Over at An Un-Canny Ontology Nate weighs in on our recent discussion of Life After People. Nate writes:
In his response to Tim and to my problem with the TV show Life After People, Levi over at Larval Subjects remarked:
I think narrative is a way in which these things take place, but is not the way. This is what I referred to in a prior post (over at Philosophy in a Time of Error, I think) as an occupational hazard. The rhetorician spends his or her time analyzing narratives and thus naturally sees narratives and signifiers in everything.
And then a little later:
The whole thing that set off my original post was Nate’s rather snide remark that all the object-oriented ontologist can say is “objects act”. Hell no. We’re interested in how objects act and celebrate those modes of analysis that show how objects act and what differences they contribute.
I’ve made bold this last sentence because it draws out a larger question. What, if we are not creating narratives, does Levi mean when he makes this last statement? A narrative is story set up in an sometimes enlightening but often constructive format. It can take shape in variety of forms (novels, short stories, poems, TV shows, movies, anecdotes, even grocery lists, etc, etc.). The first order observation that Levi fails to see when watching Life After People is that he is watching a narrative – I am in no way adding this narrative, as Levi claimed, since as a TV show Life After People is automatically a structured way of relaying a story – and if the title and the obvious fact that it is a TV show want to be ignored, one can always point out the second glaring reason – Life After People has a NARRATOR. The show, the story of a world without people still needs to be narrated, significance needs to be given to the objects of this specific (and post-human) world. BUT, this significance is not placed onto the show by an outside viewer as a first-order observation. No. It is inherent in the show itself, which brings me back to the original problem I had with it. When stripped of all of its narrative aspects, what are we left with? I would argue, that what we are left with is something far more boring than the job of a rhetorician.
There’s more there so check out his post. A couple of points are in order. First, nowhere have I denied that narrative is at work in the show. I just argued that I don’t think this is what is crucial or interesting in the show (I provide a narrative analysis I would find interesting later in this post). This is the point, in my recent post, of the garlic example. Just as I wouldn’t deny that the garlic plays a role in the pasta, I would not deny that narrative plays a role. What I am thus objecting to is the manner in which Nate and Tim are treating narrative as a God-term that is the only important difference at work in the show, or the only element that plays a role.
read on!
Implicit in the thesis Nate is proposing, I take it, is the idea that narrative makes things what they are. This is like arguing that garlic makes all the other elements in the pasta what they are. Both are absurd theses. This is the only way I’m able to understand Nate’s suggestion that somehow all the other elements become trivial when narrative is taken away and that these elements don’t have ontological import of their own. What I am objecting to is the hyperbole of this thesis, all too common in a particular mode of analysis.
Now Nate has rightly suggested that there is narrative at work in Life After People. No disagreement here. However, let’s look at some other things that are at work in the show:
* Electro-magnetism is at work in the show. The show would not be able to be transmitted without radio waves or electric digital 0’s and 1’s to convey the show.
* Sound waves are at work in the show. The show would not be able to be heard were there not sound-waves conveying it.
* Televisions are necessary for the show because there wouldn’t be a show without the television.
* Radio towers or fiber optic cables and satellites are necessary for the show because without them the show wouldn’t be able to be transmitted.
And so on. Now these observations are trivial, and that is exactly why I cite them. What they reveal is the vacuousness of the Tim-Nate argument, and more broadly of the post-structuralist correlationist two-step in general. This two-step consists of 1) pointing out that x is a necessary condition for y (the signifier, narrative, signs, etc), and that therefore 2) there is no y (in the ontological sense), without x. Move 1 is perfectly legitimate. It’s move 2 where all the problems begin. And this is exactly what the trite necessary conditions conditions for the show I outline above is designed to disclose.
