"Getting it"

This post asks a deceptively simple question: "What does it mean to 'get it'?"

Recently, my friend Scott told me that with theory you either "get it" or "you don't get it" and there's no way to teach this "getting it." Its true that those people who don't get it now might get it down the line. They might read more texts or maybe they'll have an experience in their lives, something will connect and the theory makes sense.

But I want to reserve the term "make sense" for something else. Because, relatively at the same time, my friend Tim posted a text that made me grateful that there are writers that do not always have to "make sense" because they are not beholden to academic standards of clarity or the exigency of the "hot topics" in academic discourse. I wrote,

From those of us who are doomed to make a little bit of sense for the sake of a career (rather than to be sensible), its a refreshing reminder.

Tim responded to me and initally reversed my qualification: That is, all we can do is make "a little bit of sense" the career forces us instead to "be sensible." This is different from "be sensitive" (even if the difference also always puts it in relation). To "be sensible" is a call to pragmatism; Here I am specifically referring to the pragmatic imperatives of the academic discipline rather than to the philosophical position of pragmatism.

These are not mutually exclusive calls; as Tim writes,

By “being sensitive” — attentive, curious, creative– one can surmount the rather rough sensibilities of academia (I think, I hope). It’s all a matter of how to learn to play the difference– with the sense: to somehow establish a rigor sensitive to multiple demands, often contradictory. Obscure contradictions are less observable, but more important than the blatant ones. Always.

Now how does this relate to "getting it"? It's that "getting it" is "experience making sense" (to use Tim's phrase and to incorporate all of the meaning of "experience" recently gleaned from Gregory Ulmer's Avatar Emergency). "Getting it" is what we say alternately to saying "that makes sense." Both of these refer to a flash of understanding or intuition in which we grasp something, even if we are unable to articulate it, to turn it into knowledge.

It is possible to turn it into knowledge by transforming it through an expression of our insight -- this might be called the more "aesthetic" response. In academia, in contrast, the challenge is sometimes to articulate that insight by a "reading" of the text. This involves an immense amount of energy and time because part of a "reading," arguably, traces the moves of the argument. Even if it the argument is not strictly "linear," a "reading" is a tracing of the texts twists and turns, morphing into an assessment of these turns on its own terms or otherwise.

But that's not quite right either. For as academics, we just have to "get it" enough to use it in our own writing. Indeed, the move seems to be to "get it," use it, and move on -- critical reading has become unfruitful.  However, this puts young academics in a difficult spot: We shouldn't operate critically and yet we cannot break too many conventions in our own writing to be truly inventive because we are still trying to enter the discourse.

And we should never forget that there is no final "getting it," but a series of insights that unfold and are invented over time through our engagement with various "whats" (to use Stiegler's terminology). It is whether we feel (and it truly is sometimes a feeling) we can come to new insights and new knowledge with texts that we devote the time to trace their turns, to uncover a method or instructions for our own project.

Evocative Objects

When Turkle writes of "evocative objects," I find myself trying to figure out whether or not anything can be an evocative object? Who or what decides on its evocation? Are there objects that we all experience that are more likely to be evocative? Are objects evocative at some times and not others?

The key word to answering this question, I think, is companion: "In every case, the author's focus is not on the object's instrumental power--how fast the train travels or how fast the computer calculates--but on the object as a companion in life experience" (5). Even if these objects are not ever-present or these objects (physical objects) are lost, they still play a key role in the person's emotional-mental worlds for longer than one particular moment. Thus, evocative objects are not merely objects that excite the senses; in fact, the sensual aspects of the objects in the text, so far as I can remember, are downplayed in favor of thinking  how these objects contribute to a person's life narrative. Even though the senses are not excluded, as one can consider even the cookie Proust's narrator eats that sets off a chain of memory to be an evocative object, the narrative is foregrounded, which we can see in Turkle's last exhortation: "we will need to tell ourselves different stories" (326). 

Pointing out the necessity of narrative is not to criticize, but to show that evocative objects are not necessarily specific, individuated objects; that is, objects that cannot be duplicated because of their histories. The glucometer, the cello, 'keyboards', 'stars', knots, apples, Foucault's pendulum, slime mold, all may have been encountered in a specific place and time such that the experience is not repeatable (within the person's life narrative), but its any Foucault's pendulum, slime mold, or knots, that are evocative. In contrast, the rolling pin, the painting in the attic, the silver pin, Murray: the stuffed bunny, the synthesizer, are all specific. 

Except the more I think of it, this is still an artificial division. Pinch speaks not of just one synthesizer-- his own-- but also Vickers(made by another person), which also contributed to his professional, emotional, and intellectual life. Strohecker herself is obsessed with knots, but the story crystallizes around another person's specific knot. 

I dwell on this to show that there is a slippage between the specific object that forms a narrative and the object tin general that contains the same kind of potential (does it?). Pinch's specific synthesizerdoesn't evoke anything in me and, frankly, the synthesizer in general doesn't evoke anything in me. The narrative Pinch tells, however, does evoke something in me: it makes me think about how objects have helped me compose and experience different sounds. Through these stories, these objects take on more significance and meaning in my own life, as I start to recognize how  objects have contributed to larger projects in others' lives and begin to think about my own evocative objects. 

There are very few objects that I consider indispensable to my life. Surely as a scholar one of the most evocative objects for me are texts. Certain texts have changed my professional and emotional life: I think of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce's Ulysses, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Jacques Derrida's Margins of Philosophy. These texts fundamentally altered my emotional and intellectual worlds. Part of the reason I began to study literature is because of my love, my passion for these objects. These texts I have undergone, I have suffered through. These texts that overflow with associations not just in my own life but to other texts in the world. These objects still are evocative for me; I still tear up at the final affirmation, the final "Yes" in Ulysses as Molly Bloom climaxes; the phrase "fear no more the heat o' the sun" immediately brings to mind Septimus Smith. BullockBefriendingBard is still one of my favorite alliterations (Ulysses). And Dasein has taken on a significance I cannot begin to explain. 

Sid Dobrin said in a recent seminar that academics have to be fans at the very least in order to succeed. We actually have to be more than fans. We have to allow our objects of study to evoke another text, another project, another meaning, another transformation. As a scholar, I still have not found that evocative object of study that requires years of dedication and research. As scholars, we need these evocative objects, these companions, to accompany us throughout our lives. 

Two examples from philosophy: I think for both Graham Harman and Jacques Derrida, in  different modes and for different reasons, the texts of Martin Heidegger can be considered "evocative objects." Similarly,  Heidegger has played a large role in my own development as a scholar, as has Derrida. These texts haunt me-- in a positive way. I have a connection to these texts that fuses my intellectual and affective worlds. 

But I need to find an evocative object of study in my own "field." Which is what? Theory, Rhetoric, Composition, Media? The theoretical apparatuses prominent in these fields right now consider all objects and relations mediators. If everything is an object and a relation (or rather, as Harman puts it, every relation creates another object), how can I decide which relations, which objects, I should study. Harman may be right that a banana peel and a foot is ontologically just valid as a human relationship -- that it is a difference in degree. However, this gives us little direction into what relations one should value as a scholar (who is not involved in the project of reviving a radical metaphysics). Harman writes in Quadruple Object: "Inanimate collisions must be treated in exactly the same way as human perceptions, even if the latter are obviously more complicated forms of relation" (46). For all of his careful definitions and terminology, what does it mean that human perception is more complicated (which is not the same thing as complex)? Furthermore, what can Object Oriented Philosophy add to thinking human relations, such as language?

