So, funny story about the paper you are about to read: funny from an audience perspective, anyway. It began by asking what exactly mid-20th-century science fiction had to say about “the thing” (an undertaking indirectly inspired by Hanna Pitkin’s remarkable Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social.) Mostly I explored Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1971 Roadside Picnic (which became Tarkovsky’s Stalker) and its ideas about the pitfalls associated with attributing anthropomorphic agency to things (in this case, alien visitors to Earth) which we can grasp precisely as beyond our own grasp. It staged a debate about how to handles the alienness of aliens. On the one side a tradition of cheery satirical portraits of a universe filled with objects and aliens that are knowable to us on our own terms—ranging from Stanislaw Lem’s Star Diaries, to Douglas Adams’ immortal classic Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy to space operas like Star Wars. On the other side was Roadside Picnic—in which the ultimate human mistake is to hoist up a sign that says “Welcome Dear Aliens.” Why a mistake? Because to the denizens of the universe beyond our ken we are nothing more than the bugs who creep out to wave their feelers after their picnic is over and to poke around that picnic’s detritus (readers of the recent Chinese science fiction novel The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin may recall that the alien civilization sends only one open transmission to Earth: “you are bugs.”)
I liked that paper, because it allowed me to argue that thing theory did its best work by acknowledging the incapacity to attribute meaning to the object world where it had also attributed mystery: as Frank Ramsey put it in response to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.” But I also worried that in tarrying with the Strugatskys it failed to return to today’s critical parlance, to enter productively into an ongoing academic conversation.
So to solve what I interpreted as a length problem (too short) I wrote a second half to it (you can probably see where this is going!): That second part attempted to merge my meditation on SF’s capacity to cognize the limits of cognition with the current debate between the virtues of surface reading and of description and the depth reading or suspicious hermeneutics against which such surface reading was ranged. In that half, I took a page out of Rita Felski’s recent jeremiad, The Limits of Critique. Specifically, page 84, which is the moment at which Felski, having registered her dissatisfaction both with coruscating ideological critique and with “surface reading” offers a way to navigate away both from critique and from surface reading: interpretation.
I liked that half too. Then I reread Sarah’s email about the panel and realized that what I had thought of as a paper was actually capped at 7 minutes: I recently heard Dipesh Chakrabarty say that we ought to conceptualize the problem of the Anthropocene as the “hurry up please it’s time” rebuttal to the Kantian notion that “there will always be time enough…” Instead the geological scale touches human time and where the two scales clash, guess which one wins. So, in that metaphor, the perpetual Kantian aspirations of my paper got mugged by reality. Goodbye Roadside Picnic, goodbye “The Thing meets Rita Felski” (Hint: Felski wins). I did learn something from those two ghost papers though: SF’s skepticism about making the alien simply familiar and Felski’s skepticism about a depthless world where every surface can be deciphered. So, within my allotted time I think the lesson I learned from those two undelivered (perhaps undeliverable) papers can be summed up in these three telegraphic claims:
1. Beware hypostatizing entities in the hope of establishing a legible beyond (no whistling in place of talking). The fact of graspable limits to our comprehension has plenty of meaning, without our needing to map our own ethical or epistemological presumptions onto that beyond. Such hypostatization seems to me woven into most current forms of “object oriented ontology”: the best way for the extrahuman universe to teach you ethical lessons is for you to start out with those lessons already tucked into your backpack.
2. The mirror image of that kind of hypostatization of the autonomous object is an explicitly anthropocentric “theory of things” that presumes the meaning of objects hangs together socially, the perfect extension of an equally perfect ideological totality. I think here not just of Appadurai’s three-decade-old work on “the social life of things,” but also of a structuralist tradition that conceives of meanings as existing within a comprehensive semiotic system evenly distributed over a culture, brooking distinctions neither between individual agents within that culture nor between the attributes of the objects that are put through the semiotic meat-grinder (meme-grinder?).
3. Making mystery itself into a knowable, parseable quantity seemed to me to fall into the “Welcome Dear Aliens” fallacy—treating the objective world as at once alien and yet also as entirely legible according to our own ethics and epistemology. Yet equally unworkable was a totalizing account of “the role of things” as encompassable totally within a sociological or anthropological semiotics. Instead we need a sense of how the presence of particular sorts of objects offers distinctive scope for action or for cogitation.
However (rule of threes) there exists a third way of thinking about thing theory, distinct from the notion of objects apprehensible as apart and distinct from human meaning and the notion of all meaning deriving from a pre-given social totality (exemplified in Roadside Picnic by the poster that says “Welcome Dear Alien": the kind of human absurdity that presumes aliens are alien in name only). In 1942 Woody Guthrie wrote a song around this question: “What did the deep sea say?” The answer is a bit cryptic: “it moaned and it groaned/And it splashed and it foamed/And it rolled on its weary way.” Though every sound his audience hears comes from the singer, it’s the sea’s presence that provokes and in a sense provides those words. In the same spirit, recent work on “affordances” and on various disruptive encounters between objects and persons—e.g. Lambros Malafouris's How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement—offer interesting ways to get at that peculiarity of what things mean to us, and what they mean by virtue of us. In other words, to make meaning of objects it’s necessary to grapple with that it means that it is us making that meaning.
In the past few weeks I have also been thinking about Peter Gordon’s striking new book about how existentialism may have shaped Adorno’s critique of idealism and his turn towards an object-oriented materialism; Gordon usefully highlights Adorno’s sense of the impossibility of ever removing our experience from our understanding of the world around us. Ultimately, this congeries—of ideas about affordances, of Malfouris’s theory of material engagement, and of Gordon’s work on the primacy of experience over event—seems to me to come back to the need to continue exploring that fascinating site where human perception and conceptualization come up against a world that is only as alien as we ourselves make it out to be.
Works Cited
Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Harmony Books, 1980.
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Gordon, Peter Eli. Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016.
Lem, Stanisław. The Star Diaries. Continuum Book. New York: Seabury Press, 1976.
Liu, Cixin. The Three-Body Problem. New York: Tor Books, 2014.
Malafouris, Lambros. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 2012.
Tarkovsky, Andrei Stalker. Videorecording. Kino International Corp, 2006.
Previously in this series: Sarah Wasserman, "Thing Theory 2017: A Forum"
Next in this series: Priyanka Anne Jacob, "Surfaces and Signs: On The Pond in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond"
