I found the two main readings this week difficult, provocative, and deeply interesting. Both Scarry and Benjamin seem to be talking about the same thing, the “fetishization” or “animation” of the material world, but in very different ways. Benjamin’s approach is aphoristic, and has as much to do with the presentation as with the argument—that is, the titles of his aphorisms suggest objects, and the aphorisms themselves then appear as commentaries on, engagements with, or imaginative projections through the objects suggested. Some of these aphorisms are directly about objects (books, toys, architectural structures), but many of them are not, or only obliquely so, creating a richly ambiguous tension between the “object” and the “thought.”
Scarry on the other hand offers a cultural or philosophical analysis of “projection and reciprocation” as they function through artifacts, with particular emphases on how these work vis-à-vis pain and legality. Her account is complex, compelling, and rewarding, even if some of her conclusions seem premature (for example, a trial may in fact be much shorter than the events it tracks, if the events involved lasted over some years (297), some of her thought difficult to trace, and some of her claims unsubstantiated (e.g., that art objects are “self-announcing” (314). This seems rather to be a feature of artworks in a modern/western/bourgeois sense, not of artworks themselves. Artists have not always signed their works, they have not always created them individually, and there have been many ways of understanding creation that have privileged not the “inventedness” of the artwork but rather its “super-real” or metaphysical in-spiration). Still, Scarry was interesting enough I ran out and bought the whole book.
Scarry and Benjamin reminded me of some famous insects that haven't come up in class yet: "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality" (Marx, Capital chap7 sec1).
I think Scarry's structure of the artifact maintains this distinction (one that Derrida has shown us we ought not to take for granted) in separating out making-up from making-real. How much does she help us think about stones? Do they fall in with lightning in the category of things that are not (re)conceivable by humans? Her distinction, however, is useful thinking back to Caillois: to what extent is he describing processes of making up in the forms that appear in rock? Who is making up and making real these forms? Nature? What might it mean to trouble the possibilities of (formal) originality available in human making-up?
As is often the case, I'm not entirely sure what to make of the Benjamin. Perhaps it is useful to think of him as writing from an alternate awareness of object-worlds. Scarry suggests we only become aware of objects activities when they unexpectedly cease, when we stub our toes. Benjamin is perhaps more attentive to the way his world is populated, seeing, for instance, the ways page numbers hang over the characters of a novel. He wouldn't approve of a take home message, but it might be that "the faculty of imagination is the gift of interpolating into the infinitely small, of inventing, for every intensity, an extensiveness to contain its new, compressed fullness" (466).
Benjamin’s One-Way Street seems to be the perfect deployment of the theories put forth in The Storyteller; it displays accurate retellings of the marvelous without giving psychological connections. (148) The demarcation between on eliding a psychological recounting and forming of a story with “the handprints of the potter cling[ing] to a clay vessel” (149) became evident. In this sense, Benjamin’s writing truly becomes a one-way street, his stories intentions force elaborate rumination - all the time asking, “Is this what you were getting at?” with no response. But, perhaps, this action makes it a continuous street, with an explicit need for the reader.
Scarry speaks to the ethics of recounting, laboriously trying to construct an imminence of sentience in objects. But admittedly, she can only do so with a reliance on the human: through superstition, poetry, analysis, military. (287) While she makes great strides concerning scale and force, I wonder if it is possible to truly think in the register of “their own terms”, perhaps, the recognition of one “inanimate” object by another “inanimate” object. I guess, if a sentience is established, what effects does this have on human behavior - requirement of advocacy, etc.
“Objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us… We must compensate for their coldness with out warmth if they are not to freeze us to death, and handle their spiny forms with infinite dexterity if we are not to bleed to death” (454). In Benjamin’s One Way Street, shock, through language in particular, shifts sentience and experience, possibilities for connection, amidst an increasingly commodified, materially mediated world, where ambiguity and indifference solidify in new forms and materials, rousing greed. It is the connection between material and the imagination that ties Scarry to Benjamin here, where “only images in the mind vitalize the will” (466). Benjamin’s stamps, and their postmarks may best show the connection between these two readings. These stamps, “graphic cellular tissue” extend as relations, projected materialization. Here, the stamps and then the postmarks may recreate and reinvent our communication, and connection. Circulation further complicates this, pushing inspiration and imagination through travel, interaction. These stamps, with all their uses and properties, hold letters, words (generalized and specific), subject to criticism. And their meanings, gained through startle, are made communally. For Scarry, the work of the imagination, as connected to artifacts and materials extends processes of recognition and creation, similar to Benjamin’s explanation that the advertisement matters not as much as its reflection, as a continuation, multiplication, ongoing.