I know I've drifted away from my initial question of evocative objects, but I think that Turkle's book is a good reminder (as is N. Katherine Hayles) that we still do need to think about what makes an object evocative to us? What object is worth devoting so much time and energy? Its true that not everything is "for us" or givenness for us; however, in some sense, is it not the case that anything we encounter (or choose to address in a philosophical, theoretical, or poetic work) as human beings is addressed to not-us and us (as human beings, as specific readers or thinkers, etc.). Shouldn't we think through the multiple addressees? 

My Evocative Object

Although I have yet to find the evocative object that sets off my scholarly career, I do possess at least one personal evocative object: my acoustic guitar. To this day, I have never met anyone who has the same model or even the same brand of guitar I have: a Parkwood. Everywhere I go people ask me what kind of guitar I have: "a Parkwood," I say, and no one knows what I am talking about.  I bought this guitar a long time ago, when all I wanted to do was to play pop songs like Dave Matthews. Had I knew where my musical tastes would take me (far away from Dave), I would have probably chosen a Martin or a Taylor. But the Parkwood's price was right and, to my young ear, it sounded sweet to my ear, felt right on my lap, and, most importantly, was the right price. Furthermore, it had a built in microphone so I could plug it into a PA system. The Parkwood, I was told at the time, is the Cort company's attempt at a higher end instrument. Basic Cort acoustic guitars can be purchased for about 200 dollars (sometimes less), but, if memory serves me, the Parkwood was 800. I am still not sure if this story about Cort is true, but its how I connect my guitar to a better known brand.

One of the most significant events with this Parkwood is not a particular song written, but the day I fucked it up. Late one evening, my friends and I decided to have a bonfire out on a hill somewhere--I think it was public property. We got high and played music and everyone had a grand old time. Afterwards, I slung my guitar over my shoulder, like a backpack, and started down the hill. As I was walking down, I slipped on the wet grass and fell on my back--and on my guitar. I thought I heard a snapping sound, but didn't check at the time, waiting till I got home. When I got home, I found that I had made two significant cracks on the front of the guitar and on top of the body! I was devastated and cried, but luckily it still sounds fine--although I always wonder what was lost and whether anything was gained.

A year ago, I began to play at an open mic. Toward the end of its existence, I began to do strange things on stage such as thrown down my guitar on the floor before screaming into the mic. I was afflicted with a kind of Pete Townsend-fever and had the urge to harm my guitar. One night I faked like I was going to slam it into the ground. Another night, I threw it so hard against the floor that the electronics got punched in and the battery fell out into the body of the guitar. The electronics and the guitar still works and it has the battle scars to prove its authentic history.

I once told my dad there were two different kinds of abuses of guitars, one being a far greater abuse; the first is to use it up, hit it, crack it, etc. One can consider this kind of abuse almost lovingly in the same way that we consider wrinkles and scars to be signs of wisdom as well as age. The second, however, is not playing it at all and thereby letting it gather dust in some corner. The object becomse unevocative or evocative only in the mode of a nostalgia for the days past-- no longer transformative and active, it becomes part of the furniture or the decor--memories of a time past that cannot be bothered to be relived.

In the section "Doing and Having" in Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre describes beautifully how using an object, wearing it down, makes it ever more particular and important to the point that it becomes me. Destruction can function also as an act of creation:

To utilize is to use. In making use of my bicycle, I use it up--wear it out; that is, continuous approprative creation is marked by a partial destruction. This wear can cause distress for strictly practical reasons, but in the majority of cases it brings a secret joy, almost like the joy of possession: this is because it is coming from us--we are consuming [. . .] it is to destroy by incorporating into oneself [. . .] The bicycle gliding along, carrying me, by its very movement is created and made mine; but this creation is deeply imprinted on the object by the light, continued wear which is impressed on it and which is like the brand on the slave. The object is mine because it is I who have used it; the using up of what is mine is the reverse side of my life. (757)

We could sit and critique Sartre for his denegration of the object in service of human sovereignty (the object as slave), but I think his basic point holds true. We make our mark on an object and we take it away from its status as an identical consumer product that anyone with money can buy. Sure someone can buy a Parkwood guitar just like mine, but will it bear the traces of my songs, my stories, my strums, my skin the strings rip off and embed into the fretboard? No.

However, its not just my acoustic guitar as evocative object, but any acoustic guitar. At first I had written that any guitar is an evocative object, but the designation of an acoustic guitar is important. Although I can and do play electric guitar (and electric bass), these guitars still feel a little awkward and distant from me. The electric guitar lacks the sensual response I get from the acoustic guitar. When I strum chords on the electric guitar (even with distortion) they still feel flat; the strings do not respond because they cannot create the bounce and rhythm, which makes it the perfect companion to the voice. Electric strings feel comparatively dead (even new strings) and neither the body of the guitar nor my body resonate;. An electric guitar feels other than me, like a new prosthetic arm that I have not fully incorporated into myself; my acoustic guitar is more like a metal plate in my head, attuning me to radio signals, however faint and however chaotic.

 I rarely, if ever, compose songs on electric guitar. If a song works on an acoustic guitar, effects can be added on in the arranging phase. Composing on acoustic guitar forces one to create a solid song with structure both lyrically and musically before considering how it could sound on a record. Playing with an acoustic guitar limits the kinds of sounds one can make, but as in a poetic composition, these limitations can turn to an advantage.

The guitar is necessary for me to write a song. I may have a few lines and maybe a melody in my head, but until I pick up my acoustic guitar the song remains incomplete, un-actualized, in potentia. I use the word "compose" but my songs are hardly complex compositions from a musical perspective. Surely Juliard composition majors would see my songs as amatuerish, perhaps even primitive. Tod Machover explains that "no one at Juliard  would be caught dead in practice room, or plinking out his or her music on a piano, lest he or she be accused of inadequate ear training, of a sterile musical imagination" (18). My imagination, and apparently Machover's as well, is not "sterile," its just that it is insufficient-- a prosthesis is called for to get my creative juices flowing. And really, how different is the guitar as prosthesis from the paper on which the composer's imagination is inscribed? Like Machover, my feeling for composition calls upon my intimate relationship with my guitar (18).

But as I said, not just my guitar, but any guitar (although mostly acoustic) suffices as an evocative object. The first thing I look at in someone's house or apartment is the bookshelf. The second? If they have a guitar.
because if a guitar is lying around, I am usually fiddling with it, even if I am involved in a conversation or no one pays attention. I might even sing a few lines or ask if anyone would like to hear a song. I have played guitar since I was 9 years old, so guitars in general are intimately familiar to me. Rarely do I have to consciously tell my fingers how to arrange themselves to form chords or which strings to pluck unless I am practicing a new song or technique. I can play basic chords along to most songs so much so that I can earn them on the fly (even in performances).

But I am not really a "guitarist." In fact, this admission might be one of the reasons why electric guitars feel lackluster.  Because its not the vibrations of the guitar strings and the sound they make that really get me, but rather the vibration of my entire body. Machover writes that he wanted his instrument "to be able to sing, that the bow "is where expression comes from like breathing for a singer," and that "the physical intensity of cello playing [is] a whole body experience" (14, 17, 17 ). I do not so much mold myself to the guitar (like, say, Hendrix or Clapton) to make it sing; rather, the guitar facilitates the transformation of my body, breath, and mind into both a composing and performing instrument.  For my part, I do not need my guitar to sing; I use my guitar as an accompaniment for my voice.

