In asking that question I am not asking “Why would anyone want to investigate such a thing?” The answer to that is pretty standard: “Because it’s interesting.” No, the question I’m asking, and have been asking (myself) these past two or three months is: “Given that I abandoned the Continental philosophical tradition over three decades ago, and have no plans to return to it, why do I have even a peripheral interest in this recent manifestation of it?”
I now have the barest scent of an answer to that question: Because it’s the start of something new. I could, of course, be wrong in that, but it smells like something new’s afoot. And that’s exciting.
My reasoning on that point is odd. On the one hand, Tim Morton, my chief informant, tells me it’s new. Well, not me, directly and specifically. But that’s his stance and attitude. And I take it at face value. That’s not odd at all. We take things at face value all the time.
Here’s the odd part: Most of the lit crit work in the newer psychologies is not new at all, or, I should say, not new in any deep and interesting way. How, you might ask, do we get from OOO to newer psychologies in lit crit? Well, I told you my reasoning was odd, didn’t I?
Let’s set that aside for a moment. I have some more direct observations to offer.
All Creatures
For something over two millennia Western thought has been organized by this or that conception of a Great Chain of Being in which the things in the world are arrayed from lowliest forms of inanimate matter to the most august forms of life, material and spiritual. Just what these lowest and highest forms are, that has varied from era to era. In times past, for example, the highest forms of being were higher than us; but that ended for a large class of folks sometime during the modern era. And that same modern era has seen the ambivalent assimilation of humankind to animalkind.
OOO seems to end the Great Chain by an act of radical leveling. No class of objects has more or less Being than any other class. Not only do the termite and the rhino-virus have the same ‘level’ of being as us humans, but all of us have no more an no less being than a quark or a black hole.
I find this most interesting, and even encouraging. But I’m no sure I can go more than ‘interesting.’ The problem is two-fold. On the one hand, ‘being’ dropped out of my working repertoire when I abandoned philosophy; I’m not sure what the word means. At the same time, I do believe that it makes sense to talk of some things being more complex than others; for example, worms are more complex than viruses. Within the peculiar and idiosyncratic limits of my understanding, I see no contradiction between multiple levels of complexity and only one level of being.
Perhaps I’m confused. Actually, no ‘perhaps’ about it. I am. Confused. But just how?
As for being encouraged in this confusion, I site my recent post, Living with Living Creatures (at New Savanna, at The Valve), in which I imply that even the death of plants is of ethical concern, not to mention the deaths of animals, higher, middle, and lower. That, to me, is one of the implications of OOO’s ‘leveling of being.’ I believe that our continued and sustained life on this planet (and in this universe) depends on our valuing of all life.
OOO pushes us in that direction, provides a philosophical underpinning for such a revaluing. Perhaps that is why I find Morton’s thinking so usefully provocative. His concern is ecological, the intimate interlinking of all things and hence of all living things.
The Substance of Art
Morton is also a literary scholar – a Romanticist – and he has given this talk in which he discusses tropes as algorithms in the context of talking about fractals and plants and viruses and animals and DNA as somehow fractal and algorithmic: “Since you can describe any trope in terms of an algorithm, then that’s what a trope is, at least to some extent. A trope is a kind of recipe for producing a certain sort of linguistic performance” – at which point he talks about the water snakes in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Just what he means in thus characterizing a trope is not clear to me. That is, such a characterization has many implications. Which of them does Morton subscribe to?
Quite early in my career I pursued the notion that poems are produced by a computational process. I was ‘forced’ into this exploration by problems I encountered in the analysis of “Kubla Khan,” where I ended up treating the grouping structure of the poem – lines, groups of related lines, sentences, stanzas – as the trace of an underlying and inaccessible computational process. Later on I posited a more or less explicit computational process underlying Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129.
Would Morton endorse those efforts? Would he see them as being within the larger scope of tropes-as-algorithms? I do not know.
But that’s not quite where I’m going, not now. What that work led me to was a different conception of what to do in the fact of a text. It led me to place interpretation and meaning in the background and move analysis and description into the foreground. What we need to do is get fine-grained descriptive control over the physical substance of a work – which includes its time course – and to see that structuring as the trace of an underlying computational process.
So, does OOO provide grounds for endorsing a descriptive and analytic program? If the physical substance of the poem – or play, or narrative – is as replete with Being as the meaning, then perhaps so. Only when we have a much richer understanding of the material substance and structure of literary works will we be in a position to understand the computational processes underlying and permeating that material being.
Computational Nativism
Now we’re ready to confront the odd aspect of my fellow-traveler’s interest in OOO. As I noted above, most of the lit crit work in the newer psychologies is not new in any interesting sense. It’s old 1950s wine poured into newer bottles – Chomsky ‘65, Bowlby ‘69, Lakoff and Johnson ‘81, Wilson ‘75, and so on. In particular, it has not dealt with the computational underpinnings of the newer cognitive sciences, neurosciences, or evolutionary psychology (think of evolutionary game theory). As far as I’m concerned, these new developments are all but still-born. Once the terminological novelty wears off, they will wither and die.
On the other hand, Morton’s talk of tropes as algorithms, vague though it is, seems native to his mode of thought. Beyond this, I note that one of the thinkers who’s been taking part in the web-based dialogues on OOO is Ian Bogost, who is a native computationalist, with a particular interest in video games. Perhaps OOO can assimilate computation as nothing-special, just ordinary stuff. If so, then computation is native to it, and it to computation.
On the whole, it smells like a new world. Maybe even a brave one. Maybe.
No comments:
Post a Comment