Urbanized and Object-Oriented Rhetoric, Part Two

This isn't so much a part two, as it is a revisiting of yesterday's post on the documentary Urbanized. Not too long after I clicked "Publish Post" (lying awake in bed, in fact), I began to have some regrets. In particular, my own conclusion now gives me pause:

Bad design is design that mistakes itself as purely human. If we ignore the missing masses as "we" plan, they will come back to haunt us precisely where we live.

See the trap? I have just argued, from an object-oriented perspective, that objects, or in this case the materiality of a city cannot be reduced (see Latour) to the intentionality of the designer: there is always excess. My argument makes sense, given my use of Latour. That said, how sound or practical or ontologically possible is my advice to account for missing, nonhuman, masses?

I'll here go to Graham Harman:

Behind every apparently simple object is an infinite legion of further objects that "crush, depress, break, and enthrall one another." (Tool-Being 296)

In other words, we cannot stop them from haunting us. We cannot possibly know everything about every thing and thus include any and every thing that bears upon city life. By requiring designers to ac/count for nonhumans, do I implicitly argue that every nonhuman can be fully counted? (For more on the tension between Latour and Harman, see Harman's Prince of Networks as well as The Prince and the Wolf.)

So let's try this: the best a designer or a city planner (you know, rhetors) could do is to leave room for accidents. Make a city that will bend rather than break. Perhaps that is the way of describing the limits of, in the case of Urbanized, Modernist city planning. It's not simply that they failed to account for the nonhuman (for such an accounting is fully impossible), but that such Modernism left no wiggle room for crushing, depressing, breaking and enthralling objects.

And, to make OOO more explicitly into an OOR, the designers' and planners' techne needs to leave room for tuche, which is bound to happen. Thinking more about what OOR might do, what its William Jamesian cash value is, this might be a line of thought worth pursuing (having just recently read Kelly Pender's Techne and re-read Ballif's "Writing the Third-Sophistic"). That is, in terms of an object-oriented rhetorical production/invention/action, can we think in terms of both techne and tuche? Within our plans and actions there is the irreducible materiality of the nonhuman (the object, the thing--boy I need to tighten up that terminology).

Anyway, there's my part two, my revisiting, my apology. I'll sleep better tonight for sure.

Urbanized and Object-Oriented Rhetoric

So I recently (and finally) watched Urbanized, the final installment of Gary Hustwit's Design Trilogy, which includes Helvetica and Objectified. While the first two documentaries look a smaller scale design (graphic design and industrial design respectively), Urbanized looks at urban design and urban planning: design at the level of society (which is certainly not to say the two previous documentaries don't bear on society as well). I have taught Helvetica in professional writing and technical communication and Objectified in a New Media and Rhetoric course. Indeed, the latter inspired this documentary that my students and I made:


The Rhetoric of the City Museum from Nathaniel Rivers on Vimeo.

And I am likely to teach all three in my Fall 2012 Problems in Rhetoric: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral course, which takes aim at nonsymbolic and nonhuman rhetoric, which I see as the key aspects of material and object-oriented rhetorics.

In terms of the nonsymbolic and nonhuman, Urbanized, like the whole trilogy, does a good job with nonsymbolic rhetoric: how we move one another in nondiscursive ways. For instance, how high quality bike lines can raise the social status of cycling and demonstrate that a person on a $30 bikes is as valuable in a democracy as someone in a $30,000 car. Watching Urbanized, I was reminded of James Fredal's Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens, which argues that any attempt to understand Ancient Athenian rhetoric must account for the design and planning of the city of Athens itself--it's materiality.

Where the documentary falls short (and even this is unduly harsh as it does so much so well) is with respect to the nonhuman. As the film's emphasis is design, that it centers around the human should come as no surprise: those designing, building, and dwelling in cities are it's focus. (Although even here, the documentary could have attended to the materials with which the designers work and how those materials shape the design and building processes.) That said, the very materiality of the film itself calls our attention to the nonhuman: visually, the documentary is in love with the materiality of the city.



If anything, between the voices of the individuals interviewed (multiple interviewees rather than a single narrator, provide the dialogue of the documentary) and the visuals provided by the cinematographer there is an enactment of the human/nonhuman dynamic. As I watch the documentary, then, I feel the tug between the nonhuman that "speaks" for itself and the humans who claim to speak for it or reduce it to their intentions. [I'd also grant that in subsequent viewings I will find additional moments where the documentary foregrounds the nonhuman, granting it agency and ontological weight.]

