This week my students and I began exploring Meillassoux’s After Finitude. The first chapter of Meillassoux’s After Finitude begins with a call to rehabilitate the discredited distinction between primary and secondary qualities. It will be recalled that secondary qualities are purely relational, existing only in the interaction between the body and the object or the subject and the object, whereas primary qualities are qualities that are in the object itself, regardless of whether any body or subject relates to them. Generally primary qualities are treated as any qualities that can be mathematized or quantified (extension, duration, mass, wavelengths, numerical temperatures, and so on). When elucidating secondary qualities Meillassoux gives the nice example of the pain you feel in your finger when burnt by a candle flame. To be sure, the candle flame causes this pain, but it cannot be said that the flame has pain as one of its qualities. The pain only exists in the relationship between my finger and the flame. Thus, in the traditional sorting of primary and secondary qualities, qualities like colors, tastes, textures, scents, sounds, pains, pleasures, and so on are all purely relational in character. And insofar as these qualities are all relational, it cannot be said that there is anything like colors, tastes, textures, scents, pains, and pleasures in the world itself.
read on!
Generally the sorting between primary and secondary qualities is designed to distinguish between what is objective and subjective. When my friend and I share a bottle of wine together and he finds it sweet and I find it to be hearty and robust, we don’t dispute one another’s experience of the wine because we recognize that how the wine tastes is a question of how the two of us are put together. In the lexicon of onticology, the two of us translate the wine differently because of our endo-relational structures or compositions. By contrast, when we place a gold statue in a tub full of water we both conclude that the statue has such and such a mass based on the displacement of the water in the tub. The former qualities are thus treated as secondary qualities, whereas the latter are primary qualities. The mass is in the gold statue (i.e., mass is, among other things, the power to displace in this way), whereas the taste of the wine is in us.
Kant, of course, complicated all of this. Perhaps the single most fundamental lesson to be drawn from Kant’s Copernican revolution is that there are only secondary qualities. This comes out most clearly as a result of Kant’s treatment of mathematics. The pre-critical philosopher, it will be recalled, wishes to distinguish primary and secondary qualities mathematically. Quantifiable properties of objects are primary qualities of objects because they are mathematical. However, if we follow Kant, this thesis can no longer be sustained because mathematics is grounded in space and time and space and time are properties not of things-in-themselves, but of our minds. Whether or not objects themselves are in space and time is something that, according to Kant, we can never know. The cash-value of this move is that we can now explain 1) how we are able to have synthetic a priori knowledge of mathematics through thought alone (rather than observation), and more importantly, 2) how it turns out that these mathematical truths apply to appearances in the world.
The price to be paid is that our knowledge is now only a knowledge of appearances or phenomena (not things-in-themselves), which amounts to the claim that there are only secondary or relational qualities. Kant doesn’t think this is a very high price because what matters is that we all come to the same conclusions in our measurements and mathematical calculations. Truth now becomes a matter of intersubjective consensus grounded in subjects sharing the same transcendental structure of subjectivity, rather than an adequation between thought and thing-in-itself. As a consequence, the category of primary qualities is abandoned altogether and the category of secondary qualities has to be complicated. Where before secondary qualities were the domain of the subjective, we now have two types of secondary qualities: the subjectively subjective and the subjectively objective. The subjectively subjective secondary qualities are qualities like tastes. These remain variable both in a single individual and between individuals. By contrast, the subjectively objective secondary qualities are qualities subject to quantification. If these categories are objective, then this is because we share the same transcendental structure of mind and therefore these properties are intersubjective. If these properties are nonetheless subjective, then this is because they exist only as relational.
At any rate, setting all these intricacies aside, one of the fascinating things about secondary qualities is that they don’t seem to be fixed. Consider the first time you drank coffee. It is likely that as a young person you found coffee revolting and immediately proceeded to dump all sorts of sugar and creme in your cup. At least, this was my experience. However, now, after many years of drinking coffee, not only do I find coffee delicious, but I find coffee saturated with creme and sugar revolting. Likewise with works of art. It is likely that the young child encountering Shakespeare for the first time finds him dull and uninteresting in comparison to his fantasy novels filled with dragons, warriors, and sorcerers. Yet later these fantasy novels come to be experienced as dull and uninteresting and Shakespeare’s plays set one’s mind alight. Similarly, a pinot noir might initially be experienced as bland and without character, yet as the person drinking the wine begins to discuss its properties with another person drinking the wine, somehow the taste of the wine seems to change and it shifts from being uninspired to being inspired.
