An Un-canny Ontology

More on Hacking

2011-12-07T13:10:00.001-06:00

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 here. Robert Jackson responds to both my and Harman’s posts here. And finally Tim Richardson responds to all three of us here.

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:

“…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.”

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 aporia, 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.

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 Guerilla Metaphysics, 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?

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: Ikea Hackers and body hackers are just two examples of such non-code hacking.

Democracy of Objects on Amazon

2011-12-01T18:34:00.002-06:00

Levi Bryant's much awaited tome is up for purchase in the US on Amazon. And just in time for a brilliant stocking stuffer.

3 Possible Kinds of OOR

2011-11-22T08:48:00.000-06:00

Over at Tim Richardson’s blog objet(a)uthenticity, the question is raised as to whether an object can be designed to be authentic. 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:

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).

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 the design of a device (even the body) and its potential properties isn’t something like the distance or gap I described far above as a hallmark of the authentic?” (emphasis added)

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.

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.

For Aristotle these three kinds of rhetoric were also tied to respective times. As he states in Book I chapter 3 of his Rhetoric:

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)

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 kairos 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.

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.

Hacking and Allusion

2011-11-10T20:26:00.000-06:00

Over at Tim Richardson’s new blog Objet(a)uthenticity, he questions 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:

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?

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 Prince of Networks, Harman states:

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)

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.

Rhetoric of the Uncanny in OOO

2011-09-28T17:09:00.000-05:00

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.

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.

I’m still working through the specifics, but this is the basic argument:

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.

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:

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)

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.

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 Quadruple Object 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.

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.

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 extimate—Lacan’s formulation of the uncanny—by which a thing is intimately exterior. As Dolar argues:

[The extimate] 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)

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” (The Ethics 71). For Bryant, the object is precisely a moment of extimacy—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 extimate or uncanny unto itself.

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.

*I've chosen to go with the Olimpia spelling here, although it appears in different translations as Olympia.

Back to Blogging

2011-09-15T09:16:00.000-05:00

So I know I've been neglecting this blog for a while but rest assured, I have an excuse (two to be precise):

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.

Just in case you missed it, though, make sure you check out:

Jim Brown's blog developing an OOR around Richard Lanham, Graham Harman, and Ian Bogost.

Levi Bryant's book, The Democracy of Objects, has been made available online with print and PDF versions forthcoming.

And Timothy Morton has just released videos of the OOOIII conference in case you weren't able to make the live broadcasts:

1) Graham Harman, Steven Shaviro and Aaron Pedinotti

2) Timothy Morton w/ intro by Eugene Thacker

3) Levi Bryant

4) MacKenzie Wark

5) Roundtable with Harman, Byrant, Shaviro, Shannon Mattern, Morton, and Wark.

Expanding Agency by Expanding Time

2011-03-08T13:04:00.000-06:00

In How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, 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:

• SITE – This is the geographical setting, the urban location, and the legally defined lot, whose boundaries and context outlast generations of ephemeral buildings.
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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)

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).

These layers are important for designers and architects, because humans interact with them at different levels:

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)

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.

What reminded me of Brand’s evolutionary understanding of buildings was Jane Bennett’s position in Vibrant Matter - 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. Objects act, but only on their own time.

A Lengthy Response to Glen Fuller

2011-03-01T21:25:00.001-06:00

If you've missed it, Glen Fuller has been so kind as to tell me not to continue writing posts on OOO and Deleuze. He has also, through his pedagogical discourse, 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:

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 Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:

In the various interviews they gave following the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze invariably says that their starting point was the concept of the desiring-machine, the invention of which he attributes to Guattari. There is no record of how Guattari came up with the idea, 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)

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.

This makes perfect sense then when in Anti-Oedipus our two authors argue the following:

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)

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).

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.

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.

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).

So, now that I’ve explored the creation and problematic of D&G’s desiring-machine, let’s look at the problematic of OOO.

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 After Finitude, 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.

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 Quadruple Objects 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.

For Levi, the object is essentially split into two parts: a virtual proper being (or substance) and local manifestations. In the forthcoming Democracy of Objects, Levi states:

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 virtual proper being. And because events or qualities occur under particular conditions and a variety of ways, I will refer to events produced by difference engines as local manifestations. Local manifestations are manifestations because they are actualizations that occur in the world. (46)

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.

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.

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.

Consubstantiality

2011-02-25T16:12:00.002-06:00

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

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

We find a similar problem with social groups in Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives, where Burke states:

A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may be identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.
Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is “substantially one” with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another. (21)

Consubstantiality is the key, then, to understanding how it is that the table can be both a unique object (with its own withdrawn substance), but also made up of other objects (each with their own withdrawn substance). Consubstantiality, of course, is a theological term used to describe how it was that the substance of God was able to exist alongside the material substances of bread and wine. As good logologists, though, we understand (with Burke) that “whereas the words for the ‘supernatural’ realm are necessarily borrowed from the realm of our everyday experiences, out of which our familiarity with language arises, once a terminology has been developed for special theological purposes the order can become reversed. We can borrow back the terms from the borrower, again secularizing to varying degrees the originally secular terms that had been given ‘supernatural’ connotation” (The Rhetoric of Religion 7). Now, as Burke also argues, we must be aware of this complicated and messy back and forth between terminological realms, but the point here is that there is no reason why we cannot describe the table parts as being consubstantial with the table. In other words, when we discuss the Table (proper), we must recognize that this object has both a withdrawn substance of its own, but also maintains a consubstantial identification or relation between its many individual parts, each with their own withdrawn substance. To be an object is to be consubstantial and unique.

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

The Inertia of Objects

2011-02-24T19:49:00.000-06:00

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.”

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.

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 Levi Bryant, it is the object’s substance 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.

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:

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).

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.

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.

Extensional Objects

2011-02-23T08:00:00.001-06:00

In a recent post 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.

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.

To answer this question, we turn to D&G, who argue in Anti-Oedipus 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.

And here’s why. Instead of being a simple relation, where objects are meaningful or significant by way of their relation to other objects, prostheses 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:

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).

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.

In his essay in The Speculative Turn, Levi Bryant argues something similar when he states:

While we readily acknowledge that all objects have their genesis, this genesis is a genesis from other objects or discrete individuals, and in many instances is productive of new individual entities. Consequently, we may retain terms like ‘pre-individual’or ‘transcendental’ field if we like, so long as we understand that this field is not something other than objects, but consists of nothing but objects. (emphasis added 270)

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?

SR Advertising

2011-02-22T18:51:00.000-06:00

Levi has a great post up here. I thought I might add this:

Extended Objects

2011-02-22T18:00:00.000-06:00

Perhaps 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 Watson), as an addition – see Neil Harbisson’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.

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:

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)

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.

Sampling as Causation

2011-02-22T17:55:00.000-06:00

Over at Timothy Morton’s blog, he has a few posts up developing his notion of sampling 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:

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.

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.

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.

Machines Driving Other Machines

2011-02-21T11:53:00.000-06:00

In Anti-Oedipus, 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?

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.

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, “Everything is a machine. 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?

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 sample of other machines, to have broken, crossed, or perturbed the producing-flow of other machines.

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 producer and a product, 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 that produce, but also machines that have been produced.

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).

The Hidden Realm of Thunderstorms

2011-01-13T15:32:00.001-06:00

According to an article from the BBC, scientists and researchers working with the Fermi telescope have discovered (accidentally, I might add) that thunderstorms actually produce positrons (antimatter).

The best part of the linked article is a quote from Steven Cummer of Duke University:

"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."

The question I have is, how many pieces of the puzzle are there? You might want to check the box to be sure. ;)

BwOs and Fractal Thinking

2010-12-16T12:18:00.001-06:00

I recently watched an episode of Nova 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 iteration - 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 click through to here to see 11 different images all using the same pattern.

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:

The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium 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. [...]

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)

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 before 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."

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!?

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 Ian Bogost finds between process and procedure. Where structure offers us a sense of an object being composed, perhaps referring to an object's relations to other objects (think building blocks, or frames), pattern 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.

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 Onto-Ethologies The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, “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.

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.

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.

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 is but on how the object acts.

Conversations with a Stone: An OO Reading

2010-11-03T15:18:00.000-05:00

Levi has a post up about the possibility of an OOLC (that’s Object-Oriented Literary Criticism for those who get lost in all of the acronyms). In his post Levi argues that:

Minimally an object-oriented art would have to practice flat ontology and strange mereolology. Unlike the old realism where human subjects were the real genuine actors, objects at all levels of scale and of all types would have to be treated as genuine actors. Perhaps an object-oriented art would explore the struggles and conflicts that emerge between these differently scaled objects, even when embedded within one another.

Initially I couldn’t think of anything that might fulfill such requirements; however, I just started reading Barbara Johnson’s book Persons and Things and through it, was pointed to this wonderful poem by Wislawa Szymborska entitled, “Conversation with a Stone” (from Nothing Twice: Selected Poems/Nic dwa razy: Wybór wierszy, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh 1997).

Szymborska’s poem starts off without us knowing how the conversation got started between the speaker and the stone, but we automatically understand one point of conflict – that of personification mixed with a nice helping of anthropomorphism. The first couple of stanzas are as follows:

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look round,
breathe my fill of you."

"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."

Now a couple of things should jump out to the object-oriented literary critic. First, as per Levi’s suggestion, there seems to exist a flat ontology in which the stone and speaker are both equally real. The stone speaks as does the speaker of the poem. Each equally exists, yet (as we discover in the last stanza of the poem) they do not exist equally.

However, unbeknownst to Szymborska, her poem also points out Levi’s second requirement – that of a strange mereology of objects. For object-oriented philosophers, all objects are receding in some way, shape, or form. What this means is that no other object, including humans, can ever completely exhaust an object in any of its encounters, whether its through description or sheer brute force – there will always be something held in reserve. So the stone’s response, “I’m shut tight / Even if you break me to pieces, / we'll all still be closed.”, is spot on with the tenants of OOO. Each object consists of other objects, each with its own mereological structure or split in which (at least according to Levi) we have both a virtual proper being and local manifestations. And the stone is no exception, since ultimately, every object’s virtual proper being “will still be closed” even if we found a way to break up the stone into millions of pieces. Something would still remain hidden.

Szymborska’s poem continues as the speaker asks to enter the stone in varying ways and with varying reasons as to why the stone should let him/her. So in the seventh stanza he/she pleads, “It's only me, let me come in. / I don't seek refuge for eternity. / I'm not unhappy. / I'm not homeless. / My world is worth returning to.” But ultimately, all of this pleading is to no avail, as the stone denies entry because the speaker “lack[s] the sense of taking part.” – a sense, the stone tells us, that has its seed in imagination. But what might the stone mean by this?

Personally, I read the stone’s call to a “sense of taking part” similar to the call in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to make yourself a body without organs (BwO). D&G command their readers to “Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It’s a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out” (151). And then moments later clarify that “The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole” (151). So in order for the speaker to succeed in Szymborska’s poem, is to stop interpreting the stone as stone, but think of the stone as a BwO, as not a place that is chaotic and empty (filled with “great empty halls”) but quite the opposite – an object filled with matter, forces, and other energies capable of all sorts of local manifestations.

However, this is something the speaker of the poem ultimately doesn’t understand, as seen in the last couple of stanzas:

I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in."

"I don't have a door," says the stone.

As a conclusion, these last few lines of “Conversations with a Stone” allow the reader to realize the potential pitfalls in addressing objects from a traditional perspective. We often personify, anthropomorphize, and more than often misinterpret the objects that surround us. If anything, Szymborska’s poem calls attention to these human traits, but at the same time arguing for an ontological understanding of objects as existing in a flat ontological realm and with a strange mereological structure.

Everything I Needed to Know about OOR I Learned from Watching 'The Gods Must Be Crazy'

2010-10-17T21:45:00.001-05:00

No matter how much we insist on the strangeness of our everyday objects, it is rather difficult for anybody (yours truly included) to see their world as uncanny. If it were easy, this would go against the OOO claim that objects are inherently weird or strange. So, perhaps the easiest way to discuss examples is to actually have an ordinary object (for us) be introduced into a culture in which it is truly a strange-stranger.

In the 1980 film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a normal, familiar Coke bottle is introduced into a secluded tribe in the Kalahari Desert. Now the traditional way of reading this film would be through metaphor – that is, the Coke bottle represents Western Culture, and everything that happens to the once peaceful and graceful tribe (i.e., the ensuing moments of jealousy, violence, and social upheaval) are simply shining examples of the West’s influence on other cultures. In other words, the traditional way of reading such a narrative would be through reducing it to a moment of language, a single metaphor of East meets West. Most of us would understand that even though there might be other ways to read this film (from a sociological perspective, or even a psychological perspective) this reading is the most explicit, especially given the other two vignettes in the film (centered on revolution and Western emigration).

Yet, no matter how clear such a reading might seem to us, we must not forget that this tribe has no idea what this object really is. They’ve never seen a bottle, and have no notion of what Coca-Cola is or its ties to Western capitalism. Therefore, such a reading dismisses not only the bottle itself, but also the tribe’s unique position and characteristics. We are left wondering then, what else is there? If the bottle is more than simply a metaphor for some thing, and the tribe more than a generic representation of something else, how might we read the events that take place in the film?

Taking a cue from object-oriented philosophy, we must first recognize that no object can be reduced to one aspect, actual (material) or virtual (symbolic), of said object. Therefore, a blue mug cannot be reduced to its blueness or to its mug-ness. Instead, like every object, the mug is a myriad of qualities, none of which are “owned” or inherent in the object itself, but which are manifested in certain situations. So the mug is blue with the lights on, black with the lights off, and in the right light can also appear purple. In this way, object-oriented rhetoric is never satisfied with readings that reduce things to metaphors, metonymies, or other linguistic tropes. For the object-oriented rhetorician the Coke bottle as a real, independent object has an influence all of its own, divorced from any third-party reading. It has its own agency.

To clarify this last point, we should turn back to the example in the film. If we take away the reading that the Coke bottle is representative of some other ideology, point of view, or social organization, we are left with examining the bottle itself, its local manifestations or effects. I will call these effects−following Timothy Morton and Levi Bryant−the object’s resonances. Resonance maintains the requirement that we must not confuse the object for its qualities, nor reduce the object to these effects. Instead, an object resonates with multiple effects or local manifestations on other objects, and the bottle is no exception. The bottle resonates with its environment from the time it first appears on screen. It is a beverage bottle, it is trash, it is a gift from the gods, it is used to crush grain, it is perfect for rolling snake skins, it makes music, etc. In each instance, the bottle resonates in quite different ways without ontologically becoming a different object. However, as we see in the film, the bottle resonates in other, less obvious ways than these initial findings.

The bottle also directly effects or resonates with the tribe itself. The peaceful and content tribe becomes violent and envious of each other as a result of the singularity of the bottle. The tribe itself, then, must be read as an object – an object that like others is open to resonances from other objects, whether internal or external. The bottle becomes the focal point of such an object-oriented examination, not because it represents this ideology or that theoretical trope, but that it (in itself, as an ontologically independent object) influences or resonates with the objects around it, even to the point of social unrest.

