The other day my friend Carl the Rhetorician completely stunned me by offhandedly presenting me with an entirely different concept of “commonplaces” or locus communis, far richer and more interesting than anything I had heard before. In my own case, I had always thought of the commonplace as a synonym for the cliche. Indeed, many of us who teach spend a good deal of our time fighting the commonplace in student papers. Apparently in traditional rhetorical theory, however, the concept of commonplace has a very different meaning. If I understood Carl correctly, commonplace does not refer to the cliche, but quite literally to a common place. And here, rather than writing the concept as a single word, we should write it as two words to underline its topological dimension.
When taken in this sense, the concept of common place would refer to sites where relations between heterogeneous actors can be forged. These sites, of course, can be of a literal spatial nature, or they can be of an incorporeal semiotic nature. With respect to the former, I’m reminded of my adventure with my daughter a couple weeks ago at the Taste of Dallas. The Taste of Dallas is a large festival where local restaurants present some of their signature dishes and where there is great live music all day long. Now ordinarily, I can be somewhat reserved in real life. Unlike my father who is the master of the random, warm conversation with strangers, I have a very difficult time striking up conversations with strangers. In fact, I tend to loath small talk because it makes me extremely anxious. However, for some reason, in this situation, I found myself talking to all sorts of strangers. Why was that? In part, I believe, it was because my daughter created a common place. Rather than being a strange and potentially dangerous man alone, I instead became a harmless and beleaguered father walking about with his highly energetic three year old daughter and was therefore capable of entering into wry conversation with strangers without posing a threat to the bubble of their security. A topological site was formed where network relations could be forged.
read on!
Other common places can be architectural in nature. The classroom, for example, is a common place. In the classroom a highly heterogeneous group of people are brought together in a single place for a somewhat common purpose. In many respects, the classroom functions almost like a software program. Because we’re all there to discuss and learn, resonance becomes possible among the students and with the professor, allowing for forms of discussion that would be largely impossible outside the classroom. The classroom provides a reason for discussion and engenders an exploration of ideas that it might otherwise be rude to discuss (e.g., the ultimate nature of the universe which might lead to a discussion of hypotheses that others might find rude, offensive, or threatening).
Events, also, can create common places. A year or so ago, after picking my daughter up from daycare, we returned home to discover that the power was out. This was quite a disaster, for my daughter, not quite being human yet by virtue of lacking speech, had, at the time, a ritual she had to follow in the afternoons, requiring the watching of Yo Gabba Gabba and Sesame Street and eating her afternoon snack. Howls of frustrated outrage followed. Very quickly we found ourselves outside, milling about with our other neighbors. Now in Texas I’ve found that neighbors seldom talk to one another or interact with one another. We tend to live very isolated existences unlike the neighborhoods that I grew up in as a child. However, suddenly we were all chatting with one another, speculating about why the power was out, wondering when it would come on, talking about the neighborhood, our children, school, our professions, etc. The event of the power failure had created a common place, allowing for the genesis of a collective.
Uniforms and costumes function in this way as well. The police officers uniform creates a common place that renders him approachable by other people out of the blue and which allows him to approach other people randomly. Likewise, the Halloween costume, for some reason, allows complete strangers to talk to one another. The woman can approach the handsome man at the supermarket wearing his uniform to ask a question in a way that she wouldn’t be capable of doing were he wearing plain clothes. Likewise, at the semiotic level certain topics like the weather form common places by providing a stock topic for discussion that allows heterogeneous people to bridge their separation from one another. “How about that heat!” “Oh I know, it’s ridiculous this year!”
In The Reality of the Mass Media Luhmann talks about how the mass media creates a common place. The mass media creates something like a shared lifeworld that allows extremely diverse people, coming from very different ethnic, geographical, occupational, religious, and economic backgrounds to perceive themselves as “the same”. Benedict Anderson analyzes this to great effect in Imagined Communities, showing how the rise of print media contributed to the formation of nationalist identities.
