MMM Notes, Oct 3

• Class begin 5:33
• Discussion of Midterm/Study Guide
• Attempts to make the projector/PC work
• Discussion of a girl who had a mental breakdown in the library?
• Midterm worth 10%
• Paper worth 10%
• Midterm online, on OAKS
• Six prompts, chose 4
• 300-500 word responses (2-3 paragraphs cohesive essay)
• More formal, carefully proofread
• Purpose of Exam:
• Give us an opportunity/incentive to go back and review beginning material.
• New perspective on class material
• Show, in written forum, the facility with materials
• TEXTS
• LIT
• Critical
• Be sure to be familiar with each text
• Can be used during test, but only 70
• Middle-English, Anglo-Norman
• Different versions of thing theory/thing power
• Examine which texts are in conversations with each other
• Week in Review!
• Tutorial on Object Oriented Ontology
• “Seeing Things”
• 5:50 – “Seeing Things”
• Attempts to make sound work
• Movie
• Discussion
• Photographs as objects to help people look at photographs
• Not things in our world, but a world with things in it
• 6:02 – Chapter of Bennett
• “An Actant never really acts alone”
• Drawbacks of Thing-Power
• Allows a envisioning of things as static
• Materiality is only a part of matter
• The latent individualism of Thing-Power
• avoids a congregational notion of agency
• Efficacy or agency of things depends on the assemblage
• Simple bodies/complex bodies or mode
• Conative things
• That tendency, in existence, to persist
• For simple bodies, stubborn/inertial tendency to exist
• Complex
• effort required to maintain movement and rest between parts
• relation that defines the mode as is
• Constant re-establishment of assemblage
• Confederate bodies
• Adds connection to outer things
• No deliberate sharing
• Collectivity in the moment
• Bodies enhance their power in or as heterogeneous collective
• Agency gets distributed across an ontologically hetero field
• Move away from human-determined agency
• Assemblages are ad-hoc
• Spontaneous formations
• lack of willfullness
• Characteristics of assemblages (pg. 23-24)
• Confederacies/collectivities
• Finite
• Not governed by a leading member
• no central mind driving the hive (not Borg!)
• Some things have greater traffic
• uneven typography
• power/agency not distributed equally
• power comes from reactions between things
• Distinctive history of formation
• Traceable quality of life-span
• Open-ended collective
• Context of Globalization (pg 23)
• This idea of assemblage makes more sense
• Black-out model
• Assemblage runs gamut from micro to macro
• Electron – Power plant
• All necessary contributors
• Selective account of a black-out
• Agency stretching from electron to certain members of Congress and their political ideology
• Human relation to non-human (pg 32)
• Not dismissing human intentionality
• less definitive of outcomes
• only a part, and dispersed
• 6:23 – Discussion of Guigemar
• “I don’t know where to go, and I can’t even steer this ship!”
• Assemblages in Guigemar
• Series of assemblages
• Circumstance read as fate
• The Hunt (pg. 32)
• Hunter, support group, animals, arrow, pain of the fawn, curse, woman, opportunity, deer’s antlers
• Arrival of the Ship (pg. 37)
• Rigid patriarchy, the ship, the wound, Woman, maid, courage, ship’s inviting in moment
• Distribution of agency line 209
• Will of husband is not the moving factor
• Patriarchy breaking down
• However much he wants to control, he won’t have all of the power
• Things beside his intentions that have more traffic
• Fortune is a heavily trafficked part of the assemblage

MMM Notes, Oct 5

• Class Begin 5:34
• Announcements about English events
• English Dept. Open House Oct 6 3:15pm
• Visiting Scholar: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson Oct. 6 7pm
• Vibrant Matter
• Discussion of “Black-out” from previous chapter
• Electricity puns
• pg. 25 Electric grid description
• Listing of actants, micro and macro
• Tangible
• Very tangible
• Fluid, changing actants
• Metaphysical components
• Draws attention to the driving forces of an assemblage
• Deliberately trying to break down pattern of classification
• Intent for description?
• Shows the complexity and fluidity of the “electrical grid” assemblage
• Consideration of whole allows effective critique
• pg. 28 “Willing Subject”
• No agent, but a “doing and effecting by a human and non-human assemblage”
• Avoid seeing a single entity as root cause
• “Doer and doing”
• Doing implies continual action of parts
• Re-emphasis of effects being important instead of intention
• Augustine and Confessions
• Unorthodox readings
• “the human will is only part of the moral system”
• Willing agents can act freely only in source of evil
• Good requires divine intervention
• pg. 32 – Intentionality
• “Agentic Swarm”
• Human intentions in competition and confederacy with other strivings
• Agency does not deny intentionality has a significance
• But its effect is not as important
• Intention is note-worthy, but not a producer
• Black-out
• Treating of absence as equally present as activity
• Edible Matter
• Less theoretical – lots of food
• Bennett in “application mode”
• Food puns – “A lot on our plates”
• Easier to “ingest”
• Objects as tools, context
• serve as background, creation of setting
• Objects as impediments
• traditional idea of objects shows purpose, non purpose
• Activeness of a potato chip
• potato chips have agency – “Can’t have just one”
• chemical manipulation of your brain
• Chip depends on human hand
• Human will and intentionality easily altered by ingestion of simple chemicals
• Accommodation
• Eaten and eater must accommodate each other
• Non-digestible matter just gets expelled? “Like corn?”
• Accommodation is required for an assemblage
• Discussion of “Seeing Things”
• Avoiding commentary on society

This week you’ll spend Monday taking the midterm exam via OAKS, during class time. Wednesday we will move into the post-exam, post-midterm paper period.

On Wednesday we will leap into our first extended scholarly literary application of the theories we’ve been encountering this semester, with Julian Yates’s essay tracing the agency of particular oranges in the late 16th century. As you read, consider his concluding statement:

The challenge Serres and Latour level at us is how to read the presencing of these ‘things’ as naively as possible, without the language and denunciations of fetishism or the narcissistic humanism that makes them invisible.

Right now, before reading Yates’s essay, that may sound pretty baffling. After reading his essay, though, I think you’ll find that it expresses a key concern we’ve been investigating in a range of ways this semester. Add to it, then, Yates’s final sentence:

For what is at stake here is a theory of mediation and an understanding of agency which might factor the non-human not as bearer of social forces or as mute witness but as a dynamic player in what we have been taught to read as human drama.

I hope you’ll think carefully about how his essay tracing the oranges might help us to do this very thing.

Also be prepared to discuss on Wednesday the very brief introduction to Part 1 of Reassembling the Social (pp. 21-25).

Our second after-party was tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, but that conflicts with Pacha Kucha, an event I will be attending. I’d also like to be sure we have the second one on a night when a significant number of you all can make it, which we’ve not yet discussed. So we will do in class on Wednesday.