Nate wants to claim that because x is a necessary condition for y, it is the most important condition… So important that it becomes an ontological condition. But there are all sorts of necessary conditions, but they don’t become the most important for all that. No one– rightly –would think of suggesting that the content of the show is dependent on light-waves. But Nate is claiming the exact equivalent of this. Why is it that one dreams of treating the signifier or narrative as the glue that holds everything else together, as the difference that makes all the difference, when, in fact it is only a difference participating in an assemblage of a whole network of differences? By all means I’m for the analysis of these differences. What I’m not for is forms of analysis that place everything else in the shadows because they’ve treated this difference as the difference that trumps all other differences. When theorizing in this way the theorist comports herself like the Pentacostal depicted in the documentary Jesus Camp that attributes the working or lack of working of the projector to the good will of God. Replace “God” with “narrative” or “signifier” and you get the exact same thought process.
Now Nate goes on to write,
My second problem is that I’ve never said that narrative is the only way objects interact… But at the same time, when Levi in one of his comments suggests that what makes OOO interesting is that it doesn’t rely on 1990’s narrativity studies, I find myself saying “Yeah, go for it!” I’m just trying to understand how OOO is going to address these problems. You aren’t taking away my toys, as much as you are ignoring the fact that there are toys to begin with. So far, I’m unconvinced. From a rhetorical… standpoint if we only talk about the object we are the observer. If we talk from the object’s point of view, we run the risk of giving the object qualities it does not locally manifest. So it seems that we are to always talk about the object-with-other-objects without forgetting that we are ultimately the ones performing the narrative.
First, there’s no problem for OOO to respond to because OOO never denied that there are things like narrativity in the first place. What it rejected was an imperialistic idealism that would make this the only difference that makes a difference. Second, perhaps Nate has forgotten, but one of my key distinctions is between virtual proper being and local manifestation. Local manifestations are produced by one object interacting with another. One object that can provoke local manifestations is human observers. What did Nate think we were doing in science, for example, when we heat up a chemical compound to see what it does? What did Nate think the physicist was doing when he measures quanta actualizing a state? He is acting as an object that is locally manifesting qualities in another object. However the point here is that these local manifestations are local manifestations of the object. They aren’t creations of the signifier, narratives, signs, etc., etc., etc. This is the idealist conflation that’s being rejected.
As I have said, I don’t reject the thesis that there’s narrativity at work in the show. However, what I find deeply uninteresting in the Nate-Tim analysis is the way they seem to think they’re debunking the show through their second-order observation that reveals, wonder of wonders, that the show is for the sake of a human gaze. Wonders never cease! Of course it is. But please rhetoricians, one more effort for revolution! The really interesting question is not that of revealing some supposed paradox of the presence of a gaze when the gaze has become absent (this is about as mysterious as the question of whether I can see the tree outside my window when the shades are closed), but rather what is interesting at the narrative level is the question of why humans have suddenly begun obsessively narrating their own absence.
Throughout popular culture we have seen a whole slew of films and television shows either attempting to represent the absence of humans or represent the possibility of the absence of humans. These cultural artifacts would include Wall-E, Children of Men, novels like The Road, and, of course, Life After People. In the case of my good friend Tim, I think his theoretical commitments get in the way of posing the really interesting narrative-interpretive question. Just as nature abhors a vacuum (or some physicists, at any rate), Lacanians often abhor the absence of a signifier. And what Tim cleverly tries to effect is the re-situating of the signifier and the gaze back in the space of the show to occlude this vacuum. It’s pretty obvious that he’s merely lifted Zizek’s diagnosis of fantasy in abortion debate where you have all the aborted children on an island apart from their parents in Plague of Fantasy. In this way he can go his merry Lacanian way, having deftly defended against the trauma of the possibility of a world without humans. He’s reintroduced the gaze and the signifier back to where it purports to be absent.
The problem with Tim’s analysis is that this is more an articulation of his fantasy structure and traumatic relation to the real, than an analysis of the fantasy structure present in the paradoxical narrative of the show itself. Tim-Nate take themselves as having debunked the show. But the proper diagnosis of a fantasy does not debunk anything. The really interesting question at the level of the narrative structure of the show lies not in revealing that it is a spectacle for a gaze that renders significant what has lost all significance. The really interesting question is that of why this fantasy has become so ubiquitous in contemporary popular culture. Put in Lacanese, what Nick-Nate should be asking is why the big Other has morphed in such a way that it is now struggling to represent its own radical absence. What transformation has taken place in the big Other such that it now encounters its own radical contingency and the possibility of a manifestation without manifestation?
