Friday, February 25, 2011

Consubstantiality

One argument that pops up again and again for OOO is that objects exist both in relation to each other, and at the same time maintain their autonomy, as discrete individual objects. OOO argues for the withdrawal of objects at every level of interaction with other objects. As Levi states in his upcoming Democracy of Objects, “Within the framework of onticology, the claim that objects are withdrawn from other objects is the claim that 1) substances are independent of or are not constituted by their relations to other objects, and 2) that objects are not identical to any qualities they happen to locally manifest. The substantiality of objects is never to be equated with the qualities they produce”* (48). In other words, the substance of any object – that is, its virtual proper being – is always withdrawn from any of its properties or local manifestations. This substance is also, as Levi remarks, never reducible to any of its local manifestations, though it is the source of all such properties or qualities of the object.

Therefore, if an object is to have a relation to another object, it will only be in relation of each object’s local manifestations and not their substances. But how is this possible? Take, for example, a table. It is made up of four legs and a table top (and on the micro level even more objects), each containing their own substance and local manifestations. However, when I discuss the “Table” (that is, the table proper), there seems to be only one substance – that of the table. What gives?

We find a similar problem with social groups in Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives, where Burke states:
A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may be identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.
Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is “substantially one” with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another. (21)
Consubstantiality is the key, then, to understanding how it is that the table can be both a unique object (with its own withdrawn substance), but also made up of other objects (each with their own withdrawn substance). Consubstantiality, of course, is a theological term used to describe how it was that the substance of God was able to exist alongside the material substances of bread and wine. As good logologists, though, we understand (with Burke) that “whereas the words for the ‘supernatural’ realm are necessarily borrowed from the realm of our everyday experiences, out of which our familiarity with language arises, once a terminology has been developed for special theological purposes the order can become reversed. We can borrow back the terms from the borrower, again secularizing to varying degrees the originally secular terms that had been given ‘supernatural’ connotation” (The Rhetoric of Religion 7). Now, as Burke also argues, we must be aware of this complicated and messy back and forth between terminological realms, but the point here is that there is no reason why we cannot describe the table parts as being consubstantial with the table. In other words, when we discuss the Table (proper), we must recognize that this object has both a withdrawn substance of its own, but also maintains a consubstantial identification or relation between its many individual parts, each with their own withdrawn substance. To be an object is to be consubstantial and unique.



* This is the page number of the document I have and may not reflect the final copy yet to be released.

12 comments:

  1. perhaps the uncanny, as a specifically human trait/capacity/aspect/experience, has to do (at least in part) with those moments when life seems unhinged, coming apart at the seams, and we have to fill in the gaps, make meaning full, with our imaginations our genius for metaphors. of course we are always already doing this non-consciously in M-Ponty/Sam Todes maximal grip/forward moving kinds of ways and as memory links/habits are related to current circumstances but for experiences to work as art works these more striking examples seem useful to reflect upon when trying to understand poetic dwelling and the rhetorical cast of human-being. -dmf

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  2. dmf,

    I'm not sure that I would delegate the uncanny experience solely to the human realm, but in speaking of the human animal, I do feel that such an experience is primordial. Heidegger's _Intro to Metaphysics_ helps out here, where his notion of the uncanny becomes bound up with an essential struggle between humans and nature.

    Now, I don't know if I would go as far to say that ALL nonhuman objects experience the uncanny, but I do feel that certainly nonhuman animals have such moments or breaks in their dealings with reality.

    So, just to clarify, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you here, but I would be concerned with the focus on the human as sole being able to experience the uncanny.

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  3. Hi Nathan-
    is Consubstantiality an epistemological term then?

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  4. Hi Ted,

    To be sure, consubstantiality is primarily an ontological term. Along with OOO, I feel it is best to separate the ontological and epistemological. Whether or not it becomes an epistemological term by what I argue for in my post, (to be quite honest) I'm not sure. Perhaps you could explain your idea a bit more, so that I could say a little more.

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  5. can you give me a sense, or an example, of how a non-human animal might have an experience of the uncanny? much of our anxiety is surely like that of baboons (the dog whisperer shows what happens to dogs treated like children), monkeys bluff and plot, elephants may well grieve but I do think that there is a kind of human-imagination that is a quality apart.
    http://www.janushead.org/3-2/lingis.cfm

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  6. Nathan- not sure if this points in the right direction to where I'm seeing;
    from- Some Implications of Kenneth Burke's “Way of Knowing” for Composition Theory

    Susanne Langer points out the cogency of the rationalist methodology when she reminds us that "the ancient science of mathematics" has continued its purely rationalistic methods free from metaphysical associations and charges of mentalism. She then articulates "a new generative idea" in epistemology: "The power of symbolism is its cue, as the finality of sense-data was the cue of a former epoch." Whereas epistemologists have tended to regard symbolization as "an instrument" rather than as "an end" in itself, she believes that it "did not originate in the service of other activities." She says instead that symbolization is "a primary interest and may require a sacrifice of other ends, just as the imperative demand for food or sex-life may necessitate sacrifices under difficult conditions." She suggests that Kant's question, "What can I know?" is really dependent on a prior question, "What can I ask?" And, she says, Carnap provides an answer which is clear and direct: "I can ask whatever language will express; I can know whatever experiment will answer. "7

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  7. Anonymous,

    My thinking is that since many contemporary animal studies argue for the development of languages by nonhuman animals, and the knowledge that nonhuman animals can also experience fear and anxiety, whose to say they do not experience some form of the uncanny. If it is so difficult for us to come to an understanding of this strange "emotion" in us, I would hesitate discounting the same "emotion" in nonhuman animals.

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  8. fair enough, but I remain skeptical that non-human animals have the kind of intersubjective unconscious capable of (composed by?)the sort of doppelseitig-wirkung, delay/overlay/contrast effects that are likely at play in the uncanny as in schizoanalysis. -dmf

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  9. http://www.janushead.org/8-2/lingis.pdf
    http://english.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Emerson%27s%20Adjacencies.pdf
    these are a bit Romantic/optimistic for my taste but I think that they illustrate the point.
    -dmf

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  10. flesh made words:
    http://www.psy.herts.ac.uk/pub/sjcowley/docs/cradle.pdf
    -dmf

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  11. there may be some interesting overlap with ethnographic field work on distributed views of language as possession states.
    https://www.stanford.edu/dept/anthropology/cgi-bin/web/?q=system/files/lurmann_metakinesisfinal.pdf
    -dmf

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  12. so if un-canny aspects are janus-faced, eerily familiar and yet strange/repulsive-attractors, and so not ego-centric/monomaniacal in the way that fetishes are or traumas are(possession-states/intrusions of the un-imaginable/un-thinkable which shock/lock-step us into ritualized repetitions, un-dead/zombie states), does this mean that we are working under something akin to Guatarri's ethico-aesthetic paradigm of chaosmosis?
    -dmf

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