Irreduction

I have lived in the Cleveland area for over 7 years now, and yet yesterday was the first time I ever visited MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art). I often stumble and utterly fail to apprehend or assimilate contemporary/modern art; it all seems so meta- and hypertextual, and aside from a passing familiarity with pre-17th c. Western artists, my knowledge of art history and technique is scanty at best. When I stand before some esoteric canvas splattered in paint and string and mud and blood and appearing to have been bludgeoned with a hammer, I feel like an immigrant learning English for the first time and being asked to really comprehend the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But occasionally I encounter a contemporary artist whose work transcends that inbred, art-community-only kind of work, and yesterday (before a fun and fennel-filled trip to Whole Foods) I did just that.

The artist is Ursula von Rydingsvard. Her massive sculptures, painstakingly constructed by gluing together small blocks of cedar into craggy, twisting monuments of wood and graphite, reminded me of Latour’s Principle of Irreduction as expounded by Harman in Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009). Irreduction rejects the materialist idea that the physical world can “be reduced to a final layer of tiny pampered physical elements that are more real than everything else” (161). Object ontologists believe instead that nothing can be reduced to anything else, just as each von Rydingsvard sculpture cannot be reduced to its cedar pieces. Although one can see the individual chunks of wood that are used to construct the objects, like Legos or atoms, to focus only on the pieces is to miss the monuments themselves. The vitality of her works is only felt when they are perceived as whole objects, not just assemblies of parts.

Standing before her “Weeping Plates,” I noticed the way the vertical planks of wood pull the gaze down towards the mass of ligneous tears accumulated at the base of each eye-like disc; but to focus only on those strips of cedar is to miss the potency and melancholy of the plates. The violent texture of “Halo with a Straight Line” (pictured here) is the product of the chaotic jamming together of those individual chunks of wood, but the intimidation I felt standing before that awe-inspiring phallic tower was induced by the object as a whole, not by its parts. To see only the fragments of “Collar with Dots” is to miss the play between the ordinariness of a woman’s lace collar and its resemblance to a massive, threatening but familiar uterus. While it is true that I am constructed of billions of atoms swirling and dancing about in the unique dance of the sentient creature, the real Alan-object emerges as a whole being with a vitality that cannot be explained away by the micro-particles from which I am composed. If I were nothing more than the atoms and the spaces between those atoms, there would not exist a difference between myself and von Rydingsvard’s “Ocean Floor,” and thus I could not be an actor that finds comfort in the shallows and shadows of that paradoxically tumultuous yet pacifying structure.

Human Objects

Wow, it's been far too long since I've updated my blog, and I honestly have no excuses (translate: apathy). I feel that I owe it to my readers (me...maybe 1 or 2 others), to compose something remarkable to make up for my silence, but I've nothing astonishing or profound to say at the moment, so I present instead this brief selection from an e-mail I sent to J.J. Cohen regarding a topic I would like to address as part of the GW MEMSI discussion panel "Ecologies" at KZoo 2012:

"The term ‘nonhuman’ has been bugging me lately; although OOO theorists often address the implications of the human-as-object, applications of OOO to medieval lit seem only to focus on the non-human. I think that such a definite exclusion of the human from studies of objects might actually polarize humans vs. other objects, perpetuating the idea of human as possessing some unique ontological status. I thought perhaps I could re-introduce the human into medieval discussions about OOO, open a channel to discuss the various ways that humans can be nonhuman or can perform/function in assemblages in nonhuman capacities. Humans as equipment, humans as tools, what is left when the human has receded from view and what the implications might be if humans are recognized as objects in ways that seem nonhuman. A contemporary example would be J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, in which humans are assemblages of sex acts and photographs and geographic landscapes and medical instruments and weapons and roadways. I’ll obviously include numerous examples from medieval lit in my presentation."

To be honest, I'm only posting this so I don't forget what I wrote to Jeffrey in the likely circumstance I delete the e-mail from my sent mailbox.

