Objects, Intuitions, the Imaginary, and Language

I’m heading toward language, imaginary objects, and the cognition of ontology. But I’m not ready to go there, not yet. There’s some preliminary hemming and hawing I want to do, so bracketing, as it were.

What’s with Withdrawal?

I’m thinking intuitions and how they inform our understanding of this, that, and the other—one of my current hobby horses. In one of the sessions at the recent Object-Oriented Ontology meetings in NYC someone asked Graham Harman, more or less: “What’s this about objects withdrawing? How can they do that? Who’s doing the withdrawing?” Those aren’t the exact words, but I believe they’re a reasonable rendition of the (vague) sense of the question.

Harmon, of course, was stumped. He’d been asked to explicate perhaps the originating metaphor behind his philosophy. Harmon knows very well that there’s no agent in the, e.g. hammer, that’s somehow how pulling it back from someone who sees it, grasps it, or hears its impact. That’s not it at all. But . . . What could he say? There’s nothing behind the metaphor beyond the sense that, no matter what one does to or with a physical hammer, there’s always more. Always.

It’s like someone who’s learning chess. They say to the teacher: “Tell me why bishops move diagonally and castles move rectilinearly or I won’t play.” The only answer to the question is: “Convention.” If that’s not good enough, then asking the question amounts to a refusal to play the game. So it is with: “What’s this withdrawal stuff?” If you want to play the game, if only out of curiosity, then you MUST accept the language at face value and see where it leads you.

Which is what I’ve been doing for these past several months. Now I want to ‘push back’, as the current idiom has it. Just a little.

While I’m willing to accept the foundational language of ‘withdrawal’ and so forth at face value, I’m not quite sure what the implications are.

Objects and Objects

Let me explain. The rock bottom intuition on which Harman builds his metaphysics is the distinction between real and sensual objects. He begins the first chapter of The Quadruple Object by observing (p. 7): “On my desk are pens, eyeglasses, and an expired American passport. Each of these has numerous qualities and can be turned to reveal different surfaces and uses. Furthermore, each object is a unified thing despite its multitude of features.” And he goes on from there to mention Egypt, an ideal sphere, and a unicorn, among a dozen or so others. They too are objects, but I’m not entirely sure how to take intuitions developed through thinking about, say, a hammer (Harman devotes two chapters to Heidegger’s tool analysis) or an apple, which seems to be my own default example, and apply those intuitions to those other often very different kinds of objects.

Jamming the Soundtrack: Fantasia’s Intermission

Fantasia was conceived as a concert; indeed, its working title was The Concert Feature. Concerts of classical music had, and still do have, intermissions. It follows then that The Concert Feature had to have one as well.

But Disney conceived of his intermission as more than just a break in the program where people could stretch their legs, go to the restroom, or chat with companions. He also provided a film segment that played the role of intermission. This comes between the fourth and fifth musical selections on the DVD. When Fantasia was first shown in theatres it came, I presume, after the actual break, which would have been at the same point in the program.

People are sitting in their seats, the curtain opens, and the film rolls. What the audience sees is pretty much what they saw at the beginning: an empty stage with a podium, music stands, and risers. Gradually, as at the beginning, musicians enter and take their places. There’s a bit of tuning up, and then things become quite different.

Before Deems Taylor appears, and certainly before Stokowski mounts the podium, a bass player sets a riff, plucking the strings rather than bowing them:

He’s quickly joined by a clarinetist and a violinist:

Pretty soon most of the orchestra’s merrily riffing away, playing a little swing music, the popular music of the day.

Disney’s now waltzed into one the standard tropes of films and cartoons from the 30s into the 50s, the tension between classical and popular music. Any number of cartoons and live action films were built on this conflict. Fantasia, of course, is grounded in it, if only obliquely. The music, except for this little bit, is classical. But the film medium itself is popular; the notion of film as high art was a bit in the future.

