Carl
Asher Kay
johnmccreery
Jacob Lee
I woke up yesterday morning from a dream in which I was talking for the first time in quite a while with an old favorite student, Jenna Howard. It was an oddly unsatisfactory conversation, in the specific way I always find those reacquaintance conversations unsatisfactory, only in waking from the dream I was able to figure out why: I was interacting with Jenna as an unfamiliar object, a strange intersector of my space, rather than as a person who I know and enjoy.
no, it's a kliban
According to object-relations theory, I (the subject) am ‘driven’ primarily by my desire for relations with others (my objects). In the pragmatic tradition George Herbert Mead agrees; our selves, social objects, are formed through a series of shaping interactions with and symbolic embeddings of other (therefore tool-like) objects, including what we come to recognize as other humans. I have certainly always enjoyed my relations with Jenna, who is smart and interesting and pleasantly confirms my self-image of being so also – including ongoingly in that part of myself she shaped.
Sandra Harding might say that this decidedly marginal mutual confirmation could, if we were reflexive about it, begin to ground what she calls “strong objectivity,” a kind of knowledge fully situated in the real shared experience of embodied humans, contrasted to what she calls “weak objectivity” or “the God trick” in which we imagine we can step outside of our bodies, communities and histories to see everything all at once from every perspective. For Mead too, what we call objectivity, indeed thinking itself, is a contingent product of our interactions: “Our thinking is an inner conversation in which we may be taking the roles of specific acquaintances over against ourselves, but usually it is with … the ‘generalized other’ that we converse, and so attain to the levels of abstract thinking, and that impersonality, that so-called objectivity that we cherish” (“The Genesis of the Self and Social Control,” 1924-25, in Reck, ed., Selected Writings).
Although we may all be objects and contribute our part to generalized objectivity, apparently there are objects and mere objects. For example, feminists worry about women being reduced to mere objects for men. “Man fucks woman. Subject verb object,” Catherine MacKinnon noted, excluding reciprocity and (arguably) describing reality by a grammatical trick. Subjects have popped back up as a special kind of object. On this view subjects can change the object, not the reverse; but can subjects change the subject?
Perhaps not, because similarly in the hegelian/marxist tradition, the subject is the actor, the object is the acted upon or acted toward (you may object that my object here is not clear). Fortunately, in principle subjectivity and objectivity are relational moments of being, not essential characteristics. “Practice is the actual unity of the subject and the object of activity. Moreover, as Marx understood it, the problem of the relationship between the subject and object is not identical to the basic question of philosophy, i.e., the question of the relationship between consciousness and being, because the subject is not simply consciousness, it is a real and acting person, and in its turn the object is not simply objective reality, but that part of it which has become the target of the practical or cognitive activity of the subject,” Lektorsky helpfully glosses. Incidentally, this clearly ‘reduces’ objects to their relations with subjects, actual and potential, and limits subjectivity to human beings, which does look pre-Copernican. But it’s a dialectical theory so there’s nothing essential about either of those prejudices and one may always choose to extend potential relations into an ontologically-useful infinity.
In contrast, object-oriented programming uses modules (objects) to simplify and stabilize complex programming. Objects are self-sufficient ‘virtual machines’ that maintain their own operational relations with their own data while allowing reconfiguration as parts of larger programming wholes. This looks a bit like what a subject was earlier; very confusing. I suppose we could figure it all out, though, as long as time and money are no object.