In defense of anthropomorphism/pathetic fallacy

In an early critique of my rough draft (for which I am exceedingly grateful), the critic accuses my work of anthropomorphizing its subject and its writer for employing pathetic fallacy. The problem here is that she finds fault with my describing stones that "speak" and have "voices" and thinks I don't really mean to use anthropomorphism but, perhaps since I am still such an inchoate academic, I lack the experience/education to know not to use 'human' verbs when referring to 'objects'. Yet the papers is about the ability of stones to communicate, and it is my intent to use anthropomorphic language to describe the different ways stones communicate. I've been stressing about this matter a few days now, especially because I know that if this former instructor of mine finds fault with my use of pathetic fallacy, so too will many of the essay's readers (ie acceptance committees). However, if I don't use active verbs like "mutter" or "whisper" in describing these stones, I'm simply shoving them to the very background from which I am trying to rescue them!

This morning, as I was reviewing some recent posts to Levi Bryant's blog Larval Subjects, I stumbled upon this marvelous defense of the use of anthropomorphism when writing about objects:

These anthropomorphisms– rife also in evolutionary theory, sociology, and Marxist thought –are not intended to suggest that things really have aims and purposes, but merely to draw attention to the contributions that nonhuman things make in the world and to us. They are designed to break the bad anthropocentric habit of treating nonhumans as passive stuffs upon which we project meanings and which merely obstruct us.

Thank you Levi Bryant. Perhaps I will cite your blog early in my essay so future reviewers won't be so jarred when my stones start shouting.

Notes Towards an Introduction (3/24/11)

*Notes (or what spewed forth from my mind after a shower) towards a possible introduction for the essay I hope to use as the writing sample for my grad school applications. This means I'm pretty sure I know now what I want to write about. Of course, Fortune's fickle wheel is always a-turning, I know things might not work out the way I'm hoping, but that's no reason to start planning an evacuation just yet.

**Oh, and I'm certain to change the one-line introductions to the main theorists who inform the critical perspective of this essay, I just like the way an early introduction like this allows me to juxtapose their works immediately so the reader already has a map of the journey ahead. And those little one-liners only really refer to a single work by each author which I'll cite.



A visit to the Smithsonian’s National Gem Collection is bound to fill one with wonder and awe and the radiating beauty and delicate intricacies of precious stones and crystals. A crowd always surrounds the Hope Diamond, as fantasies of limitless riches and deep time co-mingle into an experience of the sublime. Light bounces off the collections diamonds and gemstones in a splendid dance that captivates our imaginations. The stones in this room become vibrant, alive. Unfortunately, any awareness of material vibrancy is actually and only the result of a carefully choreographed theatrical experience; the sensations we feel are pre-determined by orchestrations that dictate what we see and how we respond. We enter the theater of the collection, and each stone and mineral is framed behind clear glass, is fore-grounded against matting that seems to disappear in its contrast to the gem, light dances because bulbs are positioned to create this effect, and placards are provided to give viewers appropriate contexts of luxury or deep time. We have become blind to vibrancy, to the affecting nature of objects, and curators cautiously craft a mise-en-scene that captivates and contextualizes material vibrancy by informing us that these precious stones and hard minerals exist and perform to serve us, whether their service is dazzling us in a controlled museum environment, or to represent and display our wealth, or, as many placards tell us, to help us craft our tools and build our machines. Always anthropocentric, we miss the calling of vibrant materials until we understand what they can do for us.

