Call It: Thoughts on the Coin Toss Scene in No Country for Old Men

Anton Chigurh teaches a philosophical point to an elderly man 

who owns a gas station in No Country for Old Men (2007)

 

 

I. 

 

I'm not alone in admiring the 2007 film directed by the Coen brothers, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel of the same title [1]. And I'm probably not the only one whose favourite scene in the movie is the one set in a gas station, involving a tossed coin ...

 

In this scene, fatalistic psychopath and assassin Anton Chigurh - played by everybody's favourite Spanish actor Javier Bardem - terrorises the elderly proprieter of the gas station, obliging him to stake his life on one toss of a coin: click here.     

 

 

II. 

 

There are many aspects we could comment on in this scene; Chigurh's contempt for the banal nature of small talk upon which human interaction is founded and, indeed, the small, pitiful nature of most lives, for example. Or how it is Bardem manages to convey such mocking malevolence and menace in his performance; is it the voice? is it the look on his face? is it the haircut? 

 

But it's what Chigurh says about the coin - a quarter, dated 1958 - that most interests. He says that it has been travelling through space and time for twenty-two years (the film is set in 1980), just to be flipped and slammed on a counter in order to determine what happens next. 

 

The coin exists, in other words, in all its here and nowness, in all it's thingness and dual nature (head or tails) and although of little monetary value, it's invested with the greatest weight at that moment.  

 

And that's fascinating when you think about it. But then, of course, the same is true of any other object; they all have an astonishing presence and some queer relation to us; our fate and theirs is inextricably linked [2].

 

And that's why we should treat all objects with a certain respect and never unthinkingly put a lucky quarter in our pocket, where it will become just another coin: which it is.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In fact, the movie was not only a huge commercial and critical success, but won numerous awards, including four Oscars, three BAFTAs, and two Golden Globes. It would surprise me if there's anyone who doesn't like this film. 

 

[2] Having said that, we need to be wary of slipping into a lazy relationism in which we view objects only in terms of their connections (particularly their connections to us) and forget about their radical non-connectedness (i.e., their withdrawn nature).  

  

 

Notes on Byung-Chul Han's 'Non-things' (Part 1)

 

Polity Press (2022) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Once upon a time, to value material objects - or things - was seen as some kind of moral failure; a sign that one lacked spiritual refinement; that one was greedy, vulgar, and superficial.

 

But times have changed and, today, more and more people are waking up to the fact that if they wish to do more than live their entire lives in a virtual universe, then they had better find a way to reconnect with actual objects which provide a (relatively) stable physical environment in which to dwell and encounter other beings.      

 

Philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han has been telling us this for some time now and, in his new book, he describes how the terrestrial order is disappearing before our very eyes; that is to say, how the world of things is being rapidly replaced by a digital realm of Undinge. 

 

Not only does digitalisation disembody the world, it abolishes memory, as the Japanese author Yōko Ogawa foresaw in her 1994 novel Hisoyaka na Kesshō [b] - a work that Han nods to in the preface to his new book, although, as he points out, in contrast to her fictional dystopia, "we do not live in a totalitarian regime whose memory police brutally rob us of our things and memories" [viii], it is, rather, "our intoxication by communication and information that makes things disappear" [viii]. 

 

In other words - and this is the main argument of the book - non-things obscure actual objects, including human beings, draining them of physical presence as they effectively become ghosts in the machine: "We no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud." [1]          

 

 

II. 

 

The old tree at the bottom of the garden - or that little wooden table which has stood in the corner of the frontroom for as long as you can remember - these things provide a calm centre to the world and stabilise our lives by providing a level of familiarity and continuity that you won't find in the frenzied virtual realm. 

 

Even the so-called internet of things, is really just an attempt to turn things into information terminals. Similarly, 3D printers "devalue the being of things" [3], transforming them into "the material derivatives of information" [3] - simulated objects which you can interact with but never touch or hold tight (not that we still possess hands). 

 

It's impossible to be Heideggerian in the land of non-things: for Dasein dwells in the terrestrial order of things. The smart home is really just a smart prison allowing ever-greater surveillance of our lives; we are being incarcerated, says Han, in the infosphere - and its happening in the name of greater freedom (not the freedom to act, but the freedom to choose; the freedom of the consumer). 

Another thing that is vanishing, is truth - remember that? It seems we don't have time for it any longer: "In our post-factual culture of excitement, communication is dominated by affects and emotions." [6] Spend a few minutes on Twitter and you'll soon find that out. 

 

Not only do we have no memories of the past, we cannot promise the future; as Nietzsche recognised, we are no longer capable of making commitments or being faithful - again, these things require too much discipline, too much hard work and too much time. We're too playful - and too pain averse - to practice even the slightest degree of cruelty towards the self. 

