Object Criticism, Sans the Literary
Here's a question: Can there be an object-oriented literary criticism? Here's my answer: Nope.
In part, this stems from an aversion to the 'literary bias', by which I mean the idea that a text always involves an act of 'reading' to be dissected, decoded, or deconstructed ad nauseum. As Levi Bryant points out in an exquisite post on the topic, however, meaning—the decoded and deconstructed subject(ivity), if you will—is post-textual, in that the being of a text precedes the derivation of any given meaning. In other words, reading a text—from, for example, the vantage point of critical animal studies—is architectonic, a construction of the reader relating to the textual entity, of both derivative meaning and wholly new objectal arrangements. Note that for this to happen, both the reader and the text must precede the reading, such that the two entities retain their objectal independence from one another. A reading, then, is inherently, utterly contingent. To be a bit cheeky about it, a reading involves is localized manifestation of a text's inhered power to be 'read' a certain way at a given spatiotemporal locus, under highly particular conditions.
Literary criticism—dare I say all lit crit—on the other hand, recuperates meaning within the perceptual and ideological dominion of the reader. It's not that Derrida, Culler, and Kristeva aren't making productive use of a text for aesthetic or ideological critique. Far from it. Instead, these and other theorists close off the relational possibility of a text as a thing-in-itself, bringing it always already within the frame of the ideological anthropos. For these thinkers, there can be no ontopolitics of the text. Rather, the text can only inform ontopolitical considerations, its own being be damned. Ironically, the act of literary criticism is always, in some sense, performative, if only because it involves the invocation of historically and/or ideologically situated chains of iteration to constitute the power to enact by naming. For what is performative force, after all, but the power to establish what qualifies as 'being' through exclusion and abjection, leaving abjected being(s) to haunt the boundaries of the performance? This—this—is why, as Morton maintains, horror is a hallmark of an enmeshed being.
Or becoming, I should say. It's important to note that if a text can be discussed as a text-in-itself, then its being is no less being than other beings. To reiterate, it is finite. It is agential. It obtains existential independence. It is withdrawn. And that's a funky thought for literary critics—how can the inner being of a text be epistemologically inexhaustible and unnarritizable, given that texts are a putative media through which knowledge is propounded? To this, I pose a counter-question: How does the autonomy of the text prevent one from holding certain beliefs? Put simply, it doesn't. Be a Marxist. A Deleuzean. A romantic. A new historicist. A postcolonialist. By all means, investigate those critical angles, from whence we've derived a plenitude of insights into humanity's political, social, economic, and aesthetic condition. Recognize, though, that the text doesn't need you to speak for it. It's perfectly capable of speaking for itself. Literary critics are merely one type of entity that may serve as an audience, as the text circulates throughout myriad assemblages, constantly flowing, cleaving difference wherever it goes.
So, why does this imply the impossibility of an object-oriented literary criticism? One reason, as I said, is the standardization of the 'literary' as an act of domination, whereby the text exists only insofar as its meaning for a given reader exists, reducing the text to an agonizing—very seldom agonistic, mind you—debate over whose claims of domination are superior, who has the prettiest flag. At the same time, specifically literary criticism reduces the text to a prototypically anthropomorphic system of signification about signification, correlating the text to its constituent signifiers and remolding it as-signifier, therein valorizing its ability to function as an aporia bearing the threat of epistemological inconsistency. In place of such a stance, I propose an 'object criticism', sans adjectives and prefixes. No -ary, -al, or -ive. No, this a criticism founded on a relation between distinct, equal partners, human or nonhuman. In an object criticism, the focus shifts from the form of a text to the form of a relation between the text and its others, where the form of the text is a manifestation of potentiality, not a frame dictating interpretation and actancy. As the inner being of a text becomes, its form shifts. Thus, textual form, too, is contingent, or 'formless', if form implicates a quasi-static structure. Interpretation is no longer an act of mastery, but an encounter, an agential act between discrete entities translating each other. While a literary criticism speaks of material effects in terms of consequences resulting from exegetical synthesis, an object criticism mines material traces for virtual processual recursions. Perhaps most importantly, object criticism deploys mereological reasoning, parsing parts of the text—images, signifiers, prosody—and wholes—the text encountered as a whole or totality. And this is key, since the distinction of parts and wholes as distinct entities entering into autonomous sets of relations allows for the preservation of literary insight as a relational form, while (re)partitioning sensibility as dissensual differentiation, uncompliant with any predeterminative epistemic regime.
Categories: Politics
Tags: object-oriented ontology object criticism literary criticism levi bryant
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this debate yet is that there is a root of object oriented thought that comes straight from lit crit, or at least from semiotics. It derives partially from actor-network theory, which itself is derived from the actant semiotics of Propp and Greimas, which is based very much around semiotic objects.
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Object-oriented theory draws upon Heidegger, Deleuze, Latour, and a number of others, but shuns the correlationism of each, critiquing even the failing of ANT. Lit crit may be a precursor to much of the discussion and a valid relational form, but as Kris said, it's an extremely correlationist - an extremely problematic and often reductionist - field that, in come strains, subsumes all experience and possibility within the language of semiotics, as if reality is purely socially constructed and only a matter of coding. That's a move that object-oriented philosophers would never make.
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Well, semiotics qua science is quite different to semiotics-inspired philosophy and so I'm not sure I agree that semiotics is correlationist. It doesn't deny a world beyond semiosis but brackets anything beyond it in the same way that any science brackets other parts of the world that are deemed not to affect it.
In fact the main point of critique from Derrida et al. with regard to semiotics was that referential relations were maintained, however implicitly. Semiotics doesn't really claim to address mind/world relations in any serious way; it simply addresses the relations of semiotic objects in abstraction from other kinds of things. Now, to make use of these resources we will surely want to reject the abstraction but that's something a bit different from the war on correlationism.
My point (underspecified, I'll admit) was simply that some resources exist for this kind of work insofar as the semiotics of Propp and Greimas (and, quite importantly, C.S. Peirce) were always oriented towards semiotic objects, which are kinds of objects - not the only kind, of course, but rather pivotal when we're talking about object oriented criticism (even if we reject some limitations thereof).
Object oriented philosophers may refuse the semiotic reduction but I'm not sure why that matters. It's no ready-made lacquer to be slopped out of the pot and 'applied' but it's a resource nevertheless.
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What about a literary criticism that focuses on objects? I think we can have a lit crit that focuses not just on the lifeworld of objects within narratives, but also, like Sara Ahmed, how relations are spatially arranged according to orientations betwixt objects, proximate distance to and from objects, and the appearance or non-appearance of artifacts as instructive of how we come to understand the direction to which an orientation - sexual, racial, etc. - is pointed, or the multiplicity of directions in any given instant. Might that be a way of putting object-oriented ideas to critical literary use?
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While an investigation of objects within narratives is a fruit step toward anthrodecentric immanence, it nonetheless fails to address the recuperation of narrative within the human frame or recognize the ontological being of the text as an object in itself, mereologically constituted. In that sense, what you're arguing for is, in my view, a sort of post-correlationism, in which one can strategically step outside the correlational circle for analytical purposes, but retain it to engage in more standard debates. That's not quite what I'm arguing for, which is an implosion of the correlational circle, while extending many of its most profound insights to the plane of being. I see no problem, for example, in discussing binary opposition or differance at the level of onto-relations, so long as we acknowledge the being of the relata doing the relating, and the particularity of that one from of relation, pervasive and consequential though it may be.
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Well, there's always the conclusion from Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" (1926): "A poem should not mean/ Bit be."
I note also that literature managed to make it from Homer (and before) up into the early 20th century without a body of commentary aiming to tease meanings from, or tack meanings onto, texts.
Finally, there's no reason why commentary need be so greedy after meaning. Why not try to figure out how these objects are built and how they function?
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Whoops! "Bit" should be "But".
"A poem should not mean/ But be."
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This is a very intriguing set of remarks, many of which I already agree with, and indeed, my recent essay published in "postmedieval" is an initial, and only very preliminary stab at developing a mode of reading that would be crafted as an "encounter" [and not a top-down form of hermeneutics] -- a form of relation between text and its other, an agential transaction/translation, as you put it -- and you can see that essay here: http://bit.ly/sR2usx.
But what I really want to ask us to think about more here, and elsewhere [as I've seen it discussed on other blogs, including Larval Subjects], is why we are wanting to describe literary criticism in such monolithic terms, such that, whatever "banner" it has flown under [New Criticism, New Historicism, post-colonial critique, deconstruction, Marxist analysis, whathaveyou], it has always and will *will* always, as Kris writes here, reduce
"the text to a prototypically anthropomorphic system of signification about signification, correlating the text to its constituent signifiers and remolding it as-signifier, therein valorizing its ability to function as an aporia bearing the threat of epistemological inconsistency."
I would just ask that we understand that, over the past 50 or so years, there have been strains within literary criticism that do not necessarily always reduce texts in these ways [Eve Sedgwick's thinking on "reparative reading" as well as her late thinking, never finished due to her untimely death, on the agential "queer little gods" of literary texts, is just one example, as is some work that has been ongoing in contemporary avant-garde poetics, especially in relation to the work of poets such as Lisa Robertson: http://bit.ly/V3IFk]. The so-called domain of the "literary" can be reinvented such that it is no longer about a "mastery" *over* certain types of objects; I just want us to understand that it has not always been configured that way in every single time and space. Commentary in the margins of medieval texts is also another instance of an encounter between objects of equal status [a text, a commenter] "translating" each other.
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While Sedgwick's 'reparative reading' effectively critiques the tyranny of 'paranoid' hermeneutics stemming from Oedipal repetition, opening literary criticism to considerations of affirmative affect (or new forms thereof), it doesn't go far enough, in my view, in emphasizing the force of contingency. Rather, she focuses on effecting a queer phenomenological shift, in which the experiential horizon is broadened to include multiple manifestations of difference. An admittedly bold and necessary rupture in critical strategies, reparative reading nonetheless valorizes epistemology over ontology - knowledge over being - and, thus, fashions the text into a carrier of contrapuntal palliative meanings.
This is one way of relating to a text, and that's my point. As I argue in a yet-to-be published post on the central problems of object-oriented ontology (as I see them), the problem with literary criticism is that it focuses on different ways of 'reading', which necessarily recuperates the text within the consciousness of the 'reader'. Readings that focus on the encounter or argue against human mastery of the text, but invoke the necessary condition of the reader's consciousness at the exclusion of the text's own gravity, are what I call 'post-correlationist', and I think this is what you're getting at. Rather than disavow these strategies, I think they're demanded - they are an important form of textual relation, after all. I'm merely calling for an additional step that investigates the partitioning of sensibility at the point of translation between relata in what Levi Bryant calls a 'regime of attraction', and I think this step might complement the Sedgwickian exploration of affectivity that you're calling for.
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Kris: I need to think some more about your very provocative comments here; for now, I guess I'm hesitant to worry as much as you do about the fact that literary criticism, or an attention to modes of reading literary texts, devolves to *reading* which can only ever [supposedly] recuperate the text within the consciousness of the reader. My gut reaction is that, if I think about this long enough, what I'll likely discover or avow is something like: I'm not actually trying to divorce reading from human consciousness: it's more a question of the location/enaction of that human consciousness in the process of new reading modes. Also, we have to have ways of talking about objects, in OOO-inflected discourses, that understands up front that there are some objects -- like texts -- that are already artefacts of human consciousness, and that still needs to be reckoned with while, at the same time, I'm also interested in exploring the "alien phenomenology" of these texts [their post/human agential capabilities]. Some objects in the universe have nothing to do with humans to begin with [plankton, geological substrates, an octopus on the ocean floor, etc.] -- unless we believe everything is always already enmeshed with everything else; I do kind of believe this -- but some objects are made by humans and bear the marks of human consciousness: that, too, needs to be "thought" via OOO.
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I smell an OOOIV conference panel brewing.
I think our approaches are complementary. Moreover, I think, as you said on Levi's blog, the inflections of our differing backgrounds are starting to show - and I personally find that very enriching, as I'm guessing you do, too. In a sense, I'm politicizing the textual encounter. What I'm curious about is the aesthetics, or partitioning of sensibility (to use Rancierean terms), of the encounter within a given assemblage. Put interrogatively, how does the regulatory functioning of a negentropic assemblage - for example, Waikiki - affect the sensibility of the encounter between objects, how they (can) 'sense' each other? We're one step removed from each other; you're looking at the affectivity of text-in-itself within the realm of 'readings', for the conscious reader, while I'm looking at what affects the affectivity, or something to that effect. So, I don't think we're speaking past each other, but directly to each other, or at least we should be, since I don't discount the important of an object-oriented (or post-correlationist or whatever signifier one wants to use) readership.
Moreover, I think the claim about texts as conscious artefacts speaks to my point: Literary criticism fails to escape this concept of the text, even when people like you and Levi problematize it brilliantly and poetically. If we broaden the term 'text' to encompass other types of 'readings' - say, a reading of a sculpture or film (or even other texts, like the endlessly copied, circulated, and debated U.S. Constitution) - do we not need to account for the being of these entities apart from their conscious derivation? Thus, my emphasis on the encounter, the objectal translation of being, and the becoming initiated by encounters, in a manner that accounts for affecting before affect, and the self-generative spatiotemporal locus in which this occurs (my concept of the 'really').
I hope that makes some sense. Haven't had much coffee today and my building's water heater is broken, which may be making me irrational.
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I've been following all of the various threads on this and the only thing I can conclude is that this is one tough subject. I rejected radical interconnectedness until Kris reworked Morton's 'mesh' in contingent relational terms a few posts ago, but my problem here is with the idea of an object "bearing the mark" of human consciousness and that meaning anything as far as the being of an entity. We're specifically talking about texts in this thread - novels, art, architecture, and all that goes with it. But objects that bear the mark of human authorship could be expanded to include cars, desks, cities, governing institutions, and societies themselves. One of the defining features of object-oriented philosophy as I've come to understand it is that these entities have an existence apart from their constituting objects, i.e. objects exist at different scales, i.e. mereology. I remember Levi saying in a post a few weeks ago about the weirdness of object-oriented philosophy that armies are objects apart from the weapons and soldiers that comprise them, and have agencies separate from the agencies of the constituting objects. The roundabout point I'm trying to make is that if we say that object-oriented philosophy must account from the "marks" of human consciousness, or that objects created by humans carry a constant trace of humanity wherever they go, we'll never be able to fully escape anthropocentrism. Instead, we'll have a philosophy where "natural" objects can be thought of outside the sphere of human domination, but "non-natural" objects will always be recouped within the privilege of their human authors and creators. And to put too fine a point on it, that leads back into the binary divide between nature and culture, or nature and civilization, that object-oriented ontologists have spent so much time arguing against.
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I don't think we should draw a distinction between natural and unnatural objects that risks closing humans and human societies off from nature, as if they're not a part of it. But I do think there's a sense in which we can and should talk about the lure of an object, and from whence that lure originates. I don't think originary intent, and especially authorial intent, is exhaustive of a text's possible meanings or relations with other, non-textual, entities. However, the relation between the author and the work is a relation inasmuch as every other relation a work enters into and is part of the work's history. I don't know that I'd draw a bright line around entities with human inscriptions - what does that inscription mean post-author, if we can even isolate an "author?" - but the founding relation is part of the text's history, and we might say that a text, or any entity, creates its own genealogy as it moves from one relation to the next. The question moves from a Foucauldian "how have we come to understand x" to "how has x manifested itself and how have these events impacted the evolution of the text or entity?"
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Also, we have to have ways of talking about objects, in OOO-inflected discourses, that understands up front that there are some objects -- like texts -- that are already artefacts of human consciousness, and that still needs to be reckoned with....
Yes. If somehow all humans were wiped out by a nasty virus, the agency of all those texts would be severely clipped back. They could still be in the world as complex lumps of cellulose, fiber, pigment, and glue, but there meanings would have no arena in which to operate. For those meanings are utterly dependent on humans and the cultural understandings humans have traced into their neural pathways. Without those (collective) tracings texts can have no meaning.
So, in what sense are texts autonomous objects? Autonomous with respect to what? Whatever force they can exert on human consciousness is also utterly dependent on that consciousness for the opportunity to exert any force at all.
A week or so ago I blogged a post in which I asked without or not a shadow can be considered to be an object, metaphysically. One can see shadows and photograph them. But they are not autonomous. They are utterly dependent on three things: a light source, an occluding object, and a surface on which to be projected. If any one of those things disappears, there is no shadow.
Shadows are so very simple that I hesitate to say that textual meaning is like a shadow and so is not autonomous. I note, however, that Plato put shadows at the center of ancient metaphysics.
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If all humans were wiped out, relations between the text and humans would be wiped out. My point isn't that humans can't extrapolate various meanings from texts, or rather relate to texts in different ways, but that 'readings' are merely one way of relating to a text. Here, I think it is helpful to think of textuality in a broader sense - think of building, for example. We can perform a 'reading' of a building - of its form and function as a text, cultural artefact, artwork, etc. - but our interpretation doesn't exhaust the possibilities for relating to the building, nor the building's possibilities for relating to other entities. In other words, the question "autonomous to what" precipitates exactly the kind of correlationism that object-oriented thought critiques. From the perspective of OOO, texts are always autonomous to consciousness - as Levi Bryant has said, texts precede their meanings. This is true independent of the principle of relating between relata preceding a given 'relation', even if the relata are a conscious object and a text, both by their own finitude.
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On relating to a building, yes, one can easily do something other than reading. One can enter it, walk around in it, live in it, work in it, whatever. One can use the building as it was intended to be used or, for that matter, one can use it in a different way. One can even tear it down and redistribute its parts to other buildings.
There was a time, some decades ago, when 'reading' didn't mean 'write a secondary text that purports to tell the meaning of some primary text.' It simply meant, well, you know, reading. You can read silently or aloud, but there's no commentary involved. For that matter, when an actor gives a reading of a part, or a musician of the text, they're simply creating a performance, no textual commentary.
I'd like to know how that's done. In whatever detail we can muster.
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A refocusing on form. After reading through all of the responses here, I think the thing that sticks in my mind is what I've heard Marisol Bate and read Tim Morton talk about, and that's this idea of "morphism." I don't think object-oriented theory would talk about "using" the building in a proper or improper way, since "usage" implies a relation of mastery over the building. It implies that the building was built by and for people, therefore people determine the trajectory of its existence. Isn't there a way in which the building "buildingpomorphizes" a person walking through its halls and vice-versa? Aren't entitles that relate always "morphing" each other?
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It implies that the building was built by and for people, therefore people determine the trajectory of its existence.
Well, termits build mounds for their use, beavers create dams, and humans do in fact construct buildings for their purposes. But these things aren't constructed in a vacuum and their trajectories are not completely under the control of their creators.
Isn't there a way in which the building "buildingpomorphizes" a person walking through its halls and vice-versa?
Well, I'm interested in graffiti and, in particular, graffiti sites, which seem, in somne way, to "attract" graffiti writers to them. Here's a representative post.
I'm all for focusing on form which, for me, implies not just talking about form, but actually describing the formal elements of texts. Which is not, in my experience, so easy.
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Related to all of these further comments, I think it's also useful to keep in mind a couple of things Timothy Morton argues in "The Ecological Thought":
1. we are also "strangers" to ourselves: "the strange stranger is not just the Other--the 'self' is this other . . . we are the strange stranger" [p. 87]. Any practice of reading that flows from OOO-inflected trajectories of thought will have to take this into account.
2. "The position of hunting for anthropocentrism *is* anthropocentrism. . . . We can't in good faith cancel the difference between humans and nonhumans. Nor can we preserve it. Doing both at the same time would be inconsistent. We're in a bind. . . . The bind is a sign of an emerging democracy of life forms" [p. 76]. For me, this means any OOO-inflected mode of reading will not try to work so hard to either cancel or preserve the supposed boundary between the human and nonhuman elements of a text and its "sentience."
3. "Everything is intimate with everything else" [p. 78]. Thus, for me, I'm maybe not as worried as Kris is about the term/practice of "reading" as something that [tragically?] cannot take account of nonhuman essences/realities, partly because I don't think anything in the universe is reslly 100% discrete from everything else, although I do believe that there are units and pieces of matter [things, objects, parts with systems] that possess a certain autonomy and propulsion that somehow needs to be described/taken into account somehow. And because I work in the profession of literary studies, it just so happens I am preoccupied with literary texts [with, further, fictions--as opposed to the idea that everything is a text and then that would be my more broad canvas:it is for some, but I'm interested specifically in literary fiction] and with thinking about new ways to read texts, and I think saying that, technically, there can never be an OOO literary criticism because it's supposedly impossible to separate practices of "reading" or "literary criticism" are always reducible to acts of (human) domination is both hyperbolic and ... premature.
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I don't think I would agree that the position of hunting for anthropocentrism is anthropocentrism, so much as human finitude, and individual human finitude (I'm always wary of unnecessary categorization). I'm not seeking to cancel the space between humans and nonhumans, but rather to broaden it. Again, I'm focusing on the space of the encounter, how the self-generated spacetime of one entity perturbs the self-generated spacetime of other entities, what happens there, how do assemblages attempt to regulate sensibility or affect in the encounter, thereby regulating what counts as an 'encounter', etc. I suppose I don't fully understand what you mean about blurring the non/human elements of text's sentience or being, as it still seems to me like you're trying to marry the being of the text and human consciousness, such that the consciousness of the author and reader "meet" in the text, which serves as a point of affectual change for two already enmeshed affective positions - but that can't be right, since you're not trying to place meaning before the text itself, right?
On the point about intimacy, it's also important to note that, for Morton, entities become 'stranger' as they become more intimate. As entities get closer to one another, the uncanniness of their finitude is made more clear, and this can be horrifying - horror is, after all, at the heart of Morton's 'dark ecology'. I don't think I'm merely playing a language game (something you're admittedly not accusing me of), as I don't see anything hyperbolic (or particularly controversial) in saying that the encounter precedes the 'reading'. Consider a case involving MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech, where two people encounter the speech, one audibly, in D.C., and one in a dark room, in a book, after being rejected for a job because of racial discrimination. While we can discuss at length the affectivity of the speech-reader relation, does not the form this text takes precede the affectivity for either of the given readers, such that the readers encounter two separate texts, at some level? Moreover, I think we have to account for the mereology of the text, even at the level of signification, to fully describe the encounter. Looking at the text-in-itself allows us to investigate, for instance, differing temporalities, and how multiple temporalities interact with one another. That's the kind of thing I'm getting at. Before the text "builds" something, it encounters something - what's at play there?
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The whole thing about hunting for anthropocentrism from the vantage point of anthropocentrism, and that leading to a situation in which we're forever trapped between objects and agencies, works on the level of equalizing the metaphysical playing field, but also has to be understood from the standpoint of Morton's quasi-rejection of the law of noncontradiction. And if you discount the law of noncontradiction, you very quickly end up in a Meillassouxian situation where finitude is busted and things can happen for any reason, at any time, without any type of causation. I know Morton calls for formal causation these days, but on what grounds? To say a thing both is itself and is not itself either reduces the thing to its becoming or comingles its being with others, so that it's never an autonomous entity, which violates the independence clause of object-oriented thought.
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To reiterate what Kris said on Ian Bogost's blog a couple of days ago, I think you're overstating OOO's stance against becoming. Remember, in the interview Levi did for this site, he said beings possess affirmative differences and differ from themselves, such that entities are perpetually self-differing. Process and substance are one and the same for him, with high ordered systems being entities. I honestly think the position that you and Ian take on this is a bit inconsistent in that you want to call processes objects (Ian said this on Jussi Parikka's blog, you've said it in other places), but don't recognize that this entails objects as processes in return. I suppose you could make a semantic or categorial distinction - all process are objects, but all objects are not processes - but I'd be curious to know how you classify each, and Ian seems particularly uninterested in these sorts of classifications, to his credit.
I don't know how Eileen feels about all of this, but if all beings are differences, then the we never encounter or read static text. The 'reading space' is ever-shifting. To me, that's why looking at the aesthetics of the encounter would be so important. This doesn't undermine or overmine the objects themselves, since we're merely saying that a substance doesn't stay still, not that it doesn't exist independent of other substances or can't withdraw from a given set of relations. This is where Levi's operational closure comes into play, or whatever idea you want to posit in its place.
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With regard to 'object criticism' (side stepping what ooo is an is not and different interpretations of 'correlationism' which is supposedly bad anyway), I have been reading the 30 year history of this lot with interest (having been a imbiber of the products of their craft for some time) http://www.theliminal.co.uk/2011/12/the-touch-30-interview-part-one-ritual/ and wondered if this might be the type of object your desire to leave the confines of 'literary's' dominion might see as a positive production? The type of thing production machines when set loose on a line of flight are supposed to create as opposed to the reterritorialisation of the novel.
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Just chiming in here [briefly] to say that I really like what Marisol has to say here about entities not sitting still and the space of reading as ever-shifting, and yes, looking at the aesthetics of the encounter is kind of what I'm mainly interested in doing, although I am also very interested, too, in crafting new encounters between disparate literary texts, with the reader as a kind of "trigger" or enacter of that.
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Since I also agree with Marisol, I guess my question would be this: What do you see as the difference between investigating the aesthetics of an encounter and performing a reading? It sounds, then, like you don't disagree that our interests complement or converge, yeah?
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Is the one of the questions being implicitly asked here - how does an assemblage or a system regulate what counts as a text, or what can be "read," so to speak?
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Replace "text" with "encounter" and "read" with "related" or "translated."
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One way to approach your question, Kris, might be to say that we should start thinking harder about re-defining what a "reading" is capable of? One thought experiment: how might a literary text be "read" in the same way a seismograph "reads" the movements of tectonic plates? Reading as recording?
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Well, on the one hand, some interesting work has been done in 'seismically reading' people's brain activity while they're watching movies. This is quite new, within the last decade. On the other hand, there's statistical work on texts going back to the 1960s, for example, author identification studies (aka digital humanities). In one case a reader's brain plays the role of tectonic plates and an fMRI machine is playing the seismograph. In the other case machine-readable texts are the tectonic plates while statistical software is doing the seismographic work.
Of course neither of those are thought experiments. They're both real activities. But it would be easy to amplify and transform both of them into things we might want to do, but cannot do now, or perhaps ever, because of technical limitations or perhaps even matters of fundamental principle that we cannot now imagine.
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Literary criticism, properly so called, existed long before self-serving scholastic misprision of the sort you focus on. It looked at how literature, as an object, constrained its use and what hermeneutic strategies could, usefully, remove those constraints. The analogy is with a tool whose precise purpose has been forgotten or whose potential uses are being overlooked because of something to do with its shape or colour or received ideas about its creators or place of origin. That was object oriented lit crit and it was useful.
We still do this all the time, not in the Academy perhaps, but in humbler fields- e.g. technical authorship.
If OOO embraces reverse mereological ideas- the interface of Technics and Discourse- and grasps the point that reading Object oriented texts like those of Kipling ain't about saying 'stop beating niggers. It's not nice. Just say no. Beating nig-nogs is baaaaad, okay. Why? Coz the correct Kristevan reading of Husserl permits us to interpret Kant's statement 'but the man was a fool because he was completely black from head to foot' as 'don't beat dem nig-nogs. Unless they be Republicans or something. And be nice to animals. Meat is murder'.
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I have no idea what you're talking about and I'm pretty sure that you don't, either. When you say literary criticism looked at how the objecthood of a text constrained its use to received meanings, I think you're making the same critique Bryant and Joy do - that literary criticism, today, makes the text into a carrier for various meanings and interpretation, rather than looking at what's built from the text as it circulated throughout space, place and time. In my view, no one - not even critics who focus on technics - deal with the partitioning of sensibility at the site of the encounter between a text and a "reader." Focusing on form fails to answer even the challenge issued by Joy and Bryant if form is, as you seem to indicate, a mere servant to interpretive strategies.
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Thank you for your response. I agree from a proper OOO perspective neither of us knows what we're talking about but rather confront, like the ape men, in 2001, the alien-yet-eschaton of the obelisk from deep space.
I think you misunderstand me because you thought I was saying 'literary criticism looked at how the objecthood of a text constrained its use to RECEIVED meanings' whereas what I said was ' literature, as an object, constrain(S) its (OWN) use (by reason as its objecthood like a tool that 'is at hand' but whose purpose in occluded by what we might call bad design or an alien 'ornamentalism'- and what hermeneutic strategies could, usefully, remove those constraints'
Forgive me, it is very difficult to express oneself freely when limited to 5000 characters. Perhaps this is a constraint you can lift from your blog?
Alternatively, if you email me on polypubs@gmail.com, I can give a full account of my reasoning.
I utterly reject the Derridean postcard view of the text as 'carrier for various meanings'. Joyce didn't do that. He looked at literary artefacts the same way I look at the stuff in the expensive tool box some past girlfriend gifted me in the hope that I might turn out to be a Homo Habilis rather than a Hetero Hopeless.
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Yeah, objects are finite. Object-oriented ontology specifically preserves finitude; no one is abrogating that. Literary criticism, I think, ignores the finitude of the textual objects by recuperating all reality within human experience, thereby making the text - again - a carrier of imposed meanings. Joyce did wonderful things with language, but I don't think language games open the field of textual relations in some inherent way. Rather, they show that texts can be productive of different meanings through different forms, questioning the relationship between form and function. That's important, but Bryant and Joy go far beyond this in arguing that the text is an agential form from which the conditions of possible relations are radically pluralized.
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I've been thinking about this conversation, and the parallel one over at Larval Subjects, where I've also posted this comment. There's an implicit presupposition that needs to be brought out: that in asserting its agency against individual critics who want to limit its meaning the text is doing so in the name of more and various meanings. But there's a different way of thinking about this. One might think of a collective of naked apes who need shared norms and value in order to function as a coherent society. One way they establish these norms and values is through a limited body shared texts which embody those norms and values. In this case the text is asserting its agency against individuals who want to ignore the group's norms and values. That is, the text IS NOT asserting its agency in favor of ever more meanings; rather, it's asserting its agency in favor of the (specific) norms and values central to the (specific) society.
The culture wars / canon wars that took place in America not so long ago were not about the rights of critics to say whatever they wanted to about whatever texts they wanted to. The were about the central values of American society and how gets to determine them.
It seems to me that an SR/OOO literary criticism has to explicitly acknowledge and come to terms with texts ciculating in social groups. Whatever the agency of the text is, it is not something that is exercised only in independent one-on-one negotiations between texts and individual readers. There is a collective process. What is the text's agency in that process?
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You're raising interesting and important questions, though, as an OOO'er, I disagree with some of your premises. For example, I don't think there's an assumption about the direction of agency against the limitation of meanings. Rather, for me, it's a question of the pluralization of agency, period. When we start talking in terms of "meanings-for," we're right back in the correlationist loop, where texts are reduced to being carriers of meanings, for both individuals and collectives. As for normative texts, like the U.S. Constitution, I see what you're getting at, but I'm not a consensualist. More importantly, I don't think the text is composed collectively - rather, meanings, perhaps. Even here, though, one has to recognize the agency of the individuals forming the society and the society-in-itself, as OOO would posit that the society exist as an agential object every bit as much as the people who populate it.
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"More importantly, I don't think the text is composed collectively - rather, meanings, perhaps."
So let's consider the myths and folk tales of preliterate societies. In such societies myths and tales are recited in public, and as I understand it, only by specialists who have the right to recite the stories. Not just anyone can get up and tell the tales.
The stories are all traditional, passed down from one teller to another. Everyone in the audience knows the stories and expects to hear them as they've heard them before. There will, of course, be differences from telling to another. But the central characters and their most important actions will be the same.
Because the telling is a public performance the teller gets to see how the audience reacts. And people in the audience are, of course, aware of one another's reactions as well.
In THAT world, the stories have no origins tracable to individual authors.
They are from the always already there. Because everyone knows the stories it doesn't make sense to think of information as being conveyed from teller to audience. And it certainly doesn't make sense to talk of meaning as being conveyed from one to the other. Like the stories themselve, it too would seem to inhabit the always already there.
Unless, perhaps, by meaning you have in mind how this or that story applies to some current situation. That's a different can of worms.
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If there can't be an object-oriented literary criticism then literary critics, faced with an object-oriented critique of their ontological presuppositions, have only two choices: (1) give up their craft or (2) carry on regardless.
This doesn't seem to be particularly helpful. Literary analysis is, etymologically, simply the analysis of words. Words are some of the most incredible and important objects in all corners of the human-infested world. Certainly we must admit that other objects bear upon the worlds of words and this is an important point but it's also quite an easy one to make.
In fact, it's a very easy thing to aver in the abstract but I can't think of too many examples where such an admission would fundamentally alter the practice of literary analysis. Can anyone else? (Not a rhetorical question, a real question.)
Demonstrating the falsity of bifurcating or correlationist abstraction, showing the promiscuity of the life-worlds of all things of all kinds or arguing that things are not exhausted by their relations (not even sure how that fundamental OO point would have any relevance here) is all very well but it isn't an end in itself, it's just a critical prelude to something more substantial - something new.
Banging on about how false correlationisms are is a beginning, not an end. It's not even a very innovative beginning at this point in time. So lit crit is housed on shoddy foundations - very well. It's a point worth making but its worth is finite. There is some movement in this discussion towards thinking beyond the simply critical point but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.
Let's not preach to the converted but rather say something we can really disagree about!
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I'm not calling for a death to literary criticism. No, no, no. Instead, I'm simply saying that an encounter with a text precedes a reading of a text at the objectal level, and I'm interested in exploring the aesthetics of that encounter, the partitioning of sensibility that occurs within assemblages that impacts the affectivity made manifest in the encounter, the formation of relational space - all of which precedes any given reading. I think literary criticism is invaluable, especially the kind for which Bryant and Joy are advocating. It's the necessary complement to what I'm exploring. At the same time, it's merely one relational form, and doesn't supersede that agency of the text-in-itself, existing and circulating (building?), perhaps, multiple spatiotemporalities. I think the aesthetics of the textual encounter is primary, and therefore more substantial (or at least as substantial) as any reading might be. In fact, I'd argue that privileging reading over the encounter is a privileging of epistemology over ontology, knowledge over being, and that this, in turn, is a problem object-oriented philosophy must address.
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First, Kris, with all due respect, I'm feeling a lot of sympathy with Philip at this point. It's easy to say that SR/OOO can put a chicken in every pot, but can it, really? It feels as though you're possessed by some bot that's mostly concerned about generating SR/OOO formulations for every occasion.
So, I don't know what this means: "Instead, I'm simply saying that an encounter with a text precedes a reading of a text at the objectal level, and I'm interested in exploring the aesthetics of that encounter, the partitioning of sensibility that occurs within assemblages that impacts the affectivity made manifest in the encounter, the formation of relational space - all of which precedes any given reading."
Let's start with reading and encounter. What kinds of things do those words refer to? Given that we're not talking about primary school education, for example, but we're talking about literary criticism, I'm guessing that "reading" might have a specialized meaning something like: A secondary text explicitly asserting the meaning of some other primary text, such as a literary text, or for that matter, a religious text, or a legal text or even, why not? a film. If that's more or less what you meaning by "reading" then, yes, something has to precede that. In the case of films we generally say that one sees a film, understanding that one also hears the film. In the case of texts there are settings where people do talk about reading (primary education for example) but in the literary criticism the that term has song since merged with explicate so another term would be useful. If "encouonter" is your proposal for that other term, fine.
I agree. We need to account for that. But I don't need SR/OOO to tell me that. I've known that for decades, as have many others. Really, there's nothing new there.
That encounter is want I to understand. I really could care less about how professional critics go about producing explications, though, e.g., the film critic David Bordwell has written a book about that (Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema). What I don't know is whether or not SR/OOO has anything insightful to say about that. Telling me to explore "the aesthetics of that encounter, the partitioning of sensibility that occurs within assemblages that impacts the affectivity made manifest in the encounter, the formation of relational space"—that's not very helpful.
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Whoops! Let me correct that last paragraph. This sentence:
What I don't know is whether or not SR/OOO has anything insightful to say about that.
Should read like this:
What I don't know is whether or not SR/OOO has anything insightful to say about that encounter.
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Funnily enough I largely agree with Bill's comment largely agreeing with me!
Upon reflection I'd put it like this: OOO can't usurp or replace literary practices as such but one thing it CAN do is re-articulate the ontological presuppositions of these practices to make them continuous with and non-exclusive of other forms of intellectual endevour.
I'm reminded of Elizabeth Eisenstein's work on the development of the printing press in early modern europe - OOO can make literary practice ontologically continuous with this kind of historical sociology insofar as each considers objects but different kinds of objects taken severally. It can make them compatible, thus rendering cross-fertilisation more likely than if they remain in contadiction (or remain ignorant of each other). (And hence my point originally that semiotics was always object oriented in some respects, even while it only deals with very specific kinds of objects. Such a realisation makes this rearticulation easier to facilitate.)
As for the aesthetics of encountering the text, I think I can see something in that (if I understand you correctly). The experience of casually swiping through an e-book that you just downloaded on a tablet is extremely different to gingerly - stifling a sneeze - poring over the skeleton of a dusty, fragile, leather-bound first edition you just unearthed in some dank, ancient archive. Supposing the former and latter are 'textually' identical but remain materially completely different: The mode of abstraction particular to literary criticism has no interest in this difference; it only allows the perception and discussion of the 'same' text in either case (though subject to indefinite numbers of readings). The question is: does this practice ONTOLOGICALLY entail correlationism or something of that sort? I'd say: usually, yes; but necessarily? no.
Because a series of very powerful philosopers took this literary mode of abstraction as the default one for their philosopical works and because these works have been disseminated right across the academy, through every human and social science, this mode of abstraction has become hegemonic in many quarters. It makes cross-fertilisation more difficult because it closes off vast amounts of reality; makes so many things unspeakable. To recall Wittgenstein's famous phrase: 'that of which one cannot speak one must be silent' - if this isn't just a tautological statement of the obvious the real question is: who gets to decide of what one can speak? Literary philosophy is a hegemony that shuts people's mouths because it's always already got an answer to the question: 'of what can we speak?'. It says: 'speech!'.
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continued...
Literary philosophy needs to be taken down a peg or fifty. However, I don't believe that the practice of literary analysis is necessarily wedded to that philosophy. It may evolve and become something quite different if subjected to alternative philosophical environments (I certainly hope this is the case). OOO can provide such an environment but ultimately it is a practice, or a collection of practices with its own rules, regimes and inertias. It can be rearticulated by OOO but it can't be re-written. It is one of the concrete, real things in the world that must be acknowledged as real and incorporated into the wider scheme. Isabelle Stengers' 'ecology of practices' is behind my thinking here.
I certainly think that OOO can be complimentary to lit. crit. and it can also intervene in it. But perhaps the first stage is to at least provisionally sever the practice from the philosophy and acknowledge that however imbricated the two are the former exceeds the latter and will survive the latter's (hopefully imminent) demise.
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Yes.
Abstract theorizing about literature is one thing. Analyzing specific texts and groups of texts, that's different. The two things are not very tightly coupled. At this point I'm more interested in theories and models that arise as generalizations over and abstractions from analytical and descriptive work than I am in theories that start with some notion of what literature is.
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