tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8912331104432445242024-03-14T00:00:36.365-05:00An Un-canny OntologyThis blog is an attempt to work through my ideas of the un-canny and how they fit into ontology.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.comBlogger60125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-89439472114458778622013-04-12T11:11:00.000-05:002013-04-12T11:11:39.741-05:00Material MetaphorsI know it's been a while, but you can download a copy of a presentation I'm giving this Saturday at the University of Texas at Arlington campus <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12937332/Gale_Material%20Metaphors.pdf">here (PDF)</a>.<br />
<br />
Or if you just want to read it online, here it is:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Material Metaphors</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
Whether from Aristotle’s claim in the <i>Poetics</i> and later in On Rhetoric that the act of creating metaphor is something that cannot be taught; or from I.A. Richard’s claim in <i>The</i> <i>Philosophy of Rhetoric</i> that metaphor is not only the main principle of language, but of thought as well—rhetoric and metaphor have shared a close bond. But the move towards posthuman rhetoric, whether technological, corporeal, or object-oriented, requires that rhetoric take a fresh look at its deployment and use of metaphor if its goal is to truly de-center the human subject (and, perhaps, language) from the rhetorical act. If rhetoric is to take part in any kind of posthumanism, its reliance upon and use of linguistic tropes must at minimum be reworked.<br />
<br />
However, given my limited time today, the goal of this presentation is not to give an overview of the historical relation between rhetoric and metaphor, nor is it to argue for the significance of a posthuman approach to rhetoric. These are both areas I cover in my larger project, if you’re at all interested. Instead, what I hope to do in the following is to first develop an act of posthuman and object-oriented composition I call the “material metaphor.” In short, material metaphors work by relating two previously unrelated objects, but can be identified in the unique way that they allow the two objects to unfold in the other. Taking up an object-oriented approach to rhetoric, I will then argue that by creating material metaphors, one is not only creating a unique quasi-object, but is in essence composing a rhetorical act in a moment of <i>kairos</i>.<br />
<br />
To give you a little background, object-oriented philosophy originated as an offshoot of a philosophical movement known as speculative realism. The main complaint of speculative realism is that so much of contemporary philosophy has been built around the erroneous notion that thinking and being are inseparable. French speculative realist, Quentin Meillassoux, coined the term “correlationism” to identify “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (5). For philosophers like Graham Harman, the obvious way out of this correlation was to sidestep the correlation altogether by allowing all objects the same ontological status that under correlationism only humans enjoyed. Therefore, in an object-oriented ontology everything exists as an object, including human beings. Hard drives, carpets, street tar, and graduate students are all objects. And though each is recognized as its own, autonomous object with distinct qualities and powers, they all exist and relate to each other in similar ways.<br />
<br />
In <i>Guerrilla Metaphysics</i>, one of his earlier object-oriented philosophical texts, Graham Harman describes the relation between two objects as a form of metaphor. For Harman, each object is made up of two realms: a “real” realm which always withdraws from any relation (a realm that could be described as the object’s essence); and a “sensual” realm made up of the numerous qualities an object puts forth in relation to other objects. In an earlier chapter I describe this split relative to Freud’s notion of the uncanny. An object is uncanny in that it straddles the line between what is known (or present) and unknown (or withdrawn). Yet, because of the withdrawal of the object’s essence, any relation between two individual objects is always a relation that takes place in the sensual realm. In this way, objects in Harman’s philosophy, are said to “bathe” in each other’s sensual realms. In a move that he is completely serious about, Harman argues that: “[A] thing relates to its own parts in the same way it relates to other things, and indeed in the same way that we ourselves relate to things: namely, by distorting them, caricaturing them, bringing them into play only partially” much like metaphor (172). Since objects always only interact with each other in their sensual realms, no two objects ever directly interact with each other. Instead, each object metaphorizes, or distorts the other object, in relating to it. Every relation requires multiple translations.<br />
<br />
As digital media professor and fellow object-oriented philosopher, Ian Bogost puts it, “Objects [for Harman] float in a sensual ether. When they interact…they do so only by the means they know internally but in relation to the qualities [of the other object] in which they ‘bathe’” (66). Each object makes sense of the other object according to its own logic—that is, it translates the other object according to its own structure and desires. Water and soil, for example, are both autonomous objects (in their own right) but become “fuel” for a plant. The plant relates by metaphorizing, distorting, or caricaturizing the water and soil into fuel.<br />
<br />
Bogost takes this idea of relating-by-metaphor a step further and describes a process he calls “metaphorism.” For Bogost, “Metaphorism offers a method…that grasps at the ways objects bask metaphorically in each others’ notes…by means of metaphor itself, rather than by describing the effects of such interactions on the objects. It offers a critical process for characterizing object perceptions” (67). Metaphorism, therefore, offers up the metaphor as a caricature of the perception of an object. Much like Jakob von Uexküll’s <i>Umwelt</i> theory allowed biologists and animal studies scholars to discuss unique world views for animals such as honey bees and ticks, metaphorism is Bogost’s attempt at developing a perceptual scheme whereby one might glimpse the world from the point of view of a particular object. For example, in his book <i>Alien Phenomenology</i> Bogost metaphorizes how a Foveon image sensor in a Sigma DP camera “sees” the world. Metaphor, for Bogost, then is a way one can attempt to understand what it might be like to be a specific object.<br />
<br />
And although this approach to metaphor makes sense from the philosophical and ontological perspective, where there is an importance placed on describing what is necessary—i.e., the object itself—rhetoric, on the other hand and as I argue for in an earlier chapter, deals with the contingency of these objects’ relations to each other. For object-oriented rhetoric, then, metaphor is a method by which the hitherto unforeseen sensual qualities of objects might be brought to forefront when two objects are juxtaposed or forced to relate. In order to get at a rhetoric of objects, one must compose or build something I call a material metaphor.<br />
<br />
A few points need to be made about material metaphors before we progress. First, there is a specific emphasis placed on the materiality of the objects that make up the metaphor. In other words, in building a material metaphor, a certain amount of respect should be given regarding the individual material make-up of each object. Neither the metaphor nor the other object should be seen as a substitute or ever be used to reduce the primary object (or vice versa). For example, if I were to say that a key is a kind of knife, I neither want to reduce the key to the qualities of a knife, nor the knife to the qualities of a key. Rather, the material metaphor of key-as-knife respects the materiality of both objects allowing the two to relate, bathe, and interact exactly because of these material differences. Both can be serrated, both are a times sharp, and both can used to get inside other objects. However a knife has a long handle that fits the entire hand whereas a key often does not. The point is, regardless of the connections made, each object is irreducible to the other object and to the larger metaphor.<br />
<br />
But this brings me to the second point: material metaphors are a way of modeling the uncanny nature of objects—allowing the two objects that make up the metaphor to generate, bathe, and make present certain previously unknown or withdrawn aspects of either one or both of the objects that participate in the metaphor. Such modeling is similar to that put forth by sociologist, Andrew Pickering in <i>The Mangle of Practice</i>. For Pickering, as well as for object-oriented rhetoric, metaphor as a way of modeling “is an open-ended process with no determinate destination. From a given model…an indefinite number of future variants can be constructed. Nothing about the model itself fixes which of them will figure as the goal of a particular passage of practice” (19). In this way, material metaphors should not be seen as limiting compositions, but should instead be seen as generative objects, requiring further models and further material metaphors.<br />
<br />
Take the following example given by Thomas Frentz regarding the influential work of Donald Schön:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Schön recalls a group that was charged with improving paintbrushes made with synthetic bristles. Compared to brushes with natural bristles having split ends, the synthetic ones without split ends delivered paint unevenly, in “glops,” as they put it. Even splitting the ends of the synthetic bristles didn’t help. Then someone said, “You know, a paintbrush is a kind of pump,” implying that when a brush is pressed against some surface, paint is forced out through the spaces between the bristles, like a pump. The implications of this “paintbrush as pump” metaphor led to a series of modifications in the synthetic bristles that eventually produced a brush equal to or better than ones with natural bristles—and far less expensive (105). </blockquote>
For Schön, as well as Frentz, the paintbrush-as-pump metaphor not only allowed the designers to better understand the sensual qualities of the paintbrush through its forced relation to the pump, but it also allowed the generation of other such metaphors whereby the pump becomes more than just a liquid transportation device (pump-as-bristle) and the bristles of the paintbrush more than means to getting paint on a canvas.<br />
<br />
Finally, the composition of a material metaphor is the composition of what sociologist Bruno Latour calls a “quasi-object.” For Latour, quasi-objects exist in between the social and natural poles, so that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[I]f religion, arts or styles are necessary to ‘reflect’, ‘reify’, ‘materialize’, ‘embody’ society– to use some of the social theorists’ favorite verbs –then are objects not, in the end, its co-producers? Is not society built literally– not metaphorically –of gods, machines, sciences, arts and styles?… Maybe social scientists have simply forgotten that before projecting itself on to things society has to be made, built, constructed? And out of what material could it be built if not out of nonsocial, non-human resources? (<i>We Have Never Been Modern</i> 54) </blockquote>
And it is precisely these nonsocial, nonhuman resources which Latour calls quasi-objects. These quasi-objects are not only the speed bumps in a school zone and the soccer ball in play on the field, but I would argue they are also the key-as-knife and the paintbrush-as-pump. As quasi-objects, material metaphors enjoy both abstract and material translations. They not only allow the two objects to unfold in each other, but the material metaphor as a whole becomes an object (of sorts) with which to be reckoned. The quasi-object, soil-as-fuel has repercussions not only for the plant, but also perhaps for the farmer, the gardener, and the small agricultural business owner.<br />
<br />
Neither the linguistic significance of each object, nor the meaning of the overall metaphor itself is of great importance to the composition of a material metaphor. Instead, what is important for a material metaphor is what each object draws out of the other and what inner depths the two objects plunge, allowing each to be seen in their unique uncanniness. Material metaphors as quasi-objects exploit, point out, draw attention to sensual qualities of both objects, but never reduce them to those same qualities. They take part in objects by forcefully relating them to each other, and because of this “taking part in,” each material metaphor requires subsequent material metaphors.<br />
<br />
But why use metaphor? If the goal is to get at the rhetoric of objects, why use metaphor as the primary form of composition? The answer, I’d argue, is in the way that metaphor works. Or more specifically, the composition of a material metaphor is the composition of a rhetorical act in its entire contingency.
Take for example the way object-oriented ontologist Timothy Morton describes how an object comes into being:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Crash! Suddenly the air is filled with broken glass. The glass fragments are fresh objects, newborn from a shattered wine glass. These objects assail my senses and, if I’m not careful, my eyes could get cut. There are glass fragments. What is happening? How many? How did this happen? I experience the profound givenness of beginning as an anamorphosis, a distortion of my cognitive, psychic and philosophical space. The birth of an object is the deforming of the objects around it. An object appears like a crack in the real. This distortion happens in the sensual realm, but because of its necessary elements of novelty and surprise, it glimmers with the real, in distorted fashion. Beginnings are open, disturbing, blissful, horrific. </blockquote>
Much like the birth of an object, a material metaphor causes a moment of distortion in its rhetorical situation, a “crash” between two objects and the creation of a new quasi-object. In this way, material metaphors, too, are instantaneous and require immediate translation.<br />
<br />
And like material metaphors, rhetorical acts are ripe with connections from one object to another. One contemporary understanding of a rhetorical act is through the concept of <i>kairos</i>. In my own work, <i>kairos</i> has been linked to contingency, an opportune time, a fitting place, and most recently I argued for a third aspect—appropriate orientation. For John Muckelbauer, however, <i>kairos</i> also carries with it an ontological dimension. As Muckelbauer points out, often pre-Socratic notions of <i>kairos</i> defined it not only as the opportune moment, or fitting place, but also “considered <i>kairos</i> to be ‘one of the laws of the universe’” (115). Therefore, moments of <i>kairos</i> or <i>kairotic</i> events happen regardless of human involvement. However, here’s the rub. As Muckelbauer finds, <i>kairotic</i> events often require a response. Quoting philosopher John Smith, he states that “A <i>kairotic</i> event does not happen randomly; in some qualitative sense, it is a ‘time of crisis [and]…opportunity,’ which is solicited or even demanded by the situation itself” (116). So if a human subject is not necessary for a <i>kairotic</i> event to take place, but yet such an event demands a response, who or what responds?<br />
<br />
For Muckelbauer, the <i>kairotic</i> event itself is an erasure of the line between situation and audience:
As an ontological principle, a <i>kairotic</i> response does not have recourse to generality of any kind (either through intelligibility or judgment), but must be entirely singular and situated. […] If we are to encounter the singularity of situatedness, it would be imprecise to say that a <i>kairotic</i> situation ‘demands’ or ‘solicits’ a response. Instead, within this ontological rendering, <i>kairos</i> as qualitative time indicates a style of connecting that undoes the very distinction between a situation and a respondent…<i>Kairotic</i> connections simply happen. Or not. (116)
Seen ontologically, <i>kairos</i>, instead of simply being an opportune time or appropriate place, becomes a nonindividuated resonance—the connections made simply happen or not.<br />
<br />
Similarly, a material metaphor demands that connections also be made, but it does not dictate which ones work and which ones won’t. When we are presented with the key-as-knife or paintbrush-as-pump, the material metaphor, like the <i>kairotic</i> event, undoes the distinction between primary and secondary objects, vehicle and tenor; and instead concerns itself with the connections that “simply happen or not.” By composing a material metaphor one is as close as one can get to composing a <i>kairotic</i> event—that is, to creating an object-oriented rhetorical situation. Composing a material metaphor becomes not a moment of human perception or representation, but becomes a moment of carpentry—and the rhetorician becomes an engineer, a designer, and an architect.
