A long while back someone asked me– I think it was Jacob Russell –what relationship Speculative Realism has to realism in literature. At the time the question didn’t really register, nor strike me as particularly significant because I didn’t take the ontological position of realism as having much, if anything, to say about literary or artistic movements. In short, I don’t see as ontology– at least good ontology –as legislating what art should be. However, in coming across the little passage from Latour where he remarks that the entire tired problem of correspondence arises from a confusion between epistemology and the history of art (Pandora’s Hope, 78 -9), I find that this question suddenly resonates in an entirely different way.
Perhaps, I reflect to myself, when people hear the word “realism” the first thing that comes to their mind is the epistemological position where mind is portrayed as a mirror like essence that depicts a world identical to how it is and that is characterized by a verisimilitude between representation and represented. This would account for common charges of “naive positivism” one so often hears leveled at the speculative realists. However, this is an odd sort of conclusion to reach when encountering the actual writings of speculative realists. In the case of my onticology, the ontic principle asserts that there is no difference that does not make a difference. As a consequence of this principle it follows that no difference can ever be smoothly transported from one object to another without accompanying transformations as the receiving object will always contribute its own differences. Epistemologically onticology turns out to be very similar to various anti-realisms, with the caveat that it refuses to privilege the human-world relation and that it generalizes this phenomenon of translation to relations among all objects, not just humans and objects. Harman’s position is similar. What could be further from this classical sort of realism than vacuum packed objects that never directly touch one another and where objects translate one another whenever they interact? Similarly, Brassier perpetually emphasizes how radically the real differs from the world as we perceive it, underlining how different the world of neurology and quantum mechanics is from our folk metaphysical world. Likewise, DeLanda’s world is a world composed of vectors and attractors, where objects are but accretions or products of processes that cannot be directly represented. How could anyone who has actually read the writings of myself or these other thinkers conclude that there is anything even vaguely resembling the glassy essence hypothesis of naive realisms?
read on!
If we are looking for literary equivalents of Object-Oriented Ontology or Onticology, we would do better to look at the realisms of Italo Calvino in Cosmicomics and T Zero, or, better yet, the strange world depicted Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. In The Age of Wire and String Ben Marcus depicts a fantastic reality that is paradoxically more real than any sort of realism we might find in Mark Twain. Here we have a world of imbricated relations between human and nonhuman actors where we can no longer claim that humans are at the center of things, or even where the human begins and ends. In short, what we get is a network of heterogeneous actors forming a collectivity. In the opening “story”– is it a story? is it an entry in a technical manual? is it a definition or a “how-to” guide? –of The Age of Wire and String, we are told about “intercourse with a resuscitated wife”:
Intercourse with a resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an impoverished friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new. (7)
Upon reading this bit of extraordinary poetry our first reaction might be to chuck with a bit of shame and conclude that this is a very sexist double entendre that basically says the housework won’t get done unless you fuck your wife. And indeed, there is a bit of this here. Yet there is much more going on throughout Marcus’ strange book besides. What we find in this short passage is a “flickering”, to put it in Graham Harman’s terms, between the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand, where the latter is brought forward into the light much to our discomfort. Among Harman’s key claims is that all objects withdraw and disappear from one another in interacting with one another.
When I use the hammer, the hammer itself withdraws into the depths, becoming invisible, reduced to its execution in fastening boards. For Graham this is true of all objects and not unique to the Dasein-object relation. In interacting with one another the other object is always veiled by the first. While I do not share Harman’s way of thematizing these relations, his portrayal of exo-relations among objects nonetheless helps to capture the strange world of Ben Marcus. What Marcus reveals in these passages– whether he knows it or not –is a strange world of assemblages or inter-ontic relations among actors, where no actor holds sway over the others. In this world composed of wire and string– network relations –all sorts of actors are mobilized in relations of veiling and unveiling, withdrawing and appearing, as they flicker in relation to one another.
If the vacuum cleaner slips by without being pushed by anyone, then this is because the resuscitated wife disappears in being resuscitated, reduced to her node in a network that allows energy to flow, toast to fly out on the floor, and all the rest. In certain respects, the world of Ben Marcus resembles the terrifying thermodynamic universe of Reza Negarestani, where wife refers not to a person or a partner, but is rather a generic name for flows of energy (the “energy forms” of Marcus’ little encyclopedia entry) that flow through systems, animating them and bringing about monstrous growths. The animation of the entire network in Marcus’ universe requires these flows of energy that always disappear in executing themselves, such that sockets begin to distribute their power, toasters shoot forth toast, and vacuum cleaners flit by of their own accord. What we get in this realist literature is a strange subterranean and withdrawn world of networked relations and their flows of energy where we cannot discern what is acting and being acted. Such is a realist art and literature.
Larval Subjects . 
