Quite an extraordinary discussion has erupted surrounding Eileen Joy’s Swedish Twitter University lecture on SR literary criticism and my follow-up post. Over at Digital Digs, Alex Reid has a post building on the discussion in terms of rhetorical analysis, emphasizing reading as composition or building. At Fractured Politics, Kris Coffield has a great post discussing why there is no object-oriented literary criticism, though not for the reasons you would expect. Building on Alex’s post, Timothy Richardson of Objet (A)thenticity has a post describing the process of writing as building a “thing”. Finally, in comments to my post, Eileen wrote the following wonderful response building on her axiomatics in the Twitter lecture:
Levi, thank you very much for your post here and also everyone else for a very lively set of comments. Since the constraints of the Twitter Univ. lecture allowed for only 25 tweets at 140 characters each, while that certainly allowed me to crystallize some of my thinking relative to what a speculative realist literary criticism might look like [it allowed me, further, to try to develop some “axioms” for further work], it also meant that I wasn’t allowed to unpack all of the cognitive work that has gone into my own personal project of developing new reading modes influenced by certain strains of SR and OOO work [esp. that of Levi, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, Jane Bennett, and Steven Shaviro–and these are not necessarily compatible thinkers: but I like to cobble]. Also, I might change my mind at any given moment relative to one or more of my Twitter Univ. “axioms” [everything in the humanities, I would aver, is always a work in progress, and unlike — perhaps — in philosophy, I’m not personally aiming for anything systematic here so much as I am seeking to expand my toolkit for literary analysis].
I can’t speak to everything in Levi’s post [much of which I agree with] or the comments here, but here are some clarifications I would make relative to what I have read here today:
1. in my own work — and as someone who works in medieval studies, this is partly an outcome of certain historical investments I have — I am actually interested in re-fortifying humanism, but through post/humanist and object-oriented and vibrantly materialist means, in order to make that humanism less oppressive, more ethically capacious, more critically flexible [Andy Mousley and Martin Halliwell coined the term “baggy humanism” in their book “Critical Humanisms”]. I define humanism through a kind of pared-down, bare bones description: the practice of reading, reflection, and writing with the belief that texts offer critical resources for reflection and that [my/our] writing is enworlded and might have some effect on what happens in the world [here, I borrow from the late Edward Said’s idea of “worldly” criticism]. Human beings have some important work to do and the university is an important site for continuing to raise, as Bill Readings once argued [“The University in Ruins”], what the questions of “being-together” might mean, as well as to place thought beside thought, without preconceived notions of what it is “proper” to do, or not do, intellectually. This is also similar to Derrida’s “university without condition,” where we ought to have the right to say anything, and to publish it, even under the heading of fiction. I see this as important, *humanist* work., BUT:
2. It might be important at this particular juncture within the humanities — and under the aegis, perhaps, of new strains of post/humanist thought, including SR and OOO, but also network/media studies, critical animal studies, systems theory, cybernetics, avant garde poetics, and the like — to re-tool traditional humanist practices, like literary criticism, such that they might start to take account of a wider register of the enworlded enactions and effects of things like texts [and please: I know some CURRENT and OLDER reading modes have attended to this, but … keep reading]. Here I would pause for a moment to say that we should try not to get to hung up on the language of which methods [traditional or newer] of analyzing texts supposedly “close” them down or “open” them up. I myself do not want to argue that literary criticism up until now has been mainly intent on closing down texts: I think there are LOTS of ways in which traditional reading modes [whether New Critical or deconstructist or New Historicist or psychoanalytic] have *thickened* our understanding of what texts actually do in the world, as *actants* [after all, isn’t New Historicism interested in the ways in which a text dispenses and circulates certain social energies beyond the intentionalities of an author?], BUT: these critical frameworks have also often only been interested in getting us to see texts in relation to how they are supposedly produced and received by and circulate in human-centric networks/contexts of exchange, meaning, etc. Now, these human-centric networks and contexts matter a great deal, and I would never say to stop paying attention to them [that is why New Historicism, as well as symptomatic/psychoanalytic + skeptical-ideological readings have illuminated so much for us, and will continue to do so, regarding the role of literary texts in history as *actants* in the world that are importantly enmeshed with human life–political, religious, aesthetic, whathaveyou], but I think we can also add to these productive reading models other models for reading that might help us to discern better what might be called the uncanniness, or, folllowing Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book, “alien phenomenology” of literature.