"Accompaniment," however, may not quite fit my meaning. My voice and my guitar are two aspects of my prosthetic body. The pressure of my pick on the strings serves as a counterpoint to my vocals and lyrics. The real star is the song. Everything serves the performance of the song. Every performance varies as I may decide that I want to hit a high note or scream and may have to adjust the volume, timbre, or pitch of my guitar-body-voice. My guitar-body-voice feeds off the room and the audience and I am barely conscious of all of the adjustments I make to strumming or singing. These moments a different kind of thinking from my academic work takes place: a thinking of affect, a thinking of the body, a sensual thinking. Its thought without words (even if I'm singing words); its thought without consciousness in its strict sense. Participating in the guitar-voice-body-song-audience-room network -- this is when I feel most alive. The acoustic guitar is my pivot point that sets in motion the network of sound, silence, and sense.

And it would all be impossible without my composition-performance prosthesis: the acoustic guitar. 

Object Oriented Philosophy: Reflections on Style and Method

Graham Harman 

A banana Peel

I have been tracking informally the development of Object Oriented       Philosophy/Ontology/Onticology/Speculative Realism for the past couple years, as not only several books, but also blogs have been committed to its development. Over the break, in preparation for my course in New Materialisms/Ontologies that I will be auditing, I have read roughly the first half of the semester's readings: Grahman Harman's Guerilla Metaphysics, Levi Bryant's Democracy of Objects, Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology (actually read over the summer), Latour's We have Never Been Modern, and the majority of Harman's book on Latour, Prince of Networks. I think I can firmly say that I have a grasp on the work, but I'm not sure how useful I find it, except perhaps to inspire me to compose a bit more naively and with a bit more confidence and wonder. Not because I find these texts "bad," but because I found them interesting, refreshing, and yet at the same time I wonder where they can really lead me.  Harman was most interesting of the bunch partially because he contextualizes his philosophy in the phenomenological tradition I am most familiar with in Guerilla Metaphysics (among other traditions). Harman is distinctly aware of the positions he is refuting, even if he does not do much with the texts of Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Hume, Locke, etc.

 Its interesting to me that he claims in Prince of Networks that a "minor author" or character (taking 'minor' as someone who has little impact, I guess, as opposed to D&G's notion of a 'minor' science and other such uses of 'minor') is one who is "reducible to content. The more a person, object, or idea can be summarized in a list of univocal assertions, the less substantial they are" (140). Given this definition, one could argue that Object Oriented Philosophy/Ontology as a whole deals in such propositions and content, so that reading one book by Harman or Bryant is enough, and differences between them are mostly reducible to comparing relatively clear positions. Certainly my friend Tim (www.fragilekeys.com) would argue that this is precisely the problem; actually, "argue" is not how he would put it. Philosophy, for some, does not consist of arguments. 

And yet, this would be a bit unfair to Harman, who does so much more than reiterate his positions and modify other thinkers. Harman is a dramatic philosopher, who  understands the meaning of "speculative" realism in sense that we can see him as writing Science Fiction philosophy or Theory as science fiction, to paraphrase Steven Shaviro in his book, Connected. Harman is truly interested in making philosophy more interesting because he thinks it has become boring. His targets are the analytic philosophers rather than continental, although his disdain for Derrida's style of writing (and his whole mode of thought, which he sees as indicative of "postmodernism," a movement abhorred by Latour)  is clear in Guerilla Metaphysics. But he admires Levinas, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Alphonso Lingis, even if these thinkers maintain an ontological privileging of the human. For Harman, the world is a "carnival of things" and as others have pointed out (such as Levi Bryant) his philosophy is populated with concrete objects, animals, and imaginary characters. For example, in Prince of Networks, he imagines a philosophical dialogue between Socrates and Latour in pitch perfect parody (and yet with sincerity) of Plato's style. Also, in order to illustrate how difficult it is to create enough allies to open a black box, imagines a scene in which Karl Rove has to transform himself into a philosopher so as to defeat Kant's Copernican Revolution, after trying to discredit his morality and even the sincerity of his thought (What if there was evidence that Kant wrote his whole philosophy as a joke? Harman muses). These are the moments where Harman shines as a stylist and as a rhetor that takes his audience into account as he is writing. 

Finally, he uses an endless series of objects for his examples, sometimes annoyingly so. Ian Bogost points this out in Alien Phenomenology and repeats this stylistic gesture. Bogost argues that these series of objects (Latourist Litanies) are a remedy to the philosophies of becoming, philosophies of which Harman and Latour take issue. Harman writes, “for the real novelty in philosophy no longer belongs to the tired old limerick of shifting fluxions and becomings, but to utterly concrete and utterly disconnected entities that cry aloud for mediators to bridge them” (105). 

I'm not against talking about more mundane objects and I am also drawn to the argument  that talk of flux, flow, becoming, is becoming a boring metaphorical description of interactions. However, sometimes these lists of objects don't really contribute to the argument and seem to simply function as a rhetorical ploy to make readers believe that this philosophy more than any other (especially the postmodernists/poststructualists) is concerned with the real, mundane, every day world of objects and other nonhumans. It is not the populations of objects that succeed the most in Harman's work, but rather his extended metaphors or imagined scenarios and thought experiments that truly do work to connect these objects. If Harman, Bryant, and Latour are correct that alliances among objects require work, when these authors list objects out of any sort of context or relation, we may bring these objects before our imagination, but they are disconnected. I usually skip these lists, as I can witness the wonder of the world by simply lifting my eyes from my post, noticing the lights on the windows or the chip in my coffee cup. 

Perhaps Harman is merely trying to illustrate his point that some objects do not affect one another and some metaphors do not work. One of the issues I want to take up in more detail in another post is Harman's reading of Derrida and his claims about the nature of metaphor (particularly Harman's claim that some metaphors 'don't work' -- that is, metaphors either work or not, in a binary fashion). 

But to end on an interesting note, I want to point out an explicit methodical instruction from Harman's Prince of Networks. Instead of critical thinking, Harman recommends hyperbolic thinking. Harman argues that the books that impact us the most are not the ones that are error-free, but "those that throw the most light on unknown portions of the map" (121). Hyperbolic thinking can be broken into steps: 

1.) Choose a particular provocative theorist, thinker, or philosopher 

2.)  Imagine that this thinker at maximum strength; that is, imagine that this thinker has dominated the intellectual world in the future: what would that world look like?

3.) Think about what would be missing from this world.  (121-122). 

In the text, Harman imagines a Latour intellectual domination in 2050: Here is a kind of science-fictional paradigm for thought: creating a narrative of an intellectual future and trying to figure out what one would like to see being taken account in that future. We do a similar thing when we read Science Fiction; As critics, we assume that this representation is not a blueprint, map, or prediction of the future, but rather think the underside of this representation. This comparison shines a light on OOO and OOP just as much as it illuminates a kind of Science Fiction method; That is, OOO  and OOP are, in some sense, representational philosophies. Writing serves to create vivid scenes and helpful narratives to explain and argue for positions. This is not necessarily a criticism, but it might explain why some hardcore Derrideans or Deleuzians might scoff at movement as moving backwards from these philosophies. 

I don't want to sit here and criticize this philosophy, especially since this "critique of critique" is integral to the mission and attitude of OOP. Harman has written compelling books that are readable without sacrificing argumentative rigor or compelling and vivid prose. Its going to be interesting to see how I might apply these insights to my own work as the semester develops. We can also look forward to an object-oriented view of language, writing, and or rhetoric. These well-worn themes of our discipline are not going away in favor of talking about objects, but rather could be rethought in terms of this new metaphysics. 

