Ethics, Mediation, Relation

There has been a marvelous discussion going on currently between Paul Ennis at anotherheideggerblog, Levi Bryant at Larval Subjects, Adrian Ivakhiv at Immanence, Graham Harman at Object-Oriented Philosophy, James Stanescu at Critical Animal, and elsewhere, regarding the articulation of an ethics within Speculative Realism, what Bryant calls a "flat" ethics because it puts all entities on the same ontological level. A good deal of this hangs upon the way that we construe relations and objects, which of these we consider to be ontologically prior, and so on. The whole debate is fraught with ramifications for ecology and ethics beyond the all-too-human. I hope Alf will have a look--I imagine he might be able to really sink his teeth into some of this.

The commentary online about the status of relations in Harman's ontology, and Bryant's also, is quite extensive. I am a relation-guy myself, quite sympathetic to an ontology that holds that relations go "all the way down," and that it is very difficult to elaborate a coherent account of saying what a thing is without reference to its relations. I count myself among those who have struggled to understand Harman’s account of how relations are even possible. (He seems to get this a lot; but sooner or later he will hit upon the right formulation. I also suspect that some of the resistance to his ideas may be of a less-than-philosophical nature; but then, this suspicion of mine is also less-than-philosophical). The clash tends to be between the readers of Deleuze or Whitehead who see relation as being fundamental (Ivakhiv seems to be holding out for this appraoch), and those like Harman who want to return pride-of-place to objects, which is another way of saying they want to re-establish substance as a central philosophical term. This camp would argue that you can't have relationship without relata, and that if you foreground relations too much, relata just melt into undifferentiation.

I don’t want to reiterate the whole discussion, even the recent one that has transpired over the past two or three days. But the entire debate is pertinent to the discussion we are having about authenticity and media or mediation. In this post I’m mainly going to think through a couple of examples.

Consider a couple dining before a night at the opera. She and he are sitting together at a bar in a noisy restaurant, in a certain upscale neighborhood, before heading to see and hear a performance of a piece of art from the 19th century. There are sex- and gender-roles, socially mediated; they are dressed up in evening clothes (socio-economic playacting); there's a complex dynamic of friendship. There is alcohol being consumed. All of this (and more) does more than impact or shape the encounter between them as they sit talking at the bar. This complex array of social mores and historical contingencies and gustatory processes is what mediates the encounter, is in fact how the encounter happens. To imagine that there could be some encounter without these mediations, an encounter one might abstract from them, or have instead if one could only screen out the noise, is nonsense. There would not be an authentic encounter, but rather no encounter whatsoever, without mediation. There can be other encounters (in other settings, on other occasions, with different menus and different outfits), but no "pure" encounter.

I take it that this is what Alf is getting in at the paper (I discussed & linked to in my last post), in asking about tents and tennis shoes in the desert or mountains; it's not as if running naked through the desert is more "authentic," or will better tell you what the desert is "really like," than hiking along sanely protected from the elements. It will tell you what it's like to run naked through the desert--more specifically, what it's like to run naked on this particular stretch of desert on this particular occasion. But follow this line of thought too far, pile on these qualifiers too deep, and you'll find that in deciding that you can't run naked through the same desert twice, you've bled dry the notion of "what it's like;" there's only what happens, only the experience itself. Sure, every experience is what it is, and not another experience, but how do we talk about experience-- i.e., generate experiences about other experiences? Either abstraction is possible, or thought falls dumb. This is the question of media.

Media are tremendous powers—I want to say that in one sense, they're the only power that is; that "power" or "capacity" is media. It is the power of construal. Any medium allows us to construe experience. But, the catch is, it also forces us to construe experience this way. No such constraint is absolute; the thrill of reading poetry is often the thrill of the frisson generated when language suddenly does something new, something we never thought it could do, and so lets us see—mediates—the world in a way never before open to us. But the question, "Is there a relationship that is not a construal?" seems simply another way of asking: "Is there an unmediated experience?"

To say what an experience "is like," as in our example of walking in the desert, is not to construe it any more than it is construed in the experience "itself." To speak of what it is like to feel the warmth of the sun with the first moments of sunrise may involve all manner of poetic license on my part, or may be scrupulously scientific; both accounts involve construing an uncapturable-in-words experience. But that experience is already a construal. The warmth is to me a pleasant shift from the night chill, and the growing light is welcome, bringing to mind certain half-thought kitschy associations of rebirth and hope in which I take a kind of guilty pleasure. This is already mediation enough; but to the burglar who wanted to finish the job before daybreak, the dawn is a serious glitch; to the lovers in a troubadour's aubade, it is the harbinger of bittersweet parting; to the owl or the bat, it is bedtime; to the ice crystals frosting the grass, it is dispersion.