An analogous example of this would be the music Clive Owen’s father is listening to when he visits him at his home in Children of Men. This music is more or less pure noise, the complete absence of human pattern and order, and is, as such, a fragment of the collapse of the symbolic order or big Other. In this respect it is like Life After People. How has this come to pass? What does it signify?
So perhaps an additional feature I find objectionable in the Tim-Nate analysis is that they are employing these rhetorical and Lacanian categories critically rather than analytically. What I mean by this is that the categories are being deployed as a way of debunking the symptom, rather than analyzing the symptom. Lacanians sometimes like to talk about the “new symptoms”. Back in the day, you had the spectacles of hysteria and obsession, with all their striking ticks and symptoms, and these were susceptible to treatment through speech. Talk of “the new symptoms” refers to the emergence of widespread anxiety and depressive disorders as the prime symptoms encountered in the clinical setting, rather than obsession and hysteria. An analytic approach to the new symptoms consists in raising the question of what new figures of subjectivity, of the symbolic order, of the real, and the big Other have come into being to account for the new symptom? A non-analytic approach to the new symptoms would consist in suggesting that although these disorders look like something entirely different, they’re really just hysteria and depression in disguise. And this is the whole problem with Nate-Tim’s analysis. They are erasing the symptom under the edifice of their theory, rather than treating the new symptom, this odd paradoxical attempt to see the visible in the absence of a gaze, as a theoretical opportunity to be analyzed such that theory itself becomes transformed. They’ve used these categories to make an aesthetic judgment, rather than to engage in analytic work.
Larval Subjects . 
March 26, 2010 at 11:24 pm
You’re an animal at writing and I’m really slow! I think I said most everything I can think of on my response to your response on the other post (I forget which one, but you can link to it?). As far as your new thoughts go, I think you’re pretty much right on target (except, of course, with your characterization of my position). I had thought my question was precisely What is this show a symptom of? Why now? All of that. I made a few guesses via my own small skills. They could be wrong. I’m not an analyst and not after change. Not a good revolutionary compatriot. But can’t some differences be stronger (I don’t know the right word) than others? Is everything on an even field so much that all objects are the same size and all do the same things? So electro-magnetism and sound waves and television sets and radio towers and narrative are all of equal importance? I guess that’s a choice. So garlic and pasta play an equivalent role in my dinner pasta? It doesn’t seem to me that just because you don’t find something interesting (or that you find it boring) then you don’t have to deal with it. It’s not a difference that trumps all other differences but rather a difference it’s sometimes convenient to ignore. And I didn’t see you dealing with the *problem* narrative causes, while I’m sure you could deal with the problem of electro-magnetism, etc. Until this post, when you code shift for this audience member and ask “why [has] this fantasy … become so ubiquitous in contemporary popular culture?” That’s interesting and I think you’re dead-on with the answers.
Whether the possibility of Life Without People (the title suggests Life as a g-d-term, right? thank G-d that Life got rid of all those!) comforts folks or makes them scared or nervous, though, isn’t the point. It still address an anxiety and proposes a solution they can live with. I don’t think the show raises the question as well as it forecloses it.
I hadn’t recognized that I’d “merely lifted Zizek’s diagnosis of fantasy in abortion debate where you have all the aborted children on an island apart from their parents in Plague of Fantasy,” but I probably did (oh, I can’t escape the unconscious!). But my response to the other post (I don’t know how to link to it, sorry), I think escaped most of my obvious Lacaniansms, right? If I’m allowed to revert for the moment, though, my point was really that the *show* from its inception reintroduces the gaze and the signifier. It’s the structure of tv shows to do that, and especially the structure of narrative, and that has to be dealt with, not just ignored. I still think the show fails you, not the other way around.
