digital digs

Latour and correlationism

Earlier this month, Levi had a post discussing his reservations regarding the term correlationism. His concern, as I understand it, is that we have reached a point where, at least in some circles, the declaration that somthing is "correlationist" has become a move to dismiss it out of hand. Levi, on the other hand, wants to be able to hold onto to the claim that different entities perceive differently (as a correlationist would). He takes up the example of different entities observing electro-magnetic waves and writes:

If the term “realism” is problematic, then this is because it suggests that the project isepistemological or one of deciding which form of access to the world is the true way the world is. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to decide whether the mantis shrimp, my best friend’s father, or the cat have truer access to the world.  They have different access to the world.  Nonetheless, the term “realism” is still indispensable for two reasons.  First, it is necessary to retain a realism of observers or monads.  The mantis shrimp can’t be reduced to my access to the mantis shrimp, but is an observer that exists in its own right.  The mantis shrimp is irreducible to what it is for me or anyone else.  Second, and this is really the same point, electro-magnetic waves are irreducible to how various beings have access to them.  

I was thinking about this point while discussing Morton's Realist Magic in class yesterday. We had read the introduction to the book (along with a couple of Tim's other essays), and we were discussing his central claim that "the aesthetic dimenstion is the causal dimension." In class, there was some uncertainty over the meaning of aesthetic and some wondering if this claim didn't end up as something much like weak correlationism. This uncertainty arose, I think, from thinking of aesthetics as a product of symbolic behavior. However, I see aesthetics differently, as I think Morton does, as a sensation or feeling. 

In any case, I was working through this with the students in the class, something struck me about correlationism in relation to Latour's critique of modernity. Specifcally, the correlationist argument, while refuting the "native realist" position it imagines as its opponent, holds on an important premise in naive realism: that a real world exists in something like the way realism describes, though we cannot have access to it. Now there are some extreme idealist positions that might not agree to this, but generally speaking correlationism is about an epistemological limit: what we can know about a real world that is out there. It strikes me that that "real world" is still largely understood in modern terms. 

Harman's object-oriented move is to contend that all objects, not just humans, encounter this epistemological limit: all objects only know the world in their own terms. As such, it's not that objects are out there being "real" in the conventional sense but we can't access their "realness." Objects are real, but reality is something different, weirder as the OOO folks like to say. Morton takes up quantum physics to argue objects can occupy contradictory positions, which means that they are ontologically unknowable; objects are real but they cannot be known, not because of our limits, but because of the way objects exist. Another way I might think about this is in terms of the end of the universe. According to at least one theory, the universe will end cold. It will continue to expand until it reaches a state of entropy. At that point, there will be zero information left. No knowledge. As we might take from cybernetics, information requires energy; information is energetic. To know something about the world is to do work: burn calories, drain laptop batteries, etc. Once we do away with the modernist's real world, the modernist-correlationist concern of not being able to access it doesn't make much sense. Instead, "knowing" becomes a way of doing work, of building alliances (to use Latour's terms). What we know is "real" in much the same way as anything else might be real. Knowing is as real as running. Inasmuch as any activity is real, the act of knowing is something. Knowledge as some kind of transmission or storage is also real. These are real objects unto themselves, built from other objects (as all objects are). As Latour suggests in his compositionist manifesto, some compositions are better than others. As Bryant suggests in the post mentioned above, some theories are better than others: "the Vikings thought that lightning occurred when the god Odin struck his hammer– and our theories of lightning might turn out to be mistaken as well –but lightning can’t be reduced to whatever some group of people happen to say about it.  There is a reality to lightning and some theories of lightning will be true and others false."

Once you can move into this position, you no longer face the prospect of trying to circumvent correlationism to get at the real world or the prospect of reconciling yourself to the fact that you will never really know anything about the world (i.e. the everything is text/representation). Instead, knowing becomes building real relations with real objects. Even though those objects do not exist in a way that would allow for the Truth as we have fantasized it, they are real enough to do work. The challenge then becomes one not of finding out the truth but of discovering the possibilities for composing.

Vitanza's big rhetoric and "some more"

Iternation has an interview with Victor Vitanza where he discusses the idea of "big rhetoric" (see below). Big rhetoric is a concept that has been around for a few decades. It remarks on the move by which all forms of symbolic communication come to be seen as rhetorical. It is arguably part of the larger "linguistic turn" of postmodernity and is juxtaposed to a narrower, more traditionally disciplinary rhetoric that might focus upon public address. 

Vitanza goes an interesting direction with this though in referencing George Kennedy's "A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric," which looks beyond symbolic behaviors to animals (and even plants) to speculate on nonsymbolic, nonhuman rhetoric. Kennedy's point is that rhetoric is connected to communication and necessariy precedes symoblic behaviors since it is clear that animals communicate without a symbolic language. For me, Kennedy's most interesting thesis is one he says the least about: "Rhetoric is prior to intentionality or to any belief on the part of a speaker about the meaning of a sign or its effect on others." In my own work, I separate rhetoric from communication in following Deleuze and Guattari's argument that "Language is neither informational nor communica-tional. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement" (ATP, 79). This connects with their concept of incorporeal transformations. However, I take this further than Deleuze and Guattari do here to think about rhetoric in terms of expressions that cannot enact incorporeal transformations without recourse to language; expressions that are autonomous and auto-objective, or, as Kennedy puts it here, "prior to intentionality or to any belief on the part of the speaker." The bird's song expresses itself prior to expressing some bird's intentionality. As Vitanza puts it in responding to a question about the future of rhetoric, rhetoric is going wherever it wants, that it does not know where it is going, that it is just "rhetoricking." This is what Deleuze and Guattari would mean by autonomous as well, not "free-willed," but subject to its own internal goverance and laws, laws which are never fully knowlable by the self.

