Jeffrey Kipnis & Graham Harman In conversation: On immaterialism (an allegro sonata) (March 2, 2017)

for those of you who clearly didn't have enough from last night you come back for more actually the context of this is very different than that last night for many reasons these have to do this is more like inside the family kind of conversation Jeff and Graham are two of our distinguished professors they're both on different areas and what I think is interesting is and I hope there is I think you guys another three of them through a series of three conversations on semester but is my hope that these keep going over the years in the years to come I think these are is a format that sometimes the school of architecture tend to abandon which is the idea to have a sustained discussion over time and this was something that it was a practice in different times in other institutions in the 70s and the 80s and some of the results of that were fantastic some of you will remember the multiple debates between Lyon career and Peter Iseman between three to four inches of calculus there are been different models of these over the years and he always was interesting to see how the discussion changed over time like something to start with in one direction after two or three years they became a different conversation and you start to see the participants almost switch arguments it's an interesting thing so I'm not saying that that's what we're gonna see with Jeff and Graham but it may be interesting to see in two or three years of also when you get to know each other more it is like two tennis players I've been playing many many many times is very is in many ways became more and more interest in the model play because the margin and where the difference get established became reduced on radio so there is something here at the beginning of that that it could be really really interesting so again to me this is not so much an interest much more to frame this this is part of to really for our own benefit to have the pleasure to have these two remarkable thinkers teaching in the school on a regular basis and I think these foreign and in this format with these audience allows also for a kind of a more intimate conversation which I think sometimes the much bigger venue produce a different kind of conversation so hopefully this one booth allowed also to the two of them to have more time and again because you have two more to go so also that also can maybe help us to each of them to be fairly specific about what are the territory but I think ultimately well here is a stake or what is a stake for us is a little bit something that all raised upon rabble last night and hopefully we'll keep going today we just have to do how architecture understand and relate to some of these very complex theoretical philosophical thinking and frankly done Bravo and in that sense everybody here knows the importance of gran-gran harm our work as have in the field and how many people are following and discussing and trying to understand and how that were architecture and Jeff for now I have to say for a long time has been one of those where I call architecture producer who has been really good and unravel in some of these complex theory in a kind of a almost no practical application but at least with a sense of understanding health some of the things can be deployed so I think this hopefully it start to establish a pattern and I think this will produce whatever thing is a very substantial new layers of information how it helped us to understand the different possibility how architecture operate as a cultural discipline and how these other extraordinary and illuminating way of thinking can relate in a more direct way with what we do in our field so anyway we no further ado Jeff and Graham so most of you know me and know that I suffer an amateur form of the hysterical glossolalia meaning inability to quit speaking that slab boy is the world's greatest professional love so I went home last night I thought to myself whatever I do today grandma's gonna get to finish every sentence and in fact not just to finish them but start some have an entire day of speaking so I thought what am I gonna do so I spent all morning and that Chinese energy getting energy work some of the comments I've ever been my lunch and I did that because last night he started a lot of really incredible answers to questions that he didn't get to finish and I thought I knew where he was gonna go but I really didn't I wasn't sure so if some of those I'm gonna try to ask to Betty and in fact build into some of our conversation so there will be some I think continuity between last night today but that's not the purpose of today the purpose of today is to use this recent book of the Grahams which was discussed a little bit last night I hope all of y'all have a copy to have an opportunity at sci-arc to really let gram unfold his thinking on his work which the minute one publishes a book is no longer his and I can guarantee you the way it's circulating in this school and in other schools and how it's being taking it up by other philosophers including his close friend and I suppose protege tim is that yeah it's not what he wants it to be it's something else and that's that's something as you know I applaud I mean it has a life of its own and I most of my life has been reading philosophers or physicists or other works and not really understanding it but having it stimulate my work so well and so thoroughly that I quit referring to it because I felt like I didn't want to blame my bad ideas on it but I'm delighted to have encountered so in order to do that I'm going to this is almost going to seem very a pedantic approach we're going to actually go through various sections of the book and I've chosen those sections because in order to see if I can find how his work my best apply or best be isolated for someone that is working in material discourse like architecture or art even though he takes a strong stand on the difference between materialism or in particular the new materialism and on his work and so that means that we're going to do some things that can be really boring what for example we're going to spend a little bit of time on definitions now I don't know very few of you were old enough but do you remember a thing called the Watergate hearings you wouldn't know this this happened in the mid 19th century right after the Civil War and see that gives me accounts that's the four people that actually know the Watergate er there was a guy a senator who slept through all the Watergate hearings his name was si Hayakawa he turned out to be at that time America's greatest living linguist and he wrote a book called language and thought in action the first sentence of which is any conversation that can degenerate into definitions we'll it was sort of a Murphy's Law of conversations and so one is warned against worrying too much about definitions in philosophy there's a coded use of language in so one has to be careful about how one uses language and one has to be careful how you use his terms and when you're reading Graham's work you'll find a refreshing relaxation about that he's perfectly willing to let as far as I understand and I'm going to ask him to affirm this or not but as you read this book you'll find out that thing object even other forms like corporation they're there he's not particularly demanding that one makes sure one understands the difference between a thing and an object is that true Heidegger uses thing and a positive sense an object in a negative sense and I prefer to have synonyms so that the prose doesn't become repetitive and so I try to say in the book that I'll use them interchangeably yes and which is kind of a relief so you're not sitting around trying to remember what you would you mean by an object and so as I read and I'm and I'm working through so we're going to look at trying to figure out what an object is and why his is an object oriented and for example sometimes you can read in the book and you'll see it's an object-oriented ontology so we should wonder a little bit about what an ontology means to him not just to him personally as a private writer but what it means in his thinking in relationship to the history of ontology and the contemporary uses of ontology and other discourses but sometimes he'll say an object-oriented philosophy and sometimes he'll say an object-oriented social theory and we'll I'll show you some of these things and so I'd like to clarify some of those issues and that and in the clarification so it's not really about defining the terms but it's allowing the clarifications of the distinctions in those uses but it's my opinion as I've studied now I hijacked Graham in our first meeting I showed up at Princeton he didn't know who I was by what the the clear look of a predator can't wait no I think I've been tipped off that you might show up and from the things you were saying I guess there must be a peg and you know the reason I did was no one in flux and no one in architecture for almost a decade had seriously written a new philosophy particularly any new philosophy and the fact that people were reading Graham's work primarily because of his associated associated with David was causing two things to happen one was me great joy simply that people were reading again just that fact which became my apology and the other one was incredible consternation from the previous generation of readers who thought all those people should be reading what they read whether it was de Luz dary diet dependent you could pick whoever it was went all the way back to popper and then they thought what is this object-oriented ontology it's nonsense anyway you know I mean it was an incredible negative reaction and so I thought I'd go find out what it was about and started reading it and at one point it finally hit me and I'm going to show you why that despite his efforts to the contrary or despite his efforts to soft-pedal the radical consequences of what he's that when he thinks efforts that I believe are grounded in his good manners his sense of measure his sense of disciplinary poetess the the radical limit of graham Harmons thinking reaches the possibility of shaking our thinking out of an enormous that's at least two or three centuries old that nothing comes close to it I'm not sure he will agree with my interpretation of what he's saying although I doubt seriously he will be able to simply escape my chokehold since I've got his words right in front of me and when it started to occur to me that he was saying that he was being totally generous about it they would in the sense that he's he will not be able to say oh way you're exchanging this word for that word you know that this became one of the most exciting things I had encountered and I couldn't wait to work this out because yeah he in it so that could it have the first line I'll just show you a little bit so what all you're gonna see today the next two slides and as these are going on let let me say this if you plan to the question-and-answer period will occur at the end but what will be better I think what will work better for you and work better for me because it always works better for me is it three o'clock or at four o'clock when you say to yourself I wish had asked this you write it down you email it to me and I will incorporate it in the next discussion so a dialogue in which you have a chance to think about what we're thinking about at any point in time I can guarantee you I will put it in our discussion and you have anybody in this room wants to continue to have the discussion you make sure I get it and that will be part of you know it'll be letters so is this the first line okay so see the sentence that begins what Kant failed to note is that since any relationship fails to exhaust its Relater