Looking Out

Object-Oriented Ontology on New Savanna

As I’ve mentioned in yesterday’s post on bathtub philosophizing, I’ve done some clean-up at New Savanna. I’ve had some OOO labels for some time:

• Object-Oriented Ontology
• Bruno Latour

I’ve now added some more:

• Jane Bennett
• Compositionism
• Graham Harman
• Tim Morton
• Ontological Cognition

Strictly speaking, of course, ontological cognition isn’t about OOO at all. But it’s a big part of the reason why OOO interests me, so I include it here. Just click on any of the labels, either at the bottom of a post or from the list running down the right, and you get all the posts that are so labeled.

David Brooks, Fooled by Inequality

He’s at it again, being reasonable out of one side of his mouth while makin’ it up out of the other. I’m talking about David Brooks, Mr. Reasonable, the Mr. Blizzard of plausible risibility. His current column, The Wrong Inequality, is a masterpiece of rhetorical legerdemain and misdirection.

It’s about two inequalities, call them Inequality One and Inequality Two. That’s not what he calls them, but his labels are part of the misdirection, so we’ll skip them for the moment. Inequality One is the 1% vs. the 99%. Inequality Two is the college educated vs. those without college.

After laying them out Brooks helpfully observes: “These two forms of inequality exist in modern America. They are related but different. Over the past few months, attention has shifted almost exclusively to” Inequality One. And, yes, he’s right on all three counts. America has both, they’re related, and attention is now on One, rather than Two.

The point of Brook’s advertorial is that, while Inequality One is bad (his loss leader), Inequality Two is Much Much Worse. For it affects many more people, a big percentage of the 99%, though he doesn’t quite put it that way. Here’s his oh so reasonable conclusion: “If your ultimate goal is to reduce inequality, then you should be furious at the doctors, bankers and C.E.O.’s. If your goal is to expand opportunity, then you have a much bigger and different agenda.”

Notice, first of all, that that conclusion is apples vs. oranges. We’re angry at the beneficiaries of Inequality One (apples), but we’re supposed to expand opportunity in response to Inequality Two (oranges). Umm, err, Mr. David Brooks, Sir, if we’re angry at the One Percenters, what are we to do about it? He doesn’t say or suggest. All he does is divert out attention to the need for more opportunities for, well, the bottom 50%. Well, yes, they need opportunity, and debt forgiveness, health care, and jobs would be nice too.

Again, Reflections on Color and Light

Or, Reality is a Construction and that’s OK

Let’s wade right in. Here’s a digital photo more or less as it comes out of the camera:

That’s NOT what I saw, it’s what the camera ‘saw’, more or less. The camera shoots in so-called ‘raw’ mode, which contains more information than any monitor can display or than an printer can print. So some information has to be tossed out in the process of converting it to any one of a number of viewable formats. I chose jpg, and that’s ALL I did in creating that image. Photoshop ‘chose’ what information to toss.

Now, that image is VERY MUCH UNLIKE what I actually saw. The sky wasn’t that dark. It wasn’t dark at all. It was fairly bright, though not so bright as a high-noon sky on a bright day. I assume THAT’s what happens when you point the camera directly into a bright light source and the electronics has to cope with the dramatic difference between light directly from the source and light at the periphery. It damps down all over, but the source, that is, the sun, is so very bright that it’s still bright in the image while everything else is dark.

For the next two images I exercised some control over the raw-to-jpg conversion and, most of all, I did some manipulation in Photoshop:

Houses, Wires, Colors

Occupy Wall Street: Too Abstract? Will it Last?

Plus Zombies, Bicycles, and Fat Cats

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury have an interesting discussion, mostly about Occupy Wall Street. McWhorter went down there the other day and noticed that it’s small.

Yes it is. Was there yesterday afternoon (Sunday 30 Oct) and it IS small. A whole city block, yes, but a small block. And crowded with tents. It’s large in the imagination, but physically small.

And jammed with people taking photos, shooting videos, and doing interviews. Which surely is the point, get in the media however possible.

