Over at Ecology Without Thought, Morton has a nice post up discussing his queering of objects. It appears that he’s especially indebted to Michael O’Rourke’s paper “Girls Welcome!!!” forthcoming in Speculations II, which I can’t recommend highly enough. In my view O’Rourke is both a highly sensitive reader, but also takes OOO in entirely new directions. Morton links to my post “Lacan’s Graphs of Sexuation and OOO” in relation to his trajectory of thought. This line of thought figures heavily in the final chapter of The Democracy of Objects.
For me one of the central targets of my onticology is what I’ve now come to call “phallosophy”. Within my framework, phallosophy (a portmanteau word combining “phallus” and “philosophy”) is an orientation of thought characterized by reterritorialization on a master-figure, but which is also premised on the ideal of full presence and representational realism. In his later work– especially Seminar 22, RSI, and Seminar 23, Sinthome –Lacan distinguished between “believing in your symptom” and “identifying with your symptom”. The former is belief in what Derrida would later call a “transcendental signified” or a final presence that would stitch everything together. In Burke we’d refer to this as a “God term”. The latter, by contrast is an identification with symptom as process, not unlike what takes place in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, where it is not a univocal meaning that’s important, but rather a process of production that is important. The phallosopher is someone who believes in their symptom, holding that parousia is possible in the form of a transcendental signified whether that transcendental signified is afforded by a certain version of God, the subject, communicative rationality, essences, or scientific truth. As I argue in my discussions of masculine and feminine sexuation vis a vis Lacan, it is not femininity that is masquerade as much of the psychoanalytic tradition has argued, but rather masculinity that is always and everywhere a masquerade (did we ever really doubt this? was it ever anything more than a refusal to dare saying it?). If masculinity is masquerade, fiction, illusion, then this is because it is a special form of posturing and chest thumping, where one presents oneself as being fully present, without castration, without withdrawal, and capable of mastery. Masculine sexuality, as we see in both the discourse of the master and university, is always a discourse of domestication. And domestication is always, everywhere, and only possible on the premise of presence that refuses withdrawal. This masquerade is the very essence of phallosophy. A non-phallosophical philosophy will necessarily be a philosophy that treats constitutive incompleteness and withdrawal as the very core of its thought.
read on!
Over at Ecology Without Thought, the ever dynamic, thoughtful, and brilliant Eileen Joy raises a number of interesting questions with respect to the concept of withdrawal. Joy writes:
But: if there is always an excess of “essence” not exhausted in manifestation, where is that “essence” located, positioning system-wise? I ask because my M.A. students and I, just last night, wrapped up our discussions of Harman’s always-withdrawing objects [by way of his essay "Aysmmetrical Causation," but also by way of "Prince of Networks" and "Circus Philosophicus."
So, in order to [maybe] not let this excess-ive “essence” simply hover as a kind of Absolute or to have no locatable “hiding place,” um … where might it be hiding (interior), hovering (exterior)?
It’s one thing to say something [whether a person, a species, a daffodil, an astral belt, whatever] is always “in excess” of what we can perceive, apprehend, touch, etc. It’s another to start thinking about the location, taxonomy, material makeup, etc. of such an excess. How can I be sure we’re not just reinventing animism [even your crossed out animism, which I love, btw], or soul? Haven’t you also said, in other contexts, that it’s “parts all the way down” … and “up”?
She then goes on to write:
I want to clarify, too, that I ask this question partly because, as I and my students were discussing Harman’s essay, “The Sleeping Zebra,” we were concerned to see if we could distinguish between Harman’s comments that any object [in this case, a sleeping zebra] always
“rises above its own pieces, generated by them but not reducible to them. And second, it is indifferent to the various negotiations into which it might enter with other objects, though some of these may affect it,”
and your cautions against holism in “The Ecological Thought.” You see, increasingly, and partly under the influence of reading *you* [TUI--"thinking under the influence"], I don’t know if any object retains any sort of “life” or “essence” apart from its relations with everything else. And I worry a little, too, that “essence” is being treated in some of our discourses as a kind of Latourian “black box” that we take too much for granted, regarding how it supposedly “works,” without peering inside as much as we, maybe, ought to. It might be an empty box. And that might even be okay.