meaning the things that participate every inanimate object is a thing in itself for every other as well but since this present book is concerned with human society society's object object interactions apart from humans is only a peripheral concern for us and at the very end of the book he restates that to say let us serve as a compact list the first principles of a object-oriented social theory which I have also called in materialism because of the hope will hopelessly do a mining character of every form of materialism all right so this lays out the entire argument I want to say the book and his major concerns thank you our social theory he cares about people and his wants his work to directly impact the lives of people in part by not thinking about people directly and and in a powerfully interesting way that should be of great interest to us since we have no interest in people whatsoever and you know that by looking at the history of architecture in all of the books that we write and take pictures of you don't see any people in it you see little drawings of people so we know how big stuff is people are the infestation of our work and I appreciate you're not laughing and understanding the truth of that observation so but again now it's called now object-oriented social theory I suppose is a special application of object-oriented philosophy but the radical point here is this point of Kant not having the capabilities or the it wasn't the willingness but even the capabilities understand that there was a thing in of itself thing in itself of an inanimate object now I'm gonna claim that it's true that a materialism is unable to do that but matter theory has been doing that for a long time and I'm going to try to make a distinction between materialism and matter theory and I'm gonna say in the long run that I think it might be only possible for that claim to be true if in some sense matter is always already alive because the reason can't couldn't imagine doing that and just like you said last night briefly and passing and no one noticed neither could hided her because of a sign no one can ever think of the material world as having that property unless it has not just an entity but an intellect so want to come in on that yes I've always been unsure what to say about things like vitalism and pants like ism I sometimes get accused of this of course because I'm saying that Internet relations are on the same footing as human world relations so on the one hand I feel some sympathy for these vitalist and pence I guess the currents on the other hand I'm not getting a rep you like slide weight is so I'm just going to show that please finish no but on the other hand I think when people adopt a pen psychist position which isn't as ridiculous as it used to be since David's could be in a Reuters book showing how central Penn psychism has been to Western philosophy you even finds them in Bertrand Russell he found some incredible stuff and let alone Eastern philosophy where it's all over the place it's not as a ridiculous signing an option as it once was however I'd I wouldn't want to project all of human cognitive abilities back into things that I think that'll be going way too far but I just want to say that the there's there's a certain relational structure that's the same between objects as it is between objects in the world which is the translation of the thing into a sensual form and it doesn't necessarily follow that there's cognition already at that level so I'm not sure I would call myself an advocate of living matter or not I'm I'm open to it more than most but ok so now just to be clear my argument is not based on pants psychism or my discussion nor based on vitalism it's a hardcore argument based on contemporary physics ok and when we get to the new materialist list what I will try to show is that there is no way any physics is today would not argue that what goes on between elementary particles and lower is a life of sensations that there's an exchange of communications not communications exchange of sensations and a reaction like an electron absorbs a photon not because it knows quantum mechanics but because it feels the sensation of a proton and only then and in fact you will watch important physicists today Nobel Prize winning one lecture online that says the best way to describe the relationship between a proton and a neutron - I mean a proton and an electron to make a hydrogen atom is that they're in love and so it's not a metaphor of human love but it is a sensational relationship and the interesting thing about that is that an electron has no inner structure it's ammonia so where does the electron go and what does it mean for an electron to get excited and all of the properties matter that every physicist today would talk about can only be described in these terms which will get us we're gonna about to go to the your list and so step one is to not your critique of new materialism is extremely well considered but to let new materialism which we're better look at become the straw dog for matter theory to become your the ability to stand as the your concern that you just expressed because you're gonna find a very difficult time for me to remove the phenomena and allow the new Ameena its independence meaning in the content sense of the thing itself this entity this book this table this remote control cannot have the property that you just described here unless it has it doesn't have to have self-awareness it does it has to have an entity at the level of some kind of intelligent intellect would have been a soul at one time spirit some sense of being so as Heidegger says the meaning of the thing is the being of the thing is something that is so it has to that's a design for him that's it and nothing that doesn't have that is a thing I mean you know so if I break this into it it doesn't know it's unaware you are correct but as I but I'm wanting to know is in your mind simply in the state is there a limit to that condition simply in the state that it has to be present in some sense in intellectual consciousness that the existence of the thing our awareness so it's a glass only a glass as a thing or as an object because of its state of being and in relationship to us no I think that's closer to gjx position and that's why last night I was surprised that he was emphasizing our agreement on the thing in itself because we actually don't agree on that point at all you know I think he just wasn't in the mood to fight on that point he did want to agree that there is an essence okay and that was a very generous was yes but for the canyons it's always open yah it's always the object is the object cause of desire and so it springs up simultaneously thing like with my desire it's not a real thing out there that could satisfy me for the canyons whereas for me there is a real thing out there it might not be quite the same as what we think it is but it's that's that's a pretty big difference he's a head galleon I'm a Haida garyun at bottom and that's the way in which Hegel and Heidegger are most incompatible Hegel tries to get rid of the thing in itself Heidegger tries to allow it back into philosophy okay I know what he was talking about do that we have can you help them understand that a bit sure in a way you can you could say that GJ comes from two sources everybody comes from many sources but the two sources for ggx philosophy are Hegel on the comb and he tells us himself that they both do the same kind of thing you thought that there was this Newman old world this world of things in themselves outside of our minds that we couldn't encounter because of human finitude which means that humans experiencing experience everything in space and time even though we don't know for sure if there's really space and time out there if God sees things in space in time or if it's just us and humans see things according to 12 categories the understanding which includes things like cause-and-effect and we can't know what the world is really like outside of human finitude but human infant human finitude must experience things in terms of space time in the 12 categories Lacan said there is a thing in itself out there I can think it but I can't know it and in a way all of German idealism which is the period right after Kant's culminating in Hegel got past can't by trying to radicalize that and saying hey that's a contradiction if you're thinking a thing outside thought that's already a thought and therefore you never get outside the circle of thought and so there's no thing in itself thinking itself as an obstacle internal to the thought process and this is how Hegel tries to overcome the difference between phenomena and Newman ah there are no Newman and Hegel that's the whole point and then Dziedzic tells us that Lacan does the same thing to Freud about the unconscious because for Freud the unconscious is a real thing this quasi biological mysterious thing underneath our conscious mind that controls all of our actions and from the calm which Dziedzic adopts that's not the case the unconscious is on the surface for for the call I'm calm the unconscious exists only in things like slips of the tongue and things like dreams it's not something hiding behind that and so that's in other words both roots of Dziedzic are idealist roots right they're trying to get rid of the notion that there's a real world outside of the outside of the mind now he right he did make a concession about essence but what Jesus will always say is that the the real is has to do with the structure of the subject itself it's not something outside the subject it's something that contained on the level of imminence so again Oh BJ ah which is 'la Costas is the only possible concept of the object is that the object is the object cause of desire which means if you're not desiring the object is not there whereas in triple o the objects there whether you're desiring it or not with the world exterminated or not the object is there and that's I think the unbridgeable gap between us and that's fine I greatly enjoy what G Vic does but I think he was just wrong to try to overemphasize our agreements last night again maybe he was just doing that to be generous and he was wrong but clever not letting you finish just there's a great moment in Hegel where he says Hegel played pool 12 hours a day most of his writings were notes taken by his students he they would go home and write he had an incredible writing block which I love but he also wrote a whole lot of stuff which I hate but he wrote in his first book phenomenology of spirit that's called those first but first but I think I can solve the problem of Kant's thing in itself but if I can't I'd rather be drunk and he meant that seriously he meant I don't want to live in a world made by God where God makes stuff that I can't ever know what he made he thought it was a theological problem and so he developed an argument about dialect the dialectic so this thing that they were talking about last night about why call it materialism and they kept speaking about the left and the right you'll forgive me just is because dialectical materialism was was Marx's materialist inversion of Hegel's argument which I'll lay out for you in a second so the materialism that had come into the 20th century with the word materialism that had become a hedge many of political thought that the new materialists want to overturn with the kind of scientific materialism bad science is dialectical materialism and that's the reason the term is is become a kind of coded term with no real basis in materiality or if it's going to become revived it'll become revived with Bennett and others effort to make it a scientific materialism other their Sciences extraordinarily weak so that so you never did say dialectical materialism but the dialectic is something it's you know