July 13, 2009 at 7:40 am
I really love “Age of Wire and String”, it was funny to see this on LS. Another thing very speculative realist about it might be the way it’s thoroughly de-humanized, how the human proper names become assemblages operating according to some intricate diagram. It’s not a behaviourist decription, it just levels the human actors and treats them on the same plane and in conjunction with wire, string, wind, sticks, etc…
July 13, 2009 at 2:00 pm
This reminds me of Giacometti’s “The Palace at 4 a.m.” tho he gives a very human-centric reading of it.
http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80928
July 13, 2009 at 5:31 pm
This could serve as a useful guide to reading John Ashbery, or Ron Silliman, or… so many poets from the early Objectivists to the post-avants… even Flarf! While we seem to live in the perceived world, we know there so much more to it… how can we justify writing stories as though that knowledge hasn’t changed our intercourse with reality?
July 13, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Levi, as you know, Ben Marcus’ work has preoccupied my own literary research interests for years. I have grappled to understand what resonates for me so intensely in his writing. I find there’s something honest in the attempt to situate narrative voice on the same level as the objects it describes and expose the ways in which the networks of any literary text do this. The Age of Wire and String unfolds self-reflexively within the fabric of the work haunting philosophical questions about what a strange animal literary creation actually is.
What I find most appealing here is your attempt to categorize his work as a sort of literary example of speculative realism: Truly, all literary production is a hybrid of object and network in itself. If one applies your central thesis of onticology, “There is no difference that does not make a difference.” (Setting aside my constant urge to poke at and tease out the compelling double-negative at the core of your philosophical construction for the moment–grin), the literary production, Baudrillard’s “book-object”, is an object in circulation in social and cultural networks–it’s very physical presence like a stone in a river, able to change the nature of those networks. Yet also, as Barthes argued, it is a holographic textual network in itself, intertextually linked beyond its own boundaries and physical covers.
When I shift from analyzing fiction to writing fiction, I’m always struck by how the fundamental building block of any literary creation–metaphor–is in its simplest description the use of objects to convey some nebulous and fleeting experience of human consciousness. What is it about the well-turned metaphor that at once feels so familiar, yet is in actuality so alien when its mechanics are further unpacked? Here we have a description of a mute object, separate from both the consciousness of the writer and the reader, the sender and the receiver, and yet it comes alive, frankensteined to life by the writer to make an idiosyncratic experience somehow a shared and recognizable experience. (Not unlike Marcus’ vacuum cleaner orgasmically revving to life.) I often find myself battling a sort of autistic feeling when I write fiction, overwhelmed by the “thingness of things,” especially words on the page. It always amazes how any communication takes place at all via metaphor. We see this in the Marcus quote, where household appliances can somehow express the failure of being at once a societal placeholder and an individual; in this case, the fundamental failure of any individual to fully and successfully inhabit the concept, “wife”.
I find that William Burroughs’ cut-ups and Kathy Acker’s prose, or even Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, all underscore similar questions as Marcus: What are all these strange textual objects, these chunks of other texts, that somehow network themselves into the fleeting and contrived wholeness of “a literary work”? How do they form any sort of meaning? Also, what is this strange chimera, the literary narrator? Acker’s prose in particular delights in parasitically inhabiting the uber-texts of patriarchal culture and deconstructing, in a Derridean sense, the singularities and lacunae in culturally familiar texts, as well as received assumptions surrounding the false normativity of psychological narration. Similar to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons or the OuLiPo poets’ mathematical functions as generators of literary text, these are all works that manage to take cold formulaic structures and render them alive to the reader, at times poignantly so.
Also, just to note briefly, one of the earliest instances of Wire and String was a short piece Marcus published in an 1990s lit anthology called After Yesterday’s Crash. It was a sort of encyclopedia of objects that would later inhabit the longer work. I’ve also noted the similarities to Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading, and find myself wondering again why this textual form is of such renewed creative interest. I come back to the overwhelming amount of information infused in the writing technologies of our moment. Perhaps, as Walter Ong notes, we can clearly see the edges and shapes created by the way we were constrained to the previous writing technologies once we’ve moved on to something more complicated and advanced, shifting up a level. I often see Ong’s concept at work in Marcus’ ability to trace the boundaries of print-culture mechanics.
As one who tries to connect literary texts to the writing technologies of their historical moment, I also see the pervasiveness and ease of transmitting written texts through the internet as potentially part of our shared resonance with Marcus’ prose here. Arguably, we are all communicating, through writing in particular, with as much speed and immediacy as ever possible in human history–your own creative successes via blogging are a testament to this. But what is lost when, as the Lacanian in you always revels in pointing out, all communication is miscommunication? That aporia seems to be at the center of the sort of work Ben Marcus creates, although he points it out playfully and with a Dada-esque flair. His live readings offer something similar, a sort of performance art that pokes fun at the primacy of the depth-psychological model of the literary and artistic subject.