The example of the Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy is, I argue, a perfect example of an object-oriented rhetorical reading. Does it encompass the entirety of the composition of dirt, tribe, bottle, sky, air, etc., etc.,? No, but I would argue that it doesn’t have to. OOR, in my opinion, is never going to be one hundred percent exhaustive. Nor should it try and be. The goal of OOR, instead, should be to point us away from reductions, but especially linguistic reductions, and in turn open up the canvas to be painted with all types of readings, from anthropologists, designers, musicians, biologists, etc. Object-oriented rhetoric offers a unique angle from which to approach rhetorical situations in that it brings objects to the forefront, in themselves and their immediate resonances, rather than shrouding them in metaphors or other linguistic terminology. By performing such a task, object-oriented rhetoric can observe the object as an independent means of persuasion outside of human discourse.

Rhetorical Correlationism

2010-09-02T15:39:00.000-05:00

In Meaning, Language, and Time, Kevin J. Porter succinctly restates the three dominant factions of rhetoric as espoused by James Berlin. They are as follows:

cognitive rhetoric (e.g., Emig, 1971), the “heir apparent of current-traditional rhetoric” grounded in the methods of individualistic cognitive psychology and built upon the premise that “the structures of the mind correspond in perfect harmony with the structures of the material world, the minds of the audience, and the units of language” (p. 480); expressionistic rhetoric (e.g., Elbow, 1981), with its focus on the authentic “experience of the self, and experience which transcends ordinary non-metaphoric language but can be suggested through original figures and tropes” (p. 485); and, again the hero of the narrative [for Berlin], social-epistemic rhetoric (e.g., Bartholomae 1985/1996), which holds that knowledge comes into existence through discursive interactions comprised of “social constructions […] inscribed in the very language we are given to inhabit in responding to our experience” (p. 488). (Porter 31)

First, cognitive rhetoric, with its belief that the structures of the mind correlate exactly with the world, other’s minds, and language, could very well be seen as an example of a strong rhetorical correlationism. Here the emphasis is place on the mirroring that the mind is capable of, rather than the world itself, so much so that, as Berlin remarks, cognitive rhetoricians like Janet Emig are “convinced that [they] could arrive at an understanding of the entire rhetorical context – the role of reality, audience, purpose, and even language in the composing act” (Berlin 480). The rhetorical act becomes nothing more than a construction of one’s mind, then. Or, to put this still another way, for the cognitive rhetorician, there is no reason to look outside of one’s mind. As Berlin puts it, “For cognitive rhetoric, the real is the rational” (482). All rhetorical acts, therefore, are products, or compositions, of the rhetor. Cognitive rhetoric shifts the discourse of rhetoric away from the rhetorical act, so that instead of asking “what is it” they wish to ask “how is it or how can it be composed.”

Second, we have expressionistic rhetoric which values the individual. For this rhetoric, as Berlin argues, “the existent is located within the individual subject. While the reality of the material, the social, and the linguistic are never denied, they are considered significant only insofar as they serve the needs of the individual” (484). Unlike cognitive rhetoric which in its own way denied a world outside of the mind, expressionistic rhetoric exploits the real world in order to serve its purposes. So that what remains significant is not the true ontological reality of the world and its real influences and presence, but instead, the terministic screens or perceptions through which this reality passes. The expressionistic rhetorician seeks to create metaphors by which the world comes to be – and specifically for that rhetorician. Born out of a response to political and authoritarian discourse, expressionist rhetoric wished to place the power into the hands of the rhetor. In this way, Berlin remarks that “From this perspective, power within society ought always to be vested in the individual” (485). The individual knows best how to divide up the real world for expressionistic rhetoricians. Thus, this type of rhetoric places a heavy emphasis on experience – experience as much in order to know more. For philosophy, we see this type of stance prevalent in all weak forms of correlationism – that is, much like the weak correlationist for whom the thing-in-itself could never be known, but for whom the phenomenal realm was ever knowable; the expressionistic rhetorician only ever knows his or her experiences of the real world.

Finally, for Berlin, we have a social-epistemic rhetoric. To recap, “For social-epistemic rhetoric, the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence. Knowledge is never found in any one of these but can only be posited as a product of the dialectic in which all three come together” (488). At first this form of rhetoric might sound pleasing to a rhetorician working to get outside of the correlationist circle. For here we have a rhetoric that recognizes a dialectical interaction between individuals and groups of individuals, but most importantly of a real world. Unlike the other two factions of rhetoric, social-epistemic rhetoric encorporates an ontologically independent world with which the rhetor/rhetorician must deal with. However, it is Berlin’s next statement that I find troubling.

Following up on his definition of a social-epistemic rhetoric, Berlin states, “Most important, this dialectic is grounded in language: the observer, the discourse community, and the material conditions of existence are all verbal constructs” (488). Reality, though it may exist for the social-epistemic rhetorician in an assemblage of personal, social, and material realms, language is seen as the overarching guide to interpretation. That is, everything can be reduced to language. Like the cognitive rhetorician who reduced the objects of the world to a product of the mind, and like the expressionistic rhetorician who reduced the objects of the world to the individual’s experiences, social-epistemic rhetoric reduces the objects of the world to language. The correlationist circle in rhetoric has simply been redrawn: there is nothing outside of language. But Berlin is not the only rhetorician who favors this view. His list of social-epistemic rhetoricians include: “Kenneth Burke, Richard Ohmann, the team of Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike, Kenneth Bruffee, W. Ross Winterowd, Ann Berthoff, Janice Lauer, and, more recently, Karen Burke Lefever, Lester Faigley, David Bartholomae, Greg Myers, Patricia Bizzell, and others” (488).

Each of the above three factions of rhetoric seems, to me, to redraw the correlationist circle in their own way. For cognitive rhetoricians the importance of rhetoric is on the processes of the mind and not the real world and its influences. For the expressionistic rhetoricians, the importance of rhetoric lies with the individual’s experiences of the real world. And for the social-epistemic rhetorician, the importance of rhetoric is to show how all rhetorical acts are a product of the function of language. Each faction uses the same structure – by shifting the goal of rhetoric from asking the question, “What is the rhetorical act?” to “In what way can the rhetorical act best be represented?”.

If the goal of an object-oriented rhetoric is to break outside of these types of correlationism, we must find a way of defining rhetoric that does not reduce it to any of the above (or others) positions. Rhetoric, then, as I propose it must be seen as separate not only from cognitive structures and personal experiences, but most importantly separate from the hierarchical function of language. In other words, rhetoric outside of correlation would no longer be seen as a product (e.g., political rhetoric, academic rhetoric, religious rhetoric, etc.), but a productive process that is irreducible to mind, experience, or language. Let us move rhetoric away from the forms of observation, and back toward the faculty (potentiality/potency/dunamis) of observing all of the available means of persuasion - including objects.

CFP - Material Cultures

2010-09-01T11:12:00.000-05:00

This looks interesting:

Call for Papers - 2011 Canadian Literature Symposium (May 6-8, 2011)

Material Cultures

May 6-8, 2011
Department of English, University of Ottawa

How do objects circulate in our social, imaginary, and textual worlds? What are the politics of material culture and how does this inform our reading of historical and contemporary texts? In what ways do we perceive and come to know the material world, and in what ways does the material make and unmake this "we"? Proposals are invited for a conference on Material Cultures in Canadian and Transnational Contexts, the 2011 edition of the Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa. Interdisciplinary, hemispheric, and theoretical approaches to the conference theme are welcome.

Proposals may consider, but are not limited to:

things
physical environments/nature/architecture
the human/extrahuman/animal
art objects/craft
commodities/goods/resources
artifacts
collectibles
dirt/waste/garbage/junk/treasure
miniatures/gigantica
objects and ideology
book-as-object/materiality of the text
theories/philosophies of technology
machines and the machine-made
affect and objects
toys
animate objects

Keynote speakers:

Bill Brown, University of Chicago
Jeff Derksen, Simon Fraser University

For further details and updates visit: www.canlit-symposium.ca

Proposals (300-400 words) for papers are welcome, as are proposals for panels. For panel proposals please include abstracts for each paper to be presented and a title for the panel. Send proposals by September 15th to:

Tom Allen: tallen@uottawa.ca, and
Jennifer Blair: jennifer.blair@uottawa.ca

Or by mail:

Department of English
Arts 338
70 Laurier Ave. E
Ottawa, ON
K1N 6N5

On "Smuk is King"

2010-08-31T17:09:00.000-05:00

I’ve just finished reading Adam Reed’s “Smuk is King”, which describes the role of tobacco and cigarettes in a prison in Papua New Guinea. What is fascinating about the article is the agency Reed, an anthropologist, finds tobacco to have in the prison. Reed argues that “In inmates’ eyes, the organization of prison life is premised on the action of smoking; when cigarettes are taken away those social forms break down and men withdraw from contact with each other” (42). But such significance is not imbued upon cigarettes by Reed or another outside agent. Instead, through a close examination of the way in which the Bomana prison operates at the inmate level, he finds that cigarettes govern every action. “Smuk is king” as Reed points out, “because it makes men act with these things [cigarettes] in mind” (42).

Cigarettes rule these prisons in two unique ways – as both a form of currency, but also (and I think, more interestingly) as cigarettes (that is, material objects destined to be smoked). Unlike the formal form of currency, this informal prison currency is both valuable (traded for food, toothpaste, soap, etc.) and useful. When smoked, the men claim the smoke of the cigarettes makes them forget – that is, forget the outside world, forget their anxieties of being in prison. Reed takes this claim that “smuk is king” seriously (for why shouldn’t he), stating that “As smokers, inmates learn to love cigarettes because they kill their memory and therefore change their state of mind” (35). Cigarettes (or smuk), then, must be smoked, not saved. Again, Reed finds that “At Bomana inmates identify what might be taken as the spirit in cigarettes – its role as medium of exchange and token (the same spirit they identify in kina and toea [traditional forms of currency outside of the prison]), but they also highlight what might be taken as the spirit of cigarettes – their role as consumable matter” (41).

Reed proposes that one way to look at smuk or cigarettes in this prison is to see it as a fetish object. Following Peter J. Pels, Reed states that “The fetish object is not animated by something foreign to it – human intention or social meaning – but by a spirit that seems its own. That spirit is not held to reside in matter, but rather it appears as the spirit of matter” (41). And it is this spirit of matter that the inmates at the Bomana prison find in cigarettes. “Smuk moulds men,” as Reed concludes, “by having them transform its material state (it is the smoke of the cigarette, not its solid matter, that acts upon the mind of inmates). From this simple action, life in Bomana unfurls; as far as prisoners are concerned, it is the point from which everything starts and to which everything returns” (42). What we have, then, is a process or procedure of smuk – of finding, collecting, or exchanging cigarettes and then the ritual smoking of those cigarettes. Each cigarette, each object or unit, in this financial system is valued the same. Every cigarette, whether rolled tight and thin, or loose and fat, is just as valuable as another – for what is important is the eventual smoking of that cigarette. Each cigarette is a martyr, and this martyrdom gives it authority and agency.

What excited me about this article is its potential for drawing out some of the same concepts I’ve been struggling with in my conception of an object-oriented rhetoric. Like Reed, we too must approach situations, not from the outside, but from the muddled middles, from the quasi-objects (via Latour) and work our way to the outside extremes of social or natural concepts. We must think through objects by following their effects; but we must never see them as the only cause of those effects. In other words, we must understand these quasi-objects as both being effected and effecting others, so that no one, or only, cause can be claimed. Cigarettes did not cause the Bomana prisoners to act the way they do; however, they directly effect the prisoners’ actions. For to be effective is also, in some ways, to be persuasive.

Rhetorical Scene and Onticology

2010-07-31T11:26:00.000-05:00

Over at Larvalsubjects Levi has posted a couple of responses to my initial thoughts on what an OOR pentad might look like with regards to his Onticology. The large point of contention, however, seems to be based around a remark I made about an object’s environment. I stated that an object exists “in” an environment. Yet, as Levi points out, this is not the case for Onticology, and is a mistake I fully take credit for making. Instead, following the thoughts of Niklas Luhmann, every object creates its environment. In other words, as Levi states in his blog, “the environment is not something that is already there” – that is, before the object.

And to this I readily agree. However, the point I was trying to make is that in the distinction, drawn by each object, between system and environment, a series of constraints also follows, much like those of a rhetorical scene. Every scene contains elements proper to the act of translation – that is, the environment created by the object does not “control” the object’s translation but it definitely has an influence on it. And this “influence” is exactly what is meant by the constraints of the object’s environment. As Levi states in Democracy:

When Luhmann observes that objects cannot be controlled or dominated his point is not that objects are completely free sovereigns capable of creating whatever reality they might like, but rather that any event that perturbs them will be “interpreted” in terms of the systems own organization. As a consequence, objects cannot be steered from the outside. However, the events that do or do not take place in the environment of an object and to which the object is open nonetheless play a tremendously significant role in the local manifestations of which the object is capable. […] Those other objects in the environment of the object define a regime of attraction with respect to the object, creating regularities in the local manifestation of the object and producing constraints on what local manifestations are possible. (224)

For Levi, then, we can think of these interactive networks of other objects as regimes of attraction or as Tim Morton has called them, meshes. Therefore, depending upon the objects (since each object creates its environment) being examined, the regimes of attraction (and thus constraints) can include “physical, biological, semiotic, social, and technological components” (225).

So it is in this way that I understand the scene of every act of translation – built around the self-constructed regimes of attraction of other objects. So, although an object does not exist “in” an environment, nor is the object ever controlled by these regimes of attractions, these environments created by the object limit the possibilities of local manifestations.

And it is in this way that I see the limiting aspect of an object’s created environment as akin to Burke’s notion of scene. For as he states early on in Grammar, “From the motivational point of view, there is implicit in the qualities of the scene the quality of the action that is to take place within it. This would be another way of saying that the act will be consistent with the scene” (6-7). In other words, there never exists an act that is inconsistent with its environment or regimes of attractions. Nor would we ever be able to deduce the act of translation from either the object/system or the environment alone. Instead, if we think of every object as an agent, then surely Burke is correct in stating that the distinction between scene and act gets muddled if we take both (actors and scene) as having agency. To this he remarks, “For the characters, by being in interaction, could be treated as scenic conditions or ‘environment,’ of one another; and any act could be treated as part of the context that modifies (hence, to a degree motivates) the subsequent acts” (7). Like Onticology, then, the rhetorical scene should be read as not having control, but having influence over the agents involved and vice versa.

Yet, by creating its environment, or making the distinction between system and environment, the object always limits itself in regards to is possible acts of translation. But this limitation can be lifted by the object, as well. For again, not only is the object never static but neither is the scene. Or, as Levi puts it:

While the regimes of attraction we [sic] find ourselves enmeshed in might constrain us in a number of ways, through our movement and action we have the ability to act on these regimes of attraction, construct our environments, and therefore modify the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We are not simply acted upon by regimes of attraction, but act on them as well. Given the unpredictable nature of other actors, however, the question revolves around which form of action might be most conducive to enhancing our existence. (227)

Therefore, it is only if we allow the merger between agents and scenes that we might begin to work through an object-oriented rhetoric. Only if we understand scenes as full of agents, may we begin to move from an anthropocentric rhetoric to a rhetoric of the real, where every tree, every blade of grass, or every computer screen has as much agency as the rhetor.

Rhetorical Purpose and Onticology (cont.)

