Transitional Objects

I've been thinking more about carpentry and my son. Yesterday I blogged about the book When Air Moves and a few days ago about his "collection" of twigs, leaves, chunks of brick and stone, and pines cones. This line of thought is motivated, of course, by fatherly affection, but also by the argument, which emerges from the work of Jane Bennett and Ian Bogost, about the importance of a certain kind of naivete and wonder when it comes to approaching objects as objects. And then Ze Frank told me about transitional objects (or "comfort objects"). In this brief post, I want to make a case for transitional objects as a form of carpentry and so amenable to OOO. I also want to briefly use transitional objects to attend to the affective elements of carpentry and OOO.

To Wikipedia (big deal, wanna fight about it):

In human childhood development, the term transitional object is normally used. It is something, usually a physical object, which takes the place of the mother-child bond. Common examples include dolls, teddy bears or blankets.

Donald Woods Winnicott introduced the concepts of transitional objects and transitional experience in reference to a particular developmental sequence. With "transition" Winnicott means an intermediate developmental phase between the psychic and external reality. In this "transitional space" we can find the "transitional object."

Will's transitional object: Reindeer, his tiny stuffed reindeer. By my rhetorical carpentry-infused reading of Winnicott's transitional object theory, Reindeer is a specific object that attunes Will to the withdrawal of objects in general.

At first glance, this approach to objects looks correlationist. Objects are what they stand-in for, mean or represent for humans. One immediately thinks of evocative objects, the main feature of which is the argument that "objects carry both [human] ideas and passions" (although Graham Harman has argued that we can read evocative objects as amenable to OOO as well). OOO, in contrast, is interested in objects in and of themselves, distinct from what they might mean for us. Certainly, we can easily read transitional objects this way. But I think, for the moment, we might benefit from seeing them as more than this, and we can do that through the idea of carpentry. Again, I go to JB:

Rhetorical carpentry would construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us. ("The Decorum of Objects")

It's in light of carpentry that "transitional objects" does real work for OOO. More from Wikipedia (listen, I just thought of this):

When the young child begins to separate the "me" from the "not-me" and evolves from complete dependence to a stage of relative independence, it uses transitional objects. Infants see themselves and the mother as a whole. In this phase the mother "brings the world" to the infant without delay which gives it a "moment of illusion," a belief that its own wish creates the object of its desire which brings with it a sense of satisfaction. Winnicott calls this subjective omnipotence.

Now, bear with me for a moment: could we not see "subjective omnipotence" as correlationism—the idea that the world is only ever what I am always able to make of it—in its most extreme form? What a transitional object does, then, is help the child break out of this subjective omnipotence, which is a powerful, painful, and necessary experience.

In a later stage of the development the child no longer needs the transitional object. It is able to make a distinction between "me" and "not-me," and keeping inside and outside apart and yet interrelated. This development leads to the use of illusion, symbols and objects later on in life.

So while transitional objects could easily be read as correlationist (and perhaps work will need to be done to make this less likely), what I see these objects as are objects that attune us to the strange withdrawal of all objects, including mom and dad, doggie, rocks, trees, and even Reindeer. What OOO/OOR needs and wants is for people to hold onto these transitional objects well after childhood, which some adults do. We always need transitional objects. What carpentry suggests is that we make transitional objects in the philosophical work of dismantling more sophisticated, adult, and dangerous forms of "subjective omnipotence."

Finally, and in a round about way, I also find transitional object theory compelling because it attends to the affective dimension of carpentry. Correlationism isn't just an abstract, disembodied idea that some (or many) people have; it is a whole way of being in the world. Carpentry, then, must surely provide not just ways of engaging the strangeness and withdrawal of objects but also ways of coping with the transition to an object-oriented ontology itself. Carpentry's objects must also be security blankets and stuffed reindeer.

Note: Eileen Joy, co-editor of O-Zone, has a short essay at In the Midde that dicusses transitional objects: "Willingly Playing the Role of Thing: The Hope of Persons as Transitional Objects"

Missing Masses: For Kids!

