“Yoü and I” is comfortably the worst song on Born this Way (well, on the standard edition; bonus track “Black Jesus / Amen Fashion” is basically everything bad that people who don’t like Lady Gaga say about her songs); an all too accurate re-creation of a dark period of early-90s MOR, painful for all of us who remember the 16-week reign of terror of  “(Everything I do) I Do it for You.” The video is good, though, following Gaga’s usual pattern of stitching together signifiers in the hope of creating some kind of theoretical life. My favorite thing about the video is the presence of Gaga’s drag alter-ego, Joe Calderone. Partly this is just because of a personal, erm, interest in women in masculine clothes, but it also brings up, or at least reminds me of, various questions about essentialism and gender.

With Joe Calderone, Gaga is playing the part of a guy, but not just any guy; he’s a sideburned, smoking, white-T-shirted James Dean sort of a guy. This is something that drag performances often emphasize – that there is no such thing as masculinity as such, but rather, any masculinity is always a particular masculinity (and the same goes for femininity too, of course). Interestingly, though, when I thought about this while watching the video, it wasn’t the contemporary philosopher of drag, Judith Butler, who came to mind, but Aristotle. Plato believes that the fundamental things that exist are the universals or forms: the dog, the chair, the man, and the things we encounter in the world exist only insofar as they resemble these universals. Aristotle rejects the possibility of these detached universals, arguing instead that forms are always particular; there’s no the dog, dogness only exists as it is embodied in this dog or that dog.

So, does this mean Aristotle’s theory of forms is an appropriate basis for a post-structuralist theory of gender? Well maybe. The “Yoü and I” video has a kind of bride-of-Frankenstein theme, with a somewhat sinister guy attempting to stitch together an artificial woman. But he fails to produce a viable woman; the failed artificial woman cannot live, and so must be killed. In Aristotelian terms, not all possible organizations of matter are genuine forms (or essences), capable of sustained existence in real particular things. Butler identifies the problem: the constraints on which forms are genuine and which are not “not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies” (Bodies that Matter, v). The problem isn’t, strictly, the theory of forms itself, though (indeed, unless we’re going to abandon intelligibility altogether, we are going to have to somehow distinguish between real and unreal forms); rather, the problem is the specific, and violent, imposition of particular forms in a particular social and political context; as Butler puts it, “which bodies come to matter – and why?”

 The mermaid and the robot in Gaga’s video are two opposing poles of the abject, monstrous or chimeric body. The mermaid is natural and perfectly capable of existing, it just can’t exist in our world (on dry land). The robot is artificial, but seems to have, through a more self-conscious embrace of this artifice, willed itself into an existence that eluded the Frankenstein’s bride. I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be a narrative in the video, but I like the idea of a progression from mermaid, to Frankenstein’s monster, to robot; here, the very attempt to impose on the mermaid what is supposed to be the essential, and subsistent, female form, is what destroys her; but this destruction is canceled in the manifestation of a new, artificial form, the robot. What this reveals is the contingency of essence: which forms exist and are inhabitable is not pre-determined or knowable in advance, but depends on contingent processes of manifestation, processes of appearance which retroactively produce their own essence. This isn’t Aristotle’s position, certainly, but it seems to me that Aristotle’s emphasis on the particularity of form is a more useful place to start thinking about the problems of exclusionary intelligibility than positions which simply reject an unexamined “essentialism.”

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1. There’s no such thing as a first draft There have been a number of great posts recently at Object Oriented Philosophy about being a grad student and/or academic, and the writing process in particular; but this latest I find utterly incomprehensible: I sat down, and simply wrote it straight through. 12 pages. How long did it take? Geez,...
2. I wanted to find, the logic of all sex wars As I understand it, radical feminism, particularly as developed by MacKinnon, is based on a binary account of power in which having, or not having, power, is what defines gender. It’s paradoxical, then, that one of the main criticisms radical feminists make of post-modern feminists is that the posties, in...
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The point of the example of the archefossil is to “raise the question of the emergence of thinking bodies in time,” which is also “the question of the temporality of the conditions of instantiation, and hence of the taking place of the transcendental as such” (25). The archefossil is an example of ancestrality, but the real problem of ancestrality is, if space and time depend on thinking beings, how would we understand the fact that thought first arose at a specific space and time? However, this is only a question at all if there was indeed a moment at which thought first arose, that is, if thought and being are fundamentally distinct. Meillassoux accepts this inasmuch as he points out that ancestrality is only a problem for the transcendental idealist, not the speculative idealist; but he does not consider that this ancestrality is, for the same reasons, not a problem for the materialist, either.