July 13, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Really great sculpture, Lee! As I was writing this I was thinking about Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare By Her Suitors, which is similar in certain respects:
July 13, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I was thinking of that piece too! Duchamp is one of my favorites–I even have a T-shirt with a picture of the chocolate grinder on it. How nerdy is that? Have you seen the original in the Duchamp room at the Philadelphia museum (they have an amazing collection, including the piece he worked on for the last 20 years or so of his life while pursuing chess)? He was obsessed with those mechanisms for a while, I think inspired by or just along with Picabia.
Now that I think about it, does the whole dadaist (and to a lesser degree surrealist) attempt to remove the artist from the central role of creator (aleatory techniques for example, or automatic writing) overlap with SR? Cage’s letting the I Ching write his music in a sense acknowledges their autonomous interaction instead of trying to bring it under his control. Similar to Burroughs’ cut & paste, as Melanie mentions.
July 13, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Really terrific post, Melanie. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to write something about it tomorrow after I finish my grading and class prep. This semester is going to be grueling as I’m teaching all new material (Malabou, Dennett, and Latour). Should be fun though.
July 13, 2009 at 11:56 pm
This is what I hoped for… aesthetics is lost without ontology… onticology ?
July 14, 2009 at 12:13 pm
What a splendid post, Levi. And it’s one that responds inadvertently, in part, to some similar thoughts I had here: http://ntbd.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/allusive-affinities/
I’m also interested in researching the relationship between Materialism / Speculative Realism and (partly) (neo)realism in cinema – itself related to the literary kind. Immediately figures such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maguerite Duras, and even Robert Bresson spring to mind. As Melanie – whose thoughts I’m enjoying above – is saying, this aesthetic is characterized by a parity between their narratives and its material.
This was taken to its most formal extreme, in cinema – as you may already be aware – by the Materialist or Structuralist avant-garde filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Peter Kubelka, Peter Gidal etc.
eg. Snow’s Wavelength
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-3009876496807585942&hl=en
Could I tempt you into sharing some thoughts on these – perhaps, even demonstrating how your theory of Onticology might read them?
July 14, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Italo Calvino and Ben Marcus as realists, even defined as a ‘fantastic reality’ may appear to be a lovely idea but as a direct consequence of this there appears to be no possibility of a literature which is not finally a realism. Perhaps a better question would be what literature would not be defined as a realism ?
July 14, 2009 at 1:08 pm
sdv,
I’m not sure I understand your leap from characterizing Ben Marcus’ literature as realist to the thesis that all literature becomes realist in the object-oriented sense. I think I was fairly clear as to why I would characterize Marcus’ literature as approaching realism in the sense intended by the object-oriented theorist. As Ejypt so nicely expressed it, all the objects or actors in Marcus’ Age of Wire and String are on a level playing field, such that we can only talk about assemblages of objects, rather than subject-object relations where a subject is always facing an object and objects are always turned towards the subject.
July 14, 2009 at 3:04 pm
LB,
Longtime reader, first-time commenter.
Edwin Mak,
It would seem to me that an object-oriented realist cinema could take a number of different forms.
One, the film could grant the camera a tangible and acknowledged presence, thereby affirming the camera’s participation in the network of things which interact in order to yield the film in its precise configuration; documentaries in which the cameraman is not treated as absent but rather as a crucial participant within the situation he’s filming, like in Barbara Kopple’s “Harlan County USA”, would exemplify this approach. Here the camera is not an invisible, extradimensional eye: it is an active player within the event it bears witness to. (If I can be kind of silly for a second, since Gertrude Stein has already come up in this discussion: Simply by virtue of being there the camera makes there there.)
Two, the objectivity and agency of the camera could be asserted by turning its gaze onto various inhuman objects; in Jean-Luc Godard’s “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her” the camera interacts with an assortment of commodities not only to drain them of their spectacular (in the Debordian sense) power, but also to emphasize the sheer thingness of the camera by dwelling on the thingness of the commodities it takes as its objects (including the body of the film’s prostitute protagonist, Juliette Janson); further, through the use of Brechtian-style direct address of the camera, Godard’s “characters” recognize and affirm the camera’s participation within the events it is observing.
Third, there’s what I guess could be called the Antonioni approach: the human body is situated in an environment where its presence is so dwarfed by the presence of other objects that the body (usually Monica Vitti’s) is overwhelmed by it all. I think Antonioni is more useful here than is Bresson; in his books on cinema I believe Deleuze talks a little bit about Antonioni’s concern with the different types of modern environments (the city of “L’eclisse”, the coastline of “L’avventura”, the industrial wasteland of “Red Desert”, Los Angeles and Death Valley in “Zabriskie Point”) and how these environments are navigated and perpetuated by people who are more or less vacuous subjects (humans rendered as objects). There are certainly object-oriented aspects of Bresson’s cinematic philosophy (his infamous “cinematography”), but he’s probably more of a pure relationalist due to his stated concern with composing images which have no significance or affectiveness in and of themselves, but rather, which achieve their significance and affectiveness by being juxtaposed with other images and sounds.