Those who still have hands and feel themselves able to act, have a duty to safeguard those old things in which memories are stored (to resist the urge to sell everything on eBay) - and to self-harm ...

 

III.

 

So: is it better to own a small record collection, or be able to access unlimited music online? How you answer this question tells us a good deal about what sort of human being you are (and not simply what generation you belong to). 

 

Possession, as Han says, "relates to the paradigm of the thing" [13]. 

 

Those like Klaus Schwab who think access rather than possession is the key to happiness, are not, it seems, interested in forming intense libidinal ties to objects. Indeed, some of these people are "no longer able to dwell with things or to imbue them with life" [13]. 

 

Personally, I love objects from the past - particularly from childhood (not that I have many) - even objects which have no value, interest, or meaning to other people (such as an old sea-shell). As Han says, possession is characterised by intimacy and is psychologically charged: "Things in my possession are vessels filled with emotions and recollections." [15]

 

In an interesting passage, he continues:

 

"The history that things acquire in the course of being used for a long time gives them souls and turns them into things close to the heart. Only discreet things, however, can be animated by intensive libidinal ties [...] Today's consumer goods are indiscreet, intrusive and over-expressive. They come loaded with prefabricated ideas and emotions that impose themselves on the consumer. Hardly anything of the consumer's life enters into them." [15]

 

This, sadly, is particularly true of children's toys and games (not that modern parents seem to care or the youngsters know what they are being denied). But it's also true of books, which have also lost their thingliness and their fate: 

 

"An e-book is not a thing, but information; it has an altogether different status of being. Even if we have it at our disposal, it is not a possession. It is something to which we have access. [...] It lacks the auratic distance from which an individual fate could speak to us [...] and it does not allow for the formation of intense ties. [...] E-books are faceless and without history. They may be read without the use of the hands. There is a tactile element in the turning of a book's pages that is constitutive of every relationship. Without bodily touch, no ties can emerge." [16] 

 

 

IV. 

 

Talking about the heavy weight of fate ... We now come to a chapter in Han's book on smartphones; in a nutshell, he doesn't like 'em. Like Walter Benjamin, he prefers the big, heavy phones from back in the day, which had "an aura of fate-like power" [18] about them. 

 

You don't get that with a smartphone - you get something small and light that you can put in your pocket; something that makes you feel in charge and connected to a non-resistant world that is at your fingertips 24/7 (the digital illusion of total availability). 

 

Meanwhile, what passes for and remains of the real world is desecrated as smartphone users retreat into their own self-enclosed space, where all is image and information. We carry the smartphone, but the smartphone enframes us, depriving reality of its presence and human beings of lived experience.

Oh, and don't get him started on the smooth design! Something he has previously compared with the trend for Brazilian waxing and the art of Jeff Koons (as discussed elsewhere on this blog - click here, for example). 

 

Their shiny smoothness shouldn't disguise the fact that smartphones are essentially the "devotional objects of the neoliberal regime" [24]; a regime that is itself smart enough to know that by serving our needs and exploiting our freedom it can exercise complete control.  

 

Whilst they may well function as devotional objects - i.e. a digital form of rosary - they are not transitional objects (i.e. a digital form of teddy bear or security blanket). And that's because they do not represent the other - rather, they are an extension of ourselves and the relationship we have with them is narcissistic. We might better think of smartphones as autistic objects (i.e. hard sources of sensation which ultimately destroy empathy and intensify our loneliness).     

 

 

V.

In a post from October 2013 on selfies, I said this:

 

"I have no wish to add my voice to those who suggest the selfie is evidence of either the empty narcissism of today's youth, or a sign that they have been pornified and suffer from low self-esteem. I understand the arguments put forward by concerned commentators, but fear that they often collapse into precisely the sort of moral hysteria that greets everything to do with technology, sex, and the play of images." [c]

So it's a little awkward - if I wish to appear consistent - to now agree with Byung-Chul Han's critique of selfies: "A selfie is an exhibited face without aura. It lacks 'melancholic' beauty. It it characterized by digital cheerfulness. [...] A selfie is not a thing ..." [33]

 

However, he's right that an old (analogue) photo lovingly kept safe in an album is a thing in a way that a digital image stored on one's phone is not: "Because of its material nature, it is fragile and exposed to the processes of ageing and decay." [29]

 

And he's right also to say: "In digital photography, alchemy gives way to mathematics. It disenchants photography." [31] Worse, it eliminates the referent - i.e., kills the thing it seeks to represent - and instead of capturing something of the real world, it generates a "new, expanded reality that does not exist, a hyper-reality that no longer corresponds to reality" [32]. 

