This Particular Web: November 2013

Completed March 29th, 2013, but submitted here for your viewing pleasure at Francie's request.

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Water . Within . . Water . . . Within . . . . ?

Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology aims to attune readers to the radically "unitary" nature of the material world by offering his own distinct vision of what has recently been called object-oriented ontology (OOO). OOO posits that everything in the world exists equally--whether or not humans locked in anthropocentric world-views know, agree, or care. Bogost's theory of alien phenomenology calls for repositioning the proverbial fulcrum of the philosophical gaze through an absolutely indeterminable reclassification of everything in the world as equal "units," in order to "practice...exploding the innards of things--be they words, intersections, shopping malls, or creatures[,...to] reveal the hidden density of a unit" (58). The purpose, Bogost writes, is not only to show that what is familiar is in fact foreign, but rather that the truly alien is "anything--and everything--to everything else" (34). The philosopher's job, then, is to write "the speculative fictions of [unit] processes" (34) with the "philosophical lab equipment [of the] mind" (101) in service of a metaphysical mechanics, or "Carpentry," operating on the multi-valent energy stemming from a praxis of perpetual comparatism (111). Alien Phenomenology concludes with a declamation against the uniform humanist practice of "blam[ing]...awe on false consciousness" (133); a practice that for Bogost, it would seem, seeps as fully from the rot of Marx and Engels as "the tradition of human access that seeps from the rot of Kant" (4) does for Brassier, Grant, and Harman.[1] Bogost believes that philosophers can help to recapture the "Wonder" of speculative realism, which humanists have for too long ceded to the realm of natural sciences. In other words, Bogost suggests, the time has come to "reveal the hidden density" of academia (all those theories, philosophers, philosophies, humans, humanists, theories, days, centuries, historiography, so on and so forth, etc., etc., ad infinitum) and academics who, as sub-unitary predators basking in the grey cloak of envy with their eyes sewn shut, continue to loiter on the second terrace of the metaphysical purgatory that is humanist-oriented academics (133).

As I[2] sit at my kitchen table with my laptop[3] typing this review of Ian Bogost's book, I cannot help but wonder what he would think if I were not a human(ist?), but rather one of the tens of trillions of microorganisms comprising the alien flora of his small intestine. Of course, he could never have visually perceived my existence, although perhaps knowing of it in an abstract (let's call it philosophical as, in this case, opposed to physiological) sense. In theory, I am able to imagine what it is like to be a unit with a non-human, but physical presence that is wholly invisible, unknowable to him--because inside him. In theory, I am also able to imagine that, unlike every other day of our mutually satisfactory symbiotic coexistence, I could, for no explicable reason, stop functioning in my typical fashion. In this context, you might think of me as an invisible particle of a previously unproblematic piston mysteriously misfiring from within Ian Bogost. You might imagine that--with no language or motion or process that he, or any other human, could ever be conscious of--I am signaling to my anaerobic friends (who's to say microorganisms can't have friends?) that it's time for us to do something different. This switch (unbeknownst to him) also happens to cause him extreme intestinal distress, which if left unchecked, could lead to dehydration, infection, fever, cancer, or even death. Framed by this context (his body), would Ian Bogost stop to ponder the perplexing interiority of this organism that he, in theory, would not--could not--have even granted its "unit-ness" because never knowing of its discrete existence? Would the unit be a subunit of his unit, or would he consider it just another unit of the vast and wonderful universe? Would he stop to ponder the marvels of the life-cycle of an organism that had exited his unit(s) well before he could consciously understand (if ever) that this unit had started a chain reaction that meant the beginning of the end of his unit as he knows it? What then? Would he ask, "What am I to you?" (133), if the limits of his own perception render him unfit to understand where his own organism begins and the other units inside--as well as outside--of him end (that is, not just the units that manly philosophers create, but also the units that create them)? Or would he head to the doctor in hope of a treatment that would prevent further deterioration of his unit (as opposed to all the others)? Would I then consider his body one unit, or too many trillions too small to count? And even if I do accept the premise that everything everywhere exists equally, and therefore has its own form of artificial intelligence, is the answer to such questions irrelevant even when I already acknowledge that they are, as all human thoughts must be, fundamentally irrational in the first place? Is this all a matter of correcting tendentious semantics, or is death the only way "humans will be liberated from the crushing correlational system" (132) still flowing from the unknowable limits of our physiological systems and pathetic (as in, πάθησις) perceptive faculties?

