Okay, not really but close enough. Know my love for all things pertaining to dark science-fiction (none of that mystical and fascist good versus evil Star Wars crap for me!) and for all things post-apocalyptic, Mel has me reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. I suspect this is her sly way of getting me to encounter something else she’d like me to see, but treating her reading suggestions as a sort of rebus is half the fun. At any rate, last night I came across the following passage which beautifully illustrates the Lacanian concept of the Imaginary:
“Use your neurons.” Said Crake. “Step one: calculate length of man’s arm, using single visible arm as arm standard. Assumption that both arms are approximately the same length. Step two: calculate angle of bend at elbow. Step three: calculate curvature of ass. Approximation of this may be necessary, in absence of verifiable numbers. Step four: calculate size of hand, using visible hand, as above.”
“I’m not a numbers person,” said Jimmy laughing, but Crake kept on: “All potential hand positions must now be considered. [They’re discussing whether a man’s hand is on their busty teacher’s ass at the mall.] Waist, ruled out. Upper right cheek, ruled out. Lower right cheek or upper thigh would seem by deduction to be the most likely. Hand between both upper thighs a possibility, but this position would impede walking on the part of the subject, and no limping or stumbling is detectable.” He was doing a pretty good imitation of their Chemlab teacher– the use-your-neurons line, and that clipped, stiff delivery, sort of like a bark. More than pretty good, good.
Already Jimmy liked Crake better. They might have something in common after all, at least the guy had a sense of humour. But he was also a little threated. He himself was a good imitator, he could do just about all the teachers. What if Crake turned out to be better at it? He could feel it within himself to hate Crake as well as liking him. (74 – 75)
And there, my friends, in these final bolded lines is a gorgeous example of the dynamics of the Lacanian domain of the Imaginary. The only flaw in this brief little vignette is that Jimmy is so aware of his ambivalence towards Crake and the source of that ambivalence. Jimmy senses that his identity or being is threatened and captivated by the fact that Crake shares the same identity, and perhaps better, as Jimmy. In this respect, he risks fading or disappearing in his relation to Crake.
Dylan Evan’s outlines the Lacanian Imaginary nicely in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis:
The basis of the imaginary order continues to be the formation of the ego in the MIRROR STAGE. Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, IDENTIFICATION is an important aspect of the imaginary order. The ego and the counterpart form the prototypical dual relationship, and are interchangeable. This relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification with the little other means that the ego, and the imaginary order itself, are both sites of a radical ALIENATION: ‘alienation is constitutive of the imaginary order’ (S3, 146). The dual relationship between the ego and the counterpart is fundamentally narcissistic, and NARCISSISM is another characteristic of the imaginary order. Narcissism is always accompanied by a certain AGGRESSIVITY. The imaginary is the real of image and imagination, deception and lure. The principle illusions of the imaginary are those of wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality, and above all, similarity. The imaginary is thus the order of surface appearances which are deceptive, observable phenomena which hide underlying structure; the affects are such phenomena. (82)
If there is an intrinsic alienation at the heart of the imaginary or the order of identification, then this is because one cannot coincide with their image. Here it is necessary to construe image broadly as pertaining to both the order of specularity and our sense of self-image or who we are. The image is a visage presented to an-other; an image of how we would like to be seen or how we imagine ourselves as being seen by others. If this aspect of the image is characterized by alienation then this is because we can never see ourselves being seen as the other, in fact, sees us. As such, this dimension of the imaginary is characterized by a constant frustration and insecurity by virtue of the fact that our image cannot be mastered. By contrast, insofar as we arrive at our image through identification with an-other, the imaginary is a site of alienation insofar as our image is always elsewhere or outside of ourselves. We can never quite live up to the statuesque image with which we’ve identified.