On your last critically-not-analytically point, it’s probably fair. What I keep finding frustrating to my thinking through this stuff is its apparent complete disregard of aesthetics (it’s cookery, someone famous once said somewhere). But it’s also how you get people to take their medicine.
My original training was as a poet, after all, and we like the conceit that we sometimes do more than merely describe. So, here’s a poem describing what in my darker moments I sometimes think OOO is up to:
Always
-Mark Strand
(for Charles Simic)
Always so late in the day
In their rumpled clothes, sitting
Around a table lit by a single bulb,
The great forgetters were hard at work.
They tilted their heads to one side, closing their eyes.
Then a house disappeared, and a man in his yard
With all his flowers in a row.
The great forgetters wrinkled their brows.
Then Florida went and San Francisco
Where tugs and barges leave
Small gleaming scars across the Bay.
One of the great forgetters struck a match.
Gone were the harps of beaded lights
That vault the rivers of New York.
Another filled his glass
And that was it for crowds at evening
Under sulfur-yellow streetlamps coming on.
And afterward Bulgaria was gone, and then Japan.
“Where will it stop?” one of them said.
“Such difficult work, pursuing the fate
Of everything known,” said another.
“Down to the last stone,” said a third,
“And only the zero of perfection
Left for the imagination.” And gone
Were North and South America,
And gone as well the moon.
Another yawned, another gazed at the window:
No grass, no trees…
The blaze of promise everywhere.
March 27, 2010 at 1:58 am
Hey Tim,
You write:
With respect to your first question, yes, absolutely. Flat ontology means that all differences equally are, not that all differences are equal in every assemblage of beings. So part of the point is simply good book-keeping. There’s a tendency to erase the other differences altogether. The question of what differences play dominant roles in any configuration is not going to admit of a single or standard answer. That is, certain differences can go from playing a very minor role in a configuration to playing an extremely important role in that constellation due to shifting circumstances. For example, ordinarily pebbles play pretty small roles in social collectives, but when the emperor chocks and dies on one, this very small element has suddenly taken on a very important role.
It seems to me that what you’re trying to suggest is that things like fiber optic cables, electro-magnetic waves, sound waves, etc., play a minor role in analysis of cultural artifacts. This is the sort of thesis that I’m working vigorously to undercut. It’s not that I’m trying to reject the analysis of content or narrative. Not at all. It’s that I think narrative and content analysis has a nasty habit of forgetting these sorts of differences, looking straight through them to content. For example, written text is not simply a passive medium that transports content. When I refer to written text, I am quite literally referring to written text. I am not referring to what the written text is about, what it thematizes, what it discusses, but quite literally (pardon the pun), I’m referring to that chicken scratch on a piece of paper. What we get with written text is a reversal of the relation between form and content. Rather than form following content, we get content following form.
The point is that without written text, in its sheer facticity, nothing like law as we know it, mathematics, philosophy, etc., are possible. It is not here the content that makes the mathematics possible (the semantic properties of a mathematical proposition, for example), but rather it is the medium that renders higher mathematics possible. Without that chicken scratch on a piece of paper you simply can’t form these chains of reasons that can go on for hundreds of pages as in the case of Euclid’s Elements. And quite literally (again pardon the pun), the very nature of our cognition is changed if we develop in relation to text. Our minds work differently than those of folks that do not develop in a milieu characterized by text.
Nor is it simply that our minds work differently. It’s also that very strange types of objects are possible: objects that can’t be spatially located at any precise point, where elements of the object do not have direct relations to all the other elements, and where, even more bizarrely, they can pop in and out of existence. What I’m thinking about here are social collectives that emerge around texts. Take Marx’s Communist Manifesto. We have a text that functions like a catalyst in a super saturated sugar solution bringing together molecules in a new configuration. That is, the text evokes all sorts of other objects (readers) that then form a collective with one another across time and space. Yet oddly, this collective is everywhere and nowhere. The object (the collective) only exists in and through its parts (the individuals that take up the Marxist banner), but that object is something more than any of its parts. This sort of collective isn’t possible without the written word. It just didn’t exist prior to introduction of that sort of difference.