This is more than mere perspectivism. The claim here is that the experience of shifting light and the temperature is always mediated (by physical process, by nervous systems, by social, cultural and private narratives). And, I would add, this means that Harman is exactly right to insist that construal happens between objects all the time. While we can't say what happens when the sunlight strikes the frost-covered lawn from the lights' or lawn's point of view, if I may riff on Harman's perspective, we can say that in acting on each other they construe each other in a sense, and this construal always gets it wrong, is always scandalously partial.

This may seem to take an unwarranted step. Perhaps one is willing to grant that the owl construes the dawn, and does so differently than do the lovers or the burglar. But one might balk at saying that the frost construes the sunlight, or vice-versa. Harman does not (as far as I recall) use the word "construe," so I may be mis-presenting his approach. But his point, I think, would be that the heat acts upon only a single quality of the ice crystals, and does not reach them "in themselves," and so too vice-versa. My suggestion is that if we take Harman seriously, we are bound to think not just in terms of causality but in terms of mediation. According to Harman, the sunlight’s encounter with the frost (and vice-versa) is just like the human subject’s encounter with the hammer that breaks in the opening sections of Being and Time: the "frost-in-itself" recedes into the vorhanden, from the sunlight’s point of view. The light and the frost each encounter the other in a kind of intentionality that is perfectly isomorphic with the intentionality Husserl describes. Harman calls his account of causality "vicarious causation" because "real objects never touch;" a real object only meets another via (and inside) a phenomenal object. And this means (so I claim): mediation.

I hardly know where to begin in enumerating the ways some of this play out in ethics, but in reading the discussions between Ennis, Bryant, Harman, Stanescu, Ivakhiv and others, I am quite struck by how it dovetails with considerations of media and authenticity, albeit a "problematized" authenticity.

I hope there will be some comments here to keep the conversation going, but in any case I will try in my next post I may to get to some ethical "implications," or rather, to asking in what sense this is the right question. For now I'll end with just two points.

First: the logic above that isolates every experience from every other (such that every instant is unrepeatable, e.g. "there is no running across the same desert twice"), does so by making every instant infinitely qualified. There is a radical over-determination of every entity and every event: nothing can be viewed in isolation. This follows a kind of ecological logic: just as a species cannot exist by itself, but only in an (endlessly ramified) ecological niche, so any entity whatsoever is regarded as endlessly qualified by its relations. The paradox, however, is that this ecology actually cuts off the branch it sits on, because ecology, like every science, depends upon abstraction and being able to marshall organized pronouncements of general statements, not just litanies of specifics. If this were not possible, it would also be impossible to conclude that it was impossible. Hence, abstraction is possible.

Second (and relatedly): I hasten to add that I believe one can meaningfully ask "what is it like to...?" and that it is a very good and profitable question, capable of a great deal of unpacking (as Thomas Nagel demonstrated). It's also the central question of empathy ("What is it like to be...?"); thus so asking it lands us in the heart of ethics. But the question still remains (here), how is it possible for us to ask it? There are some obvious connections to virtuality here, but that may not be the most interesting thing about it.

Mediation vs. Connection

I mentioned Alf Seegert's essay in the Journal of Ecocriticism, and I want to raise a few questions about it. What follows won't mean a whole lot except in the context of a response to that paper, so interested people should read that first. My remarks do not specifically pertain to his reading of Forster's story (though I recommend both story and reading); I am largely in agreement with this. But I have a few questions about how Alf critiques an implicit distinction that Forster draws and relies upon, between the technological and the "natural."

These terms frequently determine the way the ecological debate is generally drawn, and while it's true there are more sophisticated approaches out there, it is surprising to me how often one still encounters this too-simple dichotomy. It's not that the argument is polarized between Luddites and Technophiles; but there's still a curious hankering for some kind of "authentic" experience that, it's suggested, our technology has "cut us off" from. The contrast, or apparent contrast, here is between "immediate" contact (say, skin-to-skin, or being-in-the-same-room) and somehow "mediated" interaction (looking at a picture on a screen, or "reading about," and so on).

The notion here extrapolates from the fact that, for instance, watching a documentary about the Grand Canyon is an undeniably mediated experience, to the unwarranted conclusion that there is something unmediated about actually riding a donkey down the trail on the Canyon wall. This then serves as the basis for any number of moves in ecological critique, always commending the unmediated over mediation. The danger of course is that if mediation should prove to be ubiquitous, the whole project fails. And one does not need to be an incorrigible deconstructionist to suspect that there is something problematic about "unmediated access." In fact, one of the remarkable things about Harman's Object-Oriented approach is that despite his being a hardline realist about objects, he too maintains that one's "access" to any object at all is always mediated.