My mom and grandmother came today to steal away our son for a few days of vacation. My grandfather recently passed away, and my grandmother is distributing to her children, grand-children, and great-grand-children many of the things he collected over the years. I have received many of his old books (more than a few gems), some ties, and a pocket knife. Today, my son received this gem of a book, published way back in 1968.

Here is the first page, which, I think, both gives air a lot of credit and suggests ways of making things that allow us to explore air:

Indeed, the whole book is rather a celebration of air that moves and how important it is. It is occasionally too use oriented, but given how hard it is to find Latourian children's' books about air, I'll gladly settle for this one.

On Feeling Naive (as an Experimental Rhetorical Carpenter)

This post is an aside about feeling naive while doing the work of rhetorical carpentry.

Because we are colleagues, I had the pleasure of discussing my "Alien Relationships" experiment with Devin Johnston, whose Creaturely and Other Essays both partially inspired the experiment and provided the text I sampled in it. (Creaturely is surely an alien phenomenology.) Talking with him over a beer, I described how I felt composing the project and how anxious I was about making it public (and for more reasons than just fishing for a complement). I said that I felt silly and awkward. I felt like a naive sophomore enrolled in his first creative writing class.

My son's "collection" as he calls it. Full of sticks, leaves, pine cones,
and chunks of stone and brick, this collection is full of wonder. Ian
Bogost argues that wonder has two senses: "it can suggest awe or
marvel" and "it can mean puzzlement or logical perplexity" (121).
"The act of wonder," Bogost writes, "invites a detachment from
ordinary logics, of which human logics are but one example" (124).

As a successful creative writer, Devin's perspective is especially valuable. So I was rather pleased when he said how glad he was to hear that I was feeling that way: feeling silly and naive indicates productively (if not successfully) moving out of your comfort area. He then went on to describe his own process of writing the essays in Creaturely: how hard he worked to get the essays to approach, without appropriating, other creatures.

This conversation helped me a great deal and I share it because I think it might be helpful to others interested in experimenting with rhetorical carpentry. Carpentry is going to be hard, it's going to feel silly and weird: carpentry will be naive and full of wonder, which Bogost makes much use of in Alien Phenomenology (see the above picture taken of my son's "collection"). My conversation with Devin has also got me thinking about the possible value of team-ups or at least of leaning on our colleagues. I think carpentry might be an interesting, if not inherently, interdisciplinary venture. How might rhetorical carpentry be a good way to make things together?

Wilderness

In a previous post I introduced my new research project on object-oriented environmental rhetoric. My original way into this project was my previous (and on-going) work on the physis/nomos split. Frequently, discussions of environment or environmentalism presume a fundamental disconnect between humans and their environments: technology and culture (on the side of nomos), for instance, alienate us from nature (on the side of physis). Thus, a concept like wilderness became interesting for me. For example, the anthropologist Tim Ingold (in his awesomely brilliant The Perception of the Environment) takes the whole concept of wilderness to task.

Scientific conservation is firmly rooted in the doctrine [...] that the world of nature is separate from, and subordinate to, the world of humanity [...] As a result, we tend to think that only environments that still exist in a genuinely natural condition are those that remain beyond the bounds of human civilisation, as in the dictionary definition of wilderness: "A tract of land or a region uncultivated or inhabited by humans beings." (67)

Ingold's take on "wilderness" very much resonates with the work of environmental historian William Cronon, who argues (in "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature") that the very idea of wilderness is problematic for environmentalism:

But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living...only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living form the land.

Moving along as I was in the Cronon article (and rather fresh off of reading Ingold), I became rather content with dismissing wilderness as a defunct term with entirely too much actively pernicious philosophical baggage (for another, similar angle, see Zizek's critique of ecology). But then I reached Cronon's conclusion, where, he claims, he is "forced to confront [his] own deep ambivalence about [wilderness's] meaning for modern environmentalism." On the one hand, he argues, the notion of wilderness disconnects humans from their environment and thus often produces irresponsible behavior. That is, we let ourselves off of the hook when we take ourselves out of nature.

On the other hand, I also think it no less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is. The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance.