I do not mean to sound churlish or split hairs. But I cannot help wondering who (or what?) is Ian Bogost's audience. Did he have one in mind? Was he merely writing for "units"? American philosophers (presumably bearded)? All the philosophers in all the history of all the whole world (rotting and otherwise)? His peers? Academics in the humanities? Some semblance of a public forum? Post-humanity itself? I am simply not sure that I properly understand what Bogost means when he employs the first person plural in passages like the following:

Why do we give the dead Civil War soldier, the guilty Manhattan project physicist, the oval-headed alien anthropomorph, and the intelligent celestial race so much more credence than the scoria cone, the obsidian fragment, the gypsum crystal, the capsicum pepper, and the propane flame? When we welcome these things into scholarship, poetry, science, and business, it is only to ask how they relate to human productivity, culture, and politics. We've been living in a tiny prison of our own devising... (3)

As much as I would like to pretend otherwise, however much I imagine I can, I am stuck in the position of comparing my own limited knowledge, experience, thoughts, and ideas with the Ian Bogost that I've imagined as speaking, if not exactly to, then toward me. And on this level, it is certain that "we" (Ian Bogost and I) have done no such thing. I have not been living in the tiny prison of his mind any more than he has been living in the tiny prison that is mine. Of course, it would be fallacious to suggest that poorly-worded paragraphs are enough to render the logical composition of an argument invalid. If it were that simple, no one would ever need or bother to write a book. Bogost demonstrates that he is well-versed in the tedious "signified/signifier, perception/interpretation, metaphors, and the senses" conversation (see his chapter entitled "Metaphors"). But this is a debate that rests on the belief that humans actually can step outside the context of their bodies and use their minds to imagine what it's like to be, not others, but rather themselves. Such an act would require an omniscience that human brains lack. But more specifically, I am asking, if I cannot know what I do not know I do not know, how can I possibly begin to wonder about the wonder of things I do not know I cannot know? Bogost's book demonstrates how an argument can be advanced by constructing an imagined system of carefully selected "units" of knowledge from hundreds of years of philosophical thought (almost exclusively Western, almost exclusively male, all almost entirely stripped of past context in service of Bogost's particular conception of a present need) in what seems to me an attempt to summarily refuse, rather than invite, the very complexity of interpretation he champions. With such an approach, can the wonder of speculative realism really be enough to help other scholars who are willing to engage in a debate on such theoretical levels to "leav[e] behind [the] slug's train of identity politics" (133)? The mistake (for humanists, for anyone) is not in lamenting that we can never truly know what it's like to be an "other," but rather in not understanding that this concept is itself a projection of an internal reality: because we can never know our selves, then in some sense, we are all always suffering from metaphysical--because physical--anosognosia.