But I could be dead-wrong about all of this. I do think that an object-oriented approach to film studies has huge potential, however; it certainly offers a refreshing alternative to the Bordwell-style approach that dominates the film studies department at the school I attend. (This particular approach, which we might describe as a kind of narrative/cognitive-oriented formalism, is definitely interesting and important, but I find that it tends to privilege the subject-object relationship much more than it is willing to say it does.)
And I think that an assemblage- or network-based theory of cinema would have to treat the film as more than just a text which contains however many signs or objects of aesthetic stimulation, but also as the product of an assemblage of objects who all contributed to the formation of the film and of the film’s reputation. Such an approach would try to account for the roles played by technicians, writers, actors, financiers, technologies, critics, publicists, all sorts of historical, cultural and political forces, and of course, caterers. This would then be a sort of militantly anti-auteurist conception of filmmaking. Call me biased but I think cinema holds a somewhat privileged position in terms of its ability to illustrate object-oriented thinking because it is so obviously and purely a collective art: films are created by collectives, for collectives. In her latest film, “The Beaches of Agnes,” Agnes Varda speculates that cinema reconciles the found and the made: anyone else catch a whiff of assemblages in this statement?
July 14, 2009 at 7:43 pm
i have been enjoying your blog for quite a while, and it is with respect that i offer this. i do not intend this to be antagonistic, but i want to address a concern. for some time now i have experienced a growing disquiet over your rather casual treatment of literature– most particularly here and at some point, i believe, in one of your otherwise insightful posts on orientalism, where you tendentiously assume that the protagonists of kafka’s work, when designated similarly (not identically) are one self-identical character.
i take your point about marcus as an illustration of the interaction of objects, but what concerns me is that your reading, while ostensibly carving out a space for something like a speculative realism or analogue thereof in literature, remains a thematic one, and one that presupposes the troublingly unproblematic ‘other’ realism that you want at all costs to keep separate from your philosophical conception of speculative realism. that marcus “depicts a world,” that Joseph K. and K. (who is not at all “Joseph K.” of The Trial, but “K.” of The Castle; ought we to add Karl Rossmann to the list of aliases of this apparently transcendentally stable and whole character ?) share a univocal identity, these assumptions do anything but engage with the specificity of the domain from which they arise and treat them as unproblematic in their mimetic correspondance to some idea of a story reducible to a ‘reality’ that precedes and resists the effects of any encounters with any other objects.
i feel compelled to say that i find this sort of smugly uncritical appropriation of literature to be as distasteful as wholesale and unsophisticated appropriations of philosophical discourse for the purposes of superficial literary theory and criticism (a charge often leveled at literary studies by those with a comparable emotional investment in maintaining alpha dominance on philosophical ‘turf’). one is particularly susceptible to this temptation, it seems to me, with figures of some ambiguity or obscurity, like kafka or beckett, who clearly make it difficult to accept their narratives as easily reducible to ‘everyday’ reality. examples that spring to mind are arendt’s condescending reading of kafka’s “Er” (‘he’) in “Between the Past and the Future,” in which she assumes some sort of stability of perspective and logic (which is precisely what is rendered problematic in the text) for the purposes of illustrating her point about material history (and how Kafka isn’t quite capable of seeing the whole picture that she can see); Lacan’s and Derrida’s uses of Poe for a platform for their pissing contest that never once faithfully or honestly engages with the properly formal and textual composition that therefore eludes and more or less typically (for E. A. “let no man accuse me of leniency” Poe) outwits both their readings; Agamben’s (and Rancière’s, and Deleuze’s although his less so) reductive use of Melville’s ‘character’ Bartleby. in short, one finds oneself on shaky ground when one assumes the stability of literary discourse (as tantamount to a ‘real-life example’) for ‘illustrative’ purposes without engaging in the specificity of that discourse. in particular, your post thereby endangers itself with the very thing from which you seek to distance yourself– a naïve positivism, or what some would call literary realism.
perhaps part of the problem, one of the elements determining this temptation, in addition to the temptation that is presented by a descriptivist account of naming that leads to a simplistic and religious belief in a reference that would make no difference and experience no difference, is that very frequently literary works are deployed on the most accessible plane as never escaping that naïveté. this seems to be true for marcus, although i readily admit i have little familiarity with him. from what i can gather, although this is only a provisional intimation and would necessitate more scrutiny, adorno’s allegations at the surrealists seem to apply equally here (i would be happy to learn otherwise). however, in the case of kafka, it is somewhat baffling that one would assume something like realism or (analogously to painting) representational depiction– even at the level of the sentence. much less that a stability of mimetic “character” that strains credulity in “K.” could be conflated with another equally impossible stability in “Joseph K.” … that strains credulousness.