In short, as I watch Urbanized I kept asking Bruno Latour's twenty-year-old question: "Where Are the Missing Masses?" And the ending of the documentary is telling in terms of how the missing masses--the nonhuman objects that are part and parcel of our urban spaces and our lives as we know them--go missing, how there are silenced or erase. The final, human voice (I can't recall the fellow's name and I don't want to look it up right now) of the documentary argues:

Fundamentally, as a species, we need things [I got hopeful] that can power our imaginations, that get our our passions going, that can give us a sense of meaning. And that is not a brick; it is not a pipe. It is an idea. That's what drives cities forward.

And while I would not totally disagree, I would say that it is precisely in the name of bricks and pipes and their agency in the movement and development of cities, that object-oriented ontology, or object-oriented rhetoric more specifically, (must) makes its intervention. To reduce cities to the meaning the provide for us and the ideas we can have about or build into them, irrespective of the city's thing-ness and of the many other nonhumans that shape that city and its inhabitants, is to miss a substantial portion of what it means to be urbanized.

I would never argue that design doesn't matter; the documentary makes a pretty damn good case that it does. I would argue though that design cannot be flattened out into a solely human affair. What is buried in the documentary, underneath the persuasive argument that bad design on the part of humans produces bad effects, is that bad (however and whoever defines that) urban spaces are due in part to designers and design that ignore the rhetorical agency and ontological weight of the nonhumans that were always part and parcel of that design. Bad design is design that mistakes itself as purely human. If we ignore the missing masses as "we" plan, they will come back to haunt us precisely where we live.

UPDATE: There's a Part Two.

At some point, after I teach them, I want to write something longer and more involved about Hustwit's trilogy in light of new materialism and object-oriented ontology. That is, your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

The Twofold Problem of Interdisciplinarity

Working as I have been on a few, related interdisciplinary projects, I have stumbled upon what might very well be obvious (or what should have been obvious). My assumption for the longest time was that the chief difficulty of interdisciplinary work was getting them to let you in. And I was, of course, fine with that: read some books, ask some questions, get conversant, and then feel comfortable enough to make some preliminary claims. There is also helpful scholarship on interdisciplinary work: reminders to read widely and to double-check definitions/uses of terms that might seem familiar but which are being used quite differently.

What I had not counted on as much was the difficulty of getting us to let me out. This problem is perhaps best encapsulated by Walter Ong, who in a review of Marshall McLuhan wrote the following:

His critics often seem to feel that whoever does not stand off from technology and bureaucracy far enough to throw stones at them is betraying the cause of humanity.

There is a fear, within one's own discipline, that when you leave you might very well come back with something unwanted. Imperialism is fine and good; just don't bring back some tropical disease.

The Troll Hunter

As I investigate the possibilities of an object-oriented environmental rhetoric (see my previous two posts),  I like to work through the differences between the original 1954 Japanese film Godzilla (or Gojira) and the 2010 Norwegian film The Troll Hunter (which is do for a remake). Both can be read as films about environmentalism or the shape and health of the environment (they are or can be about other things as well, unique to their respective cultures or broadly applicable to the human condition). However, in their relationship to human and nonhuman agency they are different in one crucial regard.

Godzilla, if you'll recall, is an ancient, Jurassic beast, revived by the denotation of atomic weapons. Godzilla is, in part, about nature seeking revenge on humans for their destructive agency. Godzilla is nature's wrath, but Godzilla's proximate (or even ultimate) cause is human. Thus, he serves as the environment's check on human agency. Godzilla, like a toxic spill is, is a harmful environmental presence caused by human actions (and thus, it seems, reducible to them).

The Troll Hunter proceeds (spoiler alert) in a similar manner for sometime, before taking a different, and instructive path. This film (of the found footage variety) follows three Norwegian university students as they film a documentary about illegal bear hunting. Following someone who they believe to be responsible for a slew of poachings, the students discover that the individual is not hunting bears but hunting (or rather, managing) a population of trolls, which the government is keeping a secret. It seems the trolls are acting up and moving beyond their traditional ranges, which also entails killing German tourists and eating livestock. The troll hunter, who works for the Troll Security Service (TSS) is trying to get to the bottom of all this: to figure out what is driving the trolls so that they can be controlled. It turns out that one rogue troll is responsible for all the trouble: he has escaped his territory (defined by a circular ring of inconspicuous electric lines--an allusion perhaps to the original Godzilla film where the Japanese construct a similar ring of electrical lines around Tokyo to keep Godzilla out). This troll is both killing and infecting other trolls with an unidentified illness or virus.