I know I’m not saying anything new here. What I’m saying is largely in accord with Walter Ong, Kittler, McLuhan, and many others. What I’m trying to give you pointers as to how I’m thinking about these issues and what, precisely, I’m objecting to. The fiber optic cables, the electro-magnetic waves, the sound waves aren’t irrelevant differences. Nor are they differences that can simply be subordinated to narrative function as a matter that transmits a content. Why? Because they rebound on and form content. So the point isn’t to create an alternative where we’re being asked to choose narrative content or how media contribute to content. The point is to have a set of theoretical devices that are powerful enough to simultaneously vie with all of these things. Perhaps my post on category theory directly following the “Objects Act” post will shed a little light on just what I have in mind here.
Minimally I am simply asking for a bit of modesty on the part of the theorist. I, of course, understand that for the sake of theoretical investigation it’s necessary to draw distinctions and filter things out or ignore them. That’s unavoidable. The problem is that far too often in the world of theory as it’s currently practiced this entirely justified pragmatic decision, gets transformed into an ontological thesis (whether implicitly or explicitly). It would be fine if this sort of poor book-keeping had no theoretical consequences. The problem is that it has tremendous theoretical consequences. Thus as I argue in my category theory post, the rhetorician that ontologizes narrative, the signifier, language, treating them as a God term that overdetermines everything else ends up looking for the only source of change in the linguistic dimension, forgetting that how the nonhuman, nonsignifying, nonlinguistic actors contribute significantly to collectives. As a consequence, we not only deny ourselves powerful theoretical tools, but also asking the wrong sorts of questions. Part of my strategy thus consists in rendering the “lingua”-centric theorist a bit uncomfortable in his assumptions and pretensions so that these other actants might become a bit more visible. Again, the issue is not one of making a choice and rejecting the sort of analysis you’re proposing. It’s a question of diminishing the obsessive focus on that alone.
Finally, I have no dog in the fight of whether Life After People is an interesting show. I’ve only watched it a couple of times and despite my addiction to nearly all the documentaries that are on the 4 – 7 learning channels, this is never a show that I watch. The thing that launched this whole discussion was Nate’s splicing of the show that all OOO can say is that “objects act” without being able to say anything specific about what objects do and why what they do is important. Nate tends to express himself in these sorts of ways (his zombie posts were the first example of this), and I thought charges against OOO rising to this level of seriousness called for a pretty hard take-down. Implicit in all Nate said was a strong distinction between nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, where somehow OOO is rejecting all that belongs on one side of the equation. He misses the point. Narratives are no less actors for OOO than rocks. And Nate’s suggestion that OOO proposes a gaze from nowhere with no blind spots (i.e., the gaze of God or an omniscient being) is jaw-droppingly unacceptable because Nate knows very well that OOO theorists one and all argue that all objects “interpret” one another, including humans, and only “grasp” one another partially and in a way that never touches another object. Nate’s final paragraph is what, in boxing, is known as a low blow.
I do, however, think, contra Nate (and you?), something much more interesting is going on in the show at the ontological level. What I have found valuable in the few episodes that I’ve watched are insights into something like all of the factors that go into sustaining, say, a power grid. You’ll recall the black out all along the Northeast Coast. Now there are all sorts of narratives, signifiers, texts, and so on that hold human collectives together. But there are also incredibly complex things like power grids. I’ll never forget, for example, how my own life fell apart one evening after bringing Lizzie home from daycare when a drunk driver had knocked out a power line plunging the neighborhood into darkness. Spoken in the fashion of a Bush apologist, “our entire way of life” collapsed for that evening and things couldn’t proceed as they would ordinarily proceed. It was quite the disaster. The point is that these nonhuman actants condition our lives in all sorts of ways (not determining it), creating collectives and serving as the condition for these collectives, and are nonetheless asignifying and non-narrative for all that. That evening, the collective relations between Lizzie and I, our established “customs”, broke down, but also the absence of electricity and it’s pacifying bromide of children’s shows, light, her evening dinner, etc., generated not only tears and antagonisms, but also new collectives as we milled about in the neighborhood with our flashlights, as we chatted sarcastically with neighbors we’d never before met, and as we went off to McDonald’s to get the dinner that she missed that evening and chatted there with other chagrined figures.