As readers, how should we walk along Benjamin’s street, where the material culture of industrial capitalism becomes an object-montage of cultural imaginaries. “Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands”, and in order to discover “new aspects of his inner self”, the reader must follow “the movement of his mind” (448). Benjamin’s attention to the child-like and dream-like imaginations evoke something about the way we might exist differently in our object-worlds. “Children produce their own small world of things within the greater one” (449); the child, reading, “mingles with the characters far more closely than grown-ups do” (463); for the “untidy child”, playing make-believe, “life is like a dream” (465). This is a call not for some reversion to naivety or innocence but, to me, speaks of a certain animation of the material world that is produced in following the movements of our minds; seeing, walking, reading differently; being attentive to the phantasmagoric quality of modern life in the city.
For Scarry, too, there must be an attention to the relationship between the material world and the human imagination. Indeed, “the project of understanding the nature of human responsibility will be assisted by coming to understand the human imagination” (306). As a model of the relations not between persons but “between persons and the realm of made objects”, Scarry’s work moves towards understanding how objects are made, and how they are animated: not only how we come to know them but how, in a sense, objects also come to know, to be sympathetic, to reciprocate (318). For Scarry, artifacts contain and expose the imagination, which in turn creates them. It is in this process of creation that her political and ethical project lies. For Benjamin’s project, in contrast, moments of illumination become the essence of our object-relationships, our walks down city streets. His form, which is also his philosophy, attends to this project as a montage, collection, spatial disorientation.
The theme of “things”, in a general sense, is prevalent in Benjamin. There are two beautiful discussions I’d like to mention in particular, both of which might lead to similarities to Scarry. The first is the following: “Warmth is ebbing form things. Objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us. Day by day, in overcoming the sum of secret resistances…we have an immense labor to perform. We must compensate for their coldness with our warmth if they are not to freeze us to death” (454). Benjamin seems to directly attend to Scarry’s “projection” and the inevitable “reciprocation” of that warmth by the things themselves. The second, come to us as a love, he writes, “if the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but rather in the place where we see it” (449).
Scarry gives us some incredible ideas, but, like Roy, I would agree that some of these ideas are more powerfully drawn out than others. In particular, it might seem that she is strictly referring to made utilitarian objects (at least in the two sections we read). This is clear when she tells us in regards to the created object: “but what he or she will have always projected there is the power of creating itself...the object…is invested with the power of creating and exists only to complete this task of recreating us” (310). She then gives a list of what how these things magnify our lives (make us warm, extend our vision, etc). These objects all seem to serve purposes.
It would be particularly interesting if we considered Scarry’s ideas and applied them to living things, especially animals and plants. Her discussion of the Artifact (God) may lead itself to this. That one can create an object such as a god, and one can engage in the same reciprocating and projecting activities as one could with a material object (311), we might be left to believe that we are dealing with the power of language here more than anything else. In this case we could apply Scarry’s ideas of reciprocation and projection to cats, dogs, trees and stones. Though it might seem like to simple a move to slide into the terrain of language with Scarry, her style and the nature of what she is talking about lends itself to such a discussion.
Reading Benjamin brought me back to our conversation about about writing in our last meeting. In what ways attention to "the thing itself" necessitates a different writing technique? And in what ways it necessitates a different thinking technique? I read "One-way street" as a collection, that is something put together by a collector. Collecting (as we saw with Callois who wrote only about stones he knew well) is very different from understanding: it is content with a lack of "framework," it is about recognizing the power of things to captivate, like in the case of an old groschen-stamp (479). Benjamin's thought-images are collectables: they might often be misrecognised as refuse only to be recognized as gems upon closer look. There is a feverish excitement and risk to that process, as any collector well knows. "Benjamin’s technique in 'Einbahnstraße,'" writes Adorno, "is related to that of the Gambler. . . . Thought renounces all semblance of the security of intellectual organization, renounces deduction, induction, and conclusion, and delivers itself over to luck and the risk of betting on experience and striking something essential."