In my last post I observed that how to produce resonance is one of the key questions of political theory. Resonance, it will be recalled, refers to the capacity of one object to be perturbed by another. If resonance poses such a problem for political thought, then this is because objects are operationally closed. Objects draw their own distinction between themselves and their environment, such that they are only selectively open to their environment. I cannot, for example, sense the world through electric signatures like Amazonian electric eels are able to do. My cats are unable to sense the color red as I am able to do. Every object is only selectively open to the world.
One consequence of this is that objects cannot be steered or dominated from the outside. Objects are not black boxes that produce a reliable and predictable output based on a particular input. This is especially the case with complex autopoietic objects. Here I think we encounter one of the central problems with forms of theory such as we find in Foucault, where there seems to be a residual behaviorism and an over-optimism (or over-pessimism) about just how successful strategies of subjectivization can be. This is why the question of resonance is such a crucial question. The first question to ask is whether or not a particular object even exists in the environment of the system or object one wishes to perturb or influence. Insofar as much of what we know about the world, for example, we only know through the mass media, there are a number of things that don’t exist for average people because they don’t exist in the mass media. We simply don’t see or hear about them because they’re not reported. Returning to the WTO example I discussed yesterday, this was one of the major problems with these protests. The WTO protesters were a pretty informed bunch. Actions like breaking the windows of Starbucks and Gap did not strike the more peaceful protesters as particularly irrational (though it might of struck them as strategically irrational) because they were informed about the actions of these corporations elsewhere in the world and the working conditions of people in these other countries.
However, to the viewing public that watched these events unfold, the actions of these companies fell into the blind spot of their distinction. Unaware of what the WTO was/is up to, its effects on other countries, its effects on American workers, and of the labor practices of these companies, the viewing public could only interpret these protests and the actions of some of the protesters in terms of their own distinctions. “Why are these people so angry?” the public might have speculated. “They must be anti-consummerist, communist, wacko, dirty hippie, kids! Those kids will think differently when they have kids to support!” The things that motivated the protesters were invisible to much of the viewing audience. This, in turn, allowed the WTO and corporations to use the protesters to their advantage, further strengthening their iron grip, rendering changes in labor, economic, and environmental policy more difficult.
It is for this reason that questions of how to produce resonance is so crucial to political activism. The question of how to produce resonance is, in its turn, the question of how to produce or generate common places. Here, however, it is necessary to remember that because objects are withdrawn or operationally closed, it is impossible for one object to steer another. The formation of a common place does not steer or control other systems, but creates a space in which one object takes on the capacity to perturb another. In other words, common places are sites where structural coupling among distinct objects takes place. Structural coupling refers to a repetitive relation where one system or object begins to draw on another for perturbation. This relation is depicted in Maturana and Varela’s diagram to the left, and is what Morton refers to as interdependence.
The important point is that these structural couplings, rendered possible through the formation of common places, will nonetheless unfold in such a way that each object involved will continue to translate the world in terms of its own distinctions. As a result of structural coupling, objects will indeed evolve or develop but where that development will is anyone’s guess. It is a creative process. Moreover, the structural coupling rendered possible through the formation of common places can take a variety of forms. It can, for example, be unilateral or bilateral. In the case of the mass media, structural coupling and resonance was largely a unilateral affair. The media disseminated and we consumed. Consequently, the media could perturb the public, but the public had very little ability to perturb the media. Even letters to the editor are selected by the editors in such a way as to be representative of a pre-existent narrative and set of distinctions. In the late 90s this began to change with the formation of the internet that eventually led to the formation of citizen media that could begin contesting corporate media and playing a role in what stories are reported. Indeed, today shows like Countdown with Kieth Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow shows are largely summaries of stories reported on democratic blogs. Media has increasingly become bilateral in its structural coupling. As a consequence, what we get are the formation of new common places that also allows for the formation of new collectives.
Larval Subjects . 