My point is that like the manner in which the discrete cells of a slime mold respond to changes in humidity and temperature forming a megaorganism (depicted at the top of this blog page), this asignifying, non-narrative difference generated all sorts of new (albeit highly temporary and fleeting) collectives, relations, affects, etc. All of this tends to be occluded in analysis that focuses far too exclusively on the discursive and linguistic. And it’s no surprise that it does because our mute nonhuman fellow actors tend to do their job pretty well and regularly so we don’t see how they’re differences that are making significant difference. OOO and (in deference to my buddy Michael) OOE (object-oriented empiricism) would like to bring a little voice to these sorts of things. And again the issue isn’t one of denying the sort of analysis you’re proposing, but of blunting its hegemony or imperialism, it’s phallocentrism (couldn’t resist), so as to think something closer to cooking or metereology, than structures.
March 27, 2010 at 2:58 am
You know, I think you’re right on target. I have problems with the show and my point was simply that it doesn’t really do what it seemed to me you said it was doing. It’s not that these other things don’t make a difference (I’m with you; I went bonkers when just my internet was gone for a day); they’re hugely important and bravo for taking on that cause. But what’s obvious and old makes a difference, too. Even if your project depends for rhetorical effect on amplifying the less-obvious, it has to take the old and boring difficulties into account. That said, I don’t think I’m with you on the post-apocalyptic penchant being all that new. Alien-invasion films of the 50s did kind of the same work, the short story I Am Legend and its previous two film versions were pretty successful, too, just like the recent film. But new techniques in film making, my new hd television, all the tech stuff that I don’t know enough about to list but are hugely important, makes it more arresting and startling and engrossing because it’s possible to be more arresting and startling and engrossing. But this show in particular gives a false resolution to a problem it has rigged from the beginning, and that’s the nature of narrative. Strip it of voice-over and do some kind of Koyaanisqatsi-treatment to it and it might make me do something more than shrug my shoulders. (btw, loved the Simpsons’ Koyaani-Scratchy thing the other night)
To your points about written texts, I say “right on!” One of my teachers at Loyola is a textual critic who works with that exact thing. And I don’t think that they are “differences that can simply be subordinated to narrative function as a matter that transmits a content.” But going the other way too far seems a little second-wave-feminism.
Nate can defend himself, but I think he’s probably on to something, too, at least as a reminder that there’s always a mediation going on (via language AND lcd and electricity and…), and convincing the unconvinced is work worth doing. He’s clearly open to it or wouldn’t keep reading and participating (he’s not trolling, I don’t think). And you’re clearly open to the work or you wouldn’t respond so much and so well. Anyway, you goaded him for a long while re: not being forceful or provocative enough. You *literally* asked for it.
And, hey, thanks very much for a day of writing and thinking like I haven’t had in a very long time. Cheered me up hugely and may have actually primed the pump for some actual work-writing I’ve been avoiding.