 

Big Ideas: Victor Vitanza with Jimmy Butts from Itineration on Vimeo.

object-oriented marketing... sort of

Atlantic Monthly has an article this month, "Anthropology Inc," that examines the ethnographic work of corporate anthropologists (a contentious term in itself, at least for academic anthropologists). The article focuses on a single company and one of its co-founders Christian Madsbjerg. 

Madsbjerg had a list of clients desperate for Heideggerian readings of their businesses. The service he provides sounds even more improbable to a scholar who knows his Heidegger than to a layperson who does not. Many philosophers spend their lives trying and failing to understand what Heidegger was talking about. To interest a typical ReD client—usually a corporate vice president who is, Madsbjerg says, “the least laid-back person you can imagine, with every minute of their day divided into 15-minute blocks”—in the philosopher’s turgid, impenetrable post-structural theory is as unlikely a pitch as could be imagined.

But it’s the pitch Madsbjerg has been making. The fundamental blindness in the sorts of consulting that dominate the market, he says, is that they are Cartesian in their outlook: they view objects as the sum of their performance and physical properties....

To sell the ReD idea—that products and objects are inevitably encrusted with cultural meaning, and that a company that neglects to explore social theory is bound to leave profits on the table—Madsbjerg has evangelized with great success, giving what are surely the only successful corporate sales pitches salted with words like hermeneutics and phenomenology. 

I suppose my first response is to chuckle. Does Heidegger really work this way? Or is this more like a familiar touchstone in a sales pitch? In a sense, Madsbjerg is making the anti-object-oriented argument. That is, what he takes from Heidegger is a recognition that human knowledge of objects is highly subjective and that it is this subjective encrusting of meaning and value that corporations need to understand to sell their products. However, it strikes me that Madsbjerg is only seeing half the picture here if he focuses solely on the relations from the human side. If we are to believe, as the article suggests, the people develop attachments to vodka based upon the stories they can tell rather than about "objective" qualities, then do we not need to consider the role of the vodka in the composition of that story? What is it about these objects that create these affective bonds?

I'm not sure that this is as terribly new as the article suggests. I am reminded, somewhat, of coolhunting and characters like William Gibson's Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition, who, if I recall correctly, tracks down the first kid to wear his baseball cap backwards. Maybe it is new, though, to employ these ethnographic methods and to think about products from a Heideggerean perspective. Perhaps the alien phenomenology of the latest mobile phone could provide some insight into its capacity to enter into particular assemblages with consumers.

Meanwhile the skeptical response of academic anthropologists is understandable. This enthographic research is undertaken without any kind of ethical or professional review to protect participants. Some of it may be harmless, I guess, but certainly there is a potential for harm, particularly since the underlying purpose of any of these studies is to sell things to people like those being studied. As the article indicates, anthropology tends to be a leftist discipline, much like cultural studies or critical theory in that regard. So I imagine it is difficult for scholars in these fields to watch their purportedly revolutionary and emancipatory methods being used for capitalist purposes. And yet, should we be surprised that if a method provides real and useful knowledge about how markets and consumers interact that corporations want to make use of that method? That's just another place where the arguments that are made about a theory's politics falls short. Any method can be put to just about any political purpose. 

An object-oriented marketing research method would presumably but humans and their nonhuman products in a flat ontological space and speculate on their relations and phenomenological responses. Clients may be primarily interested in human agency and choices, but a better ontological understanding of their products seen through their interactions with humans might be useful. I'm not looking to start such a firm, but it makes as much sense to me as a Heideggerean one.

 

playing the regimes of attraction

Last weekend, we drove down to DC for a soccer tournament in which my son's team was participating. During the 16-hour trip there and back, we listened to an audiobook, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It's a sci-fi novel set in a dystopian future where the main characters spend most of their time in a virtual internet/game world called the OASIS (the ontologically anthropocentric sensory immersive simulation). The novel's plot is largely an easter egg hunt with the prize being ownership of the Oasis itself. The hunt, developed by the now-deceased creator of the Oasis James Halliday, is filled with the nerdy 80s trivia that Halliday loved. I won't say it is a great literary achievement, but it was fun to listen to while driving through central PA. Elsewhere this weekend, I was also revisiting Levi Bryant's Democracy of Objects, which I've been teaching in my Speculative Realism graduate seminar, and we spent some time on Monday discussing Bryant's concept of regimes of attraction. 

This may seem like apples and oranges to you, but these are two sides of the concept of virtuality that I explored in The Two Virtuals. Briefly, as we know, the Deleuzian virtual is a monistic substrate. As Bryant writes, "Deleuze's constant references to the virtual as the pre-individual suggests this reading as well, for it implies a transition from an undifferentiated state to a differenciated individual. If the virtual is pre-individual, then it cannot be composed of discrete individual unities or substances. Here the individual would be an effect of the virtual, not primary being itself." The digital virtual is nothing like this. Perhaps virtual reality appears to be made of some monistic malleable materiality but it is, of course, code: ones and zeros, or even better, voltage intensities across a circuit. Deleuze's real virtual lies beneath all that even further. In Democracy of Objects, Bryant undertakes a motivated reading of Deleuze, identifying particular passages where he leans in a different direction, toward a more pluralistic, less monistic, virtuality, which eventually leads Bryant toward his concept of virtual proper being.