 

If e-books have no history and smartphones have no fate, then digital images have no destiny and selfies have no secrecy. They don't deserve to be printed - only quickly viewed and then deleted. Snapchat is an instrument of what Han calls perfect justice and "represents the culmination of instantaneous digital communication" [34].

 

The problem I have with a lot of what Han says here is related to the question of the human face, something he regards far more positively than I do. Also, he wishes for photography (and human life in general) to be accorded a certain seriousness and depth. 

 

Thus, he hates selfies for "announcing the disappearance of the kind of human being who is burdened by destiny and history" [36] and for giving expression to "a form of life that devotes itself playfully to the moment" [36]. But I think that's why I like them - I don't want to see people - especially young people - looking mournfully into the camera like beasts of burden weighed down by the spirit of gravity.   

 

VI.

 

I like this idea: "Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason that it cannot get goosebumps." [37] 

 

In other words, AI lacks the "affective-analogue dimension, the capacity to be emotionally affected, which lies beyond the reach of data and information" [37]. 

 

Not only do heartless machines lack passion, but they aren't prone to moods either - i.e., they can't attune themselves to the world in the way human beings can and so cannot access the world (or read the room, as it were). 

 

Oh, and they're also deaf, which is a problem, as genuine thinking requires the ability to listen. 

 

Which is all very reassuring, particularly for Heideggerians keen to reaffirm Dasein's uniqueness. Han will be telling us next that robots lack spirit ... 

 

"Artificial intelligence may compute very quickly, but it lacks spirit." [38] 

 

See - what did I tell you? 

 

Without a pinch of Geist, all AI can do is assemble Big Data which will provide knowledge of a rudimentary kind, but won't reveal unto you the secrets of the universe, or even allow you to understand the results of your own data gathering. 

 

Human thinking may have its limitations, but, at its best - when it has become a form of erotics and seems to some a kind of madness or idiocy - then it is more than mere problem solving: "It brightens and clears the world. It brings forth an altogether other world." [43]

 

And the main danger that arises from AI, "is that human thinking will adapt to it and itself become mechanical" [43].     

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022). The work was originally published in German as Undinge: Umbrüche der Lebenswelt (Ullstein Verlag, 2021).

 

[b] This novel by Yōko Ogawa has been translated into English by Stephen Snyder and published as The Memory Police, (Vintage, 2020). 

 

[c] To read the post on selfies and the rise of the Look Generation in full, click here.  

This post continues in part two, which can be accessed by clicking here ...

Notes on an Essay by Stéphane Sitayeb: 'Sexualized Objects in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: Eros and Thanatos'

Fragment of stained glass (19th century)

7.2 x 3.2 cm (whole object) 

Royal Collection Trust

 

 

I. 

 

Stéphane Sitayeb's essay on sexualised objects in D. H. Lawrence's short fiction [1] is a fascinating read if, like me, you are interested in such things. 

 

However, I'm not sure I share his insistence on giving material items an all-too-human symbolic interpretation. Sometimes, a white stocking is a white stocking and that's precisely wherein its allure resides for the fetishist and object-oriented philosopher, if not, perhaps, for the literary scholar keen to open a "new figurative level of reading".  

 

And his claim that Lawrence resolved to "awaken his readers' spirituality by inducing a shock therapy paradoxically based on physicality, with explicit references to sexualized items and licentious tendencies", is not one I agree with either. In fact, I don't think Lawrence gave a fig for his readers' spirituality. 

 

And, again, just because an object stands upright, that doesn't always mean it has phallic significance; even Freud recognised that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and doesn't represent anything, or always express unconscious human desire. Thus, when Sitayeb says that "Lacanian readings of Lawrence have fathomed the hidden meaning of phallic objects in his fiction", I want to beat him about the head with a large dildo [2].

     

 

II. 

 

Moving on, we discover that Sitayeb wishes to discuss objects in terms of Eros and Thanatos; i.e., as objects that lead to fulfilment on the one hand, and as objects that lead to self-destruction on the other. He rightly points out, however, that Lawrence's work demonstrates a complex connection between Love and Death and thus his fictitious objects "stimulate at once procreation and destruction, creativity and annihilation". 

 

The result is that death becomes sexy and sex becomes decadent and perverse; not so much tied to an ideal of love, as to numerous paraphlias, often involving objects or the objectification of body parts. Sitayeb mentions several of these, but by no means exhausts the number of kinky elements in Lawrence's work (elements which I have discussed elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: see here, for example). 

 

 

III.