Wonderful remarks. I wish I was in that class! For me, the concept of withdrawal entails two things. First, withdrawal entails the impossibility of domestication. Freud, and Lacan after him, liked to say that there is no repression without the return of the repressed. Repression is never without a remainder or residue. It is this that we call a symptom. Such is the teaching of the Mobius Strip. In my view, the first consequence of withdrawal is that there is always a residue. Put differently and in negative terms, the first consequence of withdrawal is that domestication is impossible. In a structural coupling between two entities, there is always something that escapes such that the entity drawn on by the other entity as a perturbation in its own process ever eludes its domestication and mastery by this entity. No system of signifiers, no system of control, no system of power, no system of mastery is ever adequate to the domestication of any entity. As Morton likes to remind us, every entity is a strange stranger, ever in excess of any and all of its presencings as sensuous objects. Domestication is always and necessarily a failure. Such is the lesson of Lacan’s Master-Discourse, which is also the basic structure of every structural coupling.
However, this is not all. This first form of withdrawal refers to the manner in which one entity relates to <em.another</em. as a strange stranger. It doesn't yet get to the withdrawal of entities in and of themselves regardless of whether any other entity strives to use them as fodder for their own operations. For me, the second split within entities revolves around their constitutive openness. It is not simply that no entity is ever exhausted when treated as fodder for the operations of another entity, but rather also that every entity is constitutively open to its future. Insofar as entities are both open and unfolding, they are irreducible to any of their local manifestations or actualizations. They always, as it were, have more to “say”. Every entity is a becoming that promises to become otherwise. This is why entities are not only strange strangers to other entities (as Levinas would have it), but are also strange strangers to themselves. Any state they happen to occupy or “be” is is only provisional, containing a residue and excess beyond any phallic or egoistic identification. The second mark of phallosophic thought would thereby be the reduction of entities to an identity or fixed series of qualities, refusing the manner in which every entity is always-already an open set where its qualities are concerned and the manner in which it is always-already ex-istent with respect to itself. The object is withdrawn because it is never present either for-itself or for-another. And it is never present for-itself or for-another because it is always and everywhere becoming. The object is a space-time worm. Here we encounter a withdrawal so abyssal that it moves beyond any epistemological limitation, inscribing itself in the very being of the object itself. It is for this reason that every entity deserves the name “strange stranger”.
And does this deserves the title of a queer ontology, in addition to the title of feminist ontology? On the one hand this ontology challenges the reign of all phallic signifiers that would situate themselves in the position of sovereign and kind by marking the space of that residue that escapes any phallic reference (the dismal philosophies of mastery that we so regularly witness at symposiums, so easily marked through their lack of humor and their claims to seriousness). Queer, however, is a strange term. Sometimes we have seen it set at odds with feminism, treating it as if it had a necessarily masculine reference, reinforcing the primacy of masculine logic. Yet queer, of course, recalls the strange– here we should think of Morton’s strange stranger –in much the same way that Lacan notes that Freud’s “un-canny”, Freud’s un-heimlich recalls that which undermines and subverts homeliness by being at the very heart of the homely. The queer marks the space of the masculine as masquerade qua masquerade, subverting this masquerade as it reveals it in the most serious yet parodic of fashions. And if this is the case, then it is because it reveals the sham that is masculinity or phallosophy by disclosing the stranger stranger at work in the heart of such masquerade, undermining the fiction that phallosophy enacts, and disclosing the relation that is a non-relation to the strange stranger. Such is the (non)-relational ethics, the posthuman ethics of difference, that onticology and dark ecology strive to think: an ethics where the “non” must be placed in parentheses precisely because it is oddly both a relation and the absence of relation, precisely because it is proximity and the impossibility of any proximity… Precisely because it is charade and seriousness.
March 15, 2011 at 11:41 pm
reminds me of why I am drawn to Lingis’ campy excess-iveness instead of grim tales of lack.
http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/lingis.html
March 16, 2011 at 1:10 pm
Wow. More soon, but for now: I’d like to think more about the directionality and geo-positioning, as it were, of withdrawing. I don’t know if I like the idea of withdrawing as a “going back IN” as if there were an “into” that were separate from how we are always already worlded and worlding. Also, I wonder if withdrawing isn’t also always dependent certain modes, not of hiding or escape (from capture) but of felicitous extensibility? It’s hard to type this on a mobile device, so … more soon!
