tricky conference question

I gave a paper in Manchester a few years ago. It was on light and perception in the work of Poe and Benjamin. The audience responded well to the paper, but one attendee asked: what do you do to ensure a critical distance in your work?

I’m still not really sure how I would answer this question now. At the time, I simply said I didn’t know. In my head I was thinking, isn’t it impossible to ensure critical distance? Isn’t it precisely our blind spots that open us to criticism, and thus undermine our own attempts to maintain a critical distance? Perhaps this is just a deconstructive suspicion, a bit overdone. In any case, I should have just turned the question around and found out how the questioner keeps his critical distance. But I didn’t.

[Update: I should add that I didn't want to speak what was running through my head because the room was filled with literary theory people, some of whom were Terry Eagleton's students, and I didn't want to sound like a naive philosopher. Then again, given Eagleton's book on ideology, I might have been right to speak my silent monologue.]

specialization and a bit more

Judging from the philosophy job postings last year and the few that have trickled out recently, I’m noticing the following trend. Schools looking to hire a continental philosopher often add a qualification to their call, indicating that they’d like this continentalist to also be versed in some kind of nontraditional area of research. These often include race and feminist theory, Latin American and Native American philosophy, postcolonialist theory. Africana philosophy seems to be increasingly desirable. ‘Interdisciplinary’ is another term often injected into the posting.  Now, these are not always listed as requisite AOCs, but rather stated as ‘preferences’.

If the schools hiring are holding fast to their desires, then it seems that the field of potential candidates (those with an AOS in continental philosophy) is quickly narrowed. A great percentage of viable continental philosophers will be eliminated from consideration, and there are already only a handful of these gigs to go around. The lesson for graduate students in continental philosophy: spend your time studying a field that does not fall into one of the traditional categories like ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics. Diversifying can only help you in the professional arena, even if your areas of interest are not readily acknowledged by the usual governing bodies of philosophy.

michael’s full response

To my recent posts. Is here. I missed this, so I’ll try to get around to it soon and answer Michael’s extensive reply to my remarks on sensation.

objects and sensations

Michael at Archive Fire has a couple generous responses to my recent posts on sensation. You can find his remarks here and here. First, I want to say what I like about his own contribution to the discussion. Second, I’ll clarify a few things about my own position.

Michael writes: “What you want to call a thing’s “qualities” I call its immanent properties. I prefer to use the term ‘properties’ because the word ‘quality’ carries with it the connotation of ‘being perceived’ by the subject. In fact, I argue that entities are temporal assemblages of immanent properties – and thus vulnerable to a myriad of affects (assailing and being assailed) on multiple scales, and from various angles, depending on the circumstances obtaining within the wider ecology of forces, flows and things.”

I’m perfectly fine with the term ‘property’ instead of ‘quality’, and in fact I’ve used property and quality alike. Sometimes interchangeably, but now I’ll be sure to make a distinction or avoid quality altogether. As I said, I take an objects disposition to be constituted by its singular gathering of properties, or what Michael calls a ‘temporal assemblage of immanent properties’. For his part, I’d like to hear a little more about what temporality entails here, as well as why ‘immanent’ is used as a qualifier here. Are there transcendent properties of objects?

Michael also wants to know what I think objects are. Provisionally, I’ll say that objects are singular composites of properties with the power to effect sensations.  Indeed, they are assemblages without a substantial core. No core is needed, properties simply hang together for some time until they can no longer do so. The identity of an object is determined by its capacity to affect other bodies. In this sense, I like Michael’s suggestion that my understanding of objects has a resonance with the Latourian notion of actant. Likewise, my understanding of objects derives from Spinoza’s conception of bodies given in Part II of the Ethics, the so-called ‘brief preface concerning the nature of bodies’ (at P13). Bodies are identified by the effects they can produce, or what they can cause. This capacity derives from their disposition, which I see as dictated by a given state of their plasticity (their capacity to give and receive form [James], or affect and be affected [Spinoza]). For me, I’d like to talk about what sensations a body can produce; the language of cause may be too strong for me. Sensations are caused, it seems, but they are more than mere effects. Their conditions of actualization require more than the presence of some sentient creature. (The language of ‘disposition’ I borrow from Stephen Mumford’s book Dispositions.)