The crowd, more diverse than some reports suggest, though it’s hard to tell the OWSers from the one-time visitors. Some folks, of course, visit time and again. I got an armband of orange mesh—just like the police use to corral people—from an older couple who were helping out. I also saw some seminary students offer a sympathetic ear as Pastors for Occupy Wall Street (something like that, I forget the exact banner they flew under). Yes, lots of young folks, but also middle aged and old. Women as well as men, and a child singer playing a pink guitar in one placer, a child drummer in another. Black white yellow, probably red too.

Snow

The Bathtub Philosopher: Objects, Secondary Qualities, Memes, Description, Ontological Cognition

Eureka!

No, I’ve not found it, but I think I know where to look. And I figured that out while hanging out in the bathtub, where I do some of my best thinking.

What’s been puzzling me ever since Tim Morton seduced me into thinking about object-oriented ontology (OOO) is simply: why? Why me philosophy now because I abandoned philosophy way back when and have to intention to take it up again but, damn it! this stuff IS interesting, why? Specifically, what, if any, is the relationship between my deep and abiding interest in ontological cognition and OOO? Well, I think the connection goes through description, another deep and abiding interest of mine, one I apparently share with Latour.

But I don’t want to go there now, not directly, if only because, as you’ll see, I’m not going to get there by the end of this post. But I DO think that’s where to look.

Hence

Eureka!

But we’re not in Kansas, anymore, Toto. So take off your red shoes, kick back, and relax.

Early Morning House Keeping

I got up at 5AM last Saturday (28 Oct 2011), pretty standard these days, plus or minus an hour, poured a Diet Coke, and sat down to the computer. What am I going to post this morning? I thought, as I do every morning.

I decided to sort through some stuff. I knew the post would be something on OOO, but just which of one or two possibilities, or, rather, just how to realize the most likely possibility, that wasn’t clear. So I opened up my main OOO file and puttered around, examining, re-arranging, house cleaning.

I decided to take my Graham Harman stuff out of that file and put it in a separate file. I’ve been reading and re-reading his recent ASK/TELL interview and finding more and more in it. I decided to copy the whole thing into a Word file. But sticking that in my main OOO file violated my sense of what should be in THAT file. So, I decided to put the interview in a file of its own. And, if I’m going to do that, why not also create a file for my Graham Harman posts and notes? as that material’s growing.

That’s what I did.

Then I decided to do some clean-up on the blog (New Savanna, not The Valve, which is technologically resistant to such things). I added a “Harman” label to my label set. Well, might as well add a Bennett label and a Morton label too. Which I did.

It’s easily done, though a bit tedious. But, and here’s the thing, to do it I had to look at the titles of a bunch of recent posts. Which meant that all that stuff passed ever so lightly in review, just like looking through my OOO file for the Harman related posts. No sustained thinking about any of it, just noting it’s there.

Blink not lest ye be judged a fool

This NYTimes article by Daniel Kahneman, Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence, is interesting throughout. Kahneman starts by telling a story about his experience in the Israeli military. He was assigned to a job evaluating candidates for officer training. He and a colleague would have candidates perform certain challenges—he describes one in some detail, "the leaderless group challenge"—and evaluate the men on the basis of their performance on the challenges. They were quite confident in their evaluations.

But, alas, their evaluations were wrong, more often than not.

Every few months we had a feedback session in which we could compare our evaluations of future cadets with the judgments of their commanders at the officer-training school. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were better than blind guesses, but not by much.

We were downcast for a while after receiving the discouraging news. But this was the army. Useful or not, there was a routine to be followed, and there were orders to be obeyed. Another batch of candidates would arrive the next day. We took them to the obstacle field, we faced them with the wall, they lifted the log and within a few minutes we saw their true natures revealed, as clearly as ever. The dismal truth about the quality of our predictions had no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated new candidates and very little effect on the confidence we had in our judgments and predictions.

Kahneman elaborates on this in various ways, including some discussion of self-confidence in the world of investment and, you guessed it, there seems to0be plenty of unwarranted confidence in the ability to pick smart investments. The moral of the story (boldface mine):

As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.

H/t Rich Fritzson.