What is going on in these cases? How is this possible? Compare a Kantian-Deleuzian account of experience with a Humean account of experience. For David Hume our impressions or sensations (qualities) are given and synthesis is only subsequently exercised on the atomic sensation through association. The idea of a quality changing is literally unthinkable. For the Kantian or the Deleuzian, however, the quality or sensation is itself the result or product of a synthesis. When Kant argues both 1) that maths are based on synthetic a priori propositions, and 2) that maths are based on inuition, he is quite literally treating maths as constructive in the sense of bringing new intuitions into existence, rather than simply passively receiving them as given. They have to be built. So what is going on here is a genesis of receptivity. Receptivity or how we qualitatively receive the world is not something that is simply “given”, but somehow is something that is built, that develops, and that changes.
So this is something I’d like to understand. How is this sort of genesis of receptivity possible? How is it possible that I can go from finding coffee revolting to finding it delicious? How is my experience of Shakespeare transformed such that I pass from finding him dull and boring to finding him beautiful and heart-pounding? In these sorts of cases it is not that I have somehow been duped or that I am deluding myself. Quite literally my qualitative experience of the object has been transformed. New qualities come into existence for me. But how does this take place? This question, I think, is significant not only for questions of aesthetics (isn’t it amazing that somehow discussion of works of art can transform our experience of works of art?), or tastes and sensations, but also for cognitive orientations to the world. I suspect, for example, that the hard-right conservative quite literally dwells in a world that is fundamentally different than mind, populated by very different local manifestations of objects and events, and local manifestations that are entirely invisible to me. Yet how is this possible, what processes take place, leading to these different forms of receptivity. Perhaps one feature that distinguishes humans from other animals (and these would be differences of degree) is that our receptivity is not hard-wired but seems to itself learn and develop, allowing new signs to populate our world. Yet I confess that I find the process by which this takes place entirely mysterious.
Larval Subjects . 
March 26, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Might not a possible “answer” to your question be embodied (yes) in Malabou’s notion of the plasticity of the brain?
March 26, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Levi,
You ask:
How is this sort of genesis of receptivity possible?
In an attempt to “man up” (advice from a wise friend) my answer would be because of narrative. For example, when I was 18 I had no fear of riding in a car without a seat belt. However, after a serious car accident (irony of ironies, an 17-18 year old ran a red light and t-boned my car) when I was 24, I currently find myself often anxious well before entering any automobile, and buckling up whenever possible.
My point is that narrative – something you stated in your response to me in “Objects Act” is both(?) a form of translation and an object – gives significance to our dealings with the things around us. It creates black boxes, so that our reception of things is pre-translated, whether we recognize it or not. In other words, we approach an object that “appears” or “looks like” a hammer, as if it were a hammer we were familiar with.
I’m thinking here of those cigarette lighters in the shape of a gun. You know, the ones where you pull the trigger and a tiny flame appears in place of a bullet. If unknown to me that the gun was really a lighter, I would approach the gun as a real gun – because previous narratives about guns have created a black box for all things resembling a gun for me. However, if I discovered what the gun-lighter was, and how it worked my reception of guns might change (I might be a little less cautious).
March 26, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Nate,
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. They begin with the entirely legitimate insight that things like narrative and signifiers influence our experience in important ways and naturally wish to understand these dynamics. The problem is that the rhetorician then proceeds to ontologize, hypostasize, and universalize this legitimate insight, treating it as the way these things takes place. My point thus isn’t that I disagree that narratives can produce such a genesis, but rather that you’re here overstating your case and generalizing what is specific. First, I simply don’t agree that all human affects are bound up with the domain of significance and narrative as you seem to suggest. For example, I don’t think your analysis would work very well in athletics where the body develops new powers of acting and receiving, but where narrative plays a rather minor role. Second, it wouldn’t work at all in the case of other animals where narrative isn’t at all present but where animals have capacities to learn comparable to our own. I suppose one of the points of avoiding the hegemonic fallacy as I’ve outlined it consists precisely in avoiding hegemonic explanations such as you’re proposing where, to employ Burke’s lexicon, certain terms like “mind”, “concept”, “economics”, “narrative”, etc., come to function as God terms in which everything else is to be grounded.
Naturally because rhetoricians are rhetoricians they want to talk about rhetoric and because they want to make what they do important (which it is) they want to make everything rhetoric (ontologize it). The case is similar with philosophers who want to make everything texts and concepts. The hegemonic fallacy occurs not with wanting to talk about rhetoric or concepts, but when these things become god-terms trumping everything else. Hence my objection to your analysis of Life After People. You could only see it in negative terms (in terms of what it is lacking) because it didn’t have what you want to find in it (narrative). And because of this you couldn’t see the positivity of what is in it.