As to the point that we need to be able to distinguish between sentient and nonsentient bodies. I agree, there must be a distinction. I think its a difference of degree, not of kind. So, on my broad definition of sensation all bodies or objects are sentient, but humans have a more complex sentience than, say, a stone. However, the sentience of humans is not more complex than a community or an ecosystem–far from it. The confederation of bodies in an ecosystem renders that system’s sentience drastically more complex and multidimensional. This is my attempt to avoid anthropocentrism about sentience, despite admitting that humans have a greater degree of sentience than stones. In addition, I’d say that humans have perception, which perhaps only some other animals have, and cognition. It is at these levels that I would distinguish them from other entities.

If you read this, Michael, I’d like to hear more of your reasons for disavowing the ‘inter-mediate gap between entities’ where qualities would appear to one or the other of these entities.

do objects assail or beckon us?

I can’t recall right now (and I don’t feeling like looking it up) where Merleau-Ponty says that objects, or their sense, meet our gaze with a ‘vague beckoning’? He also uses the term ‘solicitation’ at places to denote how object attract us and draw us into a ‘communion’ with them. At a couple points in the Phenomenology he speaks about sense experience as an assault or assailing of the body, which is language he adopts directly from Erwin Straus’s The Primary World of Senses.

Realism hinges on the question of whether or not objects assail us. If we think they merely beckon us, then the idea that subject and object reciprocally determine each other’s form seems plausible. That is, a certain postdualist idealism/irrealism may be right.  But if objects assail us with their qualities or with sensations, then there is something to be said about their autonomy from our perceptual or cognitive machinery.

six theses on sensation

For the last few years I have been thinking about the concept of sensation and how to rework it, give it a more robust definition and render it amenable to realism as well as a certain materialism. Here are six theses about sensation, along with a brief elucidation:

First Thesis: sensations exist objectively; that is, they are real. Sensations originate and therefore belong to bodies that give them to other bodies. A body is constituted as a singular conglomeration or confederation of sensations. This means that sensing entails a kind of invasion or assault.

Second Thesis: sensations are actualized relationally. How a sensation will affect a body depends on the objective sensation and the constitution of the receptive body. Because any body, animate or inanimate, can be affected by the qualities of another body, all bodies are capable of suffering sensations.

Third Thesis: the practical value of sensation is ambivalent. Sensations vary in intensity and involve both pleasure and pain. That a sensation will be pleasurable or painful cannot always be decided in advance. Some sensations can be so intense that they destroy the sensing body; some enliven the body and increase its capacity to exist (Spinoza). Thus, any given sensation is, in itself, ambivalent.

Fourth Thesis: sensations are a source of alimentation. Just as we ‘live from’ (Levinas) food and drink, our sensory environments nourish us (potentially). Because they can also poison, see the thesis immediately above. If you are so inclined, you could call sensation a pharmakon.

Fifth Thesis: sensations are basically anonymous. They reach bodies below the level or consciousness, including perception. If perception is of the present, even an ambiguous and semi-amorphous present as that described by Merleau-Ponty, then sensation is the anonymous background of this present. When a sensation arises to the level of consciousness, it has become a perception. Since inanimate objects are not conscious, their sentience is always anonymous, but the effects of sensations are registered on them materially.

Sixth Thesis: the time of sensation belongs to the past. Sensations accumulate in the body as habits and we slowly become ‘desensitized’ to them (cf. James). This sedimentation is the accumulation of past sensings, sensings that are basically anonymous (see above).

adjunct life

An article in The Chronicle discusses, firsthand, the class status of the adjunct professor and graduate student. I have found that folks outside academe do not often realize that becoming a professor in higher education does not entail a hefty salary. They do not realize, for instance, that getting an MA and teaching elementary school can be more lucrative than getting a PhD and teaching in the humanities. Of course, these teaching gigs differ greatly and each has its own stresses and difficulties, but that’s not the point. The point is that nonacademics are probably even more in the dark about adjunct life and the class issues faced therein. Apart from the sadness of the matter, it’s a fascinating aspect of our institutional situation. There is so much social credit involved in getting advanced degrees, but oftentimes the economic credit is mismatched.

more on radiating sensations

Michael likes what I say about sensation in this post. I reply with a substantial comment on what I take sensation to be. From now on I’ll put comments of this sort in a new post.