2010-07-30T10:20:00.000-05:00

I realized that my last post might be read as if I see the receiving object as having the choice to translate however it wants. This is not so. Instead every object exists in an environment for Onticology. And this environment constitutes the scene of the object’s act of translation. As Bryant remarks, “The organism-environment system indeed constrains the development of the phenotype in a variety of ways, defining a topological space of possible variations” (DoO 223). And he continues, “What’s important here is that the information presiding over the genesis of the phenotype is something constructed in the process of the development from a variety of factions, and, moreover, the qualities that the organism comes to embody are not located already in the organism in a virtual or implicit form, but are rather new creations in the process of development” (223). In other words, objects must constantly deal with, work with, or fight against their environments by constantly translating perturbations from other objects in its environment. However, the object itself is constrained in the ways in which it can do so. Therefore, no object can anticipate the perturbations from other objects, nor can any other object anticipate the translations by other objects.

Bryant offers us the following:

Just as other substances in a substance’s environment can only perturb the substance without determining what information events [or translation] will be produced on the basis of these perturbations, the most the substance can do is attempt to perturb other substances without being able to control what sort of information-events are produced in the other substances. And these attempted perturbations can always of course fail. My three year old daughter, for example, might yell at her toy box when she bumps into it, yet the toy box continues on its merry way quite literally unperturbed. Everything spins on recognizing that while objects construct their openness to their environment they do not construct the events that take place in their environment. (224)

Thus, a receiving object, in this case Bryant’s daughter, becomes perturbed by the toy box when she bumps into it. This perturbation is translated by her in a way that produces a yell. A translation that, in this case, has no further effects on the toy box – but this does not mean that it doesn’t have any further effects for her environment, for Bryant might have heard her yell and run to the rescue, or at least turned to see what was causing the commotion. Regardless, Bryant’s daughter was forced to deal with the perturbation (or objet a from my last post) but is constricted in the ways in which she can do this.

What’s important for our understanding of the object-oriented pentad, then, is that it seems as if the scene only becomes apparent after the information-event or act of translation occurs, because only here do we see the constraints from which the receiving object must work, and the further perturbations this object has on other objects. Or, as Burke states, “From the motivational point of view, there is implicit in the quality of a scene the quality of an action that is to take place within it. This would be another way of saying that the act will be consistent with the scene” (Grammar 7). Any environment limits the types of perturbations that can be produced by objects, as does any object’s system.

Rhetorical Purpose and Onticology

2010-07-29T21:29:00.007-05:00

First off, I want to apologize for the length of the following. What started as a short post of ideas quickly developed into a mini essay. But, as always, I welcome any comments and critiques. Also, I want to thank Levi Bryant for letting me read a draft of his Democracy of Objects - I hope it will be as fruitful for others as it was for me.

Over the past few weeks (months really)

I’ve been trying to read Kenneth Burke’s

Grammar of Motives in OOO terms. The problem with Burke (and the initial problem with all rhetoric) is that it seems to be extremely enveloped in the human-centered world view. For example, in Grammar, Burke states: “Instruments are ‘essentially’ human, since they are products of human design” (283). In this way Burke argues that even though some objects might not have a purpose in and of themselves while still maintaining an agency as instrument, they are always imbued with a “human” purpose since they are tools, designed with a purpose in mind – i.e., a symbolic purpose. The problem, then, for an OOR is how do we separate human purpose from the ontologically independent nature of such objects. In other words, if objects act then for what purpose do they do so?In what follows I propose that it is only by means of the uncanny that we might begin to recognize an object’s purpose. But to begin with we have to look at how objects inter-act or have exo-relations. Using Levi Bryant’s Onticology, we find that all objects are mediators in relation to one another – that is, they all transmit and translate or transform what they receive from each other. Since all objects are either autopoietic (self-creating) or allopoietic (other-creating), and draw upon their own system/environment distinctions in order to transform “perturbations” into information, they all mediate or add something new to what they receive (DoO 194). It’s hardly a stretch, then, to recognize through such a formulation that each object is an agent acting with a certain amount of agency. Yet, again, where can we find purpose or motive in such acts of translation?

To begin with, objects for Onticology exist in a type of realism that accepts all beings. In other words, there is no hierarchy of “more real” to “less real” and finally to “not real”. Every object is as real as every (other) object. One part of this type of realism is the belief that all objects withdraw from each other. That is, no object is ever fully present, either to itself or to other objects. However, this does not mean that an object is ever fully withdrawn, either. No, instead for Onticology “withdrawal is never so thorough, never so complete, that local manifestation in one form or another is impossible” (295). Therefore, because of the inherent split between an object’s local manifestations or qualities, and its virtual proper being (that part of the object that is always in withdrawal) no object can be without the potential to locally manifest itself yet no object is ever completely locally manifested.

Such a realism, however, leads to a non-binary split of the object between something familiar or manifested, and something unfamiliar or withdrawn. Now, to be clear, this familiarity and manifestation are not simply for us, but are for all objects, including the objects themselves.

We might better understand this concept through what I’ve formulated here as the un-canny. Freud remarks early on in his essay that:

For us the most interesting fact to emerge from this long excerpt is that among the various shades of meaning that are recorded for the word heimlich there is one in which it merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that what is called heimlich becomes unheimlich. […] This reminds us that this word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other – the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed or kept hidden. (132)

The un-canny is a both/and term – for it represents both what is familiar (heimlich) and unfamiliar (unheimlich) at the same time. What presents itself in the object, since it is locally manifested or seems familiar. Yet, because objects never fully deploy themselves in their dealings with each other, they remain strange or unfamiliar (i.e., withdrawn). Bryant likens this un-canniness of the object to a concept formulated by Timothy Morton, namely the “strange stranger.” For Morton the strange-stranger is an object or person who no matter how long we know, we never become familiar with them. They remain constantly un-canny. Bryant, though, cautions us not to think of the strange-stranger as different from us, a difference in identity and the repetition of the same. Instead, again, every object is un-canny.

In terms of the un-canny, every object is surprising to every (other) object. That is, because every object maintains the un-canny split between local manifestations and the withdrawn virtual proper being, they are never fully consumed, taken in, or understood by an (other) object. And it is here in this un-canniness - that I find purpose in an object’s actions.

The split between the local manifestations and the virtual proper being of an object creates a difficulty in dealing with other objects. For on the one hand, a receiving object always receives something. But, on the other hand, this something is never everything. Therefore, the withdrawal of objects, in terms of its exo-relations, can be read as an excess. As Bryant remarks, “For while, in their virtual proper being, objects withdraw from any of their actualizations in local manifestations, while every object always contains a reserve excess over and above its local manifestations, nonetheless local manifestations are often highly constrained by the exo-relations an object enters into with other objects in a regime of attraction” (214). And it is precisely this excess which becomes important for our understanding of the purpose of object inter-action.

Perhaps the best way to understand this purpose behind exo-relations is through the structure of Lacan’s formulation of fantasy. What’s important to note, here, is that I am in no way performing a one-to-one reading of Lacan over Onticology, but am in fact using Lacan’s formulation since it best suits the types of relations in which objects seemed to be involved. Therefore, if we substitute the barred or split subject for the split object we could redraw the matheme ( $ ◊ a ) as ( Ø ◊ a ). This should be read as either the split object’s relation to objet a or the split object punch a. Now, normally Lacan figures this as an internal or intersubjective relation between the object and the bit of the real through alienation and separation – or the introduction of the symbolic. What’s needed for our purposes, however, is simply (Ha!) a reformulation of objet a in terms of exo-relations.

Sticking to fantasy, for Lacan, as Bruce Fink notes, “Object a, as it enters into [one’s] fantasies, is an instrument or plaything with which subjects do as they like, manipulating it as it pleases them, orchestrating things in the fantasy scenario in such a way as to derive a maximum of excitement therefrom” (60). Objet a, for our purposes, maintains its excess of immediacy – ready to excite, horrify, or perturb – yet, we recognize also that it does not come from the receiving object, but is a (by)product of an other object. In this way it is doubly excessive – in excess of containment since it escapes the first object and in excess of reception since it always perturbs the “natural” state of the receiving object. Regardless, what is important to note in the quote from Fink is that objet a is always translated in whatever way the receiving object wishes. Why is this important?

Well, since every object interprets or translates in their own way, we have to assume that there is a purpose behind this choice. For Lacan this purpose shows up in the dual movement of alienation and separation – or the punch in the matheme. Quickly, we can think of alienation as asking the subject to choose (either/or = S/S’). Immediately, the subject finds problems with her choice because of the Other – something is missing – and continues on a path of neither/nors in an endless chain of signifiers in order to fulfill her (his) desire (S’, S’’,…Sn). The purpose, then, behind this double movement or punch, is the subject’s development of a fantasy in order to deal with who she is for the Other – she is neither this nor that nor that, etc.

For our purposes, the punch represents the same two operations, yet with slightly different consequences. In the moment of alienation, the split object can either be perturbed or not. If not, the object still chooses, and thus is confronted by the neither/nor of separation. In our understanding of separation the object doesn’t choose between signifiers, but instead is forced to translate the objet a in to something else – for it is neither this nor that. Every object, therefore, is forced to deal with the excesses of other objects. And it is in this excess contained in every object that we begin to understand the rhetorical purpose behind translation. Objects translate not because they want or need the other object, but because parts of other objects are forced upon them constantly. In order to maintain a certain level of contentment, as a unified object, they must constantly deal with the perturbations of other objects.

The Object Formerly Known as Gravity

2010-07-13T20:13:00.004-05:00

Here is a recent NY Times article describing Erik Verlinde's argument that gravity is in fact a consequence "of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases."

And here is a link to his paper (just another addition to my growing summer reading list):

(PDF)

Hopefully I'll get to it sooner rather than later now that my summer courses are done. Here's to wishful thinking.

OOR Beginnings

2010-06-12T10:41:00.005-05:00

Jim Brown has a post up summarizing the OOR panel at RSA that I (somewhat) promised to discuss here. Since I’ve been ridiculously busy since I’ve gotten back from Minneapolis, I was glad to see the conversation still continuing here and a few OOO responses by Bogost and Harman (and here).

As for my own impressions of the papers on the panel, I think Jim is, for the most part, spot on in his summaries. He and I had an interesting discussion about OOO (over a few pints, of course) so I know his interest in the subject. But (and I don’t think this is pressed enough in his post or in others) OOR is in its beginning stages right now. In other words, we have not made a case in rhetoric for an Object-Oriented approach. Why is OOR needed? What would an OOR allow us to discuss that other rhetorics would not? And, finally what would an OOR look like? These questions are only now being asked and answers being attempted. So, while it might seem easy to "laugh" or "scoff" at these first attempts (and their comments), they are just that - first attempts.

So for me, Scot Barnett’s introduction along with Byron Hawk’s presentation, were of interest because they allowed me to see where other rhetoricians might approach OOO. That’s not to say that I completely agree with where they came from (mostly Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics and Prince of Networks) and what they argued (since Meillassoux’s work only figured in tangentially, and it seemed Latour took center stage), but that rhetoric is making such an attempt – and for that I am extremely excited.

Also in my discussions with Robert Leston, before and after his presentation, I felt like his perspective might actually link up nicely (though not completely) with a lot of the work Levi is doing in his Onticology. So that should be interesting, especially with the release of Democracy of Objects, but also if Robert decides to write something furthering his thoughts on Deleuze.

Anyway, I hope the discourse continues, as the panel really pushed me to write my dissertation over OOR. It will be exciting to see the reactions, responses, and translations of OOO in rhetoric.

OOR?

2010-05-29T23:10:00.000-05:00

I’m currently in Minneapolis, attending the Rhetoric Society of America Conference, and am incredibly happy to inform the blogosphere that the “hot-topic” seems to be non-human rhetorics. Today I attended a panel on bestial and creaturely rhetorics, and am extremely excited about tomorrow’s early morning panel on Object-Oriented Rhetoric. Sadly, I am not on this panel, but am instead presenting over a paper in which I argue (using Lacan) that we can understand the structure of Amish forgiveness as essentially selfish in nature. However, I would die to be on the OOR panel. That being said, I will be in attendance, so (although I can’t make promises) I will try to relay the panel’s main arguments.

No Escape

2010-03-27T01:11:00.003-05:00

So, in the recent back and forth with Levi over the past day (couple of days, really) his brilliant insights (and I'm not being flippant here) have made me realize that I have not successfully escaped the correlationist circle. I accept this now obvious reality since it appears I want so desperately to organize my ideas through a direct connection with the old way of thinking about things. I deeply feel that I at some level understand that there is a reality untouched and unmoved by human thought but can’t help but think that this reality is for all intents and purposes indifferent and insignificant, and that it only becomes significant when we interact with it, focus on it, and are made aware of it.

Then, perhaps my penchant for looking for significance in such a reality has clouded my thinking, made me pass over certain objects in favor of other objects – narrative being one of them – but I’d like to think that having favorites (favorite books, theorists, movies, etc.), focusing on the significance of one thing over the other, and trying to work out my thoughts, as flawed and misstated as they may sometimes be, is of some difference. I think they are.

That being said, I am thinking of taking time off from writing about and responding to the ongoing world-building that has been going on here and attempt to understand why it is that I can’t seem to break this damn circle (maybe it’s because I use phrases like “world-building”…hmmm) – or at least move to the outer sides. Instead, I will focus my blog writing on the un-canny, develop my ideas accordingly, and leave the object- oriented stuff to those who’ve already escaped. I’ll leave you with the following from Clément Rosset that best sums up how I feel. Cheers.

But in order to make a road impassible for a person with thousands of pathways it isn't enough to stamp it as forbidden territory. Nothing is impassible for the person ‘possessing all pathways,’ the all-terrain machine that is always able to surprise us. A person is a terrifying thing, dangerous in its unexpectedness: this is the overall meaning that the term deinon [strange, or uncanny] covers in Sophocles. A person is terrifying because he possesses all pathways, while having no destination. Nothing is as dangerous as a machine going nowhere – all roads, by definition, are open to it.

- “Of a Real That Has Yet to Come” 17

In Response to a Response

2010-03-26T15:01:00.003-05:00

I want to first thank Levi (before I get into my argument) because over the past couple of years I've really had a blast participating in these blog discussions - and he has been right there with all sorts of encouragement. Sometimes I can be snide, trite, and even downright rude (but which of us can't, right?), so I appreciate the patience he and everyone else in the OOO world has given to this lowly rhetorician.

But onto my post.

In his response to Tim and to my problem with the TV show Life After People, Levi over at Larval Subjects remarked:

I think narrative is a way in which these things take place, but is not the way. This is what I referred to in a prior post (over at Philosophy in a Time of Error, I think) as an occupational hazard. The rhetorician spends his or her time analyzing narratives and thus naturally sees narratives and signifiers in everything.

And then a little later:

The whole thing that set off my original post was Nate’s rather snide remark that all the object-oriented ontologist can say is “objects act”. Hell no. We’re interested in how objects act and celebrate those modes of analysis that show how objects act and what differences they contribute.