Memory, Technology, and Biology in M.T. Anderson's Feed

"Look at us! You don't have the feed! You are the feed! You're feed! You're being eaten! You're raised for food! Look at what you've made yourselves! -- Feed, pg 202

M.T. Anderson wrote his novel Feed in 2001 and published in 2002, but it was recently republished in a 2012 edition. I initially thought it was just recently written and even after reading the text I thought "How relevant!" This might not be the first science fiction novel to explore the idea that the internet is in our brains, but it does so with an awareness of how that might affect our biological being in a very visceral, fleshy way that I don't remember even Delaney's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand exploring (despite the fact that the book explores the problem of desire).

Anderson writes in his postscript to the 2012 edition that he didn't set out to "predict future tech" but to think "about the cultural conditions as they already were then." He was less concerned about the technologies themselves than how they were used by commercial forces, who of course will be the ones to control these technologies. Perhaps more importantly, he notes that we are less and less sure of how the technologies got to where they are (and thus who controls them): " As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder for any of us to keep track of how things were made and how they got to us. Yet at the same time, whenever we buy something, we're also putting a 'yea' vote for the system that put it together. We're responsible for a world we don't understand."

Personal Advertising

Indeed, our advertisements, even though they are not implanted within our skull, structure, predict, and form our desires in a FEEDback loop of information. Instead of watching TV on a separate device, TV can be viewed post-air time on sites like HULU that will give you a "choice" of which Ad you would like to view (usually for the same product) as well as containing a button in the upper right hand corner that asks "Is this ad relevant to you?" Based on our purchases (and moreover even our VIEWS!) on Amazon.com and other sites, the site will then recommend other things for you to buy, personalizing the range of your purchases.
The same thing happens in Feed to a more extreme degree because the person guiding  purchases is in your head and can track what you look at in a physical mall or what you order through your feed in your head. The narrator describes the power of the Feed in the following passage:

It knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them, and help you make buying decisions that are hard. Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that's keyed just to you, and then they give it to their branch companies, or other companies buy them, and they can get to know what it is we need, so all you have to do is want something and there is a chance it will be yours. (48)

I can't help but recall the Prilosec OTC commercial with America's favorite dumbass. Larry the Cable Guy:  "Cuz this is America. We don't make just things you want. We make things you didn't even KNOW you wanted!"

The Feed is literally an organ, an integral part of your body: "Before that, computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe" (47). Electric media, in this sense, are less an extension of the body as McCluhan argues, but rather an incorporation, an organ that infiltrates and fuses with the brain. The Feed cannot actually be turned off, only disconnected, because, as Violet, one of the main characters point out, "it's tied in everywhere. They said the limbic system, the motor cortex. . .the hippocampus. They listed all this stuff. If the feed fails too severely, it could interfere with basic processes." (171).

This is the other side, the unthought possibility, of the utopic extropianism of thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil in his article "This is your Brain on Neural Implants." Kurzweil imagines a scenario very close to that of the Feed, shorn of its commercial aspects:

You undergo a procedure to replace a very small part of your brain with a nonbiological unit [. . .] As promised-- the procedure works perfectly--certain of your capabilities have improved. (You have a better memory perhaps). 

Perhaps the procedure does go well, but what about continued tech support? Kurzweil is most concerned to allay people's doubts about whether they are still "them," whether they still have a unified and unique identity; what he doesn't consider, is who controls and monitors this wetware? Kurzweil's use of language gives us a clue as to his ignorance of these potential problems: 

We have already largely outsourced our historical, intellectual, social, and personal memories to our devices and the cloud. The devices we interact with to access these memories will become smaller and smaller, making their way into our bodies. It will be a useful place to put them--we won't lose them that way. And in the coming years, we will continue on the path of gradual replacement and augmentation scenario until ultimately most of our thinking be in the cloud. 

 "Outsourcing" is a term we have heard a lot recently, or at least until our own economic crisis has taken front stage, particularly outsourcing jobs. I think it is worthwhile to give an exact definition of what outsourcing is to show how commercial interests always play a role in our outsourcing of memory: 

Outsourcing is the contracting out of a business process, which an organization may have previously performed internally or has a new need for, to an independent organization from which the process is purchased back as a service. (Wikipedia)

So let's think about this for a minute: Our memories, according to Kurzweil, are now outsourced, in the sense that we allow our memories to be systematically organized and controlled by the cloud interface and purchase them back as a service!  Even free programs like Dropbox only gives you so much memory space until you either pay them or sign up for something else. Even if we don't "pay" them actual money, it has now been made abundantly clear that the companies that produce services that "store" your memories are also using them for their ends. Just recently, Instagram has admitted that their service agreement allows them to use your photographs for advertisements. Although they just as quickly denied it and repealed their change to privacy policy. Still, we all know that Facebook is becoming more and more commercialized with their "promote" function and Facebook uses our information to advertise to us. Indeed, the "newsFEED" is not only loaded with friendly updates, but also notifications (that I have to believe are false) that so an so "likes Budweiser" or whatever company they decide to notify. In other words, Kurzweil's right that we have already outsourced our memories to the internet Cloud, but we still have private memories that are not uploaded, memories attached to sensation and perception that we can sometimes recall or set off with a smell, taste, or touch. These memories are still "ours" and a deep part of our being. 

The Tragedy of Violet

But what if those memories were outsourced, or tied into something that is controlled by a corporation whose sole purpose is profitable investments? This is where the narrative of Feed needs to be introduced. One could say that Feed has one sole narrator, Titus, who is a typical college teen in this near future society, but this would inaccurate. Why? Because the feed punctures the narration with its indirect discourse: snippets of advertisements, presidential speeches, and hacking messages pepper the text. The indirect discourse may be the most powerful and most challenging aspect of Feed for younger readers, but it also illustrates that Titus and his friends are conduits for the feed, full of multiple voices, but ultimately the voice commands them to do only one thing: consume. 

The story begins on the Moon, where bored teens travel to get fucked up either by drinking or by a kind of electrical scrambling of the brains they call "in mal" ("mal" is French for "bad" or "evil," but the novel also connects it to the Mall). Titus meets Violet, who is a bit strange to all of them because she uses strange words, like "suppuration," which the rest of the group have to look up on the Feed. I must note that I myself had to look up "suppuration" on my own "external" feed (google), finding that it meant "the formation or discharge of pus."  While dancing at a club, a "hacker" touches Titus, his friends, and Violet and all of them begin to broadcast the hacker's message: 

We enter a time of calamity. Blood on the tarmac. Fingers in the juicer. Towers of air frozen in the lunar wastes. Models dead on the runways, with their legs facing backward. Children with smiles that can't be undone. Chicken shall rot in the aisles. See the the pillars fall. (39)

They are taken away to the hospital and are told they must have their feed's turned off. We find out later that they were only "disconnected" since they could not be turned off. Everyone misses their feed because they can no longer silent chat to each other nor do they undergo the constant barrage of advertisements. 

Luckily, in this world, testimony is absolutely reliable in legal matters because they can simply subpoena your memories without having to worry about deterioration or distortion (56). Memories can also be "played" for people, not only as a visual, but a haptic experience. You can experience another person's memories as if you were in their position when the memory happened: like a record of an intimate VR experience. 

