Ontology of Epistemology?

As far as I know, only creationists, panpyschists and solipsists content that outside reality is contingent on consciousness. Realists and antirealists alike distinguish between reality and epistemology, between what reality is and what humans can know about it. But the human ability to know is real in its own right.

What happens when some aspect of reality enters into my conscious awareness? Say I realize that it’s raining outside. It was already raining before I realized it. I might even have been subliminally aware of the sound of the rain falling on the windows. But now that sound has crossed the threshold into consciousness, and I think: it’s raining. The rain has now had an impact on my consciousness. I don’t have to create a mental representation of the rain, so that a mental image of the rain is created in my mind as a sort of shadow reality. My consciousness operates as a kind of rain gauge: its change of state — a new awareness that it’s raining — points to the presence of something real happening in the world. The rain registers its already-existing reality by changing the state of my conscious awareness, just as it did earlier to my window and to my auditory sensory apparatus. The rain has extended its sphere of influence, the extent to which it makes differences happen in the world.

The rain causes these changes of state in the world, but the changes happen to the window, to my audition, to my consciousness. The window is percussed and covered in water; my ear and brain hear new sounds; I think a new thought: these changes are real and distinct in their own right, apart from their common cause. In its interaction with the external reality of the rain, my consciousness demonstrates its own reality.

This description regards consciousness as a kind of object, a recording surface not unlike a window. And in many ways the brain is that sort of object — a congeries of neurons and synaptic connections physically located in the central nervous system. But consciousness isn’t just the static state of the brain; it’s more like a device that keeps track of changes in brain state. Some of these brain-state changes are triggered by changes in the state of the environment. Changes in brain state result from changes in brain processes: the auditory sensory input triggers activation of the “it’s raining” thought that’s already associated in the cerebral network with this kind of sound. Of course consciounsess often takes a more active role, but a major aspect of its own reality is its ability to detect external reality.

Does the Song Want to be Sung?

In our extended discussion on the previous post about memes, kvond and I focused quite a bit of attention on whether a song is an object unto itself and, if so, what sort of object it might be. Now I’m thinking about memic dissemination. It’s been proposed that memes, like genes, propagate themselves as a means of survival and domination of the memetic environment. Memes that successfully occupy people’s brains reproduce and thrive; those that don’t, don’t. In singing the song I am presumably cooperating with the song’s agenda for spreading itself virally through brains.

Certainly the song is a cause of my listening to it and singing it, inasmuch as I would never sing or play a particular song I’ve never heard. Repetition aids learning, so the more often the song is played in my hearing, the more firmly it gets inscribed in my memory and the better I can reproduce it in performance.  And the song may have affordances that attract my attention to itself: it appeals to my tastes, or it appeals to the tastes of others I hang with or admire.

But does the song want me to listen and sing? At first blush the premise seems ridiculous. Gravity is a cause of my not flying up off the ground, and gravity it attracts me to the earth, but it’s not personal, not intentional. Like gravity, a song is inanimate; it’s an abstract pattern of frequencies and intervals and rhythms: how can it want anything? I don’t believe it can. But maybe the song can serve as a conduit for conveying a human desire for me to listen to the song.

Suppose I want you to click onto one of my old posts. I could type an explicit request: please visit such-and-such a post. Or I could try enticing you by pointing out the post’s affordances: there’s something really extraordinary written in that old post that’s right up your alley. While the former tactic is more direct than the latter, they’re both indirect. I’m not forcing you to go see that old post, like gravity forces me down to the earth. Instead I’m using language as a mediator to convey my desire. And it’s not even an immediate mediation, as would be the case if we were talking face to face or over the telephone. There may be a gap of hours or days or even longer between the time I express my desire textually and the time you receive it. My message looks like a stand-alone textual “object,” but maybe it’s better to regard it as a delayed communique, conveying not just information but my desire.

A song could work the same way. The composer imbues a song with personal expressions of beauty and affect and maybe even truth, which he wants to convey through the song to the listener. For the communication to complete its circuit, the listener has to hear the song. And so the composer imbues the song with musical affordances for attracting the listener’s attention. Even if there’s a long delay in transmission, even if someone other than the composer performs the song, even if the performance is transmitted to the listener by electronic recording, even if there’s a delay of decades between composition and listening, the song still carries within itself the original communicative intent of the composer, including his desire that the song be heard. The song isn’t just an autonomous object; it’s an extension of the composer’s agency and intentionaliy. The song wants to be heard because it carries within itself the composer’s’ desire.

I recognize that this view is sort of old-fashioned. Next thing you know I’ll be proposing a hermeneutic of song that focuses not just on the song itself but on compositional intent. What is the composer saying? Among other things he’s saying this: listen to my song.