I've made bold this last sentence because it draws out a larger question. What, if we are not creating narratives, does Levi mean when he makes this last statement? A narrative is story set up in an sometimes enlightening but often constructive format. It can take shape in variety of forms (novels, short stories, poems, TV shows, movies, anecdotes, even grocery lists, etc, etc.). The first order observation that Levi fails to see when watching Life After People is that he is watching a narrative – I am in no way adding this narrative, as Levi claimed, since as a TV show Life After People is automatically a structured way of relaying a story – and if the title and the obvious fact that it is a TV show want to be ignored, one can always point out the second glaring reason – Life After People has a NARRATOR. The show, the story of a world without people still needs to be narrated, significance needs to be given to the objects of this specific (and post-human) world. BUT, this significance is not placed onto the show by an outside viewer as a first-order observation. No. It is inherent in the show itself, which brings me back to the original problem I had with it. When stripped of all of its narrative aspects, what are we left with? I would argue, that what we are left with is something far more boring than the job of a rhetorician.

My second problem is that I've never said that narrative is the only way objects interact (I refuse to say translate here because translation implies some sort of narrative work). But at the same time, when Levi in one of his comments suggests that what makes OOO interesting is that it doesn't rely on 1990's narrativity studies, I find myself saying “Yeah, go for it!” I'm just trying to understand how OOO is going to address these problems. You aren't taking away my toys, as much as you are ignoring the fact that there are toys to begin with. So far, I'm unconvinced. From a rhetorical (and when did we start lapsing into a Platonic notion of rhetoric as sophistry or fancy language?) standpoint if we only talk about the object we are the observer. If we talk from the object's point of view, we run the risk of giving the object qualities it does not locally manifest. So it seems that we are to always talk about the object-with-other-objects without forgetting that we are ultimately the ones performing the narrative.

*Note: While I was writing this post, Levi posted the following:

If onticology has something to offer at the level of object-oriented practice and epistemology, I think it is the hypothesis that objects act or are encountered in their doing.

Hmmm....so “objects act?” I'm confused. Just kidding.

Ontological blindness?

2010-03-04T13:23:00.003-06:00

In English there are two essential types of words: 1) words that have to do with objects (nouns) and 2) words that have to do with actions (verbs). And, just as Aristotle claimed of onoma and rhema, any structure that weaves these two types of words together is where discourse takes place. But another way of reading this “weaving together” would be to say that in discourse, or logos, we discover that essentially “objects act.”

In a recent discussion I had with my dissertation director, we came to the conclusion that this phrase (“objects act”) is the only way to describe the show on the History Channel entitled, Life After People. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it is roughly 40 minutes of watching buildings, landmarks, and cities crumble back into the earth. But what is fascinating about the show is its reliance upon the human gaze. For the only reason that this show is fascinating to its human viewers is because of the amount of significance we have given to each of the objects we watch deteriorate. Without significance there is no difference between the Statue of Liberty falling into the ocean and the face of a cliff. Significance is the recognition of the gaze, and without it we are left with the fact that “objects act”.

The human gaze or the look, then, becomes the death of the onticological object in the sense that the object is now significant. Significance does away with the object as anything other than its use, its purpose. For it places the object in a Latourian black box and throws away the key. Significant objects are separate from the everyday, from the ordinary in a way that demarcates them apart from even their own object-ness. For example, my daughter's stuffed toy dog is extremely significant for her since she's had it since she was born. She knows this object inside (after it was ripped open at one time due to excessive play) and out. And if we were to attempt to replace it with a new, cleaner version, she would almost certainly break down in tears. There is NO other stuffed toy dog for my daughter.

So if the goal of OOO/P is to remove the human subject as the pole around which the tether-ball of the world circulates, then surely it must be a blind ontology. By removing the look, or the gaze, it sees nothing/everything. The object oriented philosopher's gaze, then, is one of an impossibility, of a type of void or a field of vision without a blind spot (where infinity is as limitless as nothingness). But in this way, I wonder what more can be said of objects besides “objects act.” Isn't any move beyond this an act of signification, where objects become monads, vacuum-packed withdrawals, or differences that make a difference? Aren't all of these now significant objects?

Significant Objects

2010-02-24T14:32:00.000-06:00

I've been meaning to write a post about this website for some time now. I'm sure a few of you might be familiar with it, but recently I've had the chance to revisit some early Heidegger, and have begun to put ideas together. The following are a few of those rough ideas strung together.

For those of you not familiar with the site significantobjects.com, the goal of the site was to see if given significance, random everyday objects could take on objective significance, as well. As the site explains:

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

As demonstrated from some of the entries, these objects are not “rare” or “important” objects by any means. In fact a lot of the times these objects are purchased from thrift stores or garage sales for just a couple of bucks (max). A “fictional” account of the object's significance is added and then sold and bought on eBay – usually purchased for way more than the item was originally worth. But what I find fascinating about this experiment is that it is purposefully doing something that we often do without thinking about it – that is, adding significance to objects. This led me to question, what is significance and how/why is it important for our understanding of object-oriented philosophy?

In Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger claims:

“Significant” means: being, being-there, in the how of a definite signifying and pointing […] The definiteness of this signifying, which is what initially needs to be explicated, lies in the characteristic of the disclosedness of that which is for a while significant to us at the particular time in question. (71)

In other words, when an object becomes significant, it opens itself up, it allows itself to be-encountered through its “being-there” at a specific moment in time. He goes on to say:

This disclosedness shows itself in two basic characteristics: (1) the characteristic of availability in advance, (2) the characteristic of the advance appearance of a with-world (i.e., bringing-about-the-appearance of those with us in the world, holding them in this appearance). (71).

The first characteristic Heidegger describes is akin to his readiness-to-hand, where the object is there for such and such a manner and use, and expected to be there in the same manner at a later time. The second characteristic, as I read it, is slightly more complex. Here Heidegger is attempting to understand how it is objects seemingly “stand out.” However, the significant object does not simply stand out from other objects of the same sort, but in its “standing-out” it makes other objects known – including ourselves. As Heidegger remarks in What is a Thing?, “we human beings have the power of knowing what is, which we ourselves are not, even though we did not ourselves make this what is. To be what is in the midst of an open vis-á-vis what is, that is constantly strange” (244). And this strangeness is what is overcome by giving the object significance, by letting it “stand out”. Significance points to the strangeness of our encounter with objects by letting the object “stand out” but it forces the object into the everyday by giving it a specific use and time. This strangeness or uncanniness, then as I understand it, is neither an attribute of the human, nor is it a part of the object. Instead, Being itself is uncanny.

By attributing significance to objects we bring them into the everyday, we give them “use”, “purpose”, and “value.” But more importantly we show the object's strangeness by disturbing this in-explicit familiarity – the object's contingency in its “thereness”. And what the website (significantobjects.com) shows is that this is done by way of narrative. In other words, significance is not some mereological part of an object that we simply tack on to it, but instead what holds our attention in object is the narrative that goes along with it.

In summation, I'll leave you with these haunting words from Heidegger's discussion of his table:

That is the table – as such is it there in the temporality of everydayness, and as such will it perhaps happen to be encountered again after many years when, having been taken apart and now unusable, it is lying on the floor somewhere, just like other “things,” e.g., a plaything, worn out and almost unrecognizable – it is my youth. (Ontology 70).

When Nature Attacks

2010-02-14T08:30:00.004-06:00

I think over the past year or so what has fascinated me most about the object-oriented project is its reliance upon the uncanny. However, this reliance is also what is most unnerving for me at the same time, since the uncanny has become a tool seemingly not worth studying for the object-oriented philosopher. In other words, the uncanny is simply invoked, mentioned, or even alluded to with little to no discussion about it as an object – even if it is an object of study.

Yet, in a recent post by Levi over at Larval Subjects he uses alien invasion science fiction films to discuss the ontological de-centering that takes place in such films. At one point, though, he makes the following point:

Rather, what interests me is the effect of the uncanny that this quintessentially anti-humanist cinema seems to produce in the viewer (at least, to produce in this viewer). One reels before the jaw-dropping flatness of such a universe, where humans are treated as one other being among others, rather than a privileged center to which all other entities must necessarily address themselves. Who knows, perhaps there's even the possibility of renewing the genre of horror through the exploration of the flat and a-human, where humans are caught up in events beyond themselves but are not at the center.

So given this (rare) opportunity to discuss the uncanny in and of itself, I would like to expand Levi's argument that at the heart of horror films is the invocation of the uncanny.

A while back I argued that the object-oriented philosopher would have to take on the zombie as an ontological problem, for the zombie represents our fear of humans-as-objects, but also our desire to overcome nature, to live beyond death. And for this last reason (but not this reason alone) the zombie becomes the perfect manifestation of this aforementioned uncanniness. Unlike Levi, though, I find the most horribly uncanny movies to be ones where humans are de-centered not by some invading alien race, but the films where humans become de-centered by way of the everyday. In other words, the most unsettling films are those that place the human "in-the-world" and alongside other objects.

At one point in my academic career, I argued that the best example of these types of films were the "nature-run-amok" films. Not unique to a single time period, these types of films often use animals to turn the ontological tables on the humans in the films. So, for example, in Cujo (1983) a familiar domesticated family dog becomes a ruthless killer. The reason why Cujo is so horribly unsettling is that unlike the alien invaders, or even some extinct creature of the past (the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, for example), is that most if not all of us had a dog at one time in our lives. Therefore, the familiar non-human becomes a moment of the uncanny, of confronting the everyday presentation of humanity as over and above nature.

What I hope to do in some later posts is to discuss this uncanniness in terms of Heidegger's "everydayness". But, as for now, I wish only to point out that what is great about the uncanniness of horror films is that they are not dependent upon an Other world – for our world can be just as uncanny.

Ontological Question?

2009-12-08T10:07:00.000-06:00

What is a question? Not why do we question, but ultimately what is it that a question is? Is it an object? Does it have properties? Linguistically we can say they do, right? Or do questions exist as a form of translation? When we question someone or something what are we doing? Are we looking for information? Are we critiquing their points or egging them on? Are we attempting to invoke ideas, thoughts, differences, or affects? Or, are all questions doing just the same thing – waiting for a response? If so, who responds? Why do they respond? Is there a felt sense of duty to respond – a respons-ibility? Or are we asking questions in order to answer previous questions? If so, whose? Yours? Mine? Or, perhaps, Heidegger’s? Wasn’t Heidegger fascinated by questions? But, what were Heidegger’s questions? Wasn’t one of them the question of the meaning of Being? Wasn’t another the fundamental question of metaphysics, or why is there something instead of nothing? Didn’t he also ask, “What is a thing?” Are we now asking these same questions? Do we still not know what a thing is? Or was that the point of Heidegger’s question – to get at knowledge? Is that our point of asking the same question? Or do we have another question? What are the questions we are searching for in this new object-oriented way of thinking? Are we actually worried about things? If so, what are we worried about? Are we worried that objects can’t or won’t present themselves? Or are we determined to dethrone the human subject from its place in philosophy by focusing on things? Yet what happens if we are simply worried about things? Is there an ethics in dealing with things – even if this “dealing with” is a letting-be? In other words, what do we do with things? Can we, humans, even discuss things? What if Heidegger was correct when he said inherent in human Dasein is an incessant violence – that we find humans the uncanniest of the uncanny because of this reciprocal tension between dike and techne (Intro to Metaphysics)? Did he mean that humanity is the violent one, the one who oversteps his bounds in everything it does? Or did he mean that humanity, in its need to separate itself from the all encompassing, gathering-together of being, this real that is real for everything, is always battling for a place of its own, a unique clearing? And is not one way of clearing, of disclosing that is characteristic of the human, to ask questions? So, again, I have to ask: What question(s) are we asking in object-oriented philosophy?

Übersetzung

2009-11-24T20:27:00.000-06:00

In a couple of recent posts Levi has developed his notion that objects relate to each other via translation. This means for onticology that no two objects directly encounter each other, but that instead objects - and specifically 2 or more objects - inter-act through the process of interpretation of differences.

In answer to a couple of questions of mine, Levi states:

If it helps to visualize what is going on here, just think in terms of black boxes: actant1 (input) —-> actant2 (black box) —-> product (output). That’s all there is to it. Think about your phone. You have an input (electrical pulses), a black box (the phone itself), and the product (the sounds that come out of the receiver).

Therefore translation takes an actant (or object), interprets it, adds something new to it, and as a result produces something new. Another great example of this would be the process of photosynthesis. As Levi lays out in an older post:

Think about photosynthesis. Here we have photons of sunlight, the leaf and its photosynthetic cells, and the sugar produces. The leaf “translates” the photons of sunlight and produces something new: the complex sugars. There is no resemblance or identity between the photons of light and these complex sugars. Rather that sunlight becomes something new in passing through the medium of the photosynthetic cells.

So far I completely understand and agree with Levi's use of translation (I guess this is also Latour's, as well). But where I struggle, especially after Levi was kind enough to explain this concept even further, is: what exactly happens during translation? What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?

Translation is more than a simple replication. Translation always involves a certain degree of interpretation in which what is inputted is always changed or transformed - from photons of light to complex sugars. Objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly, which means that objects first and foremost recognize each other.

For leafs to translate photons of light into complex sugars, they must recognize the photons of light as photons of light. Just like we have to recognize the word unheimlich as German in order to translate it, objects must recognize other objects in order to translate them. In other words, the leaf doesn't attempt to translate any and all objects into complex sugars, but to some degree sees (not literally) the photons of light as being translatable. But even this recognition adds confusion, as we can now say that objects predict, expect, or anticipate other objects - they recognize potential.

Allusion and Influence: How to Say and Do Something Without Having to Say or Do It

2009-11-12T18:25:00.000-06:00

In Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant argues that:

On the contrary, I say that as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently, I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies. This word merely means the appearance of the thing, which is the unknown to us but is not therefore less real. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary. (298 - pg.33).

In Prince of Networks Harman states:

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)

And in a recent blog post he gives us another statement on allusion:

The point is that you don’t just have the options of saying something or not saying it. There is also a way of saying something without saying it: we allude to it. The same is true of thinking: it is quite easy to think of something without thinking it in the full-blown sense: “The tree that exists outside thought” is such a case. Here, I allude to the tree. As Levi wonderfully put it earlier this fall, my inability to “know” the tree in the full sense is turned from an obstacle to realism and metaphysics into the very condition of it.

For Kenneth Burke in Grammar of Motives, on the crossing over the gap between the phenomenal and noumenal realms:

The thinkable but unknowable noumenal realm, then, was taken [by Kant] as the ground of the phenomenal realm. But we slid over a Grammatical embarrassment. If the phenomenal is the realm of relationships, and the noumenal is the realm of the things-in-themselves (i.e., without relationships), just how could there be a bond between the two realms? … Kant compromised a weasel word, saying that the noumenal “influences” the phenomenal. (198).

My question is, then, what's the point for rhetoric? Isn't allusion just another "weasel word"? If we can't ever know objects by way of language and objects never fully let themselves appear in the first place, what's left? To speculate? On what? To allude to or speak of influences? What for?

Or does this involve the rhetorician becoming a constant mediator? A babbling machine that is always alluding, explicating surprises, and arousing influences? The rhetorician, instead, becomes a stepping stone in the walkway between the thing-in-itself and the language we use to describe it. It seems to me that to practice rhetoric in an object-oriented philosophy is less about persuasion of action, than it is about persuasion of language. To say something without saying it means that we must spend even more time focused in on the words we use, the examples we give, and perhaps objects we choose to discuss - in effect, to bring poetry back into the equation.

