Why "Eco" now?

In the following post I hope to examine whether or not media ecology and "ecomedia" (which we seemed to understand last class as media about ecology) belong  together theoretically. As Aaron pointed out to me the other day, media about ecology (and the 'environment') is not the same as media ecology. He argued that just because both terms contain "eco" in them does not mean that the course (or maybe even media ecology as a discipline) should necessarily concern itself with nonhuman animals or "environmental" concerns. His main point is not that we should abandon this work, but that to analyze media about ecology differs from the analysis of "media ecology." Thus, my analysis of the 'mediated' nature of environmental shows such as Whale Wars on South Park was a relatively standard move that many scholars have made using different texts, rather than using the methodology we might call "media ecology." (Is it a methodology? This will be discussed later).  BlackFish, Sea World, and other media that deal with 'ecological' issues can be thought through the methodology of media ecology, but media ecology is not restricted to issues of the nonhuman animal or ecological politics.

Caroline Stone's work on e-waste, for example, is a media-ecological study because, although she discusses the film Wall-E as a representation of e-waste, the interest is not on the film per se, but the problem of e-waste and the ways in which it is circulated and eventually gathers.

But is it a coincidence that the metaphor of 'ecology' for objects of inquiry such as media or writing has become so dominant? Does it provide an original methodology for studying the ecology of writing or media that focuses on the medium regardless of its content (and indeed, would this not be to agree with Mcluhan: the medium is the message) or is it because the problem of the nonhuman animal, nonhuman AI/bots/search optimization, matter/materiality presses upon us as we confront global issues such as climate change, overpopulation, globalization, food production,  that deal with the very real fact that the earth is a finite resource? And that these problems has allowed such a methodology to emerge?

Ecocomposition and Ecomedia

In his book Postcomposition, Sid Dobrin recognizes the 'failures' of what he calls "Ecomposition."  I recognize that Dobrin's book is situated in a particular disciplinary conversation in composition studies. I further recognize that Dobrin is not saying that ecompositional work that engages with political and ecological issues should not be done. He does write, however, that at least within composition, ecocomposition has functioned as "a misnamed approach for giving students something to write about, a political content addressed as the thing that fills writing with meaning" (124). Dobrin identifies four ways in which Ecocomposition has already failed:

1.) Falls prey to the 'pedagogical imperative' of composition studies.

2.) Ecological composition has failed because of its embrace of "floating signifiers like 'nature' and 'environment'  as its primary objects of study rather than writing"

3.) Ecocomposition has always been anthropocentric, "focusing on the human agent's relationship with the environment"

4.) Ecocomposition as an idea hasn't spread and influenced further scholarly work.

(125-26)

Dobrin explicitly reminds us that questions about the construction of nature or the nonhuman animal should not be abandoned: they are important.  Yet, this is something he explores elsewhere.

Why do I bring this up when we aren't talking about "the phenomena of writing" or even the field of composition? Because writing  seems to occupy the place of the word we have chosen for this course: media. That is, Dobrin's  description of the phenomenon of writing-as-system as isolated from other political and theoretical issues in ecology mirrors a possible position that "media ecology" does not have a necessary relationship to larger ecological concerns. In contrast, "ecomedia" does. "Ecomedia" to implies that we think about ecology as the content of media. Another way to put it -- Media ecology designates a methodology (in the same way that one might categorize 'deconstruction' or 'actor-network-theory') and 'ecomedia' designates something media ecology might choose to study, but does not have any privileged relationship to Media ecology's methodology.

But in the academic scene, media ecology as a methodology has also emerged from the recognition of global ecological problems. Is media ecology simply a new name for an old methodology or does it offer a different different mode of inquiry? Or am I simply wrong that media ecology is a "methodology" and that we should position media ecology as a 'field' of inquiry? (And what are the differences?)

I prefer the idea that media ecology is a methodology, but a methodology that is not an empty formal method, but one which is not only influenced by the concerns of those theorists that have helped media ecology emerge, but were the conditions for the possibility of its emergence. These concerns are not the same as "content," but it does seem that media ecology contains methodological assumptions that in some ways connect it to the larger scholarly endeavor of the "nonhuman turn." I turn now to those theories.

The Nonhuman Turn of Theoretical Inquiry

In the previous post, I mentioned the Wikipedia entry on "Media Ecology." The main distinction the author(s) of the entry make between the North American Media ecology and the European is that, citing Matthew Fuller,

"The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used 'because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter' (Fuller 2005:2).

Despite this claim, it seems that the more recent media ecology, especially Parrika (although he calls his method 'media archaeology'), look to the nonhuman animal, plant, and mineral world for models and metaphors for media, distinguishing them from the Mcluhanesque definitions offered by the Media Ecology Association (Parrika's book is called Insect Media for a reason, right?).  Indeed, as I pointed out in my last post, the MEA's definitions all seem to use environment to describe human made media and its impact on humans. The metaphors are of "information" "code" "system"  or all at once "complex communication systems as environments" (Nystrom). 

The title of Parrika's book would have one believe that instead of using the metaphor of "environment" to describe communication systems among humans, we appropriate elements from what we might call the 'environment' or nonhuman animals systems as metaphors or models for these communication systems. That is, 'media' is not restricted to its impact on humans, but rather becomes a problem/issue/interest between humans and nonhumans as well as among nonhumans themselves. Nonhumans do not only mean here the digital world, containing many algorithms that make decisions without direct human intervention, but also nonhuman animals and their environment. If we think "ecology" simply means the digital circulation of texts, images, videos on networks, we may be bracketing an entire realm which does not appear to concern the human (but really does). 

In other words, we get the sense that the North American Media Ecology Association is primarily interested in human endeavors and the complexity of our digital and textual lives rather than "ecology" as a biological discipline that has to bear on ecological crises.  

In contrast, many theorists have tried to theorize about what Quentin Meillasoux calls "the great outdoors," those parts of the world that are not directly correlated to our perceptions. An influx of nonhuman, nonanthropocentric philosophy has arrived in the forms of Speculative Realism, New Materialism and critical animal studies. The former is a general term for philosophers that attempt to revive the tradition of realism in the face of what Quentin Meillasoux calls "correlationism." 'Correlationism' is any philosophy that makes the real conform to what is given to the human being. In After Finitude, Meillasoux writes, 

"By correlationism, we mean the idea according  to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." (AF 5). 

The main culprit briefly discussed in M.'s book is Heidegger. I'll leave the details to the reader's leisure, as it does not directly bear on the question at hand.

The critique of correlationism has been taken up by Object Oriented Philosophy (Graham Harman) and Onticology (Levi Bryant. These philosophers also reject 'correlationism' and propose a realist theory of objects (although Levi Bryant seems to have toned his OOO influence down a bit lately). As I mentioned in class, this philosophy has had a huge web presence and one could even argue that the entire intellectual movement would have been impossible or at the very least had much less of an impact on theoretical discourse today had their not been blogs (Bryant's blog, for instance). Bryant in particular, especially in the earlier days of the blog where he was developing what would become The Democracy of Objects worked tirelessly to respond to questions and criticisms, shoring up evidence and speculations for his argument that would result in a book and continued engagement with his own work. 

Object oriented ontology argues for a "flat ontology" in which even the human subject is considered 'an object' among other objects. One of the tenets of OOO is that, because of the influence of correlationism, we have mistaken ontological questions for epistemological questions. That is, instead of asking what something "is," we turn that question into "what can we know about it?"  OOO tries to construct a different ontology in which we understand objects as "withdrawn substances" (Harman). OOO, at least ontologically, does seem to make much of a distinction between nonhuman animals and plants and other material objects like tables and hammers. Both Harman and Bryant have their own specific way of getting at their ontologies, with Harman relying on Heidegger and a weird philosophy of 'substance' and Bryant on his reading of Deleuze, Lacan, and Niklas Luhmann (among others). Both, however, are trying to construct a nonanthropecentric philosophy. 

