Matter, Life, and Culture (so far)

Edit: Tuesday evening, 16 Oct. I have added three paragraphs since first posting this in the morning. They are at the end of the section on Realms of cultural practice.

Having devoted several posts to developing concepts of literary criticism within a pluralist framework, it’s time to have a distinctly different discussion, one about the distinction between the Realms of Matter and of Life. We must be careful here, however, not to think of matter as the inert substance of Descartes’ res extensa. In talking of vibrant matter it seems to me that Jane Bennett has it about right. Rocks, clouds and star dust may not be alive, but in view of quantum mechanics and complex dynamics we cannot say that matter is as dead as Descartes and, of course many others, believed it to be.

Further, I don’t assume that either of these Realms is a single Realm. For the moment, however, I’m going to proceed as though that were the case. What I’m after is the distinction between mere matter, if you will, and life.

Conceptual Machinery: A Review

First, let’s reprise the basic propositions that I stated in From Objects to Pluralism. We have two propositions taken over and modified from Harman:

1. Individual entities of various different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos.

2. These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations.

To these I’ve added two more:

3. Realms of Being consist of specific kinds of entities in specific relations with one another.

4. Our cosmos has evolved from one Realm to the many evident today. It is possible that Realms exist of which we are unaware. There is no obvious limit to the emergence of new Realms from existing ones.

That’s the basic framework we’re working with.

Matter and Life, Rocks and Acorns

Consider the difference between a rock and an acorn. A rock is pretty much a hard dense lump of stuff regardless of its local environment. Whether it’s on the ground in a woods in Western Pennsylvania, or miles under the Pacific in the Marianas Trench, in specimen case in a museum somewhere, or floating somewhere between Jupiter and Mars, it is what it is, a rock. If you nudge it toward the Sun, however, when it gets close enough it will melt, then vaporize, and its atoms will break down into plasma (of the physical kind, not the Latourian). No more rock.

Literary Criticism 21: Academic Literary Study in a Pluralist World

The following post is an introduction to a collection of posts I've written over the past several months: Literary Criticism 21: Academic Literary Study in a Pluralist World. I've placed the collection in a PDF which you may download from my SSRN page, HERE.

Abstract: At the most abstract philosophical level the cosmos is best conceptualized as containing various Realms of Being interacting with one another. Each Realm contains a broad class of objects sharing the same general body of processes and laws. In such a conception the human world consists of many different Realms of Being, with more emerging as human cultures become more sophisticated and internally differentiated. Common Sense knowledge forms one Realm while Literary experience is another. Being immersed in a literary work is not at all the same as going about one's daily life. Formal Literary Criticism is yet another Realm, distinct from both Common Sense and Literary Experience. Literary Criticism is in the process of differentiating into two different Realms, that of Ethical Criticism, concerned with matters of value, and that of Naturalist Criticism, concerned with the objective study of psychological, social, and historical processes.

Introduction: Toward Naturalist and Ethical Criticisms

When I began nosing about object-oriented ontology (OOO) a year and a half ago I had several things in mind. On the one hand I was simply curious, especially since OOO seemed to be a science-friendly brand of post-post-structuralist Continental philosophy. But, and more specifically, I was also looking for a way of explaining my own work in naturalist criticism to scholars and for a way to supplement that work with a way of approaching ethical and aesthetic issues.

Why would I think OOO could fulfill those two functions? It’s that object thing. My own work for the last four (!) ecades has centered on the need to develop methods for objectifying literary texts and processes, chiefly through description and the newer psychologies, psychologies ultimately informed by and driven by the notion of computation. I figured that a philosophy of objects might have something to say about objectification, perhaps even a way of justifying the ways of objectification to humanists. If so, then perhaps this philosophy of objects would also provide me with an ethics and an aesthetics. For it’s long been clear that neither ethics nor aesthetics are objective in nature.

Things did and did not work out that way. It turns out that the objects of object-oriented criticism are more like subjects, which is not quite what I was looking for. So I had to do a bit of inventing. But I like the invention. So far.

Unity of Being and Ethical Criticism

I wish to offer another adjustment to my ongoing discussion of literature, criticism, and pluralism. I begin by discussing unity of being in two senses. In one sense it is a psychological concept; it is about how one feels when giving oneself over to the Literary Realm. In another sense it is broadly about one’s way of life, about the world at large.

From there I go on to discuss ethical criticism, offer some touchstone passages from Kenneth Burke, Wayne Booth, and Keith Oatley, and conclude by revising the diagram with which I ended Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects.