<br />
<br />
------------------------------------------------------<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Works Cited </b><br />
<br />
Bogost, Ian. <i>Alien Phenomenology</i>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. Print.<br />
<br />
Frentz, Thomas. “Creative Metaphors, Synchronicity, and Quantum Physics.” <i>Philosophy and Rhetoric</i>, 44.2 (2011), 101-28. <i>JStor</i>. Web. 06 March 2013.<br />
<br />
Harman, Graham. <i>Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things</i>. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. Print.<br />
<br />
Latour, Bruno. <i>We Have Never Been Modern</i>. Boston: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.<br />
<br />
Meillassoux, Quentin. <i>After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency</i>. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.<br />
<br />
Morton, Timothy. <i>Realist Magic</i>. Open Humanities Press, 2013. Web. 14 February 2013.<br />
<br />
Muckelbauer, John. <i>The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change</i>. State University of New York Press, 2009. Print.
Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-9871943024234831232012-07-17T15:06:00.000-05:002012-07-17T15:06:46.047-05:00OOR Mathemes<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Before I get into the mathemes themselves, I’d like
to lay out the four terms by which we will need to read each matheme.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-collapse: collapse; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr style="height: 50.95pt;"><td style="border-bottom-color: black; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1pt; border-image: initial; border-left-color: black; border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1pt; border-right-color: black; border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1pt; border-top-color: black; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1pt; height: 50.95pt; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 5.4pt; padding-right: 5.4pt; padding-top: 0in; width: 223.8pt;" valign="top" width="298"><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">$ = Split Object<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">S1 = Local Manifestation<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">S2 = Environment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;">a = Withdrawal or Virtual Proper Being<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> In Lacan,
the “$” can be read as the barred or split subject. As Bruce Fink points out, "The castrated subject is the barred subject, the subject under the bar: it is a product of every </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">attempt and intent to signify to the other" (73) Since my goal is to move
these mathemes into the realm of OOO, we will need to read the “$” as the split
object of onticology. As Levi Bryant states in </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">The Democracy of Objects</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">, “…[S]plit-objects refers not to a
physical split such as the idea that objects can always be broken in half or
divided, but rather to the split between the virtual proper being of objects or
their powers and their local manifestations or qualities” (70). There are a
couple of points that need to be made about this split, though. First, every
object (including humans) is split between a virtual proper being and local
manifestations. This means that “$” is representative of all objects, including
the split subject in Lacan. Second, this “$” is the object proper, meaning that
“$” represents precisely this onticological idea of an object consisting of
both a virtual proper being and local manifestations (whether experienced or
not by another object).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Next, we will need to read Lacan’s “S<sub>1</sub>”
not as a master signifier, but as an object’s local manifestation. For Lacan, as Fink points out, “An S<sub>1</sub> is often recognizable in analysis by
the fact that the analysand repeatedly butts up against the term; it may be a
term like ‘death,’ for instance, or any other term that seems opaque to the
analysand and that always seems to put an end to associations instead of
opening things up” (Fink 77). In other words, the master signifier is an actualization
of a lack in the subject, but an actualization that is so strong or frequently
repeated that it blocks further actualizations. Onticologically, however, the
local manifestation can be seen as a quality or actualization of a power in the
object’s virtual proper being, often when it comes into an external or
exo-relation with another object. As Bryant notes, “As a function of the
exo-relations objects enter into with other objects, the attractors defining
the virtual space of a substance can be activated in a variety of different
ways, actualizing objects in a variety of different ways at the level of local
manifestations” (Bryant 114). But like the master signifier that could keep the
analysand from opening up, in a sense defining him, there is also a danger to
each local manifestation. Because local manifestations are actualizations of withdrawn
virtual or potential powers in the object, each object runs the risk of
reducing the entire split object into only its local manifestations. “It is for
this reason,” Bryant argues, “that the confusion of objects with their actualization
in local manifestations always spells theoretical disaster, for in doing so we
foreclose the volcanic potentials harbored in the depths of objects”
(114). Therefore, like Lacan’s master
signifier, each local manifestation harbors the danger of eclipsing the
split-object by reducing it to its local manifestations at the detriment of its
virtual proper being.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We will also need to read Lacan’s S<sub>2</sub> in
a modified way, since for Lacan the S<sub>2</sub> represented at times
knowledge and “‘other’ signifiers” (75). Fink explains how for Lacan it was the
S<sub>2</sub> or the group of signifiers, the chain of potential signifiers
that gave meaning to the master signifier. In other words, the S<sub>2</sub> is
always multiple, S<sub>2</sub>s. And, “If S1 is not in place, every S<sub>2</sub>
is somehow unbound. The S<sub>2</sub>s have relations amongst themselves; they
may be strung together in perfectly ordinary ways by a psychotic [someone who
has no master signifier], but they do not seem to affect him or her in any sense;
they are somehow independent of him or her” (75). Therefore, the S<sub>2</sub>
is a chain or group of signifiers that retroactively brings about the meaning
of an S1. In onticological terms, however, we need to read this S<sub>2</sub>
as representing the environment of the object. For Bryant, though, “[T]he
environment is not a container of substances or systems that precedes the
existence of substances or systems. There is no environment ‘as such’ existing
out there in the world…Rather, we have as many environments as there are
substances in the universe, without it being possible to claim that all of
these systems are contained in a single environment” (146). Environments, or S<sub>2</sub>s,
are again plural. And because of the ongoing and metonymical form of
identification, environments can be seen as in-formational. As Bryant puts it, “While
there is indeed an identity to the object, in the sense that it has a virtual
endo-structure that persists across time, this identity is always manifesting
itself in a variety of ways” (166). In this sense, objects take on new forms
and actualize new local manifestations, so that “[i]n both allopoietic and
autopoitic systems, information is an event that makes a difference by
selecting a system-state” (166). In this way, the environment has an effect on
the object retroactively, by producing the space available for the object’s
local manifestations, so that the system or virtual proper being of the object
is what constitutes the environment. As Bryant points out, “Although this
distinction refers to two domains (system and environment), the distinction
itself originates from one of these domains: the system” (144). S<sub>2</sub>,
or the realm of other possible signifiers, can effectively be read as the
object’s environment, since both operate as multiple arenas by which the S<sub>1</sub>
becomes actualized retroactively.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, for Lacan the object cause of desire is
represented by the small “a.” Fink describes object (a) as “the leftover of
that process of constituting an object, the scrap that evades the grasp of symbolization.
It is a remainder that there is something else, something perhaps lost, perhaps
yet to be found” (94). In short, object (a) is that which is in excess of every
relation between S1 and S<sub>2</sub>. It is, speaking onticologically, that
which withdraws from any relation. It is the object’s virtual proper being. As
Bryant argues, “objects are always in excess of any of their local
manifestations, harboring hidden volcanic powers irreducible to any of their
manifestations in the world” (70). So that “[w]ithin 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” (70). Much like Lacan’s object (a) which escapes (and is
thus produced by) every signifying relation, the virtual proper being of an
object withdraws (and is inferred) from any of the object’s relations and local
manifestations. </span></div>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-56750357861208721322012-07-16T15:41:00.000-05:002012-07-16T15:41:57.772-05:00Why Not Democracy?<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
Recently, Levi Bryant has been attempting to work
through the political implications of OOO and his onticology. In <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/lacan-anarchy-masculinity-and-psychosis/">a recent post </a>he proposed an anarchical/feminine ontological politics whereby there would be
no sovereign or master. As Levi states:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
Indeed,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Democracy of Objects</i> probably
should have been entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Anarchy of
Objects </i>(there will be a book or chapter entitled The Anarchy of Machines
in the future). Now what is an anarchic
ontology? It is an ontology that
forecloses transcendent terms such as God, Platonic forms, a-historical
essences, sovereigns, fathers, a-historical structures, transcendent subjects,
etc. All of these beings are treated as
naturalistic, social, nation, and psychological transcendental illusions (cf. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Difference and Givenness</i>). Within an anarchistic ontology, everything
unfolds within immanence, without anything standing outside of history,
becoming, time, etc. An anarchic
ontology is an ontology without fathers; or rather, it is an ontology where the
name-of-the-father is foreclosed or banished both ontologically and socially as
a necessary term.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
As Levi sees it, onticology leads to an anarchist
political state, absent of any (transcendent) ruler. And in his argument, which
is based around his reading of Lacan’s graphs of sexuation, he is ultimately
left with the question of whether or not such a view is even possible. The question is, in other words,
if there is no master with which to identify, how are governments, societies, or
political groups even possible? Is a politics based on onticology ultimately
“doomed to psychosis?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
As
Levi explains, for Lacan, in the moment of identification one is left either
with a foreclosure of the name-of-the-father (often resulting in psychosis) or
with a countless chain of insufficient signifiers. Another way to see this
split is between the foreclosure as an endless world of metonymy (i.e., virtual
or potential) and the chain of signifiers as metaphor. Typically, subject
identification relies on metaphor to escape metonymy, but since each metaphor
(or signifier) is insufficient, it always requires another one. In my essay for
RSA 2012, I argued that object-oriented identification precedes the metaphoric
process, residing instead in the metonymic realm. But unlike metaphor, which is
persuasive, metonymic or object-oriented identification is immanently suasive,
or suggestive. At the level of identification, there is no direct metaphoric
chain of relations either between objects or within an object. What this means
is that to some degree, every object-object relation is already psychotic. </div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The
thing about it is, though, is that no object stays within this metonymic realm.
To this end, every object metaphorizes every object it relates to (this is
Harman’s and Bogost’s point). So if we look at Lacan’s Discourse of the Master,
the relation between the agent and the other (S<sub>1</sub>—> S<sub>2</sub>)
is the metaphorical relation operating under the truth of the split-object, a
local manifestation or S<sub>1</sub> acts on its environment precisely through
a reduction or singular quality. What is produced, then, is withdrawal both in
the acting and reacting objects. It’s important to note, however, that this
metaphorism is based on the object’s metonymic identification as groundwork.