The problem of ancestrality, then, depends on an implicit Cartesianism that runs through After Finitude, an assumption that thought and being are two different things, and that the connection or not between them is thus a problem. For a position like the one Marx sketches out in The German Ideology, in which thought is simple a particular set of relations among being, the problem of how thought relates to being is no problem; their interrelation is essential to understanding thought in the first place: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is…directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.” What’s distinctive about Marx’s position is that it sees thought as active, rather than merely reflective or contemplative. Marx charges Feuerbach with failing to really break with idealism because he still conceives the material world as something that is passively reflected in though: “Feuerbach’s conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling.”

This description also applies to Meillassoux, as we can see from the solution he proposes to the problem of ancestrality. Meillassoux argues that science shows us a way of thinking the unthought: mathematization. But it’s interesting what he thinks it is about mathematization that renders it independent of humans: mathematics is independent, specifically, of human sense-experience. Mathemetization provides “a world capable of autonomy” because mathematized bodies “can be described independently of their sensible qualities, such as flavor, smell, heat, etc.” (115, my emphasis). What is distinctively (and, for Meillassoux, limitingly) human is sensuous contemplation; to put it another way, Meillassoux considers the human relation to the world solely epistemologically, in terms of the kind of passive experience that Heidegger calls “present-at-hand.” Both the problem of and Meillassoux’s solution to correlationism depend on this cartesian assumption that reifies humanity, as thought, as something specific and separate from being. If one doesn’t make this assumption, is correlationism an issue at all?

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Assassination is as American as the hackneyed patriotic schtick that often seems to motivate it. This isn’t about the gallows humour of the Republican right which consists precisely of knowing, wink-wink in-jokes (gun-sight imagery, ‘Reload’, and so on) about the barbarism that already exists, and which they have done so much to cultivate. It’s about what the jokes advert to.

This is a point that needs to be made repeatedly, particularly when the consensus opinion of “reasonable voices” in the media is, as Angus Johnson paraphrased Jon Stewart, “Let’s come together in this crisis, put aside division, and focus on our real enemy: The mentally ill.” There is, I think, something interesting about the way in which Lenin’s point about wider culture is rejected and explanations in terms of mental illness are accepted. Mention Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck, and you’ll immediately be informed that they never told Jared Loughner to shoot anyone, and that you can’t prove that Palin or Beck or anyone else caused Loughner to shoot at Gabrielle Giffords. This is true but misses the point; the purpose of mentioning Palin and Beck can’t be to make this kind of direct causal link, but is rather to point to something much more diffuse and general of which, as Lenin says, Palin and Beck aren’t even examples, but at most symptoms. However, no such analysis is permitted, it seems: all explanations must be offered in terms of discrete causes acting on specific individuals.

Which brings us to mental illness. Mental illness doesn’t actually explain Loughner’s actions at all. Do we even have any reason to believe that he was mentally ill (rather than being “crazy” in the colloquial sense, which his YouTube videos seem to strongly suggest)? Even if he was in fact mentally ill, that doesn’t explain his actions, because the majority of mentally ill people don’t gun anyone down, aren’t violent at all; we would still need an explanation of why this particular mentally ill person acted in this particular way.

However, I suspect this is not how most people think about mental illness. Rather, mental illness seems to be being adduced as a cause, as something definite existing inside Loughner’s brain that compelled him to take the actions that he did. This way of understanding mental illness and the mind more generally is of a piece with the rejection of any attempt to understand ideology as anything other than direct causation. The similarity is the reductive methodological individualism, which assumes that the causes of all actions must be found within specific, nameable individuals. This is a fundamentally anti-political position, as it prevents us locating individuals and acts in the larger political (social, economic, ideological) contexts that render political action comprehensible and possible.

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3. Where do we go when there’s no more pol­i­tics? You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over. — William Gibson,Virtual Light, p. 101 Is politics something historically specific? Put that way, the answer is obviously “yes.” What isn’t historically specific, after all? But that does carry with it the suggestion that Gibson’s character could be right,...