Most of the novel centers around the relationship between Titus and Violet, as well as Violet's attempt to resist the logic of the Feed. She decides that she will look at many random objects so that the feed cannot pin her down as a particular type of consumer. Violet clearly explains the mission of the Feed: 

Everything we've grown up with--the stories on the feed, the games, all of that--its all streamlining our personalities so we're easier to sell to. I mean they do these demographic studies that divide everyone into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you supposedly like. They try to figure out who you are, and to make you conform to one of their types for easy marketing. It's like a spiral: they keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets so used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything simpler. (95)

Instead, Violet decides to make a screwed customer profile so they cannot pin her down: "I'm not going to let them catalog me. I'm going to become invisible" (97). She starts looking at all sorts of things and realizes that once you look at this other stuff, the stuff that is not dictated by the feed, "you realize this obscure stuff isn't obscure at all. Each thing is like a whole world" (102). By introducing variety into her interests and desires (and not actually buying anything) she becomes invisible because she is an unpredictable customer. As we shall see, her life depends on her worthiness as an investment. 

But there is a price to be paid for being invisible. . .

As the novel progresses, we learn that Violet's feed is actually malfunctioning (probably another reason why Anderson chose the word "mal" for his drug-like state) and causing her to lose feeling and control over her bodily functions. Later, she tells Titus that she has lost one year of her memory. Violet begins to depend on Titus and to have fantasies of them doing all of these things that she wants to do; "normal" things that actually correspond to a typical bourgeois lifestyle, like "I want to rent a hotel room with you [Titus]. As Mister and Missus Smith" (230). Or, alternately, "And I want to go into 'the office' everyday, sometimes even on weekends, and be someone's administrative assistant, and complain to you through the feed while I'm at my desk about my bitch of a manager or my pervert boss" 

When she enrolls Titus to do this, he breaks up with her, unable to handle the idea that she will die soon. He even says, harshly, that he cannot sleep with her because it would be like sleeping with a zombie or a corpse!  Violet also sends Titus her memories because she knows that they cannot be preserved within her, but he simply deletes them, and lies to her, telling her that he never received the memories. 

But one memory he does "try on" and the reader finally understands that ones very life depends on feeding the feed. Violet had petitioned for customer support for her Feed from both Feedtech and other corporations, because her family cannot afford to pay for it. The Feed, according to the novel's world, is not covered by health insurance because despite the fact that it essentially merges with your most basic functions it is not medical! (219). Indeed, the feed is commercial through and through. She receives this devastating message from Feedtech: 

FeedTech and other investors reviewed your purchasing history, and we don't feel that you would be a reliable investment at this time. No one could get a 'handle' on your shopping habits. (246-47)

FeedTech has condemned her to death because she is no longer a worthwhile investment for the company. Instead of people investing in stocks, people become the stocks, they are the commodities, and their memories are merely mined for commercial purposes not only on a cultural, but personal, intimate, level. 

The Erasure of Cultural Memory through the Attenuation of Language and Commodification of History

Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of Feed is the lack of historical memory and context in the novel. History has been appropriated as fashion or been discarded as useless. The language used by the teens contains little concreteness or any allusive or metaphorical significance. Indeed, one thing that attracts Violet to Titus, as she tells him, "You're the only one who uses metaphor" (62). Language has become purely functional; It's no longer "Yeah, man" or "Yeah, girl" but  "yeah, unit" --specificity is erased. The kids favorite TV show is called What! Oh! A Thing! and the parents speak just as inadequately. No one writes anything down anymore, except Violet, and there don't seem to be any books. 

Furthermore, as the case of Violet's father tells us, programming languages that allow the user to control their hardware and software are obsolete. Fortran and BASIC are now the "dead languages" that no one needs anymore. He makes little money and tries to preserve not only programming languages, but the variety of English as well. As Violet tells Titus, "He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony so no one can simplify anything he says" (137). 

There are many allusions that the reader will catch, most importantly, Violet's father's statement that Titus should "hang with the Eloi" (290). When Titus doesn't get it, Violet's father says "Its a reference [. . .] To H.G. Wells' The Time Machine." He just keeps telling Titus to look it up, to read it. He doesn't want the reference to be easily consumed by Titus, as he says, echoing Anderson's statements in the afterword: 

We Americans [. . .] are only interested in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them [. . .] what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away. (290)

The members of this society consume everything. Not just products but history and culture. In one of the most disturbing scenes in the book to me, Titus's friends get out of their "upcar," wearing "torn up clothes" and looking like "they'd been burned up and hit with stuff" (158). When asked about it, they respond that this is the new fashion: Riot Gear: "Its retro. It's beat up to look like one of the twentieth century riots" (158). When Violet asks which one is the "Watts" riot, no one can answer her and they think its weird that she would try and understand the historical precedent. The scene surrounding the encounter  consists of Titus and his friends trying to say  good things about Coke to your friends 1000 times so as to get a free six pack. They repeat so many phrases about Coke, it becomes a magic word that sets off their craving. They think that they are cheating the companies, but they describe it so much that they decide they will go buy a six pack. Historical questions of riots are overridden by the mantra of Coca-Cola consumption. Corporate mentality erases collective memory of history. I may explore this further with references to Steigler's Technics and Time 3 in a later post. 

The erasure of history and the dominance of corporate fashion arrives at a point where people froze in their tracks from Nostalgia Feedback:

People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition of Pity, but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them.

People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people through it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition Party, but it turned out it was due to something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. (277). 

In a way, what is happening on a larger scale is a less extreme version of Violet's predicament. Violet writes to Titus, "What are we if we don't have a past?" and the irony of this statement is that if you don't have a purchasing history, you are nothing, you aren't a worthwhile investment.

The Nostalgia Feedback is only one negative effect of the Feed on everyone (and not just poor violet, who ends up dying as a result of her malfunctioning feed). The reader suspects that the Feed is also producing lesions on people's bodies as well as causing their hair to fall out. The body is also becoming transparent: "You can see like muscles and tendons and ligaments and stuff through the lesions," one character says of another (199).  The lesions eventually become a fashion statement so that one of Titus' friends actually gets artificial lesions that ooze just like real ones. The Feed has turned disease and detrioration into a fashion statement in order to keep people from realizing what's really happening to their bodies. Violet is the only one who sees the problem: "Shes a monster! A monster covered with cuts! She's a creature!" (202).

In this world, people have become the conduits, no, the servants of the corporations; their memories are only guaranteed by their purchasing histories and while Violet's story is tragic, the novel suggests that the rest of the society is about to collapse as well: "Everything was not always going well, because for most people, our hair fell out and we were bald, and we had less and less skin" (277). Titus even notes that "My mom had lost so much skin you could see her teeth even when her mouth was closed" (283). Truly if the reader pays attention to these little details, the reader might agree with Violet that these people are monsters, monsters created by the corporations that they created. Monsters we are feeding our own flesh to, so they can sell other shit back to us, satisfying our desires that the Feed as already created:

"Soylent Green is People! It's People!" 

End of Semester Reflections on "Digital Humanities"

Alex Reid has posted some really interesting videos on the state of Digital Humanities and "middle state publishing" here: http://dhinterviews.org/  A couple of these spawned the following reflections. It will take me a bit to get through all the videos and more may be added later.


So Jamie Bianco in the below interview says that the public is doing more interesting things than academics. Not just in the sense of "bells and whistles" but rather in the thought produced.  Is this true? Is academic humanities "behind" in the sense that we need to start producing in other media (See Bogost's elaboration of Harman's concept of "carpentry") and to catch up to the speed at which thought is produced in an online ecology? The rate at which new signifers are produced is somewhat staggering to a point that it is so hard to keep up or at the very least difficult to spend time interpreting and understanding. Levi Bryant, in his interview in the same series, notes that he no longer calls himself an "object oriented ontologist" but a "machine oriented ontologist" -- "I don't believe in objects anymore" he says. Isn't it all just moving too fast and furthermore, what is the proliferation and dissemination of new movements, terms, and fields doing to our understanding? I'm not trying to sound like a conservative reactionary, but everything is speeding up in the radical sense of Paul Virilio. Although I hesitate to use the language of crisis, I truly believe that graduate students in the Humanities (particularly "English departments") are see-sawing between the literary scholarship we (or at least I) was taught and something else. Even my training in continental philosophy was much closer to my previous literature training with emphasis on reading, language, text, and rhetoric then this something else. I'm now thinking about new abstractions (that claim that they are not really abstractions) -- objects, materiality, medium, multimodality, digital humanities, image, etc. Do they not become abstractions through their academization (as they become part of the university discourse -- to refer to Lacan)? That is, the claim is to try and think the world not as language (the linguistic turn) but ironically this turn has produced a staggering amount of new language ABOUT these phenomena.