I would also add that I think John’s suggestion gets much closer to the point. The condition for narrative transformation is grounded in a more general and more basic set of conditions, to whit, neural plasticity. Narrative transformation is a sub-set of how receptive transformations can take place, with all of these sets being grounded in neural plasticity. Neural plasticity would thus be the genuine transcendental condition for these various generative processes. Of course, the question then becomes one of working out the mechanics of this more basic model. One things that makes the question of the genesis of receptivity so interesting is that it somehow takes place through receptivity. Somehow it creates a new receptivity based on the existing receptivity. I come to like the coffee that I found revolting through drinking the revolting coffee (incidentally I don’t think narrative tells us much of anything as to how these affective transformations take place with the cultivation of taste in things like coffee).
March 26, 2010 at 4:45 pm
Question: if I remember correctly, you teach at a CC. How do you get to teach such fun books there?
(I don’t mean this as snark or anything. I’m really curious, both professionally and pedagogically.)
March 26, 2010 at 5:09 pm
Full time faculty have exclusive rights to assign course material within the philosophy department so long as they meet the state guidelines for the courses.
March 26, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Right. But I guess what I’m asking is what kind of classes you’re teaching that you can responsibly use such texts – the generic Intro, Ethics, Social / Political slate doesn’t really give you room or cover to do Meillassoux, does it? I mean, I can see how you could do the Malabou book on the brain in an intro class. But you need a lot of background to get what Meillassoux is doing, and it’s hard to see how you do that in any less than an upper division elective.
March 26, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Hi Levi,
Long time listener; first time caller. I’ve been catching up on the blogs and’m finding this bit really fascinating (especially since I have a long-time distrust of Life After People).
The problem (it seems to me) with the show is precisely the one you ascribe (incorrectly, I think) to the rhetorical. The show is called Life After People, after all, so in its title it claims that it is going to tell a (it presents it as *the*) story (narrative) of the world once it has lost people. That is, what you’re misreading as Nate’s propensity for viewing the show in terms of what it is lacking is-and-is-not the basic premise of the series itself (Nate’s not adding narrative; he’s objecting to it). It’s not that the show is about lack, but that – by virtue of the narrative it performs (rhetoric is the investigation of performance, after all) – it transmutes lack into loss. Or, rather, like all narratives, it supplies an answer (the world after folks are gone) that then retroactively generates its own question, its own cause. So it seems to me that what Nate is having a problem with is the show’s narrativity. It’s not about objects, but uses “objects” to describe the place of what is, in the conceit of the series, lost by (its) nature.
Relations are narratives. They are always as much about loss insofar as they are about finding (translation is about losing some words by finding their appropriate counterparts, so I suppose difference is a narrative, too).
Or, maybe we could say it’s a show about fantasy. For the environmentalist, the series offers the obvious fantasy that the world goes on without people and that nature, by its nature, always wins (there’s not nothing). George Carlin made this point in the 90s by suggesting that plastic is a problem for the Earth; maybe the Earth wants plastic and so made us a means of getting plastic. Better, though, the show is a fantasy for those who don’t really care about the ecological concerns. For these folks, the series offers a world in which everyone is gone (through some un-named apocalypse), but I’m here, comfortable enough (read dead enough) to enjoy the story of it.
The problem with the show is *its* narrativity, not one being read into it. It takes the nothing-ness (not nothing, as Colette Soler demonstrates somewhere) and carves it up into differences in much tha same way G-d does in Genesis one (separating light from dark, land from water, and calling it good) or in the way the polymorphously perverse infant’s body is carved up. That is, and I’m stretching (thinking) here, perhaps the world of the show is like those animals in the second chapter of Television who are homme-sick, shaken in whatever way by the unconscious (which, I guess, perseveres after people, too).
On other various points, Burke also (in Rhet of Religion) describes how words become tinged with the supernatural and that this supernatural flavoring has to be taken into account whenever they’re used (rhetoric would insist on attention to all of the possible uses of certain words even after claims that “I only mean it this way”). So, an insistence on the way things are described is as important as the point being made. Language, though some scientists don’t understand this, is not transparent. Also, since Aristotle claims that rhetoric has no subject, perhaps it’s the only discipline that can tackle object-orientation (I’m trying to be funny here). Finally, while I understand that you can say that narrative is an object, etc., and that it’s turtles all the way down, this seems too much like the rabbinic rhetorical habit of closing off a conversation by saying “It was given to Moses at Sinai” or that “It is a mystery.” It’s a way of exiting, not an answer.
March 26, 2010 at 5:37 pm
How does this differ from Wittgenstein’s sad man’s-happy man’s world thought figure, as it contains both narrative function and use (which seems analogous to a brain plasticity argument)?
March 26, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Levi,
This question, as it pertains to something like Shakespeare, seems to be a fairly straightforward matter of relation. The first time one reads (usually, has to read) Shakespeare, one doesn’t have a very strong or complex set of relations established to the literature and therefore you could say one simply is receptive to less of it. It has less force on one’s sensibility. But, as one reads more, learns more about the relevant history, becomes more comfortable with the vocabulary, etc., the relation to the text becomes more and more well-established.
I think you’re right that the questions is tougher when it regards a taste for coffee or an athletic ability. However, it would seem to boil down to the same thing; the difference would be that establishing the more developed (or sometimes just differently developed) set of relations has to do very little with consciousness. But you’re right: it would have to do with altering receptivity to a certain sensation or action precisely through repeating said sensation or action. I’m put in mind of the way Aristotle think about habit & virtue. One becomes virtuous by doing what the virtuous person does, just as one becomes strong by doing what the strong person does (albeit in measured amounts). It would just be a question of translating this terminology of habit beyond the narrower realm of consciousness and volition and into that of actors generally (to which things like taste buds, neurons, and muscles would all belong).
Incidentally:
Assuming that was a typo, it was nevertheless well mis-typed.
March 26, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Fullcity,
Says who? This semester we’re doing Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Kant’s Prolegomena, Meillassoux’s After Finitude, and Latour’s Prince of Networks. Not only is the background there, but these texts all deal with basic questions of epistemology and metaphysics. What do you see as the function of an Intro to Philosophy course and what would you propose instead?
March 26, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Hi Tim,
I suppose that what I’m objecting to is the very use of these Lacanian categories like lack and loss, fantasy, gaze, retroactivity, etc. I take it that these are examples of the worst form of “wild analysis” where the categories are used as templates and whatever material we’re discussing is forced into these frameworks. Texts and cultural artifacts, unlike analysands, can’t respond and indeed, even in the clinical setting categories are never used in this way but are sign posts for the analyst to determine his own interventions. The problem is more significant yet in that in the analytic setting the analyst gets confirmation of his interventions through subsequent material that emerges following the intervention, whereas in the wild analysis of the cultural studies folk there is no subsequent material that comes forward allowing interventions to be tracked.
I’m being unfair here, but more to the point, this sort of analytic template then becomes a totalitarian tool, not to mention a metaphysics in the worst possible sense that rejects any other actors or agencies. But above all, it’s boring! We’ve heard all these analyses hundreds of times and they never are surprised by the phenomena we’re trying to investigate. Where the clinical setting allows for the overturning of all prior psychoanalysis in an encounter with the analysand (exemplified in Lacan’s complete reworking of psychoanalytic theory in his encounter with Joyce), in the cottage industry of psychoanalytic cultural interpretation we instead get the Aristotlean practice of subsuming cultural artifacts under pre-existent categories. Aren’t these bad interpretive habits that we would be well to be done with, adopting a far more pluralistic stance allowing for a variety of different approaches? Instead, what we get with these sorts of templates is the endless repetition of interpretations that find their theory in what is interpreted rather than treating what is interpreted as generative of new theory. It’s the same sort of mentality and temperament that leads some Lacanians to smugly mock Guattari and La Borde clinic for using insulin shots in their work with schizophrenics. One wonders what a smug Lacanian of this sort would have to say about the treatment of heart conditions with pace makers, or depression with paxil.
The problem in what both you and Nate are proposing is that because of these categories you’re unable to see exactly what is there right before your eyes. Let’s go back to what Nate actually said at the end of his original post:
Nate makes some rather strong claims here. On the one hand, he claims that ontology becomes entirely blind when the human subject is removed. On the other hand, he makes the claim that somehow all an object-oriented ontology can claim is that objects act. Let’s take both claims in their turn. What OOO rejects is not subjects but the thesis that everything that is said of being is to be said of being for a subject. This is an entirely different claim than the rather ugly one that Nate is suggesting. What is being rejected here is the correlationist or idealist thesis that somehow beings are what they are because they are made to be so by a human gaze, language, categories, narratives, etc., etc. Here I think the missing element distinguishing your/Nate’s and my own position is that of reference. I clearly advocate a referential dimension to language (being a good realist), a dimension of language that has the capacity to refer to something other than language, where as Nate (and yourself) are implicitly making the claim that narrative makes the thing what it is (the two of you being the good Lacanian idealists that you are where the referent is an effect of the signifier).