 

Sitayeb's reading of 'The Captain's Doll' in terms of agalmatophilia and pygmalionism is good. Perhaps not as good as mine in terms of dollification - click here - but good nonetheless. He certainly makes some interesting points, such as this one: "The interchangeability between subject and object is conveyed by an inversion of the invariable principles governing mechanic and organic matter." 

 

Similarly, his reading of 'Sun' is good, but not as good as mine: click here. Sitayeb still thinks Juliet's story simply involves an anthropomorphic type of sexuality and Lawrence's "conception of Nature as a macrocosm incorporating man", but it's far more important philosophically than that.   

 

As for 'The Thimble' - a short story that formed the basis of the 1922 novella The Ladybird - the ornate object in question is not first and foremost a symbol of unfulfilled sexual desire and Mrs. Hepburn's fiddling with it is not a form of symbolic masturbation. This lazy and old-fashioned psychosexual reading just bores the pants off me and I really can't fathom why Sitayeb bothers to refer to it.   

 

 

IV. 

 

Sometimes, Sitayeb says things that I do not understand: "Lawrence studied the escalation of desire for both objects and subjects in the presence of imitation and rivalry patterns." But that's probably due to my ignorance of theories to do with mimesis on the one hand (I've certainly never read a word of René Girard) and my suspicion of the concept on the other (I have read a fair deal of Derrida and Deleuze). Nevertheless, I enjoyed Sitayeb's reading of the love triangle in The Fox [3]. 

 

I also enjoyed his excellent reading of 'The White Stocking' - another story involving a love triangle, but this time one "not only composed of human objects of desire", but also including a material item "sexualized to express an unsatisfied ambition such as an impossible sexual act" (i.e., the white stocking). Sitayeb says that this is more precisely termed a split-object triangle and I'll take his word for that. 

 

Sitayeb also notes:    

 

"In the absence of Elsie’s secret lover [...] the eponymous object acts as a reminder of a passionate adulterous dance and a catalyst reactivating the ecstasy of forbidden desire. In the presence of the object, Elsie is invested with a sexual energy, even away from her lover." 

 

And that's true, although I'm not sure I think Elsie vain and superficial simply because she likes silk stockings and jewellery; I mean, who doesn't? But then, having said that, I did call her a 'pricktease with pearl earrings' in a case study published on Torpedo the Ark four years ago: click here.

 

 

V.

 

Ultimately, what Sitayeb wants to suggest is that within consumer society, objects - be they directly or indirectly eroticised - become dangerous shape-shifting agents, as commodity culture becomes increasingly death-driven. And he thinks that's what Lawrence illustrates in 'Things', a tale which tells of the syllomania of an American couple addicted to collecting beautiful objects:

 

"Through their syllomania - the pathological need to acquire and hoard objects [...] - the couple [...] indirectly socializes and sexualizes the various objects that they have purchased to decorate their home by replacing their usual libido sexualis with a libido oeconomicus, thus linking Eros to Thanatos."

 

Sitayeb continues:

 

"Owning or consuming objects procures an immediate and transient feeling of satisfaction verging on ecstasy [...] which is nonetheless quickly replaced by an impression of void when their desire for objects becomes insatiable."      

 

Again, that's an insightful take on Lawrence's work and I was intrigued to see how Sitayeb related this to Baudrillard's thinking on the collusion between subjects and objects, the latter being an author of special interest to me, as torpedophiles will be aware:

 

"Baudrillard's main three arguments to account for men's attraction to trinkets are staged in Lawrence's short story. Both philosopher and author highlighted 1) the escapist function of objects of desire, since they represent a spatial and temporal vehicle transporting their owners into the past of various regions and cultures; 2) the feeling of conquest through the act of collecting, as the collector becomes conqueror; and 3) the access to higher social classes, a pose that D. H. Lawrence evokes with satirical overtones through the detached heterodiegetic narrator of 'Things'."

 

Expanding on this, Sitayeb writes:

 

"Far from attractive to the reader, the couple's bric-à-brac is presented as an overload of useless items due to an accumulation where all the objects are juxtaposed in a concatenation of long compound substantives preceded by adjectives evoking several national origins with little coherence. Just as every decorative item is deprived of real functionality, the words to name them also consist of mere signifiers for the reader, which confirms Baudrillard's idea that the difference between simple objects and objects of desire lies in "'the object's detachment from its functional, experienced reality'." [4]

 

Sitayeb concludes:

 

"Although Lawrence's ideology in 'Things' is comparable to Baudrillard's, the former interpreted the phenomenon as collective, not personal, warning his contemporary readers against the loss of identity resulting from the vain desire for objects, which he perceived as a post-traumatic stigma of a World War One."

 

 

VI.