The Ontic Principle in 1909!?!

2009-10-08T22:45:00.000-05:00

David, a friend of mine, found this in James Bissett Pratt's book What is Pragmatism? (1909). Could this be an early form of the Ontic Principle?

(from page 6)

3 Types of Relationships Between Selfish Objects - A Brief Outline

2009-10-06T16:37:00.000-05:00

In my last post I argued that Levi’s onticological objects are selfish in nature – that is, that if defined by the Ontic Principle, objects must produce with an indifference to what they are producing. This indifference to the product (or the difference made), I argued, is what made the object ontologically selfish, since it is only worried about producing (i.e., keeping its ontological status as real). But this got me wondering what types of relationships could such ontologically selfish objects have?

Yet before I answer this question, I have to bring up a question of my own. For onticology, every object is radically split between exo- and endo- relationships. Exo-relations are between object and object, while endo-relations are internal to an object independent of any other object. My question, then, has to do with the paradoxical nature of such a split, when ultimately all that is needed in order to be is to be-a-difference that makes-a-difference. Therefore, why split the object? What good does this do since objects, regardless of scale, are all differences that make a difference? How can endo-relations be distinguished from exo-relations (unless by an observer)? Aren’t we essentially talking about a multitude of objects in relation to each other?

So in what follows I would like to briefly outline three types of relations that selfish objects have with each other. Please keep in mind that this is an outline, so I’ve in no way concretized my thoughts. But, I feel that such an outline allows me to not only answer how selfish objects – that is, objects which only seem to reinstate their own ontological status as real by indifferently producing differences – come into relation with other selfish objects, but also how essential it is to deny the split Levi finds necessary to discuss objects in the first place.

3 Types of Relationships Between Selfish Objects:

1) Cooperation: In perhaps the most common type of relationship between objects, differences made are differences that make, with little to no reciprocity between the objects in the relationship. In other words, as an object makes a difference, this difference (as object) makes its own differences which do not directly affect the parent difference, and so on. Metaphorically speaking, we can think of the movement associated with this type of relationship as runners in a relay race, each of whom runs in their own style and with their own object-hood, but nonetheless all have a simple relation to each other runner. However, this might not be the best example since the baton might be taken literally as the same difference, when in onticology this is never the case given Latour’s Principle (that there is no transportation without translation). Regardless, cooperation is often weak, and weakens as the chain of differences lengthens.

2) Collaboration: In this type of relationship objects maintain difference production in a more reciprocal nature, unlike in cooperation. For collaboration, two or more objects benefit from the same relation (i.e., they depend upon each other). Unlike in simple cooperation (which we could read as the simple onticological necessity for beings even to exist), collaboration requires that at least one of the objects involved both makes and is made by another object (difference). Such a relationship maintains the object’s selfishness, since ultimately every object involved satisfies the drive of being, yet at the same time collaboration allows for a slightly stronger tie between objects. An example of this relationship would be the way in which the organs in my body each rely upon each other. So that my heart depends upon my lungs to provide it with enough oxygen, and my lungs depend upon my heart to pump blood to them. Collaboration can be either weak or strong, with the objects’ own dependence upon each other being the deciding factor.

3) Collusion: Finally, we have the most important yet most complex relationship between objects. In collusion the ties between objects are so strong that ultimately this relationship itself becomes an object in its own right – that is, the relationship makes its own difference. The collusive relationship obtains ontological status by making its own differences. This is as close to an idea of form as we can possibly get, since one of our goals here is to deny the split object, which presupposes form in the exo-relation. Therefore, instead of discussing a table as having an endo-relation between its parts (its four legs and flat top) and an exo-relation as a complete table, collusion allows for a single relationship between all of the objects involved. It is because of the strong collusive relationship between the parts of the table that the table exists as a whole. And it is because of the strong collusive relationship of the particles in the wood that the table’s legs, or it’s top exists, and so on. This relationship also allows for the irreducibility claimed by onticology since no object can ever be reduced to any other object – or the table (as a collusive relationship) cannot be reduced to a single leg, or the top; but is instead the complete relationship between all of the parts. In this way collusion is different than both cooperation and collaboration since it provides the structure for a new object or a new difference to be made.

TV Shows and Tube Socks: Same Difference

2009-10-02T12:05:00.001-05:00

Deleuze distinguishes between difference in his terms and empirical difference. Empirical difference distinguishes between two objects – "x differs from y." For Deleuze, though, difference is even prior to this empirical differentiation as a principle. In other words, there has to be a sufficient reason for x to differ from y, and this sufficient reason – this process – is difference. Difference "becomes a transcendental principle that constitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity as such" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy). Difference is what makes differentiation possible. It is no longer an identity (x differs from y), but should be seen as the process (context or grounds) for such actualization to take place.

As I understand it, this is why for Levi, if we have a world made up of a single substance, a color or a sound, even though nothing else exists to distinguish this singularity by or from, this entity in and of itself is a difference – that is, it is the condition for differences to be created. Yet, with Levi's onticology and his definition of differences, this condition or possibility for the creation of differences is turned into a necessity – for there is no difference that does not make a difference. Every difference must make differences, or every difference must produce. But what I find incredibly interesting is that in discussing objects in terms of Deleuzean differences, we have shifted from a discussion of product – What is produced? Why it is important? What can it do for Me? – to one of production – How and under what conditions do differences get made? In other words, if difference is a necessary product of the process of difference, then this differenc-as-product is unimportant or in-different. So for example, suppose we have object A, and object A fulfills the requirements of an object under onticology – that is, it is a difference that makes a difference. If object A must produce in order to maintain its ontological status as real, then it must persistently produce differences, and it does so always in relation to other objects. Therefore, the differences produced by object A are in-different to the relationships (whether exo- or endo-) between object A and this other object. What is important is how and under what conditions object A produces these differences – as I say in my composition course, process over product.

If we want to look at this from a Lacanian point of view, we can think of it in terms of desire, drive, and objet petit a. In The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan states:

Even when you stuff the mouth – the mouth that opens in the register of the drive – it is not the food that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the pleasure of the mouth.[…]
This is what Freud tells us. Let us look at what he says – As far as the object in the drive is concerned, let it be clear that it is strictly speaking, of no importance. It is a matter of total indifference. (167-68)

What Lacan finds here is that the object we supposed would satisfy the drive or the larger desire is of no real importance – that is, this object could be anything: chips, candy, or a four-course meal. It doesn't matter. Instead, the satisfaction of this drive is fulfilled by something other than the food – it is the pleasure of the mouth, the process of desire that succeeds in satisfying said desire. Food, itself, is completely indifferent. What is misperceived is what Lacan calls the object cause of desire, or objet petit a – the necessity of pleasing the desire, not the object of momentary fixation (in this case, food).

For onticology, if the production of differences (exo- or endo- ) is a necessary condition for existence and the difference itself, then the satisfaction of this necessity, of this drive to produce, can only be met by producing and not by any of the actual differences produced. Difference becomes the drive of Being – the process of producing process.

But what about the second half of the Deleuzean process – repetition? Of what importance does it hold in onticology, if any? For Deleuze repetition is more than the simple mechanical replication of an object. It is the repetition of the singular, and in this way gives structure to difference as a process. Repetition is the actualization of a difference from a difference. In other words, every repetition is unique. That is, it contains something the parent difference did not.

In onticology, however, the parent object does not distinguish itself from its progeny, or the difference made. Instead, the repetition (by being a difference itself) is already distinguished. And in this distinguishing, in this actualization of a difference from the original process of difference, a creation (or genesis) takes place – new differences are born. Or in diagram form:

The only problem with the above diagram is that it supposes an original difference, which under onticology is impossible. To be a difference is to not only make a difference but also to be made by a previous difference. There is always a prior and subsequent difference to every other difference.

And it is in this way that onticology denies both a singular, unchanging monad or object, but it also denies an origin object. By origin object, I simply mean a difference that started it all – that is, a difference with no prior differences. Therefore we would have to redraw our diagram to look like:

Difference (as a process), then, makes differences (or actualizes them) and is itself actualized by a previous difference. This is why I feel we can call difference the process of being. Difference needs a before and after, and in this way is reliant upon other objects (whether internal or external to itself). The point that I have been leading up to, however, is this: these other objects are always indifferent others.

If objects are processes (thought of like drives or desire) then products are of little importance to the process itself. But, it seems to me, if what this process creates is simply similar processes, then the product becomes even less important or indifferent to the overall chain. We might be able to think of this last point in terms of a factory. Now the goal of a factory is to produce an object. But as far as the factory itself is concerned, this object is of little importance. The factory simply needs to produce to stay in business, for if the factory stops producing it is shut down or ceases to exist. If being is the process of difference, of making differences, then (again) the difference produced is indifferent to the original process. The factory of being simply needs to produce. We can take our example one step further and say that all objects in onticology seem to be factories of this sort – except that what they are producing are other factories of the same sort (and these factories are doing the same, ad infinitum). Therefore, if being is determined not by the material (or what these factories are made of), the formal (or what shape they take), or the final (or what they produce), then efficiency is all that is needed. To be is to be efficient, to be-produced and produce-being.

Now let me clarify and muddle this last statement with something I said earlier. If difference is only worried about the production of difference and not about the produced difference itself, and if we find the Ontic Principle (that there is no difference that does not make a difference) to express the notion that "to be means to be-produced and to produce-being," then being qua being is ultimately indifferent to everything else. Being, as a process, as difference, exists solely for itself – that is, for the process of being. Unlike an object that has being for others – that has a duty towards or cares for an other object – the onticological object has being only for itself. It is a selfish object, an object that gives but gives only to please itself, to satisfy the drive and desire of difference.

Zombies vs. Humans: Materialism or Immaterialism

2009-09-21T11:31:00.001-05:00

In a response to a nagging question I had about how object-oriented thought handles the particle physics notion of the Standard Model – that is, the most fundamental particles of physical reality – Levi, over at LavalSubjects, states:

I think the answer to this question lies in the point that OOO is not a materialism but a realism. Within my onticology, the sole criteria for existing is the production of differences. These differences need not be physical differences. In this respect, OOO is a slutty ontology or a promiscuous ontology, as it affirms the existence of a wide variety of objects, not all of which are physical. It might very well turn out that there are smallest possible particles within physics (it's an empirical question, not a question that can be answered a priori), but since the real is not exhausted by the material such a discovery would not undermine the infinite decomposibility of being.

In other words, for Levi, even if we scientifically prove that material existence can be decomposed into 6 or so specific particles, such decomposition is in no way exhaustive for all being. For Levi, being is more than just materiality; it is also immateriality, fictional, and symbolic. And in this way, onticology is inclusive, slutty, or promiscuous. It does not discriminate between objects.

Digging its way up from my thoughts, the zombie seems to become of interest once again. One of the largest complaints against the zombie was that it presented the human as mindless, when clearly we are not. However, let's suppose a world propagated only with such beings – that is, a world with only zombies (no "humans"). Zombies, as I originally posted on, become troubling for the object-oriented philosopher because they are humans without "humanity." That is, the zombie exists without language, creativity, and the ability to fantasize. They are merely physical beings without thought.

In such a world, ontology would be swallowed up by science, for there would be no need to discuss anything other than the material world. There would only need to be the Standard Model of particle physics to describe the world and the beings that make up the world. Yet, as the object-oriented philosopher (and any rational mind, for that matter) would point out with enthusiastic objection, we do not live in such a world. We not only live in a world with people, pets, and playgrounds. But we live with pirates, politics, and Harry Potter. Our world is one of material and immaterial existence. A world object-oriented thought wishes to understand.

However, if we accept the two worlds as coexisting, then what does object-oriented thought actually philosophizing about? Or to put this another way, if the physical side of reality (our zombie world) can be explained away by particle physics and the Standard Model, what can object-oriented thought discuss? Is object-oriented thought, then, only truly adding to the discourse on language, culture, and the immaterial world? And, can we split the two "realities" in the first place? Do we have to treat a person as both a zombie (explained away by particle physics) and a human (explained away by philosophy)? Finally, should and can object-oriented thinking move outside of the realm of the symbolic and into the material, physical, and zombie-filled arena?

The Uncanniest of the Uncanny

2009-08-27T15:31:00.001-05:00

Over at Larval Subjects, Levi has created a well-developed and nuanced ontology of objects he has affectionately called, Onticology. In short, his idea of an object-oriented-ontology is one of differences, but more importantly, it is about objects. His thoughts go something like, anything that makes a difference is – that is objects are a difference that make a difference. Without going into detail about how objects actually do this (in all honesty I don't think I understand all of it myself), suffice it to say, Onticology along with other forms of object-oriented thinking wish ultimately to dethrone humanity from its pedestal of Being to show that humans are themselves objects in a complex network of object-object relationships.

Have we become so narcissistic and self-righteous that we see ourselves as lords over Being? It would appear so. How did we get this way? And by asking these questions am I simply feeding the beast that is the human project, or do I need to ignore or bracket the human before I get a better understanding of object-ness and how objects work?

In my study of the un-canny, I've been especially drawn to Heidegger. Not because he specifically discusses the uncanny as a state of mind in Being and Time (a state of mind that along with anxiety leaves us open to the call to conscience), but more importantly because in Introduction to Metaphysics he recognizes the un-canniness of humanity and its relationship to the world. After giving us a selection from Antigone, Heidegger reads humanity as deinon – un-canny. He writes, "The human being is to deinotaton, the uncanniest of the uncanny" (159). However, we should realize that what Heidegger has in mind when he talks about deinon as uncanny is different than the common definition of the uncanny as unhomely, strange, or out of place, but it is also slightly different than his previous definition of the uncanny as a feeling we have "in" anxiety and "in-the-world" (Being and Time 233).

In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger splits deinon (the uncanny) into two parts: 1) the overwhelming and 2) violence-doing. He states:

On the one hand, deinon names the terrible, but it does not apply to petty terrors and does not have the degenerate, childish, and useless meaning that we give the word today when we call something "terribly cute." The deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe. The violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself. When the sway breaks in, it can keep its overwhelming power to itself. But this does not make it more harmless but only more terrible and distant.
But on the other hand, deinon means the violent in the sense of one who needs to use violence – and does not just have violence at his disposal but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein. […]
Being as a whole, as the sway, is the overwhelming, deinon in the first sense. But humanity is deinon, first, inasmuch as it remains exposed to this overwhelming sway, because it essentially belongs to Being. However, humanity is also deinon because it is violence-doing in the sense we have indicated [It gathers what holds sway and lets it enter into an openness.] Humanity is violence doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming. Because it is doubly deinon in an originally united sense, it is to deinontaton, the most violent: violence-doing in the midst of the overwhelming. (160).

In other words, Heidegger finds the uncanny as consisting of two sides, both making up humanity and its approach to the world. First we have Being as a whole, as an overwhelming sway which collects everything. Being, a flat (not flattening) Being, is the set of every object including humans. For Heidegger, "the deinon as the overwhelming is manifested in the fundamental Greek word dike. We translate this word as fittingness <Fug>" (171). Dike, as the Being of beings, is fittingness or enjoining in that it requires objects to fit-in, in compliance. All objects are. Every object (including humans), then, belongs to this overwhelming sway of dike.