In contrast to OOO, Cary Wolfe has recently used complex systems theory of Niklas Luhmann in conjunction with Derrida's philosophy, particularly those texts explicitly thematizing the nonhuman animal (Animal that Therefore I am (following)), to show how we are dependent on nonhumans for our current ways of life under global capitalism. Unlike OOO, Wolfe is very interested in the distinction between nonhuman animals (and other things we might characterize as 'living') and other objects. For Wolfe, there is a biopolitical imperative to interrogate the difference between the who and the what -- even if the 'what' is always the condition for the possibility of the who. Wolfe is not so much in "ecology" as a metaphor because of his adherence to Luhmann's systems theory. We will return to this point when we discuss Wolfe's critique of Latour. 

'New materialism' is, in some ways, a theoretical position that mirrors OOO except that new materialist do not think that we have to build first an ontology that can only then can lead to discussions of ethics and politics. Rather, new materialism is already intimately concerned with politic.  Rather than reviving old school philosophical terms like "substance" as Harman does, Bennett and other new materialists focus on materiality and matter (Karen Barad can also be considered a new materialist). New materialism is interested in exploring the agency and the capacity/potential/energy/affect of nonhuman beings within networks. Bennet's book title? Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. 

Bennett draws on an array of sources including Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson, and especially: Bruno Latour. 
While I hesitate to put Latour in a completely separate category than these other recent theorists, I feel I must. Latour springboarded "science studies." Furthermore, Latour is an anthropologist/sociologist. He is interested in a new methodology that could allow for a "symmetrical anthropology," an ongoing project that was outlined in We have Never Been Modern ( Latour believes that we must shift from the verb "to modernize" to "ecologize." But why ecology?

First, we should understand that none of these thinkers that I mentioned has much interest in the well worn opposition of Nature/Culture. Indeed, the 'realist' philosophical project is also deeply invested in getting rid of the distinction because 'culture' leads to the postmodern impasse of cultural relativism.  Indeed, "ecology" for some of these thinkers seems to be the only way out of this dichotomy. Because of this caveat, we cannot understand "ecology" as a synonym for a vulgar environmental politics in the name of the Natural World or the Environment (as if it was separate from human intervention). 

However, doesn't  'ecology' must have something to do with what we used to call nature?

Latour defines 'ecology' as such: "Ecology is not taken in this inquiry as a focus on Nature but  as the end of the notion of nature which is presumed to be a common world of all collectives. If nature is no longer the arbiter of judgments, we now have to compose rather than modernize" (Latour, Inquiry, online text)

Ecology, then, is meant to signify not only the movement and circulation of media, but rather the imperative for a common world. A 'common world' in some sense that can be opposed to simply accepting the values of globalized capitalism.

In other words, ecology resonates with the imperative to allow 'things' and 'animals' to have a 'say' in our common future as collective beings in the world. We already know that nonhumans act upon human beings, sometimes as essential components to human ways of life.  I believe that for Latour and many other thinkers the larger context that we must take into account is the fate of our common collective under the threat of what used to be taken as 'environmental' concerns: climate change, sustainability, overpopulation. 

These are our current problems that must be addressed not only by actions but the creation of new concepts. I am referring here to Deleuze and Guattari's claim in What is Philosophy that "all concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges [. . .] concepts are only created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed" (16). 

The question we should ask, then, is whether what I've called the methodology of media ecology is necessarily connected to the concept of ecology that has emerged because of the ecological problems we face today. 

Media Ecology/Ecomedia -- What is it? And South Park. . .again.

http://talisa3091.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/mediaecologies/

Hello again, world. It's been awhile since I've used this blog. I want to mainly just outline quickly some things I've been finding out about our two key terms for the semester.

1.) 'Ecomedia' -- In class, we seemed to focus our discussion on ecomedia around the types of texts, images, and films that participate in 'environmental' and 'ecological' discourses. We pointed out that many of the arguments made by television shows on animal planet and even some professional documentaries such as The Cove and maybe Blackfish may be critically examined not only in terms of the work's argumentative content or its politics, but also the formal techniques used to gather, present, and re-present the information.

(Side note: Using TinEye , I tried to trace the above image back to its "original" site. Many of the links were  broken links,  particularly some of the very early sites that used this image. Eventually I just gave up trying to get the "oldest" site. I was hoping to find out who generated/made the image, but my admittedly hasty attempts bore no fruit) 

South Park. . .again

 I personally have never seen many of these shows or documentaries, but I kept thinking about an episode of South Park (a constant reference for me): Whale Whores (a parody of Whale Wars). The episode suggests that the people on those on the show who present themselves as "badasses" who are combatting the perpetrators by 'any means necessary', actually are motivated partially by self-promotion (Look at me being an 'activist' on tv). South Park has poked fun at activism before (for instance, PETA), but not always to discredit activist values. Rather, they are more interested in how their values are transformed into practical action. 

The activists on the South Park version of Whale Wars throw rancid butter at ships, but Stan decides that such action is bullshit. He starts to really blow up the ships. This is just one example of South Park indictment of mild activists presenting themselves as, for instance, 'pirates'  (and the commercialization/televisualization/visual rhetoric of these so-called 'activists'). 

I recommend watching the full episode of "Whale Whores" (for free) on southparkstudios.com. At the end of the episode, we find out that the "real" reason the japanese hunt and kill dolphins and whales is because the united states gave them a doctored picture of the WWII bombings where Dolphin and Whale were in the cockpit -- not for food, not for sport, not because of cultural tradition. 

Instead of telling them the truth, they decide to make up another lie. It wasn't dolphin and whale, but Chicken and Cow (another doctored photograph is presented). 

We then see the Japanese raiding farms and killing all the cows and chickens. To which Randy says deadly serious as he watches the massacre: 

"Great Job, son. Now the Japanese are normal. Like us."

Thus, the viewer is left to ponder the contradiction in our society: Luke warm activism to save creatures because they are either endangered or aesthetically pleasing to human beings -- to the point of critiquing the country and culture that do not 'protect' these creatures -- but at the same time in our society condoning the "making killable" (Haraway) of millions of cows and chicken for mass food consumption. 

Furthermore, by giving the Japanese a picture of Whale and Dolphin at the cockpit (admittedly an absurdity that only South Park could pull off), the episode shows how indifferent we once were to their killing -- as long as it wasn't us! But then, we noticed that we could make a cool tv show and pretend to care -- so we just shift the sacrifice (but they aren't sacrifices -- just killable -- c.f. Haraway, Derrida, Wolfe) to "normal" things to kill. 

Why am I talking about South Park? Because I think that it usefully interrogates society's contradictions, usually ones that regard the division between theory and practice.

Though if I remember correctly, in the animal studies edition of JAC, one contributor discusses the "real" guy that stars in Whale Wars. I might want to reconsider that piece to show how South Park, as all satire does, simplifies the perception of this man as well. It's true: they are guilty of many an ad hominem attack. . .

But the more I watch this episode, the more I realize it needs a blogpost of its own for a full analysis of the show in terms of media, satire, critical animal studies, and environmental activism. 

Ok, just one more point. On "Whale Whores," we also see South Park calling attention to the formal techniques and rhetorical strategies shows like "Whale Wars" deploy in order to present a particular narrative. When Cartman realizes that the show is now successful, he pretends to care about the cause and becomes part of the crew. 

The first thing sign of this shift of concern is when narrator of the show begins to talk not about the conflict between the Japanese, the whales, and the activists, but rather narrates a battle between a show about Crab Fishing (Deadliest Catch or another similar show). (They shout back and forth: "Your show is fucking gay" "YOUR show is fucking gay" etc.).  Before this, the 'crew' is on Larry King Live (which actually happened and can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kimcoJc7wcw) and South Park Larry is only interested in how they created a "hit TV show." They even bring on an expert who also their creation of a hit tv show rather than their political practice.. Thus, the show becomes centered around not only what they are purportedly doing to save the whales, but its construction as a tv show!

One particularly poignant moment is when Cartman has his first one-on-one camera interview. 