 

The problem, ultimately, that I have with Sitayeb's reading of Lawrence is that he seems to subscribe to a notion of what Meillassoux termed correlationism - i.e., the idea that "we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" [5].

Why do I say that - and why does it matter? 

Well, I say it because Sitayeb posits a two-way process wherein the desiring human mind shapes the material universe or world of objects, whilst the latter either fulfil or destroy us, and this permanent and privileged relationship is a form of correlationism, is it not? 

 

And this matters because it serves to make reality mind-dependent and I find such anthropocentrism not only untenable but objectionable - be it in Lawrence's work, or readings of Lawrence's work.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Stéphane Sitayeb, 'Sexualized Objects in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: Eros and Thanatos', Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 71, (Autumn 2018), pp. 133-147. Click here to read on openedition.org. All lines quoted are from the online version of the essay.

 

[2] It should also be noted that the phallus is not the same as an erect penis; a confusion that we can trace all the way back at least as far as Kate Millett, who claims in her Sexual Politics (1970), that Lawrence is guilty of transforming  his own model of masculinity into a misogynistic mystery religion founded upon the homoerotic worship of the penis. That's unfair and mistaken, as Lawrence himself emphasises that when he writes of the phallus, he is not simply referring to a mere member belonging to a male body and male agent. For Lawrence, the phallus is a genuine symbol of relatedness which forms a bridge not only between lovers, but to the future. Thus fear of the phallus - and frenzied efforts to nullify it in the name of a castrated spirituality, not least by confusing it with the penis - betray a great horror of being in touch. 

      Writing fifty years after Millett, one might have hoped Sitayeb would've not made this same error. I would suggest he see my Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), where I discuss all this in relation to the case of Lady Chatterley, pp. 233-246. 

 

[3] My recent take on this novella by Lawrence can be found by clicking here. 

 

[4] Sitayeb is quoting from Baudrillard's Le Système des objets (1968), trans. James Benedict as The System of Objects, (Verso, 1996). 

      For me, Baudrillard's later work on objects (in relation, for example, to his theory of seduction) is far more interesting; here, he is still too much influenced by Marxist ideas and basically offers a political critique of consumer capitalism - as if, somehow, the subject might still differentiate themselves from the world of things and resist the evil genuis of the object.

 

[5] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude,  trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008), p. 5.

On the Quickness and Allure of Objects

Phoebe Stadler: Saucy (c. 1920)

collections.vam.ac.uk

Was ist Schnelligkeit? asks Heide. And it's an interesting question.

I suppose, for me at least, the quality of quickness is something I understand in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence and in terms of an object-oriented ontology.

In his essay 'The Novel' (1925), Lawrence describes the quick as an invisible flame of impersonal presence that flickers in the words and deeds of the individual. Unless, that is, they belong to the legions of the undead; living corpses with ready-made sensations who drive to work, chew their fast food, stare at the screen, and engage in idle talk that merely passes the word along (what Heidegger calls Gerede).

These men and women are awfully lifelike, but lifeless; for they have no quickness, writes Lawrence.

It's important to be clear on this point: the corpse-bodies Lawrence fears have not become less than human, but, strange as it may sound - unless one hears this phrase with Nietzschean ears - all too human (which is to say, all too limited and cut-off). Quickness is, therefore, certainly not the same as human being; in fact, it's the non-human element of man which is found in all things.

Lawrence likes to call it the God-flame, but I prefer to describe it as object-allure, if only because I find his religious language unhelpful and off-putting.* Either way, it means we have two types of object: (i) those that are quick (though not necessarily alive in the conventional organic sense of the term) and (ii) those that are dead (again, not in the sense that they lack or have lost life, but in the sense that they aren't quick or very alluring - and so don't really affect us in the same way).

Lawrence writes:

"In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn't even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead." 

Thus, interestingly - according to Lawrence - there are degrees of quickness; though he claims not to know how or why this is so, even if he knows for certain that it's the case. Probably, he speculates, the quickness of the quick lies in a "certain weird relationship" between objects; one that is "fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful".

Again, I would discuss this relatedness in terms of allure; objects attract and lead other objects, including ourselves, into temptation and it's in this way that we and all things come into touch. The more they entice us, the stronger their allure, the quicker they are; the more we come into touch - with "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper"** - the quicker we are.

Of course, even dead objects retain some power of attraction and can seduce us - they like to be tickled as Lawrence puts it - but ultimately they lead us not into touch but into the void. Dead objects, in other words, tease but don't deliver the goods; they are indifferent to those doing the tickling and drain the quick of their quickness. They are strange attractors, like black holes.       