Yet, since Heidegger continuously finds humanity to be to deinontaton, or uncanniest of the uncanny, there is also a doubling of this Being, manifested in our need to do violence against dike, or Being itself. For this violence-doing, Heidegger substitutes the Greek word techne, stating that, "techne means neither art nor skill, and it means nothing like technology in the modern sense. We translate techne as "knowing" (169). And this type of knowing found in techne as violence-doing is "the ability to set Being [dike] into work as something that in each case is in such and such a way" (170). To clarify, techne as "putting-to-work" is more than a creation, a making, or an artwork; but is a presentation of Being (dike) so that everything in a work of art can be seen, studied, and understood "as a being, or else as an unbeing" (170). If we paint a bowl of fruit, for example, we have put Being, as dike or the overwhelming sway, to work in the bowl of fruit. We have used the object to open up what it means to "be" an object. We attempt to know, to understand through our constant attempts at techne, at putting Being to work in beings. And it is this knowing that Heidegger finds humanity at its most violent. For, "in the reciprocal relation between them [between dike and techne] is the happening of uncanniness" (176).

It would seem then, that if it were our goal to stop the violence against Being, a violence that repeatedly puts Being to work in objects and consequently puts humanity on the ontological throne, then more than a mere theory of objects would be needed. We would, instead, somehow need to undo the violence we've already done, or at least attempt to do no further violence. But how do we do this, if (especially in Heidegger's point of view) this violence is part of our double-uncannines, of who we are as a group of beings? Do we stop working in the sense of techne? Should we all become lazy, and through our laziness let the object be? Or should we attempt to find our place (our home, if you will) in this overwhelming sway of Being, of dike? But in doing so, can we quell the need to put Being to work for us? Isn't any ontology, in the end, for us?

I am reminded here by something Derrida said in his reading of Potacka in The Gift of Death, where he states "Force has become the modern figure of being. Being has allowed itself to be determined as a calculable force, and man, instead of relating to the being that is hidden under this figure of force, represents himself as quantifiable power" (37). We have stopped trying to relate to Being and stopped trying to find our home in the world, and instead have decided Being is for-us. Don't get me wrong, object-oriented thought seems to be moving us in the right direction, but on some level I can't help but feel unsatisfied. What is needed, still, I feel, is a relational ontology that doesn't place humanity at the center of it (where everything else revolves around human), but that attempts to find a place for humanity within the overwhelming sway of objects – a sort of real estate ontology. But such an ontology also requires a techne that is self-aware, and in its self-awareness takes responsibility for uncovering Being, including human un-canniness. For an ontology of the Being of beings is at the same time a call for ethical treatment of objects, so that we never again do violence toward them.

The Death Set

2009-08-25T16:19:00.001-05:00

We could easily argue that a closed set is only closed by way of an other. Or to put this another way, we must have something which does not belong to the set in order have a set. A good example of this would be any of the cliques in an American high school. For the "jocks" to exist as a set, you must have a person or group of people who do not belong to the group – so you have the Goths, the Nerds, etc. Each group can be defined by what it is not, but more importantly, each group only exists if something escapes it. Perhaps we could best understand this by way of Fink:

For what could it possibly mean to speak of the set of all signifiers? As soon as we attempt to designate such a set, we add a new signifier to the list: the "Other" (with a capital "O"). That signifier is not yet included within the set of all signifiers (figure 3.1).
Other ( )
Let us include that new signifier within the set. We change the set in so doing and can now justifiably rename it, as it no longer escapes the same set. Suppose we call it the "complete Other" (figure 3.2).
Complete Other (Other)
This new name, however, is not yet part of the set. To include it would involve changing the set, and once again call for a new name (figure 3.3).
Complete Other 2 ( Complete Other )
The process can be repeated endlessly, proving that the supposed set of all signifiers can never be complete."

In other words, there can be no set that contains all other sets. Something must escape. But what about a set where before nothing escapes? What about death?

Creation, in John W. Lango's account of Whitehead's Ontology, is opposite eternality. Or, to put this another way, "An entity is created if an only if it is not eternal" (77). For Lango, we can read Whitehead's ontology as having to do with objects interacting with other objects – a process Lango terms synonty. Being, as Lango puts it, "is, more appropriately, a relation between entities…Thus [Whitehead's] types of entity are defined by the principle that entities have being for one another (i.e., are synontic)" (1). But there is a primal difference between beings that are created and beings that are eternal. For Lango, "An entity is eternal if and only if it is synontic to every other entity and every other entity is synontic to it. An entity is created if and only if it is not synontic to some other entity or some other entity is not synontic to it" (77). Finitude can be read, then, as being a closed set of created objects; but only if we have an eternal object, only if we have something outside the closed set.

Immortality or the eternal object is usually given to the gods. In the animal world death is a natural process that eventually overtakes most living tissue – or so I believed. I had heard of amoebas cheating death by replication but was not sure if this was the same thing as an eternal object, because in this process of replication there exists a time (t) where amoeba A is physically separate from amoeba B, even though they both share identical biological makeup. But recently I came across the hydra – a freshwater animal in the class Hydrozoa. What's interesting about the hydra is its ability to regenerate at the cellular level, making it seemingly immortal. According to Daniel E. Martinez in his article found here:

Escaping senescence, however, might be restricted to animals with simpler, dynamic bodies that can be constantly renewed from populations of stem cells. Given the tissue dynamics of hydra, over a period of four years somatic epithelial cells have divided on average 300 times and the whole hydra body may have been fully replaced at least 60 times. The evolution of more complex bodies with tissues and organs with a higher degree of specialization might have resulted in, or perhaps required, a loss of the capacity of renewal and thus permitted the evolution senescence. (224)

What I find incredibly interesting about this passage is Martinez's claim that senescence (or natural aging) is evolutionary – and via this claim, that death too is a creation of our evolutionary process. The hydra, in other words, makes death as a closed set possible. It is that eternal entity which has synonty with all other entities through its being immortal. The following graph from Martinez's article best sums up anything I left to say:

Ontology of the Living Dead

2009-08-22T15:26:00.000-05:00

Admittedly my first formulation of the zombie was slightly vague, and given the responses (both positive and negative) over at Larval Subjects, Ian Bogost, and Hyper tiling, it seemed to be confusing, as well. So I hope this second post clarifies a few points, but I can make no promises.

Given that my discussion of the zombie started with a notion that it was opposite the cute object, I would like to bring up a similar object to use for comparison and contrast: the ugly object. In The Abyss of Freedom, Zizek makes the following remarks about ugliness and the ugly object:

The ugly object is an object that is in the wrong place, that "shouldn't be there." This does not mean that the ugly object is no longer ugly the moment we relocate it to its proper place; rather, an ugly object is "in itself" out of place, on account of the distorted balance between its 'representation' (the symbolic features we perceive) and 'existence' – being ugly, out-of-place, is the excess of existence over representation. Ugliness is thus a topological category; it designates an object and the space it occupies, or – to make the same point in a different way – between the outside (surface) of an object (captured by its representation) and its inside (formless stuff). In the case of beauty, we have in both cases a perfect isomorphism, while in the case of ugliness, the inside of an object somehow is (appears) larger than the outside of its surface representation (like the uncanny buildings in Kafka's novels that, once we enter them, appear much more voluminous than they seemed from the outside). (21-22)

If we consider the zombie opposite the cute object, then we wouldn't have to stretch our imaginations too far to think of it equivocal to the ugly object. Like the ugly object, then, the zombie shouldn't be there, it is out-of-place – a return of the dead. As my last post hinted at, cute objects (and objects of beauty) are absorbed by us, taken for granted, or easily passed on by. Zizek reinforces this claim when he notes that “in beauty we have in both cases [i.e., in representation and existence] a perfect isomorphism” or a one-to-one correspondence or similarity (representation = existence). Ugly objects, on the other hand, have more to them in their existence than their outward representations (representation < existence). They disturb us because we at times see the hidden, excessive elements that unsettle our sense of sameness and beauty. So, initially we can read the zombie as an ugly object.

Yet, as I previously stated, “zombies are all the same. A zombie biker is no more or less threatening than a zombie baker or zombie dog.” In other words, a zombie is a zombie is a zombie, regardless of race, class, gender, or species. So, ontologically speaking, zombies are beautiful objects, perfect balances between representation and existence, for without the ability to signify their existence there is nothing else to the zombie beyond its desire. But isn't this a contradiction? It doesn't have to be. I would argue that zombies (as well as other objects) can be both beautiful and ugly.

What I hope comes from this discussion is to show how as of now, there seems to be a single understanding of objects. For both OOP and OOO, all objects are ugly. All objects have something hidden or secret which does not make itself known upon immediate exposure in an encounter either with humans or other objects. Representation and existence are in no way equal.

Yet, oddly, in their approach to the zombie, both OOP and OOO find the zombie as a physical (and perhaps mental/psychological) threat – that humanity is more than the zombie, and how dare you say otherwise. But in doing so, they are only recognizing the beauty of the zombie, or that the zombie somehow reduces humanity to an isomorphic blob. Or to put this another way, they are only recognizing the similarity between all zombies, that a zombie is a zombie is a zombie.

Out of all the objects, they haven't found the zombie ugly, as itself consisting of a subterranean existence that is a lot larger than its initial representation. For let us not forget that what makes the zombie more frightening than, say the android, is that the zombie is/was human. And this hint of humanity, the larger part of the zombie's existence, is at times both beautiful and ugly, but perhaps this is why we find the zombie at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley -between the object and the human.

Zombies Ate My Ontology

2009-08-17T20:55:00.000-05:00

For Postmodernism the cyborg seemed to represent a lot of what was being discussed. One of the reasons was that the cyborg, according to Donna Haraway, broke through crucial boundaries that had seemingly separated humanity from its world. The cyborg fused human, animal, organism, and machine into one being. It purposefully blurred boundaries and made murky the waters of pure humanism. Postmodernisms dealings with the cyborg allowed them to break free from dualisms and move beyond humanity – thus was born post-humanism.

But recent philosophical trends, mine included, have moved away from the transcendence of post-humanism to a philosophy that wishes to elevate all objects to the human level (or to lower the human to the level of all other objects). Because of this need to place all things on an equal playing field, Object-Oriented philosophy and ontology (hereto referred to as OOP/OOO) is forced to deal with its own creature.

Given the recent surge of game theory and technical talk seen on Larval Subject’s blog, and his recent post on the uncanny (YAY!!), I’ve been tempted again and again to draw attention to aesthetics, but especially to the Uncanny Valley. Developed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the idea of the Uncanny Valley can best be summed up with help from his graph:

Seen here, before any form of technology, robotic or not, reaches an exact duplication of human speech, behavior, or physical appearance, it must cross the Uncanny Valley. For Mori, this valley represents the repulsion humanity has toward something that is like a human but is not, and the closer the object resembles a human, the stronger the feeling of disgust. It would seem, then, that as far as aesthetics are concerned, humanity prefers objects that keep their distance, that look different, that act different, that are different.

We could, however, interpret the pinnacle of this first peak in the graph (that peak level to the healthy human being) to be the place of human preference. And in the “still” graph (the solid line) we find a great example of such a preferential object – the stuffed animal. For the stuffed animal presents no threat to humanity, no need to differentiate it and any real animal.

And we could only assume, then, that the humanoid robot that the moving graph (the dotted line) suggests approaches the top of its peak might look something like ASIMO from Honda or the original NES R.O.B. which played Nintendo games with you. In essence these robots are far from being anything “human”, but like the stuffed animal, are simply cute.

But what makes an object “cute?” In a recent post on his blog, Ian Bogost references Graham Harman’s definition, so that “The labors of such agents become "cute" when they are slightly underequipped for their task…” For Bogost, though, Japanese cuteness has taken over from this behavioral “underequipped” cuteness – and is instead a cuteness which relies heavily on appearance. Take for example the difference between the Nintendo Wii’s characters and most of the characters that the Xbox and the Playstation3 pride themselves on – characters which look almost-human. Or to put this another way, while the PS3 and Xbox deal with how real they can make their graphics look, the Wii is content in providing its users with slightly miniature, often large-headed, but almost always cute characters. We have to ask ourselves, why? Why are we less threatened when we create a bobble-headed avatar than when we face a character from Madden 2010 or Halo 3?

The answer lies in the Uncanny Valley. Our Wii avatars are cute, they are in the words of Harman, objects that “are either lovely, or else they are delightfully absorbed in some technique that we ourselves take for granted.” Cute objects allow for forgetfulness, or at least the opportunity to be passed by – “Oh, that’s cute.” For cuteness can never be stared at for too long. Otherwise we progress into the Uncanny Valley. As an example, my daughter has a baby doll she likes to play with. The doll is simply a shaped plastic form with a clothes and pacifier. In the context of my daughter’s play, the doll is cute for it plays the part of a baby but is underequipped to be a real baby. Yet, as Freud noticed (with the help of Jentsch and E.T.A. Hoffman) dolls can become creepy. A “Good Guy Doll” becomes Chucky in Child’s Play, small wooden marionettes become killers in Puppetmaster, and a collection of porcelain playthings become evil monsters in Dolls. Cute has the possibility to become terrifying.

As non-human objects take on human characteristics, they become creepy or horrific. Yet, looked at from the opposite end, as humanity is stripped away of language and of the ability to create and fantasize, it too becomes horrendous. In this way, I feel that OOP/OOO must deal with the creature that presents the true meeting of object and human – the zombie.

From the essential film, Night of the Living Dead (1968) to perhaps the finest in literary achievement in recent decades, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, zombies have become more than mythical creatures. Like Dracula, they have taken their rightful place in popular culture as horrific creatures of the undead. Yet, unlike Dracula or any vampire for that fact, zombies are mindless – acting only on instinct or drive. Instead of blood, zombies feed on brains. Instead of needing to develop relationships with nubile necks, zombies tear and rip into any and all humans. Zombies are equal opportunity monsters. And instead of a singular vampire, the zombie attacks in hordes and large lumbering groups.

Zombies are the uncanny kernel of the Real, they are not the object which leaves a remainder, they ARE the remainder. Zombies are Das Ding, the Thing, human qua object. And because of this, OOP/OOO must deal with the zombie much in the same way Postmodernism (especially in Haraway and Lyotard) had to deal with the cyborg. However, instead of talking about how humanity will have become, OOP/OOO will have to talk about in what ways humanity is not unique – how we are all zombies. They must take up the zombie as a human representative since only in the zombie do we find the human as it “really” exists, without any obfuscation.

First, the zombie IS – of this there can be no mistake. The zombie is just as real as the computer in front of me. For OOP/OOO all objects are as real as all other objects. Second, the zombie exists as pure desire, it moves with a single purpose and without known agency. And finally, every zombie is the same. A zombie biker is no more or less threatening than a zombie baker or zombie dog. But essentially the zombie is an empty desire, an object with no name except pure existence. Why do they hunger for brains? Who knows. Will they ever stop looking for brains? No. And in a world where all objects are on the same level playing field, stripped away of our agency as subjects, we find ourselves in an awkward position, as non-human humans alive in a world of networks and alliances. We are all zombies. And the only question that remains in a this philosophy that deals with fidelity and allegiance is, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”

Time and Object-Centered Rhetoric

2009-05-05T10:54:00.000-05:00

In perhaps a more rhetorical question, Larval Subjects in his most recent post asks his readers, “What is time?” He points to the seeming paradox of light speed travel uncovered by Einstein's general and special relativity, and in an interesting move discusses time in terms of Leibniz's Monadology and principles of non-contradiction and self-identity. And although I'm sure Larval is not expecting an answer to his post, especially one that goes beyond (perhaps in left-field as I seem to do) it, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to begin discussing what I propose to be an object-centered rhetoric that will lead us ultimately to a construction of an object-centered temporality.

Ultimately what Einstein discovered is that time is relative to the subject and the location of the subject, so that if a person were to travel at the speed of light away from the earth while another stayed on earth, the person traveling away from the earth at the speed of light would actually experience less time passing by than the stationary one. Time, then is relative to the observer and location. However, what if we talk instead about objects instead of observers? What then?

Most rhetoric that deals with objects deals with them from the standpoint of an observer. So that for instance when talking about a book and a table, they consistently say something like, “the book is located on the table” or “the book is located on top of the table.” Both of these are still observations – that is, observations from a third perspective or an observer. An object-centered rhetoric, instead, attempts to discuss the encounter of the book and the table from both the perspective of the book and the table. So that statements like the one's above become something like: “From the point of view of the table, the book is located above it” and “From the point of view of the book, the table is located below it”. See here how simply changing our use of words and language creates a more inclusive and less observer-centered way of talking about objects. Also, what this does is that it allows the book and the table to exist in their own right, not tied to the observer, whom might have a motive or create a generic hierarchy from which to classify the book as being superior to the table (or vice versa). Object-centered rhetoric also allows objects to be approached from all angles. So that the two object-centered sentences just uttered actually are that – two individual, different sentences. If we stick with our observer-centered rhetoric, the book and the table become synonymous with each other in their encounter, so that what is ultimately being stated is that the encounter is what is important. Instead, object-centered rhetoric places the object(s) at the center of the speech act, requiring the encounter to be explained from different perspectives, without favoring one over the other.

There might be a couple objections that might occur with such rhetoric, namely: A) saying the book is located on top of the table is the same thing as saying that from the table's perspective the book is located above it and B) that using such rhetoric makes sure that you could never fully understand any interaction or encounter between two objects whatsoever.

When I ask for directions or give them, I always have to listen for or make statements such as “it will be on your right” or “you'll see it on the left, if you are going south”. As far as directions are concerned, these are the types of sentences you (as a lost soul) want to hear, for they orient you to what you are looking for, where you are going, and where you might find it. If I were to just tell you, “it's on this road,” a million different questions would spring to mind: “Which direction, north or south?” “Where on the road, or how far down or up the road?” “Will it be on my left or right?” Answering any or all of these questions will put the traveler closer to the destination and with more accuracy. Therefore, the speaker or direction-giver would have to orient him/herself to how and where they are traveling, as well. So that in saying that “heading south, it will be on your left”, one is also saying that a) you will be facing this direction, b) do not look right, as there is nothing of interest on that side, c) if you head north you will not see it, and d) if you miss it, and turn around, you will be heading north and therefore it will be on your right and not your left.

However, by making a statement such as “the book is on top of the table” is tantamount to saying, the place you are looking for is on this road. It fails to orient the location and observer. From which direction is the book located “on top” of the table? What if I look at it from underneath the table, is the book still there? Or if I'm looking at it from above, couldn't I assume that the table is actually below the book? Object-centered rhetoric then places the objects as points of observation, as focal points from which all spatial location is then made available. For example, when I claimed earlier that from the table's perspective, the book was located above it, I was not only making a statement as to the relation of the book and the table, but I am also stating that this relation is relative to the table – that only from the table's perspective can the book be located above it. And, the same goes for the book's perspective. In this sense, the book and the table are given back their unique perspectives, perspectives that are equally important in understanding the relation between the two objects.

And this brings us to our second problem, that using such rhetoric makes sure that you could never fully understand any interaction or encounter between two objects whatsoever. In response to this I would like to ask another question, what purpose is there to understanding an encounter in its entirety? Is this even possible from an observer-centered rhetoric? I propose that any object-centered rhetoric is never exhaustive in describing an encounter. We can see proof for this when in an earlier post we discussed the encounter as the propagation of the event (E), which creates meaning stretched out over time. The meaning of an encounter is the immediate result of such an object-centered utterance. So, from the books perspective, meaning is created when the table is seen as being below it. How much meaning, what type of meaning, and what importance does the meaning have, are all questions we will leave unanswered for now. But, what I've hopefully done is shown the importance of object-centered rhetoric, so that we can now discuss the object's temporality.

Before we begin, I would like to add another diagram to our growing catalog:

As you can see, we have kept all of our previous parts of the object, and only added a few lines. Each line represents a movement of time and thus a temporalizing of sorts. For the most part, the lines originate in the thing-itself (A) and move outward. The only exception is the line that connects the encounter (B) with event (E). But, before we get into this exception, lets look more closely at the other lines. If you will note, the lines originating from (A) move outward, almost as if the object were expanding. Keep in mind, though, that such expansion is in no way an expansion of space (which I will discuss in a later post) but is a temporal expansion. By this I mean simply that each object moves through time in its own way – that is, time is relative to each object. It moves away from its pure Being towards its non-Being, but each object does so at its own rate. Therefore, a flower will have a different temporal existence than say a Styrofoam cup; however, each object continues to temporally expand until this non-Being is reached. Why so many lines? Well, simply put, because each object temporally expands in all directions. So that from the object's perspective time is felt in all parts, in all realms, and in all encounters, events and movements. Think of your body, so that you feel time not only mentally but you feel it when your nails grow, every time you realize you need a hair cut, etc. So that every object (here, your body) temporally expands in many directions.

Finally, we might note that the line connecting the encounter (B) with event (E) takes a different direction with regard to those originating from (A). This is because time here is also an encounter, but an encounter that does not originate from the object, yet encounters the object, and continues outside of the object itself. For example, I eat a really tasty orange. In this encounter, meaning is formed (regardless of whether it is “oranges are good” or “this particular variety of oranges are tasty”). But this meaning is formed out of the utterance and continues past the orange's (the object's) non-being – for I've effectively eaten the orange. Instead, this encounter has a temporality unto itself. So that if we have to think time relative to the object (or orange), we must also think of time as relative to the encounter and thus connecting encounter (B) with event (E). Does this time line end? Well, like we said when we discussed Porter's book on (M)eaning, meaning only becomes non-consequential (and thus meaningless) when all of the possible meanings have been exhausted or are no longer consequential. Time for the encounter (B) then should be seen in terms of consequentiality, for every encounter (B) immediately produces an event (E), which is and moves outside of the object proper.

Every object, then, is part of at least two (but really quite a bit more) temporalities – the temporality in itself and that of its encounters. Our only problem then is to shift our language from the temporal nature of discussing our encounters with the object to a language that discusses the object-itself in all of its expanding temporal qualities.

Rats + Hegel = Surrealism

2009-04-08T06:05:00.000-05:00

Since the title of this post starts with “rats” I feel the need to do so as well. If we were to look at a rat's behavior, we might consider it to be random, or contingent – in that the rat's movements do not follow a logical pattern from A to B to C. Now, if we were wanting to catch this rat, we wouldn't just simply run around after the rat, for any attempt to do so would prove futile. Instead, we more than likely would set out a trap for the rat. But what is this trap? What does it do? And how is such a trap better at catching a rat than we might be?

To begin to answer these questions, let's take a look at what the trap is. Like most traps it works on some level of availability; an open or “armed” state and a closed or “sprung” state. In the open state the trap is waiting for the rat to step into it. In the closed state, the trap has caught the rat. In effect, the trap acts as a forced binary solution to the problem of the rat's contingent behavior – either the trap is open or closed. We no longer need to guess where the rat might move, counter our movements, or avoid moving by hiding. Instead, the trap structures the situation to the point that we are not even needed. The trap takes away the randomness of the rat's movements by forcing upon it a binary structure.

Reality, the world, and all objects, then, are just as random (or in Meillassoux's terms, contingent) as the behavior of the rat. In fact we can reformulate this contingency, this being and not-being, into what others have termed Hegel's Dialectic. For Hegel thought is broken up into three parts: being, nothing or (not-being), and becoming. In any encounter we are confronted with an object's being, its existence, or in Hegel's terms “pure being.” Now, along with this beginning is this thesis's opposite or antithesis. Therefore we must also posit the objects not-being or nothingness. For Meillassoux this duality causes a problem:

To claim that an existent cannot exist, and to claim moreover that this possibility is an ontological necessity, is also to claim that the sheer existence of the existent, just like the sheer inexistence of the inexistent are two imperishable poles which allow the perhisability of everything to be thought. Consequently, I can no more conceive of the contingency of negative facts alone than I can conceive of the non-being of existence as such. 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. (76).

What Meillassoux works up to, then, is a synthesis of Hegel's two poles – a synthesis of being (thesis) and nothing or not-being (antithesis). For Hegel this synthesis is called becoming. For Meillassoux, “the solution to the problem 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” (76). In other words, it is necessary that everything that exists be seen in its contingency as possibly not existing and vice versa. Every object is always becoming, a becoming of its antithesis by way of contingency, and I would add, our un-canny.

Again, we can understand how reality, like our rat's behavior, is in constant need of a third option, a synthesis of the contingency of reality. Therefore, we are constantly throwing out traps, laying down binaries, or creating meaning in order to unburden ourselves of this ontological loop of being and not-being. By saying there is a meaning to an encounter we are, in essence, creating a way to “deal” with the object we are encountering. Or, to put this in terms of our object: every encounter or event (B) is both an encounter with the known and unknown (thus our terms, un-canny and contingency). However, each encounter also produces an event (E) as a result. And every event (E), also called a meaning or a consequence, is our encounter with the object “as” something, so that the object becomes something other than its being/not-being. It becomes meaningful.

And this is where I feel surrealism as a philosophical movement might be of some use. Surrealism works upon the basic notion of juxtaposition to create meaning. For example, the painting entitled “The Son of Man” by Rene Magritte depicts a man, dressed in a suit and a red tie; however, right in front of his face is a green apple, so that as Magritte put it in a radio interview:

At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

By juxtaposing the apple in front of the man's face – an object we are used to looking at due to the large number of portraits and self-portraits – we find the two images conflicting between the known (apple) and the unknown (the man's face), or between the thesis (the man's face) and its antithesis (the apple). Stuck with this “conflict,” as Magritte puts it, we attempt to create a meaning between the two – our brains try to make a connection between what is there and not there. In other words, we try and synthesize a solution so that the contingency of the painting is no longer a problem. So we might say something along the lines of “the apple represents death, or sin of the human race” – to disburden us from the un-canniness of the apple in front of the man's face. I'm not trying to say that such a synthesis erases or does away with the contingency or un-canniness of the painting. Nor am I attempting to say that such an utterance carries on this contingency by just hiding it somewhere else within it. No, instead what becoming does is push forward, it moves past the contention between being and not-being but not in a transcendental way. For the utterance can never fully capture the encounter. Nor is the utterance merely a vocal or audible statement, for these two formulations imply a listener, something not needed for an utterance to be made. The utterance, then, is merely the manufacturing of meaning/consequences based upon the contingency of the object – something I feel only surrealism can attempt to show.

So in our terms, by juxtaposing the realm of the known with the realm of the unknown, every encounter (B) with an object creates an utterance which carries with it a meaning/consequence. This utterance or event (E) can never grasp the object completly but instead is always reliant upon the encounter (B). Meaning is created as a result of this utterance or attempt to synthesize the two realms, and this meaning propels the object outside of this initial interaction. In this way our un-canny ontology is best considered under surrealistic terms of juxtaposition and the Hegelian dialectic – where when two objects encounter each other, each is forced to create an utterance which has meaning beyond the encounter.

For example, when a large hailstone falls on a car window, both the window and the hailstone are confronted with the other's contingent existence – both of being and not-being – since each existed independent from each other before the encounter but are now forced to deal with the other's presence. However, each object simply doesn't stay within this moment of interaction, so that something happens – simply stating, here, that there is an encounter. And although we may not know or understand the utterance that took place (remember an utterance in our terms means a system – of words, fields, experiences, etc. – for no object, like words, are ever encountered by themselves), the utterance is visible through the consequences of the encounter. Therefore the consequences of the encounter are obvious to us – the window is cracked or shattered, and/or the hailstone is chipped or broken. The contingency of each object – its being/not-being – is dealt with physically, through everlasting consequences upon each object, for both the window and the hailstone will never be the same.

Meaning, Being, and Event (E)

2009-03-31T10:34:00.000-05:00

In recently rereading the introduction to Being and Time, and having recently read Kevin J. Porter's Meaning, Language, and Time: Toward a Consequential Philosophy of Discourse, I was struck by how both arguments, although about radically different subjects, seemed to be discussing the same thing – meaning. For Heidegger, his guiding question – the inquiry into what is Being – is not simply a question of pure existence, but one with purpose. Therefore, he finds that “Inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way” (25). In other words, for Heidegger, the question of Being is not only about objects, something Graham Harman makes clear (in his book, Tool-Being, which I have begun to read), but is ultimately a question of meaning - “the meaning of Being”. Objects are a priori to meaning, true. But what can be said of them besides, “they exist.” We cannot even say “they are there” without already insinuating that they occupy a particular space (meaning), mass (meaning), time (meaning) and perhaps purpose – for they exist “there” and not “here” - (meaning). But Heidegger's mistake, easily seen above, is that there is, with the object, an a priori meaning, as well. For him, meaning is in objects, waiting to be discovered, uncovered, undisclosed, made present-at-hand. Objects, therefore, contain something that requires investigation, something more than pure existence – a stance I don't necessarily share. For if an object had meaning a priori, this would mean two things: 1) that eventually we (or other, non-human beings) would become aware of, understand, or know this meaning, and 2) that every object has with it an other way of Being – rather than pure existence. I find both of these points to be erroneous.

Working from a study of rhetoric, Porter discusses the meaning of an utterance (a string of words, “phrases, clauses, sentences”, or a text, for “one does not ever simply encounter a noun” much like one never simply encounters a single object in a vacuum (11)) as a consequence. He states that under his philosophy of “meaning consequentialism,” one can only make “the assumption that the meaning of an utterance or text is the consequences that it propagates” (12). Or, to put this another way, when we discuss a meaning of an utterance we are merely discussing the consequences of that utterance. Every utterance, therefore, has multiple meanings, multiple consequences, both at times agreeing with each other and contradictory to each other. Consequences, as meanings, exist stretched out over time so that Meaning (with a capital M) is only a grouping of every consequence ever made over time, including this consequence. Or, as Porter states it:

We may think of the Meaning of an utterance as the total set of all of its actual consequences; but this Meaning cannot be conceptualized because (a) the total set of all actual consequences is inherently open-ended, (b) the Meaning of each consequence itself is open-ended, (c) the total set of all actual consequences does not form an amalgamated consequence that can be cognized, and (d) the very act of compiling a complete list of consequences for the expressed purpose of compiling a complete list would itself produce at least one more consequence of the targeted utterance, ad infinitum. (53-4)

Those of you familiar with set theory will automatically see Porter's configuration of Meaning as the paradox of "the set of all sets" – that a set of all sets would have to include itself, an impossibility for Russell and naïve set theory. Therefore, any Meaning of an object or utterance would be impossible to find, but more importantly, what Porter points to is that Meaning is always external - something outside of structure. The only thing internal to an object is pure existence – the is. Once an object's Being has more to say about it than that it is, the object becomes meaningful to something else, and therefore becomes consequential.