I was stuck. I had no time for Cronon's ambivalence: "Doesn't he know I am trying to crank out an article!" I was troubled, however, because I was persuaded by his ambivalence. We aren't disconnected from nature (the physis/nomos split is deeply troublesome), but the many other participants in nature aren't simply the same as or reducible to us either. There is such a thing as wilderness, but it isn't a wilderness apart from us.

And this is, of course, where object-oriented ontology (OOO) and now, lately, object-oriented rhetoric (OOR) arrives on the scene. In his review essay of Graham Harman (a key figure in OOO or, also, speculative realism), Scot Barnett tightly formulates the OOO/OOR position:

For Harman, then, the project of object-oriented philosophy involves two key moves: first, the recognition of the ontology of individual objects or tool-beings and their perpetual withdrawal from other objects in the world; and second the attunement to the reality and implications of these objects coming into relation with one another and how those relations in turn produce new objects whose depths, like any other object, can never be fully known or expressed in language.

Wilderness, then, can be re-read (and rescued) in this way: individual objects, which I read broadly here to include plants, animals, and rocks, perpetually withdraw from us--they remain wild in being never fully known to or controlled by us. And those wild objects will relate with one another in ways unknown to us (as wild objects ourselves) and produce effects we cannot codified (and might very well find threatening). This, I think, suggests something very interesting (if not fully known to me at this point) to environmentalism and environmental rhetoric. Barnett writes of the

many opportunities for future researchers to extend Harman’s thinking into the development of a broader and more nuanced rhetorical consideration of the world and our (i.e. human speakers' and writers’) being with others—human and nonhuman alike—in the world.

The View from My Office. There is a garden and a tree. There are squirrels and birds and bugs in the garden and in the tree. There is an auto body shop, a play house for my son, and an alley complete with various dumpsters. I am embedded in this environment. For instance, I watch the squirrels and the birds (note the bird book). I relate to them and they, at times, to me. But the squirrels and the birds and the bugs in the garden also withdraw from me and relate to one another independent of me. I am not out of nature here, but it nevertheless is wild.

I am interested, in light of Cronon's deep ambivalence about wilderness (a term I may yet jettison) and Ingold's rather forceful (and persuasive) rejection of it, in develoing a rhetoric of, or better yet, for human and nonhuman relations (the "being with others" Barnett describes above). We can't be apart from nature, but we can never fully know and determine everything also in it.

My Son the Cyborg?

As of late, I have been paying increased attention to the moments when my son attempts to incorporate my wife and I into his actions. For instance, when Will reaches over and grabs my arm and directs my hand to:

• the bag of Goldfish that is just out of his reach
• the box full of blocks that he just can't seem to pry open
• tickle mommy's feet

With the exception of the last one, which is really just for fun but still just as clever, all of these strike me as moments of (or, at least, candidates for) genuine cyborg extension. Will works actively to augment his own abilities by tapping (into) various external resources. My interest in these moments is informed by Andy Clark's most recent treatment of extended cognition. Now, Clark is particularly interested in how cognition is extended, but that sort of extension is not opposed to or without connections to what we might call "extended embodiment." In the case of Will, it probably makes sense to think of what he is doing as both. Many of things my wife and I are asked to do Will is probably physically capable of doing himself; there is just one aspect of the task that he hasn't quite mastered. He certainly could have the dexterity to turn to crank that raises and lowers the elevator in the Bat Cave. However, reliably turning it in the directions that either raises or lower it is difficult for him. It is in these cases that Will makes our hands his hands.

Clark advances the following criteria "to be met by [...] candidates for inclusion into an individual's cognitive system" (79):

1. "That the resource be reliably available and typically invoked."
2. "It should not usually be subject to critical scrutiny."
3. "easily accessible as and when required."
4. "That the [source] has been consciously endorsed at some point in the past."

The first three are met rather easily, I think. Although, at times, Will does shoot us looks that indicate we are indeed being scrutinized. Nevertheless, we are typically invoked in many matters, we are quite reliable, and we are easily accessed whenever he requires us. The forth, however, is somewhat of a stumbling block both for my application of Clark's criteria and for my assessment of that criteria.

