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Spring 2015 H R I the Humanities Review Volume Twelve, Issue One I Spring 2015 RH VOLUME TWELVE, ISSUE ONE I SPRING 2015 THE HUMANITIES REVIEW VOLUME TWELVE, ISSUE ONE I SPRING 2015 I H R stjenglish.com/st-johns-humanities-review/ RH © St. John’s University, 2015 Kevin MacDonnell, Editor Bailey Robertson, Assistant Editor Peer reviews and editorial assistance provided by members of the St. John’s University English Department. RIGHTS All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the St. John’s University English Department. Photos and illustrations may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the St. John’s University English Department or the party the image is attributed to. PUBLICATION & SUBSCRIPTIONS The Humanities Review is published annually in the Spring of each academic year by graduate students of the St. John’s University English Department in Jamaica, NY. Founded in 2002 by Paul Devlin, The Humanities Review is catalogued by the St. John’s University English Department in the Institute for Writing Studies, St. Augustine Hall and St. John Hall, Room B40. Please direct all subscription inquiries to the St. John’s University English Department office, Telephone: (718) 990.6387. Fax: (718) 990.2527. E-mail: [email protected]. SUBMISSION PROCEDURES Articles typically range from 3,000-5,000 words. Submissions longer than 10,000 words will not be considered. Please double-space manuscripts throughout, using Times New Roman 12 pt. font with one-inch margins, a Works Cited page, and, if applicable, endnotes. All submissions must be accompanied by an abstract no longer than 350 words. Submissions should be sent as a Microsoft Word attachment via e-mail to [email protected]. Authors must obtain permission for illustrations. All images must be high-resolution and in TIFF format. For other inquiries, contact the Editor at the above e-mail or at (718) 990.6985. Cover Art: High-density polyethylene (row of chairs, patio chair, desk and chair) / Polycarbonate (plexiglass chair) / Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) (dorm chair, office chair) from The Petroleum Manga, Marina Zurkow, 2014 all images courtesy the artist and bitforms gallery Cover Design: Bailey Robertson Inside layout and design by Kevin MacDonnell and Bailey Robertson Contents Preface vii Strange Realism: On Behalf of Objects 3 Graham Harman Objects in Drag: The Mannequin’s Queer Objecthood 25 Katie N. Connell No True Substitute for the Infinite: Indefinite Space and Infinite Time in Alfred Jarry’s The Supermale 40 Phillip Grayson Reality Bytes: The Aesthetic of EXistenZ 53 Daniel Sander Hoarding Orientations: Jane Bennet, Wilfred R. Bion, and Mansfield Park 66 Emilia Halton-Hernandez Title TBA 81 Seth Auster-Rosen R Interview: Levi Bryant 100 Far from gradually erasing strangeness, intimacy heightens it. The more we know them, the stranger they become. Intimacy itself is strange. As the pas- senger side-view mirror on your car reads, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects Preface Modern science and technology have allowed human beings to analyze, assess and, all too often, exploit objects of every shape, size and variety. Whether it be the overwhelmingly huge ice shelves of Antarctica, the unthinkably small quarks and quanta that make up the building blocks HR of matter, or the coffee cups, seagulls, and parking meters we encounter every day, human beings “zoom in” on every object they encounter, at- The Humanities tempting to extract meaning from a veiled and chaotic reality. But these Review close encounters with objects have the reverse effect; rather than mak- Volume 12, Issue 1 ing the world a source of comfort for our anxieties, objects become more Spring 2015 bizarre than we could have ever imagined. As the epigraph says, “The more we know them, the stranger they become.” As the infinite depth and frightening power of objects becomes fully realized, human subjectivity loses hold of its position at the center of thought. While Kant’s argument that, “There are objects that exist in space and time outside of me,” has been referred to as the “Copernican Revolution,” it has only been in recent years with the emergence of object-oriented philosophies that Copernicus’s displacement of humans at the center of the universe has been truly complete. Object-oriented ontology, or OOO for short, argues that all objects, big and small, animate and inanimate, real and imaginary, have their own particular subjectivity, albeit unlike our own, based on the unique way each exists in the world and interacts with the objects it comes into contact with. Because of the abstract nature of the claims OOO makes, the task falls to the humanities to imagine and ac- count for the implications of a world in which the subjectivity of all objects is equally real, even if all objects are not equally real. This issue of the St. John’s