The second and more substantial point is that it is ridiculous to suggest that all OOO can say is the vapid and trite statement that “objects act!”. No! We can talk about how objects act. And this, not the endlessly monotonous thesis about narrativity circa 1990s theory and all the usual suspects coming out of the structuralist tradition, is what makes the show interesting. The interest of the show isn’t that it tries to depict a world without narrative. The interest of the show is that a) we are made witness to all of the various activities of objects in a world where their upkeep is no longer maintained by humans, and b) likewise we are made aware of the role that objects play and all the work it takes to maintain them in our world where there are humans. And this is where I suggest that Nate’s and your own rhetorical stance prevents you from seeing the very thing that is there at the heart of the show because you’re too busy applying an interpretive template to the show based on narrativity to see the truly interesting thing: all those things that objects do to allow our world to sustain ourselves. Just as the typical male is only able to see a woman as someone who doesn’t have a penis (i.e., as being the lack of what he is) rather than as someone who does have such and such characteristics, all you’re able to discern is something that is attempting to not have narrativity rather than something that is attempting to take narrativity out of the picture so we can see what objects do in fact do.
Now let’s talk about what makes your and Nate’s analysis interesting. Let us distinguish between first-order observation and second-order observation. A first-order observation would simply take the show at face value talking about the events that occur in the show. You and Nate are proposing a second-order observation where you are observing not what takes place in the show, but rather are observing the observer implicit in the show (the paradoxical gaze that is there and not there) and it is this that allows you to make the claims about gaze, fantasy, and significance that you’re making. In doing so you’re able to identify a fantasy at the heart of the show because of the gaze that it presupposes. Well I’ll one up you both and propose a third-order observation of the rhetorician that observes the show through second-order observation that had critiqued the first-person observation. Where you and Nate are trying to reveal the blind spot of the show itself when taken at the level of first-order observation, I will now ask what is the blind-spot of the rhetorician that practices the art of second-order observation. And I will propose, through my wizbang third-order reflexive observation of the rhetorician, that the blind-spot is that of a blindness to objects. And here the cash-value of my critique of the rhetorician through third-order reflexive observation is that the correlationist rhetorician (the McLuhanians, Kittlerians, Bogostians, etc., wouldn’t be guilty of this… Basically all of those who approach rhetoric in terms of rhetorical ecologies) contributes to the hegemony of capitalism and the environmental problems we face by promoting a blindness to non-human, non-narrative, non-signifying objects. If this is so, then this is because we simply cannot analyze our current historical moment and environment, economics, energy crises, and new global social configurations without giving nonhuman actors a significant place. Yet all of this is occluded in the sort of narrative analysis you’re proposing.
Let me soften my rhetoric here a bit– this discussion is extremely irritating to me because I think the stance you’re advocating represents the quintessential expression of everything that’s been wrong with continentally inflected theory in the last thirty years (i.e., in Burkean terms reducing everything to the agency of language). The theory that I am proposing is pluralistic, rather than totalitarian like the stance the two of you are advocating. I am not rejecting the claims you make about second-order observation (despite the heated rhetoric of my first paragraph), but am diminishing it and qualifying it as only one aspect of what’s going on in the show. 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. The problem with what Nate and you are proposing is that you treat only one type of difference as the important difference (signifying differences). I’m all for signifying differences but they are only one type of difference. It’s your hyperbole I’m objecting to. That said, I’d throw the whole lot of you out of the academy and shut down all presses, journals and conferences that promote this sort of hegemony were I given the chance! I think this sort of linguistic idealism is a menace and that few things have been more disastrous than theory done in the spirit of Lacan’s aphorism that “the universe is the flower of rhetoric”. I kid, I kid.
March 26, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Easy, tiger. I’m not trying to annoy or raise your ire. I’m seriously asking questions.
There are lots of ways to do Intro classes. I’ve done one basically focused on all the foundational stuff that my students would need to know to actually be responsible citizens in a democratic society – Federalist papers, etc. So I’m not presupposing that there is any one ideal schema. But my experience in teaching intro classes has shown me that ambition in course construction is not always rewarded – can an intro level student really understand why correlationism is such an interesting conceptual intervention in American Continental circles? And can they understand Latour (much less Harman) without some exposure to SSK, primary Latour texts, etc? Here again, I’ve taught Latour in a philosophy classroom, so I’ve got some idea of the difficulties in making him work pedagogically. Hell, even Kant’s prolegomena can be overwhelming for freshman and sophomores.
I’m all for challenging students. I’m all for doing cutting-edge stuff in the classroom – philosophy didn’t end with Kant, and we shouldn’t teach it as if it did. But I wonder if the extremely heavy lifting you’re going to have to do in teaching this particular slate of texts won’t be met with more confusion than anything else.