As emotional music plays in the background, Cartman, identified as "deckhand since 3 hours ago" says, "It's really hard you know, really tough. It's like we dedicated all this time and all our lives to saving these majestic creatures. [Kenny mumbles and cries, Cartman comforts him] Shhhh, Kenny. Old ken's taking it especially hard. He's always loved dolphins so much that he. . . .Yeah, yeah, but keep it in a two shot though, keep in a, yeah, there you go"

Here Cartman calls attention to how he's being cut out of the shot. This is the kind of "behind the scenes" inserted into the scenes. Again and again throughout the episode it calls attention to its means of construction. 

Ok, I'm done with South Park now. 

---

"Ecomedia" as a term

So I googled Ecomedia and what did I find? That the term has been co-opted by an advertising agency. It's mission statement states: 

At CBS EcoMedia Inc., we have a vision: To harness the power of advertising and channel it into tangible social change.

And boasts that "an award winning company, founded by a team of environmentalists and social entrepreneurs" 

Now, on the one hand, we were talking a lot about marketing in class. However, it seems like this is not exactly the idea we have of ecomedia. But, given that we were supposed to poke around at how the term is being used, it seems useful to notice the way the term has been appropriated. Furthermore, the rather excessive amount of links google brings up to that company before getting to a more 'academic' encounter with Ecomedia. Cubitt's book by the same name doesn't show up till page 2 of the google search. 

Ecomedia also does not have a presence on Wikipedia. Media Ecology, however, does. 

Media Ecology as a Term

Partially due to the Media Ecology Association, the term media ecology seems to circulate more within an academic conversation. The Media Ecology Association offers definitions from Mcluhan, Strate and Postman, but really doesn't venture further than these canonical figures. 

The Wikipedia page for Media Ecology was a bit more elaborate. It recognizes the contributions of those mentioned on the Media Ecology Association website, but attempts to incorporate some of the more recent work, some of which we will be exploring in the course. 

However, there are some strange distinctions that, while grounded in truth, seem suspect. The wikipedia article makes a distinction between the "North American" media ecology and "European Media ecology" 

The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used 'because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter' (Fuller 2005:2). Following theorists such as Felix Guattari, Gregory Bateson, and Manuel DeLanda the European version of media ecology as practiced by authors such as Matthew Fuller and Jussi Parikka presents a post-structuralist political perspective on media as complex dynamical systems. (Wikipedia) 

The writer(s) of this post seem to assume there are two totally different traditions opposed to one another -- which in some ways, goes against a kind of "media-ecological" explanation of the emergence of the very term 'media ecology', right? This reader at least is left wondering what the writer means by a "post-structuralist political perspective on media as complex dynamical systems." 

Granted, this is Wikipedia, but I'm casting my net wide here. I want to see what kind of stuff pops up when I google things. Furthermore, I'm not sure that The European version of media ecology "rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment" 

Particularly in Parrika's case, whose book is called Insect Media, it seems that Parrika is very interested in thinking ecology in terms of environment, but not just the human environment, however. Rather, "environment" in the sense of systems theory or within the paradigm of Jacob von Uexkull's biosemiotic environmental theory. The three definitions offered by the Media Ecology Association all imply that media ecology concerns media's impact on humans. 

But "media," as Robert Mitchell reminds us in his book Bioart and the Vitality of Media, also means "nutrient media." A "media" that is the kind of source of food and catalyst for growth of biological entities.So maybe its not just "systems" and "networks" and "communication technologies" but "media" can also be thought of in the way that Sid Dobrin characterizes writing as saturation. However, whereas Dobrin characterizes saturation as a kind of active and potentially violent act, the other side of saturation is a soaking in. In some ways, perhaps this concept of media (drawing on the biological terminology) is closer to Thomas Rickert's idea of "Ambient rhetoric" or "ambient environments." But Dobrin's emphasis on fluidity, especially considering the biological connotation, I think remains important. Whereas we might find it odd to think of "writing" in terms of fluids (in various viscous states) "media" (and for Dobrin I suspect these terms are all but equivalent) is easier for us to imagine. We already use fluid metaphors to talk about the "overflow" of information. It's a veritable ocean that we must navigate while being engulfed in it ourselves. 

In my next blog post, I hope to go into a summary, extension, and potentially critique of Mitchell's book on Bioart. This initial exploration will also help me to re-frame and re-compose pieces of my thesis for my upcoming presentation at Rice University's English symposium. 

Mad Men "The Crash": Of Doctors, Mothers, and Lovers

In the episode before "The Crash," Don treats Dr. Rosen's wife, Sylvie, as an object, dictating his desires to her as if she were a common whore. Although Don tends to treat women with less than full respect, this time it seems as though he's gone much further. Sylvie seems to trigger something in him when she says on the phone "I need you and nothing else will do." An innocent enough phrase, but this drives Don crazy, as he tells Sylvie to wait for him, takes her book away, buys her a dress and tells her "you are mine." His possessiveness is very disconcerting and came off as strange to me in the episode.

However, "The Crash" moves toward explaining Don's behavior.

I want to suggest that in this episode we get a glimpse into Don's Freudian 'primal scene', in which Don's virginity is taken away by a whore and then he is subsequently punished for it. The episode does not revolve around a linear plot, but rather an endless interpenetrating series of doctors, mothers, and lovers. Don has difficulty telling them apart.

The series of figures begins with Don being called out of a meeting room to take a call presumably from Dr. Rosen, Sylvie's husband (doctor #1), but we find that the call actually is from Sylvie (lover and, as we shall see, mother). Doctor becomes lover, but Sylvie is calling to chastise Don for smoking cigarettes outside her door at night. She tells Don that she wanted to make him know what it feels like to be on the brink of her husband finding out. Although Sylvie at first finds Don's demands arousing, she breaks it off at the end of the last episode and confirms her decision on the phone with Don.

But Don's secretary saying that Doctor's on the phone, sets off another chain of events. Jim Cutler (or Cutter, I can't remember) says "That's a great idea, Don! I'll call my Doctor (doctor #2) and we'll get everyone fixed up." The viewer is at first confused -- is Cutler sick? No, the doctor, it turns out, Dr. Hecht, gives Don and the other creatives a shot of vitamins and some sort of amphetamine. It remains unclear what exactly the drug is -- and this only contributes to the freedom that the director and writer take with the effects of the drug. Drugs have become increasingly more prevalent in Mad Men as we move from the 50s and early 60s to the late 60s, mirroring the development of the drug culture. Roger, for instance, ends his marriage after a particularly powerful LSD trip administered by none other than Tim Leary. However, this episode pushes the trippiness further than the LSD episode, as it seems to operate in an associational way that was not shown in the LSD episode (limited to an outside perspective of Roger and Jane, the occasional blurring of the camera, and Roger's report that he is at a baseball game when he's really in the bathtub). This makes "The Crash" even more disorienting for the viewer.

The drug is supposed to allow everyone to be more creative for a long period of time so they can work on Chevy. While the other creatives (and the sober Peggy) are rehearsing lines from Alice in Wonderland and coming up with ideas, Don has his own experience. After Sylvie hangs up on him, he coughs and this throws him back to a moment in his childhood when he was told to go sleep in the cellar by the woman (not his mother) who gave him a place to stay. This place, however, is a whorehouse (we found this out in an earlier episode).

Then he goes to take Dr. Hecht's drug -- witnessing the other creatives running around like Mad Men (haha). As Don descends the stairs, he coughs again, and flashes back to a moment when a particular whore decides that he should stay inside rather than the cellar, in her room. He sees a picture of a baby on the mirror and asks "Is that you?" and she says "No," changing the subject, and says "It's a chest cold." I suspect that this may have been a daughter of the whore, whose name is Aimee (mother/doctor, lover, as we shall soon see). As he comes back to the present, he looks at a secretary and asks if they knew each other -- the vision not quite fading. As the camera pulls back, we begin to hear loud typing and noises -- including phones ringing -- then a sudden silence. The pharmakon begins to take effect.

