When the Object Exceeds Encounter
Imagine a chair that no one sits on.
Has anything been taken away from it?
The answer may seem obvious: no. The chair still exists, even if no one sees it, touches it, or uses it.
But this simple answer raises a more difficult question. If the chair continues to exist without us, what is the relation between this “existence” and what we see and experience of the chair?
Is what is seen the same as what exists?
What is touched?
What we know about it?
Or might there be a distance between the object and what appears to us of it?
This distance usually goes unnoticed. In everyday encounters, what appears immediately takes the place of the thing itself. We see the object, and it is as though by seeing it we have reached the object itself. We experience it and take that experience as its reality. We speak about it, and language places what has become accessible in the place of the object itself.
But what if appearance is not the object itself?
In that case, every encounter reveals something while at the same time necessarily leaving something outside itself.
The question is no longer simply whether an object exists without us.
The question is: if it does, why is what appears each time we encounter it so easily allowed to take the place of the object itself?
Perhaps the problem begins here: with the distance that takes shape between the object and its appearance; a distance that can neither be easily closed nor simply denied.
What appears of an object is always something that has become accessible within a particular situation. The eye sees a surface; the hand touches resistance; the mind attributes qualities to it; and language gives it a name. Each brings something into the realm of appearance.
But why should this appearance be the measure of what the object really is?
Perhaps what appears is, rather than the object itself, a mode of access to it.
At first glance, this distinction may seem small, but its consequence is fundamental. If every appearance is only one state of encounter with an object, then one can no longer move from the first perception directly to the object itself. What is present is not necessarily everything that exists.
Here, the old question of knowledge takes another form. The problem is not only whether an object can be known correctly or not. Before that, we must ask whether what knowledge makes available can fundamentally be equivalent to the object.
If it cannot, then the object always contains something more than our accesses to it.
But this “more” should not immediately be understood as a hidden truth behind appearance; as though reality were waiting somewhere behind the curtain to be discovered. Such an idea merely repeats the problem in another form.
The more difficult question is:
If the object is never exhausted in its appearances, what kind of distance does this incompleteness create between the object and encounter?
And can this distance be preserved without turning the object into something completely inaccessible?
From here, the question of the object is no longer merely a question of knowing it; it becomes a question of our relation to something that perhaps no encounter can ever contain in its entirety.
1. From the Phenomenon to That Which Appears
Perhaps the first difficulty lies precisely here: how can what appears be the same as what is, when appearance always takes place through a particular mode of perception and cognition?
Kant turned this gap into one of the most fundamental problems of knowledge. In his philosophy, what is given to us in experience is not identical with the “thing-in-itself.” We experience things as they appear to us within the horizon of the conditions that make human experience possible. What appears as an object in experience, therefore, cannot simply be identified with reality itself without taking into account the conditions that make experience possible.
The significance of this distinction lies not only in separating the “phenomenon” from the “thing-in-itself.” The more important issue is the limitation this distinction places on our claim to knowledge. What becomes present to us can no longer be regarded, without any distance, as identical with the thing that is.
But this is precisely where a more difficult question emerges.
If what we experience always appears within the conditions of the possibility of our experience, what is its relation to something that is independent of these conditions?
Must we imagine two worlds: a world that appears to us and a world hidden behind it?
Such a reading of Kant is too simple. The issue for us is not to construct two worlds, but to preserve the very distance that has emerged between the object and our mode of access to it.
Kant does not allow us to claim access to the entirety of the object on the basis of its first appearance. Yet this distinction leaves behind a question that remains unresolved: if every access passes through the conditions of our cognition, is the independence of the object anything more than a conceptual limit at the end of our access?
This question brings the problem closer to “the way in which we encounter something” rather than simply “what we see.”
Because every encounter is not necessarily for the sake of knowing.
Before we measure something, judge it, or make it an object of reflection, we live in a world of things; a world in which things are involved in our activities before they become objects of knowledge. Before describing a hammer as an object with particular properties, we use it to drive a nail. In such an encounter, the hammer does not present itself to us as an independent object; it is present in relation to the task being performed.
Heidegger formulates this mode of being in his analysis of “readiness-to-hand.”
In this condition, the object is less seen than engaged with.
This distinction changes the direction of the question. Perhaps the distance between the object and its appearance is not merely a matter of the limitations of knowledge. Perhaps appearance itself is dependent on the mode of encounter; in a given situation, something becomes present in relation to the world of practice in such a way that there is essentially no opportunity to stand before it as an independent “thing.”