This got me wondering if virtual proper being might not be an ontology that is in some respects closer to the way that VR functions, or is imagined to function in a novel like Ready Player One. Bryant writes that

The virtual proper being of an object is what makes an object properly an object. It is that which constitutes an object as a difference engine or generative mechanism. However, no one nor any other thing ever encounters an object qua its virtual proper being, for the substance of an object is perpetually withdrawn or in excess of any of its manifestations.

And then later, he adds, "The virtual proper being of an object is its endo-structure, the manner in which it embodies differential relations and attractors or singularities defining a vector field or field of potentials within a substance." In the move from a common substrate to these virtual/hidden individual "generative mechanisms," this seems to me more like the generative mechanisms behind artificial life. Certainly it would be fair to say that the algorithms that drive such objects are only ever simulations or models of the singularities and attractors that operate virtually. I don't want to take this analogy too far. However, I wonder: if we could hypothesize some extra-dimensional position outside of the virtual-actual ontological circuit Bryant describes, would that position offer us a vantage that might be analogous to the human user examining the codes and manifestations of sofware objects in VR?

In any case, the development of virtual spaces offers a useful way to think about how regimes of attraction might operate. Bryant describes these regimes as follows:

Regimes of attraction should thus be thought as interactive networks or, as Timothy Morton has put it, meshes that play an affording and constraining role with respect to the local manifestations of objects. Depending on the sorts of objects or systems being discussed, regimes of attraction can include physical, biological, semiotic, social, and technological components. Within these networks, hierarchies or sub-networks can emerge that constrain the local manifestations available to other nodes or entities within the network.

In short, regimes of attraction place external limits on how the virtual proper being of an object might manifest itself. As it already stands, every object has an endo-structure that already places limits on what it might be (otherwise, virtual proper being would be the same as monism). However those manifestations are further limited by exo-relations, which form the regimes of attraction. As a result of this intersection, objects are neither entirely free to mutate in any fashion nor are they overdetermined by their context. To think about this within the analogy of a virtual reality space, one might say that any object that one creates will have an endo-structure that limits its operation and possibilities for manifesting. For example, Bryant uses the extended example of a blue coffee mug to talk about the mugs power "to blue" and how that manifests itself differently depending on regimes of attraction such as available light sources and the sensory capacities of the objects perceiving the mug. The same sort of mechanic would operate in a virtual world, just as most virtual worlds have game engines that govern things like "gravity." Those engines are part of the endo-structure of objects. The fact that one (or one's avatar) finds herself on a large planet with a particular gravitational field (or a virtual version of such) is then part of the regime of attraction that manifests your feet on the ground and constrains movement in specific ways. Virtual worlds often work this way, even though clearly they don't have to. 

Ready Player One offers a peculiar vision of how the endo-structure of a VR world might develop out of a pre-existing set of regimes of attraction. That is, if we were to imagine, for a second, that someone actually created the Oasis, at the outset its limits would be defined by things like available computing technologies, processing power, programming languages, etc.: in other words, the material substrate on which any VR world would be built. The Oasis in the novel becomes further shaped by its creator's obsession with the 1980s: Dungeons and Dragons, early video games, computers, sci-fi novels, anime... the whole geek lexicon. This obession becomes built into the mechanics of the Oasis itself, along with those other technological elements. Parzival, the novel's protagonist, navigates the Oasis through his deep research into this culture.

How do we want to think about a VR world as a real object? We've seen this conversation among OOO folks about whether or not Popeye is real. In OOO terms, for an object to be real it must be able to exist independent of external relations. So a statue of Popeye is real. However, there is also something like an idea of Popeye that can be trademarked: is that a real object? Can something that is symbolic or encoded be real, independent of its local manifestations in a book or on a screen? Perhaps. So, for example, if a character in World of Warcraft finds a magical sword, which she can sell or trade, even for US dollars: is that sword a real object?

I would say that one potential error to avoid here is in imagining that virtual worlds are separate from the "real world." They aren't worlds inside of worlds. A digital photograph is as real as a printed photograph. An ebook is as real as a printed book. A digital movie file is as real, as material, as a movie on a reel. Virtual characters have a material manifestation as well. They take up physical space on a hard drive somewhere. They should not be mistaken for their local manifestations on a computer screen, though it is only within the particular regimes of attraction of that software and hardware that they become viewable as characters. Otherwise they are just data files.

Maybe this is a good analogy for a pluralist virtuality, like virtual proper being. Without the proper regime of attraction, virtual beings are unreadable, inaccessible. With the right regime, they become manifest in particular ways, not their true form of course, but a form that can relate and acquire agency. That would suggest though that virtual being can be altered by altering its local manifestation, which is something we already know in OOO right? Virtual beings cannot directly interact; only their local manifestations (for Bryant) or sensual objects (for Harman) can be encountered. But real objects (their virtual/withdrawn states) can be destroyed through these interactions; there must be feedback. If they can be destroyed then it makes sense that they can also be altered without destroying them--not just altering their local manifestations but their virtual/withdrawn states as well, while allowing the object to still be the same object.... just different. In other words, we can paint Bryant's blue coffee mug yellow, and it will no longer manifest blueness. It will lose that virtual power. It's virtual proper being will be altered. And yet it is still the same mug. I don't see why that should be a problem. We can have a discussion about how much change is required to make something into a different object, but that's for another time. 