Scruton attempts a phenomenological analysis of pop music, comparing Crystal Castles with Elvis, claiming that “the difference here is not material; it is phenomenological—a difference in how repetitions are heard.” And this is true, although not perhaps in quite the way in which Scruton thinks: the problem is that Scruton cannot hear what is happening in the music he condemns. This illustrates something interesting about aesthetics, and indeed phenomenology; we might think that aesthetic responses are due simply to unmediated sensory impressions, but what Scruton illustrates is that, in the absence of an ability to cognize the input of our senses, we have no aesthetic response to them: Scruton cannot hear pop music because he doesn’t understand it.

I’m not sure Scruton himself realizes this; his claim that the pop music he dislikes “works like tickling” suggests he does indeed think an unmediated aesthetic response is possible, and his unreflective, didactic assertions about the music he does like imply a belief in the naturalness, even obviousness, of his own responses, even if they can then give rise to more detailed elaboration. I disagreed with Ian in his comments over his description of Scruton as an “emotivist,” but he’s likely right; even if Scruton represents a sophisticated form of emotivism, he is at bottom engaged in the cognization of a fundamentally unmediated aesthetic response.

For someone who actually can write about pop music, see jane dark on Jordin Sparks.

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We have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences; since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both bodily and mental. (Hegel)

If aesthetics is first philosophy, perhaps we should replace the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” with “why does what is, appear?” This is the question that underlies my concerns with Harman’s withdrawn objects. Harman does think that objects do appear despite their withdrawal, and the relationship (tension?) between real objects and the sensuous objects, in which they appear and through which they interact, is central to his philosophy. Harman (or, I should say, Guerilla Metaphysics; doubtless he’s written more on this since) doesn’t address the question of how these sensuous objects appear, and I have difficulty seeing how his philosophy could explain that. If the object is wholly withdrawn, how could anything of the object appear? Indeed, in what way would the appearance of a wholly withdrawn object be the appearance of that object, rather than some other object? In this way, it seems to me that Harman’s theory actually risks destroying the objects it is supposed to be celebrating: if there is no way of understanding the connection between the table and the appearance of a table, in what sense is the thing genuinely a table, or a horse, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? So we need some account of how appearance and essence are connected; and this is where I feel inclined to turn to Hegel, who does address this question, with a theory that makes the existence of essence bound up with its manifestation:

The essence is, in the first place, the sum total of the showing itself, shining in itself (inwardly); but, far from abiding in this inwardness, it comes as a ground forward into existence; and this existence being grounded not in itself, but on something else, is just appearance. In our imagination we ordinarily combine with the term appearance or phenomenon the conception of an indefinite congeries of things existing, the being of which is purely relative, and which consequently do not rest on a foundation of their own, but are esteemed only as passing stages. But in this conception it is no less implied that essence does not linger behind or beyond appearance. Rather it is, we may say, the infinite kindness which lets its own show freely issue into immediacy, and graciously allows it the joy of existence. (Shorter Logic, § 131)

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2. Ter­ri­fying and tedious depths “You are doubtless like myself, you all have the same terrifying and tedious depths,” ads without products quotes Flaubert, reminding me of something in Graham Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics: In addition to being charmed by objects, we ourselves want to emulate them, and wish to charm the world. It is simply...
3. How does one phi­los­o­phize with a prospec­tive tem­po­rality? K-punk writes: One of the strange things about Badiou is the curious retrospective temporality of his literally post-modernist philosophy – this is what it was to be a militant, this is what it was to fall in love… well, yes, but, now what? What’s rousing about The Meaning Of Sarkozy...

Harman, I think, believes a theory must contain all these elements to genuinely count as a realism about objects; the reason I think it’s interesting to disentangle them is that I’m not immediately grabbed by the object-oriented part of object oriented philosophy. What I find exciting in Harman is his anti-reductionism, his carnal phenomenology, and his assertion of the metaphysical importance of aesthetics; I’m trying to figure out in what ways these things depend on the reality of objects, and as part of that I’ve been wondering if they depend equally on all these four aspects of the reality of objects. In particular, I wonder about the fourth element, which seems to put Harman in the position criticized by Hegel in the quote I’ve used as the title of this post. If objects must be totally outside of all relations in order to be real, is this “realism” limited to saying merely that objects have being? I wonder how Harman would respond to Hegel here: is he doing something other than merely saying that objects have being? Would he say that it does do good to the things to say merely that they have being? Or would he reject the idea that philosophy needs to be concerned with whether it does good to the things (after all, if objects really are real, presumably they can afford to be quite indifferent to what philosophers may or may not think about them)?