Look at the ducks

Explicating Literature in Light of Object-Oriented Ontology

A great deal of literary criticism, especially that associated with so-called Theory, but by no means confined to those brands, is about finding hidden meanings in the text. Such criticism seeks to pass through the text itself, its sounds, syntax, and semantics, and into some hidden realm where the real action is. Once that real action is discovered for any one text, well . . . No critic would actually own up to discarding the text itself, no would any critic actually do so. But, it sure seems like it.

There’s the problem: 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:

There is a widespread tendency to think that if anything is moved in any way by ulterior impulses, then it must be entirely corrupted by those impulses. For instance, John Dean of Watergate fame came to lecture in Cairo six years ago. He was presenting himself to some extent as a hero for turning on the Nixon people and testifying against them in Congress. A rather cynical friend of mine said: “So what? He only did it to save his own skin.”

To which I should have replied: “So what to you too?” The fact that something is guided initially by self-interest does not reduce it utterly to that aspect. For example, the initial reasons for St. Thomas Aquinas becoming a Catholic may have been something petty like the wish to please his parents and be treated as a good boy. Well, that hardly matters, does it? The origins of a thing do not always contain its truth. Supposing young St. Thomas wanted to please his parents, then enjoyed the praise he received during his studies, who cares if these were his original motives for extreme piety? Over time, it became something much more. We could say that the original incentives lured him into the profession, but then the profession became much more to him than the original lures.

A bit later he continues in the same vein:

Birch Trees in the Fall

Seven Sacred Words: An Open Letter to Steven Pinker

Back in 2007 Pinker was touring to promote The Stuff of Thought. I heard him at a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan and, as I explain below, decided to elaborate some of his remarks into an account of why we tell stories. I put that account into a letter and added some remarks on the recent history of literary criticism (starting with the 1966 structuralism conference at Johns Hopkins) with a view to helping him understand why it wasn't the work of willful fugitives from rationality. I then posted the letter to The Valve and sent Pinker a link. He responded with a brief note, and gave me permission to publish it, which I did. Note that he expresses despair at the fate of interdisciplinary work in the university. I wonder if he's changed his mind on the score?

I'm now republshing both my original letter and Pinker's reply.

Last Friday I went to hear Steven Pinker speak about his new book, The Stuff of Thought. On the way home I began thinking about that talk and about his recent essay-review of The Literary Animal (PDF). In that review he expressed deep skepticism about various suggestions that have been made about how and why the arts are biologically adaptive. He pointed out that such an account “can't be a kind of psychology; it must be a kind of engineering - an attempt to lay down the design specs of a system that can accomplish a goal (specifically, a subgoal of reproduction) in a particular world (specifically, the ancestral environment)” (170). It seemed to me that his talk contained the seeds of just such an account of literature, though he doesn't appear to have had that in mind.

I decided to write him a note and email it to him. As I began to think about it, however, the note, like Topsy, just grew and grew. I then decided it made more sense to publish it as an open letter. Here's a downloadable version, with several new attachments: An Open Letter to Steven Pinker: The Importance of Stories and the Nature of Literary Criticism.

* * * * *

Dear Steven,

First, I'd like to reiterate how much I enjoyed your talk at Barnes and Noble last Friday. I must confess, however, that I suspect that you wrote The Stuff of Thought primarily so you had good reason to tour around saying George Carlin's seven words - and their many variants and synonyms - in public places surrounded by mixed company.

More seriously, as I was riding the subway home, I began to think that, between the cuss-words portion of your talk and the last, on language and social relations, you had the seeds of an account of why we tell stories. Not just any stories, however, but only those particular stories one finds in the literary and sacred traditions of all cultures. The purpose of those stories is to create mutual knowledge of fundamental matters that are otherwise difficult to talk about, either because they are taboo - as in the excretory, sexual, and sacred things you talked about - or because they are difficult to verbalize under any circumstances. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, as that's not how my thinking began.

I began by wondering whether or not a story told in a public setting - similar to your talk, for example - constitutes shared knowledge or mutual knowledge. It is certainly shared knowledge, as everyone present now knows the story. But does that make it mutual in your sense? As I understand it, where knowledge is held mutually among people, not only is the knowledge shared but, additionally, everyone knows that everyone else knows.