March 16, 2011 at 5:57 pm
I am copying here, with some emendations, a longish comment I also left over at Ecology Without Nature on Timothy’s “Queer Objects” post:
So, I am sitting in my study on a beautiful sunny morning in Saint Louis and editing the sound-files from the “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods” conference that was hosted at George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute this past weekend [organized by Jeffrey Cohen and Jonathan Gil Harris], and at which conference Jane Bennett gave a keynote talk on “the powers of the hoard: notes toward a material agency,” and she mentioned a few things that relate to this discussion here and also over at Ecology Without Nature. First, it should be noted that Bennett described herself as a “humble word-worker” who seeks, not to “capture” things in her descriptions of the sensuous (yet resistant) emanations of things (which are always “otherwise” to representation), but rather to “tune” her own sense perceptions toward the “frequencies” of things, which Bennett believes are “vibrating” and even “calling.” This will also entail making new words, NOT to nail things down, but to render the self “more susceptible” to the “non-linguistic communicability” between vibrant materials. [Does this not sound an awful lot like the "feminine"/queer (non)-relational ethics you sketches out here and that Timothy gestures toward in The Ecological Thought?]
Now, more in relation to our discussions about “withdrawing,” Bennett also pointed out some of the obstacles to her “tuning” project–for example, that in most philosophical discourses on “thing-power,” many of the descriptors are “privative”:
1. the “complex intractibility” of living organisms [Stephen Jay Gould]
2. “incalculability” & “withdrawing from representation” but still “calling on us” [Heidegger with further, important elaborations within OOO circles]
3. “non-identity” and “non-coincidence” [Adorno]
She summed up the caution of the intractable incalculable non-identical withdrawing-ness of objects with this quote from Deleuze [from "Difference and Repetition"]:
“Here, as elsewhere, becoming conscious counts for little.”
[laughter ensued]
But why stop there, Bennett asked? Why not ignore Zarathustra’s dwarf sitting on our shoulders and wanting to pour lead in our ears, and hazard some speculative terms for the “expressive or calling capacity of bodies”? She then turned to Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and his project to name a strange, new “power” that he “vaguely discerned around him”:
“a productive power that did not operate by repressing or by refusal, blockage, and invalidation” [Bennett talking about Foucault].
So Bennett wants to extend Foucault’s method and keep her “eye” trained on the “productive power” of things and their “expressivity.” Yes, Bennett agrees, actants are, to a certain extent, intractable and incalculable [and always "withdrawing" ALTHOUGH Eileen would like to step into this parenthetical aside and ask if maybe we need a term, like Timothy's crossed-out animism, that would be "withdrawing" with a line also drawn through it?], but can we thicken our descriptions of them a bit more, nevertheless?
Of course, I think that is what Harman, Timothy, you, and many others are mightily engaged in at present, but I guess I am still wanting to put pressure on the idea & geo-temporal spatiality of the *movement* [and it is a movement] of withdrawing. I want to hold it in place and also draw a line through it. I want to also see if we can turn it inside-out [or reverse its direction or give it curvature] and say that the reason there is a “certain something” [residue, excresence, reserve, secret interior, essence, potenitality/future, open-ended becoming] to every object [including persons] that is never capturable in words, ideographs, morphologies, images, systems of description, “our” philosophy, etc., then maybe that is also an *extensible* something that is always, not withdrawn, but just always just ahead of us, or in a “somewhere else” that is not interior, but always radically exterior, while also always being “here” which is the place we’re all “in” all the time. Like sub-atomic particles that are always wrapped up together while being far apart.
Being more attuned to our radical implicate enfoldment while also taking [ethical] account of our different “calls” across and within this fold–always “inside” and “outside” simultaneously?