Metaphorism is not possible without metonymic identification.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Why
is this important? Put simply, recognizing metonymic identification before
metaphoric relation allows us to understand the autonomy of objects while also understanding
them as assemblages. It is what makes sense of the following from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Democracy of Objects</i>:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
From a certain perspective it
can thus be said that all objects are a crowd. Every object is populated by
other objects that it enlists in maintaining its own existence. As a
consequence, we must avoid reducing objects to the manner in which they are
enlisted by other objects precisely because the objects enlisted are always
themselves autonomous objects. Another way of putting this would be to say that
there is no harmony or identity of parts and wholes Parts aren’t parts for a
whole and the whole isn’t a whole for parts. Rather, what we have are relations
of dependency where nonetheless parts and wholes are distinct and autonomous
from one another. (217)</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
We
cannot reduce a Cubs fan to a single metaphor (fan of a baseball team), nor can
we reduce the Cubs to a single metaphor (baseball team). Instead both objects
(fan and team) are metonymically identified, consisting of numerous local
manifestations—the fan is also a human, male, middle-aged, father, etc. while
the team consists of a number of players (each, too, with their own metonymic
identifications), managers, owner, uniforms, historical past, present image,
etc. But at the same time, a fan can metaphorize the Cubs in any number of
ways, relating to a player, an attitude, or to the image of the Cubs
organization. But this metaphorization is unique to that fan.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Instead
of going the way of anarchy and trying to get rid of an overall master, perhaps
a better way to understand the political implications of OOO is by multiplying
the master, by explaining how every object maintains countless metaphoric master-relations
simultaneously while itself resisting reduction to any single one of them. What
this means then, is like its ontological status, an OOO politics is messy and
psychotic. But this also means, however, that any object can resist
metaphorization, or reduction by a master. The factory worker strikes when he
feels as if he is being taken for granted, or his rights as an individual
(metonymic object) are being denied. The terrorist attacks a business building
in order to strike a blow against a perceived, repressive regime. Regardless of
the violence, both actions are contingent in their results (the factory might
change its internal structure or not; the terrorist attack might hurt the
regime, or it might simply tighten security).</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">What this does for
politics is, in a way, reverse the ideological critique proposed by Althusser. OOO
insists that language does not pre-exist the object, and instead of society
creating the ideological subject (such that the subject is born into ideology),
each object of OOO should be seen as an ideological, generative machine.
Nothing is produced in objects by ISAs, but through repetition or frequency of
local manifestations and metaphoric relations, objects create their own ISAs.
Ideologies are nothing but these metaphorical relations that attempt to reduce other
objects to a single idea, thought, quality, property, or local manifestation. So
we might talk about pen ideologies that attempt to reduce all relations with
other objects as something on which it could write. Unlike Althusser’s ISAs,
OOO ISAs are singular, emanating from individual objects. Because of this
singularity of object ideological state apparatuses, the repressive state
apparatuses or RSAs (i.e., heads of state, masters, sovereigns, etc.) are
plural. When one object resists another object’s ISA, there are multiple
offensive and defensive perturbations that could take place, each with its own
contingent result, some of which could change the organization of the originary
object itself.</span>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-83787647699174743612012-06-30T06:46:00.002-05:002012-07-09T16:05:29.739-05:00The Possibility of a Flat EthicsSo I've been a little absent here, and for that I apologize. However, I've been pretty busy. At the end of May I presented a paper at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Philadelphia over Object-Oriented Identification (I finally finished the point brought up by my last couple of posts...I might post my paper here soon). I was on a panel with <a href="http://clinamen.jamesjbrownjr.net/">Jim Brown Jr.</a> and Scot Barnett, and during the Q and A session following our presentations we were asked about the possibility of an <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/symposium-on-flat-ethics/">Object-Oriented ethics</a>. I've been able to give it some thought and what follows is a rough sketch of an idea that occurred to me after the conference.<br />
<br />
To answer the question of whether or not there can be a nonhuman or non-anthropomorphic ethics, it is important to first understand the most fundamental axiom of object-oriented ontology—that objects withdraw from all relations—for its withdrawal is also its excess. In other words, the withdrawn object is a volcanic soup of potential, waiting to be actualized. And, second, like object-oriented ontology itself, any attempt at developing an object-oriented ethics must also follow the logic of the uncanny. In this way, an object-oriented or flat ethics requires an adherence to contingency, so that what was or is could very well not be, and that was is not, could very well exist. As was stated earlier, the logic of the uncanny forces binaries to overlap, to seemingly bleed into each other without requiring the other to disappear completely. In other words, the uncanny allows there to be both appearance and withdrawal simultaneously and an interior that is also exterior.<br />
<br />
Here, Meillassoux’s insistence on the necessity of contingency in <i>After Finitude</i> might be of some help. For Meillassoux, unlike the object-oriented folks, the way around correlationist thought is to “uncover an absolute necessity that does not reinstate any form of absolutely necessary entity” (34). Unlike object-oriented ontology, which insists on the necessity of the object, Meillassoux finds his necessity in contingency itself—a non-metaphysical necessity. Contingency “expresses the fact that physical laws remain indifferent as to whether an event occurs or not – they allow an entity to emerge, to subsists, or to perish” (39). In other words, by absolutizing contingency over any specific entity, Meillassoux places contradiction at the heart of being itself. Being itself becomes contingent, meaning there could just as well be something as well as there could not. But, then why is there something rather than nothing if both are possible?
<br />
<blockquote>
For Meillassoux, contingency also requires that something exist—that there be something rather than nothing. His argument for this something, again, revolves around the necessity of contingency:
Since contingency is thinkable (as an absolute), but unthinkable without the persistence of the two realms of existence and inexistence, we have to say that it is necessary that there always be this or that existent capable of not existing, and this or that inexistent capable of existing.
Thus the solution to the problem [of contingency] is as follows: it is necessary that there be something rather than nothing because it is necessarily contingent that there is something rather than something else. The necessity of the contingency of the entity imposes the necessary existence of the contingent entity. (emphasis in original; 76).</blockquote>
For Meillassoux, then, the necessity of contingency requires that there actually be something that is contingent. In order for there to be this logic of existence/nonexistence that contingency is based on, a logic that is itself uncanny, there must be something that follows such logic. Object-oriented ontology, therefore, is justified in claiming that all entities are objects but only if they abide by some sort of uncanny logic that is guided by absolute contingency. Again, what makes this possible in object-oriented ontology is the withdrawn nature of every object. As Bryant argues, “Insofar as virtual proper being is thoroughly withdrawn and never itself becomes present, it can only be inferred through the actual. It is only through tracking local manifestations and their variations that we get any sense of the dark volcanic powers harbored within objects” (281). What withdraws from all objects is precisely this absolute contingency, this uncanny volcano of potential. But what does this have to do with the ethics of such objects?<br />
<br />
It is only because of the necessity of the contingent and the adherence to an uncanny logic, that an object-oriented ethics can exist. Simplified, ethics require that a choice be possible and depending upon how one responds to that choice, one’s actions are deemed either ethical or unethical. Typically, these decisions are based on some sort of law (social, moral, personal, etc.). So for example, if I were faced with the choice of whether or not to save a baby from a hungry shark, my choice to save the baby at the expense of the hunger of the shark would depend upon my acceptance of some moral law(s) or social law(s). If I go against some moral or social law, I might find myself attempting to explain my unethical behavior. The problem is that such laws change over time and in between social circles, so that what might be ethical today may not have been 50 or so years ago, or what might be ethical in the United States may not be ethical in India. In this way, there is already a certain amount of contingency in human ethics.<br />
<br />
Most material nonhuman objects, on the other hand, do not abide by any set of moral or social laws. Instead, most are guided by physical laws. These physical laws can guide form, structure, function, and collectivity. Two hydrogen atoms seem to only bond with an oxygen molecule in a very specific way. But as Meillassoux argues, even these laws are subject to contingency, meaning “that the laws of nature could change, not in accordance with some superior hidden law…but for no cause or reason whatsoever” (83). Because of the necessity of contingency that Meillassoux argues for, physical laws (like objects) must be seen as operating in a contingent space between being one way or another. So if objects are contingent and laws are contingent, why are things not simply constantly in flux? Why is there a seeming static nature to the world?<br />
<br />
The answer is rather simple, but one that seems to run throughout object-oriented thinking: because of contingency, there is always the possibility that physical laws become something other than what they are. Or, as Meillassoux puts it, requiring the necessity of contingency means not ruling out “the <i>possibility</i> that contingent laws might only very <i>rarely</i> change—so rarely indeed that no one would ever have had the opportunity to witness such a modification” (106). Again, the emphasis is on potential and contingency. Yet this contingency implies fidelity of the object to the physical law and fidelity of the law to the object. Objects act ethically to one another insofar as they stay faithful to the physical law. But since the physical law itself has the potential to be other at any time, it too has a certain fidelity to its relation with the object. In other words, a flat ethics proposes that all objects are contingent, and that any laws by which they might abide, must be understood as contingent, as well.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-79414443784942375732012-04-23T16:14:00.000-05:002012-04-23T16:14:05.874-05:00Metonymic Formations<br />
Rhetoric and OOO can at times seem polar opposites. While rhetorical identification is concerned with unification and signification, OOO seems to worry about the individual substances of objects, withdrawing from any totalizing unification or signification whatsoever. But as we’ve seen in the last two posts (<a href="http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2012/04/rhetorical-wrangle.html">here </a>and <a href="http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2012/04/beyond-freudian-identification.html">here</a>), the two “realms” may not be so divisive. In fact, as Diane Davis’s comparison of Freudian identification to that of Burke’s has shown us, there is a form of non-symbolic persuasion that is unaccounted for in Burkean rhetoric. My aim in the following post is to use Lacan to clarify this split between nonsymbolic and symbolic action.<br />
<br />
To say that the Lacanian subject is complex would be an understatement. However, this shouldn’t deter us from examining at least some part of Lacan’s split subject in order to better understand identification. Identification for Lacan is a two-fold process: alienation and separation. In <i>Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan</i>, Gilbert D. Chaitin clearly describes the way alienation works in terms of subject-hood:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Adopted from Hegel, Marx and their interpreters, Lacan’s alienation designates the birth of the subject of language, an occurrence that is more like a stillbirth. The subject comes into existence through the discourse of the Other, when the Other…imposes a signification upon the individual, calling her to take up a particular function, investing her with a certain position in the human family or society at large…At this point the subject is confronted with the forced choice of the Lacanian vel (Latin for ‘either,’ ‘or’), which results from the interplay of subject and meaning (attributes) in the functioning of language as predication: either he chooses being , thus loosing out on meaning entirely, or he chooses the meaning imposed on him, and thereby forfeits that meaning-less aspect of signification which constitutes the unconscious (183).</blockquote>
This forced choice of alienation can be boiled to down to the following: either choose meaninglessness and reject language and subject-hood, or you accept the meaning of the Other, and become an instrument of the Other and having subject-hood taken away from you. Either way, you will lose subject-hood. For Lacan, the only way out of this forced choice of alienation, is to recognize a third option, that of the choice itself.<br />
Separation, then, is this way out of the forced choice of alienation. It opens up a space of unknown meaning in signification. If alienation offered the subject an “either/or,” then in separation the subject defines his relation to the Other as a “neither/nor.” As Chaitin understands it:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Either the subject refuses language (meaning) entirely, in which case the nonsubject of psychosis results. From this point nothing further can result. Or she accepts meaning, in which case her individual being is crushed by the universalizing function of the signifier. From this “all” [present in the all or nothing choice of alienation] there is a possible way out, provided the totality of meaning can be disrupted. And that is just what separation involves: opening up a space of non-meaning within language; that is, forming an unconscious. (187)</blockquote>
To open this space up, the subject begins to move between signifiers, neither this one nor that one. And for Lacan, the space between signifiers is also the space of non-meaning in the desire of the Other; that is, the object cause of desire—objet petit a.<br />
<br />