But sometimes this continuity breaks apart.
The hammer breaks. The tool no longer works. What was almost invisible until a moment ago suddenly comes into focus. What had dissolved into the flow of activity now presents itself as something problematic.
The significance of this rupture does not lie in the fact that the “hammer itself” has finally become visible to us. What has changed is the mode of encounter. Something that was present in one situation in relation to work and the practical world appears differently in another situation.
So what appears does not depend solely on the thing itself.
The mode of encounter also plays a role in it.
But this does not mean that the object is produced by the encounter. Heidegger does not lead the problem to the conclusion that a being exists only insofar as it appears in a particular experience. The issue is subtler: what is disclosed in experience can change as the relation and situation change.
As a result, appearance is no longer a transparent window onto the object.
Appearance is an event that takes place within a mode of being-in-the-world.
And if this is so, the difficult question returns: what is the relation between what is disclosed in each mode of encounter and the object itself?
Are differences between appearances merely differences in our access?
Or do these differences show that the object cannot be exhausted in any of its modes of appearance?
2. Is Independence Only a Limit?
If every appearance takes shape within a mode of encounter, what happens to that which is independent of this encounter?
Perhaps we can say that the object is, but what we know of it has always passed through our relation to it. In this case, the independence of the object is acknowledged, but only as something that remains outside our access; something whose existence we can point to without being able to reach it.
Here, the problem takes another form.
Is reality only articulable for us insofar as it stands in relation to us?
Meillassoux challenges this condition through the concept of “correlationism”: the restriction of access to what occurs between thought and being, rather than access to either of them independently of the other. For him, the problem is not simply that human beings experience the world from their own perspective; the problem is whether it is possible at all to speak of a world whose existence does not depend on this experience.
His question acquires another significance for the present problem.
If the Earth existed before humans, if the stars formed before any human observer, and if events occurred in the world before the emergence of humanity, we cannot simply say that their reality acquires meaning only in relation to their appearance to us. Meillassoux uses this gap to formulate the problem of ancestrality: how can we speak of a reality that existed before any relation to the human?
But the answer to this question does not open the way to a definitive answer.
Because even if it is possible to speak of a reality independent of the human, our problem still remains: how does this reality enter the realm of thought?
Even “independent reality,” when we speak about it, has entered into a relation.
Meillassoux seeks to break this circle, but this very attempt leaves another question behind. Is moving beyond correlationism, by itself, sufficient to explain the independence of the object? Is a reality that exists independently of the human necessarily the same object that we encounter within a particular relation?
Perhaps Meillassoux’s value for this discussion lies not in solving the problem, but in preventing it from being closed prematurely.
We can no longer simply say that the object is independent and leave it at that.
We must ask:
If the object is independent of us, can we think its independence without returning it to the conditions of our own access?
And if we cannot, is what we call an “object” something independent, or merely a limit that we draw at the end of our access?
Here, the distance between the object and its appearance becomes more difficult; because we are now faced not only with the question of whether the object is exhausted in its appearance, but also with whether we can speak at all of something that exists outside appearance, relation, and access.
If the answer is yes, another question remains:
Independent of what, exactly, is this independence?
3. The Object That Is Not Exhausted in Relation
But independence does not necessarily mean freedom from relation.
Even if the object exists independently of us, a question still remains: when we encounter it, what becomes available to us?
What we see, touch, or use is not simply the whole object. Every encounter brings the object before us in a particular form; a form that can change as the relation changes.
So perhaps the problem is not simply that something exists outside us.
The problem is that no encounter can necessarily contain the whole of that thing.
Harman radicalizes this distance. In Object-Oriented Ontology, the object exceeds not only our access to it but also every particular relation. What becomes present in a relation does not exhaust the object itself. An object can enter into a relation, produce effects, disclose qualities, and at the same time not be reducible to what has appeared within that relation.
In this case, “appearance” is no longer the end of the object’s presence; it is one mode of its presence.
Yet a question remains here that should not be passed over with a quick theoretical answer.
If the object is never fully present in a relation, how do we know that something more than what has appeared actually remains?
Perhaps this surplus should not be understood as something hidden somewhere behind appearance, waiting to be uncovered. Perhaps “withdrawal” is not the name of something whose veil can one day be lifted; rather, it is the name of the limit that every encounter encounters.
What appears in a relation is not the whole object; but this statement still does not tell us what that “whole” is.
The distance remains.
And perhaps the significance of the object lies precisely in this remaining: in the fact that no encounter can completely transform it into what has appeared to us.
