Hegel, Ecology, Aesthetics

...a sneak preview of the first few pages of the talk I'm giving at Queen Mary University of London next month:

The Time of Hyperobjects: Hegel, Ecology, Aesthetics

Hegel's philosophical approach is intuitively very satisfying if like me you trained to study literature. From an early age as a literature student, you're taught that texts have narrators, and that these narrators are different from the author. For instance, a text might not have a single author, or even a human one. You could discover the text written in gigantic letters on the surface of Mars or floating at in the tealeaves at the bottom of the pot. No matter: all texts, these ones included, have a narrator.

Now the thing about narrators is that they do two things, roughly: they establish a point of view (or points of view), and they establish a subject position (or positions). The point of view is fairly straightforward: it's the answer to the question, what or who is the narrator? Is the narrator omniscient, omnipresent? Does it have a gender, a race, a class? Is the narrator a character in the story? Characters? And so on.

Slightly more difficult to grasp is the notion of subject position, but this is where it really gets interesting being a literature (or any kind of art) student, “where the rubber meets the road” as They say tediously over and over again in awful bureaucratic meetings where nothing is decided. I think that if you had to boil down what we do as humanities scholars into a single task, it would be identifying subject positions and working on them—which by the way makes me a good Hegelian. Because that's what Hegelian philosophy is all about.

So what is a subject position? The subject position of a text or artwork answers the question, “Who are you, the reader?” In other words, what attitude towards itself does the text expect you to take? Think of a perspective painting. The vanishing points in the painting dictate where to place your gaze in order to make a 2D surface appear 3D. Your gaze is encoded into the picture surface. In the same way perhaps a flower's subject position is that of a bee, if it's painted with ultraviolet landing stripes. It tells you where to put your proboscis.

This is the bad, or good news of literary theory, in a Lacanian, Althusserian nutshell. People come in to the theory class with the expectation that you can make anything mean anything. You will always get a certain essay on deconstrution that totally misinterprets it along these lines. No: that's what I call the pre-theory attitude. What you should leave the theory class with is the knowledge that not only is the interpretation of texts subject to all kinds of nonsubjective constraints, but also a place for you has been pre-established by the text itself. It's like those maps with the little red arrow that says, “You are here.”

Now Hegel's great insight is that ideas come bundled with attitudes, in other words, ideas code for subject positions. When you think an idea, the idea's thinkability as such depends upon assuming a certain attitude on the part of the thinker. So when a Hegelian wants to debate you, she doesn't argue the toss about the truth content of your claims. She makes a beeline for the subject position that your ideas code for, and talks to that.

It's a very disarming approach, as a matter of fact. I try my best to use it all the time. Again it's what I think the humanities were put on the Earth to do. Now honing in on the subject position is literally disarming, because it tends to be the unconscious of the idea, the idea's personality, as it were, and we sort of know from psychoanalysis that one's personality, how one appears to the other, is unconscious. So what happens when you hone in on the subject position is that you deprive it of its effectiveness. You collapse the idea and the attitude it codes for into a bundle.

Now this bundle is yet another idea. And guess what? Since ideas code for attitudes, this one is no exception. So off you go, Mr. Hegelian: you now have to figure out that one. And so on. It's called dialectics. It means that philosophy is the history of philosophy, not the superficial occurrence of ideas “in” time, but a temporality and a temporalizing that is internal, intrinsic, to thinking as such. For instance, it has no reverse gear. Thinking is futural, since ideas don't know yet what they code for. That's what an idea is. (Cue the spooky Heidegger music.)