Clark himself argues that it is only in rare cases that "other people" would be considered part of one's extended cognitive network. So, we are in good shape here in general. However, given the attachment behavior of infants, on which I am not much of an expert at all, I think it is safe to assume that whatever definition of "consciously endorsed" we might develop, Will would in all likelihood not meet it (and we probably wouldn't even need to be psychoanalytic critics to say so). However, if the forth criteria is indeed an important and necessary "step" for inclusion, then much of the nonbiological resources Clark identifies would seem to be out. Couldn't we think of many technologies that we use that we are not fully aware or choosing? The first to go (and one that Clark himself devotes significant time to), it seems, would be language. I know of few children who reasoned out for themselves consciously whether or not they would like to acquire language. Nor, as Clark himself argues, is language acquisition automatic or innate. So, we cannot get around criteria #4 by claiming language is simply automatic and subject to neither conscious nor unconscious thought. Language is inculcated, which is not an entirely conscious activity. In fact, we might even argue that language, as an engine of thought, is properly seen as an engine (not the only one mind you) of consciousness itself: how can we choose without the means we often use for choosing.

In other words, I would argue that not only am I a part of Will's extended cognition and embodiment, but also that Clark's forth criterion is unnecessarily strict. So many of the nonbiological resources that become embedded in our extended cognitive processes are neither automatic nor conscious. We incorporate them out of necessity (good luck getting around without language) or by virtue of societal norms (everyone uses pens and paper). These incorporations are neither entirely unconscious nor entirely conscious (or at least we don't remember choosing them).

This is what a colleague of mine in psychology and me are interested in exploring. What kinds of manipulations, cultivations, or even deceptions are at play in the incorporation of nonbiological elements of extended cognition? The iPhone can certainly become such a component of cognition, but why does anyone buy one in the first place?

And why or when did Will decide to make my arm his arm?

Day 17: Closing Ceremonies (Part 2)

I am always rather melancholy when the Games come to an end. There is the intensity of the experience (at least for someone who watches them as consistently as I do) as well as, with this year, one or two events I would have much preferred seen the U.S. win. But these never quite explain the sadness I feel (because I always feel like I missed a lot of the Olympics once they are over anyway).

Generally, we can consider the two week event in and of itself. An intense experience that takes years to plan and build and prepare for. And, then, in an instant, they are gone. There is so much so quickly. The Olympics can be made to symbolize and represent much, but their brief intensity best represents our lives (if lived well?).

Beyond the event in and of itself, however we can consider how the Olympics intervene in our normal, everyday lives. I can speak here only for myself, and my instinct about myself, which could be wrong, is that the Olympics mark the passage of time on slightly larger scale than everyday life, but on a scale that is all too easy to mark. They happen every two years (did it affect me less when they were every four?), so when they end they remind me that it has been and will be two years between the games. Now, two years is not a huge amount of time, but it is not no amount of time either. It breaks up a life into just enough time to count as a lot, but just little enough to make it pass quickly. In two years I'll be out of high school. In two years I'll be graduating from college. In two years I'll have to have written a dissertation and have secured a job. In two years I'll need to have produced so many articles. In two years my son will be three years old (perhaps the most unbelievable, depressing, and exciting possibility). So much will have happened and will have to be done, but it will happen too damn fast. And thinking long enough in two year chunks can really start to eat a lifetime.

The Olympics, however, do a great deal with time. Host countries erect infrastructures for the games. Athletes work towards them through time and effort and practice. Fans commit incredible amounts of emotional energy in following and supporting the games and the athletes. The momentary status is no reason not to prepare and participate. So what I can take away from the Olympics and their momentous status is how they mark time and what they accomplish through it.

Children of Rhetoricians

I am reading Debra Hawhee's Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language and listening to Will in the tub a room over. His "talk" drives home a crucial point about rhetorical action. Far from simply labeling and naming things, which is what we, as parents, often want or think children to be doing, Will is trying to do things in, with, and to the world. He is expressing an attitude, his body's

"emotive energy and purposive action" (113).

We watch Will—as an infant becoming a toddler—at the edges of language. He knows now what we all too soon forget: we are bodies (that learn language) moving in the world.