At this point, the four lines of thought through which we have passed no longer remain four separate answers. Kant connects the distance between phenomenon and thing-in-itself to the conditions of knowledge; Heidegger shows that encountering a being does not occur merely in the form of theoretical knowledge and that being-in-the-world plays a role in the disclosure of things; Meillassoux raises the possibility of thinking a reality independent of relation to the human; and Harman preserves the independence of the object even in relation to the relations into which the object itself enters.
But none of these paths brings the problem to an end for us.
In fact, the question has now become more precise.
If the object is neither identical with its appearance, nor merely a product of the conditions of our experience, nor reducible to an indeterminate outside, nor exhausted by the set of its relations, then what exactly is that which appears in our encounter with it?
This question brings us back to where we began.
4. When the Object Enters Architecture
If the object is never fully present in any encounter, architecture cannot pass over this problem without consequence.
Every architectural work is exposed to multiple encounters. It is seen, touched, moved through, used, measured, written about, and read within a historical, social, or cultural context. But do the totality of these encounters turn the work into its entirety?
A building is one thing for its inhabitant, another for its observer, and something else for its critic; matter too reveals different qualities within different relations. But the difference between these appearances does not necessarily mean that each of them possesses a complete truth of the work.
If this is so, architecture encounters a problem that extends beyond its experience.
The problem is not merely how architecture appears to the human; the problem is whether what appears to the human can be everything that a work is.
This question also changes the way we look at architectural elements. A wall can be read in terms of boundary, matter, structure, perception, or spatial organization; a window in terms of light, view, connection, or frame; a path in terms of movement and sequence; and a program in terms of the relations established among activities and bodies. Each reading reveals something, but none necessarily has access to the entirety of what we encounter.
From this perspective, the problem of architecture is not only what a work shows or makes possible to experience. The work itself may also be more than what becomes apparent through these experiences, readings, and uses.
But here we should not arrive at a simple conclusion: that architecture therefore possesses a “hidden truth” that must be discovered.
Such a conclusion merely repeats the same problem in another form. If we place a hidden truth somewhere behind appearance and make it the final object of knowledge, we have simply created a new center for the same desire to seize the object.
The problem may be precisely the opposite.
Perhaps we must accept that a work can leave something behind in the face of every reading.
5. A Critique That Does Not Exhaust the Object
Here architectural criticism encounters a contradiction.
On the one hand, every critique necessarily begins from a position, a language, and a mode of encounter; there is no unmediated access to the work. On the other hand, if we make this position the complete measure of the work’s reality, then what we are critiquing is no longer the object itself, but the image of it obtained within a particular relation.
Within this distance, something remains that can neither be ignored nor fully possessed.
This remaining does not invalidate criticism.
On the contrary, perhaps the possibility of more precise criticism begins precisely here.
Reading, perception, use, context, and lived experience can all disclose aspects of a work; but none of them can be identified with the entirety of that work. Criticism, in this sense, is not an attempt to reach a point at which the object finally stands completely before us, but an attempt to recognize the limits of every encounter with it.
If this is so, criticism is defined not by a final answer, but by resistance to the final answer.
The issue is not merely what meaning can be extracted from a work, what experience can be gained from it, or what social and historical relations can be identified within it. The issue is whether each of these readings, at the moment when it establishes itself as an explanation of the work, also removes something from the work itself.
Here, “the independence of the object” does not mean denying relation.
On the contrary, without relation, there would be nothing to appear.
The issue is not to equate relation with the entirety of the object.
The object enters into relation, but it is not exhausted in relation.
It appears, but it is not exhausted in appearance.
It is read, but it is not exhausted in reading.
It is experienced, but it is not exhausted in experience.
And perhaps it is precisely at this point that the concept of the object moves away from being a “thing before us” and becomes a problem concerning the limits of access.
Here, the initial question is no longer the same question with which we began.
We no longer ask whether a chair, a building, or any other object exists without us.
Its existence is the simplest part of the problem.
The more difficult question is this: if the object exists independently of us, and if no encounter can fully possess it, then what exactly is the relation between what appears in each encounter and the object itself?
Perhaps the answer lies not in eliminating the distance, but in accepting it.
A distance remains between the object and every encounter with it; a distance that no experience, interpretation, or definition can completely fill.
Perhaps the central problem is not to find what has remained hidden behind appearance, but to preserve the possibility of asking about something that enters into relation each time and yet is not reduced to it.
From here, the object is no longer merely something to be known.
It is something that can still have something left over in the face of knowledge, experience, and relation.