The past 300 or so years of philosophy has limited the scope of ontology and foregrounded epistemology as first philosophy; as a result, perception of life and the universe consistently asserts mankind as the dominant actant and observer. Objects become secondary, they perform as tools in the service of man, if they exist at all. Occasionally they are granted an ontic status, but often they are reduced to mere phenomena and often excluded from the brackets of our consciousness. Fortunately, contemporary Continental philosophy is re-introducing a return to ontology that focuses on the true power of objects as distinct and performative whether or not they are used for human ends. Bruno Latour reminds us that objects can be actants in a network whether or not humans are operating or even present in the assemblage. Graham Harman, by means of a surgically careful reading of Heidegger, argues that we must create an object-oriented ontology to become aware that objects not only exist but act completely independent of humanity and our awareness of them. Levi Bryant gives an outline for an object ontology by defining an Ontic Principle and offering a Principle of the Inhuman. And Jane Bennett reinvigorates things with a material vibrancy and proves that only by our awareness of thing-power can we align our political concerns with the ecological care we need to restore the health of the planet.

As this new-wave of philosophy and object-ontology pushes us forward and strives to construct a future of thing-awareness, it simultaneously creates a new reading of the past. Or perhaps the past offers new ways of reading the present. Either way, there is a growing assemblage of academics and scholars aware that the literature of the medieval and pre-modern is teeming and redolent with instances of and insights into the vitality of matter and the power of things. New journals like postmedieval and conferences like the "GW MEMSI: Animal Vegetable Mineral" are engaging medieval texts in light of contemporary object-ontology. This emerging criticism argues a medieval world aware of thing-power, an era that senses the vibrancy of materials and reproduces that vitalism in its literature. The inorganic of the pre-modern world is as alive and affecting as the organic and one form of matter that is particularly vibrant in medieval literature is stone.

Catalogs as Assemblage-Making Devices

As I was reading Sir Gawain last night, I couldn't help but let my mind wander back to Jane Bennett every time the narrative dilated into a cataloging of events, and I realized that catalogs as a rhetorical technique allow the reader to assess objects as parts of a greater assemblage.

This vibrant example from Bennett describes the obesity assemblage :

The problem of obesity would thus have to index not only the large humans and their economic-cultural prostheses (agribusiness, snack-food vending machines, insulin injections, bariatric surgery, serving sizes, systems of food marketing and distribution, microwave ovens) but also the strivings and trajectories of fats as they weaken or enhance the power of human wills, habits, and ideas.

Such a list reveals the obesity epidemic as a swarming array of people, objects, forces, directions, and processes that are in themselves parts of other assemblages.

Thus I was struck by the cataloging of the post-hunt spoils cleaning and carving scene in Sir Gawain (unfortunately I am using a modern English translation for my examples because it has proven too difficult to copy middle English into a Blogger/LiveJournal post):

(From stanza 53)
Next they slit the eslot, seized on the arber, / shaved it with a sharp knife and shore away the grease; / next ripped the four limbs and rent off the hide. Then they broke open the belly, the bowels they removed / (flinging them nimbly afar) and the flesh of the knot...Then they shore out the shoulders with their sharpened knives / (drawing the sinews through a small cut) the sides to keep whole

(From stanza 54)
Both the head and the neck they hew off after, / and next swiftly they sunder the sides from the chine, / and the bone for the crow they cast in the bows. / Then they thrust through both thick sides with a thong by the rib, / and then by the hocks of the legs they hang them both up; / all the folk earn the fees that fall to their lot. / Upon the fell of the fair beast they feed their hounds then / on the liver and the lights and the leather of the paunches / with bread bathed in blood blended amongst them. Boldly they blew the prise, amid the barking of dogs, / and then bearing up their venison bent their way homeward, / striking up strongly many a stout horn-call.

This catalog sews together actions, tools and trajectories just as it rends apart the flesh of the deer. The organs of the beast comingle with the knives of the hunters, bone becomes food, becomes an offering, meat is divided according to station, blood and bone and waste and animal are vibrant actants in a meat-making assemblage. And all this is presented in much the same way Bennett writes a fat-making assemblage.