Hegel does not think there's such a thing as a thinking person or a world he thinks that the two co-evolved together outside that it's guided by a larger spirit and that as the mind grows in relationship I know what I am by encountering and outside other and in that synthesis an antithesis I come to be what I am in the same way it comes to be what it is so I'm intimately related to it there is no such thing as a phenomenon and a thing itself we are together in our Co constructive sort of I mean it's a kind of elementary basis of it and so that's a very profound thing thought and all Marx did was take the spiritual dimension out of that and being a Jew and wanting to get rid of the Trinity in it it's a it's whether you like it or not it's a it's a compelling way to think about how you would undo and so this is why the the entity and this is why Graham's thinking is so radical because he has this thing in itself it's no longer based in anything like a human subjectivity it exists in its own right but how it comes to an exist in its own right and how it can come to exist in its own right by being made but once it's made it exists in its own right and not only that it existed Sun right in the world so for example Donald Duck exists in its own right cartoons in existence I mean so once something exists it exists in its own right and it also has a life in its own life it live it evolves and we're going to talk about symbiosis so it actually behaves in every way like a living object would that be fair thing and throughout his text he he's required to use metaphors borrowed from life to discuss the behavior of objects you use one example that I'd like you to unfold a little bit you oftentimes talk about the react the interaction between two non conscious objects to show that they are in that they're unable to adequately engage each other in a full term so you'll say fire will burn cotton and so all fire can ever do is burn a caricature of cotton it's a beautiful metaphor what I worry about this is is fire a thing or is fire a process set into motion by a thing so is it a part of a thing so fire it one at some points I have to figure out are we talking about process and thing process an object action an object or thing and thing is that truly an engagement between two thing is that a match in cotton the process question is interesting because there's this whole tradition of viewing the world as being a process and that perhaps not the clearest form of this is in all about song the great French philosopher who thinks that the world itself is a kind of continuous process or flux and that the human mind cuts that flux and individual objects for practical purposes there's a problem with that which is that how is the human mind different from this looks in the first place that it's able to do that which already implies that the human mind is something separate and other things must be something separate too and so I don't agree with the idea everything's in flux and yes things are in process but not all the process matters and that's what I was trying to talk about in this book that yes the Dutch East India Company is constantly in flux the ships are losing atoms every seconds and people are dying every few years and so forth but it doesn't follow that it's constantly changing because a lot of that changes unimportance and that's why I focused on symbiosis in this book the idea that there only certain okay I'll leave it I'm being orderly okay what I want to know is is a process a thing it's an object or thing it's a process an object now a lot of times the word object has these connotations that people think it means something solid and durable Monument I'm just I'm telling that not yet yeah long lasting inanimate these are the connotations the word object often has in triple o object-oriented ontology all it takes to be an object is that something is not reducible downward or upward so it's not it can't be undermined by saying it's nothing more than its pieces it can't be over mine by saying it's nothing more than its effects and I should add undermining and over mining or not evil those are the only two forms of knowledge we have and humans need knowledge to survive we need all kinds of knowledge from the medical to the geographical to all other sort of caen engineering knowledge it's just that I don't think that knowledge exhausts the things and especially the nice thing about aesthetics is that it's quite aware of this in a way that philosophy is even not aware of it a lot of philosophers mistake what they do for a search for knowledge a lot of philosophers want to be scientific but philosophy is not a science philosophy is much closer to the arts in this respect it's it's fill Oh Sophia as Socrates calls it it's a love of wisdom you're not going to get there it's a love and you can't really Socrates is never able to paraphrase what virtue and justice and love and friendship and all these things are that he asks about he never succeeds in any of the dialogues getting to the definition of a thing it's always a little bit out of reach and that's why he says the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing and this has somehow been forgotten since Socrates time and people have tried to turn philosophy into a kind of knowledge first the theological kinds and then a scientific or mathematical kind and we have the entire discipline of analytic philosophy which sees itself as a scientific discipline and I think in the arts it's more obvious no one would claim to be producing knowledge as their primary roll I mean some of them do some time I went to talk him into last time and I didn't understand why some of the stuff was called art it seemed more like anthropological filmmaking or something they're trying to inform you about different cultures around the world it wasn't a specifically aesthetic dimension to it artists are creating things that cannot be paraphrased it's only a moment it's been ahead on my stuff alright I'll let you take the order then I got your guy I got a quote coming up but you see that I'm like but I want you to finish this thinking the the question of so I mean you're now finishing this sort of definition of topic any so anything that can't be undermined or like mine but everything can be may critical technique undermining is when you imagine you can say what something is by describing its parts more or less right I can give you an account for give me a washing machine I can tell you what all the parts do and then tell you how the washing machine works even it won't work for washing machine it certainly won't work for human being it won't work for an electron because it doesn't have a example I use a lot which is Daniel Dennett's making fun of wine tasters and saying wine taster says flamboyant and velvety Pinot but lacking in stamina any citizen that the most pretentious crap ever what you should do is analyze the chemical formula of the wine and that's real wine tasting now Dennis missing something there obviously there's a reason that wine tasters talk like that and sometimes they're pretentious but as I've argued it's pretension is the professional risk we want we run in the humanities and the arts and design because we're not able to talk about things directly in a way that scientists are we have to have this kind of elusive money also does it know the native man he doesn't know the two-year process of studying the native and the charge how that is actually a learn technique that with high specificity for example you'll see the same thing in fashion you will everyone who says something like that when they go into an expert discourse in a field that they don't know we'll always sound like uncoded nonsense whereas wine tasters and experts on that I mean if you ever seen the chart you've ever seen the little kits that they have to do and how long it takes to learn that language and associate that language with a high level of specificity is just his ignorance so you're right you're right about a lot of things not everything so I want to cover is everybody feeling comfortable that objects okay why it's not a building but now you say the Pizza Hut is there's lots of objects as you could taste this one we're going to test this one last object so the Pizza Hut company is an object the Pizza Hut prototype is an object which is what all of them look like any particular Pizza Hut is an object but any particular Pizza Hut on any particular day is it a different object no I would say nuts because I think you can over mind that successfully into a set of relations okay now remember that answer this is all right now we're going to move on to something I think is really maybe the most interesting area of his discussion and that's reality so I'm going to set this up with a little story about Samuel Coleridge Samuel Coleridge the poet founder of English Romantic period drug addict writer of Rime of the Ancient Mariner none of this he is the person who famously conceived the notion of suspension of disbelief actually what he wrote was willing suspension of disbelief meaning that what makes it possible for you to go to a movie or listen read a poem or read writer the Ancient Mariner the year that Mary Shelley wrote this was done in 1870 in a year that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein how it is that you can fall into the world of the fantasy or fall into the world of the suspended disbelief and have that be a reality for you and then come back out of it to a reality required this psychic performance called suspension of disbelief and that you did it as a conscious effort or it happened as a conscious effort and that it was willing I think it's important to understand he suffered a very bad what we think was Crohn's disease he also seemed to have suffered bipolar disease he was in pain most of his life but he was deeply addicted to laudanum and so he would actually go in and out of drug so he actually did willingly suspend disbelief it was one of the most important concepts in literary theory and actors network theory in 1817 today it's to ham-fisted it's so ham-fisted as to be inept in the sense that I don't think anyone thinks we go from a this reality which is somehow real to being in a play which is we've just decided to not be real not being an auditorium watch the play be in Oklahoma then come out of that be in this reality we just go from one kind of theater into another kind of theater and so we understand ourselves to live in increasingly in different theatres with different forms of persistence --is one of which is the persistence we call our everyday lives which is staged in architecture or staged in cities in architecture would you agree with that I see no reason to disagree okay let's be careful what I'm yes you do so I want you to help us unfold and so your reality is imminent meaning the reality that you're the realism that you're helping us get to is not somewhere else it's not in topo Surenos or no it's not there's not a different world it's not a different world and in fact once needs to Road if there's not another world how can there be this world because this world has a very interesting with drawing us within it right all right so my objects are not in another world it's that that they're in this world that still can't be touched yes so they're so in this world but can't be tied to something you're gonna have to help us grasp sure okay Oh and then when I'm okay yep this is great you're gonna change slides first I'm a well I'm gonna try let's see there it is even talk of this behavior nibbly yeah that's okay so of course plato's perfect forms are obviously in another world and he seems to suggest that you see these private forms before birth and this is how you're able to recollect them once you're embodied in a physical body which distracts you with its