Approaching this process rhetorically, David Metzger, in <i>The Lost Cause of Rhetoric</i>, puts alienation and separation in terms of metonymy and metaphor, respectively. What Metzger shows is that, for Lacan, “metonymy functions as a ground for metaphor” (69). One way to understand this is to recognize that the goal of separation (or metaphor) is to temporarily choose a signifier, completing subject identification. However, as we know, Lacan has a previous step before this choice is complete—alienation (or metonymy)—which can be understood as a meaningless chain of possible signifiers. For Metzger, language and the signification of separation forces the meaningless formations of metonymy to be repressed, or given up in favor of the signifier.<br />
<br />
What Metzger’s formation should allow us to see, though, is that before identification, we are faced with a meaningless list of things, a metonymy of stuff if you will. So the problem for object-oriented rhetoric is not how then do we identify the object, but what meaningless lists came before such an identification? And instead of asking what is that object for me, we should be asking what metonymy can we provide in order to work in a less-symbolic manner, and describe the object-for-itself?<br />
<div>
<br /></div>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-58852258720911630112012-04-13T13:24:00.000-05:002012-04-13T13:24:09.349-05:00Beyond Freudian IdentificationIn <a href="http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2012/04/rhetorical-wrangle.html">my last post</a> I attempted to work through a concept of the rhetorical wrangle as the oscillation inherent in Burkean identification. For Burke, only when identification is seen as being both unification and division can it also be seen as the foundation of rhetoric. Complicating matters, Diane Davis’s work in <i>Inessential Solidarity</i> points to a cover-up in Burke’s definition. Placing Burke’s identification in comparison with Freud’s, Davis discovers that what is left out of Burke is any notion of a non-symbolic identification even though Burke calls for his subject to be divided (between self and other) before existing in any social relations. <br />
<br />
On the other hand, for Freud, as Davis reads him through Borch-Jacobsen, there is a suggestiveness that cannot be accounted for when a subject is hypnotized. Suggestion, here, is best understood as an indirect persuasion. As Davis puts it, “Unlike political persuasion, suggestion is an improper rhetoric, a bastard form that induces action (or attitude) without properly persuading, a directly suasive ‘discourse’ that defies the presumed distance between self and other, evading cognitive discretion and so all possibility for deliberation” (33). For Freud, suggestion is dangerous, leading him to reject it as a form of analysis. Instead, as Davis informs us, Freud trades in the analyst’s suggestions in favor of the patients “free-associations.” However, Freud finds himself going back to hypnosuggestion to later explain group formation as a form of such suggestion—where members, before identifying as a group, identify with a leader, a father, a fuhrer (31). Suggestion exposes, then, a type of identification that is not produced by and from the self, but instead is issued by an other.<br />
<br />
Following Davis just a little bit further, what we find in Freud is that in relation to alterity identification is at a loss. Identification fails to wholly signify the self in response to this other. And, as Davis remarks, “It is not in identification, but its failure, in the withdrawal of identity, that I am exposed to my predicament of exposedness and become capable of demonstrating concern for another finite existent” (35) The originary other that splits the subject from it’s self for Burke, is for Freud “a surplus of alterity that remains indigestible, inassimilable, unabsorbable” creating a negative, a lack that is also a surplus (34). But since, as Davis reminds us, there are no negatives in nature for Burke, what are we to make of this remainder that is not part of the symbolic? <br />
<br />
Sadly, this is where we must break from Davis, not out of disagreement but out of necessity. For Davis’s work opens a door that we must now step through. By pointing out a non-symbolic form of identification that revolves around this non-signified other, Davis ends her discussion of Burkean identification by stating that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">[W]hat Burke censored in Freud—consciously or unconsciously—is the possibility that no flex of reason, no amount of proper critique, can secure the interpersonal distance on which Burke had pinned his hopes. According to Freud, an affectability or persuadability operates irrepressibly and below the radar of the critical faculties. (35-6)</blockquote>It is the goal of the next post to explore the nature of this operation that is “below the radar” of symbolic action. In order to do this, I will have to move beyond Freud and into Lacan.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-51356986846158891522012-04-13T06:20:00.000-05:002012-04-13T06:20:48.035-05:00The Rhetorical WrangleThe “rhetorical wrangle” is a phrase that only briefly appears in Kenneth Burke’s <i>A Rhetoric of Motives</i>, but as a concept (one that I wish to push to the fullest extent) it represents the ambiguity that Burke saw in what makes persuasion possible – i.e., identification. On the one hand identification refers to unification, a wholeness or completeness. To be identified is to have definition as someone or something. However, on the other hand, as Burke makes extremely clear, this unification can only take place because “identification is compensatory to division” (21). In this way, identification is a consubstantial process, both joining while keeping separate. Including division as a major aspect of identification, though, allows Burke to create an oscillating binary (identification/division); but not without some ambiguity. For example, perhaps we have all had that friend who never seems to be satisfied with his job. And each time he accepts a new position, he seems to merge who he is with the job he is doing, at times self-identifying as a barista, a waiter, or a telecommunications consultant. However, there is always a point during each of these professions where division creeps in, and that friend starts to complain about feeling exploited as a worker. It is precisely at this point of uneasiness (or the hesitation between belonging and exploitation) that for Burke, “you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric” (25). And, as if to head our questioning off at the pass, moments later Burke clarifies such an invitation, arguing that even if you believe to be working out of the purest of motives, the ambiguities of identification lead to argument. So that, no matter how “‘pure’ one’s motives may be actually, the impurities of identification lurking about the edges of such situations introduce a typical Rhetorical wrangle of the sort that can never be settled once and for all…” (26). In this way, rhetoric, for Burke, only becomes possible through the push and pull of the wrangle as an effect of identification.<br />
<br />
Building on the ambiguities of identification and the rhetorical wrangle, Diane Davis in her book <i>Inessential Solidarity</i>, reminds us that for Burke, identification is settled symbolically:<br />
<blockquote>According to Burke, there is no essential identity; what goes for your individual “substance” is not an essence but the incalculable totality of your complex and contradictory identifications, through which you variously (and vicariously) become able to say “I.” Like the “official” Freudian version on which it’s based, “rhetorical identification” depends on symbolic representation, on the production and intervention of meaningful figures, which Burke says are already persuasive: “whenever there is ‘meaning,’ there is ‘persuasion’” (21)</blockquote>However, as Davis points out, if the self is constructed through multiple identifications, not only must we be foreign to ourselves – much in the same way our unemployable friend appears to always be playing a new role with a new identity. But, paradoxically, if identification is to only come about through shared meaning, we must also know ourselves “as and through [our] representations” in relation to an other (21). Yet it is the first split that troubles Davis. Before the rhetorical wrangle of identification ever takes place, Burke has set up a prior division (and possible identification) between self and other. For Burke, Davis argues, “the division between self and other is the ‘state of nature’ that is identification’s motivating force: identification’s job is to transcend this natural state of division, and rhetoric’s job is identification” (22). Here, identification (and by default rhetoric, as well) becomes mixed up with desire. As a separate organism, the human for Burke, is individuated. Yet, as a symbol using animal, the human becomes, in Burke’s words, “<i>homo dialecticus</i>.”<br />
<br />
<i>Homo dialecticus</i> is a split subject, both self and other, desiring to belong. For Davis, “Essentially enclosed and alienated, [Burke’s] <i>homo dialecticus</i> already desires to transcend this state of nature—‘[b]iologically, it is of the essence of man to desire”—and is ontologically equipped to do so via the inborn powers of his or her imagination” (23). So while Burke maintains individuality among human persons, he immediately places these already desiring individuals into a complex network of identifications and rhetorical wrangle of shared meanings. What Burke implies but avoids ever saying, as Davis sees it, is that “identification can no longer be understood as an identification of one <i>with</i> another, at least not at first, since it would necessarily precede the very distinction between self and other” (26). And this prior identification lends itself to a rhetoricity or “affectability or persuadability that is at work prior to and in excess of any shared meaning” (26). Does this mean, then, that there is a possibility for a nonsybmolic action?Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-38230780896148931742012-04-11T17:56:00.002-05:002012-04-11T17:56:43.693-05:00Where I am.So I've officially let this blog live its own life for awhile. Not good. So in the next few weeks I will be developing my ideas over rhetorical identification and OOO. Stay tuned, and sorry for the absence.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-3023973797453474892011-12-07T13:10:00.001-06:002011-12-07T13:11:00.160-06:00More on Hacking<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qu7BF73HiDs/Tt-5KFQJUNI/AAAAAAAAAO8/FKy6FEPKkU8/s1600/Hacker+Inside+parody.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qu7BF73HiDs/Tt-5KFQJUNI/AAAAAAAAAO8/FKy6FEPKkU8/s320/Hacker+Inside+parody.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I only have a brief amount of time before I have to run off and teach, but it seems that my post on hacking and allusion has received a few responses. Harman responds <a href="http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/nathan-gale-on-hacking-and-allusion/">here</a>. Robert Jackson responds to both my and Harman’s posts <a href="http://robertjackson.info/index/2011/12/on-ooo-and-hacking/">here</a>. And finally Tim Richardson responds to all three of us <a href="http://objetauthenticity.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/hack-is-contingent/">here</a>.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A few concessions are in order before I get into what I want to say. First, Jackson and Richardson are justified in correcting my mis-authorization of hacking. As Jackson points out:</span></div><blockquote class="tr_bq">“…when you are dealing with the reality of things including computer protocols and software objects, the dichotomy of meaningful authorisation / non-authorisation breaks down considerably. Just because a certain proprietary program is encapsulated so that general public access is forbidden, it does not entail a universal relational structure that can be attributed to relationships where HIV ‘hacks’ RNA strands.”</blockquote><div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Very true. In fact the problem with hacking is that it is often hard to place blame on the hack, the hacker, or the hacked. When I find a way around authorizing my iDevice, so that I can install third-party apps, who’s at fault? Me…well I just exploited a part of the system that was already there. Apple…well, they designed the original software that allowed me to do this. Or the hack itself…but it’s just a program or code. As David J. Gunkel points out in “Hacking Cyberspace,” “Hackers cannot be praised or blamed in the usual manner for what it is they do or do not do. In other words, hackers do not, in any strict sense of the term, cause the disruptions or general systems failures exhibited in and by the activities of hacking. Hacking only fixates on and manipulates an <i>aporia</i>, bug, or back door that is always and already present within and constitutive of the system as such” (803). Because of this lack of clear intentionality (and perhaps meaningful authorization), Richardson rightly points out that my formulation of hacking as “a faculty for observing all of the available means of perturbation” is at best inexact.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And Harman makes a good point when he argues that, “praxis falls short of the things themselves no less than theory does.” In other words, neither praxis nor theory successfully mines the depths of objects. No relation, for Harman, is ever direct. But, if allure, as Harman points out in <i>Guerilla Metaphysics</i>, is always something that “either occurs or does not occur,” then what of potential? Why assume, since the RO-SO (or real object – sensual object) relation is always the same (structure-wise) that it is untenable that we or another object could work by exploiting this knowledge? What I am talking about here is a sort of operation that works on potentiality and contingency. Such an operation isn’t interested in predicating unitary objects or reducing them to their parts or qualities, but is instead focused on uncovering (in an ontological sense, rather than an epistemological one) the unknown, subterranean object. In other words, an operation whose final cause is allusion. If such an operation could exist, then this is what I’m suggesting hacking (and maybe object-oriented rhetoric) might be considered. Wouldn't this also be in agreement with Jackson’s two points about code: 1) that code is already contingent and 2) the output of code can only be experienced and not known?</span></div><div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The only problem I see here, though, is that it does bring up questions about language. For like code, isn’t language just as contingent and unknowable in its outcome? And if so, is something like deconstruction already a type of language-hacking? This is where I think it's important, like Richardson points out, to move beyond thinking of hacking as directly related to code and see it as possible in other material relations: <a href="http://www.ikeahackers.net/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Ikea Hackers</a> and body hackers are just two examples of such non-code hacking.</span></div>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-36237652321181300332011-12-01T18:34:00.002-06:002011-12-01T18:38:38.686-06:00Democracy of Objects on Amazon<a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/the-democracy-of-objects-on-amazon/">Levi Bryant's</a> much awaited tome is up for purchase in the US on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1607852047/ref=redir_mdp_mobile?ref_=sr_1_11&qid=1322782383&sr=8-11">Amazon</a>. And just in time for a brilliant stocking stuffer.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-48892487978266901622011-11-22T08:48:00.000-06:002011-11-22T08:48:05.949-06:003 Possible Kinds of OOROver at Tim Richardson’s blog <a href="http://objetauthenticity.wordpress.com/">objet(a)uthenticity</a>, the question is raised as to whether an object can be designed to be <a href="http://objetauthenticity.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/a-home-for-stuff-i-dont-have-yet/#trackbacks">authentic</a>. For Tim, authenticity requires a certain amount of distance between the “mythical” real object and the object that is claiming to be authentic in regards to this real object. For example, Tim relays his experience with the word authentic when:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">During one of the [last democratic presidential primary] debates, when the field was still large, one pundit commented that the choice of a nominee would come down to which candidate seemed most authentic to the voter. At that exact moment, I reached for a bag of tortilla chips that was emblazoned with the slogan “Authentic Mexican Taste” and, with that coincidence, realized the problem. “Authentic Mexican Taste” only makes sense outside of (a mythic) Mexico. (Of course, you can see that referenced in the proposal, but this distance may be very much like the distance insisted on by medieval courtly love narratives, too).</blockquote>Authenticity, according to Tim, requires that there be an ideal object or place that exists apart from the “authentic” object. Authentic Mexican chips can only be authentic to a Mexico that exists outside of the chips themselves. In the end, though, Tim questions the relationship between the “mythical” object of origin and that object claiming to be authentic as being similar to the an object’s substance and its properties. He asks, “But I’m wondering if this idea of difference between <i>the design of a device (even the body) and its potential properties</i> isn’t something like the distance or gap I described far above as a hallmark of the authentic?” (emphasis added)<br />