What this indicates to me is that if we think about a pluralist rather than a monist virtuality, then we create an ontology where the particulars of an object's virtual dimension are alterable through its local manifestations, which in turn are alterable through the regimes of attraction in which it emerges. This creates a condition in which we can proceed experimentally in devising different regimes for the purpose of shaping virtual being. Our ability to know the results of those experiments might always be limited but the principle that such mutations are possible seems to make sense. 

mathematics and evil

I'm finishing up an essay for a new collection on rhetoric and the digital humanities that looks at the usefulness of a speculative digital rhetoric for dh, specifically big data applications. One of the points of commonality between speculative realism and digital humanities has been their interest in advanced mathematics. This has been pointed out before (see, for example, Michael Witmore's piece on the Ancestral Text in the Open Access edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities). Clearly Meillassoux's work connects with set theory but one could also think of Bryant's interest in cybernetics, DeLanda's use of simulation, or Bogost's work with programming. The use of mathematics and computing has also been a common point of the critiques lodged against both fields such as Alex Galloway's piece in Critical Inquiry or Tara McPherson's in the Debates book. In both cases, and many similar critiques, speculative realism and digital humanities are guilty by association. The warrants in these arguments are that we know that object-oriented programming is a tool for capitalist domination and that advanced mathematics has been built to devalue the human race and exploit our suffering for the profit of the few. So all we have to do is demonstrate that speculative realism or digital humanities rely upon such evils to prove their own evil as well. 

Of course there is another possibility that suggests that mathematics is a powerful way of investigating the world and that our philosophies ought to account for it. In that case, part of the argument that mathematics is a powerful tool is that people who are in power use it; there's no point in denying that. What makes less sense is the argument that suggests that because a tool is powerful we shouldn't use it to understand the world. 

If we think about these matters historically, as these critiques often insist that we should, the arguments become even odder. If we were to look at critical methods that have long operated in the humanities such as psychoanalysis or Marxism, it wouldn't be difficult to recognize the role that nineteenth and early-twentieth century math and science played in the formations of those theories. Similarly, it isn't difficult to identify the importance of industrial technologies to the development of modern scholarly practices. It wouldn't be that difficult to establish that the math and science underpinning Marxism, for example, were also used to hegemonic and destructive ends. And yet, somehow, century-old math, science, and technology are acceptable in the humanities in a way that contemporary math, science, and technology are not.

I understand the argument that suggests the digital humanities are "under-theorized." I would think of the situation somewhat differently. New computational methods can always identify new relationships and patterns within data and interpreting those relationships and patterns is a second step that is perhaps necessarily going to be a little behind the first step. I don't know that our legacy critical theories are of much use in this regard. On the other hand, I think those who are willing to engage more openly with contemporary math, science, and technology, including speculative realists but many others as well, might be able to develop, in conjuction with digital humanists, ways of theorizing the ontological and epistemological status of computational analysis. For my own part in thinking about a digital speculative rhetoric, I think the role lies in understanding the rhetorical function of nonhumans.

Regardless, I don't really see the benefit in passing these blanket judgments on departments across the campus from the humanities building. It seems to me that this is where the real antipathy toward speculative realism and digital humanities begins. Mathematics isn't evil, though it can be used for evil purposes. Shakespeare was put to use in English departments to perpetuate an essentialist, anglocentric, patriarchal ideology but that doesn't make Shakespeare a servant of industrial capitalism that should be abandoned. What is really at stake here, I believe, is a matter of disciplinary authority wherein these methods are not beholden to extant theories. It is understandable that humanists would not want to become epiphenomena of math or neuroscience or simulations. The response has been to attempt to turn the tables by asserting all math and science is primarily historical and cultural. Speculative realism and digital humanities do something different by rejecting this divide in a Latourian move. I don't really see how this is evil. It's more like different, though its not suprising when different is mistaken for evil.

 

the strange world of antonyms

My 11 year-old son gets these strange assignments where he's asked to come up with antonyms for real world objects (e.g. this morning he was asking "what's the opposite of 'astronomer'?" We said geologist but it could have been astrologer or how about elbow?). I don't really mind the assignment. I suppose it is asking the students to think poetically, which is how you would have to think to oppose the sky to the earth and then extrapolate to astronomer/geologist. At the same time though we might say that astronomers and geologists have much more in common than astronomers and dancers. In the end the antonym business is a playful correlationist exercise, particularly when it comes to objects; it really depends on the individual's perceptions and valuations. 

After all, what is the opposite of toaster?  Apparently the answer is "materialism." Alex Galloway makes this point quite clearly in his recent piece on "The Poverty of Philosophy:"

There are two basic options when it comes to the task of the political. One is an aligned politics and the other an unaligned politics. An aligned politics is a politics tethered to a moral yardstick and equipped with an ethical mechanic able to pursue it. The moral sphere refers to a law or goal that must be attained, while the ethical sphere refers to a set of practices governing action that, when observed and put into play, may tend toward certain ends (moral or not). One may inhabit an ethos, therefore, without having a morality; likewise one may be linked to a morality, but fail in ethical practice. Thus, an aligned politics is the name given when the vectors of ethical action aim directly at a specific moral outcome. By contrast, an unaligned politics is the name given to those projects unencumbered by the moral law. Guided solely by the force vectors of the ethical sphere, unaligned political projects may still gain formidable inertia, territorializing and deterritorializing entire domains. Unaligned, they exist as mercenaries, often jumping the gap between friend and enemy. If Badiou’s project is the quintessential aligned political project, his moral truths scaffolded by a precise ethical mechanic, then Deleuze’s is the quintessential unaligned political project, an absent moral superstructure overshadowed by a massive vector field of physical forces. 

Realism is an unaligned politics. The issue thus is not that realism is good or bad but that realism is dangerous. In its very unalignment, realism ultimately lacks a true relationship with the absolute because it abdicates the political decision. 