Perhaps this also allows us to revisit Derek Attridge’s “Singularity of Literature,” where he asked us to think about developing a responsible-creative reading that “does not … aim only to appropriate and interpret the work, to bring it into the familiar circle, but also to register its resistance and irreducibility, and to register it in such a way as to dramatize what it is about familiar modes of understanding that make them unable to accommodate this stranger” [p. 125]. This might also be to extend Eve Sedgwick’s formulation of a practice of reparative reading that would seek to find in texts a “plenitude” that could then be bestowed on an “inchoate” reader-self [this is obviously still very human-centric].
3. We might also remind ourselves that a literary text is a special object of *mentation* that relies upon its situatedness within cognitive and other “platforms” and “systems”–human and otherwise–that help to make it intelligible. I’m personally not interested in cognitive approaches to reading literary texts [such as the evolutionary psychological approach to Jane Austen novels seen in the recent work of Joseph Carroll, although I find his project and others like it fascinating–it’s just not “my thing”], BUT, having said that, I have a sneaking suspicion that our cognition is co-extensive with literary texts and in ways we do not fully perceive at present, so I’m pretty sure we should also think about texts as autopoetic systems enmeshed somehow with human autopoeisis, and as Aranye Fradenburg once put it in a lecture on Chaucer, “how do we know where the self ends and Otherness begins”? As Judith Butler put it recently in “Giving An Account of Oneself,” it is precisely because I do not fully know myself, that ethics can begin. I would extend this to say that if I cannot fully know myself, neither can a text fully know itself [which is also like saying: the author is never in complete control of a text], and literary criticism today might work a bit harder to analyze this state of affairs, and OOO and SR are helpful because, in Harman’s theory of objects, for example, his theory of withdrawal helps us to see how everything in the world [us included] is fatally torn between its deeper, autononomous “reality” and its accidents and continually shifting, sensual facades: working/mining the rift between the two is what intrigues me, especially when I consider Harman’s comment that it may be precisely because of this rift that anything [space and time] happens at all. As a medievalist, I’m thus also interested in the temporalities [emphasis on the plural] of reading this opens up.
December 28, 2011 at 1:09 am
Can’t Joy be accused here of begging the question? She claims to want “to re-tool traditional humanist practices, like literary criticism, such that they might start to take account of… things like texts” when in the passage above that she’s said, as a medievalist, she’s actually interested in doing so (reviving humanism i.e.) “through post/humanist and object-oriented and vibrantly materialist means, in order to make that humanism less oppressive, more ethically capacious, more critically flexible”.
She’s claimed to know what “things like texts” are only by assuming that they can be arrived at through post/humanist “materialist means”. But what is the “text”? And why do we need to make them less “oppressive”, among other things? Why is even the notion “humanism” such an onerous one here?
I don’t think Matthew Arnold would have disagreed with her definition of “humanism” either.
December 28, 2011 at 2:02 am
I’m not sure how that’s begging the question as I understand the term. I think she’s articulating a program or hypothesis. I think her point is that we need to shift beyond treating texts as reducible to author’s meanings, reader’s meanings, or historical context and recognize that texts are autonomous entities that can never be fully captured by authors, readers, or history, but that contribute autonomous differences of their own that exceed all that. Consider a parallel from technology. An instrumentalist/humanist conception of technology talks a lot about how humans give ends to technologies and make them what they are, yet what, to paraphrase Kevin Kelly, do technologies want and how do they transform and use us. Another parallel would be from agriculture. We talk a lot about how we use cows and grains, but how do cows and grains use and transform us? It’s a question not of eradicating the human but of shifting through a variety of perspectives in assemblages. But you’d have to ask Eileen.