It is this alienation that generates the ambivalent love-hate and aggressivity at the heart of the imaginary. On the one hand, we experience a perpetual struggle between our image and ourselves as we strive to embody it, unable to ever full assume it or live up to it. As a consequence, the ideal of wholeness and identity that the image inaugurates within ourselves has the paradoxical effect of leaving us feeling perpetually incomplete. This incompleteness or hole that lies at the center of the (w)hole, in its turn, generates a profound defensiveness and sense of struggle with the other that threatens that image. Moreover, insofar as we arrive at the image through our identification with the other, we constantly experience ourselves as being in danger of being usurped. As such, a struggle with the other ensues which is essentially a struggle over ownership of the image. The tragic paradox is 1) that if the agent is successful in either getting the other to see oneself as one would like to be seen, the value of the others gaze is destroyed and one is no longer seen as one would like to be seen, or 2) if one is successful in destroying the other that threatens to usurp the image as in the case of Crake, the gaze required to sustain one’s own self is destroyed.
It is sometimes said that fights in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Hmmmm.
Ben over at Naught Thought has an interesting post up on new trends in Continental thought. Writing about the regnant status of OOO/OOP compared to other variants of Speculative Realism, Ben asks:
OOO/OOP will no doubt continue to grow and I often wonder why (besides having multiple prolific internet presences) it is the strangest/strongest of the SR factions. I think the best explanation is that the approach and even name of OOP reeks (justifiably) of novelty and this is only supported by the fact that Harman and others take what they need from philosophers and move on. This is not an attack but a high form of praise. For instance, it would be hard to call any user of OOO/OOP Heideggerian, Whiteheadian or even Latourian (though the latter would be the most probable) whereas Grant could easily be labeled Schellingian, Brassier Laruelleian (though less and less so over time) and Meillassoux Cartesian, Badiouian or, against his will but accurate I think, Hegelian.
I have a somewhat different theory. While the strong internet presence of OOO/OOP certainly doesn’t hurt, this is an effect rather than a cause. In my view a successful philosophy has to create work for others and for other disciplines outside of the philosophy. This work is not simply of the commentary variety, but of the variety that allows others to engage in genuine research projects according to– I hate the word, but have to use it –a paradigm.
read on!
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Context
We live in a world pervaded by objects of all kinds, yet nowhere do we have a unified theory or ontology of objects. Whether we are speaking of technological objects, natural objects, commodities, events, groups, animals, institutions, gods, or semiotic objects our historical moment, far from reducing the number of existing objects as alleged by reductive materialisms, has actually experienced a promiscuous proliferation and multiplication of objects of all sorts. Moreover, this proliferation has caused massive upheaval and transformation all throughout planetary, human, and collective life. Yet outside of a few marginal, yet elite, disciplines such as science and technology studies, the investigation of writing technologies, environmental theory and philosophy, media studies, as well as certain variants of feminism and geographical studies, this explosion of objects barely provokes thought or questioning, much less any sort of genuine or informed engagement at the level of praxis.
In light of this situation one is reminded of the epigraph to Heidegger’s Being and Time:
‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being”. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have no become perplexed.’
This epigraph could just as easily be rephrased substituting the word “object” for “being”. Where before we thought we understood what it means to be an object, now we are perplexed. It is this perplexity that drives the questioning of object-oriented ontology.
1781: The Failure of Philosophy
If 1781 is a fateful watershed year for Western philosophy, then this is because it marks the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the devastating Copernican Revolution. Object-oriented ontology is not interested in Kant’s specific epistemology per se— one would be hard put to find many genuine Kantians today –but with the form of the Copernican Revolution as it has persisted and undergone variations since the 18th century. For, in effect, the Copernican Revolution will reduce philosophical investigation to the interrogation of a single relation: the human-world gap. And indeed, in the reduction of philosophy to the interrogation of this single relation or gap, not only will there be excessive focus on how humans relate to the world to the detriment of anything else, but this interrogation will be profoundly asymmetrical. For the world or the object related to through the agency of the human will become a mere prop or vehicle for human cognition, language, and intentions without contributing anything of its own. The Copernican spirit will thus consist in an anthropocentric unilateralization of the human-world relation to the detriment of the world. World, objects, will now become simple products of human cognition and philosophy will become a transcendental anthropology that seeks to investigate the manner in which this cognition forms or produces objects.
