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Conrad: There's never a shortage of hybridism in contemporary literary criticism: and (if you'll allow the analogy) the root stock from which every new theory derives is, of course, the reigning poststructuralist critique of the text (literary or otherwise). The 'family resemblance' among them is unmistakable. I've recently discovered two very interesting appropriations of traditional postmodernist critique (with dashes of traditional ontology, Husserl & Heidegger) in the forms of Speculative Realist Literary Criticism (SR), and Object Oriented Ontology literary analysis (OOO).
JBR: historically speaking, SR/OOO distinguishes itself from what you call “traditional postmodernist critique” via the claim that postmodernism has tended to privilege textuality as primary and SR/OOO privileges the “beyond the text”, rendering textuality just one kind of thing among others. It also distinguishes itself from Husserl and Heidegger in that both H’s do ontologically privilege the human, whether by privileging the phenomenal experience or by privileging Dasein. Admittedly, Harman’s stepping beyond Dasein begins in his analysis of Heideger’s tool-being, but Bryant uses Bhaskar’s critical realism as his stepping-stone out of the phenomenal realm into the noumenal, where texts are indeed just another object. There are differences between OOO practitioners as to whether this leads to a “flat ontology” or whether there are still degrees of real … So I don’t think that it’s quite fair to simply assert that SR/OOO derives from “traditional postmodernist critique”. In fact, I think actor-network theory, science studies, and Kant are crucial to rooting SR/OOO – tho of course so is Deleuze … But of course no one who lives after the great age of c20 French and German philosophy can (or should be) “immune” to it … it might not have been Arnoldian, but the rise of Hitler/Stalin, the war, the Shoah etc would shake one’s humanism to – or past - its roots …
It's to the views of Levi Bryant and Eileen S. Joy, as I've discovered them in recent online discussions (here and here), we can turn for a full explication of the principles underlining their SR/OOO analyses of the 'text'. I believe the scope and limits of this new poststructuralist wave can be fairly simply elucidated.
JBR: see above: I think you need to prove, not simply assert, that SR/OOO is “a new poststructuralist wave” … not saying it’s not, or that what SR/OOO asserts as it’s genealogy is accurate, just that … Oh, and by the way, other SR/OOO practitioners root themselves otherwhere, e.g. Brassier would hate the above to be applied to him, Bogost is rooted in computers and gaming, Grant in Schelling, etc etc …
Firstly, the common denominator in both is the emphasis on 'realism' or a strictly 'object-oriented' approach towards textuality.
Firstly, the common denominator in both is the emphasis on 'realism' or a strictly 'object-oriented' approach towards textuality.
JBR: towards everything.
And of the text they say, oddly enough, there's nothing before it that can be said to transmit or codify traditional meaning, nothing ontologically nor historically prior from which discussion of 'textuality' can begin. (I'm inclined to read this as a wilful destruction of an Arnoldian humanist tradition). In Bryant's sense of inquiry, "content seems to come after."
JBR: Conrad, I think you need to distinguish between context and content. Between literature and any particular text. It’s certainly possible to discuss textuality or literature or art or whatever before the fact of any particular text/object (tho of course with the knowledge that the addition of new texts/objects to the body of existing texts/objects will change that discussion – I mean, that’s Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent, right?). But I don’t see how one can discuss a particular text/object avant la lettre … Oh, and I’ve never met or read a word by anyone in SR/OOO who denies history in any way. In fact, Levi explicity mentions that OO Criticism might fall somewhere between New Criticism and New Historicism …
Presumably SR/OOO proponents will put something in its place: like the 'text' refashioned in some radically newer posthumanist (e.g., cybernetics, avant-garde poetics or systems theory) form or anything that serves as a theory's own operating system. Or perhaps even a more syncretistic view of humanism itself, such as that offered by Joy, will do the trick.
JBR: what is the antecedent of your “its” in “its place”? Arnoldian humanism, right? Now in what way is that not an OS? And in what way is it privileged over any other OS?
For Joy 'humanism' as a critical concept is looking, Janus-like, at two directions at the same time, both a "troubling" and "heroic" one:
While we are fully aware that, historically, humanism and the human have a long and troubling history that implicates them in violent exclusions, as well as in deprivations and disenfranchisements of all sorts, we would also aver that humanism (of different philosophical varieties) has also been responsible for heroic acts of psychic and material sustenance, rescue and redemption, mutually-productive alliance and overcoming, and personal freedom. It is not a question of having some sort of scale that allows us to measure whether humanism has led to more atrocities than it has to social and other boons, but rather, of acknowledging that it has done both, in separate times and places, and simultaneously...