It is no surprise, then, that we find Porter stating early on that:

To my mind, the claim that a text is meaningful in itself (i.e., that it has an intrinsic or objective meaning) is akin to the claim that the sun intrinsically exerts a gravitational pull. An intrinsically meaningful utterance or text, if one existed, could not help but be meaningful in the same way that the sun cannot help but be gravitationally attractive. But meaning does not operate in this way, for utterances and texts clearly do not consistently produce a certain consequence or uniform set of consequences. (13)

For an intrinsic meaning, a meaning of Being that Heidegger so readily assumed existed a priori, would not say much other than “I exist”. Any other meaning that we might try to pull out of the object is a pulling external to the object – a pulling of the object and not from it.

In my view, then, the object exists. It might exist in a certain structure, with a certain way or state of Being, but ultimately all that the object states for itself, again and again, is that “I exist”. So, in what I've been attempting to show in previous posts is how an object restates its pure existence by allowing itself to be uncovered, un-disclosed, or encountered. When I discuss element (C) I am merely explaining that any encounter with an object (whether by a human object or a non-human object) is an encounter with this pure existence and an inquiry into meaning. The thing itself (A) is not a mysterious, complicated, unknown entity. It is, rather, the object's pure existence, its is. Yet, any encounter directly related to it, encounter (B), produces something external to the object – event (E), a consequence, or a meaning. And it is this meaning, this event (E) that becomes the thrust of the object. It is what we discuss when we discuss the object as something, for the object itself only is in its pure existence. Like Porter, I believe that meaning (or our event (E)) is propagated over time, stretched over encounters, encounters (B), that all attempt to understand the object outside of its pure existence.

A Few Notes on Element (C)

2009-03-09T19:28:00.000-05:00

1. Every encounter or event (B) must also contain an available element (C).

2. Element (C) always comes from the unknown realm.

3. Every element (C) must pass into the known realm by way of the thing itself (A) and in doing so becomes a carrier of the thing itself (A).

4. Every element (C) has the availability to be uncovered by another object in its encounter (B); however, if this availability becomes apparent – i.e., the element (C) presents itself – it is always and only by way of an accident or misunderstanding.

5. Not every element (C) of an encounter (B) is uncovered, so that, “If (C) then (B), but not if (B) then (C).” Any un-discovered element (C) remains available for later uncovering through a different encounter (B).

6. Element (C) exists regardless of its uncovering; however, once element (C) is uncovered it becomes part of the object – i.e., because of its passing through the thing itself (A), any element (C) that is uncovered is recognized as being part of the entire object. This is why it is important that the thing itself (A) requires all elements (C) to pass through it. And this is why we can say that for example iron’s availability to rust is both an availability of the iron-itself (A) and a previously unknown element (C). What this means is that once uncovered, the element (C) becomes an ontological necessity for the object as well as an epistemological characteristic. Because of element (C)’s bit of the thing itself, an uncovering of element (C) is also an uncovering of the object’s being – thus a part of ontology.

Encounters and Uncanny Elements

2009-03-06T14:33:00.000-06:00

In a recent (and strikingly poetic) post, Larval Subjects describes the wonder at finding a spot of mud that has been dried and cracked as a result of the heat of the sun. He remarks, “The idea, then, would be that substances reveal themselves, disclose themselves, in their interactions with one another. One substance draws something out from another substance, a new quality, a new arrangement, new properties.”

So, I want to discuss the second part of my object-cone by describing just this, the way objects reveal themselves. In a way, this is building upon our discussion of the thing itself, but more importantly we may now bring in a discussion on how objects interact with other objects, how subjects interact with objects, and how subjects interact with other subjects. Let’s first look at a new diagram:

As you can see, our original diagram has been left unchanged, but now we’ve added three new aspects, each of which will be discussed in what follows – they are, B (an event that relates directly to the thing itself or A), C (an element that passes from one realm to the other, in this case from the unknown realm to the known), and E (an event that does not relate to A).

When any thing interacts with any other thing we have a sort of meeting not just of substances but of entities with individual existences or being. As such these types of meetings are not simply a bumping of substances, nor are they merely a passing of information. Instead, when we encounter another object, as well as when other objects encounter us (and each other) there exists a type of exchange, much like a dialogue. By dialogue, I wish only to describe this type of meeting as a back and forth of availabilities. In other words, when I encounter say a rubber ball, I immediately encounter the ball’s texture, color, weight, circumference, etc. And, the ball encounters me in just as immediate of a way, through the pressure I exert on it, the oils in my skin, etc. Each encounter (B) is a sharing that takes place regardless of whether or not the other object is aware of it, much like Larval’s encounter with the dry mud. But, it is important to note that each encounter (B) always takes place in the realm of the known. We experience things (and things experience us) in certain ways, ways in which we can grasp understandingly. Therefore, I can know the color of the ball, it is familiar to me if I come upon it again, just like I can anticipate the weight of it since I have previously held it. The dialogue between objects, since it happens in the realm of the known, allows each object to perceive, apprehend, and even anticipate the other object.

Yet, with each encounter (B) there is also a slight encounter with an element from the unknown realm – element (C). In other words, each B is contains a C. But, what is this mysterious element? Well, the answer is quite simply, complex. It is a moment of un-canniness and contingency. Since the element (C) originates in the realm of the unknown and passes into the known realm, the only way it can do so is by way of the thing itself (A). By passing through (A), the element (C) takes on, or is changed by the thing itself in such a way that this change, this difference, is also experienced alongside the object in an encounter (B). However, this element (C) is never experienced outright, or by purpose. Instead it shows itself by accident, through a misunderstanding on the part of the object encountering it. So, for example, when Larval picks up the dry mud shapes and wishes to put them together as if they were puzzle pieces, he anticipates them being like other “solid” shapes he has encountered before – a simple misunderstanding – but when the mud shapes break, Larval instead encounters the element (C) of the unknown realm. In a sense, he realizes that the shape is something else – other – that it was hiding a part of itself (an unknown, unfamiliar, or uncanny) part that would never have shown itself if he hadn’t interacted with it. The mud is never there, present-at-hand or for-Larval, but instead is itself, simply unbeknownst to him. We, as other objects, encounter the mud always in the realm of the known. Mud behaves, then, as we expect it to behave until it does not. When the mud breaks, we get a glimpse at the possibility of the mud’s non-existence, or of its contingency and un-canniness. We understand that the mud could very well just as not be there (Un-Dasein) as well as be there (Dasein).

As for the last point on our diagram, (E) or the event that does not relate to A, all that needs to be said of it, at this point, is that this event takes into account the fact that there are other entities that play into the scenario of this object’s being or existence that do not directly come into contact with the object. An example of such an event could be seen as the writing of this post, which although a writing about the mud experienced by Larval Subjects, it has no direct encounter with the object in discussion - i.e. the mud. Event (E) as it exists in the diagram, then, is a concept of the object - in this case, my concept of the mud described by Larval Subjects. I can discuss the mud, describe the mud, and talk theoretically about the mud; however, since I had no direct encounter with the mud, these events never reach the point that (B) does - that is a point where element (C) appears.

Yet, I wish to make another point clear (a point that needs further clarification in another post) event (E) is an integral part to the object even though it may seem outside of the object proper, simply because of the aforementioned duty it holds – that it is through the event (E) that the object comes to exist as something other than material object. This is why, if drawn elsewhere event (E) should always be drawn as if it were just outside the known realm.

Hopefully, now that our object is completely drawn, we can begin to explore its eccentricities as they come into light.

The Thing Itself

2009-03-05T15:00:00.000-06:00

In his article, “The Thing Itself,” Giorgio Agamben contends that the thing itself found in Plato’s seventh letter is something outside of language but deeply reliant upon its existence in language – or in his terms, the thing itself is a “non-linguistic”. He argues that “the thing itself is not a thing – it is the very sayability, the very opening which is in question in language, which is language, and which in language we constantly presuppose and forget, perhaps because the thing itself is, in its intimacy, nothing more than forgetfulness and self-abandonment” (25). Or, to put it another way, the thing itself – the object of language but unsayable by language – is an opening, a gateway through which an object becomes both known and forgotten. For Agamben, language is weak in its discussion of the thing itself, that morsel of the object that is unknown to the speaking subject. For language consistently attempts to say that which cannot be said – but which, Agamben finds, can only be in language. Put another way, the thing itself is both of language and outside of language.

But what if we open up this idea a bit? What happens if we say that instead of language holding this primary position of what can be known or unknown, any interaction with an object is a signifying moment, a linguistic event, as it were? For surely we can argue that any encounter with an object shapes both subject and object – perhaps even to the point where the line between subject and object become blurred, where object in its interaction with subject becomes subject and vice versa. By doing this – by lessening the importance of subject over object, and object over subject – we begin to talk about a single entity - that entity which both subject and object share - the thing itself. And as Agamben pointed out, this thing itself is neither sayable nor unsayable, but is instead both of them – it is the possibility of being said, or sayability.

We can picture the thing itself as existing in the middle, between both what is known, sayable, or familiar and what is unknown, unsayable, or unfamiliar. However, this mid-point is also a crossroads of sorts, a place where the two spheres of the thing come together and exist in each other. So that initially, if seen in this way, an object exists in a light-cone-like shape with the thing itself at its middle, connecting the two realms – the known and the unknown:

Here we begin to see how the object or thing is split, between the realm of the known and unknown (more of which will be discussed in later posts), but how at the heart of it is the thing itself. Figured here, the thing itself can be both everything and nothing, since it is at times the place where the two realms collide but it also exists as the point from which both realms begin. Perhaps, in a later post, we might see how distinct the thing itself is from Alain Badiou's conception of the null set, or void.

It should be mentioned here that what we call the unknown, unfamiliar, or uncanny realm is only one part of our term, un-canny. For, if we are to accept the un-canny as containing both it and its opposite (both the canny and uncanny) we must not conflate the two terms. The uncanny realm as shown in the above diagram is not a mixture of both terms - but instead is the realm of that which we "un" know, that of which is "un" familiar and "un" canny. It can be said, then that the emphasis in this realm is placed on the "un", for this is simply one side of the overall object, just as the known, familiar, or canny realm is the other.

The thing itself, though, exists at the mid-point, consiting of both realms. So it is here that we can begin to see how the thing itself is truly un-canny. For it is here that the thing itself can be read as both known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, canny and uncanny. If we are to open up Agamben’s figuration of the thing itself as simply sayability – as possiblitiy, or perhaps contingency – then, it must also be un-canny.

Contingency and the Un-canny

2009-03-05T14:23:00.000-06:00

In After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Quentin Meillassoux argues against the predominant philosophical view of correlationism. For Meillassoux, the correlationist claims that there is no access to the in-itself of an object but only of the for-us. In other words, for the correlationist, we can understand the hammer as a hammer for-us (what it does, how it looks, its weight, height, and color, etc.) but we can never know the hammer in-itself, or what makes the hammer a hammer – i.e., its hammer-ness.

However, Meillassoux contends that in order to counter this perspective, we must demonstrate “that the capacity-to-be-other of everything is the absolute presupposed by the [correlationist] circle itself, then we will have succeeded in demonstrating that one cannot de-absolutize contingency without incurring the self-destruction of the circle – which is another way of saying that contingency will turn out to have been immunized against the operation whereby correlationism relativizes the in-itself to the for-us” (54-5). By this, Meillassoux is calling for a form of thinking that relies heavily upon the contingency of the object – put simply, whatever is could not be, and whatever is not could be. This type of contingency, which Meillassoux names facticity, is both thinkable (as in I can think about my own death) and unthinkable (but I am not dead, so I don’t know death). Contingency can thus be a way of talking about the known and unknown existing at the same time and in one thought. For, as Meillassoux points out, this contingency is the only absolute – the only thing not contingent.

Therefore, we can understand how close the two terms, contingent and un-canny come. For on the one hand the contingent is that which allows us to think a thing’s existence and non-existence at the same time. And on the other hand we have the un-canny as that which allows us to think the knowable and unknowable at the same time. Perhaps, then the difference is one of ontology and epistemology. For, now, given both, we can talk about the being of things as well as how we know things. Perhaps, now, with both terms we can ask the question that Heidegger asked, “What is a Thing?” but perhaps now, we can understand both what a thing is and how we know it as such - the thing itself.

The Uncanny: The Return of a Definition

2009-03-03T14:49:00.000-06:00

In Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, “Das Unheimliche,” he describes the un-canny (Unheimliche) as that which was to remain hidden but has come to light. For Freud, this definition allowed him to talk about the uneasy feeling one gets when a repressed memory (usually related to childhood) returns to the conscious mind. His interpretation of the un-canny, not surprisingly, revolves around a fear of castration. Instead of this definition, a definition that we shouldn’t entirely do away with or repress, we might fare better in our understanding of just how wide of a concept the un-canny is if we re-examine the un-canny as it relates to Being. And what better way to do just this than by bringing back a definition of the un-canny that has seemingly been repressed from our memories.

Initially, Freud finds that any discussion of the un-canny is at the same time a discussion of the canny. Or, as he puts it after examining a lengthy list of definitions, “What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word Heimlich [or canny] exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, Unheimlich. What is Heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich” (132 - Penguin Edition). As Freud finds, the two words have a unique relation, for anything canny seemingly comes to be un-canny, and anything defined as un-canny must originally have been canny. Therefore, in order not to make the same repressive move, we will use the term “un-canny”, with an emphasis on the “-” in order to remind ourselves of the word’s dual function. Un-canny is both “uncanny” and “canny”, as we have just defined it.

Roughly translated from the German word, Unheimliche means “unhomely,” or not belonging or familiar. It is often associated with something supernatural, or at odds with our reality. Moved into English, Unheimliche has no better translation than our word, un-canny. However, this English word is a misnomer of sorts. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of the word “canny” comes from a Scottish word, "can," meaning to know. But, as the OED points out, this usage is somewhat archaic, while other dictionaries list this usage as obsolete altogether. This means, then, that the un-canny would be defined as an un-knowing, or to un-know something. Which leads us to question not only how such an act of un-knowing is at all possible, but also (and more importantly), how can we keep this definition buried? The un-canny requires us to move things into the light, especially that which has been repressed, forgotten, or become strange to us. So we need to make sure that any understanding, discussion, or use of the word, un-canny, has with it a sense of both knowing and at the same time an un-knowing. And specifically “un”-known, for the un-canny is never a “not knowing” or a “never knowing”. Instead it is a movement away from knowing, a movement akin to forgetting but with less chance of remembrance.

The un-canny as will be used in later posts, then, is similar to how Derrida defined pharmakon - as being both itself and its opposite, being both familiar and unfamiliar. But, it should be noted that unlike the contradiction that Derrida found, the un-canny is not essentially a contradiction. True, it maintains itself around a contradiction in terms of its definition; however, the term itself - the un-canny - is noncontradictory. To be un-canny is simply to possess both a known and unknown, a familiarity and unfamiliarity. It is a word that, as we will see in later posts, best expresses contingency.