to sum up : one at all times can address what is finally the ideological residue of literature’s rhetoric– something like a “story” with “plot” and “character”– but this would indeed be a direct analogue to “naïve positivism” in philosophical terms, or the kind of literary realism from which you want to distance yourself. it is one thing to say “if my brand of philosophical discourse were a brand of literary discourse, it certainly wouldn’t be balzac or dickens, it would be ben marcus or italo calvino” and it is quite another to approach and engage with what occurs at a textual level in those works. wherein one may find nothing like a “depiction” or illustration of a represented world which operates by the logic amenable to your philosophy, but perhaps an operation that is (or isn’t at all) analogous to your philosophy but that produces something that may indeed look like a ‘perceived world’ … sarrasine may be more speculative realist than ben marcus. what is for certain is that you read ben marcus like one would expect a naive positivist, or a ‘literary realist,’ to do, whereas that uncritical approach is precisely what at every juncture balzac already renders untenable. and what is precisely what you seek to avoiding comparison with your philosophical bent. to be clear, i think that kafka’s work could be considered in many ways analogous to what you propose, but not at all for the thematic reasons that seem superficially evident, but rather for reasons arising from the peculiarities in the grammar and rhetoric of his narrative.
for these reasons, it is always crucial to heed the specificity of one’s discipline and approach other disciplines with the respect that acknowledges that there may be more going on than what “meets the eye.” i for one would never want to take for granted the context and discipline specificity of deleuze’s work and start spouting off unadvisedly about schizoanalysing henry james. although it easily could be done, if one neglects (on the one hand) the “form” and assumes an extractable “content” that precedes all formulation, and (on the other) neglects the tradition and context of a type of discourse, and assumes an easily digestible and superficially apparent transparency of that discourse.
with that, i’d like to conclude that i hope you take this in the spirit in which it is intended, with respect and with a view toward mutually beneficial dialogue. perhaps, in the end, i misunderstand your statements, everyone (and i am the worst one) being capable of naïveté. thanks again for always interesting reading.
July 14, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Drowsy,
I am certainly no literary theorist or critic, nor do I claim to be one. I also think that in this post I did exactly what you propose, saying that “were I to choose a literary analogue to the sort of philosophy I’m talking about it would be…” I will say, however, that your thesis as to how we should approach literature strikes me as very sad. In effect, you seem to be saying that literature should be prevented from ever circulating outside of its own terrain or field of discourse so as to enter into different assemblages. This would be like perfume bottle designers berating automotive engineers for using the perfume bottle apparatus to invent fuel injected engines, or a quantum physicist berating a plant for photosynthesizing sunlight and turning it into something else. I also think the idea that Deleuze should only be approached on philosophical terrain would be among the ways of most readily betraying his thought. As a differential ontologist, half the point of his thought is to enter into new assemblages and circulate in unintended ways. And indeed, Deleuze and Guattari have been mightily fecund through precisely these betrayals or refusals to engage his thought purely “philosophically”, having a significant impact in the sciences, arts, ethnography, even among the Israeli military if reports are to be believed. I wouldn’t dream of berating Negri and Hardt or Appadurei for the manner in which they put Deleuze and Guattari to work in political theory and ethnography respectively. While I definitely respect the work of literary critics, I take a dim view of anyone who thinks that art is to be owned by the critics or philosophy by the philosophers, etc.
July 14, 2009 at 8:40 pm
[…] LEVI HAS BECOME A POWERFUL CONVERT TO THE CAUSE. So has Nick at The Accursed Share, though the results of that interest have been less visible so […]
July 14, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Drowsy,
Additionally I wonder whether you see a similar necessity of policing disciplinary boundaries when, say, Pynchon draws heavily from cybernetics and information theory in his novels, or when Neal Stephenson speaks heavily of mathematics, philosophy, and science in his baroque trilogy. Presumably you don’t, but why not? I think it’s useful to recall in this connection the relationship Deleuze and Guattari draw between art, science, and philosophy in What is Philosophy?.
July 14, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Drowsy,
With lines as rigidly drawn as you seem to suggest, one would have to dismiss virtually every influential work of art and literature–and much in music, created since the late 19th Century.
July 14, 2009 at 9:34 pm
perhaps i was insufficiently clear– in no sense do i intend to say that one should leave literature, or philosophy, or any other discipline, to the specialists. quite to the contrary. i only wish to suggest that in one’s forays into other discourses, it is important to be cautious not to impose one’s presuppositions on those discourses. a certain level of competency (or at least an awareness that it might not all be so transparent) allows for cogent and tenable engagement with the material, while a lack of it often results in tendentious or unfounded and reductive moves.
the haphazard subsumption of one type of discourse to an illustration of another discourse’s claims, without heeding the peculiarities of that discourse, is at best a risky business. i don’t say that the interaction of different discourses is to be avoided or “policed” as you say (at no point do i make such a claim nor do i see where i imply one). i merely stress the importance of addressing one’s object of inquiry in its specificity. to begin throwing around Deleuze-Guattari’s terms without a consideration of the histories and debates that occasion them is reckless and betrays an insufficient understanding of or respect for them– not to mention that can lead to confused and illegitimate or naïve applications. of course Deleuze and Guattari brought multiple discourses into interaction with one another, and of course this can be fruitful, as it is frequently in their works. it is quite another thing to reduce their discourse or disregard the stakes so as to appropriate a poorly understood “reader’s digest” version of their thought to explain away a phenomenon taking place in another discipline. this is what i intended to suggest by my comment about schizoanalysing henry james. although the insights D & G may present in their work on capitalism and schizophrenia indeed may yield new insights into the narrative art of henry james, it would be a vulgar, reductive, and inaccurate thing to say that The Golden Bowl is henry james’s transparent depiction of maggie verver as a body without organs, whereas her father, et cetera et cetera, without any consideration of the essential role that free indirect discourse plays in the presentation of narrative consciousness, viz., with no regard for the novel qua novel. by the same token haphazard quotation of wittgenstein to bolster some party-line reading of beckett shows remarkable lack of competency with the intricacies of wittgenstein’s formidably complex thought.
my specific claim is that your gesture, it seems to me, of aligning brand names of literary “styles,” as well as your previous use of kafka’s works to illustrate a point about the fragility of identity (at the same time assuming the continuity of a single “character” not even bearing the same “name” across multiple and fragmentary works) exposes a logic at work in your treatment of literary examples that is precisely the sort of logic you attempt therein to claim you oppose and with which you should not be confused. the general problem is that you take for granted as a transparent, “glassy” medium a literary text as a reflection of some reality, and upon a thematic reading of that phenomenon you propose that it demonstrates some facet of the logic underwriting your philosophical position; whereas what your philosophical position opposes, in the same post, is being included under the heading of a naïve positivism that would take such things for granted.
to conclude, i see no necessity whatsoever of policing the boundaries of discourses, that being a fool’s game and radically impossible. i want to suggest to you that your use of literature in some of your posts, particularly the two i addressed, are reductive and tend to occlude their objects. this in no way is meant to suggest that you never should address literature, only that you could do it more profitably were you a bit less hasty to make assumptions about what you read, and were you more mindful of formal operations that occur. i think you are quite capable of addressing literature in your development of your conception of speculative realism, and i hope for a fruitful encounter. thus far, all i have seen are synopses that take for granted that some sort of literary content can be abstracted from the work without any difference for it.
i have absolutely nothing to say on the topic of pynchon. however, there is at least this crucial difference between literature’s use of philosophical discourses and philosophical deployment of works of literature– literature makes no truth claims, it is much more likely the disruption of the possibility of truth claims. it seems that neglect of this might factor into the basic problem i have with your use of literary work as unqualified exempla.
thanks for your response. again i hope that you do not take these comments as an ad hominem attack, and i hope, if this dialogue continues, that it can remain free of animosity. i hope i am wrong when i sense the beginnings of it in your posts.
for the record, if i have not been clear, i don’t think that “art” any more than anything else, is to be “owned by the critics” or by anyone. what determines one’s status as a critic or a philosopher in the first place ? a certain competency ? or is there always some police waiting in the wings ?
July 14, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Shrugs. Anyone is free to take or leave my literary examples as they see fit. I am not really interested in engaging with the “discourse of literature” as you seem to believe is necessary. When I evoke a literary example, I do so in the same spirit that I evoke an anecdote from life, something from film, a historical event, a painting, a joke, an episode from a television show, etc., etc., etc.. The point is not to provide a commentary on the work, but to provide an example or a common frame of reference for some idea, concept, or line of argument I’m attempting to develop in a way that doesn’t remain at the level of abstraction and that perhaps enlivens what’s being discussed a bit. It so happens that my mind is a sort of collage or mess of textual references, images from films and television shows, useless factoids, this or that painting or sculpture, anecdotes, instances of history, etc. and that is simply how I think. There’s nothing more nor less than that to it when I cite an example from literature or any other domain.
July 14, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I’d also like to know– since you’ve seen fit to refer to me as behaving “smugly” –what is more smug… The person that approaches literature in a way that “respects its own discourse”, keeping it zipped up and safely cloistered or those who encounter cultural artifacts in a way that allows them to freely circulate, enter into life and thought, and impact us in aleatory and surprising ways that would have never initially been intended in the original production of the work. You say that you’re not trying to police discourse about art, but I think you’re sadly mistaken in what it is you’re doing. I also think you’re deluding yourself as to how the work of Deleuze and Guattari has been put into circulation. Certainly Appadurei doesn’t draw from Deleuze in a way that respects his specificity, the discourses he was engaging in, etc., etc., etc. No, he draws from his work and puts certain concepts to work in a way that D&G themselves would have never anticipated and that are remote from the immediate concerns they were dealing with. This is already internal to their own metaphysic and the connectivity of their so-called “desiring-machines”.
