Christopher Hall farting the unfartable

Christopher Hall, a Canadian College Professor, asks in 3Quarks- 

What does it mean to turn somebody into an object, either literally, by killing them, or in a more conceptual sense, by robbing them of freedom of thought and action?

 It doesn't mean anything at all. A person is an object from some points of view whether or not anything is done to them. If you have actually murdered or kidnapped a person, you may be arrested and charged with particular crimes. If you have merely robbed Hall of his freedom to shit on your head, the police will decline to arrest you even if you gild the lily by suggesting that you also robbed Hall of his brain with the result that he has taken to quoting the nutter Simone Weil. 

This, according to Simone Weil in her celebrated essay on the Iliad, is the central topic of that poem:

She was wrong. The central topic of that poem was the Trojan War. Many of those who listened to the poem claimed descent from heroes mentioned in it. These heroes were related to various divinities who were being brought together in an ecumenic, pan-Hellenic, Olympian religion.

Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form

Nope. You don't see helpless people being butchered. You see trained warriors engaging in combat according to quite well-defined rules. True, as the conflict progresses, things get uglier. Still, Achilles does grant a truce so Priam can bury his son Hector. 

Weil was stupid. She had studied worthless shite at Uni. She was incapable of writing a single sentence which wasn't false or foolish or both false and foolish.  

– the force that kills.

We also see it when a bus hits a pedestrian and the pedestrian dies.  

How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet.

There is no such force. It can't be 'varied'. Thus it isn't the case there is some 'force of gravity' different from the one which currently operates on my body, which is just waiting for the right moment to cause me to fall off a cliff and thus meet my death.  

It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment.

Weil was mad. Her madness, in the view of the English coroner, was the cause of her starving herself to death. No doubt, she thought there was some 'force of chocolate cake' which was just hanging around waiting for the right moment to put some tasty food into her mouth, but she was wrong. She needed to eat up her din-din. Otherwise, she would die. 

In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone.

That was the Gorgon's glance. But Gorgons are mythical.  

From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another,

Since anybody can kill anybody, if they have a gun, it follows that being a Gorgon is a property all human beings have. Yet, nobody throughout history seems to have bothered to gain a reputation as a sculptor by the simple expedient of turning people to stone. Simone may have been so puzzled by this that she put off eating her din-din. What if the baked potato on her plate was actually a Gorgon who could turn her to stone? Anyway, the good news is that the dim bint died long ago. Her misery, if not ours, is at an end. 

quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive.

People would often say to Simone 'you are a sofa'. She would then become a sofa and they would sit on her. Simone de Boudoir, however, was more exacting in her requirements. She would demand Simone turn into the Ottoman her grandmother owned. This was the real cause of the collapse of the Caliphate.  

He is alive; he has a soul; and yet – he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this – a thing that has a soul. (Mary McCarthy’s translation)

Not extraordinary at all. Hylozoism is, perhaps, the most ancient of philosophies and is the foundation for the earliest Animist religions. Panpyschism is a perfectly respectable contemporary approach to 'the hard problem' of consciousness.

Simone wasn't just stupid. She was also ignorant about her own subject. It's a good thing she gave teaching High Skool to go work in a factory. But she didn't last long there. She was too crazy and generally useless.  

A thing that has a soul. Is this not a rather routine definition of what a human being already is?

No. We only say 'thing' for inanimate objects. Hall has a PhD in English. He should know this.  

In one line of thinking, a human being is an object, and no amount of force is needed to make this so. We are the same kind of stuff as rocks, clouds and black holes, even if one feels Weil would very much balk at this description, and insist that the human being, properly understood, is no sort of object at all.

Our physical bodies have a chemical composition just as rocks have a chemical composition. But Medicine is not reducible to chemistry. We know there are electrical properties of organic matter. Might there also be quantum properties associated with consciousness? Perhaps.  

Why insist that force makes us into this “extraordinary entity” otherwise?

Madness. Stupidity. Having studied useless shite at Collidge. Simone was the victim of all three maladies.  

Force may exercise the majority of its workings on the human object,

Only in the sense that it may visit its cousin, Power, on the planet Jupiter.  

but its ultimate goal and function, in Weil’s view, is an attack on the subject.

Weil was mad. She may well have believed that Force, Power & their buddy, Concupiscence, were busy attacking her in the pages of  'Je suis partout'. 

Unless we are of the opinion that such a subject doesn’t actually exist – and there are plenty around who are – then force does indeed enact something terrible on the human being, whether we subsist, at least in part, as objects or not.

Also, Gravity is saying mean things about me to the Electro-Weak force. Should I starve myself to death like Simone Weil? Fuck that. I will order three extra-large Pizzas and eat myself to death.  

But what does that entail, exactly – the transition from subject to object?

Anything you like. Ex falso quodlibet means that from nonsense any nonsense can be deduced.  

It is to set us loose in territory we already live in, but are deeply unfamiliar with.

No. This isn't territory. It is the place where useless academics teaching shite go to relieve themselves. On the other hand, it may be that Hall earns his living by manually emptying cesspits.  

A set of loosely concurrent philosophies that have come under the name of “speculative realism” charges Western philosophy as being too focused on the human mind and its constructions.

Western philosophy turned to shit fifty years ago because it couldn't recruit people smart enough to keep up with developments in STEM subjects. There is as little point in bringing charges against Western Philosophy as there would be in accusing a baby of having provided a faulty proof of the Reimann Hypothesis.  

An element of hubris is evident, as Graham Harman

useless tosser 

says in Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything:


We have launched spacecraft, split the atom, cracked the genetic code[….]

No. Smart people did that. You guys just played with your own faeces.  

But all of these amazing achievements, even if we assume that animals cannot do anything nearly as complex, and even though we as a species are of special interest to ourselves, do not automatically make human beings worthy of filling up fifty percent of ontology.

Ontology is just some shite shitheads gas on about to students of utter shite.  

This, however, is the verdict of modern philosophy since Descartes and Kant, whose ideas entail that we cannot speak of the world without humans or humans without the world, but only of a primordial correlation or rapport between the two[…]

The verdict of the world on modern philosophy is that it is stupid shit. The good news is that you don't have to be as crazy as Simone Weil to write that stupid shite.   

The “other fifty percent of ontology” is

fifty percent of a word for stupid shite. 

that world of objects, contemplated as if the conscious subject didn’t exist. And this only makes sense; unless one subscribes to some of the bolder speculations about quantum physics, if every conscious subject disappeared from the universe tomorrow – so far, we only know about the existence of the human kind – it is doubtful that the being of, say, a galaxy 34 billion light years away would be affected.

The same could be said of every fart. If they all disappeared or appeared or whatever, all we would be talking about would be farts. There really are better ways of passing the time.  

Perhaps this is ultimately what force does:

only in the sense that this, ultimately, is what a fart does or what doing farts or farting whats as doing's own doing or undoing or whatever.  

it denies the “specialness” of consciousness,

there really is nothing special about Hall's to me or mine to Hall.  

and renditions us “back” to a place where we are subject to no different laws and occupy no more special position than anything else in the universe. Objects are meant to be used, altered, and destroyed as need be.

No. Particular people may mean to use certain objects in certain ways. But Hall too may mean to mean something. Rocks which are thrown at him may mean to cause him harm. We may think it mean of them if they fall short in this matter.

Eugene Thacker, in describing “the horror of philosophy,”

which, it will turn out, is just horror  

likewise tries to approach thinking about the unthinkable

or farting the unfartable 

territories of the non-human 

which is just territory or space 

In Thacker’s view, the universe is three-fold: there is the “world-for-us”

i.e. Thacker & his ilk. The rest of us want nothing to do with it.  

– the world as a place directly tied to the human,

Sadly, we have no means of knowing what this is. Everything or nothing may be directly tied to us. Physicists may puzzle over this to some good purpose.  

of things and relationships designed for humans;

There is an 'argument from design' against Darwin's theory of Evolution. Sadly, we know of nothing which fits the bill. The most we can say is that we live in an 'Anthropic' branch of the multi-verse because we could live nowhere else.  

the “world-in-itself,” a world of objects subject to empirical investigation;

Empiricism is not aware of, nor can establish, any such entity.  

and the “world-without-us,” a world not subject to any form of human cognition.

many of my farts would be part of such a world. Sadly, other people unfortunate enough to be in the same room with me, deny that my farts occur in a 'world without us' rather than a place where they are heard and smelled.  

