Reality and the Feelings of the Inanimate
Apr. 25th, 2005 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaI hadn't ripped any Hiatt! How crazy is that?
So I was listening to this, and was reminded of a recent post by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quantumduck. I, also, often anthropomorphize objects, to the point of feeling sorry for them. My particular worry, though, is not their breakage or their wearing out, but their abandonment.
In my head, inanimate objects borrow whatever consciousness they have from us, so abandonment is the worst thing that can happen to them - it unreifies them, consigns them to oblivion in a way that their physical destruction doesn't. This shows up in the Toy Story movies, of course - being tortured and disassembled is horrifying, but it doesn't un-do them in the way that being abandoned does.
I suppose it all ends up back in Velveteen Rabbit territory, but that particular system makes things real once and for all. I'm not sure I think it works like that, at least in that the consciousness of things doesn't seem to extend into times and places in which they're not being used. (Maybe "use" for a thing is the proper analogue for "life" in a being?)
What's the correlation between treating objects as beings and treating beings as objects? I think to a certain extent, having a sufficient capacity for empathy automatically demands that it be extended, at least in imagination, to pretty much anything we interact regularly with - the mental exercise of seeing/feeling someone else's perspective becomes so habitual that we do it for things that don't have perspectives of their own. In reverse, then, it seems that someone who didn't have that habit ingrained would be more likely to act as if a being, with feelings and motives of its own, would have no more emotional resonance than a screwdriver. Of course, this links back to the old idea of "delusions of ownership" - you can't own a being in the same way that you can own a thing, but those who are deficient in empathy act as if you could.
Or can you? "Ownership" doesn't describe anything in the real world. There's no way you can tell from physically examining an object who it belongs to. Maybe one way of getting out of our ugly, patriarchal/capitalist ideas of people-ownership is to see object-ownership in terms of relationship. Instead of modeling the relationships between beings on the relationship between a being and an object, model the relationship between being and object on the relationship between two beings. Certainly adopting a functional animism seems like it would lead to a more humane way of dealing with Others, whether human, being, or object.
But then does it take something away from the power and numinousness of Life to treat the non-living as a Thou, rather than an It? Is imitation flattery, or a cheapening?
What happens when an It eventually (inevitably?) becomes a Thou? We already treat our computers like they were marginally conscious; what happens when that becomes objectively true? One problem with allowing an It to become a Thou-Other is that it makes it okay to fear it . . . And then there's the problem of feeling parental about something that isn't one's flesh and blood, writ large when it's not flesh and blood at all.
Hmm. Any thoughts?
So I was listening to this, and was reminded of a recent post by
quantumduck. I, also, often anthropomorphize objects, to the point of feeling sorry for them. My particular worry, though, is not their breakage or their wearing out, but their abandonment.In my head, inanimate objects borrow whatever consciousness they have from us, so abandonment is the worst thing that can happen to them - it unreifies them, consigns them to oblivion in a way that their physical destruction doesn't. This shows up in the Toy Story movies, of course - being tortured and disassembled is horrifying, but it doesn't un-do them in the way that being abandoned does.
I suppose it all ends up back in Velveteen Rabbit territory, but that particular system makes things real once and for all. I'm not sure I think it works like that, at least in that the consciousness of things doesn't seem to extend into times and places in which they're not being used. (Maybe "use" for a thing is the proper analogue for "life" in a being?)
What's the correlation between treating objects as beings and treating beings as objects? I think to a certain extent, having a sufficient capacity for empathy automatically demands that it be extended, at least in imagination, to pretty much anything we interact regularly with - the mental exercise of seeing/feeling someone else's perspective becomes so habitual that we do it for things that don't have perspectives of their own. In reverse, then, it seems that someone who didn't have that habit ingrained would be more likely to act as if a being, with feelings and motives of its own, would have no more emotional resonance than a screwdriver. Of course, this links back to the old idea of "delusions of ownership" - you can't own a being in the same way that you can own a thing, but those who are deficient in empathy act as if you could.
Or can you? "Ownership" doesn't describe anything in the real world. There's no way you can tell from physically examining an object who it belongs to. Maybe one way of getting out of our ugly, patriarchal/capitalist ideas of people-ownership is to see object-ownership in terms of relationship. Instead of modeling the relationships between beings on the relationship between a being and an object, model the relationship between being and object on the relationship between two beings. Certainly adopting a functional animism seems like it would lead to a more humane way of dealing with Others, whether human, being, or object.
But then does it take something away from the power and numinousness of Life to treat the non-living as a Thou, rather than an It? Is imitation flattery, or a cheapening?
What happens when an It eventually (inevitably?) becomes a Thou? We already treat our computers like they were marginally conscious; what happens when that becomes objectively true? One problem with allowing an It to become a Thou-Other is that it makes it okay to fear it . . . And then there's the problem of feeling parental about something that isn't one's flesh and blood, writ large when it's not flesh and blood at all.
Hmm. Any thoughts?
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Wow!
Date: 2005-04-27 06:59 am (UTC)That was when I was young. Now, as a parent, I think I'm right there with you on this abandonment issue.
I was deeply touched by "The Brave Little Toaster" because of its use of this theme of abandonment. I loved the film's odd resolution where the child brings childhood things along to college, essentially giving a second life to desk lamps, toasters, etc.
When I went to college I met an old paper folding machine that was hated by its master. The folder was this magnificent 1960's machine with shiny green painted metal parts and an old air compressor that hissed wildly when it ran. The head of the copy dept. at the college said it was broken, so it needed to be used a certain way. She hated it, and wasn't very nice to it. Mostly it sat while humans did the folding. I lubricated the parts, adjusted the old valves, and had it singing in just a day or two. I often wonder what happened to it after I left. It hadn't been loved in a long time when I met it, and I worry it won't be ever again.