Those familiar with my work and who have expressed criticisms of object-oriented ontology will, no doubt, be amused by the following dream that I today suffered and see in it confirmation of just why object-oriented ontology’s posthumanism is potentially dangerous. Today, after a satisfying lunch and as I indulged in my afternoon meditation– er nap –I awoke from a lingering nightmare in which I was, in reality, a rock that was conscious of itself as being a rock. This mineral being that I was knew itself to be a mineral being and knew that it would sit in this place– now frozen by the winter weather, now baked by the summer sun, now covered by earth, now the victim of sculpture –for all eternity, aware that it was a rock and that it would never be anything but this still, motionless rock. Curled into a fetal ball, I awoke, terrified that my mind had somehow chosen to transform myself into a rock and that I would exist in this way for all subsequent time. As the tendrils of the nightmare gradually dissipated, I got up and slowly stumbled about the house, seeking out the eyes of another person so that they might see me and reassure me that I really am a person and not a rock and that I am not, in fact, condemned to be conscious for all eternity without being able to move in any way. And just like in Lacan’s parable, in this brief instant I felt as if the entire world had disintegrated and that I was a rock dreaming about a person stumbling about his house rather than a person recovering from temporarily being mineral in his essence. This is certainly one of the most terrifying dreams I’ve ever had and I’m rather disturbed that my mind could produce such a bizarre fabulation.
February 15, 2012
February 15, 2012 at 2:21 am
On reading the headline my guess was that the dream involved being lost in the groundless depths of an object — like being set adrift into hyperkinetic sub or super-space, pure effects and forces and operations and functions. I always love this dimension of Harmon’s work, how he forces us to focus on the affects of worldly things — at the very least, it sometimes forces the analyst “outside” (inside the depths of things) for a time, if perhaps sometimes too briefly… Anyway, this was wonderful; thanks for this.
February 15, 2012 at 3:02 am
This dream, ‘of course’, is the living proof that you are not a ‘rock’. And what what would be the ‘invariant’ organization of such a thing?
‘The hard material of the earth’s crust, exposed on the surface – any natural material consisting of one or more minerals.’
This is a good way of illustrating how non-empsyched beings do not have an intrinsically unbarterable element. One bit of a rock, or the rock can be exchanged for another with no change. Like electrons – all the same in their organization.
Not so for psyches….each one, both one, and not another (cadacualtic). Hecceity ‘standard uniqueness) does not get down to this. There is an ontic difference between rocks and persons (whether human or non-human). Posthumanism seems toignore this ontic difference – which Guattari recognized in Chaosmosis I think. And, of course, only persons can ‘hold their hand out to the future’…
February 15, 2012 at 3:07 am
I enjoyed it too. Was Lacan quoting Zhuangzi?
The horror, I think, is in becoming a rock rather than being a rock. A rock that had always been a rock (and supposing it were conscious, somehow) would not miss agency / volition. Perhaps it would experience its kinetic activities (bouncing off other rocks, being pulled towards other objects big enough to exert a gravitational pull, etc) as a form of intention.
February 15, 2012 at 6:18 am
The horror in becoming a motionless mineral object without agency includes the horror of loosing one’s agency/volition. The horror in ‘being’ a rock is different. Anyway the dream is equally powerful as Kafka’s novella Transformation. Although a stone and a cockroach are not equal in their ontology, the horror experienced by the consciousness is similar. The difference is you could shake your dream off and able to communicate with others.
February 15, 2012 at 6:47 am
When learning SmallTalk in the late 80s, I was so taken by the OOP/OOD paradigm that I fully immersed in the language. After a week or so in its world, I found myself trapped in a dream with my wife (who I had just recently married) attempting to uncover the public methods to engage her with but kept discovering nothing was published. Even after wakening, I kept finding myself trying to write the SmallTalk code necessary for interfacing with her. It took what seemed to her like five minutes to shake me out of it.
Remarkable paradigm.
February 15, 2012 at 6:57 am
Try DMT, that’ll help you excavate the artefacts of your subconscious very quickly.
February 15, 2012 at 8:29 am
“No light has ever seen the black universe. . . Black is entirely interior to itself and to man.” – François Laruelle
February 15, 2012 at 1:36 pm
young Carl Jung had the uncanny experience of not being able to tell if he was the boy sitting on the rock or the rock with the boy sitting on it, widens the range of doppelganger experiences a bit…
February 15, 2012 at 6:56 pm
http://www.coldbacon.com/pics/kliban/bkrock.gif
February 15, 2012 at 9:20 pm
I hear there’s a religion followed by some rocks which says they are not so much rocks as part of the earth.
February 15, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Would this be the fictional, but symptomatic, and hence real, backlash striking OOO, just as David Kepesh, the literary scholar in Philip Roths novel “The breast”, too deep entrenched in psychoanalysis (and identifications with his objects of desire) becomes the very object that fascinates him, a huge breast, rendering him totally incapable of acting according to his former rational wishes, other than through the sexual drives, pleasuring his nipple constantly.
What would be the capacities of a stone? how does a stone “express” itself, or actualize it’s potentialities?
Another problem might be what difference would it make if this scenario was viewed from the point of view of either relations or internal properties determining the being of this stone?
– maybe relations, in space and time, would not reduce this being to inert materia – aphanisis of the subject in the stone. No wonder to be “stoned” can produce paranoid affects…
February 16, 2012 at 2:44 am
I think a similar experience is narrated in P K Dick’s Three Stigmata.
February 16, 2012 at 1:08 pm
Dr Sinthome I think in this dream your overly conscientious superego was trying to restrain your ego’s narcissism, which made the ego uncomfortable as it doesn’t like feeling small and unsuccessful.
On another note, the one and only time I swallowed Dutch mushrooms in my life, which I don’t recommend to anyone with a remotely sensitive stomach, I hallucinated quite vividly and realistically that I was a pebble in the wall. But the feeling was not unpleasant; as a pebble I felt even more illustrious than I am in person.
February 16, 2012 at 6:47 pm
object-oriented ontology rocks!
February 17, 2012 at 3:29 am
[...] that do not exist at all or that are nowhere to be found in the physical world (such as my dream of being a rock or a universal), and 2) they are, as Kant would say, productions of the spontaneous power of mind [...]
March 8, 2012 at 10:24 pm
Earlier I dreamt i was paper. So I guess i have you there.
May 9, 2012 at 10:14 am
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