Kant sums up this inversion and its spirit early in the Critique of Pure Reason:
Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. (B xvi)
In beginning with the hypothesis that objects conform to mind rather than mind to objects, Kant who genuinely sought a secure grounding for knowledge and freedom from the endless debates of metaphysics, paradoxically rids us of the need to consult the world or objects. For as Kant himself observes, this shift or inversion allows us discern how it is possible for something to be given in advance. Yet if the world is given in advance, then there is no longer any need to consult the world or objects. Rather, philosophy, at this point, becomes self-reflexive, interrogating not being or the world, but interrogating rather the mind that regards the world. While the Copernican turn will not deny that there is a world independent of mind, it will nonetheless argue that this world, as it is in-itself, is forever beyond human knowledge precisely because the world, for-us is everywhere and always structured by our cognition. As such, philosophy will become an investigation of the mechanisms by which cognition structures the world. However, what will be lost will be the ability for the world to surprise us. And if the world no longer has the capacity to surprise us, then this is because the world already conforms to the structuring agency of our cognition. The rabbit has already been put into the hat.
read on!
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I came across this interesting interview with Brassier by way of Graham’s blog. I was particularly interested in this portion of the interview:
Bram – You were the driving force behind the Speculative Realism conference (London 2007), which brought together you, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux. The name ‘speculative realism’ was quickly picked up to designate a supposedly new wave in philosophy, but you quickly became more critical of it. Why is that?
Ray – The term ‘speculative realism’ was only ever a useful umbrella term, chosen precisely because it was vague enough to encompass a variety of fundamentally heterogeneous philosophical research programmes. But people have started to pick up on it as though it was the name for a new philosophical doctrine or movement, like ‘logical positivism’, ‘existentialism’, ‘structuralism’, or ‘deconstruction’. In this context, the vagueness which was initially useful is beginning to generate more confusion than clarity. There is no ‘speculative realist’ doctrine common to the four of us: the only thing that unites us is antipathy to what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’—the doctrine, especially prevalent among ‘Continental’ philosophers, that humans and world cannot be conceived in isolation from one other—a ‘correlationist’ is any philosopher who insists that the human-world correlate is philosophy’s sole legitimate concern. Anti-correlationism is by no means a negligible unifying factor—but our alternatives to correlationism are fundamentally divergent and even incompatible in several regards.
Read the rest here. I completely agree with Ray’s remarks here. A lot of confusion has been caused surrounding SR insofar as people have cast about looking for a shared philosophy among these divergent thinkers when really they’re only united by their rejection of the primacy of the human-world correlate. The situation is similar with object-oriented ontology. Clearly I am sympathetic to the work of both Harman and Bogost (as well as the thought of Latour and Whitehead), but it would be a mistake to assume that all of us share the same ontology. While we are more or less united in the thesis that being is composed of objects, we diverge quite a bit as to just what constitutes an object. These differences, I think, will become more clear once The Democracy of Objects is completed– I’ve been feverishly working away at it, and I’m very much looking forward to hearing what Harman has to say. In particular, I retain the category of potentiality whereas Harman does not, and also think that we can say a lot more about the internal structure of objects than Harman allows. However, I’m never sure if these differences between Graham and myself are more a matter of terminology and styles of thought or are fundamental ontological disputes. These differences provide a productive opportunity for a lot of friendly debate and discussion. Returning to the interview, Brassier’s remarks on scientific reductivism are particularly interesting, vindicating, I believe, certainly claims I’ve recently made about his thought.
Okay, not really but close enough. Know my love for all things pertaining to dark science-fiction (none of that mystical and fascist good versus evil Star Wars crap for me!) and for all things post-apocalyptic, Mel has me reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. I suspect this is her sly way of getting me to encounter something else she’d like me to see, but treating her reading suggestions as a sort of rebus is half the fun. At any rate, last night I came across the following passage which beautifully illustrates the Lacanian concept of the Imaginary:
