Over on Larval Subjects, Levi raised some concerns about Nate’s recent post about zombies and speculative realism. Specifically, Bryant expressed a worry that treating humans as zombies might suggest that object-oriented ontology sees humans as lesser forms than other objects, rather than as one of many objects on equal footing.
As I mentioned in the subsequent discussion, I didn’t read Nate’s suggestion in this way, but as an invitation to apply distortions upon the human so as to remind us that the human ought not sit at the center of being. Levi responded,
The reason I get nervous about the suggestion that OOO necessarily encounters the figure of the zombie â?¦ is that already in the debates that have raged around OOO and SR, there have been continuous charges of “objectifying” humans, which I think the zombie image all too easily plays into.
His clarification struck a nerve, because it reminds me of the challenges Nick and I have had in advocating for Platform Studies, our book series on hardware/software systems and creativity. As I’ve mentioned before, I see the platform studies project as a specific example of “applied” or “pragmatic” speculative realism, an idea I’m expanding in my current writing. Our efforts to draw attention to hardware and software objects have been met with myriad accusations of human erasure: technological determinism most frequently, but many other fears and outrages about “ignoring” or “conflating” or “reducing” or otherwise doing violence to “the cultural aspects” of things.
Except, our work doesn’t do this, at all. In Racing the Beam, Nick and I devote considerable attention to matters of business, culture, society, reception, and so forth. But we also pay attention to all the other real things that cultural studies alone tends to ignore, in this case the construction and operation of a particular computer system, the Atari VCS, and why it works the way it does. But for some of our critics, that fact matters little. The idea that one could put non-human objects in front, even if just for a time, signals a coarse and sinful inhumanism.
When I drew this new frame around Levi’s reaction to Nate’s zombietalk, I realized that we are sometimes backed into the same corner. It’s not surprising, really. Cultural and media studies have been afflicted with the same correlationist excess as has metaphysics. I’m sure that one of the reasons I’ve found myself so much at home in speculative realism is because we are coming at the underlying challenges from different directions.
In the conversation about zombies, Levi suggested that object-oriented ontology “allows for the possibility of a new sort of humanism,” to which Graham Harman added, “Humans will also be liberated from the crushing correlational system.” One of the ways this will take place is by adding to our expertise in being human and in caring about human affairs, as they relate to specific non-human objects.
As Nick Srnicek said in his recent interview with Paul Ennis,
Do we really need another analysis of how a cultural representation does symbolic violence to a marginal group? This is not to say that this work has been useless, just that it’s become repetitive. In light of all that, SR provides the best means for creative work to be done, and it provides genuine excitement to think that there are new argumentative realms to explore.
This hits home. Why are we so unconcerned with the “marginalization” of other sorts of things, like 6502 microprocessors and picture tubes and joysticks and shag carpets? Are we really so cowardly as to think expressing interest in such matters embezzles the last of some limited resource of concern for our fellow humans? If that’s what humanism has come to mean, then Bryant and Harman are very correct to point out that a new conception of it is in order.
Just as eating only tacos becomes gastronomically monotonous, so talking only about human behavior becomes intellectually monotonous. The rise of objects, to borrow Harman’s term, need not be a revolution, at least not all the time. This is not just a rise of fists, but also a rise of bodies, as if to leave a table, politely folding one’s napkin before departing. Like Bartleby, we can simply declare, “I prefer not to.”
Comments
Mark J. Nelson
This is only about a part of your thought-provoking post, but I wonder if the push-back against Racing the Beam is in large part because you’ve actually come out and made the platform-studies argument explicitly? That is, do people object more to the philosophical idea than to the actual practice, and the book might have passed with nary a peep had it just been a platform study of the Atari VCS without coining that phrase or making the argument? It seems that, until you call people’s attention to it, of course an in-depth analysis of the Atari VCS has to discuss the actual device, and it would even be odd to avoid doing so.
I ask partly because, despite the dominance of the cultural-studies view in many areas, something like platform studies seem to happen now and then in media studies anyway, without (as far as I can tell) particularly vociferous objection. For example, would you agree that the recent book Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s is something like a film version of platform studies, studying the interplay between technology, art, business, and culture in 1930s color film (with a heavy focus on the organizing role of technology)? I can hardly imagine someone arguing that writing a book like that is somehow wrong, but perhaps I’m naive.
Ian Bogost
Great point, Mark. I haven’t read Higgins book, but it certainly sounds platformy. The same could be said of my colleague Jay Telotte’s book The Mouse Machine: DIsney and Technology, which deals with a similar topic. Certainly there is an active history of engagement with material things in STS, including its more humanistic variants.
So perhaps it our advancement of a method of some kind that draws philosophical and methodological reaction. Perhaps while people are willing to allow an outlier materialist text at times, it’s the idea that a wholesale change might come about, after which all criticism would have to deal with the objectness of media, that sets off the klaxons.
Indeed, in the peer reviews for the Platform Studies series, one common bit of feedback was that a series might not be necessary: how many such studies does the world really need? (MITP, to their credit, disagreed.) One can’t imagine anyone in cultural studies saying the same thing of, say, works on the identity politics of media.
Another way to put it is like this: platform studies offers a philosophy for digital media, not just an example of it. Philosophies are much more threatening than haphazard examples. This also partly explains my feelings of solidarity with speculative realism: in SR, we have an entire philosophy of objects, not just the casual mention of one from time to time. It is this sense of a “turn” that draws ire.
Levi
Great post, Ian. I’m especially struck by this passage:
Melanie got beat over the head with this early in her own studies, when her research was even more heavily directed at the intersection of literature and technology. At conferences, for example, she’d be berated for “technological determinism”. I’m not sure what can be done about this. A long time ago I wrote a post entitled “The Alethetics of Rhetoric” that addressed this sort of issue in the context of political rhetoric:
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/the-alethetics-of-rhetoric/
The idea was that rhetoric is alethetic in Heideggers sense of simultaneously revealing and concealing. The good rhetorician is someone who is capable of revealing some set of signs in the social space, while concealing all sorts of other possible topics. Part of this just has to do with the temporality of writing. You can’t talk about everything at once. Even if an issue is a system defined by simultaneity, you can only talk about that structure piece by piece, setting aside the other elements for the moment to focus on the element in question.
Charges of technological determinism seem to play on this sort of structural issue in writing. Rather than recognizing the manner in which writing is temporally structured, they instead say you’re excluding some other elements like the human or the subject or norms or whatever else. Perhaps the appropriate rejoinder is simply to say “but you’re excluding objects and technology!” As I see it, charges of technological determinism are really sneaky strategies of alethetics. Far from trying to make room for the human, they strive to structure discourse in such a way that anything that is nonhuman is excluded from the discourse so that the discourse might remain in its comfortable humanist grooves.
Such charges also seem to miss the crucial distinction between attractors and determinations. Where an attractor is just a possible state that a system can occupy, a determination is a state that a system will necessarily occupy under certain conditions. Charges of technological determinism treat statements made by object-oriented thesis in terms of the latter category, when, I suspect, most of those examining the intersection of technology and culture are making claims about attractor states that happened to be actualized in a particular way and which can and could have been actualized in different ways. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of your terms “affordance” and “constraint” in this connection, as they capture the sense of an imbroglio that nonetheless is not deterministic.
Ian Bogost
Levi, I really like the idea of rhetoric as alethetic, and I agree strongly with where you take it in the comment and the post.
I also think the technological determinism objection comes from the same place as the objection of “misreading” that we so often gripe about with respect to contemporary thought. When someone mounts an accusation of misreading (“I don’t think you understand Derrida”), they are not disagreeing with a position, they are simultaneously imposing their own position and attempting to undercut you the speaker as incompetent. Similarly, when someone makes an accusation of technological determinism, they are simultaneously imposing their own rejection of the importance of technological factors and attempting to accuse you the speaker of dispassion for the plight of human beings.
Riffing off your distinction between attractor and determination, I’m reminded of another common strategy of discourse structuring, the objection of coverage. How often do we hear someone object to an argument by quipping, “You don’t take account of X” or “You fail to consider the impact of Y.” Typically X and Y correspond with the pet thinker or project of the inquisitor, of course. In this move, no position is allowed to be an attractor, unless it matches the interlocutor’s exactly.
Of course, in that case, what’s the point of discourse? It makes me conclude that humanism writ large is a sham, a selfish affair of obsessed egomaniacs interested only in nodding to the same tune. I’m at risk of going too far here, but it’s also one of the reasons why I feel dismay at accusations that positions or approaches aren’t political enough (a common accusation directed at SR), when the average humanist interlocutor is among the least political actors around, no matter his or her apparent positions. In Badiou’s terms, intellectuals are more like politicians than like activists: they do not think.
One last note: “affordance” and “constraint” are terms I borrow from various fields of design, most notably the work of psychologist J. J. Gibson and cognitive scientist Don Norman.
Mark J. Nelson
As I see it, charges of technological determinism are really sneaky strategies of alethetics. Far from trying to make room for the human, they strive to structure discourse in such a way that anything that is nonhuman is excluded from the discourse so that the discourse might remain in its comfortable humanist grooves.
Maybe I don’t give enough credence to those employing the rhetoric, but I see it as a somewhat simpler attempt to argue by setting up a false choice: either you’re socially determinist, or technologically determinist. And if you talk about technology in a way that claims it’s meaningful, you must be the 2nd. Sort of a typical “paint anyone who deviates from the consensus as deviating radically and unconscionably” boundary-policing strategy.
The first time I remember encountering that sort of strategy was with some of the rather bizarre attacks on Bruno Latour after he moved in his actor-network-theory direction (his reply). Since ANT contemplates physical apparatus and materials as a possible element of a network explaining the results of scientific experiment, Latour got accused of being a Bad Old Positivist, and enabling oppressive right-wing politics to boot, because ANT allows something like “the real world” to be considered as an explanatory factor.
One way of reading the charge of technological determinism from that perspective is as a charge of failing to adhere to some variety of material-erasing social construction (and that charge is of course accurate).
I suspect implicitly something else is going on, though. Beyond the philosophical level, I think many people leveling the technological-determinism charge have an intuitive view of technology and materiality that does read it on a realist level, but assumes that it does not strongly constrain human activity. That is, at most, materials present engineering and implementation problems, but the real work of organizing society is determined by humans based on social factors. Thus claiming that technology or objects do in any sense organize, constrain, modify, or guide human activity seems like a surprising and even somewhat oppressive claim (we’re no longer masters of our own destiny?). Read on that level, the disagreement is basically a factual rather than a philosophical one, over what level of constraint or influence on human society materials actually do produce. If the answer is “very little”, then the ignore-technology positions would be tenable in practice even if they were philosophically flawed.
Ian Bogost
Mark, as for the last bit, it amounts to a social construction of technology (“SCOT”) position, doesn’t it? But, isn’t that just to say, here is a position that performs a prima facie exclusion because it just tries to explain technology (or objects more broadly) as objects of human intention anyway?
As for your replacement of the sneaky cleverness of alethetics with the sneaky simplicity of false choice, perhaps what’s at work is an ideologizing of the former, such that it becomes a matter of acceptable social practice. Hey, that’s something for the social construction folks to study!
Mark J. Nelson
Ian: On the last bit, I was meaning to ascribe a somewhat different position to our hypothetical opponents. If, for the sake of argument, we assume technology can organize or constrain human behavior, and that’s the right way to look at it, we can still ask: is that organization/constraint strong or weak? I think (but could be wrong) that many of the people who prefer to ignore technology in their work would answer “weak”. That would mean that, even if they were wrong to hold a SCOT-like view on philosophical grounds, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in practice, because technology and artifacts still don’t matter that much.
In media in particular, I could imagine someone making this argument: even if we grant that in certain examples, like VCS games and early color films, technology played a strong role in influencing artistic and cultural production, those are unrepresentative outliers, and usually it doesn’t.
Levi
I think one of the problems here is that we just don’t know because we haven’t had much in the way of adequate analysis of these sorts of issues and are therefore trying to decide them in the dark. I know I’ve been all grooving on Braudel’s material history lately, but I do think that one of the things his close analysis of things like how food is produced by certain cultures and at certain points in time, the tools used, population densities, whether or not livestock are cultivated, and so on is that the role played by nonhuman actors in influencing culture is not simply an outlier. Rather, these things play a central role in organizing human bodies into particular forms of organization and in defining the limits of the possible and impossible in design space. The cultivation of rice, for example, does not determine what politics, art, ethics, and so on will be, but it certainly plays a significant constraining role in defining the structure of possibility and what forms of organization are likely.
In my view– though maybe I’m taking this too far –the social and cultural does not differ in kind from tornadoes or hurricanes. Tornadoes and hurricanes can only sustain their organization through constant influxes of energy produced as a result of differing barometric pressures and heat differentials. Societies are similar in this respect. They require influxes of energy to sustain particular forms of organization across time. The sorts of energy drawn upon play a major role in the sort of social organization you’ll get. It makes a big difference if your hunting and gathering, producing wheat and grains, producing rice, producing corn and so on. Moreover, it makes a big difference if you’re using human and animal power, water power, wind, coal, electric, and so on. All of these things play a role in relating human bodies to one another in particular ways. Then there is the issue of all sorts of other nonhuman actors involved ranging from technologies used to environmental conditions to geographical topology and so on. These things are not determinative, but do structure possibility in various ways that influence art, politics, norms, and so on.