As with "immediacy," so with "nature" When plastic or nuclear power is denounced as "unnatural", it is as though a wooden table or a waterwheel was somehow a spontaneously occurring phenomenon. The pacific garbage patch is as 'natural' as the gulf stream, and if human beings one day wipe out the whole damn biosphere, this will be only one more natural event, every bit as natural as solar flares, volcanoes, or indeed as the beginning of life on earth.

So I can't but agree with Alf when he suggests that a tennis-shoe-clad foot, or a foot on the gas pedal, has no more (or less) 'mediated' an encounter with the earth than a bare foot or a hoof. When Forster describes the final catastrophe (the collapse of the technological utopia and the destruction of the human life that had come to depend upon it), his narrator waxes eloquent:

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body.

As Alf rather ingeniously points out, the nakedness of Forster's "beautiful naked man" is in fact an index of his technological co-evolution, not the sign of its absence; human beings look as they do naked because of the technology of clothes. "Naked man" is not unmediated man. In the same way as Kuno, in Forster's story, can't breathe the natural air on the Earth's surface, neither could Captain Scott have withstood the Antarctic winds if he faced them the way he was born.

Nonetheless, I have some reservations about the enthusiastic tossing-out of "mediation" as a term of distinction. If everything is mediated, then the term becomes meaningless, and this I think leads to places Alf doesn't want to go. This makes his next steps hard for me to "get;" though I understand (I think) each step, the whole shape of his approach feels a little vague. (To be fair, I should point out that this essay of Alf's is part of a chapter in his dissertation, so the argument might be more balanced and easier in the context of the whole work.) Having spent a great deal of energy problematizing the categories on which the critics of technology want to rely, he nonetheless suggest (as I certainly want to also) that some mediations are more equal than others. And here I don't fully understand the criteria to which he is referring.

Alf asks: "is the problem with “mediated nature” the simple fact that it is mediated (an inescapable condition always at some level), or rather that with certain types of mediation comes a loss of connection with the Other...?" But I wonder how we are supposed to tell the difference between one type of mediation and another type. I find myself wanting to argue back that the critique that points out mediation is actually more to the point. When McLuhan (upon whom Alf is relying here) points out the threat that technological mediation poses to alterity (or rather, to the recognition of alterity) this is because precisely here, mediation is disguised and concealed. Alf argues that the question to ask is not whether a connection is "authentic," but rather, with what or who does it connect us? But already it really is possible to believe, in a kind of automatic unthinking way, that one "knows" the Grand Canyon or the Northern Lights from having seen a movie. One day very soon it will be possible to emerge from a V.R. theatre and say it with absolute conviction. And yet, I insist, one has a crazy-making intuition that such conviction will be wrong.

So how can one do justice to both the critique of the mediation/unmediated distinction, and to the intuition that a perfect planetarium show does not show you the real sky? I think the (only? best?) way to argue this is to say that the so-called "connection" in this case is ersatz.

There is also the issue of the seductiveness of certain kinds of mediation. I remember a trip to the zoo where I saw hosts of children flock to a TV monitor playing an "instructional video" about an orangutan, oblivious to the real orangutan who was playing and looking curiously through the glass at them a yard away. What I mean by seductiveness is not really the providing of pleasure, but simply the providing of a good substitute for what used to give pleasure, without the cost in pain or (what increasingly is regarded as the same thing) inconvenience. The children at the zoo, were I think, seduced by the form of TV; it didn't give them more excitement than the unpredictable real animal; but everything in their previous experience had already trained them to prefer it. Why?

Well, I prefer to see a shark through a big plate glass window than in 'unmediated' proximity in the water, and in fact there's a part of me that prefers a shark on TV to a shark in the aquarium. Likewise, I prefer sterile surgery with anesthetic to some of the more "authentic" alternatives. These preferences of mine are based on a disinclination to experience pain--based, in sum, on fear. It need not be an irrational fear. But I wonder if we are not close here to the root of the problem. It is a short step, perhaps, from rational fear to irrational aversion, and from this to mere laziness (a disinclination to effort is also an aversion to pain).

I don't think that we can either correct this, or even really correctly analyze it, via a kind of utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain or cost/benefit analysis. But my guess is that there is something here that is pertinent, not primarily about pain and pleasure but about fear and whatever one will oppose to it; courage, or interestedness, or love.