacher.” (3) “The demographic makeup of Los Angeles at the time of the 2010 census is like a teacher.” Which of these is a good candidate to work as a metaphor? Number 1 is out of the question in most cases, since it is merely a literal statement that points to numerous banal properties shared in common by teachers and professors. With number 3 we have the opposite problem. The two terms appear so unrelated that no aesthetic effect occurs when we hear the sentence: though again, perhaps a poet or comedian of genius could make it work, given the right set-up. Number 2 seems closer to a happy medium, one in which candle and teacher have some connection, though it is not entirely clear what that might be. Perhaps it has something to do with the way that both “bring light” in different senses of the term. But once this is made too explicit, we have again entered the realm of the literal comparison of qualities, and the metaphor immediately falls apart. Imagine the following lines by a poet who should have quit while she was ahead: “A candle is like a teacher, because candles literally bring light to a room, and teachers figuratively bring light to the minds of students.” We now have little more than an annoying platitude. For metaphor to occur, there must be a connection between its two terms, but it must be non-literal and should not be made too explicit.

To learn another important property of metaphor, we can simply reverse each of the three statements from the previous paragraph and see what happens. (1) “A teacher is like a professor.” (2) “A teacher is like a candle.” (3) “A teacher is like the demographic makeup of Los Angeles at the time of the 2010 census.” In Number 1 there is really no change from the previous version. A professor is like a teacher, and a teacher is like a professor; reversing the order of the terms makes no difference to the palpable if tedious truth of the statement. Since the two objects share similar properties, it hardly matters which is mentioned first. In Number 3 there is also no real difference when the terms are reversed: an already highly implausible description has been flipped around, and it is no more or less plausible than it was in original form. It is still difficult to see any connection between a teacher and the demographic makeup of Los Angeles in 2010; this comes off as merely a failed literal description in which the properties of the two terms do not match. But notice how different things are with Number 2: “A candle is like a teacher” and “a teacher is like a candle” both work as metaphors, even if not as especially brilliant ones. Yet the important point is that the metaphors are completely different in the two cases. In the first, we have a candle that seems to impart some sort of teacher-like wisdom and prudence as we sit with it vigilantly through the night, or something along those lines. In the second, we have something like a teacher who somehow illuminates young minds or sets them aflame, though no such literal paraphrase can ever exhaust the metaphor, any more than a globe can be successfully rendered in a two-dimensional map without certain distortions. In the first case the candle is the subject and somehow acquires vague teacher-predicates; in the second, the reverse is true. Literal description or paraphrase simply compares the qualities of whatever two objects are discussed side by side, and hence the order is easily reversible. In metaphor, however, it is a case of translating qualities from one object to another, and thus it is either a teacher with candle-qualities or a candle with teacher-qualities, each completely different from the other.

This has philosophical importance. Imagine a literal statement of the following sort: “a teacher leads the classroom, prepares lesson plans for each day, assigns homework, grades student performance, and lets parents know how their children are faring academically.” We need not interpret this statement in empiricist fashion as just a bundle of qualities. We may be well aware – like Husserl himself – that teachers do many other things besides these, and that the teacher remains a teacher no matter what limited things they are doing at this very moment. If that is the case, then we are already aware of a certain tension between the teacher and his or her currently manifest qualities. In OOO terms, we are dealing with the teacher as SO-SQ, an accessible sensual object with numerous shifting sensual qualities. Yet something different happens with “a teacher is like a candle.” Here, the teacher takes on candle-qualities rather than the expected teacher-qualities. We have no clear idea what a teacher with candle-qualities would be like, and for this reason the teacher is no longer an SO teacher presented directly to our minds, but an RO teacher: a withdrawn object, a kind of black hole around which the candle-qualities mysteriously orbit. Here we have the (Heideggerian) RO-SQ tension that is the basis of all art. Even if we know that the sensual teacher is different from his or her sensual qualities, in principle he or she can always be described in terms of an accurate qualitative description. But no such paraphrase is possible when the teacher becomes a real object, one that mysteriously withdraws behind the sensual candle-qualities it is now said to possess. Elaine Scarry is on to the same insight when she tells us of metaphor that “when one term ceases to be visible (either because it is not present, or because it is dispersed beyond our sensory field), then the analogy ceases to be inert: the term that is present becomes pressing, active, insistent, calling out for, directing our attention toward, what is absent” (BBJ 96).