December 28, 2011 at 1:47 pm
there is a great deal to like in EJ’s gesture but this “is fatally torn between its deeper, autononomous “reality” and its accidents and continually shifting, sensual facades: working/mining the rift between the two is what intrigues me,” leaves me wondering how we would work/mine (even recognize) the rift when we have no access to what is withdrawn (or as I prefer what exceeds our grasp) and so must make do with surfaces? Can we do without the filling in of imagined “deeper” realities and leave things as at least somewhat alien/unknown/open-ended? Wouldn’t the possibilities of new combinations (new circumstances/aspects) do the same freeing/generating work as a “rift” without a heideggerian/theological turn towards getting closer to the origin-ating source?
December 28, 2011 at 3:54 pm
It’s hard to get a handle on that notion of texts as “autonomous entities” and appreciate the nature of their contributions to literary discussions without saying what exactly is the nature of the text first. In a proposition like “x is a text if and only if x is an “object” or “artifact” (in your sense) of which it is true that, given a changing historical milieu of authors, readers and cultural technologies, x can be expected to “contribute autonomous differences of their own” (in Joy’s sense) to reflect that changing historical milieu”, we do seem to be getting the changes but no appreciable basis on which they can occur. Joy hasn’t done the hard work. I think there is a begging of the question, assuming through the changes undergone by texts that there’s something in the nature of textual objects that makes “autonomous differences” possible, but also a kind of postmodernist “preamble” way of talking that’s tantamount to what Stanley Fish has recently called “the new dispensation and its prophets”.
Alex Reid’s lately at “digital digs” (http://www.alex-reid.net) quoted Stanley Fish as saying, in regards to this religious characterization of digital studies, “The digital humanities is the name of the new dispensation and its prophets tell us that if we put our faith in it, we shall be saved. But what exactly is it? And how will its miracles be wrought?” I think the same can probably be asked of SR/OOO literary theory, your and Joy’s formulations of it. The language (I’ve noticed also) is suspiciously that of the theologian who always conveniently blankets a “preamble of faith” over every perceived inconsistency, discrepancy and shortfalls in religious understanding. For example, theologians will ultimately account for the very real problems with the canonical vetting of Old and New Testament scriptural texts by referring ultimately to some notion of “divine inspiration” or the importance of “tradition”. There’s a principle of witness to biblical revelation that, when all else fails, gives cohesiveness to what is an otherwise very fragmented, very controvertible issue of scriptural authority & its sources. So the same can be said about the most contemporary poststructuralist formulations of the nature of the “textual object”: SR/OOO is already fully organized/articulated, it seems, in advance in terms of the same Derridean/Deleuzian categories.
Now I know in your case, Levi, you’ve done the heavy “onticological” work already. I wonder if Joy has, or if even your account of the ‘being’ of the text can support the poststructuralist claims (and digital applications, as in the case of Alex Reid) of your wider SR literary theory. As I’ve already said, the theory stands or falls by it. I suppose that’s why the first postmodernist theorists bypassed this stage by writing the text out of literary tradition, trying to banish it from the literary psyche: at least they’ve been faithful to that “mise en abime” premise of textual origins (I’m thinking here of Derrida’s “Of Grammatology”).