Memes as Abstract Artifacts

While I was enjoying a cup of tea at Larval Subjects recently, our host gracefully steered the conversation from emergence to memes. Recapping the basic premise, a typical meme is an idea or song or joke floating around in the environment. It can make innumerable copies of itself, but it’s essentially parasitic: each copy of the meme must infect a host organism in order to survive. This new meme “wants” to survive and to reproduce itself, which it does by lodging itself inside human brains. The meme manifests a certain property — cleverness or catchiness, say —  that the brain finds attractive or that lowers the brain’s resistance to infection, making memic reproduction more likely, just as sexual attraction makes biological reproduction more likely. The human “host” functions as a vector who, by telling someone the idea or singing the song, transmits the infectious meme to other brains.

Here’s my limited understanding of Levi’s position on memes. First, he regards the meme as an object. It’s essentially a material thing, consisting of a particular set of sounds or markings decoupled from their meaning. This conceptualization hasn’t quite stabilized though, and Levi vacillates between categorizing memes as material objects and as Aristotelian ideal objects that must be embodied in material form. The meme’s idea-ness or song-ness is an emergent property spawned by the raw meme’s physical properties but not reducible to them. Though idea-ness and song-ness were spawned by the meme, these emergent properties exist not in the raw physical meme itself but in the brains of people who see or hear them; i.e., the meme’s “hosts.” Similarly, the meme’s infectious properties — cleverness for the idea, catchiness for the song — emerge from the idea/song and likewise manifest themselves in the hosts, assuring that the idea/song takes up long-term residency. When the host states the idea or sings the song, the meme lodges itself in the hearer’s brain and the reproductive cycle repeats itself.

Rather than critiquing Levi’s scheme, I’m trying to work through the way I think about memes. It makes sense to me to regard a meme as an object. A song is a distinct thing separate from its singer; an idea exists independently of those who think it. I don’t, though, believe that the essence of a song or an idea is its materiality. But a meme isn’t ideal either, in the traditional sense of being perfect and eternal form or of existing only in minds. A meme is an abstract object. (I got this idea from Amie Thomasson’s Fiction and Metaphysics, about which I previously posted.) An abstract object is a structured pattern of information that isn’t restricted to any particular space-time coordinates and that can manifest itself materially in a variety of ways: in a voice or a musical instrument, on a piece of paper, or in someone’s brain. Though, as Levi observes, the abstract pattern has to manifest itself materially somehow, the pattern is real in its own right.

[A visual illustration of an abstract object: The top photo looks like a random assortment of junk, but when you line yourself up with it at the proper angle you realize that the junk is organized according to an abstract pattern that conveys meaning to brains familiar with the rules of arithmetic and the content of selected works of 20th century fiction. The abstract information embedded in the junk emerges in our awareness when get ourselves lined up with it, but the information was designed into the junk assembly. This junk pile is an artifact.]

In essence the meme is its abstract structured pattern; its particular material manifestation is of secondary importance. But the pattern has to be received as information in order for it to be perceived as a song or an idea, rather than just raw physical sounds or markings. My cat can be exposed to the textual or vocal embodiment of an idea and miss the point entirely, focusing solely on the materiality of the piece of paper or the sound. My cat as it sits on the table can see me pointing my finger at the floor and it will look at my finger: the abstract information embedded in the pointing gesture is completely lost on the cat. I could write a memo outlining my expectation that the cat not get up on the table and the cat would likely sit on the piece of paper for awhile until it got bored, then jump back onto the table.

The meme’s abstract pattern isn’t an emergent property of the sounds or words or images in which it’s made manifest. That’s because the pattern is designed into the meme from the beginning. Almost all memes are artifacts. Composing a song or thinking up an idea isn’t all that different from weaving a basket or manufacturing a lamp. The main difference is that song-ness and idea-ness are more clearly abstract. A basket can’t duplicate itself in people’s brains; it has to be copied materially. Still, the idea of basket-ness and lamp-ness is abstract, and the idea can be made manifest in a whole host of different materials and shapes. The information that identifies something as a basket or a lamp is an abstract pattern that’s designed in to the material stuff of which it’s constructed.

A song isn’t inextricably connected to its composer, nor is an idea inseparable from the person who first thought it. It’s reasonable to count these sorts of abstract patterns of information as objects in their own right, decoupled from any particular material manifestation. But what happens when the song is materialized, say in its being played on a harmonica? Has the abstract song been transformed into a concrete song? Has it merged with the sounds produced by the harmonica to become a merged object with its own distinct properties? Surely it has: play the same song on a harmonica and on a bassoon: while the abstract pattern of songness is identical, the song sounds different on different instruments. Certainly the song is transformed in different ways by harmonicas and symphony orchestras and copies of sheet music, while still retaining the same abstract songness. I’m not sure what to think about it, but I suspect Latour’s ideas about translation will prove helpful here.