July 31, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Interesting. . . You offer a fresh perspective on the ancient locus communis (Gk. tópos koinós) principle. When you mentioned Taste of Dallas, I expected you to say that being among other people who think a lot about food and cooking, you could easily strike up conversations–the common place being food. But thinking of your daughter as a common place is perhaps even more interesting. Pardon the comparison, but pet dogs can work the same way. People walking dogs, especially exotic and/or large dogs, are often stopped and engaged by strangers. And the public spaces where such encounter occur are, of course, common places. So we have common places within common places. We can also think of a common place as a common problem. Here your power outage example applies. People must have common problems in order to engage socially. For a husband and wife, how to raise their child constitutes a common problem. Problems are necessary in this sense.
August 1, 2010 at 1:06 am
Very interesting. This implies that the linguistic topic or common place is an object (perhaps not a sensual one but a real one). It doesn’t matter who is saying it or who is the addressee. It has its own life, as a resonator. This hugely amplifies the idea of “meme”–something I find quite suggestive in any case. Memes do what ideologemes do only you don’t have to be an Althusserian to think them. Humans become meme vectors.
August 1, 2010 at 5:14 am
I’ve experienced exactly what Carl describes with dogs. I do a lot of walking (not really having access to a car) and when I walk alone I can’t even bring myself to mutter a full word to someone else. But walking with my dog I can talk to everyone. I’ve actually thought a lot about this since it happens so often. There is even a group of people that I meet with every day to let our dogs run off leash in a local park. All of these people were complete strangers to me, but whenever two dog walkers passed one would tell the other about the meetings. Entirely new social relations have been created. These social relations have proven very fertile to me as I can have interesting conversations with people I normally wouldn’t have an excuse to talk to and number of interesting ideas have resulted.
It seems similar to me to sociological studies done on smoking. I can’t find the study right now, but the idea was that smoking allows ad hoc groups of workers at a business to meet at the same place. If smoking isn’t allowed in the building, all of the smokers have to meet outside the door (15 feet away is the law) and here a vice president might be able to speak with an underling, but not in their normal business roles. Smoking allows for the exchange of ideas that wouldn’t happen in the normal business hierarchy. People could step out of their usual roles and share ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be shared, and this was great for innovating. This particular sociology study argued that smoking meetings like this were an important part of how business gets done, how innovations come about, and worried that as more people quit smoking, this will force everyone back into the hierarchy and such exchanges will be less frequent. I think they even ended the study with an estimate as to how these dwindling smokers meetings will effect the GDP.
What I find interesting is that you have placed the emphasis on to the common site, whereas I’ve been thinking more about the individuals in terms of role theory in sociology. Your daughter casts you in a role that allows you to speak to strangers, the masquerade or the uniform or my dog does the same. So I guess my question would be how the role is linked to the common place? In a way roles are common places themselves. A police officer is not just a role with a set of expected (or feared) behaviors but a site in itself. Or maybe the way to think of it is more simple dramaturgical terms that every role carries with it a specific stage and that every stage forces the people who occupy it towards certain roles.
August 1, 2010 at 2:05 pm
Hey Levi,
I’m thinking here, too, of common ground. That is, an argument can’t exist if the two or more parties either disagree completely where you get simple contradiction (yes she did/no she didn’t) or if the parties completely agree on all fronts. Instead, as I understand the theory, some sort of common ground between the sides or objects involved needs to be there in order for the two to perturb each other in a way that is productive or conducive to argument.
Yet, I’m also wondering in what way does this notion fit with the idea of the enthymeme (an object of rhetoric) which is commonly charged with either:
a) leaving out the already agreed upon premise of a typical syllogistic argument,
or
b) via Bitzer, an argument, co-constructed by the rhetor and the audience, in which the common place is both assumed by the rhetor and accepted by the audience.
August 1, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Levi,
Some good examples here, I remember Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling making some similar points to those of the commonplace in their Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity, although they were drawing on the work of Georg Simmel and give their phenomenon the name of sensual solidarities. Some of the examples they give are of ‘two parents struggling with their babies in a shopping mall, the buying of rounds between friends in a bar, and the sharing of laughter’. They go on to add that, ‘it is these events which may appear to display an “empty nature”, but which can also possess a transcendent character’ (1997: 175).