December 28, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Hi Conrad: thanks for your comments here; as someone who has been working for a while now in various post/humanist areas, I have a split view on what might be called the traditional histories [emphasis on the plural] of humanism, in the classical era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. I’ve written on this more extensively in an essay, co-authored with Christine Neufeld, “A Confession of Faith: Notes Toward a New Humanism,” published in the Journal of Narrative Theory, which you can see here:
http://www.siue.edu/babel/JNTIntroductionJoyNeufeld.htm
And by the way, I never meant to imply that texts were “oppressive”–I was talking about humanism + the humanities, in some of its more traditional vectors [Plato, Erasmus, Kant: take your pick]. As has been well demonstrated now [esp. in the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, but more recently, in the work of thinkers like Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Cora Diamond, Iain Hacking, etc.], humanism *does* indeed have an oppressive history grounded in the notion of a supposedly unitary and transcendental liberal humanist subject [what else, since the 1980s especially, has critical theory been about, really, except the dismantling of this myth?]. For myself, in an interview with Kris Coffield that is still under construction, I say,
“. . . on one level the posthuman . . . designates a very unruly yet productive set of discourses in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities that, through various mechanisms (technological, medical, philosophical, etc.), are aiming to either problematize, decenter, dismantle, supersede, or enhance (‘super-size’) the human. But on another level, what the post/human signifies for me that is very important (and which is why I now insert my idiosyncratic backward-slash here between ‘post’ and ‘human’) is that, within the humanities at least, the category of the human still needs to be held onto as an important question, and we are never really beyond the human — if anything, I think we need to work toward getting more, and not less human, if by “being human” we mean understanding better and putting into better practice the ways in which the human species can serve as a special vector of thought (both as a “receiver” of the emanations of movement, affect, and thinking external to the human and as a “transmitter” for re-directing affects and thinking in particularly eudaimonistic directions) that is “attuned” to more capacious and generous modes of being-, living-, and perhaps also dying-together in this world. So, again, with my backward-slash, I mean to denote a state of historical affairs by which, although we may have witnessed a certain dissolution of the liberal humanist subject as the world’s sovereign meaning-maker, as well as the emergence of new non- and quasi-human “intelligent” technologies, such as cybernetics, robotics, and bioinformatics, that may supersede us, while we have also gained new insights into the fact that the “human” has always been unstable, contingent, hybrid, accidental, other to itself, “animal,” etc. (“we have never been human” as Cary Wolfe once memorably put it, thereby also opening up the important question of the historicity of the post/human), nevertheless, the human is always left open as a productive question, both there and not-there at once. . . . I might then tentatively advance that the work of a ‘humanist’ (a label I embrace) today is to locate herself in the space between the ‘there’ and ‘not-there’ of the human, and see what kind of productive work can be done in that interstice — intellectually, socially, culturally, politically, ethically, aesthetically, etc. Humanism still matters, in the sense that one still believes (and I do) that a life devoted to reading, reflection, and writing might play some part in increasing the well-being of the greatest number of inhabitants (animate, inanimate, whathaveyou) of this world.”
Also, in my currently very preliminary ruminations upon the *possibilities* of an SR/OOO-inflected literary criticism, I am decidedly NOT interested in getting at the supposed hidden meanings or deeper realities of texts, by any means. I’m more interested in crafting “vicarious” encounters, in what Graham Harman would call the sensual realm, between objects [reader-objects, text-objects, fictional self-objects, etc.] that might help us to thicken our relationships with things, animate and supposedly inanimate, also heighten our awareness of the world’s complex nonhuman sentience. You can see my first preliminary stab at this here, in an essay of mine recently published in “postmedieval”:
http://siue.academia.edu/EileenJoy/Papers/1242544/Like_Two_Autistic_Moonbeams_Piercing_the_Windows_of_My_Asylum_Chaucers_Griselda_and_Lars_von_Triers_Bess_McNeill
December 28, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Hi [again] Conrad: my comment, posted above, was written before also seeing your second comment here. There is a lot more for me to still ruminate further and respond to [later] relative to your further comments, but for now, I did want to signal my distaste for metaphors like “heavy lifting”–I guess I just really dislike such gymnasium-inflected terms/putdowns. Typically, when at the gym, I don’t “lift” more than 50 or so pounds, so yes, I’m a lightweight. More seriously, though, I myself began reading the SR/OOO literature in depth about 2 years ago. In that time, I have mainly confined myself to such reading and to only very recently, in public lectures and 2 publications [one linked to above], sketching out what I would call very preliminary starting points for a more thorough investigation of how some trajectories of thought in SR/OOO might help us to craft new reading modes in literary studies. I am also an editor and publisher and intellectual symposium/conference/event “producer” [BABEL Working Group, postmedieval, punctum books, etc.], who has invested a hell of a lot of time and energy since about 2004 organizing, publishing, generating various intellectual projects relative to postmedievalisms, post/humanism, OOO/SR, and various other intellectual movements. So, I don’t know how we want to define “heavy lifting” here, but maybe let’s avoid that kind of typification of others’ work, okay, and concentrate on actually helping each other to think through these very complex ideas and their possible value [or lack thereof] relative to the work each of us does within the university today? I have found many of your comments really, really helpful in that regard [for example, your attention to the possibly theological/spiritual language of work in SR/OOO has been brought up before and needs to be discussed: it’s something that concerns me as well, and I also address it in my postmedieval essay, but through a different route: Foucault]. Work through, if you care to, what I’ve actually said and written, and help me out, but don’t presume to know what it is I have done or not done, reading-wise, thinking-wise, or otherwise.
dmf: I think we might *have* to “make do” with surfaces, but your more important point has to do with making new combinations–that’s actually precisely one of the things I very much want to do, and that is also what I gesture to in my postmedieval essay [which “combines,” through a kind of queer act of vicarious causation, Chaucer and Lars von Trier].
December 28, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Both Conrad’s and dmf’s comments [ as well as the posts by Kris Coffield and Alex Reid linked to by Levi here] have also got me thinking about the different *investments* different theorists, situated in different disciplines, might have in thinking about SR + OOO in relation to literary criticism, or analysis of digital media, or rhetoric, or whathaveyou. Perhaps because I also have an MFA in fiction writing and continue to write fiction [and have also made films: waybackwhen], I want to leave a door open [this is just for me, btw] for the development of a critical practice that might also be an artwork or art practice [and vice versa]–Harman’s “throw-down” comment in his essay “On Vicarious Causation” that, now, “aesthetics is first philosophy,” partly inspires my thinking on this. Related to that, and unlike others with very different disciplinary investments than mine, I’m not at all interested in developing and/or propounding [arguing for] some sort of *systematic* SR/OOO literary reading practice. Timothy Morton mentioned recently on his blog [Ecology Without Nature] that Harman would have an essay on OOO literary criticism forthcoming in New Literary History that “outlines a stunningly simple form of OOO literary analysis” that “could easily be taught in grade school.” I personally can’t wait to read this essay, but I can also say that I’m not interested in a “stunningly simple” form of OOO literary analysis; I think that might depress me, actually.
December 28, 2011 at 11:28 pm
Eileen,
thank you so much for a lively exchange of ideas here. I do disagree at places but there’s much I’ve learned, too. A guy like me who likes to think of himself as an enlightened ‘generalist’ has to be ‘au fait’ with current literary trends. I greatly appreciate your taking time from your busy day to answer my objections to SR/OOO theory.
There’s much to think about here and I think I’ll respond in a blog article of my own. Do pop in at http://didiodatoc.blogspot.com later this week and leave a response (if you’d like).
December 29, 2011 at 2:14 am
Conrad: disagreement is productive, and that’s a GOOD thing. I will pop in at your blog as well! Best, Eileen
December 29, 2011 at 2:23 am
…I am decidedly NOT interested in getting at the supposed hidden meanings or deeper realities of texts, by any means.
So what do you think, Joy, of description as a mode of commentary? I noticed in your twitter-course you listed Heather Love’s essay, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn” in which she says:
The encounter between literary studies and sociology that I stage here does not rely on a complete renunciation of the text (to focus, for instance, on books as objects or commodities). Instead, I play out the possibilities for a method of textual analysis that would take its cue from observation-based social sciences including ethology, kinesics, ethnomethodology, and microsociology. These fields have developed practices of close attention, but, because they rely on description rather than interpretation, they do not engage the metaphysical and humanist concerns of hermeneutics. Through studying such models, I suggest we can develop modes of reading that are close but not deep.
Unfortunately I fear her essays falls apart when it comes time to demonstrate by example, as the demonstration turns out NOT to involve close descriptive work of a literary text, but rather (all but New Critical) reflection on how description is used in a particular text (Toni Morrison’s Beloved). But that’s neither here nor there.
She’s put description on the table, and invoked Latour in the process, though OOO is not, so far as I can see, particularly keen on description as a mode of praxis. But it is a way of being serious about the text that isn’t about hidden meanings which, I think, is all to the good.
December 29, 2011 at 2:35 am
I’m not privy to Harman’s NLH piece, but he’s made some interesting remarks which I snagged in a post a few months ago. Here’s most of that post, starting with my framing:
If the real meaning is hidden in the text, what do we then do with that TEXT once we’ve chased MEANING out of its lair? Do we decorate it? Destroy it? Take up residence? What?
Preparatory to thinking about those problems, consider some observations Graham Harman makes his in recent ASK/TELL interview:
A bit later he continues in the same vein:
As with dreams, so with literary texts. Can we think of those hidden meanings, not merely as the objects of critical quest, as prizes to be won through diligent effort, but simply as some of the machinery and scaffolding used to build the text? Keith Oatley talks of literary texts as simulations of real experience. Those hidden meanings are traces of the machinery and scaffolding needed to stage and to run the simulation.
December 29, 2011 at 3:51 pm
kubla, after Pickering (and Derrida pace Levi-Str) I like these experimental engineering models/modes, this is why I talk now in terms of prototypes vs archetypes and maybe we can shift from asking what does some-thing ‘mean’ to what can it do and how might we hack it.
Wittgenstein critiqued Freud’s dream/symptom interpretations b/c he felt that Freud was masking inventions/mashups in the Author-itative name of objective discoveries whereas he should have left them to ‘speak’ or not on their own terms/affectiveness.
and it would seem an interesting related possibility to revive Jung’s notion of dreaming the dream (active imagination) forward if we could understand such in terms of extended/enactive-minds vs kantian sublim(e)ation.
December 29, 2011 at 6:43 pm
Kubla: thank you so much for your VERY rich comments here; I had not seen that Harman interview, although it echos a lot of what I’ve heard him say elsewhere and also in print [it kind of relates to his stance against both the under-mining and over-mining of objects]. As to Heather Love’s essay, it sounds like you and I have a very similar reaction to it: I found much of it wonderfully provocative, but was dismayed at the “example” portion: an altogether overly brief description of a small passage in Morrison’s “Beloved” [although I do think Heather’s attention to the inhuman and distantly neutral elements of Morrison’s narrative technique are worth thinking about further]. I know Heather and have asked her in person more than once if she’s done any reading in the SR/OOO corpus and she doesn’t want to [at present, anyway], which is her prerogative; for now, she wants to stick with figures like Erving Goffman and Bruno Latour and others who do “microsociological” analysis and see where that leads, and I think that’s an admirable project: I’m also VERY interested in thinking about new ways to read literary texts through methods of “flat” description, BUT, where I differ from Love is maybe in relation to this statement early on in her essay,
“If the encounter with a divine and inscrutable message [traditional hermeneutics, going back to Biblical exegesis; think here also of Frank Kermode’s “The Genesis of Secrecy”] was progressively secularized in the twentieth century, the opacity and the ineffability of the text and the ethical demand to attend to it remain central to practices of literary interpretation today” [p. 371].
While Love worries a little bit [and maybe rightly so] about certain humanist values still grounding literary criticism [literature as the historically “privileged site of moral education and self-making” with the critic as the “privileged messenger,” and where the supposed “richness of texts continues to serve as a carrier for an allegedly superannuated humanism”], unlike her, and perhaps because of my reading in the SR/OOO canon thus far, I *am* interested in exploring the “richness” and even [following, perhaps perversely, Derek Attridge] the “singularity” of literary texts as unique *objects* possessing properties, partially withdrawn realities, sensual affects, accidents, a certain “substance,” etc. that relate to but are also never fully capturable within human-centric domains [cultural, social, historical, conceptual, etc.]. And because of my reading of Jane Bennett, I’m also interested in the sorts of “propulsive” tendencies a literary text might have apart from my attempt to capture them within certain hermeneutical schemas, AND, also thanks to Bennett, I’m interested in the ways in which language [poeisis, specifically] — albeit, fatally human but also, thanks to Derrida, inhuman, too — might be used to throw some “sand and grit” into the space between things/objects and their inevitable “slide” into our very human co-option of them. So, again, unlike Love, while I share her interest — immensely, even — in the so-called descriptive turn, I want to get deeper into, and not turn away from, the question of the singularity of literature, but vis-a-vis the decidedly non-correlationist schemas of SR and OOO thought.