Levi Bryant says in his interview (posted below) that he's not sure what to call himself anymore. His blog larvalsubjects deals with philosophy, rhetoric, technology, ecology (and the "environmental crisis"), "theory," and so on. As he points out, he is able to talk about many different things. This is great and is generative of so many ideas, but I think Bryant's confusion as to the nature of his "field" is precisely what so many of us in graduate school are struggling with. Partially this is because new "fields" (or the master signifiers that designate a specialization) are created. Despite the fact that Bryant is correct that there is no "master discourse" that can serve as some sort of foundation (Philosophy, Science, etc.), there are still new master discourses formed, picked up, and disseminated. I am very far from arguing that this has not always been the case, but the introduction of the "digital" as an object for study as well as, as Bianco puts it, a "set of methods or practices," means that as graduate students we are struggling to not only learn how to expand theoretical perspectives on scholarship, philosophy, and literature in completely new ways -- not just new interpretations of texts that negotiate previous interpretations. That is, my object of study was pretty clear at one point: literary texts. I could say that my object of study is now "writing," but "writing" is really any moment of inscription; this includes videos, images, objects, bodily movements, DNA, etc.

This is what Sid Dobrin tells us when he says that we should do theory. --But how? Part of this task seems to be to find new "texts," but instead of making the text the focus, the object, and thus the purpose for the interpretation, the interpretation serves as an example in a larger argument. True, this happens in more "traditional" literary scholarship in dissertations and books, but I am still floundering around, trying to figure out what "my" argument could possibly be (in the larger sense). Perhaps this is a regular condition of graduate school.  But the rhetoric of Digital Humanities suggests otherwise.

In some sense, perhaps all I'm saying is that I miss contributing to a tradition rather than a current conversation; But perhaps this is less the fault of the university or graduate education, and more because, as Bianco suggests, publics have caught up with the academics and are doing more interesting things and thinking more interesting things that form relevant and meaningful practices that address our collective situation. Perhaps the speed at which thought is created and disseminated is even more intimidating to a nascent academic than it used to be because of "middle state publishing." No longer am I merely trying to produce some sort of "original" thought or argument in the midst of peer-reviewed journal articles and books accessed on EBSCO Host, but the conversations on the blogs as well.

I feel like more academic books are being published that address interdisciplinary theoretical and practical issues than ever before. I'm not only trying to catch up -- I'm trying to get ahead.

Hypnosis and Psychoanalysis: Toward a Research Prospectus

It is well known that the origin of psychoanalysis is in hypnosis. It is even more well known that Freud eventually left hypnosis behind in favor of the "fundamental rule" of psychoanalysis -- that the patient free associate. However, it is less well known that Freud was never quite able to "get rid" of hypnosis. Hypnosis remains psychoanalysis's repressed other, the true 'underside' of psychoanalysis. As Freud said, hypnotic relation is rediscovered in the "transference." In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud even writes that "being in love" is really a form of hypnosis, one in which everything is much less "clear." Hypnosis is evidence of the unconscious (what better evidence?) and, as such, remains a mysterious phenomenon that Freud cannot entirely grasp or explain. He writes,

there is still a great deal in it which we must recognize as unexplained and mysterious. It contains an additional element of paralysis derived from the relation between someone with superior power and someone who is without power and helpless. (60) 

On the one hand, Freud claims that the hypnotist possess a great power, similar to the power of a shaman: 

This mysterious power [. . .] must be the same power that is looked upon by primitive people as the source of taboo, the same that emanates from kings and chieftains and makes it dangerous to approach them (mana). The hypnotist, then, is supposed to be in possession of this power. (73) 

The argument that the hypnotist has too much power over the patient and thus, as Lacan might say, imposes the hypnotist's own beliefs, opinions, or modes of being on the hypnotized (the analysand) is problematic. Freud states outright in his essay on "Hypnosis" that, 

The chief deficiency of hypnotic therapy is that it cannot be dosed. The degree of hypnosis attainable does not depend on the physician’s procedure but on the chance reaction of the patient. (111)

If we follow Freud here, then the hypnotist actually has much less control over the patient then previously thought. Indeed, the hypnotist, like the analyst, is at the mercy of the patient's "chance reactions." While these may not manifest themselves in speech (although, is it not the case that the patient may report to the analyst what he or she is experiencing in the same way that analysand's report their dreams?). I would argue that similar to psychoanalysis, the hypnotist is not the "subject-supposed-to-know" but rather, the "subject-supposed-to-be-powerful." Both of these are "false" (and 'true') projects onto the analyst/hypnotist -- they both function as lures that keep the analysis/hypnotism going. Both are lures that manifest in the belief and susceptibility of the patient to treatment. 

There is much more to be said about Freud and psychoanalysis and I hope to go further into this relationship in my research paper, referring to further passages in Group Psychology and drawing on the work of Borch-Jacobsen, D. Diane Davis, and engaging critically with Dylan Evan's masters thesis, which argues that Freud mainly rejected hypnosis on ethical, rather than theoretical grounds. However, for now, I want to point to two passages where Freud makes apparent the close relationship between psychoanalysis and hypnosis in the phenomenon of the transference. Both passages are from Group Psychology. 

First passsage: 

The hypnotist avoids directing the subject’s conscious thoughts towards his own intentions, and makes the person upon whom he is experimenting sink into an activity in which the world is bound to seem uninteresting to him; but at the same time the subject is in reality unconsciously concentrating his whole attention upon the hypnotist, and is getting into an attitude of rapport, of TRANSFERENCE on to him. Thus the indirect methods of hypnotizing, like many of the technical procedures used in making jokes, have the effect of checking certain distributions of mental energy which would interfere with the course of events in the unconscious, and they lead eventually to the same result as the direct methods of influence by means of staring or stroking. (74)

First, we should note the distinction made between direct and indirect suggestion. Freud seems to equate direct suggestion/influence with physical gestures ("staring" or "stroking"). Indirect suggestion is likened to "technical procedures in making jokes," and,according to Freud, these methods can lead to the same results (!).

Second, we need to note that for Freud hypnotism is a way for the world to withdraw so that the patient focuses entirely on the hypnotist, which is evidence of the transference. This second point plays into the next passage I want to focus on.

This next passage is actually a footnote in Group Psychology, indicating that it is an "aside the point," that it can be subsumed under the main text. Footnotes are the unconscious, the repressed other of any text. It is the space of the text where the text exceeds itself, where the author must acknowledge other arguments or points of view: " See ____ for an argument different than mine."