I believe I agree with Galloway's analysis here, though not his ultimate conclusion. I even agree with the notion that "realism is dangerous." On the flipside, who would deny that "aligned politics" are also dangerous? Colonialism, fascism, racism, sexism, capitalism, totalitarianism: would these not all be aligned politics? Galloway's preferred aligned politics is materialism, which he defines as "an aligned politics because it identifies something like an absolute moral sphere (history, the social totality), and buttresses such an absolute with the necessary tactics governing practice (demystification of the commodity, ideology critique, the dialectic, and so on). What does materialism ultimately espouse? That everything should be rooted in material life and history, not in abstraction, logical necessity, universality, essence, pure form, spirit, or idea." In the realm of aligned politics, everything is dangerous and immoral except for what one happens to believe. Personally I find Galloway's description of materialism as both accurate and contradictory. How can "everything be rooted in material life and history, not in abstraction" and simultaneously identify "an absolute moral sphere"? Isn't an absolute moral sphere already an abstraction? Furthermore, this is an argument grounded in antonyms, which are necessarily abstractions, like aligned and unaligned politics.

From a realist-ontological perspective, what does one want to say about moral spheres? Presumably that they are rooted in material life and history, though maybe not in those words. At least from my perspective, a law or a goal is a thing that exists. All that a realist ontology argues is that there is no particular moral law or goal that is ontologically essential. E.g., it is not necessary for the world to be just or end up in justice or even move toward greater justice. If justice is a historical and material thing, then it can change over time. It is possible that the concept may cease to exist, just as it is certain there was a time when it did not exist. To deny this would be to claim that justice is an essential and universal idea. Clearly one can make that claim, but not as a materialist. My understanding of the way a politically aligned materialist position works is that one believes one knows how the world should work. What is the basis for this belief? At the foundation I think one must belief in the material existence of antonyms. 

Contrary to Galloway's argument, it would seem fairly obvious that the most dangerous and destructive human actions have not come from politically unaligned positions but rather from those who believed that reality must conform to their political views. When one looks at how Christianity becomes Crusades and Inquistion or Marxism becomes Stalinism, how can one possibly believe that aligned political positions are not likely to exist as mercernaries or jump the gap between friend and enemy? A realist ontology does not accept that antonyms like friend and enemy exist in some absolute sense among real objects. Perhaps a realist ontology makes it more difficult to make the judgments that make political belief comfortable. If you want to argue that a realist ontology provides no grounds in itself for opposing genocide, I think you could make that argument. By the same token it provides no grounds for genocide, which is where politically aligned positions almost inevitably tend to go.

 

an example of the rhetorical force of objects

Wired UK reports on a new study about the effects of simple scents (e.g. oranges) on shoppers. Pumping scents into stores to affect shopping behaviors is not a new practice, though apparently this is new research on the effectiveness of particular scents. The article reports

According to the researchers, the increase in shopping activity stems from the fact that simple scents are more easily processed. Complex scents take more resources to deal with and therefore interfere with cognitive task performance.

Support for the cognitive explanation for the increased spending came from a second experiment, in which participants were able to solve a greater number of word problems and in less time when a simple scent was present, than when working in an atmosphere with a complex scent or no scent at all.

Should it surprise us that our environment can affect our ability to think on both unconscious and conscious levels? I don't think so. Of course we can be seduced by beauty and by the tones of a voice: we have been aware of the rhetorical power of the sensorium since the dawn of rhetoric. However, I was interested in this explanation about cognitive processing. Here we are looking not only at receiving some particular message from a scent but a change in cognitive operation. Equally of interest to me is the abstraction of the scent here. Oranges do not produce an orange scent to encourage holiday shopping, but the scent does serve an expressive purpose for orange trees. What do we discover when such expression is abstracted from its "original purpose"?

So here's how we begin to move toward this example of rhetorical objects. One might say the following things about the two usesu of orange scent here (in stores and by trees). In the first case, one might object that it is humans (store managers) using the scent to achieve their rhetorical purpose (increase sales) on other humans (consumers). The second case one might argue is a matter of nature and science: scents attract insects because of instinct rather than rhetorical persuasion. Both of these positions can be questioned, but for the purposes of my example they are both missing the point as neither really identifies the object that is at work here: the complex organic molecule that finds its way into your nose.

The human olfactory sense is apparently very complex with ongoing theories and experiments regarding its function, but it would appear that human sensory receptors interact with these molecules to produce sensory data. Does the molecule care if you shop, polinate, develop a thirst, or remember eating oranges as a child? I'm going to guess no. Does the molecule contain a message "orange smell"? Not exactly. It has a certain molecular structure that your nose "reads" as orange. The expression "orange" isn't in the molecule; it arises from your encounter with the molecule. If you have a bad cold, you could be sprayed with orange scent and maybe still not smell it. You have to encounter the molecule in a particular (nasal) way.

Now we can hypothesize that by some co-evolutionary process, oranges and mammals developed so that we would find them tasty, eat the fruit, and distribute the seeds. The particular taste and scent (i.e. the specific orange molecule) formed as part of this process, a kind of rhetorical process whereby animals are persuaded to eat fruit and/or trees are persuaded to produce tasty fruit. In other words, hypothetically one can trace a (pre)history of rhetorical attunement between oranges and mammals that participates in our current preference for oranges and the unconscious response measured in the shopping experiment. While the molecule itself doesn't have a stake in that attunement, it does have this expressive potential, a potential that is autonomous and auto-objective: an expressivity that is autonomous of humans, trees, and molecules; an expressivity that emerges in that olfactory relation but withdraws from the molecule and nasal sensory receptors that produce it. 