What about the idea of memes reproducing themselves by parasitically colonizing brains? I suppose you could look at it that way. What I think, though, is that consciousness is overemphasized in the way we pick up things like songs and ideas. Much of what we learn we acquire unintentionally, unconsciously. With practice I learned to hit a moving tennis ball back over the net. The information I need to accomplish this feat is abstract and calculable, but I don’t perform the calculations consciously — it’s an unconscious calculation. Did the hand-eye coordination meme reproduce itself by colonizing my brain? No: I learned it because I wanted to and because I practiced, even though the learning took place unconsciously. I learned to speak English as a child without consciously studying the grammar and syntax and vocabulary: I picked it up unconsciously. Did the language reproduce itself in my brain? No: I wanted to understand other humans and to communicate with them, and I learned to do so unconsciously. Even when I purposely read a book, I pick up bits of knowledge that I didn’t consciously commit to memory.

Knowing your way around the neighborhood, recognizing people’s faces, riding a bike, picking up tunes: most human learning takes place unconsciously. Consciousness is functions mostly as the attentional interface: the unconscious takes care of storing and organizing. I can call up the answer to 7 x 8 from memory without constantly rehearsing the multiplication tables in my head. It’s part of Freud’s legacy to regard the unconscious as a repository for things that were once conscious but that we’ve subsequently repressed. That happens, but it’s a relatively small aspect of unconscious thought. “All thought is unconscious,” Donnel Stern asserts; a thought becomes conscious only when we need to call it into awareness for some reason. If memes are self-reproducing parasites on our brains, then so is practically everything that we’ve learned in our lifetimes. I think it’s more plausible to say that we unconsciously pick up all sorts of brain content that amuses us or is useful to us because those are the sorts of abstract patterns that humans attend to in their environment.

Besides, memes are artifacts. Songs are written by people who want them to be heard and played and sung. Ideas are formulated by people who want them to be known and understood and accepted. The memes aren’t out there reproducing themselves on their own; they’re being actively disseminated by their originators and their “hosts.”

Virtual and Fictional Properties

This morning Larval Subjects put up a post about emergence, using for illustrative purposes a deceptively simple video game that Dennett discusses in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. “The Game of Life” consists of an array of on/off cells in a video display, an initial configuration of ons and offs, and a simple if/then algorithm by which the initial configuration is transformed iteratively into subsequent configurations. The printed narrative displayed during the demo says that the game “demonstrates how complexity can arise out of simple, low-level rules.”

The algorithm running the game is completely deterministic: all subsequent iterations of the video display can be predicted precisely from the initial configuration. At the lower level of systemic organization the algorithm assigns an on/off position for each of the cells, and that’s it. What features of the game are “emergent”? Jaegwon Kim identifies five “central doctrines” of emergentism:

1. Systems with a higher level of complexity emerge from the coming together of lower-level entities in new structural configurations.
2. Higher-level systems exhibit higher-level emergent properties arising from the lower-level properties and relations of its constituent parts.
3. Emergent properties are not predictable from information about lower-level conditions.
4. Emergent properties are not explainable or reducible to the lower-level conditions.
5. Emergent properties have novel causal powers of their own.

The emergent properties of the Game of Life are its “repeating patterns of information,” as the demo’s narrative phrases it. The sum of individual on/off settings can anticipate neither the complex clusters and dispersions of ons and offs that illuminate the screen at any given time, nor the changes in the patterns over time as successive iterations are displayed. While most of the multicellular patterns flicker abstractly on the screen, some patterns bear uncanny resemblances to familiar objects moving through the simulated world, performing recognizable functions. Names have been assigned to some of the more compelling patterns:  gliders, eaters, puffers, guns, trains, rakes, spaceships.

I detect the emergent properties when I watch the game go through its iterations. To what extent are they  properties of the game itself? Certainly at the lower level the individual cells do light up or go dark. Certainly in the aggregate the lights form patterns. But what about those higher-level clusters of cells that appear to move across the screen over time: do they really move? They seem to eat other objects or fire weapons or propel themselves across the screen: are they really doing so?

The seemingly mobile and purposive objects that emerge from running the game aren’t physical objects being tracked by a camera or a computerized eye. I’d say that they’re optical illusions, imposed by our perceptual systems on the higher-level emergent optical outputs generated by the program. The illusion takes advantage of the human perceptual system’s ability to impose higher-order structure on sensory input so as to extract meaningful information from a visual array. So: at time t I see an illuminated rectangle of dimensionality L*H located at position XY on the grid; at time t+1 I see an illuminated L*H rectangle located at position X(Y+1). My visual perception system interprets this information as evidence that the original rectangle moved a little bit to the right. Inside the game’s algorithm, though, what happened is that the leftmost cell on the illuminated rectangle switched from on to off, while the cell just to the right of the rectangle swithed from off to on. This isn’t the same rectangle moving to the right; it’s two separate rectangles displayed sequentially.