Notes

* I like the word allure as it is drawn from the language of seduction, which is the appropriate language in which to discuss objects philosophically. One might also note that the modern English word quick is of Germanic origin and is related not only to the Dutch term kwiek, meaning sprightly, but the German word keck, meaning saucy; another term belonging to the language of seduction. In sum, quickness goes beyond merely a question of speed - it's more than Schnelligkeit - just as it's more than vitality.

** With the use of a list like this, composed of seemingly random objects, Lawrence wishes to show that there are no absolutes; all things exist relative to one another upon a flat ontological field and/or within a general economy of the whole. We can call this a democracy of objects, like Levi Bryant, or a democracy of touch, like Lawrence.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177-90. Lines quoted p. 183.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Cry of the Masses', Poems Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 511-12.

Graham Harman: The Third Table (Synopsis and Critique)

Picasso: La Table (1919)

I. Synopsis

The Third Table (2012) is a fascinating short piece by the object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman. Whilst providing a convenient summary of the four principles of OOO, the author primarily wishes to offer us his reading of A. S. Eddington's well-known parable of the two tables; the first of which is the familiar table of everyday life; the second of which is the quantum table as understood by physicists.

For Eddington, the latter table is more real than the former, which, although visible and tangible, is essentially a 'strange compound of external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice'. You might be able to eat your supper off this first table, but that proves nothing to those who subscribe to the remorseless logic of modern science.    

For Harman, however, both humanists who insist on the everday thing and physicists who care only for quantum reality, are equally mistaken - and for precisely the same reason. For both are engaged in reductionism, even though they reduce the object in opposite directions: 

"The scientist reduces the table downward to tiny particles invisible to the eye; the humanist reduces it upward to a series of effects on people and other things. To put it bluntly, both of Eddington's tables are utter shams that confuse the table with its internal and external environments, respectively. The real table is in fact a third table lying between these two others."

Interestingly, it's not traditional philosophers who are best placed to understand this, in Harman's view, but artists: for artists aren't obsessed with reducing tables "either to quarks and electrons or to table-effects on humans". They are concerned, rather, with tables and other objects - sunflowers, nude women, pickled sharks, etc. - as things in themselves with their own autonomous and inexhaustible reality. And they know that the real table "is a genuine [substantial] reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter with it". 

That is to say, the third table "emerges as something distinct from its own components and also withdraws behind all its external effects". If this sounds vaguely Aristotelian, that's because it is; although Harman assures us that it's Aristotle with knobs on (i.e., given a "properly weird interpretation" - weird being one of the privileged terms within Harman's vocabulary).       

The problem that some will immediately identify, is that by locating der dritte Tisch in a space between the first and second types of table, Harman posits an object that lies forever outside the scope of human access; "a table that can be verified in no way at all", as he cheerfully concedes. Indeed, Harman suggests that practitioners of OOO should pride themselves on this fact:

"Any philosophy is unworthy of the name if it attempts to convert objects into the conditions by which they can be known or verified. The term philosophia ... famously means not 'wisdom' but 'love of wisdom'. The real is something that cannot be known, only loved."

Object-oriented philosophers - inasmuch as they remain lovers, not knowers - are thus old school philosophers. In a lovely passage, Harman continues:

"This does not mean that access to the table is impossible, only that it must be indirect. Just as erotic speech works when composed of hint, allusion, and innuendo rather than of declarative statements and clearly articulated propositions ... thinking is not thinking unless it realizes that its approach to objects can only be oblique."

Weird (or speculative) realists cannot be downward scientific reducers, nor upward humanistic reducers - they can only be hunters, forever chasing "ghostly objects withdrawing from all human and inhuman access, accessible only by allusion and seducing us by means of allure".

As suggested earlier, it may be artists who best fit this description:

"For on the one hand art does not function by dissolving ... [things] into their subatomic underpinnings. Quite obviously, artists do not provide a theory of physical reality, and Eddington's second table is the last thing they seek. But on the other hand they also do not seek the first table, as if the arts merely replicated the objects of everyday life or sought to create effects on us."

Art does something else, something more; it both establishes the existence of objects as things in themselves and alludes to objects that can never be made fully present. And philosophy, concludes Harman, would be wise if it gave up its pretensions of being a rigorous science and transformed itself into a uniquely vigorous art, thereby regaining its original character as a form of Eros:

"In some ways this erotic model is the basic aspiration of object-oriented philosophy: the only way, in the present philosophical climate, to do justice to the love of wisdom that makes no claim to be an actual wisdom."

Despite the obvious criticisms that can be made, I have to admit to finding Harman's thought very enticing and would happily pull up a chair at his third table in order to share a bottle of wine or eat some figs. Having said that, I do have a couple of concerns ...