From Callois's collection of stones, through Taussig's museum we have lately been looking at gatherings of things (or thought-images) in a way that begs to return to Jullien: what emerges from a certain configuration and how to write with it, not against it? Is ethnography more compelling when imagined as collecting, not interpreting?
"A period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way a ray of light falls through a chink in the wall of the alchemist's cell, to light up gleaming crystals, spheres, and triangles" (458). Benjamin's meanderings on the crafting of writing and the manufacturing of things are at once precocious, resentful, desirous, erudite, and, at times, suggestively opaque. The way in which he lingers over sudden moments of radiance - those flashes in which the "thingness of things" are laid bare, as Taussig might say - reminded me of Czeslaw Milosz's "Blacksmith Shop." (I'm thinking most of the last line.)
I liked the bellows operated by rope. A hand or foot pedal - I don't remember which. But that blowing, and the blazing of the fire! And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs, Red, softened for the anvil, Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe, Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.
And horses hitched to be shod, Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair
At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.
This question of being "called" upon to "glorify things just because they are" is, to me, one of the central concerns (ontological and ethical) in thinking through, with, and about configurations of an animated, material, imagined, built world. Benjamin insists on the physicality of writing, urging us to see it as a process of composition with distinct stages: musical composition to architectonic building to textile weaving (455) or, put differently, "idea-style-writing" (459). His emphasis on the work of creation seems to mimic (or is it the other way around?) Scarry's discussion of object-creation as a movement from making-up to making-real, to giving the object "aliveness" or "awareness of aliveness." But Scarry posits that our attention to objects-awareness is razor-sharp only when the objects belie a certain "stupidity," not, of course, "just because they are." But then are we, strangely enough, back at Mol's ontology-in-practice? Is the focus on the mimetics of language and the manufacturing of things another way of getting at ontology as relatedness and cohabiting?
Where is the intervention in these texts? What does it do for us to explicate, as Scary does, the various projections of the body into the world, and made up objects. No doubt, the “organismic metaphor” crops up all over the place, and as these texts outline this animation of things in the form of the humankind is deliberate – for numerous reasons.
But, as Scary also gives us, made-up things are animated by this make-up. And they do something in return. Like the gift, they reciprocate. I found her discussion about law and “object-responsibility” (i.e. product liability) to be quite interesting for many reasons. For instance, (and here is a place where an intervention can be made), corporations are legally charted as “people”, and one of the reasons for such is to shield individual stakeholders from liabilities that might be incurred from the deleterious consequences of the products they produce. (But, corporations are not people and when we extend rights to “them” as if they were, there are quite a few injustices that precipitate. I mean, whom do we really hold responsible? What agency do we allow them to have?)
So, as Alice pointed out, Scary’s text suggests that to understand the relationships between the human and the material world we need to understand the human imagination, and I would add, its limitations. On the other side of this coin is the question that we have been returning to numerous times in this course about how we might understand the nonhuman in their “own terms”. In some ways, this weeks readings bring us back to that question. To make some progress with this concern, I thought I would throw out several ways in which we can understand the word “term”. When we talk about the term of an object are we talking about the duration in which it exists in the world, like the term of office or a contract? Are we talking about a process of signification? Are we talking about conditions, as in the terms of a contract? Are we talking about the quality of our relationship to something? (Are we on “good terms”?) Are we talking about the members of some expression (i.e. algebraic terms)? Are we talking about the limits, or boundaries of something, it terminations? Are we talking about subjects and predicates, logic?…
Last comment. I think reading this Benjamin text in the context of this could make it something else. I mean, for me, I could not help but notice the presence of a woman, his beloved, their (possible) physicality, and his remorse, (among other sentient qualities of their relationship with each other) woven into practically everything he talks about. And when it is not there, I could not help but sense an inanimacy in his words. (You know, it didn't grab me by the balls.)
When reading One Way Street for the first time, I had to stop half way through and start over in order to rethink my expectations of the piece. What was Benjamin's aim in this piece? The piece suddenly made sense when I paid attention to the dedication to Asja Lacis and to the text of the Chinese Curios passage. Much in the way Lacis was to have "cut a street through the author," or the way that a country road may be walked or viewed from above, there is a sense that the city may be viewed as an organism or thing whose essence must be traveled on foot, that there is significance to the minutia as much as the whole as seen from above. Stylistically, the piece reads like advertisements, travel diaries, dreams (or dream-like) reminiscences, observations and criticisms, items found on the back of old newspapers. It is not too much of an exaggeration to imagine the passages as slips of paper and periodicals blown about the streets of a city straight out of the Threepenny Opera. In a way, Benjamin appears to impart life to his subject, or rather, he demonstrates that there is life within the minutia, created (or enacted?) by the people who inhabit the street and the city.
