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

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.

In Response to a Response

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.