Unity of Being

In real time, unity of being is, well, unity of being. I don’t mean to be perverse, but I don’t know of any general term, though perhaps Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow will do, or the phrase “being in the moment.” As far as I know flow always happens spontaneously in that we cannot flip the mind’s flow switch at will—I rather doubt there’s such a thing as a flow-switch, rather it’s a matter of balance. But we can do things that will increase the likelihood that the mind will flip into flow.

One of those things is to read, in the basic ordinary sense of the word, a literary text. Or listen to a story, watch a play or movie. Whatever. In this sense, unity of being is psychological, it happens in the mind/brain in real time.

But unity of being, I believe, is also a reasonable way to talk about how individuals and peoples live their lives in the large, from years to decades to centuries. One wants everything one does, 24/7/365, to fall into a coherent pattern. A pattern more or less attributed to the nature of the world. To the extent that one cannot achieve unity of being one feels, well, perhaps alienated is the most general concept for it. In that literary texts are (always) about the world, they point toward unity of being in the large.

As far as I know there is no one way of life that yields unity of being in the large nor is there one way of organizing texts that yields it in the small. In the large it is a matter of how one chooses to live, where that one can be an individual or a group. In the small it is a matter of craft and one’s knowledge of its ways and means.

The Living Cosmos

As I understand it the modern conception asserts that the cosmos is fundamentally inanimate. Dead.

And then, somehow, life evolved. Miraculously. Except that we moderns don’t believe in miracles. So life isn’t a miracle.

It’s merely a puzzle. One we have yet to solve. That non-miracle puzzle remains a mystery.

Like consciousness.

I have a suggestion: Let’s declare the cosmos to be fundamentally animate. Or at least fecund. Brimming with abundance. But not dead.

No.

Not dead.

In urging such a declaration I do not intend, thereby, to dissolve the mystery, solve the puzzle, explain the miracle. As if by magic.

Word magic.

Spells. Incantation. Enchantment.

Voodoo.

Who do the voodoo that you do so well?

Not at all.

I just want to reframe the question, you know, the question that Chas. Ives was always asking. The unanswered one.

It’s not an idle suggestion, nor unmotivated, nor even unreasonable. After all, that big bang, or whatever it was/is, was/is enormously productive. Wasn’t it? Well then, what sense does it make to say that it was/is dead?

No. It’s alive. Animate. Fecund. Abundant.

Which means that our story is no longer one of heroic struggle against and defiance of a dead universe. It is not a story of us against them. Of fragile conquest, belligerently maintained in the face of a hostile universe.

Brrrrr!

It is simply a story of us.

All of us.

bosons quarks Sappho cathedrals atoms Sam Clemens molecules V2s RNA Buddha DNA cells slime molds yurts c. elegans mushrooms Murasaki Shikibu peacocks jelly fish Tezuka Osamu ants adding machines worms manga soup wheat Richard Pryor rabbits submarines Florence Nightingale buffalo fetishes ice bergs streams braids cocktail napkins Mt. Everest Joan of Arc Sun Yat-sen

and so forth

etc.

usw.

غیره

等等

osv.

stb.

'וכו

dll.

기타

n.k.

.

.

.

∞

From Objects to Pluralism

This is a somewhat revised version of the essay which I originally posted on July 18, 2012. I have revised it to take account of Levi Bryant's recent work on onto-cartography and to incorporate Graham Harman's notion of vicarious or indirect causality. To do this I expanded the section, Patterns of Relations Among Objects, and added a new section, Indirect Cause and Realms of Being. The rest of the essay remains the same.

* * * * *

. . . we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher, but to take example from our two recent speeches. The single general form which they postulated was irrationality; next on the analogy of a single natural body with its pairs of like-named members, right arm or leg, as we say, and left, they conceived of madness as a single objective form existing in human beings. Wherefore the first speech divided off a part on the left, and continued to make divisions . . .  

–Plato, Phaedrus (265e-266a)

Having hazarded that pluralism is the Next Big Thing I now feel some obligation to clarify what I mean by pluralism. As it’s object-oriented philosophy that brought me to this dance, I’ll use it as a vehicle for so doing.

First, using a passage from a Graham Harman interview, I raise the question of the relationship between philosophy and the more specialized disciplines. I then continue with Harman in a section where, in effect, I ask: What can we build with objects and relations alone? By way of illustration I bring up the case of knowledge representation in the cognitive sciences, where complex conceptual systems are constructed from just that, objects and relations.