Perhaps we can think of Benjamin's piece as what Scarry describes as "the felt experience of sentience" (285); in fact, the city of Benjamin, via Scarry, could be viewed as a mimic of an organism, of the people who were its architects and designers. There is a sense that we create objects to impart an essential self-awareness to that object, and in doing so construct them to be either identifiable only in their original forms (Scarry's example of Hamlet) or changeable through replication and reflection (the trial example). Mimesis is identified in the act of construction, of perception, and description, and thus, in way, sentience, for Scarry, is enacted through the investment of human perception and existence within its creations and its absorption of the environment. The city becomes a catalog of human experiences, and vice versa.
Alphonso Lingis makes use of a particularly productive conceptual distinction between animism and fetishism, which, I hope, will clarify the precise nature of these challenges to be taken up in this rethinking of the ontology of things. “Animism,” he writes, “recognizes a spirit in material things. The voice that we hear in things is not their voice, the voice of matter; material things are animated by a spirit or by spirits.” In contrast, “Fetishism,” he continues, “recognizes a spirit of material things. Things emit signals and issue directives on their own. The voice is the voice of their material bodies” (Lingis 2005: 111). For Elaine Scarry, objects, when brought into relation with humans, acquire a particular sentience to them; they are instilled with capacities, or to use Uexkull's terminology, particular tones. To return to Lingis's distinction, things, for Scarry, are only vitalized by animism; if they are alive, it is because we humans (but, what about many of our closely related primate friends?) invigorate them with this spirit. But, in the formulation Scarry makes, things do not have a spirit of themselves, on their own. If they mystify us, it originates in something we put into them—though perhaps inadvertently. The creators of things build sentience into them; once made, these things, for the most part, become magnified in power and reciprocally come to effect us humans. These reciprocal effects are sometimes surprising and unpredictable, but still authored by humans. Yet, something about these unpredictable effects, affects, thoughts, capacities that things exude, which escape the forethought of their human creators, demand a kind of theorizing which departs from a primary focus on the human creator—something like Calloise's rocks. After all, non-human-made objects also have these exact same kinds of startling effects on us. What difference would it make to theorize the affective and effective excess of things without privileging the human creator (as the case may sometimes be) as the originary force of those properties?
Writing about aphorisms is always a challenge. Some pithy observations about Benjamim from reading “One-Way Street”: he likes breakfast; he doesn’t like Germans; he is intrigued by children. It is perhaps this last one that is most relevant here. The child, for Benjamin, provides simultaneously an enigma, an occasion for nostalgia, and a site of trouble for those adult practices and engagements with the world that seem obvious beyond notice. “His heart pounds; he holds his breath. Here he is enclosed in the material world. It becomes immensely distinct, speechlessly obtrusive. Only in such a way does a man who is being hanged become aware of the reality of rope and wood” (465). Moving quickly from the child at play to the man about to be hanged, Benjamin points to the material world as that which eludes the stability that might otherwise be assigned to it and the distinctness – the not-humanness – that has come to define it. “And behind a door, he himself is the door” (465). Benjamin is perhaps referring to what Scarry calls making and unmaking. For Scarry, there is in fact a material world, separate in kind from the human world, but it is inscribed with humanness from the beginning. And this projected humanity, which gives responsibility and personality to objects, in turn reciprocates, giving objectness to humanity in a swirl of exchanges that does not allow for a simple return to zero. She uses god as the ultimate example. Here, humans create an object that they then designate as the original creator. God then “acts” in his own name (reciprocating), and alters the world in which new creations are then made, ad infinitum. Necessary for all of this to function is a distribution of recognizability; precisely the distribution that Benjamin sees children queering. God can never be recognized as made; a work of art can be always recognized as made; and a rope, while recognizable as made, does not insist on its authorship above all else – except, perhaps, for the man about to be hanged, or for the child, who, in a moment of hiding, is the door.
