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The Call of Things A Critique of Object PDF
The Call of Things A Critique of Object PDF
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Thank you,
Andrew Cole
Princeton University
6 October 2015
Andrew Cole
People have been using, thinking, and writing about things for . . . let’s
just say for a long time. Fast forward to some very recent approaches to
the philosophical problem of things or objects: vitalism, actor-network
theory (ANT), and speculative realism, or object-oriented ontology.
These new areas seek to dispense with old philosophical dualisms that
put a gap between subjects and objects, conferring onto subjects their
humanity and relegating inert objects to whatever is useful for us.
Instead, according to the new line of thinking, objects should be
recognized for their indifference to us, for the sorts of things they do
behind our backs, and for the ways in which they “are” behind appear-
ances. Objects, that is, do not need us to actualize their ontology in
their own hidden ways, withdrawn into their dim worlds of non-
relation but expressive of their forces and tendencies. Objects are
actants, falling in and out of assemblages and entering into collectives
of their own making. And we are the posthumans, objects in a world
of objects, who in fact have the capacity to describe that which Kant
said cannot be described, to think that which cannot be thought:
things in themselves. How can we think the unthinkable? How do we
write about what cannot be thought?
These questions come to mind when reflecting on the new vital-
ism, ANT, and object-oriented ontology. I cannot characterize these
new fields as a single movement, because they are not one, though it
may be fair to call all of them object-oriented ontologies (plural) and
recognize accordingly how they are aligned in one particular way,
which is the focus of this short essay. While they all work hard not to
project the human into the heart of things, in their attempt to respect
the indifference of objects in themselves, they do so anyway by dint of
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Cole 107
the ancient Logos principle by which things call out to us and speak
their being. This principle is, I will show, a convenient fiction in this
new work, enabling the philosopher to hear the call of things and to
speak to and for them, despite the new rule that we cannot think of
objects as being-for-us and must reject older philosophies smacking
of “presence” and traditional ontology or ontotheology. The contra-
dictions within each of these new philosophies —it is and it is not
anthropocentrism, anthropocentrism is and is not a bad thing — can
be resolved, I suggest, when the idealism and mysticism of these
fields are acknowledged rather than disavowed in facile critiques of
ersatz idealism and pseudosubjectivism. More crucially, a philosoph-
ical Middle Ages, which comes into view when generous attention is
paid to the richness of premodern thought, presents an opportunity,
if not a challenge, to these areas, enabling them to acknowledge cog-
nitive limits that will never be breached by colorful, and sometimes
only purple, prose.
Prehumanism
Let’s delve within the philosophical tradition that these newer areas
overlook and start with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who is relevant to these
considerations precisely because of his Kantianism, far more idealist
than Kant’s own. To make a long story short, Fichte wants to cross the
chasm set in place by transcendental idealism, the Kantian idea that
there are noumena and phenomena, things in themselves on the one
hand and appearances on the other: you cannot know, see, or experi-
ence things in themselves, sealed off as they are from our own thinking,
but you can regard their appearances, thanks to the so-called “forms of
possible experience.” Fichte supports this distinction between humans
and things, subjects and objects, but there is a crucial difference —
namely, he tests the distinction, starting with his claim that “both [the
subject and the object] are supposed to be unified here; the natures of
both object and subject are supposed to be preserved without either
being lost” (2000, 31). He continues to collapse the distinction between
subject and object by showing how the very thought of an object is
indistinguishable from the object’s call or summons to the thinker:
“Both are completely unified if we think of the subject’s being-deter-
mined as its being-determined to be self-determining, i.e. as a sum-
mons (eine Aufforderung) to the subject, calling upon it to resolve to
exercise its efficacy” (31). Fichte is referring to the call of things, the
demands objects make upon subjects: “The object is not compre-
hended, and cannot be other than as a bare summons calling upon the
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I say that he [God] speaks to all things and he speaks all things.