Then I take an excursion into the work of Levi Bryant, whose concept of regimes of attraction indicates the existence of relatively stable patterns of relationships over large collections of objects. I then go into full tap dance mode, suggesting that we can construct Realms of Being from that notion plus Harman's conception of indirect causation. Realms of Being, that the world consists of many different ever evolving Realms, THAT’s what I mean by pluralism. Given that, the task of metaphysics is to figure out what those Realms are and how they’re interlinked.

I conclude with some more general remarks.

A General Theory of Objects?

As a way of setting the stage, consider the following passage from Graham Harman’s interview at ASK/TELL:

. . . the reason to focus on objects rather than on “language, social change, sexuality or animals” is because philosophy is obliged to be global in scope. If philosophy were to give one of these other entities a starring role, it would have to reduce the rest of the universe to them. “Language is the root of everything.” Here, you are choosing one specific kind of entity to be the root of all others, and there is no basis for this. Sociology tends to view all reality in terms of its emergence from human societies and belief-systems. Psychology treats all reality as made up primarily of mental phenomena. Physics deals with tiny physical objects and says that everything is made out of them, except that physics is useless when trying to explain things like metaphors, the Italian Renaissance, the meaning of dreams, and so forth.

All these other disciplines focus on one kind of object as the root of all else in the world. Only philosophy can be a general theory of objects, describing Symbolist poetry and the interaction of cartoon characters just as easily as the slamming together of two comets in distant space.

My immediate and quite spontaneous reaction to that was a less than charitable: And just what can philosophy tell me about cartoon characters? I asked that question in my capacity as someone who has a specialized interest in cartoons and so has spent hours upon hours going through cartoons scene by scene, shot by shot, and even frame by frame, trying to figure out how these things work. It would be too much to expect a philosopher to look at cartoons in such detail.

But just what WOULD I expect of a philosopher? I don’t need a philosopher to tell me that Popeye is, in some sense, real. I know that already, that’s why I care about them and study them. Nor do I need a philosopher to tell me about the difference between the real object on paper or in celluloid and the image in someone’s mind. That’s been around for a long time. I don’t see that philosophy has anything new and interesting to say about that.

But then, just what does philosophy have to offer the other specialized disciplines? Do they have need of Harman’s “general theory of objects”? I have my doubts. Does ANYONE, other than philosophers, have need of a general theory of objects? If the answer to that question is “no” does that mean that such a theory has no use?

What’s an Object, Anything, Everything?

One of the many avatars of Anonymous posted a bunch of questions about my recent post, Harman’s Ontology on a Single Level and Objects as Wells of Abundance. While the questions had a certain wise-guy attitude about them, they nonetheless collectively raise an important issue: What’s the distinction between philosophy and the many specialized intellectual disciplines? So, I’ve decided to answer those questions as a way of exploring that issue just a bit.

I do not expect to answer them definitively nor do I expect to define the distinction between philosophical questions and questions in the specialized disciplines. All I want to do is indicate how I’d begin approaching the issue, and that’s to consider many examples. Anonymous’s list is a useful set of examples. Some are nonsense and some seem deep and beyond any answer I can give; most are somewhere in-between.

Caveats

The questions end up being framed as questions about Human’s thought, which makes sense, of course. But I am not Harman and do not speak for him. I do, however, find his ideas useful, though I suspect that the use I make of them is not something that Harman himself would do.

More importantly, I have never considered any of my posts about Harmon’s ideas as ‘ground-level’ posts suitable for those unfamiliar with Harman’s own writing. I assume some knowledge of his work. That doesn’t change in this post, not at all.

The fact is that the idea of a metaphysical object is a subtle one. And while Harman does give definitional statements, in The Quadruple Object and elsewhere, it would be a mistake to think that, once you’ve read those statements you know what he’s talking about. You don’t. Think of those statements as guide posts at the beginning of a path. You still need to walk the path by reading what he says at some length so as to get a feel for the kind of intellectual work he’s doing with the idea.

The remarks I make here aren’t going to change that.

Harman’s Ontology on a Single Level and Objects as Wells of Abundance

I've revised the post to clarify the relationship between abundance and autonomy.

In my first post on literature and pluralism I argued, almost as an aside, that Harman’s 2-level ontology, real and sensual objects, could be interpreted as a single level. In this post I wish to restate that interpretation and explore it just a little bit.