One could use this video game to demonstrate why solipsism might be true: our retinas work more or less like the video game, with our brains interpreting the changing patterns of digitized retinal cell activation patterns as discrete, moving, even intentional objects. This is the premise behind virtual-reality paranoia tales like Total Recall, Existenz, and The Matrix: vision is a solipsistic illusion disguising some other hidden reality — or perhaps the absence of reality.

A realist, on the other hand, observes that the video game’s illusion works because it exploits visual and cognitive mechanisms for extracting information from the environment about real objects actually in motion. As supporting evidence for the reality of what we see, we know that we can move our heads to track the movement of an object appearing in our visual field — a flying bird, say — in such a way that the image recorded by our visual system does not move: we keep the bird constantly centered in our field of vision. We aren’t fooled by the static shot captured by our eyes into thinking that the bird is suspended mid-flight. Why not? Because we’re moving our heads, and also because the other objects in the visual field surrounding the bird appear to be in motion relative to the bird — as if everything other than the bird is moving backward. This is the sort of observation — a sort of ecological phenomenology of visual perception — that J.J. Gibson offered to empirical psychology back in the 60s and 70s, keeping the field’s nascent cognitivism from getting too solipsistic.

Similarly, a fiction writer can write a bunch of sentences and from those textual fragments a fictional character will emerge. It’s an illusion: the character isn’t real; the reader assembles from the author’s sentences a simulated person who looks, acts, speaks, and thinks in particular and consistent ways. We could argue that, because the fiction-writer’s trick works, we should regard the way in which we perceive and understand others who populate the real world as similarly fictional, and that all we encounter are the solipsistic projections we impose on them. But, as with the video game, the fictional character works because we’ve learned to extract information about real people populating our environment by attending to and understanding meaningful sentences uttered by and about them.

So: should we regard simulations of objects and people, these trompes l’oeil with emergent properties that depend on our ability to assemble and interpret information in self-deceptive ways, as real and autonomous objects? Or are the arrays of on/off cells and word strings really real, whereas the emergent objects and people that we assemble from the raw sensory input are unreal? Or are these emergent objects and people real to us, subjectively and intersubjectively, but not real in themselves?

Get Out

Which protester would you find more persuasive and energizing; with which would you be more likely to join forces in concerted political action: the strident grimacer, or the ingratiating smiler? Maybe it’s the sign that sucks?

Fictional Objects

Discussions of fiction typically begin with whether or not we must postulate fictional objects, with the defender of fiction attempting to establish that we absolutely cannot do without them, and the opponent attempting to show how we can manage to avoid postulating them through paraphrasing our apparent discourse about them and reconceiving our apparent experience of them.

– from Fiction and Metaphysics by Amie Thomasson, 1999, p. 5

Thomasson begins by observing that fictional characters are best thought of not as imaginary people but as abstract human artifacts, the result of human intentionality not dependent on a specific material manifestation, similar in this regard to scientific theories and laws of state and melodies. Even the clock is an abstract artifact: it can take a variety of physical forms while performing the same function.

In the first half of the book Thomasson explores what sort of entity a fictional character might be. Neither real (in the sense of having a spatiotemporal location)  nor ideal, neither material nor purely mental, the fictional character presents a challenge to traditional ontological categories. Does Sherlock Holmes exist in the world because the texts of books make reference to him? No: he would continue to exist as long as people remembered him. If there were no readers left in the universe who could make sense of Doyle’s books, would Holmes still exist in the texts? No, says Thomasson: the existence of a fictional character described in a book depends on there being readers who understand the text.

What is a fictional character’s identity? Is it the sum of all descriptions in all books written about him? Or are the words just a partial description of a character that’s more fully formed in the writer’s imagination? What if a writer other than Doyle were to import Sherlock Holmes into his own work and provide additional or even conflicting descriptions of him — is this the same Holmes, or a different one? If an author presents a character who shares all the key character traits identified in other literary appearances by Holmes, should the reader assume that this character is in fact Holmes even if the author doesn’t name him or assigns him a different name?  Thomasson acknowledges:

The prospects seem dim for drawing out a definitive set of necessary and sufficient conditions for character identity. But that does not place us in any worse a position than we already face in the case of formulating identity conditions for actual humans. (p. 67)

What counts as an entity? Tomasson proposes to accept all spatiotemporal entities and mental states, as well as anything that depends on them in any way. The first clause accounts for physical entities and intentionality; the latter for abstracta, intentional mental events, imaginary objects, and entities dependent on joint intentionality of multiple individuals or collectives such as governments and theories and fictional charcters. The everyday world is populated largely by entities that are neither purely physical nor mental but are dependent in part on both.