Does the smell of oranges tell us to buy home decor (as in the experiment)? No more that it tells us to disperse orange seeds. But it does create an affective state of mind wherein certain behaviors are statistically more likely. This is where a nonhuman rhetoric begins. Take the human out of it and think about the squirrel, the nut, and the molecule that makes the nut tasty for the squirrel. That molecule too has an expressive, rhetorical potential that is autonomous from the reproductive needs of trees and mammals. 

In any encounter where there is expression and hence cognition (and we can define cognition as broadly, as pan-psychically, as you like) there is an intermediating expression-object (a sound, an image, a gesure, a scent, an electromagnetic signal) with an expessivity that is autonomous from the two objects encountering one another through the expression. That same signal can be abstracted and reused with different results because its expressivity is not tied to anything except its capacity to express in relation to an object with the necessory sensors.

Now bring the humans back in and consider this blog post. It is a series of images on a screen. To you they are letters, words, sentences, paragraphs. They are creating an expression in your mind, but they have no more interest in that expression than the orange molecule. They might be reused elsewhere to different effects, like the orange scent in the store. Like our evolved preference for oranges there is nothing intentional about our evolved capacity for symbolic action. It just happens that oranges and humans developed along a path that was mutually beneficial. Other plants interact with other species to reproduce, and some have unsucessful reproductive strategies. Of course it's not wholly random either. Orange trees have evolutionary pressures to develop edible fruit and humans have evolutionary pressures to develop means for figuring out what is edible.  Our capacity for symbolic action is not wholly random either. But, as with the relation between the orange scent and purchasing, perhaps symbolic action is a kind of abstracted expressivity. Perhaps that it is a interesting way to look at how rhetoric develops from the more immediate expression of the scent of a flower attracting a polinating insect to the seductive perfume scent: a kind of increasing abstraction or distancing of expressivity that emerges into symbolic action.

Latour's moderns and correlationism's gift

I've been trying to think through the relationship between Latour's critique of modernity and the now-familiar issue of correlationism. While I am certainly not trained as a philosopher, I can count, so it's clear that Kant's arguments, which Meillassoux identifies as the inauguration of correlationist thinking, develop in the 1780s, while Latour focuses on Hobbes and Boyle (more than a century earlier) as a start point for the modern division of nature from culture. Latour clearly states that it is Kant who fully realizes the division that Hobbes and Boyle begin (in We Have Never Been Modern), so at least from Latour's perspective there is merit for seeing correlationism as a product of modernity. In Latour's view, Kant's Copernican revolution is one step in an increasingly attenuated line between the poles of nature/object and society/subject. In the modern world, there are always quasi-objects that serve the role of linking these two poles. For moderns these objects are mute intermediaries where for Latour they are mediators with an active role. This is a crucial difference.

I often hear from readers of speculative realism I encounter that philosophers in this school want to solve the problem of correlationism. Some do, perhaps, but as I see it, establishing correlationism as a problem to be solved might be misleading at best. That is, it is misleading if one imagines that the goal here is to establish a means by which modern subjects of the type Latour describes can encounter the natural world without mediation, without the drifting/withdrawal that makes our knowledge of the world always knowledge for us. That's not what's happening here. However, if solving the correlationist problem means offering a better explanation for the ontological/epistemelogical problem Kant identifies, then yes I think that makes sense. 

At the same time, I think it is important to recognize that the disconnection between subject and object in correlationism (and the general withdrawal among all objects in OOO) is the foundation of life. Without this disconnection, things would happen instantaneously via pure translation of cause. I'd have to think it through but perhaps one would even want to argue that there could be no events or time. Relations would be always already decided; they would be pure and total. Instead, because there are gaps, there is thinking. Because relations are not complete and translation is not overdeterminingly causational, there is agency. These are not solvable conditions, except through total destruction. I am not even sure why such a thing would be desirable. It seems that part of what one can learn from Latour is that our efforts to imagine the natural world in these terms have contributed to our destructive ecological condition. Who would want to extend such "solutions" further?

The "problem" of correlationism might, in Latourian terms, be understood as the problem of hybridity. If one extends this in a way Latour hasn't to not only object-subject but object-object (a kind of OOO move), then one begins to investigate how objects mediate one another through relation, developing capacities for thought and agency. Whether object or relation is primary can be a debate for another day. I am willing to say that an object need not be in relation in order to exist, as long as all objects are already made up of objects in relation. (In other words, there can be objects that have no relations but no objects can exist without relations also existing because every object has to be made up of other objects that are relating to form that object... make sense? he asked breathlessly) In any case, my particular interests are in objects that happen to be in relation to one another anyway (rhetorical relations). This problem of relation is not be solved (in the pursuit of substituting pure connection for relation). Instead, in the Deleuzian sense, it is the problem that forms the assemblage from which thought and action develop.

 

 

what an object-oriented rhetoric has to offer

I'm going to be answering a question like this in video format for the new journal Itneration (maybe I'll get my haircut first), but in the meantime I thought I'd visit the question here. I am in the midst of a book project on this matter and it is useful to get big picture/back-to-basics as part of that. 

To start with a generalization: the discipline of rhetoric studies human symbolic action. Does anyone want to dispute that or offer up the exceptions that prove the rule?  If you are unsure of that claim, go to any rhetoric conference or rhetoric journal and count the number of presentations/articles that do not deal with humans and/or do not deal with symbolic action (e.g. language, gestures, media, visual communication, etc.). What is it that we study about human symbolic action? The "means of persuasion" is the first answer, but clearly the contemporary discipline is about more than persuasion. We examine rhetoric's ideological effects in the formation of subjectivity and the shaping of knowledge in public-civic spaces, workplaces, in relation to technology, as informed by cultural, gendered, ethnic differences, etc. Obviously we also study compositional processes. But again, it is all human and symbolic. 