pleasures and pains so that's one of the other worldly theories that's most famous in the history of philosophy another would be constant in itself which is in a completely different world than the one we're in we have no access to it the objects that I talk about the real objects that is we do have access to them but they're it's indirect access it's not direct access and we aesthetics is one way we have indirect access to things there other ways such as allusions hints innuendos most of our communication consists of these things not of clear literal prose statements which is the model that science uses and the reason they don't see this is because disciplines that see themselves as a knowledge tend to erase the difference between objects and their qualities so for example electron it's a proper name it was discovered in what the 1890s I believe and since then we've learned a lot more about the electron so we're learning all these two properties and that electron is simple enough that I think they are may almost know everything about it by now that's a very limited number of properties that are like Tron has and so there's a tendency to agree with him there and humans the one who thought there are no objects they're just bundles of qualities there's no such thing as an apple there's just red rounds juicy cold these kinds of things hard and then we see all these qualities go together so often that we invent a nickname Apple which is just a shorthand for all these qualities together there's nothing called an apple over and above these qualities according to humans whereas I think what phenomenology contributed is starting from the objects and saying it can vary its qualities within a wide range so I think the object comes first I think there is an apple over and above its qualities and you can see this by turning it in your hand and seeing different qualities change as you do that and what literal disciplines do by literal does literalist disciplines I mean they claim to have knowledge as their final product is there's a tendency to think that the object is nothing more than all the true things we can learn about it there's nothing over and above that whereas disciplines like aesthetics and even like philosophy according to me are able to deal with or produce objects that are beyond their qualities and qualities are a certain kind of relational thing because the the Apple has its qualities many of them in relation to us the red is in relation to our eye and the cold is innovation to our sense of touch and cold and heat and so there is an object beyond those qualities and triple Oh is a lot about driving a wedge between those so that you have the object here in the qualities here which means you're never sure quite what the object is it's out there somewhere and I use metaphor often as an example and is it okay if I explain this there and again one of the metaphors I mentioned in this book as I mentioned Homer's wine dark sea probably the most famous metaphor in the Odyssey when you refers to the Mediterranean and the wine dark sea first thing we notice about metaphors that they the terms cannot be too close or too far away if you say a pen is like a pencil that's not a metaphor it's a literal comparison you're talking about the similar use value of both of them if you use Andre for a Minsky's example and say drinking a milkshake is like drawing an isosceles triangle that's also not a metaphor it's just you can't possibly combine those in your mind you you can try but it has to be a very good poet to make that work and I don't think anyone can do that has to be something in somewhat with resembling the other thing and wine dark sea is a good example of that that's the first thing to notice the second thing to notice is that metaphors are not symmetrical wine dark sea is a metaphor and see dark wine is also a metaphor but it's not the same metaphor whereas a pen it's like a pencil or a pencil is like a pen that's interchangeable you can say it either way because it's a literal comparison metaphor is not a literal comparison and therefore you cannot reverse it in wine dark sea the sea is the object that seems to have these wine light qualities but if you were to say see dark wine then you're talking about the wine and saying that it has see light qualities such as bottomless infestation by pirates adventure whatever and in the case of wine dark sea probably imagining the season the wine isn't just dark like this sorry the sea isn't just dark like the wine but it also brings oblivion and lack of inhibition and whatever other things you associate with wine now here's what happens these the you have now the sea which is the object and the wine light qualities which sort of go with the object but not quite so there's sort of an orbit around it the wine light qualities are somewhat clear to us we can imagine those the new sea that has one that qualities is not imaginable it withdraws it becomes something we don't have direct access to now this is a problem because in triple o you cannot have objects without qualities or qualities like objects so what does it mean you have these wine light qualities with no object that's there it can't happen it cannot happen and therefore my reading of metaphor is that we step in for the missing scene metaphor is theatrical I am the I am a real object and I am the one real object that's here that's not absence I'm here there in the experience and so I myself like a method actor playing like Daniel day-lewis playing Lincoln or like Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone II I am playing the C playing wine I am a method actor performing that metaphor if I don't do that like if I'm lazy and not interested in just zipping through Homer metaphor doesn't happen it's there on the paper but it doesn't matter 'non act it and so I think there's a theatrical core to aesthetics that the the real object is me I'm the one who performs those properties and I don't think any literally you can't do this in knowledge this is the one knowledge does you can't literally paraphrase what's going on there you can't say what Homer means by wine dark sea is that the sea is a similar shade of color and perhaps he is also suggesting drunkenness because sailor was sometimes got seasick and it made them feel drunk you've ruined the metaphor what else can you ruin it in this way you can ruin jokes in this way jokes or no I've have an example literal as a joke and you've ruined it right so a joke is not knowledge which which jokes shall I try today there's just three I rotate when I give this example I'll tell them I've told the Chinatown one I haven't used that one in a while it's joke that I got the email from somebody wants involves this guy going into a shop in Chinatown in San Francisco and looking around and he finds this brass rats and he's interested in he asked the shopkeeper how much for this brass rat and the guy says $10 for the rats but $10,000 for the story behind the rats and he says I'll just take the rat pays $10 walks outside and he notices rats coming out of the alleys running after him so he starts jogging more and more rats are coming out of all the alleys and gutters in San Francisco chasing after finally there's thousands of rats and he's running and sprinting and running as fast as he can he gets down to Fisherman's Wharf and there's this pack of millions of rats coming after him he climbs up this telephone poles the last resorts rats are chewing up the pole and his final strategy is to take the brass rat and throw it into the sea and all the rats jumping after it in drown so he walks back to the shop and the shopkeeper kind of smugly asks so I guess you want to buy that story now huh and he says no I just want to know if you have any brass lawyers okay no it's not that funny but it's sort of funny and I asked myself how could you ruin that what are the ways to ruin this joke there are three ways I can think of to ruin this joke and all of them shed light on how the joke works first way you could ruin it is by getting a backstory right you could say a man was going through a really bitter divorce and his wife's lawyer totally took him to the cleaners and he really made him hate lawyers and then he's in the shop and buys it see you by getting the backstory you're removing the completely arbitrary surprise ending of the lawyer you're ascribing a kind of trivial psychological motive to the guy personal biographical order that's one way to ruin it the next way to ruin it is instead of saying I want to know if you've any brass lawyers say I want to know if you've any brass carpenters see it's not funny it only works because a lawyer there's this kind of Suey topos in the culture that lawyers are all trying to screw us and we can't trust any of them and they're all bad that's the second way the third way to ruin it is he says I just want to know the only brass lawyers actually I do in fact and then he sells in the brass lawyer and the guy walks out and now the lawyers are coming out after him and lawyers are running after him out of all the firms in San Francisco then he throws it in the water all the lawyers around that would ruin it too somehow so that'd be pretty funny yeah I think is used that in the Shakespeare kill all the lawyers so literalism automatically ruins a joke this is why anytime anytime children are nearby and you tell the joke and you have to explain it it's not a joke anymore that's another example there has to be a non-literal element a gap between the what the joke says and what's literally said magic tricks are like this too I read a biography of Houdini some years ago and what it's said which I didn't know because I never do magic tricks he said there's a kind of unspoken agreement while all magicians and the world amateur on up that they just they don't share their tricks with any nominations so if somebody comes up to you after the magic show and ask you how you did a certain trick you're just not supposed to say it's it's an unwritten rule of the magic profession and so yeah of course the magic tricks obviously ruined as soon as the guy says Oh while you weren't looking I switched this hat and there was actually a rabbit in this one now that ruins it it's not magic anymore so all these cases are threats okay threats the one I always mention is is the Godfather's offer you can't refuse I'm gonna make them offer you can't refuse the greatest one of the greatest lines in cinema if you were to replace that with a concrete threats like saying I'm gonna cut your horse's head off and stick it in your bed exactly that's grisly that's what he does in the movie but it's not a threat anymore it's it's not ominous and I since I've used that example I also read another example that comes from Dick Cheney Dick Cheney understood this of all people when Dick Cheney was defense secretary during the first Gulf War remember there are these worries that that Saddam was going to use chemical weapons on the US soldiers and apparently the message Cheney sent to the Iraqi government to dissuade them from doing this was if Iraq uses chemical weapons on US soldiers the United States will respond firmly and decisively in a manner from which it will take Iraq centuries to recover which is a one of the most horrifying statements I've ever heard a lot more horrifying than if he had said we're gonna nuke Baghdad or some some March oh well he had some background for having already done some really horrible things even to the people in the United States Cheney yeah but he's kind of refreshing now isn't that the scary thing yeah because he said that the CIA knew it he was he didn't notice like he had a grasp on what he thought was reality as opposed to no clue yes and he also has said that forbidding Muslims from coming in as an American I can't believe I'm at the point where I