<br />
Now hopefully Tim will build on this question (and I look forward to reading his next post), but it got me thinking about my own project and a note I drew up some time ago about Aristotle’s three kinds of rhetoric.<br />
<br />
For Aristotle, there existed three kinds or species of rhetoric: deliberative (argues that we should take a certain action or that a certain action should not be taken), forensic ( or judicial rhetoric, accuses or defends someone according to some event), and epideictic (offers praise of blame determining if someone is honorable or shameful). But, as Eugene Garver points out in his essay “Aristotle on the Kinds of Rhetoric,” these three kinds at times seem trivial since “[e]ven in Aristotle’s time, most rhetorical speeches did not fall under one of the three kinds of rhetoric. Today, the proportion of rhetoric that is deliberative, judicial, or epideictic is even smaller” (17). Now ultimately for Garver, Aristotle’s three kinds of rhetoric act as guides that “tell us what rhetoric should and can be” by “show[ing] us rhetoric’s possibilities” (18). And while I don’t disagree with Garver’s point one hundred percent, I would argue that in order to develop a true faculty to discover all available means of persuasion, we also need to take into account the temporal dimension of deliberative, forensic, and epideictic rhetoric.<br />
<br />
For Aristotle these three kinds of rhetoric were also tied to respective times. As he states in Book I chapter 3 of his <i>Rhetoric</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Further, to each of these a special time is appropriate: to the deliberative the future, for the speaker, whether he exhorts or dissuades, always advises about things to come; to the forensic the past, for it is always in reference to things done that one party accuses and the other defends; to the epideictic most appropriately the present, for it is the existing condition of things that all those who praise or blame have in view. It is not uncommon, however, for epideictic speakers to avail themselves of other times, of the past by way of recalling it, or of the future by way of anticipating it. (135b12-20)</blockquote>So we can see that apart from purpose, there is also a temporal distance between each of these types of rhetoric. Therefore, any interaction, if it is dependent upon a certain amount of opportunity or <i>kairos</i> is subject to a temporal characteristic as much as a motivating one. In other words, it makes sense (especially if we agree with Garver that Aristotle’s three kinds of rhetoric are often irrelevant to the extent that rarely do rhetorical acts fall under one of these categories) that we can reduce rhetoric to a temporal structure. So that if we were to develop any new categories, they would not have to accommodate or acquiesce to the purpose of Aristotle’s kinds, but simply the temporal format of future, past, and present.<br />
<br />
And it is with this temporal understanding of rhetoric that I wish to put forth my own three kinds of object-oriented rhetoric: architectural, practical, and aesthetic. With architectural rhetoric, the focus is on the object’s future design, for the object stands as something to be improved upon, developed, and planned for, whether that object exists or not. Architectural rhetoric relies on the future much like deliberative rhetoric does, by attempting to determine future models and manifestations. Practical rhetoric focuses solely on use, for objects in use are either in reference to objects that have worked before or to the withdrawn substance of the broken tool. Therefore, practical rhetoric relies on the past in order for objects to be put to use, constantly oscillating between tool and broken tool, real and sensual. Finally, aesthetic rhetoric focuses on objects as they appear or present themselves to us and to other objects, for it is in the object’s existence as something pleasing or perturbing that creates networks of relations. However, like epideictic rhetoric, it is not uncommon for aesthetic rhetoric “to avail themselves of other times,” of the past by way of recalling an object’s use, or of the future by way of anticipating the potential of new local manifestations.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-75528023720155539002011-11-10T20:26:00.000-06:002011-11-10T20:26:41.596-06:00Hacking and AllusionOver at Tim Richardson’s new blog <a href="http://objetauthenticity.wordpress.com/">Objet(a)uthenticity</a>, he <a href="http://objetauthenticity.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/we-arent-zeros/trackback/">questions </a>the idea of authenticity as it relates to both the prosthetic and the hack. He posits that like rhetoric, as dunamis, hacking seems to be a way of getting the object to reveal itself while a prosthetic is merely a replacement part:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">What seems to differentiate the hack from the prosthetic (that talk I linked to last note) is that the latter is a replacement in kind, a surrogate that may or may not live up to the standards or utility of the original (and may or may not appear authentic). The hack, though, is all about new functionality. So it might be that all hacks are prosthetic (though maybe they address a lack, not a loss?) but not all prosthetics are hacks? <br />
</blockquote>I’m going to get back to this in just a bit, but I want to bring up something that’s always bothered me about Harman’s OOO—allusion. In <i>Prince of Networks</i>, Harman states:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">When the hammer surprises us with its breakdown, the exact character of this surprise can admittedly be described by various predicates. But note that ‘surprise’ is only the phenomenal result of the previously concealed hammer. The veiled, underground hammer cannot be identified with the surprises it generates, since these merely allude to its existence. (Allusion and allure are legitimate forms of knowledge, but irreducible to specific predicates.) (225)<br />
</blockquote>Therefore, even when the object seems to offer us a glimpse into its withdrawn nature, these are just allusions to the real object that lies beneath. Now I used to think that this “allusion” (whether on our part or the object’s) was just a weasel word—a way to get around not having to talk about a seemingly important point. But what Tim’s post seems to get at is that perhaps a better way of understanding the relationship between the real object and the sensual one, or when the hammer breaks, is by way of hacking. Hacking allows users to get at parts of their objects that were meant to remain hidden, tucked away in code or purposefully disabled. What the hacker does, then, is never a physical modification but an action that allows the excess or withdrawn “reality” of the object to come forth. A recent example is when iOS hackers found that there was a panorama setting in iOS 5.0 that wasn’t turned on by Apple. Hacking, therefore, is a sort of non-linguistic way of alluding to a real object. And humans aren't the only objects that hack. For example, HIV works by hacking a host cell to replicate its RNA strand. HIV, in its hacking, makes the allusion to the host cell's hidden functionality extremely clear. Hacking in this sense is a faculty for observing all of the available means of perturbation. And as Tim reminds us, rhetoric (and maybe more specifically for us, OOR), too, is a faculty for discovering an object’s hidden functionality or local manifestations.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-9274478009900001212011-09-28T17:09:00.000-05:002011-09-28T17:09:58.101-05:00Rhetoric of the Uncanny in OOO<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xv0jcw2MPic/ToNNU7m3L7I/AAAAAAAAANw/Avr45vyxVqQ/s1600/11+-+1" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xv0jcw2MPic/ToNNU7m3L7I/AAAAAAAAANw/Avr45vyxVqQ/s320/11+-+1" width="240" /></a>Okay, so it’s been kind of hectic around here with the newborn and all (so excuse the messiness and rambling of this post), but I’ve been working through the chapter of my dissertation on OOO, and in my writing came up with this fourfold.<br />
<br />
Let me explain. Originally, I was planning on writing my dissertation over the uncanny as a rhetorical structure and device. So I ran across my notes on Mladen Dolar’s article “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,” and decided to reread the entire article. What struck me was Dolar’s reading of ETA Hoffmann’s story, "The Sandman"—the same one that appears in Freud’s famous 1919 essay over the uncanny. Dolar, however, develops a fourfold out of the characters, arguing that the four poles represent two pairs of uncanny doubles in the story. But what I saw was a way of discussing the difference between Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Levi Bryant’s Onticology.<br />
<br />
I’m still working through the specifics, but this is the basic argument:<br />
<br />
It’s been argued that OOO deals with that which is uncanny. So, when I started trying to differentiate between these two philosophers, I decided to see in what way their respective object-oriented ontologies dealt with the uncanny.<br />
<br />
When we look at Nathaniel (a human) and Olimpia* (an automaton) in Hoffmann's tale (and our first pole), there is a moment when the two blur the boundary between human and nonhuman. Dolar argues: <br />
<blockquote> There is a strange reversal in this situation: the problem is not simply that Olympia turns out to be an automaton (contrived by the Sand-Man figure Coppola, who contributed the eyes, and Spalanzani, who took care of the mechanism) and is thus in the uncanny area between the living and the dead; it is that Nathaniel strangely reacts in a mechanical way. His love for an automaton is itself automatic; his fiery feelings are mechanically produced… (9)<br />
</blockquote>In this way, there is a tension between Nathaniel and Olimpia whereby what was meant to remain hidden or withdrawn (i.e., the automatic response of human emotions or Olimpia’s true nature as an automaton) has come into the open (or appeared), and in doing so become uncanny. <br />
<br />
The Freudian uncanny comes close, then, to Harman's ontology. Harman’s OOO, developed out of Heidegger’s tool analysis, says that all objects oscillate between a tool-state and a broken-tool state; or in <i>Quadruple Object </i>terms, between their apparent sensual side and their subterranean real side. This polarization, then, functions much in the same way Freud saw the uncanny working. For in the first part of his essay, Freud finds that there is a moment when what was defined as homely suddenly becomes unhomely—where the familiar and the strange oscillate much like the tool and broken tool. In this way, Harman's ontology is seemingly wrapped up in the rhetoric of the Freudian uncanny.<br />
<br />
The poles of the Father and the Sandman, however, are slightly more complicated. If we read the father as external (perhaps as a Lacanian “name-of-the-father,” and thus as the symbolic legislative and limiting function over Nathaniel), the Sandman can be read as a frightening bit of the real in this symbolic function. For not only is Nathaniel mentally (or intimately) haunted by the Sandman, but the Sandman is also responsible for the father’s death and seemingly defies being signified—he is at times called the Sandman, at others Coppelius, and still at others Coppola. In this way, these two poles point to the blurring of the exterior/interior. <br />
<br />
Similarly, Bryant’s Onticology favors a split object in which an object is seen as both a retreating virtual proper being and its local manifestations. Instead of reading either sides of this split as specifically internal or external, Bryant seems to favor the <i>extimate</i>—Lacan’s formulation of the uncanny—by which a thing is intimately exterior. As Dolar argues:<br />
<blockquote>[The <i>extimate</i>] points neither to the interior nor to the exterior, but is located there where the most intimate interiority coincides with the exterior and becomes threatening, provoking horror and anxiety. The extimate is simultaneously the intimate kernel and the foreign body… (6)</blockquote>Here the uncanny does not point to a level of access but to a level of proximity. What becomes frightening is the closeness or intimacy of this foreign object. Or, as Lacan states, the Other is “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me” (<i>The Ethics</i> 71). For Bryant, the object is precisely a moment of <i>extimacy</i>—caught up not in relations between sensual and real objects or qualities; but, instead between endo- and exo-relations. Even the split in Bryant’s object seems to point to the way in which the object is <i>extimate </i>or uncanny unto itself.<br />
<br />
Therefore, what’s important to see is that although both Harman and Bryant at times seem to share a view of objects, rhetorically they each approach the object in different terms of the uncanny—Freud for Harman and Lacan for Bryant.<br />
<br />
<br />
*I've chosen to go with the Olimpia spelling here, although it appears in different translations as Olympia.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-27566452503332622222011-09-15T09:16:00.000-05:002011-09-15T09:16:22.216-05:00Back to Blogging<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div>So I know I've been neglecting this blog for a while but rest assured, I have an excuse (two to be precise):<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BloYwA4Mq_E/ThnY_lT6wKI/AAAAAAAAAKU/RgN9FhM6jgI/s1600/SDC11220.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BloYwA4Mq_E/ThnY_lT6wKI/AAAAAAAAAKU/RgN9FhM6jgI/s200/SDC11220.JPG" width="200" /> </a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> I'm also at a point in my own work that I need this space to work out a few thoughts, so in the next few posts I'll be doing just that.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Just in case you missed it, though, make sure you check out:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://clinamen.jamesjbrownjr.net/2011/09/12/the-decorum-of-objects/">Jim Brown's blog developing an OOR around Richard Lanham, Graham Harman, and Ian Bogost.</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/the-democracy-of-objects-unleashed/">Levi Bryant's book, The Democracy of Objects, has been made available online with print and PDF versions forthcoming.</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And Timothy Morton has just released videos of the OOOIII conference in case you weren't able to make the live broadcasts:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/09/oooiii-video-archive-1.html">1) Graham Harman, Steven Shaviro and Aaron Pedinotti</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/09/oooiii-video-archive-2.html">2) Timothy Morton w/ intro by Eugene Thacker</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/09/oooiii-video-archive-3.html">3) Levi Bryant</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/09/oooiii-video-archive-4.html">4) MacKenzie Wark</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/09/oooiii-video-archive-5.html">5) Roundtable with Harman, Byrant, Shaviro, Shannon Mattern, Morton, and Wark.</a>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-34180484753927782202011-03-08T13:04:00.000-06:002012-08-03T11:15:48.994-05:00Expanding Agency by Expanding Time<a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XHeaMMrB43E/TXZ8DQIcpVI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/TCIYzcjo_6I/s1600/Brand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-XHeaMMrB43E/TXZ8DQIcpVI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/TCIYzcjo_6I/s1600/Brand.jpg" /></a>In <i>How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built</i>, inventor/designer Stewart Brand argues that buildings and architecture must be thought of in terms of time and not simply in terms of space. For Brand, buildings consist of six layers, each with its own temporal lifespan:<br />