II. Critique

Firstly, Harman rather overdoes the praise of artists - though he's by no means the first philosopher to do so and his flattery has earned him recognition as one of the hundred most influential figures on the international art scene; something he seems inordinately proud of, compensating as it does perhaps for the fact that many philosophers choose to ignore or dismiss his work entirely.

Still more problematic is the star-struck nature of Harman's boast in the introduction to his latest book that object-oriented ontology has attracted not only the interest of artists and architects, but also entertainers and actors. The charismatic nature of OOO, he claims, "has even captured the notice of celebrities ... with the popular musician Björk having engaged in correspondence with OOO author Timothy Morton, and the actor Benedict Cumberbatch having listened attentively to one of my lectures at a private residence in London".        

This could possibly be the most embarrassing (and shameful) line ever written by a philosopher.  For as Nick Land once said: Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked. I would therefore encourage Professor Harman to worry less about sucking-up to a pretentious singer-songwriter and a big posh sod with plums in his mouth, and concentrate instead on persuading colleagues within the world of philosophy to take his writing more seriously.

Secondly, whilst I agree that philosophy should always be conceived in terms of Eros, I see it as a far more perverse and transgressive form of love than Harman; one born of disease and the madness of unconditional desire, or what Land terms libidinal materialism. 

Thus, whereas he thinks of objects as rather shy and retiring - almost coy - and insists we must talk about them with poetic metaphors and maybe a dash of saucy innuendo (OOO-er missus), I think of objects as promiscuous and obscene; things that don't just seek to seduce us from the shadows, but which indecently expose themselves and seek to ravish us in broad daylight if given the opportunity.

However, as I'm not one of the top hundred thinkers on anybody's list and have never had Sherlock listening attentively to one of my lectures, there's really no reason why readers should favour my (equally unverifiable) view over Harman's - unless, of course, it pleases them to do so ...    

Notes
  
A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, (MacMillan, 1929).

Graham Harman, The Third Table / Der Dritte Tisch, Number 085 in the dOCUMENTA (13) series '100 Notes - 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken', (Hatje Cantz, 2012). Lines quoted are from pp. 6-15.

Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, (Pelican Books, 2018), p. 8. 

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, (Routledge, 1992).

Technosexual Futures with Reference to the Case of Tanya (RealDoll 2 Configuration 1)

Tanya: a second generation RealDoll

For her full details click here. 

Technosexuality refers to a rapidly evolving phenomenon that includes erotic fascination with engendered robots and artificially intelligent sex-dolls. For many, it is and will always remain a niche activity amongst a small number of slightly creepy men, mostly in the United States and Japan, who can afford to purchase a mechanical bride. For the love of a good woman doesn't come cheap, even when that woman is made in a factory; the RealDoll shown above, for example, Tanya, not only has gel implants in her pendulous 32F breasts, but a price tag of over $7000.

And, if you want to download the new Harmony Artificial Intelligence App released earlier this year to enable Tanya to better cater for all your personal needs, that'll cost an additional annual subscription. But it's only a small price to pay, surely, for something that allows you to become-Pygmalion and create a unique personality for your silicone lover, controlling how happy, shy, or talkative she is. What's more, as an added bonus, the Harmony app also enables users to create a fully customizable 3D avatar. 
 
For those futurists and transhumanists who get excited by this sort of thing, technosexuality is mankind's erotic destiny and they insist we'll all have artificial lovers by the middle of this century, transforming what is presently regarded as a kinky (and, in some cases, criminal) form of love into a perfectly legitimate and normalized practice.

I have to confess, however, that I still have my doubts about this - even though it's certainly true that increasing numbers of men and women are pleasuring themselves with crude robotic devices, such as vibrators and mechanical vaginas. And even though it's also true that the quest to produce full-sized, fully-interactive female sexbots is simply a further development of a trend (and a fantasy) that has been unfolding for many years.

The problem, for those who dream of a technosexual utopia, is that many people find the sexy cyborgs presently in development profoundly troubling, problematizing as they do the fundamental distinctions between natural and artificial, human and machine, alive and dead.

There will almost certainly be individuals strongly opposed to the idea of sexual congress with beings born of the pornographic imagination and assembled in the Uncanny Valley; men and women keen to preserve the unique onto-moral status of humanity and the purity of love as something existing between consenting adults - not man and child, or man and beast, and certainly not man and sexbot, no matter how lifelike and human the latter may appear.

Even David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots (2007), can’t quite disguise his discomfort. Thus, whilst happy to speculate about technosexual futures, he doesn't actually advocate erotic relations between humans and robots, nor does he wish to suggest that sex between two people will become outmoded. In fact, Levy claims that only misfits and the sexually inadequate might willingly opt for exclusive relations with non-human objects, thus reaffirming a belief in authentic, healthy, natural sex whilst denigrating those who choose to love differently. 