want W and Chani back I know it's hard to believe yeah but I mean it believe me Trump will be gone and then it'll get worse I mean what fence I mean if you look at every year gets worse and every century gets better it's an incredible pattern ok so here's some magic here is that which cannot be made present with a noun phrase what is an object yeah here in my hand okay is that which cannot be made present with a noun phrase okay see it no I don't see it is it there it's there as a sensual object because it's there only as the correlative you're referring to it so is that magic where is that grammar that is the act of producing a sensual object and I should say what something about a sensual object is just makes sense there there are two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities Interpol oh and the background for this is that the real object is what I identified at my reading of Heidegger and ggx writes I had to push Hydra but to get this this isn't one how to go says this is what I deduce from what Heidegger should have said it's I think it talks about a hammer and he says that as long as you're using the hammer you're not noticing it it's not conscious and therefore phenomenology is wrong philosophy isn't primarily about what is conscious to us it's primarily about what's not conscious to us what we're relying on silently without being aware of it like the floor in this room we don't notice the floor in this room if there were an earthquake we have noticed the floor in the room things tend to be noticed when they're going wrong and long story short most people who interpret Heidegger interpret him is saying that that means praxis comes before theory we have this unconscious world of practical actions then theory is only when we become conscious of things whereas well how I read Heidegger is saying that the praxis doesn't go deep enough practice distorts the things just like Theory does by sitting in this chair on not any closer to it than I would be if I'm staring at it and talking about it in both cases the chair is more than what what I'm encountering of it it's more than my theory of it it's also more than my use of it and so what I came up with was the idea of individual objects as being that which is withdrawn from the tour relations withdrawn from all the system of equipment and purposes and that's the real object because it can it's like canceling on itself it can never become present it's deeper than any relation you can have to it physical practical theoretical inanimate causal any any relation you can have in the chair the chair itself is deeper than any of those things even though we humans made it it doesn't matter once you make it it has a life of its own chair is there that's that's the real object the central object is what I take from Husserl's phenomenology and this took me a while to see because who Searle also talks about objects who solves the phenomenologist he says there there's no such thing as a thing in itself we philosophies about describing things exactly as it appears to us because there's nothing that can't appear to us in principle there's nothing hidden okay that's that I think is wrong I'm all tied up with Heidegger on that one but nonetheless even within this world of conscious phenomena he thinks there's a difference between objects of qualities and I think this is what Searles real contribution to philosophy he's the one who discovered that an Apple is not just the bundle of qualities that the quality sorry the object comes first the Apple and then we see it change its qualities every second as we move around it and as our mood changes and as we move view it from different angles and distances as the sunlight changes but it's still not a real object because it's not outside of me there might be there is a reliable out there probably that has some relation to this central apple the Apple I see is not the real one it's out there in the world whose throat explicitly rejected what I'm just saying because he gives the example of Berlin who says there can't be two Berlin's the balloon of the real world in the Berlin that I'm talking about because then how would you make a connection between the Berlin others knowledge about in the Berlin that's hidden in the real world therefore he simply denies that the real world exists I think that's a cop-out I think you have to raise the question of how the real Berlin relates to the one that I talked about because I can talk about false things they don't exist I can say for example that John McCain lost the 2008 election because he didn't get enough of the soccer-mom votes which is what some people said at the time soccer moms this suppose a demographic category of educated somewhat well-off suburban women who have kids who were sophisticated to play soccer instead of American sports this was a big topic of political demographers around then soccer moms are very important they were had they turned into security moms is the Democrats the bomb are not gonna be tough enough for them on terrorism this was a big question in so we can we could make a diagnosis the McCain lost the 2008 election because he didn't capture the soccer-mom vote in large enough numbers but maybe that's a bogus demographic category someone else could come along and show there never was any such thing as soccer mom you know they were misinterpreting this data that's a very smaller group than people think and so forth so we can be wrong about central objects a unicorn can be a central object I can hallucinating in a corn and walk around in my mind and see it from different angles it's different from its qualities but it's still not a real object it's not something that's gonna exist when I close my eyes and it's not something that exists for other people it exists only as the correlative my thought so that's why there's real objects and central objects and as far as the unnameable object in your hand I would call that essential objects because it's an object for us that you defined it and I can define it by talking about my imaginary friend and those are objects and they're objects because they're not reducible with our properties we can always think of new properties of them but they're not real objects so would you say that's true for all fictional productions it's a tough question I'm not sure about that Sherlock Holmes for instance would you want to call Sherlock Holmes a real object or a shared central object and I go back and forth on this question one thing that analytic philosophers talk about and even jean-jacques talked about is that one thing that characterizes fictional objects is that they're not determinant so if you ask how many books that Sherlock Holmes owned nobody knows right because the Conan Doyle never says in any of the stories no it's no specific number I mean I can pretend that it's 357 but I don't really know because any of us can say it's it's arbitrary whereas a real a real detective has to own certain specific number of books that's one difference and so fictional objects are incomplete in this way but there may be lines where you can cross where the fictional object becomes real and maybe ones where the real object becomes fiction I suppose I can think of examples where real objects become fictional those are example examples where an object lives on a name only so what did Pope Francis do to get rid of one of the most conservative guys in the Vatican this is hilarious he named him to be spiritual advisor of the Knights of Malta which is the funniest thing even do to somebody cuz the Knights of Malta I mean that that was big in the Crusades right they were they were fighting the Turks on roads and and you know working with the Spanish and yes they still exist actually they're not in Malta though I think they're offices in Rome and I don't want to make fun of them in case of a knight of Malta is watching this but they're not what they used to be let's put it that way so that's I think maybe a line where a real object has almost crossed into a fictional existence because it's become so enfeebled and there are other objects like that you can find that still exist you don't technically the United States is still at war with the Seminole Indians there was never a peace treaty signs you wouldn't that war is not something that ever cursed any of us it's a historical curio so last night you and Slav way were confronted with the question that said for most of history art was seen as the production of fictions against reality so as Nietzsche said art I forgot the exact quote but art is through how we stay alive against the truth now everything else everything in the world seems to be fictions so what does art do and he put you on the spot and I asked you to answer and he answered he said if art has to now produce reality that was actually JG Ballard's right you on it and I I admire bards take on that that what makes art important now is not that it can produce fictions because anybody can do that anybody can make anything on their computer now has to be something that compels interest compels belief and now we have politics as a fiction that doesn't compel belief which proving proving Ballard's point I wish Bauer I'd live to see this I think he would have had something interesting to say about it so but say so let me run some thoughts by you for my sake first of all I resist the notion of fiction fiction is a metaphor proper to literature it took literature almost for centuries to perfect the techniques of producing fiction as opposed to nonfiction so when one refers to a painting as fiction or other forms of practice like architectures tonight it's a metaphor it's useful metaphors are useful but they produce a realities that are proper to themselves in their own way that are quite different than literature and based on techniques that only they that are irreducible to their own object so no literature can produce the same fiction as a great work of music or a great painting and so I'm off very suspicious of the generalization of the notion of fiction I'm also suspicious of the idea that art now has to fill in for so in your world of reality the radical limit of what I'm talking about is it seems to me that we never need to we don't need to worry about let's get real we don't need we dirt we and there's a big difference between the truth and facts and reality so it seems to me that triple Oh guarantees a certain reality and we need to be attentive to it and understand you know for example last night y'all and I say this because I like the plural form of you from the south you act like alternative facts you act like journalists when you say as if alternative facts is some kind of new concoction made up by Trump in the journalists that don't exist when in fact alternative facts have always existed and that's why they have courts of law so for example the photograph of the mall and the count of the people that left the the styles of the subways those are genuinely alternative facts legitimately used an argument about account of the people that were it's a not that I care about this but alternative facts are in fact alternative facts that's the point of having alternative facts that's why you have a debate that's why you have an adversarial system of law all right but I don't think we've ever seen a situation we've had presidents lie before every time we've gone into the every time the US has entered a war it's been preceded by a felonious lie speech Gulf tenkan attack of Fort Sumter because the people of the United States will not enter into a war without anger and so presidents have to say we you know they can't say look we have an economic interest the Strait of Malacca by the way is why we fought in Vietnam and you know that did you ever is that you know I never once and all those years heard anyone mentioned the Strait of