JBR: I certainly agree with Eileen. I think that this is exactly the case. That’s what I tried to make clear in our discussion, and in my postscript. I have to admit to not seeing a single thing wrong with this.
Secondly, now that the possibility of a traditional source criticism has been abolished, it looks as if we are living in a "Year O" world in which SR/OOO 'post-texts' potentially thrive.
JBR: Since, apparently, all criticism has an OS, including yours, we are no more in a Year 0 than we ever were, or, better, maybe, we are always already in a Year 0. I kind of think so. Question, why are texts now ‘post-texts’? In any case, whether we are in Year 0, whether texts are now post-texts, as long as thriving is happening, it sounds ok to me.
But to arrive here the hard work of literary analysis must begin. If the traditional (Arnoldian) text has been 'deracinated', certainly reduced to Joy's troubling sense of humanist tradition in general,
JBR: Joy is troubled, yes, but what in her troubled state is troubling? I mean, what is there in her analysis of traditional humanism with which you disagree?
anything we put in its place will have to both cover the Tradition deficit
JBR: Why is it a deficit? What have we lost, exactly, by critiquing traditional humanism in order to improve it?
and put in its place a new 'Object-Oriented Ontology' of text and reading practice. It is a question of 'origins' in a more radically 'speculative' sense. Bryant proposes an answer to the question, 'What is the ontological nature of things?' in his essay "The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology" (OP) in which he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique so that the look for origins, tentative in nature, may begin anew. As he says,
Faced with such a bewildering philosophical situation, what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naïvely and pre-critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access?
JBR: when you write “he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique” you are absolutely right; and the key words are not “the very past”, they are “philosophical critique”. According to many philosophers and historians, the noumena were present to us (philosophically speaking) prior to Descartes, who thought only God guaranteed the reliability of our senses, and therefore our ability to contact noumena directly. But things went really wrong with Kant, who cut off all contact (Nick Land called Kant’s philosophy something like “the biggest panic attack in philosophical history”). OOO wants to get us out of our heads and back into the world, where we are anyway. It’s about time, after all, given what we’re doing to it (tar sands, global warming, etc etc) Tho every OOO philosopher gets Kant’s argument, and is troubled by it …
Engagement with the world, textually and existentially, means to meet it and the material objects in it (like literary artifacts) as objects of open-ended enquiry. SR/OOO theorists are, Bryant says, "speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers [who] will see any secure foundation we might discover as an outcome of inquiry rather than as an αρχή governing our inquiry from the outset". Borrowing terminology from Saussure and Derrida, Bryant gives the "Ontic Principle' in terms of a pre-critical encounter with a world of objects marked primarily by a positive affirmation of their significant "differences" (causes, interrelations and entailments among things to be fine tuned in the course of inquiry itself). The nature of the textual object begins with this basic assumption (αρχή ) of the ontological (metaphysical) priority of significant differences in all discoverable 'things'. A 'thing' like a poetry text 'is' regardless of whatever's been said or thought about it, and so in that sense nothing's come before the text. A poetic text existing simpliciter is, upon encountering it, to make a significant 'difference' to the reader or it simply doesn't exist.
JBR: Yes, exactly. Except maybe for the simpliciter. Maybe. As far as making a difference goes, I’m reminded of the title of that Kenneth Burke article, “Literature as Equipment for living.” Tho, of course, that’s only part of what Bryant means; he’s also saying that we are unaware of the myriad objects that don’t affect us in any way (e.g. intestinal bacteria when everything’s working right).
Thirdly, since a text is a "thing in itself" existing simpliciter, it's only one among a potentially myriad of things to which must be added the nonhuman, insensate, even robot objects. Bryant's completely undermined any notion of 'humanism' as a superordinate concept where Joy at least can entertain contrasting ideals. There's an unmistakable flattening of the metaphysical playing field here. In this radical 'posthumanity' objects live as 'ontic' equals, materially vital & meaningful to us and to each other only to the extent that they reveal their 'differences'. (We can set aside the technical aspects of this 'flat ontology' inference)
JBR: Yes, exactly, exactly. OOO is profoundly non- (tho ***not*** anti-) anthropormorphic. Tho, as noted above, not all are agreed on flat ontology.
What are the implications for literary criticism? Bryant may have provided his answer to that in the interesting "The Principle of Translation" section of "OP" where he states "there can be no object that is a mere vehicle for the acting differences of another object", destroying at a stroke the notion of authorial agency or any sense in which texts can serve as carriers of meaning.