As Bogost himself recognizes, even labeling the field of OOO is itself problematic since none of the philosophers participating in the original symposium from whence OOO came can agree on any specific sociolinguistic framework by which OOO can or should be understood (4). Why? Because theories, as composed of so many words, will always depend on a political context to be heard. Yes, Bogost is right; language "is only one tool" (100). But we are limited by it even if, as he claims, we believe "we ought not feel" (100) that we are. This is because in communication we aim at a level of clarity already impossible to achieve--especially when stripped of context. Yet democracy itself would be a complete failure if it weren't for the possibility of negotiating brute physical authority through the potentially equalizing nuances of language entailed in the act of interpretation and exchange. What's more, the word "limit" does not only signify the threat of being contained by the wrong meaning, or lack thereof. It also means the possibility of being confounded by the dizzying perpetual motion of meaning too much to be contained. Herein lies the dilemma: if alien phenomenology requires humans to consciously and continuously wonder about exploding the innards of the external world, it requires us to know, not feel, that the world is limitless, even as we feel, but do not know, what we never can: how we ourselves are limited. The "who, what, when, where, why, and how" of linguistic expression (always theoretical) remain equally subjective on both the projecting and receiving ends of communication--whether we are directing our attention toward "quarks, corrugated iron, Amelia Earhart and dyspepsia" (11), or living, breathing humans (like one's wife, who is decidedly not one's mother, or one's daughter, who is decidedly not one's wife). Ultimately, philosophy itself cannot escape the Achilles' heel of rhetoric, which always betrays the political exchange we would like to think our brilliant ideas magically refuse. Bogost's argument falls rhetorically flat simply because it fails to demonstrate nothing more than one more person's perspective of the harm caused by mistaking the physical form of limits in nature for the metaphysical nature of limits in form. This is nothing new.[4] Perhaps the debate continues because the content of our ideas is indissoluble from their physical form or utterance; after all, like any given word, the comprehension of ideas is always metaphorical because grounded in both the physical and metaphysical; damned to perdition within--yet deadlocked in limbo without--context.[5] The negotiation of authority inherent in the exchange of complex ideas which might make perfect sense theoretically, has little bearing in a world in which we simply don't get to determine the physical composition of even our own existence, let alone our minds. Yes, ideas are lovely in the idea world, but to harness them from the abstraction of our thoughts and to put them in any form of expression (whether through words, games, dancing, pictures or music) for the benefit of another unit (with or without a human consciousness) requires harvesting nutrients to produce energy to perpetuate the physical force behind our metaphysical projections. While we might in theory accept the premise that everything exists equally (although not designed or functioning or evolving equally) because everything in the world appears to be subject to the same laws of motion and energy, in our practical every day lives, we know that this is not so. The wearying second law of thermodynamics (entropy) tells us that everything does not, in fact, exist equally because everything decays differently, thereby illuminating the presence of "otherness" across all levels of our daily existence. I like to think that acknowledging this does not necessarily mean surrendering to despair like the fictional Young Werther, but rather that it could serve as a reminder to continue imagining my self as--first, last, and always like every animal and every object and every idea--in the words of Georges Bataille, "in the world like water in water."[6] We can only ever hope to move beside (not beyond) the perpetual laws of occlusion and misunderstanding caused or created by the limits of human form and faculties. But conditioning the mind toward radical uncertainty is necessary precisely because no one has yet to prove the ability to wonder about what we do not know we cannot perceive. There are certainly facets of Alien Phenomenology that I do not know I cannot perceive. But the question I would pose to Ian Bogost is: "What do we do next?"

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End notes:

i. Excerpt from "The Anosognosiac's Dilemma: Something's Wrong But You'll Never Know Why, Part 1.," by Errol Morris ( http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/ )

1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,
SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.

At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.[1]

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. Commander Ronald Freeman assured Fuoco that Wheeler had not gone into “this thing” blindly but had performed a variety of tests prior to the robbery. Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details — “although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work.” He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn’t anywhere to be found in the image. It was like a version of Where’s Waldo with no Waldo. Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid. He came up with three possibilities:

(a) the film was bad;

(b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or

As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.[3]

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

ii. From Jose Ortega y Gasset's essay "Man Has No Nature":

The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for being what it is—a stone in the field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality. This he has to conquer hour after hour. Man must earn his life, not only economically but metaphysically.

And all this for what reason? Obviously—but this is repeating the same thing in other words—because man’s being and nature’s being do not fully coincide. Because man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it. Dante would have likened him to a boat drawn up on the beach with one end of its keel in the water and the other in the sand. What is natural in him is realized by itself; it presents no problem. That is precisely why man does not consider it his true being. His extranatural part, on the other hand, is not there from the outset and of itself; it is but an aspiration, a project of life. And this we feel to be our true being; we call it our personality, our self. Our extra- and antinatural portion, however, must not be interpreted in terms of any of the older spiritual philosophies. I am not interested now in the so-called spirit (Geist), a pretty confused idea laden with speculative wizardry.