I found the two main readings this week difficult, provocative, and deeply interesting. Both Scarry and Benjamin seem to be talking about the same thing, the “fetishization” or “animation” of the material world, but in very different ways. Benjamin’s approach is aphoristic, and has as much to do with the presentation as with the argument—that is, the titles of his aphorisms suggest objects, and the aphorisms themselves then appear as commentaries on, engagements with, or imaginative projections through the objects suggested. Some of these aphorisms are directly about objects (books, toys, architectural structures), but many of them are not, or only obliquely so, creating a richly ambiguous tension between the “object” and the “thought.”
ReplyDeleteScarry on the other hand offers a cultural or philosophical analysis of “projection and reciprocation” as they function through artifacts, with particular emphases on how these work vis-à-vis pain and legality. Her account is complex, compelling, and rewarding, even if some of her conclusions seem premature (for example, a trial may in fact be much shorter than the events it tracks, if the events involved lasted over some years (297), some of her thought difficult to trace, and some of her claims unsubstantiated (e.g., that art objects are “self-announcing” (314). This seems rather to be a feature of artworks in a modern/western/bourgeois sense, not of artworks themselves. Artists have not always signed their works, they have not always created them individually, and there have been many ways of understanding creation that have privileged not the “inventedness” of the artwork but rather its “super-real” or metaphysical in-spiration). Still, Scarry was interesting enough I ran out and bought the whole book.
Scarry and Benjamin reminded me of some famous insects that haven't come up in class yet: "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality" (Marx, Capital chap7 sec1).
ReplyDeleteI think Scarry's structure of the artifact maintains this distinction (one that Derrida has shown us we ought not to take for granted) in separating out making-up from making-real. How much does she help us think about stones? Do they fall in with lightning in the category of things that are not (re)conceivable by humans? Her distinction, however, is useful thinking back to Caillois: to what extent is he describing processes of making up in the forms that appear in rock? Who is making up and making real these forms? Nature? What might it mean to trouble the possibilities of (formal) originality available in human making-up?
As is often the case, I'm not entirely sure what to make of the Benjamin. Perhaps it is useful to think of him as writing from an alternate awareness of object-worlds. Scarry suggests we only become aware of objects activities when they unexpectedly cease, when we stub our toes. Benjamin is perhaps more attentive to the way his world is populated, seeing, for instance, the ways page numbers hang over the characters of a novel. He wouldn't approve of a take home message, but it might be that "the faculty of imagination is the gift of interpolating into the infinitely small, of inventing, for every intensity, an extensiveness to contain its new, compressed fullness" (466).
Benjamin’s One-Way Street seems to be the perfect deployment of the theories put forth in The Storyteller; it displays accurate retellings of the marvelous without giving psychological connections. (148) The demarcation between on eliding a psychological recounting and forming of a story with “the handprints of the potter cling[ing] to a clay vessel” (149) became evident. In this sense, Benjamin’s writing truly becomes a one-way street, his stories intentions force elaborate rumination - all the time asking, “Is this what you were getting at?” with no response. But, perhaps, this action makes it a continuous street, with an explicit need for the reader.
ReplyDeleteScarry speaks to the ethics of recounting, laboriously trying to construct an imminence of sentience in objects. But admittedly, she can only do so with a reliance on the human: through superstition, poetry, analysis, military. (287) While she makes great strides concerning scale and force, I wonder if it is possible to truly think in the register of “their own terms”, perhaps, the recognition of one “inanimate” object by another “inanimate” object. I guess, if a sentience is established, what effects does this have on human behavior - requirement of advocacy, etc.
Nina Mehta
ReplyDelete“Objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us… We must compensate for their coldness with out warmth if they are not to freeze us to death, and handle their spiny forms with infinite dexterity if we are not to bleed to death” (454). In Benjamin’s One Way Street, shock, through language in particular, shifts sentience and experience, possibilities for connection, amidst an increasingly commodified, materially mediated world, where ambiguity and indifference solidify in new forms and materials, rousing greed. It is the connection between material and the imagination that ties Scarry to Benjamin here, where “only images in the mind vitalize the will” (466). Benjamin’s stamps, and their postmarks may best show the connection between these two readings. These stamps, “graphic cellular tissue” extend as relations, projected materialization. Here, the stamps and then the postmarks may recreate and reinvent our communication, and connection. Circulation further complicates this, pushing inspiration and imagination through travel, interaction. These stamps, with all their uses and properties, hold letters, words (generalized and specific), subject to criticism. And their meanings, gained through startle, are made communally. For Scarry, the work of the imagination, as connected to artifacts and materials extends processes of recognition and creation, similar to Benjamin’s explanation that the advertisement matters not as much as its reflection, as a continuation, multiplication, ongoing.