Aside from this concern, I’m not sure I understand the argument for this fourth step; why does it not establish the reality of objects to say that they are never fully accessible in any given interaction? What is gained by the further step of insisting that objects are inaccessible to any possible interaction? One idea I’ve been toying with is seeing Harman’s philosophy as a particularly innovative response to Berkeley’s idealism. Berkeley argues that mind-independent reality is unimaginable, because, in anything we can imagine is, precisely because we are imagining it, dependent on our mind; this argument is interesting because everyone in the history of philosophy thinks it’s wrong, but it’s frustratingly difficult to argue against. Many have attempted to argue that in fact we can imagine a mind-independent reality; but perhaps we could see Harman as accepting the structure of Berkeley’s argument but drawing different conclusions from it. Berkeley’s premise is that any reality must be conceivable, so he concludes that, because mind-independent reality is inconceivable, there must be no mind-independent reality. But, if one starts with the premise that there is a mind-independent reality, one could equally use Berkeley’s argument to prove that, because any mind-independent reality is inconceivable, the mind-independent reality that exists must be inconceivable. Extend this argument to cover any kind of relation, not just mental representation, and, I think, you have something like Harman’s argument for the absolute withdrawal of objects.

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2. Ap­pear­ances are es­sen­tial We have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences; since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both bodily and mental. (Hegel) If aesthetics is first philosophy, perhaps we should replace the question “why is there something...
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In fact, however, the concept of politics is essentially problematic, and there is no aspect of it that can be protected from this difficulty. If politics as a practice is good, that depends in part on an ability to distinguish political practice from non-political practice, which is to already invoke an incipient reification of the political; if the political as an ontological condition is good, we need to explain how it can give rise to the bad institutions of politics. No. Better to recognize that politics or the political, whichever term we choose, is a fundamentally ambivalent category: a practical illusion, as Marx puts it, and we need to wrestle with  the practical need to engage with politics, as we try and overcome the illusions that are cast by it.

As an illustration of what this vacuous distinction covers over, consider Rancière’s theory of politicization as the appearance, or making-appear, of the excluded part of the people. What this misses is the dialectical ambiguity of appearance, which is always both the specific appearance of a thing, and an appearance in contrast to the reality of the thing. The appearance of something new on the political scene is never the full presence of that thing, but rather the production of a gap between the thing and its political appearance.

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2. Where do we go when there’s no more pol­i­tics? You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over. — William Gibson,Virtual Light, p. 101 Is politics something historically specific? Put that way, the answer is obviously “yes.” What isn’t historically specific, after all? But that does carry with it the suggestion that Gibson’s character could be right,...
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I’ve complained on many occasions about people who take class to be a positive identity. The point is that class is not an empirical category, but a structuring abstraction. This is especially true of the proletariat (the most real of the real abstractions that are class, and so also the most abstract). The “propertylessness” of the proletariat is not just a lack of possessions, but a lack of positive qualities: that is what makes the proletariat abstract labor. As abstract labor is a subtraction of distinguishing qualities, so “proletarian” names an absence, the absence around which the whole capitalist system is structured.

The idea of a generic absence structuring a social system sounds a bit like Laclau’s idea of the universal as an empty signifier. The problem with Laclau, though, is that this idea of the empty universal is based purely on an abstract philosophical argument about the nature of meaning, but there’s nothing to tie this argument to actually existing class structures. What Laclau loses is Marx’s historical argument for the development of a particular form of absent universalism in the capitalist system in particular; we’re left with a formless mass of particulars. Ironically, given Laclau’s stress on the importance of the political (as opposed to the supposed “positivity of the social”), this is actually a de-politicizing move. Rejecting the Marxist account of class as an abstract structure underlying empirical social groupings leaves us with no way of evaluating the alignments and movements of these shifting empirical identities (this depoliticization is visible, I think, in Laclau’s theory of populism).

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a question of the opposition of the universal as ‘form’, in the form of universality, and the universal as ‘content’.

In science, for example, an individual can fully perform public affairs, and it is always individuals who do so. But public affairs become actually public only when they arc no longer the affair of an individual but of society. This changes not only the form but also the content (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State).