Disconnect?

Today is the 31st, so I expect that by the end of the day our next-door neighbors will have finished moving out. That means we’ll be without internet again. We live close enough to the neighbors that we can leech the signal emitted by their wifi router. Internet is usually packaged with TV and telephone service, but we rarely watch television and we have no land line. So we’re prepared to suffer from a slightly weaker internet signal as the price we have to pay for not paying the price. The neighbors never password-protected their connection, so their signal was floating out there free for the grabbing. We’ve been contributing a proportionate share of internet connectivity fees to our neighbors, which seemed only fair. In all likelihood the new neighbors will want full-service cable, so our internet down time probably won’t last long.

Internet connectivity ought to be distributed as a public utility. More than three-quarters of Americans use the internet. It’s more useful than television, and it’s becoming increasingly necessary for conducting ordinary transactions. Though I’ve conducted no feasibility studies, I suspect that the internet companies limit home-delivered signal strength in order to keep people like me from getting a free ride. A relatively small number of signal amplifiers systematically distributed through town would probably serve everyone’s needs adequately at a fraction of the cost. I get free TV signal for the basic channels, just like all TVs used to work in the good old days before cable and satellite. I’d be happy to pay for my own amplifier if need be.

Surely this sort of thing gets discussed. Just as surely it’ll never happen. Either way, by the end of today we’ll probably be out of service, at least for awhile.

Becoming Visionary: Toward Praxis

Having recently read most of Peretz’s Becoming Visionary, I wonder how I might move his insights beyond theory and DePalma film studies into practice, both for becoming visionary myself and for helping others to do so. It’s not possible to deploy split screens or jump cuts or saturated set lighting in real vision: cinematic techniques of this sort are the apparatus of becoming-revelatory, of the filmmaker showing others what he has already seen. The question at hand is about seeing rather than showing.

The most persistent theoretical insight offered by Peretz is that becoming-visionary doesn’t rely on the traditional mind-body, real-ideal split of Platonism and its successors. Meaning doesn’t come into the picture from outside the field of action, from some transcendent POV, accessible only through the third eye of the mind, where the fragmented glimpses offered to our finite perceptions are resolved in the big picture of eternity and infinity. Instead, meaning is immanent in the world itself, in the subjects and objects, the forces and trajectories that link everything together. We are blind to ultimate meaning not because the future is hidden under a cloak of darkness but because it’s saturated in the blinding light of infinite possibility. It’s necessary to look into the blindness, to see openings in the saturated field of the present and near future, to detect possibilities rather than certainties. These possibilities have angular momenta of their own; the best we can do is to be aware of them and to react to them as best we can.

Though I think Peretz overstates the case, I’m in general agreement. Meaning is all around us, in part because nature follows its own laws, but mostly because we’re surrounded by other humans who pursue their own meaningful motivations or who are caught in others’ force fields. Instead of trying to see either the deep past of what brought the present situation into play or the long-term future in which all uncertainty is resolved, it’s important to see more clearly inside the limited temporal window that’s open around us. While both past and future recede into blindness, we aren’t just locked into the moment. We can search the present for glimpses of motivation coming up from the recent past and potential consequences likely to unfold in the near future. This sort of vision requires attention to what’s happening around us and then thinking about what it might mean to the various agencies participating in the scene.We split up the saturated field into fragments, then rearrange them in terms that afford us opportunities to react to what we’re experiencing, even to throw our weight behind certain immanent possibilities that suit our purposes.

These insights aren’t novel to Peretz, of course, but let’s assume that they’re valid ones. Is it possible to learn to see the world this way more clearly and more consistently? Is the process of becoming visionary a function, at least in part, of becoming adept at certain perceptual and cognitive and imaginative techniques for looking into and through the glare of the oversaturated present?

*   *   *

Speculative Realism affirms that objects and their properties can be real even if humans don’t know it. Reality operates independently of consciousness. Let’s suppose we adopt the SR variant put forward by Dr. Sinthome that something is real if it is different and if it makes a difference. The multitude of things parading through my visual field can be really different from each other, and can really inscribe differences on my sensory systems, even if I don’t attend to those differences consciously. To bring these already-existing differences into my conscious awareness isn’t to bestow reality on the already-real. At the same time, becoming conscious of a real thing does present that thing with another way of registering its difference and of making a difference in me. The objects populating my visual array present an opportunity for my perceptual and cognitive systems to extract these objects from the oversaturated visual field and to recognize the separations between them as distinctly real objects. In so doing I also give these objects access to my consciousness, offering them an opportunity to make a particular kind of difference that previously had been foreclosed to them.