Malacca mmm and then in this book yeah that's so interesting so I worry I you know I so fake news is a legitimate form of parody John you're guy that you mean Stuart that is fake news Saturday Night Live fake news is fake news oh it's not fake news that's parody it's conference you accept US Bank news is gets up and saying I'm about to give a comedian performing some fake news but Trump isn't doing that Trump isn't presenting his news conferences parody he's insisting on things that we have advocated directors calling other news it's not fake news fake news right I don't think we've ever seen anything like this I don't think we've ever seen the leader of the country refused to take reality into account I agree from small things to big and that I think is new Butler but what you don't see is someone saying no that's disinformation all right but you can you can find disinformation in nearly every presidency right and it's something different about it you can say that the yellowcake uranium during the Bush administration this that was a deliberate lie on somebody's part but at the end of the day the Bush administration was willing to make some concessions and the reality and not go too far not the case anymore yeah yeah I want you to I need to talk about your clothes a minute and why you need to dress better oh okay one quick question why do you separate art and architecture only because I don't want to rush into making the same claim about both some art is an easier arguments architecture is harder because there you have the fact that there's also a functions of the objects that are made and therefore the formulas the argument it's more complicated to make nice-nice okay I don't think that's okay we're not the baby I just wanted to know and the the problem of a sensual object and the let's say the impossible rostering of fact of actualities that doesn't apply to an art object what doesn't when you were saying like Sherlock Holmes so if I look at a painting oh I can say what its properties are as a physical thing but what makes it an art object is what you say I mean the way you put this is extremely not like you and I want to do this so let's just take a quick look at this one sentence works of art and architecture are misunderstood if we reduce them there is something in these works that reduce is resistant a reduced reduction what is this something in them where's the in and where is this what is this something I'm just saying something as a placeholder you can't describe exactly what it is you but wouldn't that be true for this that that would yes it's true of everything it's just it's more clear in the cases of art and architecture so I don't think the central object comes very close to being what you say is the art object no because the art object needs the real object there which doesn't exist them in the canvas or it needs that debate it's not the canvas no because that's a physical object by the real object I mean what the thing is over and above its qualities the artwork comes when you split those two apart from each other otherwise no aesthetic experience some uses yeah we're okay we're the author Hartman who currently types these words in the University of Florida while wearing a black sweater is far too specific to be the Hartman who will leave next Sunday and can remove the sweater when he pleases right so this is about how much specificity can an object be did you see The Devil Wears Prada I didn't know shall I play it for you if you were if you were in st. Mark's school of fashion and later on and next week when I'm going to talk to you about Whitehead and the Monod ology and we're going to talk about symbiosis right now and I talked to you already about an electron having an inner life Whitehead its critique of Newton and Lyman its ease of life that's mr. critique of Newton was a kind of only subject to external forces and the object was only external subject to external forces and Newton had completed that task but never explored what the inner life of that object was so I can knock this can over but it tells me nothing about the inner life of this can so if I'm correct that this can is not just an entity but in some sense according to your thinking has some form of intellect some existence then it has an inner life and what a good fashion designer is going to tell you is that when you have that black sweater on it's not how you appear to the outside its how you feel on the inside and you have something against black sweater no I have something for black sweaters I bet you only write in that black sweater our bet you never wear a suit like you were last night while you're writing so the thing that you consider to be an irrelevant appurtenance to the essence of the harmon object a fashion designer is going to tell you actually forms you as harmon that there's a symbiotic relationship between that material environment which you consider to be a pertinent and irrelevant and too specific and your state of internal life your psychology and the same thing is going to go with true for any architect who's going to tell you the same and I will show you paintings next week about the corners of rooms and paintings and why one says go to the corner when you're misbehave all the way back to Velazquez and you know so when you find yourself able to say this that I think that's a symbiotic relationship I think I think the person had designed that black sweater assuming you spent enough money and you you need to watch the scene from Devil's I should get it up for you it's a wonderful scene where the head of Vogue is explaining to the assistants he just bought Y fashion actually is the be-all and end-all of and in fact as you know fashion Midwife the computer industry the pharmaceuticals industry and the computers pharmaceuticals and which one am i leaving out the three most important financial industries in the 20th century were Midwife by fashion move so the coal-tar industry pharmaceuticals computers and I'm leaving one out so I'm not got nothing against that black sweater what I wonder is why that where I how do you know when to draw a line about the appurtenance so that an object I mean I understand why you need to yeah that's more methodological question I want to say first that I agree that you can have a symbiotic relationship with clothing but in that case if somehow myself plus the sweater makes something happen then it's the Harmon plus sweater object it's a new object from just Harmon here I'm just saying that Harmon can be withdrawn look subtracted from that and I don't need to have any particular thing on to be me when we enter into these symbiotic relations the effect it has is it has a retroactive effect on the parts Harmon and Kiro is probably even a better example because that affected me a lot more than wearing a sweater changed my life to be in Cairo for 15 years so a lot of things I'd never seen before but that doesn't mean I am nothing more than my relation to the Cairo environments because of course I am there are things about me that have stayed the same since before then can we go right into symbiosis yes that you yeah I want to recommend to everybody in the room that they read Lynn Margulis book symbiotic planet is short and it's a quick read and it's one of those science books that will change the way see the world and Margulis will unfortunately died a few years ago of a stroke very unexpectedly actually is less famous than her first husband Carl Sagan but is a more significant scientific figure as one of the heroic now he was a TV star yeah he's good at that wasn't a very significant scientific figured out billions and millions of light years that was a nice show she was an important design very important yeah I learned so much from heretics markoulis even back as a graduate student she was kind of a feisty rebel who asked a lot of tough questions and one of the things she asked is have we ever seen evolution happen in a laboratory to really know how it works the answer they gave her is that there's only one case we know of and it's fruit flies in a tank where they split the tank in half that's it on one side they slowly turn up the heat on the other side they slowly turn down the heats and after however many months of this the two fruit flies could no longer mate they're different species technically and so to find out why they they kill the poor fruit flies and dissect them as usual and they found the hot fruit flies had a certain virus in them and so a lot of the scientists at all of the experiments contaminated and the michaelis said no that's the whole point the reason the fruit flies evolved into a new one is because of the virus yeah they incorporated the virus into their own body and she had the idea that evolution does not occur primarily as Darwin thinks through big fish eating little fish and having bigger babies gradually over time instead there are jumps in evolution and of course Gould and Eldridge said this but golden Eldridge thought the punctuated equilibrium was because of climatic changes usually like or asteroid hitting the earth our GU think sits because an organism incorporates another organism wonderful examples is the prokaryotic cells which are very simple turn into eukaryotic cells which we have in our bodies by a parasites coming in a some kind of bacterium or virus coming in and in order to eat our nutrients they're just the true parasites but then over time we needed this parasite to live because there's more oxygen when to the Earth's atmosphere we needed this bacteria or virus to process the oxygen which is very deadly stuff we breathe it so we don't think of evident oxygen is very volatile stuff some people think if we had a little more oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere it could all burn just combust suddenly so it's it's very dangerous how much oxygen we have even though we needed to live so her her idea is that evolution occurs primarily through two previously independent life forms forming a relation and it occurred to me that this concept would be useful in my first attempt at social theory which was an attempt to incorporate but also criticized bruno latour zactly network theory I'm pretty close to it or personal you know actually but there's some things I don't like about his theory auteur theory is that everything is what it does that's all it is everything's an actor and not an object a thing is what it does you are what you do and I saw some problems with that in the case of history one of the problems is that you can't really explain how change occurs because if I'm nothing more than what I'm doing how can I be doing different things in the future Aristotle already saw this there needs to be a surplus and the things that is not what it's doing right now that allows it to do other things later he called this potential I don't like that word for different reasons but it's the idea that there has to be something to a thing more than what it actually is kind of surplus and wit enables it to do other things later that's one thing another thing is that let's whoresons he's talking about actions can't really distinguish except quantitatively between different actions in history and its standard of what's the most important event in history is gonna be things that create the most effect on other things but that's not always true sometimes the noisiest historical events turn out to be less important than the ones that had less effect at the time that nobody noticed I ended up in this book I talked about the Dutch East India Company and the book I finished a few days ago for a pelican introduction to triple o I used the American Civil War as a new example and I ended up arguing that the two really important places in the war are not the places people think I said it's Vicksburg and Chattanooga even though many a lot