This particular footnote does not point to another text, but it explicitly addresses a point of intersection between psychoanalysis and hypnosis:

This situation, in which the subject’s attitude is unconsciously directed towards the hypnotist, while he is consciously occupied with monotonous and uninteresting perceptions, finds a parallel among the events of psychoanalytic treatment. . .At least once in the course of every analysis a moment comes when the patient obstinately maintains that just now positively nothing whatever occurs in his mind. His free associations come to a stop and the usual incentives for putting them in motion fail in their effect. If the analyst insists, the patient is at last induced to admit that he is thinking of the view from the consulting room {etc.} Then one knows at once that he has gone off into the transference and is engaged upon what are still unconscious thoughts relating to the physician; and one sees the stoppage in the patient’s associations disappear, as soon as he has been given this explanation.  (75)

In the former passage, Freud argues that the hypnotist puts the patient into a state in which the "world is bound to seem uninteresting to him," at the same time as his unconscious is directed toward the hypnotist. Perhaps we should understand the remarks about the consulting room (the patient's immediate surrounding) as still marking this "uninterestedness" or "withdrawness" from the world. This speech may correspond to what Lacan once called "empty speech," speech that signifies to the analyst that something else is going on that the patient is not saying. Freud points to this phenomenon in the case of "The Rat Man"

 Next day he came in a state of deep depression, and wanted to talk about indifferent subjects; but he soon admitted that he was in a crisis. The most frightful thing had occured in his mind while he was in the tram yesterday. It was quite impossible to say it. His cure would not worth such a sacrifice. I should turn him out, for it concerned the transference. Why should I put up with such a thing? None of the explanations I gave him about the transference (which did not sound at all strange to him) had any effect. It as only after a forty minute struggle--as it seemed to me--and after I had revealed the element of revenge against me and had shown him that by refusing to tell me and by giving up the treatment he would be taking a more outright revenge on me than telling me --only after this did he give me to understand that it concerned my daughter. (326)

 Here, we see that Freud notices that Rat Man's speaking of "indifferent subjects" indicated that there was something else going on. However, we also note that Freud had a hard time explaining the transference. Freud argues that once he gives the explanation the patient's free associations go on again, but what if the transference cannot be explained away? And, does it really go away? There is more to say here (always more to say).

Lacan and Hypnosis

Lacan is generally thought to have dismissed hypnosis and the problem of suggestion outright. Whereas Freud confronted it again and again throughout his life, Lacan seems to have dismissed it as irrelevant to the search for signifiers. Hypnosis is the realm of affect and that which cannot be explained in words. In this sense, it is similar to the realm of "desire" which cannot be reduced to language.

But even in Lacan, there are a few passages where he makes a distinction between "crude suggestion" and another kind of suggestion.

in "Introduction to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's Verneinung," referring to ego psychologists, Lacan says,

What they in fact do--instead of confining themselves to the dialectical pathways by which psychoanalysis has been elaborated, and lacking the talent necessary to return to the PURE and SIMPLE use of suggestion--is merely to resort to a pedantic form of suggestion, taking advantage of our culture's ambient psychologism. (314, italics and capitalization mine)

The "pedantic" form of suggestion is one in which the analyst desires to "have the last word," that is, to form the patient in their own image of what they should conform to. This kind of suggestion would result in, as Lacan puts it in "Direction of Treatment," a directing of the patient, in particular his or her conscience, rather than directing the treatment. For Freud as for Lacan, directing the treatment is merely to put a process in motion. Freud writes that the analyst "cannot determine beforehand exactly what results he will effect," and that the process "on the whole, once begun, it goes its own way and does not allow either the direction it takes or the order in which it puts up its points to be prescribed for it" ("Beginning the Treatment," 368-69).

Thus, "pure suggestion" (whatever that might mean) is not excluded. Does Lacan mean here suggestion without the transference? Or, on the contrary, does he mean the affect created within the the transference, a pure performativity without any content (i.e. the hypnotic effect?). Either way, Lacan says that the transference effect must be interpreted:

However, this interpretation [any interpretation the analyst gives], if he gives it, will be received as coming from the person the transference imputes him to be. Will he agree to take advantage of this error concerning who he is? Psychoanalytic morals do not forbid it, on the condition that he interpret this effect, failing which the analysis would remain at the level of crude suggestion. (494)

The "suggestion" spoken of here is meant in the sense of something spoken by the analyst that contains content. Lacan's distinguishing between "crude suggestion" and an interpreted suggestion refers to the difference of the analyst thinking he knows best once and for all and the analyst who allows the patient's reaction (the effect) start the dialectical process moving again. The mistake is to think that somehow a suggestion can cure a patient in itself, without the dialectical movement of further interpretation. That is, suggestion is understood here as a particular rectification.  Lacan sees this as one of Freud' strengths as an analyst:

The fact is that this rectification is also dialectical in Freud's work. It takes off from the subject's own words in order to come back to them, which means that an interpretation can be exact only by being. . .an interpretation. (502)

Lacan emphasizes interpretation, as Terry Harpold puts it, "does not mean the resolution of meaning, but the continued ongoing exposition of meaning" (from commentary on wiki)

 This is the mistake of hypnosis, if by hypnosis we mean that it is only by the suggestions of the analyst (while the patient remains silent) that the patient is cured. However, "hypnosis" here refers to a particular therapeutic technique and method rather than what Freud calls in Group Psychology the "hypnotic relation" (that constitutes group formation; hypnosis is a group relation involving two people) and what we refer to here as the transference.  For as Borch-Jacobsen argues,

At bottom, what is transference described by Freud if not hypnosis without a hypnotist, persuasion without a rhetorician, since it is produced in the absence of any direct suggestion? Paradoxically, the phenomenon of transference reveals that the influence of the hypnotist and/or analyst is based not on a particular technique or power, but rather on an a priori affectability (a 'spontaneous receptivity') in the patient-- that is to say, on the 'rhetoricity' of the affect as such, a rhetoricity anterior to any verbal persuasion and also to any metaphoric expression of passions. (71, first italics mine)

Thus, transference is indirect suggestion because what it suggests is that the analyst/hypnotist has the power to cure. What else could Lacan be referring to when he speaks of "pure suggestion" than this subtle indirect suggestion, the lure of the therapeutic situation itself?

Lacan leaves the question of "pure" suggestion far more open than previous commentators have admitted. Lacan even indicates that he may be able to come up with an account of suggestion that fits with the analytic situation. I quote at length for context:

And given that Freud goes on to deplore the fact that the concept of suggestion has drifted in an ever vaguer diretion which does not allow us to foresee the clarification of the phenomenon any time soon, what mightn't he have said about the current usage of the notion of resistance? How could he not have encouraged, at the very least, my efforts to tighten up its use in analytic technique? In any case, my way of reintegrating it into the whole of the dialectical movement of an analysis is perhaps what will allow me to someday provide a formulation of suggestion that will stand up to the criteria of analytic experience. (315)

Does this reduce suggestion to a verbal suggestion or, on the contrary, does it open it up to suggestion as an indirect, "pure" suggestion, a pure performativity, affectivity, rhetoricity that should only be used to further the dialectical process of interpretation? Should we perhaps follow Isabelle Stengers and Leon Chertok when they write,

“For Freud, psychoanalysis was not the opponent of suggestion, but had succeeded rather in ‘putting suggestion in the service of knowledge’ (272). 

"Science" in the Humanities

I can't remember when, but it may have been over drinks and a bonfire, a friend of mine, who has a background in science remarked that she thinks the humanities have a reductive straw-man concept of what science "is" and tries to do. Despite having little background in formal science education, I have also thought that this may be the case, since  "science" is hardly a unified field as Terrence over at Agent Swarm recently has pointed out (echoed by Adam over at und fur sich -- I'm not sure which post came first).