<blockquote>
• SITE – This is the geographical setting, the urban location, and the legally defined lot, whose boundaries and context outlast generations of ephemeral buildings.<br />
• STRUCTURE – The foundation and load-bearing elements are perilous and expensive to change, so people don’t. These are the building. Structural life ranges from 30 to 300 years (but few buildings make it past 60, for other reasons).<br />
• SKIN – Exterior surfaces now change every 20 years or so, to keep up with fashion or technology, or for wholesale repair. Recent focus on energy costs has led to re-egineered Skins that are air-tight and better-insulated.<br />
• SERVICES – These are the working guts of a building: communications wiring, electrical wiring, plumbing, sprinkler system, HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning), and moving parts like elevators and escalators. They wear out or obsolesce every 7 to 15 years. Many buildings are demolished early if their outdated systems are too deeply embedded to replace easily.<br />
• SPACE PLAN – The interior layout – where walls, ceilings, floors, and doors go. Turbulent commercial space can change every 3 years or so; exceptionally quiet homes might wait 30 years.<br />
• STUFF – Chairs, desks, phones, pictures; kitchen appliances, lamps, hair brushes; all the things that twitch around daily to monthly. Furniture is called mobilia in Italian for a good reason. (13)</blockquote>
Breaking a building up into these layers allows Brand to describe how these objects appear at once static things – “that church has always been there” – but at the same time, an object that is always “tearing itself apart” and becoming something new (13).<br />
<br />
These layers are important for designers and architects, because humans interact with them at different levels:<br />
<blockquote>
The building interacts with individuals at the level of Stuff; with the tenant organization (or family) at the Space plan level; with the landlord via the Services (and slower levels) which must be maintained; with the public via the Skin and entry; and with the whole community through city or county decisions about the footprint and volume of the Structure and restrictions of the Site. The community does not tell you where to put your desk or your bed; you do not tell the community where the building will go on the Site (unless you’re way out in the country). (17)</blockquote>
Therefore, the Skin and Stuff of a building might undergo a quicker degree of change (every 3-30 years), while the Structure and the Site might change a lot slower (every 200+ years). Services, on the other hand, might undergo change depending upon the Skin and the Stuff – do I need a T1 connection if I do not own a computer? The point Brand is making is that buildings act much like an ecosystem, in that “the lethargic slow parts are in charge, not the dazzling rapid ones. Site dominates the Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff. How a room is heated depends on how it relates to the heating and cooling Services, which depend on the constraints of the Structure. […] The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint” (17). Each independent layer relies on and influences the other layers – though again, the results might not be immediate.<br />
<br />
What reminded me of Brand’s evolutionary understanding of buildings was Jane Bennett’s position in <i>Vibrant Matter -</i> that the claim to vibrant matter (or a vital force located in all objects) becomes “more plausible if one takes a long view of time” (10). For Bennett, this type of evolutionary (temporal) view allows us to recognize the object specifically as an actant. So that, following De Landa, she finds that, “Mineralization names the creative agency by which bone was produced, and bones then ‘made new forms of movement control possible among animals, freeing them form many constraints and literally setting them into motion to conquer every available niche in the air, in the water, and on land” In the long and slow time of evolution, then, mineral material appears as the mover and shaker, the active power, and the human beings, with their much-lauded capacity for self-directed action, appear as its product" (11). By simply extending our view of time we find that agency is not necessarily a human property. This lesson seems to be similar to that found in Brand, that time becomes a hindrance to understanding an object’s agency when it is not allowed to regress (or progress?) beyond a certain point. <i>Objects act, but only on their own time. A lesson needed for OOO.</i>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-89266349038100425112011-03-01T21:25:00.001-06:002011-03-01T21:31:20.069-06:00A Lengthy Response to Glen FullerIf you've missed it, <a href="http://eventmechanics.net.au/?p=1807">Glen Fuller</a> has been so kind as to tell me not to continue writing posts on OOO and Deleuze. He has also, <a href="http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2011/02/extensional-objects.html?showComment=1299019497467#c1805042513686481311">through his pedagogical discourse</a>, explained to me that I can't just "use" Deleuze and Guattari, but that in fact I have to know every thing about them, know all of the secondary literature, and read all of the philosophers D&G use themselves. So,this post is an extremely lengthy response to Glen's comments to say thanks for all of the helpful information on how to use “concepts.” Let's begin:<br />
<br />
So let me see if I got this right. First I need to understand the development of the original concept. Okay, fair enough. According to Ian Buchannan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus</i>:<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><blockquote>In the various interviews they gave following the publication of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anti-Oedipus</i>, Deleuze invariably says that their starting point was the concept of the desiring-machine, the invention of which he attributes to Guattari. <i><b>There is no record of how Guattari came up with the idea</b></i>, but on the evidence of his recently published notebooks, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, his clinical experience at La Borde had a large part to play. As Deleuze tells it, Guattari came to him with an idea for a productive unconscious, built around the concept of desiring-machines. In its first formulation, though, it was judged by them both to be too structuralist to achieve the kind of radical breakthrough in understanding how desire functions that they were both looking for in their own ways. At the time, according to Deleuze, he was working - 'rather timidly' in his own estimation - 'solely with concepts' and could see that Guattari's ideas were a step beyond where his thinking had reached (N, 13/24). Unsurprisingly, Guattari's version of events concurs with Deleuze's, though he credits the latter with being the one whose thinking had advanced the furthest. Guattari describes himself as wanting to work with Deleuze both to make his break with Lacanian formulations more thoroughgoing and to give greater system and order to his ideas. But as we've already seen their collaboration was also always more than a simple exchange of ideas, each providing the other with something they lacked. They were both looking for a discourse that was both political and psychiatric but didn't reduce one dimension to the other. Neither seemed to think he could discover it on his own (N, 13/24). To put it another way, we could say that Deleuze and Guattari were both of the view that a mode of analysis that insists on filtering everything through the triangulating lens of daddy-mommy-me could not hope to explain either why or how May '68 happened, nor indeed why it went they way it did. The students at the barricades may have been rebelling against the 'paternal' authority of the state, but they were also rebelling against the very idea of the state and the former does not explain the latter. (emphasis added 38-39)</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">So, in essence the development of the desiring-machine was centered on the need to develop a concept that did two things: 1) described desire counter to the Freudian Oedipal complex which reduced every desire to a sexual desire (daddy-mommy-me) but could still be used to describe both the political and psychiatric, and 2) explained how desire was ultimately productive. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">This makes perfect sense then when in <i>Anti-Oedipus</i> our two authors argue the following:</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><blockquote>It is often thought that Oedipus is an easy subject to deal with, something perfectly obvious, a “given” that is there from the very beginning. But that is not all: Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring machines. And why are they repressed? To what end? Is it really necessary or desirable to submit to such a repression? And what means are to be used to accomplish this? What ought to go inside the Oedipus triangle, what sort of thing is required to construct it? Are a bicycle horn and my mother’s arse sufficient to do the job? Aren’t there more important questions than these, however? Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for? Can we possibly guess, for instance, what a knife rest is used for if all we are given is a geometrical description of it? (3)</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">D&G find their answer to these questions in the desiring-machine and the schizophrenic. For the schizophrenic experiences the nature of the world differently. Nature is a process of production. And D&G mean three things by the word process: 1) as “incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thus making the productions of one and the same process,” and 2) “man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other – not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer product,” and 3) process “must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself” (4-5). </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Desiring-machines work in binary (that is, always coupled with another machine) to produce such a process: “[T]here is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast-the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction” (5). What this means is that every machine must always be connected to another machine and at every connection there is a new machine. For, “a connection with another machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one machine always interrupts the current of the other or ‘sees’ its own current interrupted” (6). And it is in this coupling from flow-machine to interrupting-machine, and so on, that D&G argue that producing is always “grafted” onto production. But what this also means is that every desiring-machine should also be seen as a product of production.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">However, one of the products of a desiring-machine (since it holds to the process described above) is its body without organs (BwO). D&G state that “[t]he body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity producing and the product...” (8). The BwO is a wild collection of unactualized forces, or a blank space across which desiring-machines constantly cut across, “so that the desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs” (11). So that desiring-machines constantly create the organism and its opposite – the BwO. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">So it is with these concepts (the BwO and the desiring-machine) that D&G are able to form a schizoanalysis that describes a non-Freudian-psychoanalytic sense of desire that is in itself a producing/product. For, as they note, once this is done and “desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality…The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine” (26).</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">So, now that I’ve explored the creation and problematic of D&G’s desiring-machine, let’s look at the problematic of OOO. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">OOO was created in response to a certain version of realism in which the things in the world (including the world itself) were all a product of the human mind. Given its name by Quentin Meillassoux in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finitude</i>, this type of realism became known by the name of Correlationism – pointing to the necessary correlation of human thinking and world. Contrary to correlationsim, OOO proposed a weird realism in which all objects enjoyed the same ontological status as all other objects. As Ian Bogost once put it (and I’m paraphrasing here) OOO does not claim that all things are equal, but that all things equally are. The important thing to note is that like D&G, OOO was attempting to understand the world counter to an overwhelming philosophical world-view. We could say that for OOO objects do two things: 1) describes reality counter to the correlationist view which reduces the world to human thoughts and 2) explains how objects are ultimately productive.<br />
<br />