BUT, now here is where it gets tricky, and this is where some of Conrad’s comments here become really valuable as [prickly] prods for further thought and discussion: by turning to the so-called “deeper” realities/weird realisms of objects, including literary texts, do we run a risk of a sort of theologically-inflected discourse? Have we now begun describing objects in a way that starts to sound disturbingly familiar to discourses of the sacred, mysterious, divine, etc.? A similar question was raised by Amy Hollywood [a brilliant feminist historian who is a professor at Harvard’s Divinity School] when she responded to a series of sessions on critical animal studies at a meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Siena, Italy a couple of summers ago–she wondered if all of the attention in these sessions on the “animal” as an Other that is inassimilable to/with the human [while, historically, the animal has of course been “constructed” very much in relation to the foundations of the “human”–the “human” can’t exist without it, and this is what we need to get beyond, vis-a-vis critical animal studies] treaded dangerously close to theologically-inflected discourses on Otherness: were we, without realizing it, re-enchanting the forests? It’s a provocative question, and one worth thinking and arguing about further, especially, I would argue, in relation to how Harman departs from Latour in “Prince of Networks.”
[more to follow]
December 29, 2011 at 7:07 pm
And to answer your question a little further, Kubla, as to my interest in description, yes, I’m very interested in that, especially by way of medieval commentary as a model [the writing in the margins of texts by readers: what I see as an additive and not a subtractive process]. Partly inspired by a small conference Nicola Masciandaro put together at CUNY a couple of years ago, “Glossing is Glorious,” and by Hans Gumbrecht’s book “The Production of Presence,” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about commentary versus “criticism.” I think Nicola’s new open-access e-journal “Glossator” is also offering up amazing models for what this might look like:
http://glossator.org/about/
Thinking a little bit about possible convergences between commentary and OOO, I contributed this essay to Glossator’s most recent issue on love + commentary:
http://siue.academia.edu/EileenJoy/Papers/1046356/All_That_Goes_Unnoticed_I_Adore_Spencer_Reeces_Addresses
December 30, 2011 at 7:19 pm
dmf: …we can shift from asking what does some-thing ‘mean’ to what can it do and how might we hack it.
Yes. I’ve been hacking away at that shift off and on for a loong time. Early in my career I trained with a computational linguist (the late David Hays) and so apprenticed with computational models for textual semantics. The key notion is simply that the computation is done by the reader (perhaps better, the computation IS the reader) and so the semantic model resides in the reader, along with syntax and the rest.
In this mode, the ultimate hack would be an actual computer simulation of the reading process. Such things do exist in some degree and kind but they can’t deal with interesting texts in illuminating ways. There was a time when I thought that such systems might be available in, say, 20 years. Now I haven’t got the foggiest idea when we might be able to build/grow them.
… an interesting related possibility to revive Jung’s notion of dreaming the dream (active imagination) forward if we could understand such in terms of extended/enactive-minds vs kantian sublim(e)ation.
I’m not familiar with Jung’s notion and can’t understand the rest of your sentence. But I note that fan fiction does continue canonical stories. There’s quite a bit of it these days.
eileen: Yes, the Harman interview is quite nice, especially as it covers a wide range of material.
As for description, I think of it as basically orthogonal to SR/OOO. My interest in description, and my practice of it, precedes my awareness of OOO and is more or less independent of it. I can see mounting an OOO case for descriptive work, but I think OOO probably has other uses, such as articulating an aesthetics and an ethics.
To some extent, when I think of description, I think of biology, where so very much work has gone into ‘flat’ description of organisims, ecosystems, and behaviors at all scales from molecules to the whole planet. In that discipline description is how an organism is brought into disciplinary purview. I’m imagining description, then, as a way of grasping texts so that we can then do something else. Just what? Well we can make comparisons–that’s how the notion of evolution arose, though comparisons. We can frame efforts at ‘hacking’ in terms of texts as described.
But also, just as some organisms have been described in considerable detail, others have been described only enough to name and classify them; for that matter, many species have not even been discovered. So, some texts will be described in detail, others only lightly.
