The human subject produces an external layer to the thing by encapsulating it in a name, which also becomes its function. For example, imagine a gift that is wrapped in paper – this is similar to what a human subject does when we name a thing and designate its purposed within the anthropocentric order. A human covers the unknown with a layer that is known to them. Graham Harman states the following, ‘…the fact that objects withdraw from each other makes us ask how they interact at all. If fire only encounters a caricature of cotton, how does it burn that cotton?’[4] He is highlighting that object must have their own internal reality and a set of real effects with other objects, a set of relations that exist outside of the human-object relation. Therefore, in my scenario, the entire gift represents an object, which means that underneath the gift (object) each of the thing’s elements (which are captured and reduced to the gift) are active and open to infinite refraction within the universal abstract object. A thing will not individually appear to itself or other things, as it appears to humans. As a result, human subjects produce objects that hold within themselves the thing (an inter-relation of complex parts) but it is shrouded in a layer that simplifies what they are for human subjects. However, measuring the distance between the thing and its name is difficult and the gap between its outside (which has been co-opted by the subject-object relation) and its internal reality (its inside or thing relation) is not easy to unpick.

In Seventy-Six Thesis on Object Oriented Philosophy (2011), Harman highlights that a thing’s, ‘Essence is the strife between the concealed real objects and the concealed real qualities that make them what they are. This tension lacks any foothold in experience, and happiness elsewhere.’[5]In this statement, Harman is claiming that each thing has an essence and he elaborates on this reading, ‘Each thing has an essence. A chair is what it is, deeper than all the events and surface effects through which it is manifest. To say otherwise makes change impossible.’[6] However, it is easy to ignore the object’s essence or qualities because humans assume that they dominate things through our naming and utilising of them as objects, as well as our ability to manufacture objects. Objects, as a result, appear to exist or be created for humans and all manmade objects are a copy of the original object; the original object having the most intimate relationship with the human who identified it. This process reduces our access to the object’s essence and leads humans to forget that each object has its own essence (or thing-potential). For example, a chair could be reduced in science to its chemical composition or to its user as merely a seat. However, in Harman’s manifesto above, the ingredients of a chair (e.g. 50% carbon, 42% oxygen, 6% hydrogen, 1% nitrogen, and 1% other elements) and its use cannot fully represent what a chair is. Harman reminds humans that each object has an essence, although its essence is never directly knowable through human experience. 

Our human relation to the essence or thing is also, simultaneously, loose. In the everyday human treatment of objects, it is difficult to see this looseness in our relation to an object but, as Harman highlights, their essences are active, or else change would be impossible. For example, Joseph Kosuth points to the looseness of an object’s relationship to the human subject in his work, One and Three Chairs (1965)*. In this work, Kosuth separated one object into three layers; a real chair, a photograph of a chair, and a name/definition of a chair. Kosuth juxtaposed these three different approaches to the object (chair) to show the differences within the object that the subject assumes is merely one entity (chair). Through this he also questions the consistency of the term/field of art, which also produces a human relationship to objects.