It is the world not funnelled through any terrestrial sensory apparatus or Kantian cognitive machinery.

Can scientists find 'relic neutrinos' left over from the Big Bang? Probably, though you'd have to be hella smart to have an opinion. Philosophers & Socioproctogists aren't smart at all. Still, it is a fact that some of our own farts are not currently detectable- at least I hope so. 

This world, as Thacker states in his book In the Dust of this Planet, “lies in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific”

A person may say 'the world feels this way or that way to me' but these are predicates applicable only to that person's feelings, or claimed feelings, at some particular time or in some particular context.  

and “persist[s] in the shadows of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself.” It cannot be thought out through philosophy,

It can be dismissed easily enough.  

though cultural productions like supernatural horror and science fiction may allow some confrontation of it.

Only in the sense that we can confront, or copulate with, vampires and werewolves- id est, we can't at all.  

That violence “dehumanises” people is a trite observation,

It isn't true. Soldiers or prize fighters don't become sub-human. The population of Ukraine has fully retained its humanity- indeed, the highest human faculties and noblest virtues have flourished there as never before precisely because of the brutal, insensate, violence and terror inflicted on them by a greedy tyrant and his corrupt clique of oligarchs. Apparently, the 'Wagner Group'- the brutal mercenaries Putin had previously employed- continues its operations in Africa. But, its leader was happy enough to use the same methods against White Christians who speak the same or very closely related language. 

but I’m not entirely sure we understand all that that term means.

Whatever we want. 

It is not merely that we look at others as not human;

that has no effect on them. It isn't the case that, if a person develops a psychiatric illness such that he comes to believe that his own family and friends are actually robots or demons, anybody ceases to be human. Equally, a person brought up by wolves who shows few human traits is still a human being- a very unfortunate one deserving of sympathy and as comfortable and happy a life as is possible. 

it is not that the subjects of violence are pressured to become kinds of automata as force relentlessly grinds away at their being.

That can happen. We understand that people subject to a cruel type of conditioning may, indeed, do terrible things. Consider the 'child soldier' brought up to be a merciless killer. Can such young people be 'rehabilitated'. I think, the answer, for the most part, is 'yes'.  

It is that the “world-for-us” disappears, the “world-in-itself” becomes irrelevant, and we are stuck in the territory of the “world-without-us” – a world that was there all along, but is resolutely unthinkable.

This has never happened. It is merely a stupid, ignorant, conjecture of a pseudo-intellectual type.  

I say all of this because the unthinkability of the current moment has been, ironically enough, the prime subject of my thoughts lately.

Trump got elected. Kamala didn't. Boo hoo! 

I’ve tried to process the reality that I may be living on the cusp of a new era of force that will make the depravities of the 20th century look like an undercard to the main event.

I was born under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. The Doomsday Clock was inaugurated in 1947. For the first time in history, Humanity attained the capacity to make itself extinct.  

I’ve also been thinking about how much “the future” plays a role in my conception of my current state of being. I can cognise, and live with, a future without me – I suppose I’m as comfortable with the idea that I won’t be around at some point as the next person. But I do not think I can entirely process a future without us.

Scientists have no such difficulty. As to what shitheads who teach shit can or can not process- who actually gives a shit?  

And I don’t mean this purely in the sense of any mere post-apocalypse, after the actual, physical annihilation of every human being. People being wholesale replaced by automata has at least as long a pedigree in science fiction as Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. If I don’t quite mean anything so dramatic, I do wonder whether the central challenge of the 21st is not merely to save our collective bodily existence.

but also to talk hysterical, virtue signalling, nonsense coz Trump is sooooo EVIL!

Weil has perhaps the same blind spot toward the nature of force that Orwell did.

No. Weil was mad. Orwell wasn't.  

Force, in their conception, is the kind that, when it does not kill, steps on a human face,

Orwell had been a Colonial policeman. Stepping on faces was a comparatively mild punishment similar to Brigadier Dyer's 'crawling order' in Amritsar. It didn't actually 'de-humanize' anybody. 

the one that creates actual slaves.

