In the past, I have often taken this literally — imagining viewing an object from multiple vantages in space, from front, back, inside, above, close, far, and so on. In this session, however, I looked at the objects in my environment differently, applying some of my recent OOO studies to TSK: looking at objects as both reducible and irreducible at once (Latour’s principle of irreduction). Seeing objects as “really” time, space, or knowledge would be a form of reductionism, for instance. And when such an inquiry erases the object altogether, that would be an example of either undermining (the apparent trees or stones in my environment are not deep enough; the truth is “beneath” them, perhaps in a pre-individual “space”) or overmining (the trees and stones are falsely deep, and are really just grammatical illusions or abstractions of process). The principle of irreduction says both that objects are inherently irreducible to anything else, and that objects may always be seen in terms of something else — as dependent arisings, in Buddhist terms.
Not taking this principle as a “truth,” but just as a possibility, I played with seeing the objects in my environment simultaneously (or really in alternating fashion) as irreducible — as wholly unique and discrete entities or presences — and as communications of a deeper or more comprehensive “field,” or concrescences of time and space. While I expected that seeing the objects as irreducible might “feel” naive or “materialist” to me, going in, my sense in playing with this — perhaps because I was doing it on the “far side” of reduction,” wherein I had viewed trees around me reductively in terms of their countless relations (time) or their many different overlapping and interpenetrating boundaries and layers (space) — was that this might rather be a rare taste for me of the 3rd Level, where even time, space, and knowledge are opened up and there is just a kind of “suchness” to things from which there is nowhere else to go or to look or to be. Things felt both infinitely reducible, and thus empty, nothing-at-all; and also profoundly particular and substantial and unique.