March 26, 2010 at 7:03 pm
[…] trying to take away their toys (as can be seen in my recent heated discussion with Nate and Tim, see the comments). Michael quite rightly points out that a central feature of object-oriented […]
March 26, 2010 at 7:18 pm
Hi Full,
I’ve been teaching for about a decade now and have always proceeded in this way. I’m not entirely in disagreement with you. Sometimes things work, at other times they don’t. Thus, for example, when I recently taught We Have Never Been Modern, I found that this categorically did not work. The text, as great as it is, just presupposes too much and is not put together very well. I do think, however, that difficulty is pretty much par for the course with philosophy and our intro students. In other words, for the intro student no philosophical text is easy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re teaching Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Mill’s Utilitarianism or Division 1 of Heidegger’s Being and Time. They find it all difficult. In my view, the aim of an intro course is not so much mastery of the texts– hell we labor our entire life trying to master texts –so much as it is a question of acquainting them with basic questions, reasoning and relations between premises and conclusions, key concepts, and the cultivation of textual hermeneutics. With Meillassoux, for example, I don’t think the issue is one of showing them how correlationism is an interesting intervention in Continental circles (they lack the background to find that important), but rather to acquaint them with the debate between realism and anti-realism and how Meillassoux is attempting to navigate that debate. This question can stand fairly well on its own, independent of its broader context, and especially after they’ve worked through Kant’s Prolegomena and understood its basic argument and what led Kant to that argument.
Maybe a better way of thinking about it is in terms of the game of darts or pool. Suppose you take a semester long course on darts. It’s unlikely you’re going to be a master dart player by the end of that semester. Nonetheless, you will have beginning foundations that you can begin to build on. It’s the same with philosophy. They have to start somewhere, it’s all difficult for them, but they do gradually develop understanding over the course of the semester. Classroom discussion is lively and engaged in my courses, the students generally do fairly well on their essays and quizzes, and when they take subsequent courses with me (which is a common occurrence) they surprise me by drawing on material that they’ve studied in their prior courses with me. I should also add that Collin is pretty unusual for a 2 year school. Most of the students here are university caliber students completing their general requirements before they go on to University because the state got rid of tuition caps and university costs skyrocketed. They tend to be fairly good writers, readers, and thinkers to begin with. And surprisingly, they end up devouring these things. As for Meillassoux, he’s an exceptionally clear philosopher that clearly outlines his arguments. He’s actually a relief after Hume and Kant.
March 26, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Levi,
An interesting approach! All the intro-to-philosophy classes I’ve seen (including the one I took in undergrad) generally take a more great-historical-philosophers approach, with exclusively pre-20th-c material, usually stuff that “everyone” would agree was Really Important. A reading list of, e.g.: Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Mill, Nietzsche. Not necessarily the best way to actually introduce people to philosophy, but I suspect it might be chosen to avoid controversies, in that if you were in a department where such things are contentious, someone might object to Meillassoux, but nobody is going to really object to Hume, even if they don’t like him.
March 26, 2010 at 8:16 pm
In Response to a Response:
http://un-cannyontology.blogspot.com/2010/03/in-response-to-response.html
March 26, 2010 at 9:37 pm
[…] 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 […]
March 26, 2010 at 10:05 pm
Hi Levi,
Wow. My guess is I’m pushing myself into a conversation I don’t know most of. So, by way of a traditional apologia, any temperament-ality on my part (and I’d guess on Nate’s, as it seems to me he’s asking and not claiming, though I shouldn’t speak for him) is a kind of frustration. But probably a personal kind, since I’m really interested in the ideas I find here and elsewhere (though I visit *way* too infrequently to be considered a participant, clearly) but haven’t really found yet how these ideas, as fascinating and exciting as they clearly are, can be useful for me in my field. I’m inferring (though I wouldn’t say that you imply it) that one answer is that my field doesn’t matter for OOO, which is clearly a possibility and in that case it’s fine to stop reading. But it’s difficult not to want to participate, and if I sound snide it’s likely my own frustration at clearly not getting something.
Anyway, to your very fine points. If I’m guilty of wild analysis, sorry ’bout that. My hope was that I could translate thoughts into a common language we share, but clearly something is lost in the translating. I’ll try not to use Lacan henceforth (we’ll see if I can; in the nineties I was on a Nabokov listserv where anytime someone mentioned Freud s/he was made to shut up because Nabokov didn’t like Freud and I didn’t last very long since I didn’t and don’t know Russian, which was what most of the posters studied). I’ll try to use other tools that maybe aren’t as sharp for me lately. But I’m a fan of other tools, too. You know full well that I’m a fan of pacemakers.