But this also raises a significant problem: in what sense do we direct our attention toward what is absent in the metaphor? That which is absent is said to be inaccessible in any direct way to human cognition, like a Kantian thing-in-itself or Heideggerian tool-being. Just the same, it makes no sense to think that an object might withdraw and leave behind purely detached qualities, given our acceptance of the phenomenological axiom that objects and qualities always come as a pair. In the metaphor “a teacher is like a candle,” the teacher becomes an RO withdrawn object that leaves behind insistent candle-qualities. And since these candle-qualities cannot attach themselves to a withdrawn teacher, and cannot reattach themselves to their original candle without collapsing into a merely literal statement, there is only one remaining option. Namely, it is I the reader who am the real object that performs and thereby sustains the candle-qualities once they are stripped from their usual candle-object. As strange as this may sound, it really just expresses the obvious fact that if the reader is not truly engrossed in the poem, then no aesthetic effect can occur amidst the literalizing boredom. Stated differently, all aesthetics is theatrical, as we will see again in Chapter 3 when partially disagreeing with Fried. Nonetheless, the withdrawn teacher does not lose every role in the metaphor, since it guides or steers the way in which we perform the candle-qualities it leaves behind in its wake. This becomes clear if we consider alternative metaphors such as “a policeman is like a candle” or “a judge is like a candle.” If it were merely a question of the reader performing candle-qualities in place of the absent subject term, then all of these “like a candle” metaphors would be the same, though clearly they are not. One metaphor asks us to perform candle-qualities in the manner of a teacher, another in that of a policeman, and the third in that of a judge. What exactly does this mean? I propose that in such cases, the missing object performs the same role of guidance as the title in the case of paintings, poems, or pieces of music. But I leave this theme for another occasion.

At any rate, this is the point at which opponents of OOO generally complain about “negative theology,” by which they mean a gratuitous positing of mysterious hidden objects to which no access is possible. But our claim is not that no access is possible to the shadowy teacher with candle-qualities. Instead, we insist that one can allude to this personage: speaking of him or her indirectly or obliquely, rather than by literal paraphrase in terms of qualities. It is true that we can never attain knowledge of the candle-like teacher, since knowledge is always literal mastery of what a thing is made of or does, and we have no idea how to paraphrase a candle-teacher; in fact, we really know nothing more than its name. Here we broaden our point beyond metaphor and expand it to cover any art at all. The minimal negative condition for something to count as an artwork is that it cannot primarily be a form of knowledge, whether of the undermining or the overmining sort. This does not exclude the possibility that artworks might also communicate certain literal truths, but it does entail that anything that solely communicates such truths is not an artwork. We gain little from describing what an artwork is physically made of (undermining), and miss the point just as badly if we replace the work with a description of how it affects or is affected by its socio-political context (overmining). For if it is actually an artwork, then it must be a surplus capable of many other possible effects or even of none at all. An artwork, of no matter what genre, is unparaphraseable.

Art, then, is a cognitive activity without being a form of knowledge, which to repeat does not exclude the possibility that artists and beholders can also obtain knowledge from artworks as a kind of side-effect.²³ It is perhaps more surprising that the same is true of philosophy. When Socrates and perhaps some earlier Pythagorean figures spoke of philosophia, or love of wisdom, they meant that actual knowledge was attainable only by a god and not by a human. There is no passage in Plato’s Dialogues in which Socrates claims to have attained knowledge, though there are several in which he openly declares that he knows nothing. His famous search for definitions of justice, love, friendship, and virtue always fail to obtain the desired definitions. Socrates is not just being ironic when he says that he has never been anyone’s teacher, or that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing. This point has been forgotten largely due to philosophy’s jealous modern emulation of mathematical physics, today’s model of knowledge par excellence. Philosophy has aspired to be like science or deductive geometry in attaining knowledge, even though this is the exact opposite of its mission. After all, knowledge means the literal paraphrase of a thing by its qualities, and philosophy has more to do with objects than with qualities. This is the abiding sense in which philosophy is much closer to the arts than to the sciences, and the opposite assumption is the flawed central principle of analytic philosophy, for all its clarity and rigor.

Aesthetics is first philosophy because aesthetics relies on the non-literal character of its objects, by which I mean that they are unparaphraseable in terms of qualities. Knowledge always amounts to a downward or upward paraphrase, but art – like Socratic philosophy – is not a form of knowledge. That is why the relation between OOO and the arts is so strong, and it probably explains why artists and architects have responded to it even more warmly than other disciplines. For in both cases it is a question of withdrawn or inscrutable objects that need to be approached from the side rather than head-on. The reader now has enough background in object-oriented philosophy to be able to follow its theory of art. Given the importance for us of the debate between formalism and anti-formalism, we turn to the godfather of formalism in aesthetics and everywhere else: Immanuel Kant.