As readers, how should we walk along Benjamin’s street, where the material culture of industrial capitalism becomes an object-montage of cultural imaginaries. “Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands”, and in order to discover “new aspects of his inner self”, the reader must follow “the movement of his mind” (448). Benjamin’s attention to the child-like and dream-like imaginations evoke something about the way we might exist differently in our object-worlds. “Children produce their own small world of things within the greater one” (449); the child, reading, “mingles with the characters far more closely than grown-ups do” (463); for the “untidy child”, playing make-believe, “life is like a dream” (465). This is a call not for some reversion to naivety or innocence but, to me, speaks of a certain animation of the material world that is produced in following the movements of our minds; seeing, walking, reading differently; being attentive to the phantasmagoric quality of modern life in the city.
ReplyDeleteFor Scarry, too, there must be an attention to the relationship between the material world and the human imagination. Indeed, “the project of understanding the nature of human responsibility will be assisted by coming to understand the human imagination” (306). As a model of the relations not between persons but “between persons and the realm of made objects”, Scarry’s work moves towards understanding how objects are made, and how they are animated: not only how we come to know them but how, in a sense, objects also come to know, to be sympathetic, to reciprocate (318). For Scarry, artifacts contain and expose the imagination, which in turn creates them. It is in this process of creation that her political and ethical project lies. For Benjamin’s project, in contrast, moments of illumination become the essence of our object-relationships, our walks down city streets. His form, which is also his philosophy, attends to this project as a montage, collection, spatial disorientation.
The theme of “things”, in a general sense, is prevalent in Benjamin. There are two beautiful discussions I’d like to mention in particular, both of which might lead to similarities to Scarry. The first is the following: “Warmth is ebbing form things. Objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us. Day by day, in overcoming the sum of secret resistances…we have an immense labor to perform. We must compensate for their coldness with our warmth if they are not to freeze us to death” (454). Benjamin seems to directly attend to Scarry’s “projection” and the inevitable “reciprocation” of that warmth by the things themselves. The second, come to us as a love, he writes, “if the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but rather in the place where we see it” (449).
ReplyDeleteScarry gives us some incredible ideas, but, like Roy, I would agree that some of these ideas are more powerfully drawn out than others. In particular, it might seem that she is strictly referring to made utilitarian objects (at least in the two sections we read). This is clear when she tells us in regards to the created object: “but what he or she will have always projected there is the power of creating itself...the object…is invested with the power of creating and exists only to complete this task of recreating us” (310). She then gives a list of what how these things magnify our lives (make us warm, extend our vision, etc). These objects all seem to serve purposes.
It would be particularly interesting if we considered Scarry’s ideas and applied them to living things, especially animals and plants. Her discussion of the Artifact (God) may lead itself to this. That one can create an object such as a god, and one can engage in the same reciprocating and projecting activities as one could with a material object (311), we might be left to believe that we are dealing with the power of language here more than anything else. In this case we could apply Scarry’s ideas of reciprocation and projection to cats, dogs, trees and stones. Though it might seem like to simple a move to slide into the terrain of language with Scarry, her style and the nature of what she is talking about lends itself to such a discussion.
Reading Benjamin brought me back to our conversation about about writing in our last meeting. In what ways attention to "the thing itself" necessitates a different writing technique? And in what ways it necessitates a different thinking technique? I read "One-way street" as a collection, that is something put together by a collector. Collecting (as we saw with Callois who wrote only about stones he knew well) is very different from understanding: it is content with a lack of "framework," it is about recognizing the power of things to captivate, like in the case of an old groschen-stamp (479). Benjamin's thought-images are collectables: they might often be misrecognised as refuse only to be recognized as gems upon closer look. There is a feverish excitement and risk to that process, as any collector well knows. "Benjamin’s technique in 'Einbahnstraße,'" writes Adorno, "is related to that of the Gambler. . . . Thought renounces all semblance of the security of intellectual organization, renounces deduction, induction, and conclusion, and delivers itself over to luck and the risk of betting on experience and striking something essential."