But I’m not sure psychoanalysis invented lack. And the point wasn’t really about lack anyway (that argument really is boring), but a claim at something being “lost.” That’s a claim made by the show in its title. I don’t think I’m adding something or reading into it when I take the title at its word. And each episode is clearly a narrative. It has a narrator, after all, who tells us the stories of things once people are missing. The fact that people are gone is something the narrator reminds us over and over. The rhetorician in me asks the obvious question, Why is he telling me this over and over? Again, I don’t think that’s so much analytical as just an honest response as an audience member. You’re right, I think, in characterizing rhetoric as making me blind insofar as I can’t get past seeing the tv show as a tv show; that is, as a performance addressed to an audience). My response as both an audience member (and a rhetorician) is then, Who is the audience this is addressed to? Clearly not me, since the show leaves me a little bored and a little perplexed. The show says something like “and the Statue of Liberty crashes into the ocean” and I think first, so what? and second (this in my pointy rhetorical-analytical hat) isn’t it really “Something somethings into something? Each of these somethings are different, of course, but the Statue of Liberty is a name that has a meaning and meaning-effect only for people who, as the show says over and over, aren’t here (you might say that we have to call it something and Statue of Liberty works as well as anything else, but that’s pretty much my point, too). So I guess I’d agree, too, that language can clearly refer to something other than language, but not without a bias or motive towards a particular organization that’s predetermined (though sometimes pretending to be dialectical). The point I was trying to make in the earlier comment is precisely *not* that narrative makes the thing what it is, but that narrative is a kind of sleight of hand, a misdirection, that narrative’s function is to say “here it is” by the false solution of an answer to a question the narrative presupposes and then tries to get you to believe you asked. Narrative is a (the?) way of making the thing what it isn’t, at least not completely.
I don’t see in what you quote a claim that “all OOO can say is the vapid and trite statement that ‘objects act!'” but it might be somewhere else in his comment I don’t have time to find right now. Anyway, the point I was trying to make is exactly not that the show is trying to show a world without narrative, but it’s doing exactly the opposite, that it can’t avoid narrative and that narrative is the problem with the show (which means I might like it better without the narrator telling me what to see, I guess, or when something is happening). Your “a)” is what I don’t find very compelling in the show because of everything I’ve just said about loss and narrative, etc. I like plot-driven tv as much as the next guy (despite my complaints above about narrative) but what the show offers seems to me a kind of given and pretty boring. Your “b)” point is really compelling and that might make it more interesting, but my tv plate is a little too full as it is. But as to the rhetorical stance that you claim is making me (and I guess Nate) blind to whatever, the problem is that you’re right. I can’t decide to ignore that it’s tv, that it’s a series addressed at an audience, that choices are made by producers or whoever as to what to show me and that there’s some sort of motive behind it, that they’re telling me a fable (a fantasy in the generic sense) in present tense in order to give me a feeling of immediacy, an immediacy meant (I gather) to make me feel like “you are there” like the old Walter Cronkite school films I grew up on even though the title tells me I’m not, in fact, there. If OOO isn’t interested in dealing with these boring issues, that’s of course completely fine. It may be boring work; so is grading papers, but I still have to do it. It’s my job.
I don’t thing I follow the paragraph about what’s *interesting*. It seems to argue for some kind of analytic hierarchy with maybe an OOO metaphysics at the top? Anyway, the end of the paragraph posits exactly what I was trying (clearly, not well) to argue *against*. I wasn’t trying to propose a narrative analysis but rather complain that the show is a narrative and that narratives like this tv series (in my own poor understanding) work against everything you seem to be arguing for. It is in fact the show itself that promotes “a blindness to non-human, non-narrative, non-signifying objects” from it title to its narrator to its present tense, to …. (one take on its environmental message could easily be “Don’t worry; everything will be taken care of once people are gone and Life can get back to work!). My complaint (ok, I’ll have to go find Nate’s offending remarks later to see what his is) is a complaint that the tv series doesn’t do what you want it to do for OOO. It’s a problem the show, not your project.
Finally, then, I think perhaps the who problem might be the misunderstanding I just hit. It occurred to me when you first mentioned the show a while back that *its* narrativity is a problem for it being on any OOO poster. It’s not that Life After People is “attempting to not have narrativity” but that its rotten with it and that the show itself refuses “to take narrativity out of the picture so we can see what objects do in fact do.” In the terms you propose (gosh, I hope not in mine; I’m trying to stay away from Psychoanalysis), the tv series keeps insisting on the penis as absent? My question may be simply, Why does that man keep talking about the missing penis?
Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to do so much writing and thinking. It’s certainly more than (if not better than) any writing I’ve done in a very long time. It’s been fun to stretch my brain in a new direction. Sorry for being such a tourist. Hope there’s something here worth something to someone else. T
March 26, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Hi Tim,
I think all three of us are talking at cross purposes. First, no, I’m not rejecting your field by any means. As you know I’m quite fond of it. What I’m calling for is a pluralistic mode of analysis. What originally set me off in Nate’s post was his thesis that somehow OOO is rejected to the stance that all we can say is that objects act, i.e., that we can’t say anything substantial about how objects act, what they do, what they contribute and all the rest. Second, you might have missed it due to a lack of clarity on my part, but in all of my posts I’ve conceded Nate’s point about narrativity. I just don’t think the show is about (it’s narrative) is about what you guys seem to think it’s about. Rather than being a show about life after people, I think the show is about how objects behave in the world we exist in right here and now. What I see the show as discussing is how all these little invisible objects function and maintain the world we’re living in. That’s what’s interesting about it.