Slavery is established by killing people who don't obey or try to run away. It does not 'de-humanize' though it may humiliate. Slaves are human. If their masters get drunk and inflict sadistic punishment on them, it is the master who is considered inhuman or bestial.  

That sort of literal force is at the present moment making itself very much felt.

Kamala has become a zombie. She wants to eat our brains.  

But there is another kind of force, one Aldous Huxley might be more apt to recognise. I’ve had the fantasy more often recently of being a philosophical zombie – something which would do all of the things I do, would work and relax normally and interact as usual with other people – but which would have no conscious mind. How nice it would be, for a while, not to know and not to think, but to also retain all of the things I need to my life going, like relationships and a job.

Why not simply give up virtue signalling? Your life will go on as normal. It's just that you won't have to keep pretending that Trump is causing you to shit your pants incessantly.  

Yes, Freud diagnosed this a century ago as the Thanatos, the death-drive that whispers to us that the purest state of relaxation is non-existence.

It is true that biological organisms have a strong drive to reproduce. It isn't true that they have a strong drive to fucking die. Freud was a fraud.  

But I suspect there is also a kind of force involved here – something about the age which pushes us to want our objectification.

Very true. There really is something peculiar about the age. I think it is because its Uncle is sexually abusing it. Kamala Harris should prosecute the Uncle and send him to jail.  

The totalitarian state – definitely on Weil’s mind as she composed her essay in the 1940s – moulds us in this direction with the subtlety of a demolitionist.

Who moulded Weil to starve herself to death in England? Was it Churchill? No. It was Atlee. Labour Party is totes totalitarian.  

But we need not believe that force is so restricted in its methods. There is force by deprivation and force by saturation.

and force by farting and farting in a manner which totally dehumanizes and objectifies virtue signalling cunts. 

And a lot of what is forcing us into a kind of mechanisation is, at least at the beginning, rather pleasurable. If we’d all rather have a masseuse do the job, is the moulding any the less accomplished?

There is no 'moulding'. Some adapt to changing circumstances. Some shit them incessantly because, any time a politician whom they don't like wins an election, they think Hitler has risen from the dead. 

So I feel myself being pushed into strange regions. The “world-for-me” is still there – my toaster still works, my dog still needs walks, my job is still there, etc, and the “world-in-itself” I presume continues on much as it always has. That “world-without-us” comes, as Thacker suggests, not with clarity but in glimpses and hints. I get them sometimes when I’m marking an AI-generated student assignment. It would be hysterical to treat this in apocalyptic tones, but a future where machines do all the writing and the reading (I have as yet not given into the temptation to use AI when I’m grading) is one which the human subject has retreated from.

No. It is a wholly inconsequential future featuring useless shitheads teaching nonsense or hoping to get a sheepskin in nonsense. 

A future in which art and literature continue to fade into irrelevance is

like a future in which twerking retains as little relevance as it has now. Entertainment is only entertainment even if it pretends to be 'politically engaged' or philosophically profound. One can make a little money teaching literature or dancing or basket weaving, but the world doesn't really revolve around you.  

one in which human consciousness makes no significant mark upon the world, beyond the ongoing rituals of ecological destruction.

That's one in the eye for all those stupid enough to study STEM subjects! Tell me one thing the Physicists or Chemists or Medical Researchers have done which has actually improved our lives.  

And in doing so, the subject has done more than retreat “inside;” it brings that mechanisation into itself. Suddenly, the unthinkable territory of a “world-without-us” becomes the pathway to the chasm of “us-without-us.”

Once you adopt a paranoid theory, you are on a slippery slope to believing everybody has been replaced by robots and that you yourself are being 'remoulded' by sinister forces.  

We will have to start thinking seriously about the duty to think.

You are too stupid. Also you studied and taught worthless shite all your adult life.  

The path forward – assuming the air isn’t on fire in 15 years or so – is not just to cultivate inwardness, but also to reward whatever masterful expressions of that inwardness we find in the outer world with our rapt attention.

Pay rapt attention to your own farts. They are less shitty than what you think or what you write.