The camera cuts to the creatives where one of them says "The strategy is about some sort of love transaction between a parent and a child involving the greatest gift of all, a Chevy." It seems as though they are thinking about fathers and sons, but we shall soon find out that the episode revolves around another love transaction between mother and son. The creatives rattle off ideas and Peggy hits upon "The child is the father of the man" -- a cliche, but one that also works well with the idea of Freudian primal scenes.

After Peggy's statement, we cut to Don running into Ken Cosgrove. Don says that he has to speak to the Chevy people in the flesh. As Don says this, Ken begins to tap dance. Don asks who taught him that and Ken says "My mother. No, my first girlfriend." -- This statement turns out to be more foreshadowing as Don's 'first girlfriend' can be figured as Aimee, who is also in the position of the mother.

Don then arrives at the creative office asking how's it going (they are repeating lines from Alice in Wonderland). He gives a cryptic and vague speech,

"I know your all feeling the darkness here today. But there's no reason to give in. No matter what you've heard this process will not take years. In my heart, I know we cannot be defeated because there is an answer that will open the door. There is a way around this system. This is a test of our patience and commitment. One great idea can win someone over."

We suspect that there is more going on here than a Chevy advertisement. Even at this point, we might suspect that Don is indirectly speaking of Sylvie (a test of his patience and commitment and the idea that he might be able to use to win her over -- how can he seduce her again). Flashing back, Aimee feeds young Don soup and Don has an epiphany that there was a "soup account" that is the answer to his question (not the question of how to sell Chevy): "I've got it." He goes back to the creatives where Wendy (who? We find that it is a Frank Gleeson -- a man who just died from cancer-- daughter) is doing the I Ching. Don asks Peggy to find the soup account, but someone else had already looked.  Don says to Peggy, again, cryptically, "You'll know when you see it and its gonna crack this thing wide open."

When Don returns to his office (presumably he already returned, but the drug's effect is taking its toll on cinematic time as there is no transition from Friday to Saturday), Wendy is there. She is wearing a stethoscope (doctor #3). When Don asks where she got it, she said it was in one of the offices upstairs (potentially Dr. Rosen's office). She tells him she's there to make him "feel better" and asks if he wants to "get it on." He ignores the question and Wendy listens to his heart, which is silent: "I think its broken." Who broke is heart? Sylvie? Megan? Betty? All the other women? The very first woman? (Aimee?).

At the same time as Don's drama, the creatives are throwing pens at Stan and one gets stuck in his arm. The camera cuts to Don listening to a song through Sylvie's (?) door ("Going out of my head over you/out of my head over you/out of my head . . ."I must think of a  way into your heart"). The song sets Don's project and gives further significance to some of Don's more cryptic speeches earlier in the work: he must find a way to 'get his foot in the door' as Ginzberg will say (more on this later), find an idea that will convince Sylvie to listen to him.

But then it cuts back to Stan and Peggy, who has become doctor #4 ("You have a great bedside manner"). Peggy moves from doctor to lover (Stan kisses her), to mother, as Peggy recalls the pain of her abortion ("I've had loss in my life") to comfort Stan, whose 20 year old cousin has died in Vietnam. Peggy says that you can't dull the pain with drugs and sex.


A musical interlude is called for at this juncture.

--------------------

While all this is going on at the office, Sally has been put in charge for caring for her little brothers in the place of Megan, who is going to audition. She thus plays a kind of "motherly" role (that she is not ready for). Earlier in the episode, we also find hints of Sally's burgeoning sexuality through Betty's comment on Sally's short skirt. We may also remember the episode where Sally has her first period. Sally's transition into a young woman is further suggested by the book she is reading: Rosemary's Baby. The satantic undertones of this book is reinforced by a seemingly meaningless comment by Stan in the creative room earlier who says "I did it! I've got 666 ideas!" The book sets the tone for the sinister scheme about to unfold.

Sally hears a noise outside her bedroom and investigates. A large black woman is rummaging around the house. She says she's her grandmother visiting, claiming that she raised Don (mother (?)). The ensuing scene is awkward, as the viewer is suspicious (like Sally), but also find it plausible that we may learn of yet another twist in Don's past. Alternately, the woman says "Your dad is Donald Draper?" We might think that this woman raised the real Don Draper, whose identity was stolen by Dick Whitman.

But this mother is not a mother (or at least not Don's mother). She robs the house although, fortunately, does not hurt the children.

Meanwhile, Don is searching for the soup advertisement. The advertisement turns out to be an oatmeal advertisement with the words "Because you know what he needs." A mother holds the shoulders of a young boy about to bite into oatmeal. The image of the mother, however, has a beauty mark or a mole on her cheek and this causes Don to flashback once again.

Aimee is doing her makeup, but with a pencil, marks her cheek, in the exact same spot as the woman on the advertisement. She says "do you like this?" Don says, "I do." Aimee begins to seduce Don "You like my bosom." This is clearly Don's first sexual experience.

This dot, this mark, even though it is not 'natural' is the mark that links Aimee to Sylvie, who also has a dot on her cheek. If Don doesn't realize this, the viewer does. We can now begin to guess at why Don treated Sylvie like a whore: she reminds him of his mother/lover ("My mother. No, my first girlfriend" says Ken) Aimee.

After a cut to Grandma Ida, Sally, and Bobby, which increases her and the viewer's suspicion of her motives (Sally calls the police), we cut to Don in his office to perhaps the most significant scene in the entire episode:

Don (reading to himself): "This may be hard to believe, but the history can't be ignored. The history should not be ignored. Look, I don't want to waste your time, but. . ."  (calls for Peggy, resumes reading) "I don't want you to shut this door. Just let me say a few things. You and I both know. . ."

He tells them that he's "got it," showing them the oatmeal advertisement, saying that "it says it all." 

Don: Ok. I've got this great message and it has to do with what holds people together. What is that thing that draws them? It's a history. And it may not even be with that person, but it's. . it's like a. . .well, it's bigger than that.

Peggy: And that makes them buy a car?

Don: If this strategy is successful it's way bigger than a car. It's everything.I keep thinking about the basic principle of advertising. There's entertainment and then you stick the ad in the middle of the entertainment like a little respite. It's a bargain. They're getting the entertainment for free all they have to do is listen to the message. But what if they don't take the bargain at all? What if they're suddenly bored of the entertainment? What if they don't-- what if they turn of the tv? 

Ginzberg: You gotta get your foot in the door. 

Don: Exactly! So, how do I do that? Let's say I get her face to face. How do I capture her imagination? I have a sentence, maybe too. 

Peggy: Who's her? 

Ginzberg: Promise them everything. You know, you're gonna change their life. Your gonna take away their pain. [. . .] Then you hit 'em with the one two punch. What's the answer to all of life's problems? A Chevy. 

Don: No, it's not. 

First, note the slippage between the abstract notion of advertising and shared history (even if its not with that person) and the pronoun "her," which is clearly Sylvie. Is Don planning on telling her this history? Her strange and almost arbitrary connection to his first fuck? We are not sure.

So how do you do it? You become a doctor -- I'm gonna take away all your pain. Don goes home, rehearing what he's going to say to Sylvie: "Don't close the door on me. When in the course of human events. No. . .You haven't heard everything I have to say. Don't shut the door on me."

. . .But these plans are spoiled as he realizes he's been robbed (and that he left the backdoor open). Betty is there and call the city "disgusting." Don  faints. We flashback.

Aimee is charged with robbing/withholding money from selling herself on the street and is kicked out of the whorehouse. Just before she leaves, she tells him "Considering I took that boy's cherry for 5 dollars we'll call it even." Don is then beaten by the woman of the house -- called "filth" "disgusting" "shameful" "You're trash."

Don wakes up in the middle of the night. Briefly talks to Megan, who says "Sally seems so grown up, but she's really still a kid."

Cut to the morning.

Sylvie and Don ride the elevator in almost total silence ("How are you?" says Sylvie, "Busy"). Why, we should ask, has Don changed his mind about Sylvie (has he? Or is he just keeping up appearances?). What is it about the robbery and the flashback that make him realize that they should not be together? Does he realize that he was treating her like a whore? Or is he afraid of getting caught? Perhaps further episodes will shed light. Was it the drugs that cured him of his desire?