ReplyDeleteFrom Callois's collection of stones, through Taussig's museum we have lately been looking at gatherings of things (or thought-images) in a way that begs to return to Jullien: what emerges from a certain configuration and how to write with it, not against it? Is ethnography more compelling when imagined as collecting, not interpreting?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"A period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way a ray of light falls through a chink in the wall of the alchemist's cell, to light up gleaming crystals, spheres, and triangles" (458). Benjamin's meanderings on the crafting of writing and the manufacturing of things are at once precocious, resentful, desirous, erudite, and, at times, suggestively opaque. The way in which he lingers over sudden moments of radiance - those flashes in which the "thingness of things" are laid bare, as Taussig might say - reminded me of Czeslaw Milosz's "Blacksmith Shop." (I'm thinking most of the last line.)
ReplyDeleteI liked the bellows operated by rope.
A hand or foot pedal - I don't remember which.
But that blowing, and the blazing of the fire!
And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs,
Red, softened for the anvil,
Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe,
Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.
And horses hitched to be shod,
Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river
Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair
At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor,
Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds.
I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.
This question of being "called" upon to "glorify things just because they are" is, to me, one of the central concerns (ontological and ethical) in thinking through, with, and about configurations of an animated, material, imagined, built world. Benjamin insists on the physicality of writing, urging us to see it as a process of composition with distinct stages: musical composition to architectonic building to textile weaving (455) or, put differently, "idea-style-writing" (459). His emphasis on the work of creation seems to mimic (or is it the other way around?) Scarry's discussion of object-creation as a movement from making-up to making-real, to giving the object "aliveness" or "awareness of aliveness." But Scarry posits that our attention to objects-awareness is razor-sharp only when the objects belie a certain "stupidity," not, of course, "just because they are." But then are we, strangely enough, back at Mol's ontology-in-practice? Is the focus on the mimetics of language and the manufacturing of things another way of getting at ontology as relatedness and cohabiting?
Where is the intervention in these texts? What does it do for us to explicate, as Scary does, the various projections of the body into the world, and made up objects. No doubt, the “organismic metaphor” crops up all over the place, and as these texts outline this animation of things in the form of the humankind is deliberate – for numerous reasons.
ReplyDeleteBut, as Scary also gives us, made-up things are animated by this make-up. And they do something in return. Like the gift, they reciprocate. I found her discussion about law and “object-responsibility” (i.e. product liability) to be quite interesting for many reasons. For instance, (and here is a place where an intervention can be made), corporations are legally charted as “people”, and one of the reasons for such is to shield individual stakeholders from liabilities that might be incurred from the deleterious consequences of the products they produce. (But, corporations are not people and when we extend rights to “them” as if they were, there are quite a few injustices that precipitate. I mean, whom do we really hold responsible? What agency do we allow them to have?)
So, as Alice pointed out, Scary’s text suggests that to understand the relationships between the human and the material world we need to understand the human imagination, and I would add, its limitations. On the other side of this coin is the question that we have been returning to numerous times in this course about how we might understand the nonhuman in their “own terms”. In some ways, this weeks readings bring us back to that question. To make some progress with this concern, I thought I would throw out several ways in which we can understand the word “term”. When we talk about the term of an object are we talking about the duration in which it exists in the world, like the term of office or a contract? Are we talking about a process of signification? Are we talking about conditions, as in the terms of a contract? Are we talking about the quality of our relationship to something? (Are we on “good terms”?) Are we talking about the members of some expression (i.e. algebraic terms)? Are we talking about the limits, or boundaries of something, it terminations? Are we talking about subjects and predicates, logic?…
Last comment. I think reading this Benjamin text in the context of this could make it something else. I mean, for me, I could not help but notice the presence of a woman, his beloved, their (possible) physicality, and his remorse, (among other sentient qualities of their relationship with each other) woven into practically everything he talks about. And when it is not there, I could not help but sense an inanimacy in his words. (You know, it didn't grab me by the balls.)
When reading One Way Street for the first time, I had to stop half way through and start over in order to rethink my expectations of the piece. What was Benjamin's aim in this piece? The piece suddenly made sense when I paid attention to the dedication to Asja Lacis and to the text of the Chinese Curios passage. Much in the way Lacis was to have "cut a street through the author," or the way that a country road may be walked or viewed from above, there is a sense that the city may be viewed as an organism or thing whose essence must be traveled on foot, that there is significance to the minutia as much as the whole as seen from above. Stylistically, the piece reads like advertisements, travel diaries, dreams (or dream-like) reminiscences, observations and criticisms, items found on the back of old newspapers. It is not too much of an exaggeration to imagine the passages as slips of paper and periodicals blown about the streets of a city straight out of the Threepenny Opera. In a way, Benjamin appears to impart life to his subject, or rather, he demonstrates that there is life within the minutia, created (or enacted?) by the people who inhabit the street and the city.