Some things hear and answer him according to the property of
existence, namely that by which God is existence and the exis-
tence of all things is from him. Other things hear him and
receive the Word of God insofar as he is the first and true life.
These are all living beings. The highest beings hear God not
only through and in existence and through and in life, but also
through and in understanding. Intellection and utterance are
the same here. (1981, 115)
here contrasts with what John Berger reports of his tour in the hills of
Sardinia, marveling at the “stones of silence” that are the nuraghi and
enjoying their “companionship”: “To place a stone upright so that it
stands vertical is an act of symbolic recognition: The stone becomes a
presence, a dialogue begins” (1998, 3).2 What does it mean, for Eck-
hart, but to reflect on the significance of holding up a stone that contin-
ues, as opposed to begins, to speak, as we see in Berger? Eckhart’s differ-
ence from Berger is philosophically significant, because for Eckhart, it
is as if the stone refuses to be either “ready to hand” or “present at hand”
in the Heideggerian sense, its ontological significance at this very
moment of contact with the human indicated by an equipmental total-
ity mattering only to it but inaccessible to us in our moments of sense
certainty. Imprecise as the analogy may be, we are working our way
toward asking how the fundamental Heideggerian principles of specu-
lative realism (Harman 2005, 76) remain informed by medieval mysti-
cism and indeed what a mystical discourse can do for objects deemed
mysterious.3
What we have here in Eckhart is, again, a Logos theology, the
principle that “God’s speaking is his making” (85; see 40–41) and that
what is heard is the voice of God, with objects emerging as transmis-
sion devices. This, too, is a crucial revision of Aristotle, from whose
work “On the Soul” (1984) Eckhart intentionally draws and scram-
bles, insofar as Aristotle understands “sound” to be “generated by an
impact,” with certain objects having “no sound” (667/419b), and
“voice” to be a “sound characteristic of what has soul in it” (669/420b).
Eckhart puts soul into the soulless and thus definitionally, at least in
his relation to Aristotle, emerges as a vitalist (more than a panenthe-
ist). For a theologian whose Neoplatonism would strongly encourage
him to “turn away from other things” (1981, 115), Eckhart certainly
lingers around them, even human products, long enough to hear them
out,4 but this dilation perfectly suits a mystic who commends silence
as the opening to the noise of the world. That Eckhart proposes that
only contemplative mindfulness can foster a conversation with things
and encourage an openness to their calls suggests that Fichte is right.
Fichte knew that this initial relationship with objects is a mystical one
and requires the mystical discourse of the summons. He understood
that our moment of spontaneous receptivity to the call of things is
the moment before self-consciousness. It is the moment before self-
thematizing, the moment when the self has yet to define itself over
and against objects, the moment —in other words —before Kant.5 It
is a posthuman move on account of its prehumanism: the thought of
objects, their call, before the thought of thought.
Cole 111
Talk Talk
So, what does this Fichtean view of the mystical origins of subject-
object relations have to do with ANT, vitalism, and speculative
realism —fields that wish to stand far apart from the Logos principle
and the pitfalls of what Derrida (after Heidegger) calls ontotheology?
The answer is a lot, especially if your hermeneutic demands things to
make the call.
I begin with Bruno Latour, who has inspired much of the work
under consideration here. In Reassembling the Social (2005), he sum-
marizes the effort to create an “an object-oriented sociology for object-
oriented humans” who witness the awakening of noisy objects: “As if
a damning curse had been cast unto things, they remain asleep like
the servants of some enchanted castle. Yet, as soon as they are freed
from the spell, they start shuddering, stretching, and muttering” (73).
This is not an off moment for Latour, nor is it a mere rhetorical point
with a dash of medieval nostalgia. Rather, this is how he seeks to make
his method persuasive, as in this passage:
If, so the idea goes, we make objects mute owing to our instrumental
approach to them, we need to relate to them differently so that they
will tell stories about themselves. Make them “utter a word.” “Make
them talk.” Let’s stop “talking.” Or at least, let’s allow the objects to be
heard. For, as Jane Bennett says in Vibrant Matter (2010), we can “give
a voice to a thing-power” (2). She elaborates: “I will try to give voice to
a vitality intrinsic to materiality” (3). When things actualize this
“thing-power” they make a “call”: “Stuff exhibited its thing-power: it
issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying” (4).