Of course the object might break through of its own accord from raw sensation into perception into consciousness without my consciously attending to it an pulling it into my awareness. But it is, I think, possible to open the “doors of perception” through some combination of attentiveness and receptivity.

Usually the world doesn’t present itself to me as an oversaturated field. I see the world in terms of my own purposes and intentions. For example, I see the screen before me as a place that’s recording my keystrokes, which in turn are translating my conscious thoughts into text. But the other features of the screen — its luminance, its borders, the font, the scrolling of the cursor from left to right and from top to bottom, its electrical source — I ignore, even though these properties have a direct effect on the display of my typing. I don’t consciously try to ignore these features, nor, I think, do they withdraw from my consciousness. These features continue to have a real effect on me even though I’m not paying attention to them. It’s just that, with respect to my current engagement of the computer, these other features aren’t directly relevant to the conscious use I’m making of the computer screen. If suddenly the screen went black — or white — then my attention would be drawn to the previously-ignored property of luminance and I would focus my intentional consciousness on this property. Heidegger talks about this sort of experience, referring to the “handiness” of things, things as pragmata. Harman says (I believe) that, even when we shift our attention to the non-handy properties of a thing, those previously ignored or hidden properties now surge forward as the object’s “handiness.” Luminance per se becomes the focus of my attention, and I seek pragmatic means of restoring this handy property to my computer screen. Even if I merely focus my attention on the screen’s luminance for no particular pragmatic reason, or detach my consciousness sufficiently from my typing task so that other features of the screen are allowed to register their presence in my perception, Harman contends that I’ve merely shifted or widened my pragmatic frame, and that I’ve still not encountered the reality, the essence of the screen.

At this point I’m inclined to say “so what?”.  The distinction between the essence of the screen and the various ways in which I can interact with the screen — from my subjective conscious standpoint this isn’t a difference that makes a difference. Still, I can, through a kind of broadening of my intentional engagement, open the doors of perception beyond the mere recording of keystrokes to some of the other properties of the screen. I may not encounter these properties directly for what they are in and of themselves, but I do encounter them consciously in a way that had previously been inaccessible to me. This isn’t a vacating of consciousness or attention or intentionality, making myself a passive recording surface; it is rather a broadening of my conscious subjective engagement.

Let’s say I allow some previously-inaccessible properties of an object to register their reality in my consciousness, to make a different sort of difference in me. This expanded awareness also has pragmatic consequences: it opens up new possibilities in which I can use this new awareness to make a difference in the world. The differences I make might be consciously intended, or they might occur spontaneously without my conscious intentional mediation. But through allowing changes in my consciousness to happen, my consciousness becomes different, and thereby capable of making-difference, in ways that weren’t there before.

This ties back to the Peretz book. When I’m overly tied into my own immediate pragmatic engagement of the world, real people and objects are making real things happen in my environment. But I’m too locked in: outside of my frame of attention the world is a void. If I let my focus drift outside the frame I’m liable to be blinded, overwhelmed by the glare of too many objects pursuing too many trajectories. Rather than letting my pragmatic intentionality drift away, I need to open that intentionality to more possibilities. People and objects are pursuing their own subjective pragmatic agendas; if I pay attention, if I open my awareness, some of these agendas might register in my consciousness. I might never see the big picture of how everything ties in with everything else; I may never know the true essence of anything or anyone who appears in my environment. But I’ve allowed them to register more of their reality, more of their differences, in my consciousness. And now I achieve a greater instrumental flexibility in using this broadened pragmatic awareness in making differences happen in my environment. It might look to outsiders like I’ve got greater control over the world than they do, but it’s more a matter of exerting leverage in the space-time interval that I occupy, an interval that extends only a short distance in space and time from me in the here-and-now.

*   *   *

I’ve sort of drifted from the original intent of this post, which had to do with specifying a praxis of becoming-visionary. I think it might be possible for one person to serve as a catalyst for another’s attentiveness and receptivity. But first it’s been helpful for me to explore some of the implications theoretically.

Sole and Sacred Fruit

Yesterday Dr. Zamalek again repeated k-punk’s injunction to “surround yourself with people who have projects.” Dr. Z elaborates:

“Tearing down other projects does not count as a project.”

On an earlier thread we explored the “hermeneutic of suspicion” as applied both to the tearer-downers and the project managers. We also saw how mark k-punk’s resistance to tearer-downers is explicitly rooted in what he regards as the need to protect the boundaries and integrity of projects, with an authoritarian hand if need be. But what about Graham Harman? Are we just indulging in armchair psychologizing about his resistance to criticism? I don’t think so. Here’s an excerpt from Harman’s paper in Collapse II:

“While analytic philosophy takes pride in never suggesting more than it explicitly states, this procedure does no justice to a world where objects are always more than they literally state. Those who care only to generate arguments almost never generate objects. New objects, however, are the sole and sacred fruit of writers, thinkers, politicians, travellers, lovers, and inventors.”