Humanities Review explores the role of subjectivity in a world that we now know is characterized by an inexhaustible multiplicity of subjec- tive objects. viii I THE HUMANITIES REVIEW SPRING 2015 The opening article in this issue, “Strange Realism: On Behalf of Objects,” is by Graham Harman, philosopher and founder of object-oriented philosophy. Originally presented as a lecture in Berlin, Germany in April 2012 as part of a month-long attempt to recreate the now-famed original Speculative Realism workshop held at Goldsmiths College in London. In the article, Harman outlines his object-oriented philosophy by first defending his claim that the realness of objects should be considered on a case-by-case basis. He goes on to consider, by way of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, the inexhaustability of an object’s reality to other object’s, not just sentient beings. Harman then proposes that all objects interact vicariously, or indirectly, and closes with a brief critique and analysis of Levi Bryant’s onticology. Our second essay, “Objects in Drag: The Mannequin’s Queer Objecthood” by Katie Connell, seeks to engage object-oriented philosophy with Judith Butler’s queer theory by way of their common marginalization by privileged subjects. She claims objects are radically queer and recent developments in OOO have promoted a similar dismantling of heteronormative subjectivity called for by queer theory. Threaded into her argument, Connell provides an analysis of the mannequin’s role in culture, positioning the mannequin as a fascinating object in the eyes of both queer theory and object-oriented ontology. The next article, “No True Substitute for the Infinite: Indefinite Space and Infinite Time in Alfred Jarry’sThe Supermale” by Phillip Grayson, looks to one of the absurd science fiction novels byfin de siecleFrench writer Alfred Jarry to explicate how the limits of subjecthood can be experimented with within Henri Bergson’s conception of dureé. Grayson considers the ways in which Jarry, through his writing, is able to extend the self’s limits indefinitely, but not infinitely. Following Grayson’s piece, Daniel Sander’s essay “Reality Bytes: The Aesthetic of eXistenZ” positions the world-making and reality-structuring rela- tion of objects and worlds in David Cronenburg’s film eXistenZ, as well as in Zeno’s paradox of motion and Schopenhauer’s porcupine dilemma. In doing so, Sander considers the representational possibilities of spacetime and rela- tions as presented in object-oriented ontology and Nietzschean perspectivism. The next article, “Hoarding Orientations: Jane Bennett, Wilfred R. Bion, and Mansfield Park” by Emilia Halton-Hernandez, engages Bion’s psychoanalytical approach to material substitution with Bennett’s speculative realist under- standing of human-object relations in an effort to understand the nature of hoarding tendencies. She then examines how these theoretical developments allow for a new understanding of the portrayal of Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Acknowledgements I would like to first thank all of the contributors to the journal. Our featured articles come from individuals that range across all levels of experience in aca- demia, from graduate students to full professors. I would like to thank Marina Zurkow for her wonderful artwork and her continued advice and support as we experimented with numerous cover designs. From St. John’s University, I would like to thank Dr. Stephen Sicari, Dr. Steve Mentz, and Dr. Granville Ganter for providing me with the opportunity to get involved with the Humanities Review, as well as full support and guidance from start to finish. I also benefited greatly from the advice and support provided by the last three editors of the Humanities Review, Phillip Grayson, Anna Sicari, and Meghan Nolan. Finally, I’d like to thank Bailey Robertson for the extensive time and effort she committed to the publication, and her invaluable construc- tive criticism and commentary throughout the development of this issue. 3 THE HUMANITIES REVIEW SPRING 2015 Strange Realism: On Behalf of Objects Graham Harman, American University of Cairo This article was originally a lecture given at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, on April 11, 2012. The occasion was Armen Avanessian’s recreation of the original 2007 London Speculative Realism workshop, but in serial order. My fellow original Speculative Realism members Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux also gave lectures within the same general period, with the addition of Marin Hägglund, who led off the series. HR The Humanities Review o many people, realism simply means scientific realism: there is an Volume 12, Issue 1 T objective world outside the mind, and with the use of proper scientific methods Spring 2015 we can obtain increasingly accurate information about that world.
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