Another catalog spoke to my animal interests, the hunting of the fox:

(From stanza 68)
The fox flits before them. They find him at once, and when they see him by sight they pursue him hotly, / decrying him full clearly with a clamour of wrath. He dodges and ever doubles through many a dense coppice, / and looping of the lurks and listens under fences. / At last at a little ditch he leaps o’er a thorn-hedge, sneaks out secretly by the side of a thicket, / weens he is out of the wood and away by his wiles from the hounds. Then he went unawares to a watch that was posted, / where fierce on him fell three foes at once / all grey. / He swerves then swift again, / and dauntless darts astray; / in grief and in great pain / to the wood he turns away.

A catalog constructed almost entirely of verbs. The fox is not an animal but a river of motion, a lurking, listening, leaping flow that sometimes pauses and sometimes rushes through the wild wood. The fox is each flitting moment of its movement, it is each obstacle in its path and each obstacle it overcomes, it is an unpredictable trajectory. Jane Bennett’s Derridean observation applies: “things in the world appear to us at all only because they tantalize and hold us in suspense, alluding to a fullness that is elsewhere, to a future that, apparently, is on its way.” The fox is unfulfilled promise and impossibility.

Of course, none of this is surprising if we read the fox hunt as parallel of the human seduction scene occurring back at the castle! But I’m really digging this flow of the vibrant animal assemblage as metaphor for sexual seduction.

And I can’t forget to mention another master of the catalog-as-assemblage-making-rhetorical-device: Ballard. Consider this collection of materials that represents the human animal/machine Karen Novtony in Travis’ schizophrenic world:

(1) Pad of pubic hair, (2) a latex face mask, (3) six detachable mouths, (4) a set of smiles, (5) a pair of breasts, (6) a set of non-chafe orifices, (7) photo cut-outs of a number of narrative situations – the girl doing this and that, (8) a list of dialogue samples, of inane chatter, (9) a set of noise levels, (10) descriptive techniques for a variety of sex acts, (11) a torn anal detrusor muscle, (12) a glossary of idioms and catch phrases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various vents), mostly purines, etc., (14) a chart of body temperatures (axillary, buccal, rectal), (15) slides of vaginal smears, chiefly Ortho-Gynol jelly, (16) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70 rising to 200/150 at onset of orgasm.

The Karen Novotny sex-act-machine is presented much like the deer-corpse-becomes-food machine: processes and tools mingle with meat and organ, objects move between assemblages in a dissection-as-construction trajectory. Sex is the rending of animal flesh from bone, an offering to crows or a moment captured in a photograph. It is the blowing of horns and the screaming of orgasms. And much like a fox is a river of leaps and bounds, wiles and seductions, a Karen Novotny is an ocean of pumping blood and sexuality.



1. Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

2. Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

3. Tolkein, J.R.R., trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980.

Medieval Stones and Morality

Can contemporary object-ontology breathe new perspectives of morality into medieval texts? Existing before the glass wall between man and nature (before Kant’s binary inside/outside, before the dominion of epistemology reified that binary), non-human objects existed in the same ontological plane as humans. Thus objects become a site for the question of morality. How do we read/respond to the threatening gestures of “rokkes black,” to Merlin’s preternatural sensitivity to the disruptive power of stones hiding dragons, or to scientific/magical properties of precious stones defined by lapidaries and depicted in Breton Lais and the Travels of Sir John Mandeville?

TBC…

Vibrant Wands

“First, a life is not only a negative recalcitrance but a positive, active virtuality: a quivering protoblob of creative elan. Second, a life draws attention not to a lifeworld of human designs or their accidental, accumulated effects, but to an interstitial field of non-personal, ahuman forces, flows, tendencies, and trajectories.” –Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter

Alright, with an introductory quote like that, one would expect I would apply it to a bit of scholarly material deserving of such a cerebral yet aesthetic dance of language. But that’s not going to happen. I just spent a solid week ill to the teeth from a sinus infection and a simultaneous flu. As badly as I desired to start perusing Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, read a few Breton Lai’s searching for instances of thing-power, and continue Mallory’s Morte Darthur, my head was a viscous cloud of pain and I could not give any of the most materials the attention they deserved. Thus, I finally read the final book in the Harry Potter series, a bit of light reading I knew I wouldn’t regret if I failed to read it with a critical eye.