Have you, by any chance, seen the documentary on what the world would be like without the moon? Angela had a similar reaction to yours with respect to that show. She was like “why the hell do I care about what a world would be like without the moon? we have a moon!” But that, in my view, misses the entire point. What makes the “World Without the Moon” show so interesting is that it discloses or reveals all those things that the moon does do in this world. It turns out that the impact of the moon is pretty extensive. For example, it’s unlikely that life would have evolved as it has without the moon because the world would spin too quickly creating massive winds that would prevent anything beyond small plant-life from developing. The interest of the moon show is thus counter-factual. It presents a situation that doesn’t exist as a way of bringing into relief a set of relations governing what does exist. Likewise with Life After People.
If you take a look at the post I just wrote responding to Nate you might get a better sense of what I take to be an interesting narrative analysis of the show. Part of the problem I have with what you guys are proposing is that you seem to be deploying these rhetorical categories as a means of judging the entertainment or aesthetic value of the show. Why not instead treat the show as symptom belonging to a wider genre. What’s interesting (to me) at the narrative level is just why we’re obsessively trying to imagine our own absence in popular culture. I think a good deal of this revolves around the environmental crisis and, putting on my Levi-Straussian cap, I would say that these sorts of shows, movies, and novels are ways in which culture is mytho-poetically trying to think the possibility of its own disappearance. It doesn’t seem to me that Life After People leads to the sort of conclusion you’re suggesting (that things will just go on) precisely because it doesn’t go on just as before, but with us as absent or gone. While I don’t find this particularly upsetting– in my darker moments I think we’re a pretty wretched species over all –I recently witnessed a discussion on another blog where people were quite traumatized by this possibility. What seemed to disturb them most was the possibility of a universe that doesn’t become conscious of itself and register itself, knowing its own laws through some sort of gaze. Why anyone would find this troubling or traumatic, I don’t know, but apparently this gaze at the absent gaze is quite upsetting for some. Incidentally, with respect to Nate’s dissertation work it seems to me that this is precisely the sort of stuff that he should be focusing on. The uncanny just is that moment where all significance and human gaze has disappeared. It’s that strange moment where paradoxically the gaze is present at the absence of its own gaze.
March 26, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Tim,
Just to follow up, a couple of the key moves of OOO lie in rejecting any distinction between nature and culture. If you haven’t been following the discussions and literature in this stream of thought, this might be part of what’s confusing you. A common first-approach is often that OOO theorists are trying to be “objective” and simply rejecting the subject. This is because the conceptual sorting that is assumed since modernity is that of a strict ontological distinction between nature and culture, where these are two entirely different domains. Consequently, when one hears the term “object-oriented” they immediately leap to the conclusion that the theorist is privileging the nature category and rejecting the nature/subject category. This is not the OOO thesis. Here are some examples of objects:
A rock
The sun
A tree
A book
Tim
Tim’s toenail
A signifier
A television show
The United States
A police officers badge
A married couple
The point of OOO is not that natural objects are the really real objects and that all culture is just BS. For the OOO theorist all the objects I just listed are metaphysically real and are genuine objects. What OOO thoroughly rejects is eliminativism or reductivism of any sort. It doesn’t matter whether that eliminativism moves in the nature to culture direction as in the case of the Churchland’s that want to reduce signifiers to brain neurons, or whether it moves in the culture to nature direction where the aim is to reduce neurons to signifiers. Both are forms of reductivism or eliminativism. OOO rejects either move and treats both the signifier and the neuron as genuine and real entities in their own right. For the OOO theorist there is thus not an object opposed to a subject or a subject opposed to an object, there are just objects. And these objects come in all sorts of flavors.
As for the unfair pacemaker quip, the point isn’t that you don’t appreciate them (I know you do). The question is that of whether or not you have a theory or ontology adequate to accounting for something like what a nonsignifying, nonnarrative, nonhuman entity like a pacemaker does? That’s the issue. Can you talk about pace makers qua pace makers without reducing them to elements of a narrative? Do they enjoy ontological dignity in their own right? Here I think it’s the OOO theorist that’s the moderate in this discussion. The OOO theorist recognizes both the pacemaker qua pacemaker and the narrative and discourse in which its embroiled. It just refuses to base one on the other. The problem with hardcore narrative analysis is that it tries to reduce these nonsignifying actors to their role in signification, denying the entity its own ontological dignity.
March 29, 2010 at 7:18 pm
[…] 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 denounced under […]