objects and objectification

PAUL REID-BOWEN ADDRESSES my earlier reference to his paper. He’s right that “object” is often confused with “objectificiation”.

Choice of terminology always involves a set of somewhat arbitrary trade-offs, and there is also a point at which you become committed to certain terms and it’s simply confusing or gimmicky to change them.

For example, initially people would give me a tough time for using “metaphysics,” since it’s been kicked around as a bad thing by Heidegger and Derrida and others. I made the choice to use “metaphysics” anyway, not just for shock value (though shock value does have its rhetorical weight), but also to try to link what I was doing to a much older tradition in the history of philosophy. And now I think that battle is won. The appeal to “metaphysics” in my work and related work has now largely been accepted as part of the landscape of options.

“Essence” is still in somewhat more difficult shape. More people get angry about essence than about metaphysics. It sounds like “essentialism.” My answer to this is that what usually gets called “essentialism” has nothing to do with the fact that essences exist, but only with the unjustifiable claim that they can receive privileged incarnation in specific appearances. And also with the unjustifiable claim that a thing can never change. To be more specific…

I hold that , for example, there is such a thing as a human essence. But all that means for me is that the human is something real over and above its current manifestations or performances. But that doesn’t entail that I think the human (or anything else) is fixed for all time. Of course it isn’t. And it also doesn’t mean that, like Heidegger, I would say: “All Dasein is thrown out into the nothing– but especially Greeks and Germans. Spanish is not a philosophical language.” etc. etc.

As for my use of “objects,” it grows out of a couple of different factors. One is the basically phenomenological background from which I work, where “objects” was a key term in moving the discussion away from empiricism toward Husserl’s object-oriented model of experience. (Heidegger went back to using it negatively– but Heidegger doesn’t own the word, so who cares?)

I could also use something a bit more neutral, like Bogost’s term “unit”. But then I would lose the resonance with the phenomenological background of the work, which is less decisive among Bogost’s readership than among mine. And besides, at this point I’m more or less married to the word “object”, so I may as well stick with it.

To repeat my remarks of earlier today, the use of “objectification” as a pejorative term makes sense only if you think there are two kinds of entities (human/animal subjects and inanimate objects) and think the greatest horror is to confuse the two. The point is that I’m talking about objects as what resists all objectification.

A similar problem existed for the first few years of my using the word “tool-being”. How can I say that human Dasein is also a tool?! That was the complaint back in the mid-1990’s, but that disappeared as well.

In short, I see the horror over specific terminology as, usually, a short-term problem that is easily solved within a couple of years by repeated explanations.