But for now, its important to see where this particular episode ends.

He calls Sally, telling her that he left the door open and that she did everything right: "Sally, I left the door open. It was my fault."

What seems to be a relatively straightforward remark becomes incredibly significant when we attach it to the many references to doors in the episode. Ginzberg: "Gotta get your foot in the door" and Don's repeating to Sylvie: "Don't shut the door on me." Its as if his obsession with Sylvie and his obsession with keeping the door open (keeping his options open?) led to the robbery.

Don goes to see Ted to tell him that he can only serve as creative editor rather than come up with advertisements for Chevy. We find that Wendy is Gleason's daughter (and know that Stan fucked her after a failed attempt with Peggy) and Ted chastises Don for the gibberish produced over the weekend: "Chevy is spelled wrong."

The last line of the episode: "I'm sorry Ted, but every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse."

A brilliant clincher to the episode.

But where will they go from here? Has Don's creativity dried up? Or is he directing his creativity toward winning Sylvie back? But if that were the case, why wouldn't he have tried to talk to Sylvie in the elevator? Is that over? Where is Don, and Mad Men, going from here? I will patiently await next week's episode.

On "Writing Studies" and recent projects

"Writing studies," is a somewhat hypothetical discipline (insofar as we still don't see research positions in "writing studies," but rather "new media," "communications," "composition,"  "rhetoric") mentioned in Sid Dobrin's book Postcomposition, as a way to mark a form of disciplinary research apart from "composition," traditionally associated with First Year Writing and 'research' on pedagogical methods. In Dobrin's own words,

Thus, the primary agenda of Postcomposition is to argue for a move
beyond the academic work of composition studies in favor of the revolu-
tionary potential of the intellectual work of writing studies, specifically the
work of writing theory, an endeavor likely best removed from the academic
work of pedagogy and administration." (Postcomposition 24). 

Too often in composition, 'writing' is tied to a subject, usually a student subject. Writing as an expression of that subjectivity or writing as constituting that subjectivity. For Dobrin, 'writing' should be the focus of a 'writing studies' such that the subject cannot be torn from the inscriptional practices themselves. I like to think of this as thinking each inscriptional practice as a performance of a subjectivity, one that can only be described through that particular assemblage of inscriptional practices. That is, "subject," is no longer an expression of a human being or a consciousness, but the particular moment of inscription. The human and nonhuman actants work together to inscribe a 'subject' (if we still even want to preserve that term, so as to preserve a sense of agency). Byron Hawk gets at this through Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of the 'molecular' and the 'molar' in A Counter History of Composition:

"Meaning, purpose, and intention all are molar and separate subject and object, but the desire and the force behind them are molecular and collapse subject and object [. . .] The subject is a molar residual, off to the side, a side effect of desiring-machines, not a single center from which desire is born" (165).

 Raul Sanchez argues in his 2012 article, "Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity," that the subject is neither an 'effect' nor an origin or something that precedes a moment of inscription:

"Identity names this singularity, which is neither a precursor to the act of writing nor merely its effect. If we no longer say that identity is expressed through writing, but rather that identity names the moment of inscription-the intrusion or emergence into Judith Butler's "grammatical time of the subject" (117)-yet is only available in and after writing as writing's condition of possibility, then we can also say that identity manifests, at once metaphorically and materially, in both the figure and the body of the writing-subject. These claims make it possible to recognize that there is neither an origin story for the "moment" of inscription nor an aporetic limit at which one must hover perpetually. They make it possible to name the act of writing, the moment of inscription, as that which marks a convergence of time, space, and linguistic code at the production of a text. More important, they make it possible-necessary, actually-to use this very convergence to embody, figuratively and empirically, the convergence itself. They make possible the writing-subject as both thing and word, object and concept."

The writing-subject in this sense is an event -- an event that draws together all of the actants, human and nonhuman. As Latour puts it in We have Never Been Modern, "History does something. Each entity is an event" (81). 

Ok, so the writing subject is linked to an act of inscription. Is writing simply any act of inscription? In broad terms, yes, it is. Every event leaves traces -- I would be tempted to say irreversible 'traces'. "Writing" ever since writing scholars' took notice of Jacques Derrida, has been refigured as 'the trace' in general. "Writing" is not necessarily about conscious invention and arrangement of an essay, but writing could be as simple as a mark on a wall or an animal's tracks. 

If this is truly the case, then scholars of "writing studies" are able to study practically anything as writing, as acts of inscription, of traces. My question, however, is what do we get by understanding in terms of 'writing' rather than 'rhetoric'? Are there not rhetorical limitations to the word 'writing'? Although his tone bothers me, I can't shake Ian Bogost's point in Alien Phenomenology that, "writing is only one form of being" (90). Of course, the problem with his statement is how he slips from 'writing' to "language" and then proceeds to deny the medium of writing and even language of a certain materiality, so brilliantly traced by Derrida. Bogost writes that in contrast to philosophical works (with the exceptions of Derrida, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein) "philosophical works generally do not perpetrate their philosophical positions through their form as books. The carpenter, by contrast, must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy" (93). Here Bogost makes two mistakes: 1) seeing Derrida's form as a "book," when Derrida explicitly attempted to subvert that very medium, and 2) denying the inseparable bond between medium/form and content. 

In other words, Bogost makes no meaningful distinction between writing/carpentry outside of the fact that carpentry seems to lead us to 'doing philosophy' with objects other than the pen and paper. But if we understand writing as any trace, then these 'carpentry' projects of philosophy are just as much 'writing' as they are carpentry. Furthermore, the 'designation' writing, given its rigorous deconstruction by Derrida, avoids some of the baggage that 'carpentry' contains -- an emphasis on the 'hand made', for instance. 

Thus, carpentry just becomes a better metaphor for describing the practice of 'philosophy'. But what exactly is 'philosophical' about Bogost's projects? Of course this depends on our definition of philosophy, but if philosophy is the "invention of concepts" as Deleuze and Guattari contend, then Bogost's projects are not philosophy, even if they contain an 'affect' or a 'percept', which is the domain, according to D&G of ART. 

Within Derrida's understanding of writing, however, such art works would be considered "writing." But what do we get from describing artworks within a general system of writing? Does it erase the specificity of it being art or does it put into question the boundaries of what constitutes the art "work" (does it include all of the 'writing' and 'responses' that take place because of it? . . .and any possible future response?). 

Currently, I'm trying to adapt a significant piece of my writing on BioArt to a writing posthumanism. In my original piece, I framed the project in terms that would preserve these works as art, even if, at the same time, the artwork is always within a complex system of writing events, which will affect the function and efficacy of the artwork (critics reviews, theoretical statements from the artists, etc.). 

The question I have for myself is: what is it about BIOART that makes visible art as entwined within a writing system of human and nonhuman actants? My hunch is that by using 'life' materials as their medium, there is an increased probability of the artwork to not simply be the subject of writing surrounding it, but 'writes us' in some unique way. There is an unpredictableness, a propensity for failure that can be made visible through Bioart that reveals the general conditions of artworks: the possibility of their 'failure'. However, it is precisely the failure of BioArt that gives it's significance for biotechnological practices because the force of this failure is to recognize our inability to simply program and control life through genetic coding or otherwise. We can substitute "writing" for genetic coding, since there is no real way to control, in this age, the effects of our writing practices. What is the fate of this blogpost? What videos go viral? BioArt also is potent example of how our best laid plans can be foiled by nonhuman agency. 

But then, does BioArt simply become a stand in for any "writing?" Indeed, could not the same point be made with other artworks or even other inscriptions? Is there something that BioArt adds to our understanding of 'general writing' (that is, 'writing studies') or is the point of writing studies to show the very specificity of this writing practice? But then would we not succumb to the temptation of 'rhetorical analysis'? What words, what concepts does BioArt suggest that would be an essential supplement to our understanding of writing-as-system? 

These are the issues I am struggling with as I attempt to integrate some very specific research on an important group of artists and artworks in the biotechnological age. 