For D&G it was Freud’s Oedipal complex by which everything seemed to be interrupted, and for OOO it was correlationism by which everything became a product of the human mind. OOO found its savior in the creation of objects – everything is considered an object (including its opposite, the subject). Now, I’m not going to go into Graham Harman’s objects (as I’m really still waiting to read his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quadruple</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Objects</i> book to really get a grasp on some key issues), but am instead going to focus on how Levi Bryant puts forth his understanding of an object.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">For Levi, the object is essentially split into two parts: a virtual proper being (or substance) and local manifestations. In the forthcoming <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Democracy</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Objects</i>, Levi states:</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><blockquote>Because difference engines or substances are not identical to the events or qualities they produce while nonetheless substances, however briefly, endure, the substantial dimension of objects deserves the title of <i>virtual proper being</i>. And because events or qualities occur under particular conditions and a variety of ways, I will refer to events produced by difference engines as <i>local manifestations</i>. Local manifestations are <i>manifestations </i>because they are <i>actualizations </i>that occur in the world. (46)</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The object’s qualities are therefore products of the object’s substance, but are not identical to the substance. At the same time, each quality or local manifestation is an actualization of that substance or virtual proper being. Another way of putting this process would be to say that local manifestations cut across the virtual proper being, both actualizing productions of it but also allowing it to withdraw from complete actualization. This is, in fact, one of the main tenants of OOO – that all objects withdraw from both other objects, but also from themselves. But still, regardless of this withdrawal, objects are seen as acts - in that they produce. Here we find Levi's main axiom: there is no difference that does not make a difference. There is no object that does not produce local manifestations, translate other objects, and withdraw from all such relations.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Without getting into the complexities of Levi’s autopoetic and allopoetic systems, we can safely say that this construction of the object is not unlike the process by which desiring-machines operate. Both objects (in Levi’s formulation) and desiring-machines are essentially productive products, and both onticology’s objects and D&G’s desiring-machines produce a realm of potential at every actualization – the virtual proper being and BwO respectively. What D&G’s concepts do, then, when placed up against Levi’s objects is to allow us to better understand how an object can be both limited and open for production. In a lot of ways, the virtual proper being and the BwO act as a structure or limit, while still being a site of production or of recording. I'll be the first to admit that these two theories don't always see eye-to-eye, but when we use D&G to work through these objects, we can broaden the conceptual field of OOO to understand how these objects can be both tablecloths, remote controls, tennis shoes, and stucco while at the same time still be subjects, societies, mobs, and revolutions. Personally, I think D&G can offer us a useful moment of extension from thinking about material things to thinking about all sorts of objects. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Whew! You weren’t kidding, Glen. That was a lot of work. Regardless, I hope I clarified a few things that you had problems with. I’m sorry you dislike OOO, and my own work. And I don’t know if I will change your mind as to the usefulness of OOO, but perhaps that is another project for another post. Instead, my aim here was to show you that these concepts are not all that different. </div>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-44075074382732190342011-02-25T16:12:00.002-06:002011-02-25T16:31:56.417-06:00ConsubstantialityOne 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 <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/">Levi</a> states in his upcoming <i>Democracy of Objects</i>, “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”<i>*</i> (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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
We find a similar problem with social groups in Kenneth Burke’s <i>A Rhetoric of Motives</i>, where Burke states:<br />
<blockquote>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.<br />
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)</blockquote><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6d26GDVoG5g/TWgoxo-i8CI/AAAAAAAAAHM/ee-gr8bpVIU/s1600/Cayetano+-+Matryoshka+doll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6d26GDVoG5g/TWgoxo-i8CI/AAAAAAAAAHM/ee-gr8bpVIU/s320/Cayetano+-+Matryoshka+doll.jpg" width="320" /></a>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” (<i>The Rhetoric of Religion</i> 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.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>*</i> <i>This is the page number of the document I have and may not reflect the final copy yet to be released. </i>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-76259766572868200102011-02-24T19:49:00.000-06:002011-02-24T19:49:36.471-06:00The Inertia of Objects<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JQX5dgYB4ng/TWcKAIDWZYI/AAAAAAAAAHI/kCEi_YxrStY/s1600/hipsters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JQX5dgYB4ng/TWcKAIDWZYI/AAAAAAAAAHI/kCEi_YxrStY/s320/hipsters.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Growing up I was fond of Mad Magazine, especially when they would provide a humorous (but most of the time, spot on) look at how to identify a certain subject – e.g., a punk, a hipster, or a rent-a-cop. For those who either remember these caricatures or know of others like them, you might also remember that such pages involved multiple lines to objects on or near the subject along with witty comments that aided in such identification. So for example, in identifying a hipster, you might have a line pointing to an item of clothing that said “Satchel Bag: Contains “intellectual texts” that were purchased at nearby Barnes and Noble, and is usually garnished with pins or buttons that state the hipster’s disdain for society.”<br />
<br />
The reason these types of humorous images came to mind was while I was recently packing away some of my daughter’s old toys, I came across a “Doctor’s Kit” one of her aunts had given her. Later it struck me that there was a striking similarity in the way such objects are markers for identification – much like the hipster would not be found without his “satchel bag,” a doctor may not be found without his necessary “doctor-objects” (I believe the kit consisted of a plastic syringe, a plastic stethoscope, a plastic tongue depressor, and a toy blood pressure cuff and pump). Both “subjects” became products of a series of objects.<br />
<br />
Objects are said, metaphysically, to have properties. We know from OOO, however, that these properties are not actually owned or housed within the object, but in fact such properties are actions of the substances of these objects. For <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/">Levi Bryant</a>, it is the object’s<a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/a-remark-on-anteriority/trackback/"> substance</a> or virtual proper being that produces its properties or local manifestations. However, this isn’t the only definition of property. Etymologically, the word “property” becomes so entwined with this notion that a property is a belonging that in the 14th or 15th century it becomes synonymous with a material object that belongs to a human subject. We then discuss concepts like private property, consumerism, greed, and wealth. In other words, there is a point at which a property of an object coincides with an identification of a human subject. To be a subject is to be surrounded by certain objects.<br />
<br />
This notion of property opens up a unique space for the object-oriented rhetorician. Turning to Kenneth Burke we find in A Rhetoric of Motives that:<br />
<blockquote>Metaphysically, a thing is identified by its properties. In the realm of Rhetoric, such identification is frequently by property in the most materialistic sense of the term…In the surrounding of himself with properties that name his number or establish his identity, man is ethical. (“Avarice” is but the scenic word “property” translated into terms of an agent’s attitude, or incipient act.)…But however ethical such an array of identifications may be when considered in itself, its relation to other entities that are likewise forming their identity in terms of property can lead to turmoil and discord. Here is par excellence a topic to be considered in a rhetoric having “identification” as its key term (24).</blockquote>We surround ourselves with all sorts of objects that both help us to identify with a subject-hood, but which also influence us. How? Well, here comes the speculative part of this post.<br />
<br />
When Burke discusses property in terms of identification, he points to a collection of objects surrounding the subject. Like in the doctor kit or the Mad Magazine illustration, one way we create an identity is by collecting things – the doctor surrounds himself with “doctor-objects” and the hipster surrounds him/herself with “hipster-objects.” These aggregates carry with them a certain gravity or inertia around which these subjects continuously operate, coming into existence again and again. When the aggregate of objects breaks apart or loses its pull, the subject also ceases to exist. And, as Burke argues, rhetoric is uniquely able to deal with these relations of consubstantiation (a term I will explore soon) and division.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-9960219263817442192011-02-23T08:00:00.001-06:002011-02-23T08:02:12.751-06:00Extensional ObjectsIn a<a href="http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2011/02/machines-driving-other-machines.html"> recent post</a> I pointed out the similarity between D&G’s desiring machines and objects. Both are sites of production and are themselves results of production. This notion of the object goes against the traditional, static image of the object as passive possessor of qualities. Instead, these active objects produce production. As we stated, when we have an object like a pencil, it creates all sorts of other objects in its environment: paper, hand, desk, text, etc. To an extent, to be an object is to also connect or couple to other objects. At first this might seem as a reduction of these objects to their relations—to be a pencil means to be in relation to paper, a hand, and a desk. However, what I wish to do in the following is to explore the relation of D&G’s desiring machines and argue for a type of relation that does not reduce the autonomous objects to the relation itself. <br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Desiring-machines, what we call objects, are productions of production for D&G. This means that these objects have a binary identity of producer/product. Or, as Levi Bryant has put it, there is no difference that does not make a difference. Regardless of how you describe the object, the point is twofold: 1) every object is a product of other objects, and 2) every object produces other objects. The first point restates the autonomous nature of every object, in that every whole object is a black box of other objects—every object is a product. And the second point states that every whole must be seen as relating to other objects as sites of production. But (and here’s the problem for OOO) how is it possible for objects to relate to other objects, when in their most fundamental Being, it is argued that they withdraw from each other? How then are we supposed to think of these types of objects as being both independent from each other but also wrapped up in relations with each other.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">To answer this question, we turn to D&G, who argue in <i>Anti-Oedipus</i> that as sites of production, every object is essentially coupled with other objects as their products. Yet, “[p]roducing is always something ‘grafted onto’ the product; and for that reason desiring-production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine” (6). Grafting is a process by which a part of one object is taken from its original space and transplanted onto a new space, where it then becomes part of the secondary object. The graft can be seen as both a replacement for a missing part (as in skin grafting), but also can be seen as an addition (as in tree or plant grafting). The graft, then, is a type of prosthetic. Just as a prosthetic arm can be a replacement for a missing one, prosthetics also allow us to add to our senses—as in the case of Neil Harbisson, whose eyeborg implant allows him to hear colors. Therefore, the coupling that prosthetics or grafts bring about is quite different than our normal understanding of relations.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">And here’s why. Instead of being a simple relation, where objects are meaningful or significant by way of their relation to other objects, <a href="http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2011/02/extended-objects.html">prostheses </a>and grafts (whether as replacements or additions) extend an object or part of an object. And this extension is not only irreducible to either object, but it is, itself, also productive. For D&G, we can think of these prosthetic objects or machines as being perturbations in a flow of machines:</div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1in;">Far from being the opposite of continuity, the break or interruption conditions this continuity: it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity. This is because, as we have seen, every machine is a machine of a machine. The machine produces an interruption of the flow only insofar as it is connected to another machine that supposedly produces this flow. And doubtless this second machine in turn is really an interruption or break, too. But it is such only in relationship to a third machine that ideally—that is to say, relatively—produces a continuous, infinite flux: for example, the anus-machine and the intestine-machine, the intestine-machine and the stomach-machine, the stomach-machine and the mouth-machine, the mouth-machine and the flow of milk of a herd of dairy cattle (“and then…and then…and then…”). In a word, every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is the law of the production of production. […] [E]verywhere there are breaks-flows out of which desire wells up, thereby constituting its productivity and continually grafting the process of production onto the product. (36-37).</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">For D&G, these machines both break up the continuity of flow, but also are flows themselves. So in our example of the out of reach box, we find the following: the elbow-machine extended by the wrist-machine, the wrist-machine extended by the hand-machine, the hand-machine extended by the broom handle-machine to finally reach the box. Every machine, apart from existing in its own right, is an extension or prosthetic of another object.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">In his essay in <a href="http://www.re-press.org/content/view/64/38/">The Speculative Turn</a>, <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/">Levi Bryant</a> argues something similar when he states:</div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1in;">While we readily acknowledge that all objects have their genesis, this genesis is a genesis <i>from</i> other objects or discrete individuals, and in many instances <i>is productive</i> of new individual entities. Consequently, we may retain terms like ‘pre-individual’or ‘transcendental’ field if we like, so long as we understand that <i>this field is not something other than objects, but consists of nothing but objects</i>. (emphasis added 270)</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">For Bryant, as for D&G, objects are both product and producer. But, as I’ve accented in the last line above, it is important to note that this field of extensions, or differences, is not external to objects, but is itself made up of objects. To produce is to extend, to move beyond appearance into use-value. Every time we discuss the relation of two objects (e.g., myself and the box on the top shelf), we miss the various withdrawn prosthetics that populate such a relation, and because of these overlooked, unhomely objects we often prize the relation over the objects. For it is part of the way prosthetics work – in that they are always surprising when noticed or pointed out. What could be more unsettling than to realize the whole is in fact made up of parts?</div>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-46762970944470647652011-02-22T18:51:00.000-06:002011-02-22T18:51:21.304-06:00SR AdvertisingLevi has a great post up <a href="http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/the-gig-is-up-sr-and-advertising/">here</a>. I thought I might add this:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vUumCJeX_Io/TWRZzDI-UyI/AAAAAAAAAHE/jecSkasLmCQ/s1600/churchsign.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vUumCJeX_Io/TWRZzDI-UyI/AAAAAAAAAHE/jecSkasLmCQ/s320/churchsign.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-38077322389551433182011-02-22T18:00:00.000-06:002011-02-22T18:00:35.601-06:00Extended ObjectsPerhaps one of the most uncanny objects for me is a prosthetic. Prosthetics are unsettling in that they both replace a part (arm, leg, teeth, eye, etc.), but they can also be seen, especially in a world one step away from cyborgs and artificial intelligence (Yes, I’m looking at you <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(artificial_intelligence_software)">Watson</a>), as an addition – see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Harbisson">Neil Harbisson</a>’s eyeborg implant which allows him to hear color. But either way, prosthetics are uncanny in that they are seemingly “unnatural” or sometimes literally “artificial.” Prosthetics are objects both out of place, but useful in their place. They truly are unhomely, or unheimlich. And perhaps what is most uncanny about prosthetics is that they work by extension. Even the word “extension” denotes a movement beyond the normal or everyday. <br />