JBR: While I have problems with the notion of authorial agency – I’m a traditionalist on this – it seems to me, as a writer, that an author is often the worst reader of her text – and one with no control over its social reception and significance, once it’s out in public, I asked Levi about meaning in a comment left at his blog post and I think he understands something different by meaning than either you or I. I think there’s no doubt that texts do carry meanings, tho it is difficult to say quite what this “means.” See the very beginning of A Thousand Plateaus …
Tradition goes by the wayside. Since meanings cannot be transported through traditional avenues, literary transmission must be understood as a radicalization of the notion of 'affectivity' that's consonant with Bryant's "Year O" premise.
JBR: tradition goes by the wayside? I mean, isn’t affectivity via what you call something like “the lyric self’s voice” (which may or may not have anything to do with authorial intention) about as traditional a way of literary (or any artistic, religious, etc) effect as could be imagined? But that may be beside the point. I think your notion of “traditional avenues” is something we never quite got to in our previous discussion. And I feel that it ties into your “benchmarks, or standards” or whatever you want to call them
More specifically,
‘translation’ should not be understood as a hermeneutic concept, but as an ontological concept.‘ Transportation’ refers to the action of one object on another object. Not all transportations are of a causal variety, so it is important to employ terms capable of both capturing causality while allowing for other sorts of exercises of action. For example, the manner in which I am affected by a work of art differs from the manner in which a flower transports the differences of sunlight. And these manners of translating differences again differ from the manner in which the ocean transports the differences of the moon.
Fourthly, not just objects in the world but it follows from Bryant's 'onticology' that literary criticisms have been flattened as well. It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered.
JBR: Re: “It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered”, I don’t understand how it could be otherwise.
In fact, to call these literary interpretations in the first place, loaded with all their traditional Yeatsian lore, is to trump "any differences that might be contributed by objects independent of language." The differences in Yeatsian interpretation are not radical enough since any weighing of alternative readings will by nature privilege (or act as if it would like to privilege) one over another.
JBR: Yes, of course. One of the first problems I had with OOO was over its implications for “politics” – used broadly … Turns out that everyone involved in OOO has very specific “politics”, i.e. an interpretation of, and desire for, reality that they privilege. Ontology might be flat; but that doesn’t mean the end of ethics. When questioned about this the standard OOO response seems to be something like, “of course humans anthromorphize; pencils pencilomorphize, rocks rockomorphize” etc etc – and yes, they know they’re speaking metaphorically, that is, literarily.
Strictly literary readings of Yeats' poem—by which we mean one that's too human-centric & excludes its possible impact, say, on nonhuman objects, like robots— are too exclusive given the existence (as per the αρχή or the primary 'ontic' principle of an object-oriented ontology) of "inter-ontic relations or all interactions between objects", which is to say that in the act of translating "Second Coming" we exclude the possibility that the poem (enjoying the same 'ontic' status as the rest of the world) can just as materially translate us.
JBR: I don’t think **any** translations are excluded. Everything translates everything and each thing is translated by each other thing are not mutually exclusive. Poems translate us and we translate poems, at the same time the chair we’re sitting in as we read translates us and vice-versa, and the air we’re breathing as we read translates us and vice-versa and every bit of knowledge in our brain, e.g. Aristotle, Longinus, Arnold, Deleuze, etc etc, translates us as we read and vice-versa, and the war in Afghanistan translates us as we read and vice-versa, and the shape of the book, and the color of the paper, and the ambient temperature, and so on and so on … the deal is, it’s never just an encounter between us and some bare text.
An encounter with the 'differences' of Yeatsian poetry can spell changes from which we may never recover.
JBR: I should hope so! Tho he’s not much read in contemporary poetry circles these days, he should be, and will be again (tho I know that’s not what you’re getting at here …)
Here's a meeting of ontology and poetry that I find particularly interesting. There are some problems with the SR/OOO as I've found it (and my reading of the literature has so far been rather limited), as well as some very real methodological strengths, that I'd like address in my next post.
Here's a meeting of ontology and poetry that I find particularly interesting. There are some problems with the SR/OOO as I've found it (and my reading of the literature has so far been rather limited), as well as some very real methodological strengths, that I'd like address in my next post.
JBR: The main thing I’m trying to say it that I don’t think we have an either / or here: either Arnoldian humanism and values or no values whatsoever. I think what we have is, as Joy has it, and as I tried to say in my postscript, and attempt to find a better humanism, which keeps what still lives in the tradition (however defined) and tries to improve on it, to further democratize humanism and all other isms (rockism, pencilism), to make life better for ALL of us. To quote Deleuze/Guattari, it’s not or, it’s and.
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