Philosophy and Autobiography: On the Heidegger Question

A good friend of mine who has just started seriously reading Heidegger (Sein und Zeit) asked me if my reading of Heidegger changes when I consider his fascist politics-- to the point that  it may discredit his thought! Related to this, I've seen a few posts by one ardent blogger who is obsessed with the argument that because Harman respects Heidegger, Object Oriented Philosophy is inherently fascist -- its an absurd argument. Anyway, at the time (maybe I was just in a bad mood) I said "absolutely not." I justified this statement in several ways. First, I said that I no more feel that Heidegger's thought is discredited than I feel Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Knut Hamsun, are somehow discredited. The idea that literary artists get a pass (or at the very least are less condemned than philosophers) on their personal lives or politics, but philosophers do not is silly to me. Philosophical work such Heidegger's has influenced an entire new way of thinking. What's the difference between Nietzsche's texts which were appropriated in the service of Fascism and Heidegger's texts which one might rightly say have passages that resonates with fascism? True, Heidegger participated in a cruel system and should be held responsibile for this, but all this says something about the texts and helps contextualize them, in no way does it mean that they somehow should be ignored or discredited. The sheer power of Heidegger's works shines through by itself; Derrida, an Algerian Jew, could not help but be captivated by Heidegger's thought! Some might try and explain this through Derrida's biography and to say that somehow deconstruction is not really "essentially" concerned with the challenge of phenomenology. But without Derrida' encounter of Heidegger -- how would his thought be different? Would we have deconstruction? We can never know.

Derrida brings us to an interesting point, since Derrida is famous for weaving "autobiographical" aspects into his work, going so far as to say in a documentary that he wished philosopher's would talk about their sex lives. However,  Derrida also puts autobiography into question -- the very possibility of an 'auto-' biography ties to critiques of presence-to-self. It is tied to the question of whether we do not also have an other-of-oneself inside oneself (a theme of philosophy since Socrates' daimon). For my purposes, this is to say that we can never divorce Heidegger from his politics and his life; however, at the same time, believing that we cannot separate these events from his texts does not imply that his texts can be explained by his politics -- as if his philosopher were some allegory of his seduction by fascism. This would be just as reductive as exculpating him from responsibility. We find a similar situation, deftly navigated by Derrida in a lecture, with Paul de Man's participation in a fascist journal. On top of that, we have Derrida himself saying that deconstruction is not in itself "left" or "right" on the political spectrum, but can be appropriated for either end.

My argument boils down to the idea that of course Heidegger's texts can be appropriated or read through his fascist politics. However, as Derrida also reminds us with regard to Marx in Positions, Heidegger's 'text' is not a unified corpus, but multiple. Heidegger is the proper name that gathers these texts, sure, but they are and are not essentially tied to them.

This post was actually inspired by reading Bernard Stiegler's long essay Acting Out in which he reflects on how he came to become-a-philosopher. For Stiegler, accident plays a large role in our becoming. I personally agree, as I find myself reading encountering texts seemingly at the "right" time which structure the way I attune myself to the world. For Stiegler, the very development of what we call the "human being" was an accident, an encounter with a "what" that constituted a who. This is why I ask: Would deconstruction exist if not for Derrida's encounter with phenomenology? What drew Derrida to Husserl, to Heidegger? Does it even matter? Yes. It matters in the sense that it will have been the case that all accidental encounters produced the possibility of deconstruction as we know it now through Derrida's disseminated texts.

My final point is one that I suspect will infuriate some, but I think is warranted. In America, the Holocaust/Hiter/Nazism has become our de-fault relay for everything. We use it as an example of the very worst parts of history. Please let me be clear: there is no doubt that the Holocaust is unjustifiable (and anyone 'justifying it' would terrify me and I hope any of my readers). However, why do we assume that everything that came out of Fascism is thus unequivocally bad? For goodness sakes, how much art has been inspired by the events. This is not a justification, it is an observation. An attempt to get away from our obsession with Hitler -- a call for a new reading, an invention of new concepts and new ways of thinking. Consider the Futurists: a fascist lot if there ever was one (and mysoginist to boot) but would we ever consider never speaking of them again or dealing with their challenges to the status quo? This is the same logic conservatives use against anyone speaking the name of Lenin, Stalin, or Trotsky positively as serious writers and thinkers. Hearing the name is anathema to those who don't read -- or who believe that everything produced by an individual associated with a political party or programme to which we disagree is useless (this cuts all ways you Dogmatic Democrats and Militant Marxists!).

But as Heidegger's lover, Hannah Arendt, tells us: evil is banal. As Derrida tells us following Kant, the radical opening to the (im)possible future also opens us to radical evil.

 I'd rather have an open future than a paralyzed present.

Reflections on Wolfe's Before the Law

I am in the process of composing a review for Cary Wolfe's Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. In my first crack at a review, I tried to stick as close as possible to the text, tracing the main argument through the entire book, and carefully crafting my language to condense the argument of each section while staying under the 2000 word limit.

 I'm not sure how that turned out yet -- but it seems like it hardly reads like a review. The theoretical background required to understand the arguments are daunting. Wolfe both critiques and preserves moves and arguments from prominent theorists in the same section. He vacillates between abstract theory to concrete examples that illustrate how the theoretical lens makes visible aspects of the political previously ignored through politics grounded in the concept of sovereignty or humanist 'rights' discourse.

In this blogpost, I'm going to do the complete opposite of my first try at the review. I am going to contextualize the text as a whole within my own recent readings in ANT, Object Oriented Ontology, and New Materialist philosophy. I want to show how Wolfe's methods and arguments differ and correspond to these other theoretical paradigms.

Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy may be the furthest from Wolfe's own project. Harman's philosophy, at least as elucidated in Guerilla Metaphysics, departs from particular phenomenological figures: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Alphonso Lingis. For the most part, it seems that Harman picks out passages from these thinkers that deal with objects in a quasi-mystical way; indeed, it seems that Harman is less concerned with their major arguments (particularly his treatment of Levinas, so concerned with ethics as first philosophy) than tracing thinkers who use the same rhetoric he wishes to preserve in his own philosophy. No doubt, these passages are beautiful, but one cannot help thinking that Harman does not take seriously the legitimate critiques of phenomenology, particularly those of Jacques Derrida, which he dismisses as an instance of tortured self-reflexivity. Furthermore, even Harman's use of Heidegger rarely addresses the fact that Heidegger's work is oriented toward the meaning of Being itself (late Heidegger) and the meaning of Being for Dasein (Being and Time). Harman's uses of Heidegger Heidegger make almost no reference to temporality, Being-towards-death, or even Dasein. I would argue that Harman's appropriation of Heidegger ignores Heidegger's desire to move beyond thinking of Being in terms of the "present-at-hand," as it preserves the idea of 'substance'.  

Harman quite unashamably develops a metaphysical system of relation based on autonomous 'withdrawn' substance.Harman uses the concept of "withdrawness" in order t avoids accusations of a return to naive metaphysics. While Harman's articulation of a grand metaphysical system of relations is impressive, it says little about the crucial distinctions among these entities. Because Harman does not believe the physical world should be left for scientific investiation (an epistemological endeavor) he posits a general metaphysical account of the world's constitution. But where does this ontological/metaphysical description get us if it cannot make meaningful distinctions among objects? Is this not still left to epistemological and empirical inquiry? Harman admits that the human relation to everything else is surely "more complex" than other relations among objects, but not different in kind. How is our relation more complex? What is the difference between a rock, a deer, and a human being? 

Harman's metaphysics, and his rhetorical decision to use "lists"  random objects that fascinate him (usually objects in the natural world or objects not specific to our contemporary time), flattens rather than thickens and multiplies kinds of relation. Even as Harman says that we should populate our texts with objects and things, he does little (if anything) to articulate the object's concrete specificity apart from naming it in a list with other objects. Objects are not considered in terms of their meaning but, Harman argues, should be considered because they are part of the world. Harman's metaphysics, then, is framed as an autonomous realm from ethics or politics; for Harman, we need to articulate a foundational metaphysical system first and only then can we consider and decide on these other issues. If I'm not mistaken, Harman has argued that metaphysics do not necessarily imply a particular political or ethical stance. Even if we accept that, it still might be worthwhile to 'speculate' on how his metaphysical position can be used to support and even justify particular political or ethical orientations. 