After securing a blood sample (an incredible dangerous and violent job) and taking it to veterinarian, we discover that the trolls are suffering from rabies. And here is the moment when The Troll Hunter departs from the Godzilla model. Humans have been attempting to control (by measures, preserving and conserving) the troll population in Norway. For instance, the troll hunter recounts a terrible story of a time when he had to exterminate a large group of trolls (including baby trolls) as part of this government cover-up. The movie, in other words, is not at a loss to condemn human beings when it comes to our relationship to the environment and its nonhuman inhabitants (nor I am). But what the film also suggests (or can be made to suggest) is that human beings are not the whole show--we are not the end and be all of the earth (one way or the other). The trolls have rabies. They are not being driven mad by climate change (this is, full disclosure, what I guessed at, early in the film, as the cause of the trolls' troubles--this increased my surprise, and later, interest in the rabies twist) or even habitat destruction (although these are certainly part of the story). They were being driven by a cause quite apart from humans. Their relationship with humans is being shaped by their relationship with things other than humans.

My choice of The Troll Hunter might still seem odd given the obvious influence on Godzilla on the human imagination with respect to the violence and volition of nature. Godzilla in its many iterations is clearly compelling and vibrant in his/her own right. However, what most interests me in the troll is that its cause, in contrast to Godzilla, is not, strictly speaking, human. What drives the rogue troll in The Troll Hunter is not nuclear war or waste or global warming (anthropological climate change) but rabies. The Troll Hunter reveals not, to borrow from the Blue Oyster Cult that "again and again how nature points up the folly of man" but that, and perhaps quite often, man has very little to do with "it" one way or another. The Troll Hunter can thus be read as an object-oriented environmental rhetoric of the sort I am working toward.

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.

A New Project

From my Current Projects page:
"The Shape of the World to Come: Toward an Object-Oriented Environmental Rhetoric" (In progress, 3000 words).

Abstract: This article works to develop an environmental rhetoric that gives vibrant matter its due. My argument, and it is one made by others, is that much environmentalism overemphasizes human agency. Or, in other words, in giving ourselves the responsibility to save or fix the planet, we have over-invested in our own agency, enacting the self-same hubris that results in dispositions toward the environment that environmentalists themselves might very well (and rightly) condemn. I argue that this over-investment (to the exclusion of denying and/or erasing nonhuman agency) is not the proper comportment we should have with the environment. Drawing on work in speculative realism (and related theories such as new materialism) and work in the emerging area of object-oriented rhetoric, I suggest that we can neither fully understand nor determine the environment, and that we need an environmental rhetoric concerned with inventing and shaping attitudes alive to this suggestion.

Intensity

As readers of this blog know (when it was active as many as a five of you), I frequently bemoan the ubiquitous use of the depth/surface distinction (and its kin: real/fake, natural/artificial) in public life. This goes back, as much does, to Plato's Socrates's distinction, for instance in the Gorgias, between true arts such as medicine and false arts such as cosmetics. In contemporary life, we have superficial changes and superficial policies and superficial responses. They don't really do anything; they just appear to.

I get it. I am often with those that make such criticisms. There is obviously a difference between adding a sign to a store's front door and changing the store policy inside. If the door says "No Shirt. No Shoes. No Service" and yet I am never removed from the store when I am barefoot and bare-chested, then it makes sense to remark that something is off here--that no real change has taken place.

However, I'd like to imagine other ways of addressing this kind of disconnect without relying on the surface/depth superficial/real distinctions. My "for instance" here would be the notion of intensity. Rather than working from the binary of the "superficial" and the "real" (in part because even a "superficial" change is a "real" change), we can describe changes, policies, responses, etc. as more or less intense. Changing the sign on the door but not the treatment of the shirtless customer inside would no longer simply by superficial but only less intense. I think intensity nicely calls attention to the qualitative rather than quantitative differences in enactment and effect. Telling some to stop, yelling at someone to stopping, and physically intercepting someone are not in different categories (superficial and real) but rather register different levels of intensity, and, depending on the context, effectiveness.

It's something I have been thinking about lately, and hope to think more about soon.