<br />
The prosthetic extends the effective reach of an object beyond what it is normally capable of reaching. But, in creating a relation between the object of interest and the initial object, the prosthetic drops away, or withdraws. So, for example, when I need to reach a box at the top shelf I might extend my rather puny reach with the help of a broom handle. The broom handle becomes a prosthetic, which means that it also drops away as I achieve my goal of reaching the box. This type of extension is closely tied to Marshall McLuhan’s argument that media extends us: <br />
<blockquote>All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, [and] electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique rations of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – when these ratios change, men change. (26-41)</blockquote>But we need to extend McLuhan’s definition beyond the human to state that all objects extend other objects. Cables extend information, aglets extend the life of shoelaces, and remote controls extend the couch. Each prosthetic either withdraws or forces other objects to withdraw in its use.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-86495327898465666742011-02-22T17:55:00.000-06:002011-02-22T17:55:35.350-06:00Sampling as CausationOver at <a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/">Timothy Morton’s blog</a>, he has a few posts up developing his notion of <a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/02/reverse-causation-and-objects-causation.html">sampling</a> as a form of causation (and it appears, interaction, if I read him correctly) of objects. For Morton, objects sample each other but in doing so, retroactively change or effect themselves:<br />
<blockquote>Every sample is a translation, in that it chops a sensual slice out of an object and thereby creates another object. To that extent then, causality is a kind of sampling. Thus when we observe a phenomenon, we are always looking strictly at the past, since we are observing a sample of another object. To sample is to posit retroactively.</blockquote>In other words, any quality found in an object is an uncanny return or a moment of retroactive causation. For example, the table in front of me has a certain hardness to it, a phenomenon or effect of some other object(s), but what withdraws from my interaction with the hard table is precisely this cause – that is, those tiny dense particles. Therefore, according to Morton – and I think I understand him correctly – this hardness works retroactively to color over the table and perhaps its surroundings. Effects, then, are often so surprising that they cover over the everyday work that causes them.<br />
<br />
Objects interact with other objects at all levels of scale. Morton’s sampling proposes that objects are both samples of other objects and are themselves constantly being sampled by other objects. Perhaps this is another way of discussing the active or productive nature of objects in OOO – like I argued for in my last post with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of machines as products/producers.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-31441898742783074672011-02-21T11:53:00.000-06:002011-02-21T11:53:51.582-06:00Machines Driving Other MachinesIn <i>Anti-Oedipus</i>, Deleuze and Guattari describe desire not as part of ideology, nor as a passive part of the unconscious. Instead, for D&G desire is productive. The desire-machine “is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. […] Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (1). Desire, therefore, is a process or act of production. For D&G, the point is that desire is a producing-machine, specifically a producing-machine which is always plugged into or driving other machines. Each machine produces another machine. This means that every machine must be coupled, or connected to other machines. But what are these machines? Are they simply abstract processes with no “real” dimension? Or, are they objects, in the sense that my computer and the tree outside my window are objects?<br />
<br />
To begin with, D&G make it clear (as we saw above) that these machines are “real ones—not figurative ones” (1). In other words, these machines are not to be thought of as simply figures of speech or products of our linguistic systems. No, instead, as they explain a little later, in every machine, “[s]omething is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors” (2). Desiring-machines, make up our world. Every object, no matter the scale, is a producing-machine. This means that we can discuss table-machines, coffee mug-machines, lamp-machines, and cellular-machines along with body-machines, organ-machines, subject-machines and capital-machines. <br />
<br />
There is not distinction between man-made and natural machines for D&G. For, “man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other—not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product” (4-5). What this means is that a chair is just as much of a producing-machine as a subject is. In fact, as D&G argue, “<i>Everything is a machine</i>. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines […]. The continual whirr of machines” (emphasis added 2). But if everything is a machine, and all machines produce other machines, does this mean that everything is also a product?<br />
<br />
In short, yes; but, this does not mean that all machines can be reduced to their relations with other machines. For, on the one hand, every object registers other objects, so that “everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced” (4). In this way, every machine is a record of other machines, re-producing these machines in its archive. To be a machine is to be a <a href="http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/02/reverse-causation-and-objects-causation.html">sample </a>of other machines, to have broken, crossed, or perturbed the producing-flow of other machines.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, because there is no distinction drawn between man and nature, human and nonhuman, subject and object, “production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle” (5). Every machine, then, is both a <i>producer </i>and a <i>product</i>, and because of this binary nature of the machine, “one machine is always coupled with another machine” (5). Desiring-machines, then, are both multiplicities and independent wholes, both machines <i>that </i>produce, but also machines <i>that have been</i> produced.<br />
<br />
Each machine is a production of all sorts of flows from other machines, but itself produces its own flow according to its own rules. As D&G point out, “each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the perspective of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets everything—speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking—in terms of seeing” (6). Therefore, every object, as machine, interprets the world according to their own terms: a human anthropomorphizes things, a pencil pencil-morphizes things, while a cable cable-morphizes things. But in this interpretation (this interruption of other objects’ desiring or producing-flow), these machines produce other machines: the pencil-machine produces the paper-machine and the hand-machine, while the paper-machine produces the text-machine, and so on. In each instance, a producing/product identity is created. To be an object then, for Deleuze and Guattari is to be a producing-production, “the production of production,” or, as Levi Bryant has put it, a difference that makes a difference (7).Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-66631590845569639542011-01-13T15:32:00.001-06:002011-01-13T15:33:35.949-06:00The Hidden Realm of ThunderstormsAccording to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12158718">an article from the BBC</a>, scientists and researchers working with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_telescope">Fermi telescope </a>have discovered (accidentally, I might add) that thunderstorms actually produce positrons (antimatter).<br />
<br />
The best part of the linked article is a quote from Steven Cummer of Duke University:<br />
<blockquote>"It has some very important implications for our understanding of lightning itself. We don't really understand a lot of the detail about how lightning works. It's a little bit premature to say what the implications of this are going to be going forward, but I'm very confident this is an important piece of the puzzle."</blockquote> The question I have is, how many pieces of the puzzle are there? You might want to check the box to be sure. ;)Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-891233110443244524.post-44013163408398733432010-12-16T12:18:00.001-06:002010-12-18T07:51:42.324-06:00BwOs and Fractal ThinkingI recently watched an episode of <i>Nova</i> called "Hunting the Hidden Dimension," - an episode devoted to the history and uses of fractals - and took away two important points: 1) that even the most complicated and seemingly chaotic systems often have a simple pattern, and that in order to see said pattern we simply need to change the scale at which we observe the system; and 2) that this aforementioned pattern is often repeated - a form of repetition called <i>iteration</i> - so many times that not only do you get objects that look similar, but also many that look nothing alike. To clarify this last point simply <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/assets/swf/1/fractal-detail/senseofscale.swf">click through to here</a> to see 11 <i>different</i> images all using the same pattern.<br />
<br />
I'm also currently working on a paper that argues that the best way to approach objects for any experimentation - a word I use to describe both composition and rhetorical examination - is through Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the body without organs (BwO). For D&G in A Thousand Plateaus:<br />
<blockquote><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ODZPhKAZ1_U/TQpXJg_Pj2I/AAAAAAAAAGs/3hdgV935foc/s1600/dogon_egg1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ODZPhKAZ1_U/TQpXJg_Pj2I/AAAAAAAAAGs/3hdgV935foc/s320/dogon_egg1.jpg" width="248" /></a>The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a <i>spatium</i> that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree - to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity=0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. [...]</blockquote><blockquote>The BwO is a childhood block, a becoming, the opposite of childhood memory. It is not the child "before" the adult, or the mother "before" the child: it is the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The BwO is preciesly this intense germen where there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic representation). (153, 164)</blockquote>The BwO is seen as the blank or recording space of an organism, across which flow intensities, forces, and (I would argue for OOO) qualities - i.e., local manifestations. Yet, the BwO is never <i>before</i> such qualities but exists alongside them and is independent from them and the larger organism. Nor does the BwO exist as a physical space for such qualities, but instead is an "intense matter." <br />
<br />
So for OOO we can read the BwO as similar to the virtual proper being of the object, that part that withdraws or recedes but also maintains the capacity for other possible local manifestations. But why is this important? And what the hell does it have to do with fractals!?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ODZPhKAZ1_U/TQpXJ4_IFUI/AAAAAAAAAGw/gkr_GZ7Bi6A/s1600/fractal11.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ODZPhKAZ1_U/TQpXJ4_IFUI/AAAAAAAAAGw/gkr_GZ7Bi6A/s320/fractal11.gif" width="320" /></a>Well as I understand it, objects for OOO are split - between a present, quality-rich part (for Levi, an object's local manifestations) and a withdrawing aspect (or virtual proper being) that is the object's powers or capacities. What I would argue, then, is that this split is not so much a structure of being as it is a pattern of being. The difference between structure and pattern is akin to the difference <a href="http://www.bogost.com/writing/process_vs_procedure.shtml">Ian Bogost</a> finds between process and procedure. Where <i>structure</i> offers us a sense of an object being composed, perhaps referring to an object's relations to other objects (think building blocks, or frames), <i>pattern</i> refers more to an object's hidden repetition - of its fractal-like irreduction of objects upon objects upon objects. This split-object pattern allows us to understand how it is objects come about or are actualized - and here is where the BwO comes into play.<br />
<br />
For D&G the BwO should not be seen as an empty vessel set against organs but instead, "We come to the realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism" (158). The organism, then, is much like the OOO object in that it too is split between organs and the BwO. But to be actualized, the organism must be seen as a limit or stopping point. As Brett Buchanan states in <i>Onto-Ethologies The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze</i>, “An organism proposes a solution only at a level where one has stopped counting affects, where the body has been taken as a formal and fully organized self-consistency” (161). Whether it is by choice, or simply because we cannot physically see (even with the help of microscopes or telescopes) the iteration of the object-pattern, this does not mean that it is not there. Because of the fractal pattern of objects we must realize that the object is never object qua object - it is never a whole or a one unless there exists a limit or self-consistency.<br />
<br />
So that if I see my house key as nothing more than an object that fits a specific lock, I've actualized my key as an organism - as an object proper - and limited its BwO. No wonder I'm surprised when I find out that it is quite sharp (and could possibly be used to open up packages). However, if I see my house key as a BwO, I become fascinated with the intensities and possible local manifestations it can produce. I begin to experiment by introducing it into new environments, each time drawing out different intensities and qualities.<br />
<br />
Unlike the dark shadow cast over the organism by D&G, an object-oriented approach relishes in the object as a whole (as an organism) precisely because of the object's hidden BwO and its local qualities/manifestations.<br />
<br />
It is OOR's responsibility, then, to approach objects not as organisms - that is fully formed and limited structures - but as BwOs consisting of ever more potential local manifestations. Approached from this way, OOR's experimentations focus themselves not on what the object <i>is</i> but on how the object <i>acts</i>.Nathan Galehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04326939633169223993noreply@blogger.com4