First off, it’s clear that in Harman’s system new objects are spawned not only by humans but also by collisions between billiard balls, fire encountering cotton, and all manner of non-human interactions. Secondly, in that same article Harman says that “every connection is itself an object.” An argument generated by an analytical philosopher results from an intentional connection initiated by the arguer in response to some feature of the idea being critiqued. The result, per Harman, is itself an object. So it seems that Harman, in invoking the sacred charge to create objects bestowed upon a certain elite class of humans, is stepping outside the bounds of his own theory. We can only speculate why, but we can certainly identify the self-contradiction explicitly.

We’ve not clarified what’s meant by a “project,” but I’d say it refers to the intentional and systematic and usually goal-directed work undertaken by individual humans or groups of humans. The project is a kind of dynamic meeting-place where objects and subjects interact to produce new products, inventions, events, ideas, and so on. I suppose that a bunch of boulders and pebbles and what-not could have as a project the production of an avalanche, but I don’t think that’s what Dr. Z is talking about here — though I’d say that preventing or stopping the avalanche would constitute a project in its own right. No, both Graham and Mark are talking about projects as the laboratory or incubator for the creation of “sacred fruit” — objects of human genius like theories, inventions, books, discoveries. It seems that for Harman the creation of such objects is better than other kinds of activities in which humans can engage.

I tend to subscribe to this romantic notion of the heroic creator. But critiquers and destoyers can also create heroic objects, just as writers and politicians and inventors can create quite ordinary and even terrible objects.

Surging Into the Inhuman

I have always unconsciously sought out that which will beat me down to the ground, but the floor is also a wall.

– Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, 1992

The attraction for me is remote: letting go of all craft and judgment, all reason and restraint, casting aside the distinctly human, in order to ride the primal forces surging up through the organism. For Land there’s no liberation here other than the liberation of the zero, of death. Going posthuman doesn’t mean achieving some sort of superhuman freedom and power: it’s posthumanity in the rawest sense of death and extinction. Humanity is a blight on the planet and an excruciating burden on the individual: the sooner it’s gotten rid of the better. Worldwide warfare might be the ultimate solution if it could shake itself loose from controlled rational discipline and just let it rip. For Land only an orgy of slaughter will do.

Presumably people who assert this sort of “virulent nihilism” never gain access to the levers of destruction, and one wonders whether they’re having too much fun talking about self-immolation actually to plunge in the knife. Surely there’s a puerile rhetorical thrill in writing and reading about the horror and the mayhem, the psychosis and the putrefaction, the collapse. Maybe Land’s book should be admired strictly as a worthy exemplar of a particular genre of philosophical writing instead of being given serious consideration as a way of living — or of dying.

If someone came to my practice wanting to “get different” in this particular way, would I help him? Would I encourage my client to cultivate full commitment to this particular form of extreme difference? Or would I try to dissuade and distract him? Again, maybe if I could reduce this posthuman impulse to an intellectual exercise, maybe even a personal lifestyle experiment: nothing serious, nothing he won’t grow out of eventually. Ride it hard, get some mileage out of it, have some fun, write a book about it while the energy lasts. After the surge exhausts itself maybe we can move on to something else…

Microphonic Conifer

“Nearby, a bulbous conifer tilted like a giant microphone awaiting a quote from the sky.”

Earlier yesterday I had been trying to remember how Graham Harman’s theory of metaphor works. Then, reading before going to sleep, I came across this sentence on page 6 of Glen Duncan’s Death of an Ordinary Man. It’s a simile we’re dealing with here, but no matter: the same principles apply. According to Harman’s theory, no object ever encounters another object directly: the encounters are mediated by the sensual surfaces of the objects coming into proximity with each other. In Duncan’s simile the sensual conifer takes onto itself certain notes of the sensual microphone, thereby alluding to notes of the real conifer. It’s not just that the conifer and the microphone share similar sensual features — their shapes and tilts. Rather, the metaphorical object alludes to the depths of the real conifer hidden beneath the sensual surface. Deploying Harman’s language from his Collapse II article, the metaphor points to the microphone-soul of the conifer looming in the darkness and magically hovering beneath the surface, animating the conifer and illuminating it from within.

Does the hidden essence of the conifer possess properties it shares with a microphone pointed at the sky? The implication of the metaphor is that there’s a voice in the sky — God, presumably — speaking into the conifer. As glimpsed through the metaphorical allusion, the conifer has the property of amplifying the Voice coming down from the sky, a way in which God reveals himself through earthly media. I suppose that really is the idea of the metaphorical relationship: the shared sensual properties of conifer and microphone allude to a deeper property of the microphone, which in turn points to a deeper property of the conifer.