Then there’s this: I see description as a collective process. We need to coordinate descriptive efforts so that descriptions of different texts are commensurate with each other and so that different people can contribute to the description of a given text in a cumulative fashion. I think this will be very hard to impossible to do as the profession has been dominated by a ‘roll your own’ ethos for decades.
In any case, as I’ve said, I think of description as the necessary foundation for something else. And, while I certainly given some thought to that something else, right now I think getting the description ball rolling is critical. And I suspect that many of the most interesting things that can be built on descriptions simply won’t come into view until will have a lot more well-articulated descriptive work done.
This past summer I blogged a pile of posts on Heart of Darkness, and much of that work was descriptive in kind. Some of the description was fairly formal and rigorous, but not all of it. There’s even one longish post that takes the form of a commentary on the longest paragraph in the text (which I’ve dubed the nexus), which is also structurally central, and which includes, wouldn’t you know? a Latour litany. I used the last post to think about what a Heart of Darkness Handbook would be like, the idea being that such a handbook would contain only consensus information, much of which would be descriptive.
…by turning to the so-called “deeper” realities/weird realisms of objects, including literary texts, do we run a risk of a sort of theologically-inflected discourse?
An interesting question. FWIW, the weird aspect of SR/OOO doesn’t much grab me.
December 30, 2011 at 8:25 pm
All of this discussion is great, but I don’t get this continual question of whether OOO is “theological,” or treats the depths of objects as some kind of divinity or sacred Other. This is so obviously not the case. First—there is no Other in OOO. There are only countless specific others. Secondly, in most theologies, divine Otherness is treated as absolutely unique, belonging only to the god or gods, as part of the divine nature—this is the opposite of OOO, in which every entity, from instances of electromagnetism to fashion shows, have, simply by virtue of being real, a reality both accessible and inaccessible (though Levi and Graham account for this differently). This isn’t a sacred right or unique property of some special god-like beings or Other, but a prosaic ontological structure. Thirdly, none of the traditional theological notions of the divine apply to OOO’s objects or entities—they are not eternal, they are not indestructible, they are not simple or undivided, they are not absolutely necessary, they are not omniscient (even of their own reality). If it is bothersome to articulate the need for a hidden or reserved dimension to an entity (which has been exhaustively *argued* by Levi and Graham, not assumed or stated as if by axiom), then remember that this does not mean omniscient self-presence—the reality of the entity is hidden even from the entity itself, especially obvious in the case of humans and other sentient animals.
Rather than bringing up the specter of theology or ontotheology, OOO banishes even the possibility of such a position, even IF a god or gods exist. The only alternative to having a hidden or inaccessible or unactualized dimension is for everything to be on the surface, accessible or present (to or for something else). But the latter really leads more to the problem of self-presence, and then to the idea of absolute self-presence, it seems to me.
December 31, 2011 at 12:17 pm
I’ve been thinking about this conversation, and the parallel one over at Fractured Politics, where I’ve also posted this comment. There’s an implicit presupposition that needs to be brought out: that in asserting its agency against individual critics who want to limit its meaning the text is doing so in the name of more and various meanings. But there’s a different way of thinking about this. One might think of a collective of naked apes who need shared norms and values in order to function as a coherent society. One way they establish these norms and values is through a limited body shared texts which embody those norms and values. In this case the text is asserting its agency against individuals who want to ignore the group’s norms and values. That is, the text IS NOT asserting its agency in favor of ever more meanings; rather, it’s asserting its agency in favor of the (specific) norms and values central to the (specific) society.
The culture wars / canon wars that took place in America not so long ago were not about the rights of critics to say whatever they wanted to about whatever texts they wanted to. The were about the central values of American society and how gets to determine them.
It seems to me that an SR/OOO literary criticism has to explicitly acknowledge and come to terms with texts ciculating in social groups. Whatever the agency of the text is, it is not something that is exercised only in independent one-on-one negotiations between texts and individual readers. There is a collective process. What is the text’s agency in that process?
May 19, 2013 at 2:15 am
[…] scanning a bar code. Or in this particular case, me interacting with the text in this video game. The discussion over on Levi's blog (and elsewhere) as been about an SR literary criticism, but I don't want to use literary […]