ReplyDeletePerhaps we can think of Benjamin's piece as what Scarry describes as "the felt experience of sentience" (285); in fact, the city of Benjamin, via Scarry, could be viewed as a mimic of an organism, of the people who were its architects and designers. There is a sense that we create objects to impart an essential self-awareness to that object, and in doing so construct them to be either identifiable only in their original forms (Scarry's example of Hamlet) or changeable through replication and reflection (the trial example). Mimesis is identified in the act of construction, of perception, and description, and thus, in way, sentience, for Scarry, is enacted through the investment of human perception and existence within its creations and its absorption of the environment. The city becomes a catalog of human experiences, and vice versa.
Alphonso Lingis makes use of a particularly productive conceptual distinction between animism and fetishism, which, I hope, will clarify the precise nature of these challenges to be taken up in this rethinking of the ontology of things. “Animism,” he writes, “recognizes a spirit in material things. The voice that we hear in things is not their voice, the voice of matter; material things are animated by a spirit or by spirits.” In contrast, “Fetishism,” he continues, “recognizes a spirit of material things. Things emit signals and issue directives on their own. The voice is the voice of their material bodies” (Lingis 2005: 111). For Elaine Scarry, objects, when brought into relation with humans, acquire a particular sentience to them; they are instilled with capacities, or to use Uexkull's terminology, particular tones. To return to Lingis's distinction, things, for Scarry, are only vitalized by animism; if they are alive, it is because we humans (but, what about many of our closely related primate friends?) invigorate them with this spirit. But, in the formulation Scarry makes, things do not have a spirit of themselves, on their own. If they mystify us, it originates in something we put into them—though perhaps inadvertently. The creators of things build sentience into them; once made, these things, for the most part, become magnified in power and reciprocally come to effect us humans. These reciprocal effects are sometimes surprising and unpredictable, but still authored by humans. Yet, something about these unpredictable effects, affects, thoughts, capacities that things exude, which escape the forethought of their human creators, demand a kind of theorizing which departs from a primary focus on the human creator—something like Calloise's rocks. After all, non-human-made objects also have these exact same kinds of startling effects on us. What difference would it make to theorize the affective and effective excess of things without privileging the human creator (as the case may sometimes be) as the originary force of those properties?
ReplyDeleteWriting about aphorisms is always a challenge. Some pithy observations about Benjamim from reading “One-Way Street”: he likes breakfast; he doesn’t like Germans; he is intrigued by children. It is perhaps this last one that is most relevant here. The child, for Benjamin, provides simultaneously an enigma, an occasion for nostalgia, and a site of trouble for those adult practices and engagements with the world that seem obvious beyond notice. “His heart pounds; he holds his breath. Here he is enclosed in the material world. It becomes immensely distinct, speechlessly obtrusive. Only in such a way does a man who is being hanged become aware of the reality of rope and wood” (465). Moving quickly from the child at play to the man about to be hanged, Benjamin points to the material world as that which eludes the stability that might otherwise be assigned to it and the distinctness – the not-humanness – that has come to define it. “And behind a door, he himself is the door” (465). Benjamin is perhaps referring to what Scarry calls making and unmaking. For Scarry, there is in fact a material world, separate in kind from the human world, but it is inscribed with humanness from the beginning. And this projected humanity, which gives responsibility and personality to objects, in turn reciprocates, giving objectness to humanity in a swirl of exchanges that does not allow for a simple return to zero. She uses god as the ultimate example. Here, humans create an object that they then designate as the original creator. God then “acts” in his own name (reciprocating), and alters the world in which new creations are then made, ad infinitum. Necessary for all of this to function is a distribution of recognizability; precisely the distribution that Benjamin sees children queering. God can never be recognized as made; a work of art can be always recognized as made; and a rope, while recognizable as made, does not insist on its authorship above all else – except, perhaps, for the man about to be hanged, or for the child, who, in a moment of hiding, is the door.
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