If the reader reflects a little upon the meaning of the entity he calls his life, he will find that it is the attempt to carry out a definite program or project of existence. And his self—each man’s self—is nothing but this devised program. All we do we do in the service of this program. Thus man begins by being something that has no reality, neither corporeal nor spiritual; he is a project as such, something which is not yet but aspires to be. One may object that there can be no program without somebody having it, without an idea, a mind, a soul, or whatever it is called. I cannot discuss this thoroughly because it would mean embarking on a course of philosophy. But I will say this: although the project of being a great financier has to be conceived of in an idea, “being” the project is different from holding the idea. In fact, I find no difficulty in thinking this idea but I am very far from being this project.

Here we come upon the formidable and unparalleled character which makes man unique in the universe. We are dealing—and let the disquieting strangeness of the case be well noted—with an entity whose being consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet, a being that consists in not-yet-being. Everything else in the world is what it is. An entity whose mode of being consists in what it is already, whose potentiality coincides at once with his reality, we call a “thing.” Things are given their being ready-made" (1).[7]

[1] This I find problematic, given the extensive amount of scientific and sociological research that has been done--for nearly one hundred years now, though it finds its origins if not its name much earlier than 1914--on a condition known as anosognosia. Anosognosia is the condition of unawareness of a neurological deficit (whether resulting from blunt trauma, a degenerative genetic condition, or a form of mental illness). If false consciousness depicts the act of denial in response to perceived external pressures, anosognosia can result in a false consciousness stemming from the confluence of pressures both known and unknown, both internal and external. Given that individuals can only ever understand this peculiar human condition in theory, it might be much easier to claim that all human brains exist in a state of perpetual false consciousness. (See end notes for an interesting article on anosognosia written by Errol Morris and published in the New York Times' Opinionator blog.)

[2] " I " : A one-strain variation on a theme of parasitic academic existence (also known as "English graduate student") juggling what seems like an ever-increasing number of tasks now generally labeled work, tempered by the privilege of trading in the cultural capital called stress. (Stress, strangely enough, might just be the optimal "vorhanden" for illustrating the infinite-divisibility of Bogost's "units." It is, after all, an invisible unit that is always everywhere; present or just around the chronotopic corner; felt, but never seen.)

[3] A machine that, according to OOO, I have thinged. That is, I've given it the old Heideggerian TKO in naming this unit "Hier-nonymous Bosh."

[4]For example, the speculative realism of Goethe's poetry is present in his fiction as much as in his scientific theories (of anthropology, zoology, agriculture, and optics): “Natural system: a contradictory expression. Nature has no system; she has – she is – life and development from an unknown centre toward an unknowable periphery.” Goethe understood that a system is contained--finite, knowable. Human nature, therefore, has no identifiable system because the limits within that theoretical system are forever in motion. This is a concept that Jose Ortega y Gasset takes up in his essay (published in 1961), "Man Has No Nature." See end notes.

[5] In "Carpentry," Bogost claims that few theories of philosophy depend on their physical format to convey their internal meaning (93). On one level, this is true. But on another level, it would be impossible to separate the physical form of a text from the reception of its content, since the perception of objects is a complex mathematical process in which our minds produce an internal response to the sight and sound of information for reasons and in ways we're not entirely conscious of. Form is a part of the content since humans understand words through a process of association unique to each individual.

[6] Leon Weinmann, a comparatist at SCSU, has written a piece called "Water/Zero," which suggests a speculative illustration of what this concept might mean to human/object relations. (http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v9n1/poetry/weinmann_l/zero_page.shtml)

[7] Excerpted from: History as a System, 2nd ed. (1961), Translation by H. Weyl, E. Clark, and W. Atkinson.

Originally appeared in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann, ed., revised and expanded edition (New York: New American Library, 1965). Accessed via JSTOR 3/28/13.

This Particular Web

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Silence

Friday, November 29, 2013

Know your faults and keep your wits

AP:438-476 Know your faults and keep your wits

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Never give up

Thursday, November 7, 2013

I Made Friends with a Spanish Cat

For Your Mood: Sadness is Inevitable Sometimes

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

All the lies.

Lovers would have been one thing.

The Selflessness Gene

Monday, November 4, 2013

Water . Within . . Water . . . Within . . . . ?

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Not on earth

Down

Destroyed Angel