 I spent some time with a friend who was doing research in immunology and learned that immunologists see the "ecological" sciences as less sciences. In other words, there is just as much debate between the sciences (because, again, scientific paradigms are not unified and are splintered into different focuses that have different goals) as in the humanities (Literature proper vs. 'rhetoric and composition' vs. 'new media' vs. 'theory' vs. digital humanities -- I'm far from suggesting these don't interpenetrate one another, but these are some of the disciplinary identities that are currently floating around). 

Without a doubt, as Levi Bryant has emphasized in his posts, the humanities should not shun science, but at the same time, do we not have a different relationship with knowledge? I realize that I am essentializing "the humanities," as much as we have essentialized "science," so let me narrow it down to "English," which at UF is a strange hybrid of literature, composition, philosophy, "theory," psychoanalysis, ethnography, etc. etc. We have a very "broad" definition of our department. Anyway, I am getting away from my point. . .

Despite my misgivings of treating science as a unified field or reducing science to one dominant way of epistemology or ontology, I would like to affirm that our treatment of the sciences is about on par with what I am going to call "pop science" books, written by renown scientists for the general public. 

In the public intellectual sphere of books like Regenesis (discussed in more detail below), The Selfish Gene, Consilience, there is just as much "essentializing" and "theorizing" and "speculating" about where science is taking us as in academic articles in the humanities. In some cases, academic theorists go into even more detail about how these theories are constructed. For instance, Thierry Bardini in Junkware spends 3 chapters discussing the genesis of Watson and Crick's theory of DNA, mobilizing a specific critique that has political ramifications of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman narrativizes the cybernetic conferences to bring forth the tensions and decisions that were made in order to come to agreement about the field. Some may find these tedious, but I find them fascinating as they take into account the "material" reality outside the laboratory (in letters, conference presentations, transcripts, etc.) that eventually result in a scientific "movement" or "discovery" reported in the newspaper under the headlines "science." Hayles and Bardini both take seriously Sherry Turkle's demand at the end of Evocative Objects that we must tell new stories, counternarratives to the one presented by the mainstream media. 

The question for me is how our stories are different from the "narrativizing" of science we find on our pop science book shelves aimed toward the general public? But even if our stories are at the level of abstraction or at the level of the regulative genres of writing/recording (see Spinuzzi) that help form a scientific discipline and are the same "level" as the popular science books, we should at least be OK with that since even the "hard scientists" when explaining the implications of their works resort to the same kind of rhetoric, sometimes sacrificing an "interesting anecdote" for a hard critique of dominant paradigms. 

In order to illustrate further what I mean, I want to take George Church's and Ed Regis's recent text, Regenesis into account. I saw Church on The Colbert Report discussing his new book and figured I had to read it as the chapter titles dealt with issues I raised in my thesis. I would post the interview, but it is currently unavailable. . .I'm not sure why. Probably copyright issues. 

Regenesis, Biohacking, and Transhumanism

Instead of buying this text due to fund restriction and since it was not in our library yet, I just went to the local Barnes and Noble and causually "browsed" the book (speed skimmed it in an academic fashion). Undoubtedly, the book contained some scientific descriptions as well as narrative expositions of the origins of Genetic technologies. The subtitle is "How Synthetic Biology will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves." I've noticed that a lot of the subtitles of pop science books directly address an individual reader, which suggests that it will serve to teach them something that will give them an ability to do x,y, or z. These titles are sexy and make you want to read them. So this one claims that synthetic biology will reinvent us in some major way. I'm not disagreeing, but a scientific paper (and even a humanities paper) would hardly make such claims within the title. 

Let us move to the rhetoric of the inside flap: 

"Imagine a future in which human beings have become immune to all viruses, in which bacteria can custom-produce everyday items, like a drinking cup, or generate enough electricity to end oil dependency. Building a house would entail no more work than planting a seed in the ground. These scenarios may seem far-fetched, but pioneering geneticist George Church and science writer Ed Regis show that synthetic biology is bringing us ever closer to making such visions a reality.

In Regenesis, Church and Regis explore the possibilities—and perils—of the emerging field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology, in which living organisms are selectively altered by modifying substantial portions of their genomes, allows for the creation of entirely new species of organisms. Until now, nature has been the exclusive arbiter of life, death, and evolution; with synthetic biology, we now have the potential to write our own biological future. Indeed, as Church and Regis show, it even enables us to revisit crucial points in the evolution of life and, through synthetic biological techniques, choose different paths from those nature originally took.

Such exploits will involve far more than just microbial tinkering. Full-blown genomic engineering will make possible incredible feats, from resurrecting woolly mammoths and other extinct organisms to creating mirror life forms with a molecular structure the opposite of our own. These technologies—far from the out-of-control nightmare depicted in science fiction—have the power to improve human and animal health, increase our intelligence, enhance our memory, and even extend our life span.

A breathtaking look at the potential of this world-changing technology, Regenesis is nothing less than a guide to the future of life.

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First, I want to point out that there is a concrete division (at least at this level of discouse) between 'nature' and human life: "Until now, nature has been the exclusive arbiter of life, death, and evolution; with synthetic biology, we now have the potential to write our own biological future."

As most writing teachers know, "writing" is never fully in our control (nor is language) so to "write our own future" is still to live with contingency. This is a small point, but I think that claiming that we can now "write" our biological future is in essence to say that we are in control of where we are going and this assumes that we know who this "we" is (or who the "we" ought to be).

Second, note the contrast between the dreaded science fiction "out of control nightmare" with the "powers" of these new technologies. These "powers" are most extensively explored in the "epigenetic epilogue," titled "+1 year, The End of the Beginning, Transhumanism and the Panspermia Era (Societal Risks and Countermeasures)" This is the chapter I read closely and the one I want to focus on. Due to the method I chose to encounter this text, I will be unable to cite exact passages.

The chapter mainly is mainly addressing the problem of control, drawing on Francis Fukuyama and Ray Kurzweil. Although Fukuyama makes a decent argument in his text, both he and Kurzweil, although on opposite sides of the spectrum, both have an essentialized view of the human. Fukuyama uses statistics and Kurzweil betrays his concept in his discussions of the future. Fukuyama sees our "Posthuman future" as an immanent disaster and Kurzweil reads our posthuman future as an immanent transformation of human transcendence and control. Church and Regis straddle this line of thinking, erring on the side of Kurzweil.

One movement discussed briefly, and which I discuss in more detail in my thesis, is "Biohacking." Regis and Church seem to think this is a real threat to the control of biological life, and offer some general ways that we might keep it under control of experts. But as I point out, these tinkerers are doing things mostly on 6th or 7th grade level and the threat of bioterrorism is greatly exaggerated in popular discourse. Still, Regis and Church, though eschewing his paranoia, follow Fukuyama in arguing that problems will largely be a manner of control and regulation, while still recognizing the difficutly of enforcement of possible regulations.

There is no discussion of BioArt, which of course, serves no utilitarian value for the human race, so why discuss it in a book on what science will be able to do for us next? (catch my sarcastic tone?)

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I bring up Regenesis to show that popular science books by scientists are not enough and that the humanities does have a role to play in theorizing concepts and rhetoric of science (and various sciences -- physics, ecology, immunology) and that the detail and rigor we can bring to the table is at least on par with books by scientists that claim they can predict or illustrate what developments in science have to offer.
I don't think these scientists would disagree with me as ultimately Regenesis ends with a lot of questions (left unanswered -- as they should be) about the ethics and politics of scientific experimentation.

Popular science works pepper their texts with formulations from great authors, theorists, and philosophers in order to frame their theories in a more interesting and accessible manner. Humanistic discourse is usually the clothing that dresses up scientific discourse. This is really no different from the humanities using concepts and paradigms of the sciences to expand our own discursive horizons.