That said, there has been a growing interest in various nonhuman theories in rhet/comp. Latour might be the most prominent example, though one could also consider various Deleuzianisms, new materialistfeminisms and others (not trying to create a comprehensive list) that have appeared everywhere from computers and writing to animal studies in rhetoric. These are all fellow travelers with speculative realism, and if what speculative realists share is an acknowledgement of Meillassoux's correlationism (while differing on how to respond), many might even be called speculative realists themselves. The primary difference between an object-oriented view and these other nonhuman views is the nonrelational ontology of the former. That is, as those familiar with OOO know, objects always exceed their relations; as such, the processes/relations in which objects might be involved do not define those objects (even though they can destroy/consume them). This means that I see two, nested questions here.

1. What does a nonhuman rhetoric have to offer?
2. What does an object-oriented rhetoric (as a kind of nonhuman rhetoric) have to offer?

In the last paragraph I elided mention of "symbolic action," but that will have to come back in as part of the answers to these questions. The answer to question #1 begins with recognizing the limits of "human rhetoric:" that is, one that asserts only humans are rhetorical. First, historically we can see how the category of humans has not always included all humans. As such, the definition of rhetoric has always been mixed up with the definition of humanness in ways that have had obvious political implications. Part of the political project of rhetoric then has been getting all humans equally into the human-rhetorical club. On a different day, I might go into various speculative-realist views on the ontological status of biological concepts like species, but for now I'll just leave that. A nonhuman rhetoric does not discount the political or ethical importance of human equality for humans, though it might offer a different description of the problem. What it does argue though is that objects do not need to be human (or human-directed) in order to be rhetorical. This would offer a different (and I think better) description of how the rhetorical forces that shape cultural definitions of humans operate. 

Second, and I think more importantly, a nonhuman rhetoric addresses the problem of human exceptionalism that pervades our discipline (and the humanities). Obviously it is understandable that humans are more important to humans than other objects. However it is a different matter to imagine that humans are exceptional on an ontological basis (the fight to get into the human club is a reflection of this belief in our exceptionalism). Rhetoric/symbolic action has long been a hallmark of a secular human exceptionalism. There are many reasons, beyond the immediate concerns of rhetoric, that one might be concerned with this exceptionalist belief: for example, it's impact on how we address climate change. However, in terms of rhetoric, the belief that rhetoric/symbolic action is an exceptional human characteristic establishes every other object in the world as a potential threat to our inherent rhetoricity. We see this with technologies from Plato and writing up through digital media, but really any object that might impart nonrational effects on humans is part of the "problem." This shapes our understanding of human-rhetorical deficiencies (e.g. "students can't write") and the general problem of miscommunication or misinterpretation. In short, a human-exceptionalist view of rhetoric imagines symbolic action is primarily hermeneutic: as communicative, informational, and interpretable. While clearly these words all describe phenomena that are associated with human-rhetorical acts, they all describe things we try to make symbolic action do, from a nonhuman perspective these are not what rhetoric/symbolic action is. Rhetoric is not human.

Let me shift now specifically to an object-oriented view. Here we can begin by saying that even though humans use rhetoric/symbolic action to communicate, inform, persuade etc., rhetoric cannot be exhausted by these relations. While it might be possible to consider rhetoric as an object (e.g. as a discipline or a book), I am interested in rhetoric as a way of describing relations among objects. In OOO, an object is made from other objects that are in relation to one another (in the formation of that object), even though the created object exceeds its parts. An object can also enter into a relation with a second object without forming a third (e.g. the cup is on the table.). There are many ways to describe these relations, though the descriptions always face the correlationist problem. For example, there are all the typically physical kinds of relations: chemical, gravitational, electro-magnetic, mechanical, etc. There are biological relations that emerge from these others. And then we typically say there are symbolic relations which are all the cultural- and language-based relations, plus the psychological effects of the unconscious, which again I believe we only attributed to humans as exceptional, symbol-using beings. An object-oriented view would not deny that humans enter into singular relations via language; it would just also say that all objects enter into singular relations and that humans are not ontologically exceptional in this way. In other words we can also talk about specific kinds of relations among objects as long as we understand that 1) objects are not exhausted by this relations, 2) objects cannot be made ontologically exceptional by the relations into which they enter, and 3) our descriptions of relations always confront the correlationist limit (though we can speculate about "alien phenomenology" as Bogost puts it).

Though there are likely many ways to approach this, right now, I am conceiving of rhetoric as a general, nonhuman, relational force that any object might possibly enter into to the same extent as any object might have psychic/cognitive experiences. For Harman, psychic experiences result from relations, so all objects have at least a dormant capacity for some minimal psychism on an ontological basis. I would say the same thing for rhetoric. Following upon our classical link between rhetoric and persuasion, rhetoric might then be understood as the agentive force of psychic relationality. That is, an object enters into a relation with a second object (such relations need not be bi-directional). This relations produces a psychic experience (we can call it thought but that might be too anthropomorphizing). That experience may not have a symbolic component, but it will be informational on an autopoietic basis. I.e., the object "senses" something. However that sense-information is not neutral in terms of its force. Instead that sense-information generates some reaction. The object being sensed cannot determine that reaction, though if it has entered into a bi-directional relationship (each object relating to the other), some feedback loop can develop. At the same time, the sensing object is not fully in control of the relation either: on some level it is subject to what it senses. So how does this psychic-informational relation generate some possible agency by opening up possible actions and perhaps influencing one course of action over others? Good question. One for specific study: rhetorical study I would say, at least on a minimal rhetorical basis. 