Obviously, maintaining a site of ultimate unknowability/impenetrability/recalcitrance allows for the safeguarding of the “open” as well as the “private,” allowing each thing “its own thing,” which might be a form of radical love to “let things be” while never really letting them be [alone]. But this safeguarding of the secret interior, or essence, when inflected in certain directions, also leads to ideas of the kinds of “precious” differences that, in my mind, lead directly to violence and war.
Well, those are my thoughts on this brilliant, beautiful day.
March 16, 2011 at 6:25 pm
I want to add here, too, that Bennett also argued that our notions of our “embodiment” are really insufficient–
“it’s not like we’re something that *gets* embodied; we are through and through an array of bodies, many different kinds of *nested* sets”
–so this goes again to the question of *what* it is, exactly, that might always be “withdrawing”; is this withdrawing always an embodied one? Is there anything else?
March 16, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Hi y’all, I continue the discussion by posting some of Eileen’s comments on mine as a separate post, along with some of Levi’s.
March 17, 2011 at 4:43 pm
[...] like this, “She models for me the spirit of a self (or self-object) who, cadging from a recent post by Levi Bryant, is constituitively open to the coming of every-thing” and I think to myself you arrogant [...]
March 17, 2011 at 6:55 pm
WOW. I’m speechless. Maybe appropriately so. Given how you weirdify the notion of “withdrawal” here I must say that I agree with you Levi. I think I come at it from a different (much less sophisticated) angle, but I always arive at the same conclusion: the simultaneous reality of relation and non-relation (wave/particle?) and closure (suchness) and openness (emptiness).
March 18, 2011 at 12:02 am
[...] front-paging this comment without further commentary as it so beautifully encapsulates so many issues. I’m particularly [...]
March 18, 2011 at 9:10 am
I’m going to try my hand at participating here. I’d like to begin with this passage of Levi’s: “every entity is always-already an open set where its qualities are concerned and the manner in which it is always-already ex-istent with respect to itself. The object is withdrawn because it is never present either for-itself or for-another. And it is never present for-itself or for-another because it is always and everywhere becoming.”
First, I am enthralled by the paths being pursued here. I sense a pairing of Lacan’s ex-timate core of the subject and Nietzsche’s ‘being is only being-in-becoming,’ where the very inaccessibility of that ‘inner’/'outer’ core is the ‘rivet’ of the becoming (in the dual sense: it anchors it and it agitates it).
I want to point out the difficult or ambiguous moments here. You write that it is “non”-relational insofar as there is relation and an absence of relation. Perhaps even relation qua non-relation. I can sympathize with that (and I think virtual networks such as this ‘manifest’ this kind of “non”-relating quite adequately). My question, however, is this: upon admitting that “I myself” am a “strange stranger” to myself; and that “you yourself” are a strange stranger to yourself and to me; can there be a rigorous line of demarcation between one ‘strange stranger’ and the other ‘strange stranger’? In other words: what is the role of friendship, dialog, or as Ricoeur would have put it, ‘solicitation’? In short, how do we still ask the question of self and other when both of these have become strange strangers to one another and to themselves? Is there a rigorous line of demarcation that can be ‘systematically’ drawn? And what are the ‘attracting factors’ that draw one strange stranger to another? These questions seem to compound in complexity the more I recognize the strangeness at hand and in heart. Literally: who is it that recognizes that I am a stranger to myself, in the process of becoming?