Levi Bryant's Onticology (or OOO) fares a bit better in relation to Wolfe's work, since he recognizes that each object is an autonomous system with its own structured relation to its environment. Like Wolfe, he draws on Luhmann's systems theory. However, as Wolfe's points out in a footnote to Before the Law, Bryant still remains tied to Harman's theories of relations and objects on an ontological level (with the addition of the realm of the 'virtual' drawn from Deleuze).  That is, Bryant agrees with Harman that each new relation creates a 'new object' so that objects are nestled inside other objects. Bryant and Bogost have both maintained that ontological problems are often mistaken for epistemological ones, a position I do not think Wolfe shares.  In a blog post on What is Posthumanism?, Bryant writes that the weakness of Wolfe's book, citing Harman, is that

  Wolfe still seems to think these issues in epistemological terms. Rather than seeing selective relations entertained towards other objects as a general ontological feature ofeach and every object or as a fundamental feature of the world itself, Wolfe seems to adopt the pessimistic thesis that this marks the impossibility of our knowledge.

For Wolfe, this does not just mark the impossibility of a complete knowledge (which Wolfe addresses in Before the Law as the God's Eye View) but also assures that no matter what entities we choose to consider as possessing what he calls, drawing on Heidegger, a "self-contestatory" relationship, that we will have been wrong in our decision. Does this relegate knowledge of how other beings 'see' to scientific inquiry? To a certain extent, yes, but I do not think Bryant would necessarily disagree with this delegation.. Indeed, is not scientific inquiry (or at the very least, empirical inquiry) the mode of 'second-order observation' (how something observes rather than how we observe it) occurs? If we do not rely on such empirical inquiry, then our method results in anthropomorphization. Sure, we do this anyway, but without the check of empirical inquiry into a system's observational systems, then perhaps we go too far in assuming that ALL objects function as autopoietic, closed systems. 

Wolfe argues against the ontologizing of relations in a footnote to Before the Law. Even though Wolfe agrees with Bryant's ethico political position, in the following passage, he argues "we do not need the either/or-ism of 'literally different agents': 

"when we relate to something, we literally become a different entity," that "an entity that enters into a relational network with a hammer or a computer has different powers and capacities than an entity that does not exist in these relations and is, therefore, by this logic, a different agent." (Bryant qtd. in Wolfe n131)

Wolfe responds: 

"we can simply say that we are and are not the same agents depending on the context, Bryant's 'pre-hammer' entity does not vanish when the hammer is picked up (and if he did, he, naturalistically speaking, couldn't pick up the hammer in the first place). We are (to put it in Derrida-ese) constituted by differance pre- and post- hammer" 

In other words, Wolfe does not see much benefit to following Harman's ontological distinction of separate objects. . 

For Wolfe, distinctions between system and environment, as for Luhmann, are functional distinctions. These functional decisions are based, in some cases, on  our current state of knowledge.  I think that for Wolfe, these new forms for ontology go too far in considering any and every object as worthy of speculative inquiry. We have pressing political and ethical questions that call for pragmatic action, informed by empirical inquiry, and even though, as he puts it, we will always have been wrong in our choice, we must make one conditioned action at a time. 

This is not to say that Wolfe exclusively privileges the living or even carbon based life forms. He writes, 

"The relevant question, which I cannot explore in detail here, would be the mode of embodiment in relation to recursive developmental change that allows not just requisite plasticity in the organism's individual ontogeny, but also, and therefore, its ability to thereby enter into an essentially prosthetic relation to the external technicities of code, semiosis, archive, and so on--regardless of whether the organism is made of 'flesh and blood' or silicon and silicone" 

We have to seriously ask whether it is worth thinking about the relations between a banana peel and the floor, given that the banana peel (at least so far as we know) cannot enter into a prosthetic relation as the condition for the possibility of having its relations matter to it. This is why the speculative realism of Harman and to a certain extent, Bryant, goes too far in its kind of object fetishism. Bryant even speaks of "abstractions" as "objects" that act in the world and Bogost even asks if we have an ethical responsibility to these "ideas." Ideas and abstractions are 'embodied' in particular material instances, as Bryant has argued, but do ideas matter to ideas? Do ideas mean to each other? Are ideas and abstractions really "whos" that can relate to other whats? I have my doubts. 

And Bryant recognizes, in a way that Harman never even begins to address, that entities have different capabilities. Relying on Maturana and Varela's distinction of allopoietic and autopoietic entities in Democracy of Objects, he writes, 

"where allopoetic systems often appear to have a greater degree of elasticity with respect to their qualities, autopoietic systems seem to have a greater degree of elasticity with respect to distinctions or what we might refer to as 'channels'" (173)

 Bryant's term, "channels" refers to an autopoietic system's ability to make new distinctions "thereby enhancing their capacity to be irritated or perturbed by other objects" and this is what we mean when we say that certain autopoietic entities have different degrees of 'freedom' (the freedom to develop different distinctions) (173). 

Bryant thus addresses a major problem I have with Harman: his offhanded description of relations between human and other objects as "more complex." In Bryant's terms, then, we might say that Wolfe is much more interested in investigating autopoietic systems than allopoietic systems -- at least in terms of biopolitical choices. 

The key distinction for Wolfe, however, drawing on Stiegler, is that the nonhuman animal (or the nonhuman entity) must be able to have a prosthetic relation that constitutes it as a 'who' in the first place. 

I find the following passage in Before the Law as making a similar point as Bryant, referring to evidence of 'neuroplasticity' of certain animals:

"their individual ontogenies are quite rigid and subject to a very limited set of variations. Thus, their individual ontogenies are of little importance in explaining their behavior. For creatures of sufficient neurophysiological plasticity, however, it is a different story, one in which the correspondingly high degree of individual variation in individual ontogenies give rise to more complex social and communicational behaviors necessary to coordinate them" (70). 

He expands on this in a later passage, 

"the animal behaviors and forms of communication we have been discussing are 'already-there', forming an exteriority, an 'elsewhere', that enables some animals more than others to 'differentiate' and 'individuate' their extistence--and thus to be 'thrown'-- in a manner only possible on the basis of a complex interplay of the 'who' and the 'what', the individual's 'embodied enaction' (to use Maturana and Varela's phrase) and exteriority of the material and semiotic technicities that interact with and rewire it, leading to highly variable ontogenies, complex forms of social interaction, individual personalities, and so on" (76). 

I think this relation -- the individuation of 'whos' is what Wolfe will compare later to Dasein later in the text, but not Dasein as understood by the Heidegger of Being and Time, but the 'limited' Dasein given to the 'animal' in Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: "having a world in the mode of not having" (79). 

Bryant agrees that each entity has its own 'world' as it appears to it and this is why it is necessary to use second-order observation. But for Wolfe it is crucial to distinguish between having a world in the mode of not having and simply that any entity (or even abstraction) always has a limited way of seeing the world.  That is, because of pressing political and ethical issues, Wolfe is most concerned with the nonhuman animal just as much as the 'human' as  'thrown' Dasein. This is because the world matters and means to a Dasein -- the Dasein cares for its own individuated being and is constituted as a 'who' by relation to a prosthetic what. The block of wood outside is not a 'who' because, so far as we know, it does not have sufficient neuroplasticity to make new distinctions, which would eventually result in a collective memory shared among the community of wood-beings. 

Indeed, Wolfe seems to make the argument that this position may even be more 'posthumanist' than Bryant's, who (at least in a blogpost) restricts the conditions of value to the existence of the human. Bryant writes, 

"No case could here be made [. . .] that there's something of intrinsic value in nonhumans such as animals or planets. Rather, we would be committed to the thesis that there are only relative values of some sort of another. . .the planet, for example, would only take on value-predicates in relation to humans. Were humans to not exist, the planet would neither be valueless or valuable, it would just be." (Bryant, qtd. in Wolfe 84). 

