Subject, Verb, Object

What are the consequences of what we know?

“Can rocks die?” This is the question proposed in the title of an essay by anthropologist Dr. Elizabeth Povinelli of Columbia University. More than one person will have snickered in reading that sentence. If you can conclusively prove otherwise, five Canadian dollars are yours. After all, death requires life. Rocks are not alive and therefore cannot die. That’s it. Article over. The next 940-ish words will be filled with meaningless nonsense. That is only the case if you refuse to reconsider what you know. How do you know that a rock is not alive? Are you quite sure you are alive? What other options are there? Perhaps, most importantly, why should you care? 

In her article, Dr. Povinelli recounts the story of how, in 2013, OM Manganese Ltd. became the first entity to be penalized under the provisions of the Northern Territory Sacred Sites Act (1978). While the details of the court case itself are not central to her argument, she uses it as a lens to explore a broader matter: how the academic world conceptualises and defines reality. When I say to you as an Indigenous person that the moon is our grandmother, you likely conceive of that as a metaphor—if you’re being generous. After all, just like the rocks here on Earth, the Moon is not alive and therefore cannot possibly be a grandmother. Have you questioned, however, that life itself may not be a fact, but an assumption? 

In biology, there is a set of criteria by which something is evaluated to determine whether it’s alive. While I’m sure this is an oversimplification, the criteria can be boiled down to the proposition that being alive is being physically distinct from its environment and organised to perpetuate its redox reactions. Everything else is non-life. For Povinelli, this is the propositional hinge around which much of what we know revolves: it is an assumption that we do not prove, but rather our doubt signals that a true statement is not being made. In other words, if we begin to question this assumption, we reveal that it is not an objective truth but rather a foundational premise that shapes our understanding of the world. But let’s set aside the notion of truth for a moment. What would happen if we acknowledged life and non-life for the socially constructed categories they are? How else might we begin to sort the data of the universe? What new knowledge might come of it? These are exciting questions—ones that challenge us to rethink the very foundations of what we consider real. 

Here’s where things take a dark turn. In one clause, what makes you unique? Let me try. You’re nobody else. Of course, you have more to you than that, but what makes you unique is likely only that you’re nobody else. This distinction—the Self being constructed in opposition to the Other—is the foundation of psychoanalysis. But if our sense of identity hinges on this opposition, what are the implications? What happens when difference itself becomes the basis for meaning?  

The process by which your Self comes to be is called “subjectivation.” We can’t get into the many competing aspects and theories of it now, but as mentioned earlier, a Subject is defined in relation to the Objects that it is not. Those Objects constitute what most would call “objective reality.” For French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, reality is the world we can signify, usually by talking about it. This means that there must be things that we cannot talk about, known as “Abjects.” Lacan draws a line between the two, called a “foreclosure.” What is beyond the foreclosure cannot be spoken of or represented, and it does not constitute reality. Among other things, Lacan places what he calls The Real, or our primordial, pre-consciousness experiences of oneness, with the Other from before our Selves came to exist firmly in the realm of the Subject. To recap, we’re both Subjects, everything we can talk about is an Object, and everything we can’t is an Abject, which includes remembering your infancy. 

What happens when Objects change? Surely, at least once, you were given language to describe what you could only outline before. At that moment, something crossed the foreclosure, and the definition of “I” changed for you. Maybe that change was just a small one. Maybe it was a medium-sized change. Maybe it was significant and deeply unsettled you. 

Another, far more frequent change, is a change in one of the existing Objects. As Judith Butler tells us, Objects, including bodies, are brought into being and given meaning by acts of speech. This remark means that staying on this side of the foreclosure is an active, ongoing process, which requires the reiteration of those speech acts. The world we take to be stable is actually sustained through continuous repetition—without it, meanings slip away. Unfortunately, words are tricky. Every time someone speaks, their meaning shifts slightly. For anything representable to endure, it must remain open to change over time. This, understandably, frustrates people; when the key things against which you define yourself change, it can be very upsetting. After all, it calls the very existence of the person you are/were into question. It can feel as though the foundation of your identity is shifting beneath you. This is a pretty natural reaction, but those whose Subjectivities are rarely challenged tend to react rather poorly to this. 

One reaction against the change matters, though. What we have seen in the US, Germany, and here in Canada, is the immense popularity of politicians who promise “common sense” and “sanity.” These politicians say that objective reality shouldn’t be tampered with and accuse their opponents of doing just that. This is an extremely worrying reaction. When we think of whose Subjectivities have been prioritised, and which bodies are treated as Subject, Object, and Abject, we begin to see why these politicians seem obsessed with asking what a ‘woman’ is. When everything is changing so fast, it may be tempting to allow these politicians to put the brakes on the changes, but I urge you to reconsider. What ceases to change soon ends up beyond the foreclosure. You thought this article was about rocks. This article is about women and their right to be persons whose thoughts are part of reality. Cis women, please remember this when your trans sisters are being targeted. That is all for now.