Yet I did get something more than just entertainment value from Harry Potter, and although my diction and critical writing skills haven’t fully recovered from my week of illness, there is one thing I want to get written down before I move back into more scholarly literature (although I firmly believe there is scholastic merit in studying the relationship between medieval literature and contemporary medievalisms).

Thus, as a fledgling OOOist (is that right?), I couldn’t help noticing all the attention given to the vibrancy, the autonomous activity of inorganic objects in Harry Potter. The ubiquity of Tolkien’s influence on the fantasy genre involves the redolence of medievalisms in fantasy narratives, especially the appearance and frequency of objects that have power unto themselves. The bit of Harry Potter that most struck me refers to a particularly powerful magic-wand :

Its history is bloody, but that may be simply due to the fact that it is such a desirable object, and arouses such passions in wizards. Immensely powerful, dangerous in the wrong hands, and an object of incredible fascination to all of us who study the power of wands.

While contemporary understanding of the magic-wand treats it as a tool through which the operator directs his/her magical powers, in Harry Potter, the wand is written as having agency unto itself. Wands are actants, assemblages of manpower, wood, and objects, and as far as the human mind can describe them, they make decisions on their own, they control their own fates. Wands choose their operators, much like swords in medieval romances. Men write a place for wands in their own anthropocentric world, seeking dominance over a power that is outside the human realm, and the result is either violence or fascination. And even though wizards often believe they have mastery over their wands, the objects can still act independently of their operator. This is an obvious appropriation of the role of certain objects in medieval writing, and I welcome the way medievalisms in contemporary literature are able to resuscitate the pre-Humanist acceptance of thing-power.

Yes, a very brief observation, a mere glancing-over instead of a full surgical treatment, but in my defense, the brain operating the person writing this has not recovered as fully as the rest of the body.

Shells and Genres

“We talked at great length about the difference between deciding the contours of a genre beforehand, then slotting the texts into the scheme they had not created; and allowing a field of alliances to emerge from a grouping of texts that seem to be conversing with each other, as allies and queer families.”

J.J. Cohen, over at In The Middle, provided a summary today of a discussion in his Objects seminar at GWU about the genre of the Breton Lai and about the nature of genres on predetermining how a text is read. I admire his approach, especially with a genre that is terribly difficult to pin down, and I hope to keep this pedagogical perspective with me when I too am teaching university seminars (this, of course, is a reflection of my aspirations and is in no way a determined and inevitable future). He also brought up the question: “what if life (in the form of a life) is emergent rather than determined in advance?” What a fantastic vibrant materialism discussion starter!

Yet, as I was enjoying a steaming hot shower in this unending Ohio winter (wow, what an example of Timothy Morton’s ecomimesis), my mind kept returning to the beach (obviously I was associating the comfort of the shower water with the womb-like nurturing of the sights and sounds of a lapping sea-tide). Dr. Cohen’s perspective on genre reminded me of combing the beaches for seashells as a child. In my adolescent naiveté (distinct from my 20-something naiveté), on family vacations I would determinedly scour the beaches for seashells and sand dollars. And I would find seashells and sand dollars, or I wouldn’t. I consider this now to be fueled by a (proto)human gathering instinct as well as the desire to engage in an activity that is instantaneously gratifying, but that is neither here nor there.