T
March 27, 2010 at 4:15 am
Tim,
I appreciate what you’re saying here, but ontologically I just can’t accept what you’re saying about mediation. When taken to its logical conclusion this thesis commits one to the equivalent of young earth creationism because what you’re in effect claiming is that any claim that purports to speak of beings independent of a relation to or mediation by the human is, strictly speaking, meaningless. In effect, the conclusion that follows is that to be is to be in a relation to the human. This is roughly what this entire discussion has been about. Now the person supporting the sort of mediation you’re speaking of can protest and say that they don’t buy into all the theological trappings of young earth creationism. The problem is that it still ends up amounting to the same thing, that being must be mediated by the human. This is why the thesis about narrativity generates so much hostility because what it contains coiled within it is this hypothesis; to wit, the thesis that any statement about beings independent of humans is, strictly speaking, meaningless or merely a statement that “beings act”. This is the conclusion to be avoided and the circle to be squared is how it is possible to preserve the best intuitions of the last two hundred years of social analysis while simultaneously avoiding this unacceptable conclusion. This is the reason I sent you After Finitude a year or so ago.
March 27, 2010 at 5:24 am
[…] Larval is up with a post responding to the use of narratives in works of realism. This is great time to raise this question, […]
March 27, 2010 at 6:23 am
Hey Levi,
One last response, I promise:
http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2010/03/no-escape.html
March 27, 2010 at 2:40 pm
You’re right, of course, and the mediation-line was a Burkean goad (I should’ve used a winking emoticon). But I suppose what I also meant was to admit simply that whatever message I might be sending out does indeed go through wires, is blips on my screen and electricity and grammar and idiom and education and all sorts of objects that I may or may not take a count of that none the less have an effect. Isn’t this a kind of mediation? I categorically don’t think that being must be mediated by the human. But I do (still) think that statements by humans have humans involved. It seems to me that ignoring that any “statement about beings independent of human beings” is also a statement (as well wires and electricity and …) has problems, too. Amplifying the issues we want to discuss is what we have to do (you said so yourself), but we’re not stating these beings, we’re making statements about (around, etc.) them. There are (still) scientists and engineers at my university who don’t think writing is important for their students to study because writing is transparent, language has a one-to-one correspondence with what’s being described, and I would think that a point of any object-oriented program would be to say that there’s more going on here, perhaps more than one (can) recognize. I’m not saying (and don’t think Nate has ever said) that such claims are meaningless. I just think it’s sometimes useful to remember that they are also claims.
Thanks again for the fun. I don’t see how you guys can keep this up and still get to all the tv we all need.
March 27, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Tim,
If you are inclined or have the time you might want to check out the two manifestos in the righthand sidebar. These outline the core argument as to what entitles us to speak of independent entities. No disagreement with what you say here. A key thesis of OOO is that objects “withdraw” from one another. What the idealist tradition sees as unique to the human-world relation, the OOO theorist argues is true of all relations to objects. So just as, for example, my eyes and brains transform light waves, producing colors and certain shape patterns, when two nonhuman objects interact with each other they transform the inputs they receive from one another. All of this is just a way of saying that mediums always contribute differences. I call this “translation”, where translation is lifted from the domain of linguistics and generalized ontologically to all interactions between objects whether they be human-object, animal-object, object-object, and complex assemblages of all. The emphasis here is on the manner in which a translation is something new, i.e., the object translating another object produces a new quality not identical to the input it received from the other object. The key thing to be avoided, however, is the reduction of the “giving” object to the property produced by the receiving object in the process of translation.
March 27, 2010 at 7:03 pm
I see this de-throwning of narrative at work in both fiction and poetry of the “experimental” mode, and for not unsimilar concerns.
http://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com/2010/03/poetry-myth-philosophy-haunted-house-of.html
March 29, 2010 at 7:18 pm
[…] more I think about the recent discussion surrounding Life After People and narrativity (here, here, here, and here), the more it seems to me that what is at stake is something similar to what Marx […]
April 24, 2010 at 12:42 am
“When taken to its logical conclusion this thesis commits one to the equivalent of young earth creationism because what you’re in effect claiming is that any claim that purports to speak of beings independent of a relation to or mediation by the human is, strictly speaking, meaningless. In effect, the conclusion that follows is that to be is to be in a relation to the human.”
Thank you! As a YEC with a philosophical bent, I’ve come to essentially this conclusion. I look forward to following this discussion. I consider this a form of humanism (in the best sense of the word).