Personally, I don't really have any objections or qualms about sex with synthetic lovers, though I do find the desire for techno-intimacy somewhat perplexing; I can't see why you would want a sentient machine to moan with pleasure one minute, only to then start moaning that you never listen to them or ask about their day the next.

Surely one of the main advantages of a conventional (non-sentient) doll is that it doesn't have thoughts and feelings and doesn't get moody or have headaches. One is tempted to suggest to those who insist on knowing the full girlfriend experience, that they date the girl next door and allow the alluring Tanya to remain blissfully unaware and withdrawn into the perfect silence and impersonal mystery of her own being as an object.

To make her whisper the words I love you is to collapse technosexuality into sentimental humanism ...


Note: readers who are interested in this topic might like to see a recent news report on RT America, with Trinity Chavez, discussing the ethics of sexbots: click here. 

Nothing Important Happened Today (On Revolutionary Events)

King George III (1738-1820)

One of my favourite stories concerns George III who, on July 4, 1776, wrote in his diary with regal indifference to unfolding events in the Colonies: Nothing important happened today. 

Royal biographers and historians - overly concerned with the facts as these people often are - insist that this is entirely false; one of those apocryphal stories that enters and continues to circulate within the popular imagination simply because people wish to believe it to be true. King George didn't even keep a diary, they protest, but, sadly for them, to no avail; even former Deputy Director of the FBI, Alvin Kersh, referenced this fictitious journal entry.         

I suppose, philosophically, why it interests is because it makes one question what constitutes an event of any description; that is to say, what has to happen for something to be recognised as a happening? 

Without necessarily wanting to posit an absolute ontological distinction, it's tempting to think of events as things that occur dynamically in time, contra objects that exist concretely in space. The cat that sits on the mat is an example of the latter; his grin, or the flick of his tail as he leaves the room, might better be thought of in terms of the former. But it could well be that events are simply unstable objects and objects monotonous events and that there is thus no essential metaphysical difference.

For Deleuze and Guattari, whom we might characterize as philosophers of the event, the task of philosophy is to invent concepts which express events, or, more precisely, extract them from the material facts of the world; i.e., concepts that allow one to engage with social and political reality in such a manner that one challenges received ideas and royal prerogative. 

No wonder, then, that George was thought keen to turn a blind eye to (revolutionary) events ...

Just Saying Something on Subjects and Objects

 

Cambridge Professor of Philosophy, Rae Langton, makes it very clear why she values people over objects. For whilst conceding that the former are a part of the phenomenal world of things, she insists that human beings (as subjects) have a uniquely rich inner life and a moral-rational capacity to make choices. To be an object, she writes, is to be something which isn't free; something that is stabilized and whose movements are all-too-predictable. She continues: 

"It is to be something incapable of the activities of knowledge, communication, love, respect. It is to be something that is merely a sensory appearance, something whose qualities are exhausted by how it can look, feel, sound, and taste to a perceiver. It is to be merely a body, something solid and extended in space. It is to be a tool, something whose value is merely instrumental, something which is a potential possession."

Obviously, as an object-oriented philosopher, I don't agree with this. For me, it's an anthropocentric conceit to believe that we belong to a superior ontological order to all other entities; be they organic or inorganic, natural or artificial, real or virtual objects. For me, our subjectivity is really just a peculiar way of being an object - much as life is simply a rare and unusual way of being dead (to paraphrase Nietzsche if I may). 

The question, I suppose, is why do so many thinkers like Rae Langton continue with this conceit? That is to ask, why do they continue to think of the object with such contempt and dogmatically privilege the position of the human subject?

Baudrillard, who has a far more interesting and philosophically provocative view of the object, provides us with a convincing explanation. Those who continue to support the fiction of an autonomous subject do so because it has "an economy and a history which is quite reassuring; it is the equilibrium between a will and a world ... the balancing principle of the universe". 

If we are more than mere objects, then we are not delivered up helplessly to a monstrous and chaotic universe of chance. Nor are we simply the unfortunate victims of surrounding forms or fascinating and fateful events that exist beyond our control.

In other words, to believe in ourselves as free-wheeling and free-willing subjects makes us feel safe and secure, as well as significant. That's comforting, but it's a lie. Perhaps a necessary lie that allows us to live and which it would be nihilistic to expose as such, but a lie nonetheless.

I'm just saying ...

Notes

Lines quoted from Rae Langton and Jean Baudrillard can be found in:

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 329. 

Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, (Pluto Press, 1999), p. 112.