July 14, 2009 at 10:09 pm
this is perhaps what bothered me initially, that your citations seem frivolously (and implicitly, in a somewhat paternalistic way) to disregard what is, on my view, powerful about literature. of course casual reference to the most superficial level of a domain is always possible and may be helpful in the effort of explicating some point. however, in the larger picture, i don’t believe that this does the justice that could be done, or allow the interaction to do the work it could do. it seems to me that a much more fruitful encounter between this philosophical discourse and literary discourse is possible, and that is why i wanted to suggest that a less casual approach might be worth pursuing. particularly since you, whether you claim to be interested in it or not, have on at least a semi-regular basis engaged with literary discourse. that is what occasioned my initial comment.
at any rate, i thank you for taking the time to discuss this with me, but i hope that you will give more serious thought to my suggestions. i suppose though, we can just leave it at that.
July 14, 2009 at 10:16 pm
My style or approach in these references is closer to the way Zizek employs such references or the way you might make such references in a discussion or when teaching, than the way really serious literary studies folk like Blanchot, Derrida, or Jameson approach literature. I am not, of course, dismissing the value of these latter approaches, but for them literature is the object of their inquiry, whereas when I reference some literary work I am not treating it as an object of investigation but transplanting it– as you might splice a sequence of DNA into something else, for example as in the case of taking a sequence from a particular fish and situating it in cucumbers –into another set of issues. Given that I don’t have pretensions to be doing a “literary analysis”, I think this practice is perfectly acceptable and appropriate.
July 14, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Very good stuff. I’m both pleased and a little terrified that some of the literary examples I’ve been organizing on my desk as I pursue the pragmatic speculative realism project find mention here (especially those two works of Calvino). Nice to feel a fire lit under me though.
July 14, 2009 at 10:58 pm
perhaps i ought not to have used the word “smug”– i did not mean to be insulting. i don’t think, however, that confusing or conflating two differently named characters from two distinct works while saying that kafka “investigates the fraught relationship between symbolic and personal identity” shows very much respect for one’s object of inquiry, however fleeting that inquiry may be. it is very much true that identity is at stake in these works (albeit in different ways), but it signals a blind spot that when discussing the fragility of identity one assumes that just because two names are similar one is dealing with the same person.
as to ben marcus, it is another example of the same problem– that of your lack of appreciation for the object with which you are dealing that leads to that which you denounce creeping across the boundaries of your distinction. to treat the work as a mimetic representation of a “strange world of assemblages or inter-optic relations between actors” presumes the very transparent realism from which you seek to distance yourself.
thus, it strikes me as at least unconcernedly reductive, if “smug” is too strong, and it leads in each case to a confused reading which might if more carefully approached be a powerful argument.
i hope that i am not policing discourse about art. in all honesty, this conversatin will give me food for thought on the matter and may help me reevaluate my positions. as it stands now, however, my intention is only to suggest to you that in your discourse about art (a discourse that i at least twice now if not three times have expressed desire to see continue) you could be more successful were you to be more scrupulous about heeding what is actually occurring. because, as i understand the two moments under discussion, your logic becomes contaminated by that from which you wish to separate it as a direct result of your insufficiently clear understanding of the cited example.
i don’t recall making any pronouncements about how D & G’s work has circulated. if i did or seemed to, let me clarify that to put something to good use, it is helpful to know what it is. it may be that a hammer is as good a musical instrument as it is a construction tool, but disregarding that it came into circulation as such can lead (and as i have suggested, in your case i believe it has lead) to unproductive, or counterproductive, use.
let me say again, though i was at pains to make this clear before and i don’t see any reason that you should not understand me on this point, as it seems you do, that i at no point want to say that you, or anyone, is incapable of talking about literary, or any other art. i wanted to suggest to you that your discussions, from my understanding of them, have undermined the points you wished them to support, in virtue of superficial readings. i offered my criticism in hopes of it being helpful, so that you might put literature to better purpose by thinking a little more clearly about what it is doing when you bring it into the discussion.
i recognize your affinity to Žižek’s use of literature. in fact, though i am sympathetic with a great many of his arguments, i find his use of literature and film generally very superficial, reductive, and unhelpful.
once again, i hope that you will read something other than antagonism in this, but it seems that that is what you find. i can only say that when one makes public claims, it is entirely possible that someone may reply, and even possible if however hard to believe that such a reply might be intended constructively and might be worth listening to on that basis. this is particularly so when one’s public claims do in fact engage a specific discourse with a body of scholarship that might have something of value to offer, and when the claims made public yield their problems to so light scrutiny.
thanks.