I’d like to connect this with question of language (or of signifiers): what is the relation between the moment of recognizing-strangeness and the moment of “writing”/”thinking”? Is it that the recognition is non-linguistic and thus requires a ‘translation’ into language (and therefore the infinite proliferation of this attempt to translate, “finishing infinitely”); or is rather a recognition for the sake of linguistic beings? To apply the proper weight to this phrase, “linguistic beings,” I feel compelled to contrast it with the ‘masquerading premise of presence’ that would presume to domesticate language itself as yet another object of its mastery: a “linguistic being” would be that being for whom giving rise to an expression (a possible world) and giving rise to ‘them(strange)selves’ would be precisely the same thing. (Thing? Or process? Obviously, the process of identifying with the system/symptom, but with whose system/symptom? That is to say, whose language?) In short, to express and to be would be one in the same thing; but the question of ‘who is’ would not be solved in the expression nor in the case of the being. Rather, “domestication (of language, of being) would always fail,” there would remain the “contingency of a local manifestation,” etc…
I’ve tried to highlight the parallels that I see between the expressive-process and the subjectivization-process to indicate their coterminality on the plane of immanence. I’ve also tried to suggest that friendship (and the basis of personhood it relies on, as if by default) might introduce an asymmetry between “me qua my-strange” and “you qua your-strange, as you are to me.” This wouldn’t reduce the ‘imperative’ openness of the relation; but it would reintroduce the dimension of ‘mastery’. Now, I have not read enough of your work to gauge this problematic adequately, but from the tone of this post, you advocate a non-phallosophy and therefore a non-mastery. Perhaps ‘mastery’ is too ‘sticky’ of a word. All I wish to point out is that my relationship to my-strangeness is singular, just as your relationship to your-strangeness is singular; more than that, I wish to point out that without your expression of your singular relation to your strangness, I could not fully know the nature of my own.
I’d like to thus risk a schematic for where relation and non-relation might apply: between me and my-stranger, between you and your-stranger, there is only riveting. But between you and me, there is a relation. This is because we as we express and identify in language and in gestures necessarily make objects of ourselves. But I’m willing to risk here that that strange stranger within me is my subject myself: it’s a ‘non-relation,’ ‘inaccessible,’ but it is the very thing that I am, before and beyond any domestication of language or being. Thus, mastery is reintroduced, but on the level of the impossible: on the properly Lacanian level where the objet petit a and the subject are structured the same way. Lost, sought (usurped); found, lost (usurped).
Let me interject with Ricoeur: “The self is structured by the desire for its own existence” (188, Oneself as Another). Owning myself is not what is important, but that doesn’t mean I don’t belong to myself. But before I belong to myself, before I can fully take responsibility for myself as myself(stranger), I must recognize that I first belong to ‘others.’ Not a constituted ‘others,’ not even a ‘given’ others. I must first recognize that I am situated in us speakers, speaking.
One question would therefore be: is this game of hide and seek linguistic or more than that? (I happen to think that there is no ‘more than that’ without describing the ‘more than that’, and so linguisticality swallows everything, but in a way that creates that everything in being swallowed (Lacan’s “Eat your being there!”)) The more important question, for me at least, is this: why does this game of hide and seek require others? Why could I not write this passage if I did not “know” whose hands it might fall into? Why is it that we cannot seem to express/identify ourselves unless we sense the existence of some other who will recognize our ‘struggle’ to express/identify ourselves, some other who (we sense) is engaged in a similar struggle? And not for the sake of their mastery or domestication of themselves or their language, but for the sake of their opening-it-up and opening-themselves-up? All of my questions have revolved round this knot: how is it that opening-myself-up seems to eo ipso generate the expressivity-of-the-open? It is my sense that this is because we recognize ourselves as expressions only insofar as we recognize ourselves as (shared, unsharable) expressions.
In short, perhaps we can retain the sense of/for mastery while retaining our constitutive openness. Perhaps there can be presence (or sense) without the attempt to domesticate it, having gone through the ‘ordeal of nothingness,’ so to speak, or having reached ‘subjective destitution’: and thus knowing that there can be no, nor could there ever have been, any presence that wasn’t eo ipso a shared presence (and thus lost, an absence: but dedicated). Perhaps there is ontology of non-all that says, yes, not-all of the entity is phallic, but some part is: it’s uncontrollable, it writes, it inseminates, but blindly, attempting to be what it can’t be for the sake of everyone (troubled, guilty, frightened, ashamed).
