Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing

3. Metaphorism: Speculating about the Unknowable Inner Lives of Units

61 [ 3 ] metaphorism Speculating about the Unknowable Inner Lives of Units Meanwhile in mind, consider for a moment some of the things that are happening somewhere, right now: Smoke vacuums through the valve, grommet, and hose of a hookah and enters a pursed mouth. The dog teeth of a collar engage a gear against the layshaft coupling of a transmission assembly. The soluble cartilage of a chicken neck decocts from the bone into the stock of a consommé. These and other interactions between objects constitute different moves in the material world. From our human perspective, they correspond with actions we know well: smoking, shifting, or cooking. Traditionally, a human’s first-person experience of such interactions would offer clear subjects for phenomenological inquiry; not only perception and thought but also memory and emotion: the taste of the honey-sweet ma’sal heated under the charcoal in the hookah’s bowl, or the sensation of foot on clutch as the collar of the synchro obtains a friction catch on the gear, or the smooth, thin appearance of broth as it separates from fat and bone in the soup pot. But for the hookah, the gear, or the chicken, what’s going on? Or likewise for Shore’s cantaloupe or ice milk or water glass? And how might we understand those relations? A tempting answer might be science. We could evaluate the surface tension of the melon rind, determine the indentation hard- [62] Metaphorism ness of porcelain, measure the condensation point of vapor against ice-water glass, or describe the rotational force of gear in relation to transmission lever. But unlike the jobs of horticulturists, physicists, or forest rangers, alien phenomenology is not a practice of scientific naturalism, seeking to define the physical or causal relations between objects. To do so would take things for constituents. As Bruno Latour puts it, science “is forced to explain one marvel with another, and that one with a third. It goes on until it looks just like a fairy tale.”1 In his famous 1974 essay, the philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel attempts to answer the question “What is it like to be a bat?”2 In Nagel ’s account, consciousness has a subjective character that cannot be reduced to its physical components. Physical reductionist positions hope to erase the subjectivity of experience by explaining it away via underlying physical evidences. For example, a reductionist explanation of the sweet taste of a Hostess Twinkie might involve a chemosensory account of how the compounds that make up the treat bind with a biomolecular substrate on the taste buds, which a human eater interprets via a set of neurological receptors.3 Nagel points out a problem with reductionist explanations like this one: even if the experience of the Twinkie can be understood as a neurochemical unit operation, such an explanation does not describe the experience of sweetness. When separated from the various forms that might produce it, Nagel calls this encounter “the subjective character of experience.”4 That character, he suggests, entails “what it is like to be that organism .” For Nagel, the very idea of experience requires this “beinglikeness ,” a feature that eludes observation even if its edges can be traced by examining physical properties. Because of this elusiveness (which OOO calls withdrawal), physical reductionism can never explain the experience of a being. The bat serves as an effective example, because we know that bats experience the world thoroughly unlike humans (despite being mammals) or birds (despite being flying creatures). Bats use echolocation to form an understanding of spaces around them, their own modulated cries acting as a kind of sonar. Even though we sometimes call them “blind,” bats have a very lucid and detailed sense of space—it’s just a sense that’s totally alien from a human perspective. Metaphorism [63] As Nagel puts it, “Bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.”5 The best we can do is to try to conjure what it might be like to be a bat, and in that task we will always fail, given that imagining what it’s like to be a bat is not the same as being a bat. Even though Nagel’s article is really about the mind...