July 14, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Hi Drowsy,
On the one hand, I think this discussion gets to one of the core theses of my ontology. I hold that in relating things are changed. As a consequence, it’s difficult to know what “respecting an object” might mean. That would entail a representational conception of objects that remain fixed in their identity when entering into their relation. It is through relating, I think, that the new comes into being. This is one of the reasons I systematically combine things that do not really belong together in my own work… For example, drawing on someone like, say, Carnap in the context of discussing Lacan. On the other hand, I’m curious as to whether you think literary studies accomplishes what you believe it ought to do. It seems to me that what has been most fruitful in literary studies– and its best chance for relevance beyond the monadic cells of literary studies folks –are not those moments where it “respects the literary object qua literary object” (though we hear a lot of this rhetoric) but precisely when the literary object is assembled with something else: linguistics, marxist social theory (Jameson), phenomenology, philosophy, systems and complexity theory, ethnography, information theory and cybernetics, etc. In other words, literary studies does not articulate what is “in” the text, but rather provokes texts to speak by assembling them with something other than the text.
July 15, 2009 at 2:19 am
Pragmatic Speculative Realism…
A stake in the ground…
July 15, 2009 at 10:15 am
das,
Thanks so much for the generous comment. I hope you won’t mind but I’m going to post it on my own blog, I think it deserves its own post – plus it’ll give me some time to respond to it.
July 15, 2009 at 10:22 am
If object orientated philosophy becomes just more aesthetics might we not lose sight of the objects once again?
July 15, 2009 at 2:39 pm
@Paul
Perhaps if it becomes “just more aesthetics,” but what the Rise of Objects (to use Harman’s phrase) offers is an invitation to reconsider aspects of philosophy that have been shrouded by Kant’s Copernican Revolution. This is also a great boon for the field, since it invites a reexamination of so much work. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
July 15, 2009 at 4:52 pm
[…] comment at the dauntingly clever Larval Subjects – was it too inane? too busy? –, fortunately a fellow first time commenter known only as “das” did. And it was a generous response too. I asked for further thoughts on relating aesthetics – in […]
July 15, 2009 at 5:26 pm
@Ian: I agree, but I do worry about the philosophical tendency to fly back into aesthetics at precisely the crucial moment. For example Heidegger, it could be argued, pushes the phenomenological project into undiscovered places only to pull back in later years and find solace in poetry, art and so on. In this example/warning we have to wait for over a half-century before we remember to turn back to things themselves!
July 15, 2009 at 10:01 pm
this is what i was hoping to suggest, really, is the relation i think it bears to your ontology. again i think my formulation was imprecise (or perhaps i inadvertently was reifying the concept, although i don’t think so). what i meant by “respecting the object of inquiry” (in this context at least, an infelicitous way to put it) was merely to engage with the literary text as it happens to be (a text). a textual narrative, regardless of the purposes to which it is put, or the new assemblage it may come to embody in encounter with another object, cannot escape its textuality. by respect for the object i suppose i meant, then, consciously accounting for textual operations. that is where i think that you went astray on the two topics i mentioned earlier.
again, i do not intend to promote ‘monadic cells of literary studies’ … i read and think quite widely, and am always open to new ideas. if i have seemed to promote that, it is a misunderstanding, although i feel i have been at pains to make this clear. all i am suggesting is that when you assemble a literary text with some other perspective, that you actually engage it rather than subsuming it to a presupposition born from the other side of the assemblage. this is what i think was happening in your engagement with these literary texts, whether you were aware of it or not.
i do not think anything like an isolated literary studies achieves anything at all. this is why i think that linguistic studies and linguistically-informed studies of other sorts have been so important to literary study as a practice (which i think impossible to sever from all of the perspectives that inform it). it is however the unavoidable fact of the textual constitution of literature, and the textual operations that simply are the literature, that i think you neglected to heed.
this is another way of completely agreeing with you, that literary studies don’t articulate what is “in” the text, as there is no way to say that there is anything “in” a text. it isn’t a basket, it is a fabric. my point all along was that i think that you were distracted by what looked like (and therefore maybe at some level, “is” although in the particular examples saying so leads one into trouble as a result of their constitution) a mimetic representation of some content, though as it often turns out, it is the interaction of some textual threads that give that impression, but upon closer inspection, make it untenable. in the particular cases i brought up, the perceived pattern ultimately yields a logic antithetical to your intentions.
i’ll leave it at that, thanks.
July 17, 2009 at 2:29 am
[…] last but not least, my dear friend Melanie has a brilliant post up responding to my post “Realism and Speculative Realism“. Mel proposes an object-oriented, self-reflexive, realist account of literary production as […]