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Hard Problems
The premodern contributions, the role of mysticism and the summons
or call in particular, were not lost to Henri Bergson — a philosopher
whom the vitalists, ANTs, and speculative realists hail as a founding
and enabling thinker. Bergson, unlike many he inspired, knew that
the vitalist tradition must account, conscientiously, for the summons,
the soul, and the kinds of mysticism necessary to thinking the vitality
of things.
In an essay called “Frenzy, Mechanism, Mysticism” (2002),
Bergson writes, “Man will rise above earthly things only if a powerful
equipment supplies him with the requisite fulcrum. He must use mat-
ter as a support if he wants to get away from matter. In other words,
the mystical summons up (appelle) the mechanical” (1932, 166). As
if this point were not big enough, he continues: “So let us not merely
say . . . that the mystical summons up (appelle) the mechanical. We
must add that the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that
mechanism should mean mysticism” (339). The world has a soul,
just as Eckhart thought. But — and this is crucial for Bergson —just
because the world is animate with the hubbub of élan vital does not
mean that consciousness itself dissolves:
what the speculative realist project even is, what it can do, what its
limits are. The deconstructive lesson about the identity of thought and
being perhaps now looks pat, but as speculative realists sever this Par-
menidean nexus and being is taken as its own category irrespective of
thought, there remains consciousness, and the questions of its basis
will always be asked, even when you believe you are thinking about
something else entirely.
Notes
1. What I cover here, however, is not discussed in Ernst von Bracken’s Meis-
ter Eckhart und Fichte (1943).
2. For an essay that asks, “If stone could speak, what would it say about
us?,” see Cohen.
3. On Heidegger and Eckhart, see Caputo.
4. See Eckhart 1981, 134; more generally, 134–35; see also 131, 142–43,
145. Elsewhere, Eckhart speaks of fire that “sees” (172).
5. Clearly, one could turn next to Emmanuel Lévinas’s “summons” in
Totality and Infinity (1969).
6. For a different example of this critical approach, see Daston’s collection
of essays entitled Things That Talk, and the editor’s discussion about talkative
things (11–15).
7. Here is one way to object to my (and Bergson’s) point:
If a sentient being is like a wind harp, and if, moreover, sensation and think-
ing are ontologically similar to one another, then we can invert the image.
Wind harps are like sentient beings. We are approaching territory into which
the new philosophy speculative realism has burst, in particular, the insights of
object-oriented ontology (OOO) concerning regions of nonhuman “sen-
tience.” . . . We OOO philosophers can sound as if we are saying that nonsen-
tient objects are conscious. This is not exactly what is being said. Rather, what
OOO claims is that consciousness isn’t all that different from what a tree
does when it “translates” the wind. (Morton 2012, 205, 206–7)
This “Rather” assumes a false identity —it is not even an analogy — between wind
activity and human consciousness, taking consciousness to be equal to, and delim-
ited by, anthropomorphic activity: “The strings of the wind harp stringpomor-
phize the wind” (207) just as the tree presumably treeopomorphizes the wind.
8. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology have garnered interest
in some quarters of medieval studies as well as in art and architecture, as Harman
notes (2012, 183). But one starting point for medievalists, I believe, can be the mys-
tical and idealist texts discussed here, because they open up a line of inquiry that
anticipates speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, in turn facilitating an
encounter between the medieval and the modern that reveals —and this is key —the
philosophical depth of the former and the conceptual limits of the latter. To my mind,
any glance at these texts shows the weaknesses and occlusions of this new philoso-
phy, and I am not sanguine that taking what works while ignoring what doesn’t is
the way to go.
Cole 117
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