Is the audio-ampifying property of the microphone a more essential feature than its conical shape and its tilt? I’d say that’s true. But now we’re getting close to equating essence with function: the tool-ness of the microphone is its essence, the shape and tilt are inessential surface characteristics. Equating essence with function is, I’m pretty sure, something that Harman doesn’t want to do, based on my reading of second-hand discussions of his book Tool-Being.

The sensual conifer possesses conical shape-notes and positional tilt-notes. It doesn’t possess microphone-notes. However, the metaphorical relationship produces a new object: a metaphorical conifer. This merged object does possess microphone notes. And I think that’s true: a metaphor is an object, even if it’s not a distinct material thing. The metaphor was created in the author’s imagination and deposited onto the manuscript of his book. It has multiplied its presence in all the printed copies of the book, and it has left its trace in the minds of all those people who have read that particular sentence on page 6 of the book. Imaginations, books, minds — these are distinctly human objects. Isn’t metaphor also a distinctly human kind of object? As best as I can tell, no metaphorical object can come into existence except through the mediation of human thought and language. The only other possibility I can imagine is that a Voice from the sky announces the reality of the metaphor into the microphones of our consciousnesses.

“You Don’t Know Me”

I was walking around the pond this morning when I saw another guy approaching. “Don’t I know you?” I asked the guy, but then I corrected myself: “No, I guess I don’t.” “No, I guess not,” the guy agreed. This was all a little joke: he was wearing a t-shirt that read “You Don’t Know Me.”

If I spent some time “getting to know” this guy, would it be a futile undertaking inasmuch we can never really know anyone? Even if he took great pains to reveal things about himself to me, and even if I concentrated intently on understanding him, would our efforts be for naught because his true self would always retreat from interaction into unassailable hermetic isolation? If I were to enter into a relationship with this guy, would I come to know only his relational properties in our little dyad, with those properties bearing possibly no connection with his properties as an individual or as dyadic participant with someone else?

Miller’s Crossing by the Coens, 1990

“Now if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust? For a good return, you gotta go bettin’ on chance. And then, you’re back with anarchy, right back in the jungle. That’s why ethics is important, what separates us from the animals, beasts of burden, beasts of prey. Ethics.”

“What are you chewin’ over?”

“Dream I had once. I was walking in the woods. I don’t know why. Wind came whippin’. Blew me hat off.”

“And you chased it, right? You ran and ran. You finally caught up to it. And you picked it up, but it wasn’t a hat anymore. It had changed into something else, something wonderful.”

“No, it stayed a hat. And no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.”

The hat dream occupies the prophecy slot, a vision of the old school. And so we figure: the fix is in on this movie. But if it’s just a hat, then all bets are off.

Blow Up and Out

Reading the Blow Out chapter in Peretz’s Becoming Visionary, I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with the author’s  take on DePalma’s film. Not until after I’d read all 73 pages did I realize that Peretz had made only a brief passing mention of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Now I’ll grant that DePalma does more than slavishly repeat the earlier film, just as Antonioni did more than merely film Cortázar’s short story. But in my memory it’s Antonioni’s film that more directly manifests the kind of visionary openness that Peretz writes about.

The photographer in Antonioni’s Blow-Up thinks that he may have witnessed a murder. On the developed film we see foregrounded the man who is about to be killed; behind him two shadowy figures lurk. One of them is holding something shiny, metallic — a gun? The photographer blows up the image trying to zero in on the possible murderer and weapon, but the larger he makes the image the more indistinct it becomes. Even the body disappears without a trace, leaving no evidence whatever. Maybe the murder never occurred at all. This is precisely the sort of becoming-visionary Peretz has in mind: looking into the opaqueness of the revelation not in order to perceive its essential truth and meaning but rather to see the irreducible indeterminacy.

DePalma takes all the guesswork out of it. A man is dead: was it a murder? The soundman tries to reconstruct the crime with audiotape and evidence from the scene. He’s not sure. But DePalma is sure: his vision transcends the soundman’s; he knows what happened. Eventually we know it too, as does the soundman, but it’s too late to prevent the murderer from striking again. The unfolding is not unlike that of Carrie from my last post: the director knows, then we know, and we want the heroes to know, but they don’t have access to our visions. These are tragedies of the old school, where a fate dimly glimpsed reveals itself fully only in its inevitable fulfillment.

Granted, the photographer in Antonioni’s film doesn’t celebrate his visionary blindness. This is European high-modernism after all, when auteurs nostalgically lamented the post-war loss of certainty and faced indeterminacy with ambivalence and angst. DePalma exhibits a dynamic visual style that’s perhaps had greater impact on Hollywood than Antonioni’s almost architectural compositions. But DePalma’s rendering of the story is, in Peretz’s terms, more old-school than Antonioni’s.