In contrast to Bryant, Wolfe maintains that we need to leave open the possibility that the 'to whom' it matters might not be a human being; he leaves open the possibility that "the addressee of value--and indeed of immunitary protection--is permanently open to 'whoever it might be'" (84). 

One thing is for sure, though: Wolfe emphasizes that there must be a qualitative difference (not just a difference in 'degree' as if there was a 'biologistic continuum') among "the chimpanzee in biomedical research, the flea on her skin, and the cage she lives in--and a difference that matters more (one might even say, in Derridean tones, 'infinitely' more) to the chimpanzee than to the flea or the cage?" (83). 

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Of course, we might ask, why should we have an ethical and political obligation to those beings that we learn 'have a world' in the sense of Dasein, but not to other nonhuman objects or ideas? I think this returns us to the basic question posed by Bentham: not can they reason ,but can they suffer? Although 'suffering' is  an insufficient criteria as we are not quite sure of its extra-human meaning--it is already an anthropomophism-- it seems as though that being a 'who' to which the world matters is a condition for 'suffering'. A block of wood, so far as we know, does not suffer,  nor does a cage: it just 'is'. It seems like Wolfe may suggest that an originary technicity may be a necessary condition for something to 'suffer' in the sense of Bentham. 

Still, we are left with the question: what is to be done? That is, if we cannot simply extend "rights" to various animals, then how do we enact our choice through law? Do we need to think law in terms of 'immunitary protection'? According to Wolfe, we cannot depend on outmoded terms of political sovereignty. 

And just who is this "we" that decides? I t think Wolfe is aware of the problem of assuming a 'we', but his pragmatic bent means that 'we' as human beings who are reading this book, who are helping to shape and enforce laws, must choose. We must choose to want to know rather than not want to know about the animal Holocaust taking place in service of globalization -- the mass 'letting die' so that we might live. We must choose to want to know that our consumption of meat may endanger the ecological sustainability of the planet. We must choose, we must decide, we must act conditionally -- and we must do this satisfied that we should never be content with a 'good conscience': no matter who we choose for "immunitary protection" we will have been wrong. We must act on our incomplete knowledge and hope that we will come to know and make ever more subtle distinctions, thickening and multiplying the lines rather than flattening relations through an all-encompassing metaphysical ontology. 

Wolfe writes, 

"This very act of immunitary selection and protection on the basis of the capacity to 'respond'--a capacity itself based on a constitutively prosthetic relation to technicity--can never be juridical, however, because is is always already traced with the automaticity and mechanicity of a reaction. It is a 'line', to use Derrida's formulation, that is always already 'multiple' and nonlinear, always folded and in motion, always under erasure" (103). 

The benefits of thinking in a biopolitical frame is that "it puts us in a position to articulate the disjunctive and uneven quality of our own political moment, constituted as it is by new forces and new actors not very legible by the political vocabulary of sovereignty we have inherited" (104). 

Biopolitical thinking is to think the apparatus or dispotif (the institutional practices!) that subject both humans and nonhumans. We no longer just think about the ethics of eating "animals" (as if they were a unified category) but of what Wolfe provisionally calls "flesh." 

One of the best examples Wolfe gives to illustrate the complexity of Biopolitical thought is the problem of 'synthetic meat', which, now that I think about it, challenges my idea that the notion of 'suffering' is sufficient to decide (to draw a line, make a cut) of who counts and who does not. Wolfe argues that synthetic meat according to someone like Peter Singer, would be perfectly ethical, since (presumably) no animals had to suffer in order for it to be made. Leaving aside the fact that most synthetic meat production requires serum derived from other killed animals in order to grow (and issue explored in The Tissue Culture and Art Project's artworks), Wolfe argues that from a biopolitical standpoint, the issue is not so clear: 

"From this vantage, synthetic meat might not even appear to be an 'animal' issue per se, and would be seen as utterly continous with the technologies and dispotifs that are exercising a more and more finely tuned control over life and 'making live' at the most capillary levels of social existence. Indeed, it would seem continuous with the practices of domestication, manipulation, and control of life that characterize factory farms" (96-97). 

Because it even further distances us from the animals we kill, leaving it to industrial production, some groups are against the production of synthetic meat. 

Thus, it is not only that we need to choose which animals might fall under the criteria of Dasein, but the institutional practices that fundamentally change our relationship to the nonhuman world. 

The "Holy Grail" of Design?

Colbert Interview

I just wanted to reflect briefly on a comment by a Curator of Architecture and Design when speaking to Stephen Colbert. Stephen asks, in his characteristic tone, "We have two sizes of Ipads, aren't we done?" Antonelli responds that we could have a 3rd, and a few more or that really, the "holy grail" of design is to make the Ipad disappear.

What can she possible mean by that? She elaborates: "The idea is to make everything disappear so you can be in things so you can be in the interfaces." Not only could be "in" the interface but rather the interface would be "in" us. Stephen asks, "What would I show the people who don't have one?" She says "You would show your retina."

Stephen's question reveals one problem with the ubiquitous design paradigm: not everyone can have one. If the interface is "within" in our body, even more so than now (its not as if we are separate from our interfaces; as Marshal McCluhan reminds us, our technologies are extensions of the central nervous system) than it is like saying not everyone can have such an extravagant interface.

But aside from the question of access, the deeper problem lies in our desire for the interface to "disappear." Once interfaces disappear, we forget about them as filters and reality simply becomes "the way it is." Devices are already disappearing into our every day use of them (my computer for instance) but once they become incorporated back into our bodies, it will be even more difficult to see them as mediators, as one possible mode of existence among others.

When shown the "bee vase," Stephen's remarks reveal the problem with forgetting the materiality of the interface: "Is that more or less expensive than having Chinese people do this?" Only recently has the media made visible the exploitation of foreign labor for our high-tech devices through the scandal at FoxxCon. Still, we forgot about this exploitation and go on using our devices. The "bee vase" most likely does not only exploit bee labor (animal labor is explored by Haraway in When Species Meet), but most likely human labor as well.

Thus, if our devices our microscopic (or 'nano') then we will most likely forget this labor altogether -- until the device malfunctions.

When we talk about devices disappearing into our bodies, we tend to focus on what this does to our essential "humanness." As a relatively committed posthumanist, this is not my issue; my issues are, in addition to the ones above: What about continued tech support? If our Ipod fails, we have to throw it away and buy another one. Although this creates problems in terms of e-waste, we should also consider the possibility of the possible failure, or, if not that, the regular maintenance required for devices that disappear into our bodies.

And the Ipad (or perhaps the MacAir -- see below) is a perfect example of this, since Apple arguably makes some of the most closed and mysterious "black box" technologies of any company today. If we cannot maintain our external computers ourselves and must rely on "geniuses," a crucial device for professional life in America today, how could we ever expect to be able to maintain and care for the devices that will most likely be surgically inserted into our bodies. If this were the case, we would have to subject our embodied flesh (and not just our minds) to corporate technicians/surgeons.

What if we cannot pay for such maintenance? What if, instead of having a broken phone and being disconnected from others, we go deaf, blind, dumb -- insensate to an extreme. As we know from drugs we put in our bodies (vaccinations, SSRI's, Aspirin) anything we put into our bodies affects them in unpredictable manners and if we are allergic to a medicine or our body rejects it, it can leave traces on our body and mind. The artist Stelarc ran up against this limit when he tried to change his evolutionary architecture by grafting an ear onto his arm, complete with bluetooth capabilities. The fictional novel, Feed by M.T. Anderson also explores the problem of inserting internal hardware, particularly when this hardware is controlled by for-profit companies.

Clearly we need to think about these issues when we state unproblematically that the "holy grail" of interface design is for them to "disappear." I think Antonetti is probably aware of these dangers, but if design is sold to citizens in such a manner, we may forget these dangers in our techno-optimistic visions.