Harman’s Core Assertions

Let us start with Harman’s elegant encapsulation of his philosophy in two propositions:

1. Individual entities of various different scales (not just tiny quarks and electrons) are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos.

2. These entities are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. Objects withdraw from relation.

My initial reaction to that was: What happened to sensual objects? In my current interpretation of his thought they are unnecessary because they can be derived from the existence of relations.

After all, an object that exists utterly without relation to any other object cannot have any sensual objects in its ‘interior’—I believe that’s a term Harman uses in this context. If two objects exist in relation to one another, than each will have a sensual object of the other in its interior. Further, the nature of that sensual object depends strictly on the nature of the relationship, no? It follows from that that positing the existence of these sensual objects adds nothing to our understanding of the ontological situation. They are redundant.

Abundance and Autonomy

It is thus apparent that, in an imagery of abundance rather than of withdrawal, real objects are sources or wells of abundance, while sensual objects are not. As real objects enter into relationships with one another, abundance is drawn forth in those relationships. And it is this abundance that is most important in understanding the autonomy of real objects. They are autonomous, not in the sense that they are not dependent on other objects—they may or may not be—but in that they are endless sources of abundance within their own Realm.

Thus the acorn depends on its immediate environment for the nutrients it needs to sprout, take root, and become an oak tree. It is not autonomous from that environment. But it is abundant in the world in that it persists through a wide variety changes, shocks, and insults, and continues to convert its inputs into, ultimately, more acorns and hence more oaks.

Each Realm is characterized by its own form of abundance, abundance which may or may not depend on other Realms. Just how that works in detail, well, that’s obviously the major conceptual task for ontological pluralism and far beyond the scope of a blog post.

Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 3: The Reality of Fictional Objects

Once I began investigating Object-Oriented Ontology it didn’t take long to bump up against that claim that fictions too are real. At first I found that claim disconcerting, but then I got used to it. I had been reading OOOist thought through the standard notion that the real world is one thing, and fiction is quite different. Against THAT claim the OOO notion IS disconcerting.

But only superficially so. For the belief that fictions are different from ‘reality’ does not entail a belief that fictions do not have consequences in the ‘real world.’ Not at all. That fiction has real consequences is not in doubt, and that’s all the OOOists are claiming. More or less.

That fictional objects have real consequences. That is to say, they are real objects, good and proper.

But is that so? Are they philosophically proper objects?

Is Popeye Autonomous?

Consider Popeye, who seems to have become OOO’s paradigmatic example of a fictional object that is real. There’s nothing particularly problematic about any of the physical images of him, whether in print media or movie. They’re all real objects. And, while the psychological and neural processes that take place in the minds of people reading Popeye comics or watching Popeye cartoons are not well understood, they are not, as processes, any more obscure than those involving reading about George W. Bush or watching film and video clips of him.

What’s tricky is the fictional being that is conjured out of all those still and moving images through all those mental and neural processes in all those individual heads. As I understand them, the objects under investigation in OOO must be autonomous objects. The physical images, yes, they are autonomous objects. And the neurochemical brain processes, they too are autonomous—or are they? But that fictional being, that Popeye, is not autonomous in that sense. He is utterly dependent on all those people being aware of him.

And so we arrive at a problem I stated in From Objects to Pluralism and simply set aside, that of object autonomy. In that post I was worried about acorns and oaks: “…in what sense can an oak tree be autonomous if its very existence is dependent upon a proper environment?” Now I’m worried about fictional beings and their dependence on minds that construct them out of promptings from some material substrate.

This time I have a suggestion to make, but only a suggestion, one which I’ll elaborate in a later post. My suggestion is this: What matters about (real) objects is that they be sources of abundance. That a given object may depend on some substrate is no problem if the object absorbs and reconfigures the substrate in a new and open-ended way, as acorns and oaks do with the nutrition on which they depend.

And so, I submit, is the case with at least some fictional objects, the Real ones. But I want to take a look at some remarks by Harman before outlining an argument on that. He seems to have an other notion.

Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2

As the title indicates, this post is a follow-up to my previous post, Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism. This post has been prompted both by my own after thoughts and by remarks by Terence Blake.

Caveat: This is quick and dirty. I’m more interested in sketching out a quick scheme than in working out details.