would not would include Vicksburg not a lot of people big food yeah not a lot of people gonna I never heard anybody say Chattanooga and I'm from the south okay yeah I I think an argument that the War Between the States by the way not the civil not tsavorite my family wasn't fighting on the other side so my ancestor lost his finger in Shiloh learning underground so symbiosis happens when two things come together and it's an irreversible relationship it changes the further course of the history of the thing and I argue in this book that symbiosis usually happened early in the life of an object you can see this in a human life usually the key things in your life citizen may be a half-dozen key events in any life and most of them are gonna be earlier in your life and then you reach mature form and it's harder to change after that point they're exceptions in the case of the Dutch East India Company I asked myself well first I said some Bo seats are going to be nouns it's gonna be symbiosis with other objects even though we all like to talk about verbs and processes and flux these days about nouns it's about you forming a symbiosis with another object and we learned in school that our noun as a person place or thing so you can look for persons you can look for places you can look for things this objects of symbiosis in the case of the Dutch East India Company I said there's only one person who transformed the company irreversibly John Peterson Cohen who was the most usually considered the most villainous figure in the entire history of the company he's the imperialist villain in the history of the company there were statues of him and the Netherlands until recently Cohen is the one who had authored a treatise called discourse on the state of India it said look the only way this is going to work is if we become ruthless monopolists we're gonna have to ruthlessly exclude other European countries from trading over here and when what's now Indonesia and we're going to have to also not let Asians trade with each other we're gonna three the middleman for every transaction that occurs which means using some kind of unspecified violence to do this and they had to do this because they were in under existential threat from Spain so he was right an appointment to a point but he the means he was willing to use it were quite viable and the interesting thing is that he wrote this treatise and everybody back in Amsterdam which was already a very liberal place what kind of shrinking from this we can't really do this but they sort of didn't say anything about it and kind of let it pass through at first but it wasn't acted on until a few years later the 30 Years War started and Dutch needed the English alliance in that war and so the the Dutch told Kuhn in Indonesia please give 1/3 of all of your valuables to the English as part of the peace treaty and he couldn't believe it he said I just finished beating English here but he knew he wouldn't listen to they wouldn't listen to him and so what he did instead is he provoked an English incident with the English where he had his subordinate Massacre a bunch of English so the peace treaty would automatically be killed so that he wouldn't have to go along with it that's really villainous Machiavellian thing but that's really when the Dutch East India Company get started because then they can't go back on it they can't go back on this monopolist routes and I found two geographical points that were reversible Malacca and the illustrate whose name I'm having a mental block on now in the south the one between Java and Sumatra Strait number two yesterday number two that's where Krakatoa volcano is anyway those two straits were important to the the first one because it gave them control of a shipping route from the Netherlands the second one because it allowed them to link the old Arab and Chinese trade routes into one and vastly increased their wealth and then the other one was I know it was the shift of focus to intra-agency scindia company was all about shipping goods back and forth between the Netherlands and anja and what's now Jakarta and then after a time they realized that would it was more profitable to switch to smaller ships that could go up Asian rivers and focus on intra Asian trade so they started focusing on smaller ships on pirating ships stealing ships in other countries and so in this way they were able to totally change the nature of the company in an irreversible way and we have one problem with these analyses is you think okay the Dutch in Southeast Asia this is a story of western depression and Western colonialism there was a lot of that it's also interesting to note that the power of the Dutch was not absolutes they they couldn't do anything to the Chinese in the Japanese the Chinese and the Japanese were too strong to be pushed around and so you see the limits at that point of Western power I mean the Western dominance was was with the British later really anyway maybe that was more detailed than you need it I hope you well I tell you you got a couple of things you get as your self is what was so great about nutmeg and mace you know that you had to get high on it because I mean there's the whole thing is based on the Spice Islands that's right like in China it was opium mm-hmm that you can understand in Petra which was 2,000 years earlier it was frankincense and myrrh you know the richest civilization and I'll have you ought to do an analysis of Petra I have been there too yes and 70 countries the richest civilization in constant dollars in all of history but that's it yeah they built the first Las Vegas well and so I'm gonna have students do an analysis like yours of Petra because of it was they they brought miles of water from five hundred mile I mean it's an incredible story but just for what because they had a monopoly on frankincense and myrrh have you ever had any frankincense and myrrh so the whole you read know this stuff and I'm thinking to myself what is so great about like clove nutmeg and mace it you know the Dutch nation was built on those three ingredients it's amazing to think of and he would kill anybody to get him enough yes on that but I can't wait now it turns out I discovered that nutmeg is what you use to make em da as you call it ecstasy mmm da so that's probably they were able to make some form of that thing I don't know this in the official capital research has produced this strange relationship between that Megan mm da I'm gonna ask you to do y'all got the how you doing energy-wise let me just do one okay these are these lists if I I have a great love of science the numa the new materialist movement has got nothing to do with science well Karen Berg does she's pretty knowledgeable well this list you made is either a straw dog okay everything is calm that lead changing okay so you can argue with that I mean how much it changes the thing about the changes so in matter theory if something changes it never changes from a type to a non type it changes from a type to another type the matter theory is not what I meant by the new materialist no I'm what I'm trying to say is this rise of new materialism is not about science I would say that's true that's right and so I want to go through this list not what is absolutely not true that is everything that contains along a continuous gradient that is total nonsense in sixty three orders of magnitude for the largest dimension to the smallest attention for the Planck's constant to the size of the universe there is not a single magnitude in which things are not organized in matter types not one case there are no monsters there's no single kind there's none of that so there are no continuous gradients and so when we when we got totally interested in flows you know for a little while back when computers started when we started making those kinds of architectures and you heard a little bit less a it's just what I look cool you know I mean that was it it just kind of looked cool we were so sick of collages and then we read some stuff and we saw flows and then that's it it was just you know her nah maybe good accusative so you know we'll use anything we can read to justify what we feel like doing but that is just not true everything is contingent is not true and so this list if you're accurate is a list of total false journalistic science and so it's a strong dog no it's not because I'm not attacking science I'm attacking the people who hold these views right and there are people who yeah but I do think for example a matter theory view of your work this collaborates extremely strongly sounds like it yeah and that's kind of I already alluded to visit Princeton and this is and so that takes us to this idea of an ooh alchemy which is we're gonna go now I know you know this but for six years Newton worked on optics and eye and mechanics he then spent 34 years on alchemy and so this and what alchemy is in my opinion is trying to find out the inner life of matter and so matter is always exchanging it's always transmitting it's always receiving and it's always reorganizing it always has a thing it's relational and it's exactly like you described in this incredible list this list that of the axioms have been materialism is about as good a list as you can get if you want to know the relationship between matter theory like things and science or contemporary science but you you you would have to allow for a level of metaphysics a complete transformation of metaphysics that would simply allow for something I don't mean life and but something like the sensation view of matter that would produce this and this is where I think I want to go next week when we start now I am I don't work in philosophy much anymore I just decided to introduce I mean out Kim the chemi the chemistry and alchemy that means Egypt as you know so when I call it real Camila alchemy it was to honor you this kind of new realism and okay so but what I would like to do the next time we meet is show some works of art and architecture and see how I can fit them into what you're thinking and maybe if you could propose some things it's like you know move so I'll do maybe a 15 or 20 minute discussion of my work and then but maybe in closing you could explain what I didn't touch it all on actors network theory which is really the real concern of this you'll notice that you don't find any of it in the school mm-hmm so you'll find new materialist thinking in the school and that's basically the status of de luces effect a bad interpretation of Daluz and it's manual de Landa is one-sided view of the list the science of the list not he picks one half of de luces body of work particularly the early work he doesn't look at the art work at all not that he's not fantastic but it's sort no man well well but he just decided he's interested in science you know I'm interested in science but I think that the world of art does a lot of what you're talking about already and you actually belong here more than you know and need to dress better Oh black sweaters no good black suede Oh sir very good legs waiter which David will show you how to buy them but can you explain just briefly in closing what is actors network theory and why is it so important to everybody else but us okay actor network theory is usually credited to three people Bruno Latour being one and the other two being John law and Michelle Colin who was the tourist colleague in Paris and it's the idea that you should not do sociology by talking about big abstractions like society with a capital S or religion with capital r or capitalism you should instead look at very concrete situations and you should look at what the actors are in each situation this was sort of foreshadowed by fair number of dolls three-volume work on capitalism right board l tried to show how capitalism arose from local markets to regional