Perhaps withdrawal can be inscribed on what doesn’t withdrawal; and perhaps this is the truth of withdrawal as such, the truth of mastery in non-mastery, of knowledge in non-knowledge…
“Phrases chain themselves to one another with their feeble power… Thus, out of the circle of banal realities, entangled in each other, factories, ateliers, rooms, offices, laboratories, classrooms, with the limited functions that each such place implies for each person, the exit from human existence takes place necessarily in the order of becoming self-conscious.” (Bataille)
March 18, 2011 at 11:13 am
Redress one: I suppose I take it for granted that the recognition of strangeness at my core must be explicated, explained, described, expressed. Perhaps this is where the psychoanalytic approach differs from the Buddhist approach; namely, where the latter is content to sit absorbed in this knowledge, the former is charged with the duty of “not stopping with writing the sexual difference” (Lacan). Then again, what is the correlate between this “not stopping with writing” and the Bodhisattva vow (“I vow to remain among sentient being until are attain enlightenment,” i.e., “not stopping with Buddhahood”)? To phrase it otherwise, can we construe psychoanalysis as a wholly negative discourse, as it the case with Buddhism (where, yes, the Dharma is in all things, but it is in no one explanation or tenet of the dharma, so don’t get it twisted!)? Or is it that the psychoanalytic discourse is even more subversive, more negative than that of the Buddhist? The vow seems to reify the very conception of the self that it then seeks to undermine. Psychoanalysis doesn’t seem to require this initial assertion of individuality that is then dissolved; it seems to be able to begin with the subject as inaccessible to itself, a fundamental fantasy that is then traversed. It is my sense that ‘not stopping with writing’ is a more articulate means of the Bodhisattva vow; but this ‘not stopping with writing it’ started long before psychoanalysis proper began. It seems to have begun with the conception of friendly-love that must be the girders of any truthful writing. I’ve ran ahead of myself. All I meant to ask here was: which is more socially-oriented discourse, Buddhism or psychoanalysis? Which one is more urgently sharing the unsharable?
Redress two: I neglected to say anything about the question of ‘excess.’ But this excess was precisely what I had in mind when I alluded to ‘retaining a sense of/for mastery.’ It would remain without mastery precisely because it was a mastery that was in excess over me. The exact question to ask (whether ontologically or simply topologically) is where this excess is “located.” While this is certainly uncertain terrain, if I had to venture a hypothesis, it would be that ‘excess’ is located in that tight knot of as-yet-unrealized-potential and time.
Here, I would assert something similar to the idea that only in expressing oneself is there a ‘oneself’ to be expressed. This is similar also to Hegel’s notion that the Ideal doesn’t pre-exist the striving for the Ideal; nor is the Ideal some culminate goal; but rather, as Zizek writes, “in [one's] ethical effort, one realizes something (the Ideal) that is already realized in his repeated efforts to realize it”; “the Absolute is nothing but the movement of self-sublation of finite determinations”; “we fail to grasp the Absolute because we presuppose there is an Absolute to be grasped” (Ticklish Subject, 93-96). In terms of excess, there is no excess that exists outside our recognizing something-(more-)to-come, recognizing the possibility for excess. Thus, excess would be ‘located’ in the space-time of anticipation and expectation; and to tie a conviction or an ethics to this expectation is to see the excess through to the end. There is good reason not to give up on what’s excessive: excessive is the anonymous, excessive is that which has no ‘place’ in the established order of being. Excess-expectation is what we must determinately make a space for. I do not think we employ or virtualize/actualize excess for our sake.
Lastly, these two questions seem to be connected. What is the enigma of the Buddha’s body if not the enigma of excess? And likewise, what is the enigma of the Lacanian text if not the enigma of excess? I don’t think this means there is some prior kernel of meaning that is hidden, waiting to be discovered; rather, excess is precisely what one thinks one needs, thinking that the other has privileged access to it, when in fact it is through the enigma of non-relation to that other that one accesses “it,” i.e., accesses ones own inaccessibility qua the inaccessibility of the other’s inaccessible. It remains to be asked whether Buddhahood doesn’t amount to a recognition and acknowledgement, not of ‘no-self,’ but of ones-self-inaccessibility; a recognition that leads to the awareness that there is no ‘thing’ that’s inaccessible at all, that nothing is accessed wherever anything is accessed. This is what ‘dawns’ on the disciple; and it also seems to be a kind of machinic ‘not-stopping-with-writing’…
March 30, 2011 at 4:57 am
Recently I wrote a blog entry offering a leftist critique of the ideology of “Green” environmentalism, deep ecology, eco-feminism, and lifestyle politics in general (veganism, “dumpster diving,” “buying organic,” “locavorism,” etc.). I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter and any responses you might have to its criticisms.