Let’s start with a simple diagram depicting relationships between three Realms of Being:

The Common Sense Realm is the world of consensus reality; we hold it more or less in common with all (adult) inhabitants of our society. The Literary Realm is the world of literary texts of all kinds, high, low, and mid-cult, adults, children, young adults, whatever. The Realm of Literary Criticism is that of formal written commentary on those texts. An arrow between two realms indicates some relationship between the two. The Realm at the head end of the arrow has access to the Realm at the tail end.

Thus LCR (Literary Criticism Realm) has access to both CSR (Common Sense Realm or Common Sense) and LR (Literary Realm). Note that the arrow between CSR and LR is double-headed, indicating that each has access to the other. The texts in LCR are largely about objects (informally understood), persons, and events in CSR while the texts in LR physically circulate in CSR and people comment informally on those texts in CSR.

Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism

When I set out to investigate Object-Oriented Ontology a year and a half ago I had several things vaguely in mind: 1) the possibility that Continental philosophy was waking up from its dogmatic dreams of dalliance and devastation, 2) some help in conceptualizing graffiti as a manifestation of the spirit of the place, and 3) some help in framing some questions about literature and literary criticism. Let’s set the first two aside and take up the third.

I take the following three propositions to be true:

1) The meaning of literary texts is indeterminate.

2) There is, however, something quite precise about texts; I take that to be form.

3) The form of texts can be effectively described in that, presupposing agreement on method, different can come to agreement about formal attributes of a text.

As a practical matter, literary criticism has taken the first as a truism. Every critic gets to “roll their own” meaning for a text; all that one has to do is provide a reasonable justification within some accepted interpretive scheme. Beyond this tacit and informal practice, some critics have explicitly argued for indeterminate meaning while others have argued for determinate meaning, often making the author the source of that meaning.

OOO as Interpretive Scheme

Object-oriented ontology can easily serve as an interpretive scheme, providing of course, that it can justify itself as a philosophical regime. That is, primary justification comes in basic philosophical terms, not in the application to literature. From my point of view, this is neither here nor there. The addition of one more interpretive engine to the critic’s tool kit is of relatively little consequence if, like me, you want to do something other than, beyond, reading texts.

Harman, however, has made some remarks that point toward the possibility of non-reductive readings, readings that don’t bypass the “surface” of the text in haste to find the “hidden” meanings, which I’ve discussed in Explicating Literature in Light of Object-Oriented Ontology. But those remarks are only pointers. It’s not clear to me how they might open up into full-blown explications. And, in any event, an explication is, in the end, an explication is a reading, and I’m chasing different unicorns.

Nor, it seems to me, does OOO have anything special to say about textual indeterminacy. Levi Bryant, to be sure, has declared that texts are factories, in a usage from Deleuze and Guattari. As far as I can tell, Bryant has nothing particularly interesting to say about how it is that texts do this, just that they obviously do so. All Bryant has to offer is old wine in new bottles or, as Terrence Blake puts is, tautological reformulation.

Something Big this Way Comes—Do We Live in a Pluriverse?

In the course of the recent discursive eruption over the relationship between speculative realism and objected-oriented ontology on the one hand, and ethics on the other, Ian Bogost posted a plea for “less blogging, and more working.” He worked his way around to this:

Sometimes I regret having gotten back into the "traditional humanities" after spending the last ten years in a weird hybrid of liberal arts and engineering at a technical institute. For it deals with the greatest irony of conservatism: a conservatism whose hallowed tradition is a purported progressive radicalism. Things are changing in philosophy, and that change is terrifying to some and liberating to others—perhaps it should be both. This conflict, if that's really what it is, is evidence of something big.

“Something big”—yes, that’s what got me interested in object-oriented ontology last year, the scent of something big. Perhaps it was OOO itself, or a close conceptual kin, or perhaps they were/are but a symptom of something else. In some sense, surely the latter.

That is, to the extent that SR/OOO are types of academic philosophy, and they are that, an eruption in academic philosophy that is confined to academic philosophy, that doesn’t interest me. But if these forms of academic philosophy are symptoms of something larger than that philosophy, well then, I’m curious.

And these philosophical movements do seem to resonate outside philosophy departments. So I’ve been curious.

But, though my knowledge of SR/OOO is sketchy, I’ve seen enough that I must gather my thoughts, if only as a way of plotting out my next moves. This post sets out the terms in which I’m thinking these matters through. First, by way of calibrating bigness, I introduce some metaphors of geographical exploration. Then I look back at two movements that launched in the 1960s and 1970s as points of comparison. I conclude by taking a WAG on The Next Big Thing.