Then came a day at some point along my undergraduate career in which I was on a mad hunt to experience the sublime. Watching the sun rise over the Gulf of Mexico, I was still missing it. I still hadn’t grasped Burke’s Romantic notions of the sublime as distinct from the beautiful. I also didn’t see a sunrise as sublime or beautiful, nocturnal creature that I am. And I recall turning my attention to the beach again, only my perception has shifted slightly and instead of looking for shells as I had become programmed to do, I just looked at the sand. I saw the violent intensity of abhorrent morning sunlight reflecting like the Texas heat off that sand. I saw dried and sun-bleached seaweed, and as I moved about I found feathers and Coke cans, dead fish and condom wrappers, beach glass and a deflated beach ball, I heard the shrill screaming of children and watched self-indulgent vacationing parents choose to ignore their children to the dismay of misanthropes who thought they could beat the throngs of people crowding the beaches by arriving at the break of dawn. I then realized that the beach wasn’t just the place where shells were found, hell, sometimes there weren’t even shells there, but the beach really was everything and anything that the beach was. It was everything beautiful and everything repellent I could see/hear/smell/feel on the beach; each screaming child and each rusting soda can was a part of the assemblage*. Things I once ignored as trash and irritants were no longer imperfections but were simply a part of what was. Jane Bennett would probably say it was the first time I noticed the vibrancy of matter. She would probably be right.

Now when I go to a beach, I still find myself desiring to gather bits of debris, but instead of hunting for shells alone, I simply walk about and find whatever the hell I find! Because I no longer see the beach as “the place where shells are found,” because I no longer claim to understand the genre before I have read the material, I have a gorgeous collection of violet beach glass, awkwardly shaped feathers, fossils, and a piece of drift wood that resembles the liquid grace of a ballerina, torso to toe (I hate to anthropomorphize a piece of wood, but if one has EVER seen a ballerina, one would have a seriously difficult time denying the resemblance). Only after I’ve visited a beach can I know what is to be found there, and only after visiting many beaches with an open mind have I started to make conclusions about what truly belongs to the beach genre: litter, screaming children, overweight men in speedos, sharp feathers one regrets stepping on with bare feet, and yes, seashells.

*There is still too much ego in that sentiment, of course the beach was/is more than only what "I" could perceive, but of course, I was so much younger all those six years ago...

*I'm still suffering from a serious sinus infection, so I'll use that as my excuse for why (I'm almost certain) this thing shifts tense so much.

RIP Arthur

At 6:30am I rose after a sleepless night and prepared myself to accompany my mom to put down the 17yr. old Pekingese dog Arthur that had been a friend and a brother to me since I was 9. Of course, such an undertaking is tragic to any pet owner, but myself being too-much an animal enthusiast, putting Arthur to sleep was absolutely agonizing. And yet, as surreal as the experience seemed (just as any gut-wrenchingly emotional event seems out of space and time), I couldn't help but rationalizing it and noting how scripted and programmatic the event and our responses to it were. Certainly nothing so prescribed as Victorian mourning, but there was something artificial about it nonetheless. The room was sterile and funereal, and a sitting room was provided in which you can hold your dog while the second injection is given. We were all out of the room before the second injection. The first injection left him immobile and incapable of keeping his salmon tongue from lolling on his cheek. But we were made to feel like it was the passing of a human, all the trappings of those rituals packed into one veterinary space. The antiseptic hospital room, the dim and serene waiting room like a funeral home viewing, ashes and urns, the swiping of credit cards; the only thing uniquely 'animal' about it was the offer to have his paws imprinted in a stone memorial plaque. I don't disagree with treating the passing of a loved pet-animal as distinct from the passing of a loved human-animal, but the experience of putting down Arthur seemed like a summary of American mourning rituals.

I am happy about the animal/object my parents get to receive, the paw prints in cement. But I of course believe in a return to earth, not ashes in an urn. The need for 2 objects seems obscene. Thinking of my own death, the only reason parts of me will be preserved is because I wish to become a block of cement used for constructing artificial reefs. It is both an economically sound and it satiates my irrational concerns with the goings-on of my corpse, something I of course will know nothing about. And perhaps having an unconventional treatment of my lifeless body will provoke unique responses in people instead of programmed tears.