August 1, 2010 at 3:17 pm
I think David Bohm would say that the common ground is that both parties are involved in thought (even if they completely disagree in “content”), that thought acts on matter (nerves, chemical reactions, etc.) and is therefore a material process. That’s really all the common ground you need; if we’re thinking together we’re already united, in process. That’s a pretty close relation when you think about it.
I’m clinging to this idea right now, because rhetoric’s limitations are too glaringly apparent to me. This idea that we could foster in ourselves and then also help others in the collectives to cultivate the ability to engage in second-order thought via proprioception, applied to thought (the body already does it reflexively), is the beak of the finch.
August 1, 2010 at 3:48 pm
I want to think of common places pretty strictly as loci that relate agents together such that they come to appear in the environment of one another. In this regard, I think care must be taken not to confuse the common place or loci with a shared belief, purpose, or value. For example, the Eastern Front was a common place in WWI, yet it certainly did not revolve around any sort of shared belief, consensus, or agreement. Rather, it was a site where autopoiesis took place in a highly antagonistic manner. A blog is also a common place in that it draws agents together in a shared space. However, there’s often a great degree of conflict in the comment sections of blogs. Here I think Carl’s formulation comes closest to what I’m trying to think about. The common place would be something like a problematic field. It seems to me that common places are very different than enthymemes. Enthymemes are premises in an argument— albeit unspoken –whereas the common place as I’m trying to think about it is prior to any sort of argument, demonstration, position, or consensus. Prior to any agents attempting to persuade or demonstrate, common places would be sites or loci where agents are drawn together in a network.
August 1, 2010 at 4:31 pm
I’m not sure I completely agree with your formulation of the enthymeme as premise since Aristotle calls it the body of rhetoric, but that’s neither here nor there. Instead, my point was that for Lloyd Bitzer, there seems to be sense in which the common place of an enthymeme is specifically co-constructed. So that neither one object or the other(s) do all the work.
August 1, 2010 at 6:26 pm
I associate enthymemes with content-based, semiotic, or propositional components in language. At least, that’s how they’re taught in logic where students are trained to identify unspoken premises in arguments. The idea of a common place that I’m proposing doesn’t place emphasis on co-construction, but sites that link or draw actants together that were previously unrelated. And again, the antagonistic examples I gave are, I believe, extremely important for understanding what’s being proposed. At any rate, the sort of OOR that interests me is one that de-emphasizes a focus on the content and style of propositions or utterances, language, the semiotic, and so on. The point isn’t that these things are unimportant or unreal, but that cultural theory has focused almost exclusively on these things and has consequently generated a host of bad habits in its thinking that render other types of actors invisible. Scott Barnett, I think, makes this point very nicely. It’s a question of what your distinctions encourage you to indicate. I think this is why I’m resistant to treating enthymemes as equivalent to locus communis. Enthymemes are almost exclusively semiotic entities, even if only negatively. The term “common place” has certain connotative resonances that draws attention to elements outside of language, signs, propositions, style and so on: namely, the reference to place or locus which is crucial. In my view, a good deal of what OOO and OOR are up to revolves around untraining certain styles of thinking and ways of employing distinctions. Terms are chosen carefully to encourage such untraining. For example, I refer to local manifestations rather than “qualities” precisely to defamiliarize certain patterns of thought which, in its turn, (hopefully) allows questions to be posed differently (qualities as acts or actions, etc). Common place is preferable to common ground because it draws attention to topological spaces and points of connection in a network. Both are far more preferable, I believe, to references to enthymemes which tends to pull thought back in linguistic orbit which is the cardinal sin of contemporary cultural theory.
