Ontological blindness?

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

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

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?

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

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

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!?!

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)

:)