Equality would be the universality of form, universality in the sense of a potential accessible to all. But the problem with this kind of formal universality is that it has no content: Rancière’s hypothesis of equality tells us nothing about how collective participation in the universal might be realized. Rancière’s understanding of equality is both individualist and idealist, that is to say, the conception of equality characteristic of capitalism. For all it’s abstraction, it seems to me that Badiou’s notion of the generic is much more materialist, and more useful here, because it forces us to consider the process of construction, that is to say, the process of collective change, required for any achievement of universality

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2. Non-​speaking beings W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would...
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In addition to being charmed by objects, we ourselves want to emulate them, and wish to charm the world. It is simply not the case that our fundamental wish is to be viewed as dignified free subjects with a chance to speak at the microphone of the universal assembly…. The kind of recognition we would prefer is always far more specific, since we often feel ourselves to be so painfully mutable that any specific role will do…. The one book that all of us would approach with greatest interest, that no human in history would be able to resist opening, would be a book of anecdotes about ourselves as told by other people. The appeal of such a book would not lie in some sort of grotesque human vanity, but in our wish to be something definite, a desire at least as great as our desire to be free. There is a profound need to escape the apparently infinite flexible subjectivity within, which feels far more amorphous to us than to anyone else.

Contrary to the usual view, what we really want is to be objects.

I do like Harman’s description of the “painful mutability” of subjectivity. This pain is compounded by the illusion that we are the only people to experience this mutability: so often everyone else seems to be exactly themselves, with the terrifying and tedious depths confined to ourselves alone. Would it be wrong to see this as one of the ways in which we experience the existence of inaccessible depths in objects?

Experiencing the existence of an object’s inaccessible depths (not, of course, experiencing the depths themselves, otherwise they wouldn’t be inaccessible) is part of  the main problem that animates Guerilla Metaphysics, of reconciling the inaccessibility of objects with their evident interactions with one another. Now, when I see an apparent contradiction like this, my first thought is always “it’s dialectical, innit,”  though I imagine dialectics seems like a nonstarter for Harman, for at least two reasons. The standard thesis/antithesis/synthesis dialectic is what Harman calls an “overmining” position, in that it would reduce any object that appears in it to a mere moment of the final synthesis. Worse, this synthesis occours preeminently between subject and object,  or, rather, between subject and itself mediated by objects; that is, dialectics privileges the human/object relation to such an extent that objects disappear entirely (the opposite of object-oriented philosophy).

However, I don’t think these are necessary features of dialectics, and I wonder what would happen if one attempted to do for Hegel what Harman does for Heidegger, expanding his notion of the relationship between subject and object to encompass the relations of objects to objects. I think you might get something like Marx. This might seem to go against the early Marx’s purported humanism, but his humanism is of a very particular sort in any case, not being about the deification of man, but the integration of humans and nature, which is not so far from an object-oriented idea of humanity existing alongside (rather than ontologically separate from) non-human objects. This appears in the young Marx’s discussion of private property, which he claims is problematic not just because it opposes the humanity of humans, but also because it fails to respect the thingness of things:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us….

The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object…. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man. (“Private Property and Communism,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

Now, this idea of objects being objects for human beings looks like it privileges humanity; however, Marx extends this idea to all objects, in that an object is an object when it is an object for another object:

To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power. (“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

Here we have a picture of aleatory objects, with a shimmering and contingent existence as they become objects for further objects. I think Harman would probably find such a position too relational; nonetheless, it does seem to me to be a position that neither subsumes objects into something else, nor subordinates them to humans, too key features of object-oriented philosophy. It’s also interesting to discover that Marx shared Harman’s dislike of subject-centered critique:

“Criticism” is transformed into a transcendental being. These Berliners do not regard themselves as men who criticise, but as critics who, incidentally, have the misfortune of being men…. This criticism therefore lapses into a sad and supercilious intellectualism. Consciousness or self-consciousness is regarded as the only human quality. Love, for example, is rejected, because the loved one is only an “object”. Down with the object. This criticism thus regards itself as the only active element in history. It is confronted by the whole of humanity as a mass, an inert mass, which has value only as the antithesis of intellect. It is therefore regarded as the greatest crime if the critic displays feeling or passion, he must be an ironical ice-cold sophos. (Marx to Ludwig Feuerbach, August 11, 1844)

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