August 1, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Another way of putting this is to say that one thing OOO aims at in the cultural theory domain are the invisible infrastructures of nonhuman objects that bring humans together in a variety of ways. Rather than the obsessive focus on content (which OOO doesn’t reject, it just de-emphasizes it) OOO would be more interested in the fact that our exchange here is made possible the existence of computers, electricity, blog platforms, power plants, fiber optic cables, etc. It would ask both how these things bring people together in particular ways, how they inform what it is possible to think and say, what sorts of social formations they tend to generate, etc. OOO takes this emphasis when wearing its cultural theory hat because it’s pretty convinced that the role the semiotic plays in generating humans relations has been vastly over-inflated and that humanities tends to ignore the role played by all these nonhuman actors that play a much larger role than cultural theorists tend to suspect. Whether or not your primary mode of agriculture consists in rice produce plays a far larger role in why human groups are organized in a particular way than discourse, signs, ideologies, or speech.
This makes me think of the difference between our respective approaches to the show Life After People. You and Tim wanted to talk about the fantasy gaze of the show and its narrative structure. I didn’t deny the existence of any of this, but saw it as yet more cliched and worn out cultural analysis focusing on content and the semiotic. In my view, what makes the show interesting is not this narrative structure, but the manner in which it discloses all of these whizzing machines and mechanisms that sustain life and social existence as we know it. In other words, Life after People is not about life after people at all, but is rather about our existence and what renders our forms of life possible (power plants, chemical plants, highways, etc., etc., etc.). What’s interesting is that these things are invisible in our day to day life… So much so that we can take them for granted and wonder why Afghans live is they do, forgetting that Afghans live in the midst of entirely different infrastructures that contribute to the formation of very different social relations. I read you talking a lot about objects in the abstract, but I don’t ever really see you concretely analyzing or discussing nonhuman objects and the role they play in collectives. When you do you raise questions like whether or not humans are zombies, which is a characterization thoroughly opposed to OOO’s characterization of objects as OOO readily recognizes that there are different types of objects, that they have different powers and capacities, and that humans, as objects, have unique characteristics. What I never see you do is analyze what difference power lines make to how humans relate, or even just what difference power lines make regardless of whether or not humans exist. Your discussions of these matters seem to be very content-centric or semio-centric.
August 1, 2010 at 9:12 pm
One thing that occurs to me off the top of my head is the fifth part of Aristotelian rhetoric, “delivery.” Aristotle takes it to mean the disposition of one’s body and voice. In an expanded definition delivery could include physical location, material media of transmission such as electromagnetic waves, Earth’s gravitational field (which keeps this computer on the desk), software and so on.
I read that Demosthenes used to practice his speeches on the seashore with a mouth full of pebbles. So in a sense the ocean ended up in his rhetoric…
August 1, 2010 at 9:14 pm
The relevant passage of the Rhetoric is found at
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.3.iii.html
August 2, 2010 at 6:40 am
This re-inscribing of infrastructure into our philosophy is part of what really fascinated me about OOO in the beginning. It’s a difficult task, finally impossible, but I think it is a task which is demanded by object-orientation. To help expand my thoughts, I took, as a starting point, something which has been with me since I was a child: the novel Jaws, by Peter Benchley, which I’ve always loved (I love the movie, too, but the novel is a bit richer). At first I thought of David Harvey’s discernment of the dimensions at work in Marx’s Capital: nature, technology, modes of production, social relations, reproduction of daily life and mental conceptions of the world (the semiotic). Applying these (admittedly tentative and open) categories to Jaws seemed like a way for me to break out of my own worldview: looking at the shark as a kind of semiotic construction, or, conversely, as that which might resist semiosis, like a puncture in the hermeneutical horizon (I’m aware that the novel is technically a construction, but using this as an example the way Zizek might). So what are the various dimensions of the universe of the novel if we use Harvey’s schema? For good measure I added in the three-legged bar stool of Gould and Darwin (which I interpret liberally): agency, efficacy and scope, which might help us to see how good our ontological theory is. What agents does our theory allow us to identify, what is the scope of our theory’s explanatory power (here, philosophically, its ability to find general, overarching structures of reality) and, perhaps the most difficult, what is the efficacy of our theory in identifying and mapping these dimensions of agencies, their weak points, and ultimately their ability to effect change in the overall structure.