markets and he ends up with the conclusion that the capitalism is not the same as free enterprise capitalism is about monopoly and an anti markets so arctor network doing sorry active network theory is doing much the same thing and what it does is in each situation is looking for which things are doing stuff and also tries to erase the difference between humans and nonhumans one of the famous examples is a speed bump you know speed bump is an inanimate object but it's doing the work of a policeman docked in French it's called the sleeping policeman it's doing the same work that a human would do and so it doesn't matter that it's not human you simply look at what effect each thing has in each situation and this has been very powerful a lot of fields for showing giving new and interesting readings of certain things like for example Latour wrote a very fascinating book on Louis Pasteur and the easy way to talk about the way past stories to say you know what a medical genius he bought enlightenment into the darkness these other idiots thought that there was spontaneous generation of bacteria from broth and he showed that's impossible well the torch tries to do in that book a show that a store had to navigate these various political coalition's to get to where he was going at first the doctors did not like Pasteur but believe it or not for a couple of reasons one is that it looked as though passed through as vaccinations were going to end all illness and we wouldn't need doctors anymore I know it sounds naive now but it really looked like they'd be able to invent a vaccination for every possible ill and you just take them all and you're never sick again so the doctors thought they'd be out of work and the other thing is that traditionally the doctor-patient relationship was a very confidential one and beginning with Pastore it's no longer completely confidential because if you have a contagious disease the doctor can quarantine you and has to tell the public health officials that you have this disease and that you're a danger so those were two problems the people who like to pass through at the beginning were people we don't even think about now because they've triumphed they're called the hygienists Dai genus were the people who said public sanitation and cleanliness is important this seems to be why all the workers are getting sick and we don't know exactly why but it seems like a bad idea to eat without washing your hands and it seems like a bad idea to live next to a dung heap and it seems like a bad idea to have a lot of insects in your house they couldn't quite connect the dots and all these things they had long lists of stuff you shouldn't do if you wanted to be healthy pastor gave them an explanation for all of their discoveries he said oh it's germs and they said oh yeah that's it all these things cause germs to spread to us and so they loved him and at first the doctors hated him and what changed that is that they were able to develop serums that doctors could minister in the office after in fact like rabies and as I wanted probably maybe the only person in this room who had rabies I was bitten by a rabid dog and look I got the shot so I never developed a disease and died it's a hundred percent fatality rate this is when I was in Egypt thankfully this these rabies shots exists and then I was painful as they were in the 70s when I was I think I have today a horrible story is I was late I was a six-year-old five-year-old kid late getting home lied to my parents about being bit by a dog yeah went and got 14 shots in my stomach Oh God that's the wrong guy didn't have enough sense like I'm the seventh shot saying you know I just took it it's painless now it's just that it's a hassle now it's just in the shoulder but it's you have to go on day zero day 4 day 7 day 14 you have to actually go and get it on those days that's the hassle but it's not painful anymore in any case that was one reason the doctor switched to Pastore side the other the other way the Latour showed is that the doctors struck a deal with the government about patient confidentiality the doctors told the government okay we'll start reporting our patients who have contagious disease on one condition that you outlaw all the charlatans and the the alchemists and the frauds who are pretending to care people you have to only let licensed doctors treat people that's the beginning of the professionalization of Medicine so it's a fascinating story now the problem is that Latour can't account for a lot of things with this theory one of them is he cannot handle counterfactual cases at all because for him a thing just is what it did where its history as Dziedzic and i were talking about now has a lot of its interest in counterfactual cases what if Hitler had not gone to Stalingrad but gone to the Caucasian oil fields it's a good one that I've read before what do you have had a chance to learn in the war if you'd seize the oil fields in Azerbaijan maybe what if Hillary Clinton had been elected instead of Donald Trump how might things be different what if gore been president of 9/11 instead of W Bush that's a very interesting one how might things have unfolded differently this is a large part of what historians do or think about and look after network theory doesn't really allow you to do that I don't remember a single counterfactual case in the whole ANC literature which is vast after Network theory even if architects don't use it much dominates the social sciences in large part to the world it's the tour is probably going to be the next Foucault in terms of you know who's somebody who gets cited in every article Foucault Jerry died Jerry died was sighted something like 102 thousand times on Google Foucault's in the five hundred thousands micro history I mean it's done because the procedural techniques are so specific and broadly applicable and other fields and so Foucault is kind of the default reference that everybody refers to even if they're not that interested in them I think that's going to be Latour in another ten years because Foucault is not so good at dealing with inanimate objects as Latour and I think we're gonna be dealing with a lot of an table jex with climate change and so I think the tour is gonna probably be elevated into that position of the standard social science reference as far as architecture and why he hasn't caught on more I'll tell you why I think there's one person in architecture who's done level the tour that's Albina your navel we were with her at a conference at Yale and then I was with her at a conference at Texas in October and what I think about her work with Latour is she's not really doing architecture she's doing an ethnography of how architects work so she went into REMS office for a few years and wrote a nice story about that how how REM lost the Whitney thing it's fascinating but it's not really it's not gonna help architects design anything it's it's it's a social science project not an architectural project as far as I can see and she's a social scientist she's not an architect so how would you really use actor network theory to design something I'm in the art world do you see it a little more but even there it's the same sort of issue they're interested in him but he doesn't he's more telling us how artists work than he is telling us I mean Jenny so can I just I'm gonna close with this last night y'all were trying to figure out what formalism is or y'all we're trying to figure out and and the best way I could have offered explain it to you is there's the the larger principle of formalism is that a formula can contain the substantial information without using it so for example if you're a technical trader in the market you don't need to know all the fundamentals of the stock you can the price already reflects all the fundamentals and you can just follow the ice trends according to various formulas so the black shells the black shows option pricing model which was the basis for all derivatives figured out that the futures price could be rationally predicted and that's how and it worked the the incredible thing about the derivatives market is not that was oversold or trillions of dollars is it it's a formula that works so formalism and music is the same thing you get they took the music of Bach Beethoven and they they turned it into formulas and those formulas enabled you to reproduce the effects of that music without understanding necessarily the fundamentals and that allowed composers to accelerate the evolution of it formalism in painting so in law for example the reason that innocence isn't a legitimate defense after a guilty plea is the rule of law requires formalism so if you go through the procedures and there's a guilty plea so formalism is one of the great achievements of 20th century intellectuals thought actually starting with quantum Reiter Quincy primarily but not conned it's not that kind of formalism and so the idea is that the entire consequence of the fundamentals can be consolidated in a set of formulas the great success of formalism is 20th century quantum mechanics where the entire behavior can be in fact it's entirely contained in the mathematics so much so that you don't even know anymore now you're talking about mathematical formalism which I agree exists but there is the other kind of formalism well there was an effort there's been an effort so musical formalism for example was an incredible success and it took it became such a stranglehold that by the mid twentieth century there had to be there was a revolution against it architecture has been struggling to find its formalisms there are six periods six kinds of formalisms but the idea for example the typology and architecture assumes that the construction the materiality the pricing structure and the pad living our sufficiently persistent that if you build a type you are automatically going to meet those some equilibrium state of those criteria and they change so fast now you know so formalism I think is a very easy ideas are very important idea that it's not only mathematical it's most successful cases are the applications of mathematics but I think musical formalism type of logical formalism early on contextual formalism was very important in architecture for about 30 years but then it was so successful it changed the economics of the context it entered into and so the very context that it was honoring were transformed by the economics that it entered and then the context changed so you would go and you know so so are you like that's what questionnaire are you would you say that Eisenman's formalism is closer to the kind you're talking about them to Kant's eyes immense formalism it was a radical use of formalism to introduce a deviation estheban a deviation his project for intellectual reasons into the discipline and what's the relation between that and the formulaic kind of formalism the formulaic formalism was an effort to continue the social the was the sense of responsibility that arguments are had to a social project and so Yzerman's idea was that architecture is more responsible to an intellectual project than to a social project and so he used the techniques of formalism to challenge the results of formalism all right because I also see some connection between him and the kanji in kind maybe we'll leave that for another time yeah next week I mean but that was one of the unanswered questions I thought I want to make sure we do okay we can keep it in this but I enjoyed it thank you very much you [Applause]

Channel: SCI-Arc Media Archive

Views: 3,763

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: Jeffrey Kipnis, Graham Harman, Immaterialism, Slavoj Žižek, Phenomenology, J. G. Ballard, Lynn Margulis, Bruno Latour

Id: CwLcIX9ORa0

Length: 102min 53sec (6173 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2017