Now if one wants to shift back to more familiar rhetorical territory, what would such an approach mean for understanding our efforts to create a digitally-mediated democracy and civic space? Or how would such an understanding inform the way we teach rhetoric for a digital-literate culture? Again, good questions (I hope, since I have been/will be writing about them). But basically it begins with understanding the rhetorical role of these objects differently and recognizing that even though we may be hopelessly anthropocentric that the digital-rhetorical networks in which we participate are not "for us" or "by us" but rather nonhumans with which we relate. If we fail to see that, then I think we fail to see how these networks are operating on an ontological level, and we will struggle to develop good rhetorical strategies in relation to them.

 

object-oriented literary criticism and incorporeal transformations

I have been giving a lot of thought to Levi Bryant's recent post on writing and incorporeal machines. Obviously (at least from my perspective), understanding symbolic action's (e.g. writing) ontology is central to my work, and I have been trying to work through the implications of the Deleuzian notion of incorporeal transformation (and the broader, non-symbolic concept of expression) as it may (or may not) relate to an object-oriented rhetoric. 

Here is a key point for me in Levi's post: 

There are two considerations that lead me to resist the move of reducing incorporeal machines to corporeal machines:  Iterability and identity.  Unlike corporeal machines that are singular and always exist at a particular time and place (while also having a duration), incorporeal machines have the curious feature of being iterable, while remaining identical.  As an incorporeal machine, a novel, scientific theory, mathematical equation, grammatical rule, recipe, political ideology, perhaps genetic codes, etc., can exist in countless corporeal machines (books, newspapers, magazines, symphony performances, brains, computer data banks, conversations, etc.), while nonetheless remaining that incorporeal machine.  Every copy or iteration of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the paper of a book or in a computer program is still Hamlet, just as every execution of the operation of the Pythagorean theorem is still the Pythagorean theorem, and every performance of Beethoven’s Ninth is Beethoven’s Ninth.

So here Levi is explaining why he believes incorporeality is necessary. I'd like to expand on this and make some modifications. First, I'd like to differentiate between copies and iterations. If I copy a poem or Hamlet is Levi's example, then that's one kind of relation. That is, the 30 copies of a particular book I order for a course are each withdrawn objects from one another but bear a relation to one another that is strengthened by their position within a network. An industrial printing system operates to maintain similarities among these objects as they are produced. Are there differences? Yes, of course, but the deployment of the books within a system of reading makes these differences unimportant for us. In a slightly different example, the student who buys a copy of my book versus one who finds a free pdf somewhere is reading the same text. However readers may have different experience due to the affordances of different media, and from a legal-copyright perspective these things are quite different. Nevertheless we can see the impact of some shift from copy to iteration here. In my final example, if you read through various introductions to OOO in books, blogs, articles, and published talks, you will find a great deal of surface variety and yet all make reference to Harman. We might consider some more or less accurate or more or less helpful/clear. To me this last example is significantly different as we are no longer talking about copies/iterations of a text but of the ideas that exist in some relation to that text.

Now a slight detour. For Deleuze and Guattari I don't believe there are any "incorporeal machines." They do speak of incorporeal transformations that are the product of collective assemblages of enunciation. In the plateau on linguistics they write a great deal about incorporeal transformations, but they are clearly indicating that such transformations are specifically the product of symoblic action. E.g., when one turns 18 (in the US) one is transformed into an adult: that's an incorporeal transformation. When one is pronouced married or guilty in a courtroom that's an incorporeal transformation. It doesn't have to be strictly a legal matter though. For Deleuze and Guattari "there is no individual enunciation" (ATP 79). Though from an OOO perspective, each book, each word in a book, each letter is a withdrawn object, there is also another object in which those objects participate (partially always, without exhausting themselves). We can call that object a "language," which makes it possible for me to write and read. How does this work? For D&G, "Rather than common sense, a faculty for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words" (76). What D&G say here is key for what Levi is investigating. They note that language's power lies in it's capacity for transmission and even translation. They use the example of bees. A bee who has discovered a food location can communicate that location to a second bee, but the second bee cannot pass along the information. This is not language for D&G. Anyway, I could go on for a while on this, but I think that's sufficient for now.

Returning to Levi's investigation now. In D&G terms, I think one might say that language has a special power to transmit order-words through incorporeal transformations: that would be what is happening in Levi's examples. However I think it is important to note that it is the transformations, not the machines, that are incorporeal. The collective assemblages of enunciation are not themselves incorporeal. So what one might see in language is a particular kind of relationality, and I am interested in considering what the ontological basis for that relational capacity might be. D&G make clear they do not believe it is metaphor or metonymy, so that is perhaps a difference (one of many) from Harman or Morton. That is, language is not in a metaphorical relation to its supposed referent. Instead language is always indirect discourse. Language withdraws from other objects in the world and withdraws from our "direct discourse," our intersections with language through speaking/writing. Language though, relates to itself. Again, there's more to go through here (a book's worth, I hope). 

I do think though that there are interesting implications for an object-oriented literary criticism in this line of investigation that would suggest a method clearly different from the cultural-sociological methods that presume first that language is communicational. What is it about Hamlet or any literary object that allows it to be transmitted from saying to saying? Is it strictly the technosocial apparatus I described above or is there a deeper ontological explanation, an indirect discourse, a collective assemblage of enuciation enacting incorporeal transformations? If such an indirect discourse exists, can one find an ontological basis for it that creates the capacity for language to do what it does? Then finally, how might one investigate "literariness" as an aesthetic-stylistic intervention/investigation into that capacity?