My opinion is that we see all of this working very vividly in Jaws. First, we do have all sorts of hermeneutical and semiotic elements at work: ichthyology, oceanography, cartography (the maps used by Quint and Hooper), novels, books, newspaper articles, music, real estate boundaries, the writing on the “beach closed” signs. But, equally present in the novel in terms of agency is nature (broadly conceived): weather patterns, conditions, temperature and climate of the Northeastern United States and the greater Atlantic, the Atlantic itself, water pressure, schools of fish and water birds, feeding frenzies, the beach itself (as the edge of the locus communis of the sinewy shark and the pink, fleshy humans — though their autopoietic systems do not necessarily really “meet” there — it is only a very bloody perturbation at first), and finally the great fish itself. The dominate mode of production in the universe of Jaws is capitalist, and it is interestingly enough the system and world of real estate and tourism which is deeply perturbed in the novel by the irritating presence of the shark. Yes, a young girl and boy are viciously eaten in the first few chapters, and this is surely its own story, while the novel focuses on the greater system of financial stability — Amity depends on the estival tourism for its financial life, and the shark’s activity — an autopoietic system, an object — interrupts and eventually stalls this financial system with its elements of surplus-value derived from sales of cottages and beach homes and the glut of tourist spending from June to the fourth of July. Mayor Vaughn, caught as he is in many systems, often speaks for this financial object itself, which can only see the shark in terms of the interruption of capital investment and re-investment. Though the police chief Brody is a thoughtful and decent guy, he is simply immobilized and rendered feckless by the system of real estate and capital and its representatives — at first he is unable to anything to stop the beaches from remaining open to the public. The shark eventually causes such a panic that the town is deserted, and it is the economic system itself which is then forced to deal with the shark on its own terms, at which point Brody is allowed to hire a man to destroy the fish. Eventually the fish perturbs the systems enough that its own life is endangered, and a battle of life and death ensues. But we certainly see that the financial system-environment was very closed — information was not produced in that system till people stopped spending and the circulation of capital dried up. (We could also look at it from the perspective of the shark and its system-environment perturbing the system-environment of Hooper’s ichthyology — they are obviously not identical. The shark’s behavior and patterns are not really predictable, and Hooper, as well us the reader, remain in the dark as to the mysterious causal factors which brought the shark to Amity. Many other objects could be identified as well, for instance, the array of technologies in Jaws, from the Orca to compasses, rods and reels, etc, etc.) At this point, I’m a long way from my hermeneutical reading in which the shark is a hole for discourse, in which basically one agency — human language — is the sole domain of perspective and efficacy. That is retained, but whole other dimensions at work are revealed, and many others still remain half-submerged and only barely alluded to.
I’ve thought and written far too much on this already, but we can see that, and this might just be preaching to the choir here, that reality is really as rich (richer still, of course) as the apparatus one brings to interpret it. A small thing, but I think I’m able to see objects and systems at work in the world (no less a novel) that I just didn’t care to see before. Not sure what this response does, but I just wanted to agree as to the untapped value of infrastructural analysis (not even sure my thought above qualifies!).
August 2, 2010 at 4:36 pm
[…] a resonator is an entity that promotes or enables resonance among entities. I have recently discussed resonators in terms of tópos koinós or common places that are sites that bring entities together in a […]
August 3, 2010 at 10:02 pm
You wrote:
“For example, the Eastern Front was a common place in WWI, yet it certainly did not revolve around any sort of shared belief, consensus, or agreement.”
But didn’t the two side agree to fight there? If one side was retreating that would be a different situation, but if they say “Okay, this where we’ll stand and fight,” it seems like a common place to me. They also agree to shoot at each other, rather than, say, one side playing chess and the other side shooting.
August 3, 2010 at 10:19 pm
Carl,
I suppose that’s true. What I want to emphasize, however, is that a common place is where communication begins to take place, regardless of whether or not it leads to consensus or a shared identification. For me, it’s the linkage that’s important. Hence I’m trying to minimize talk of agreement and consensus.
August 18, 2010 at 2:11 pm
[…] with a very low degree of intensity. The internet, and blogosphere in particular, created a common place that allowed these strange entities of SR and OOO to become a little more real, a little more […]