review » roger t. whitson

Review of Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost

Apr 272012

Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to Be A Thing. Ian Bogost. U of Minnesota Press, 2012. pp. 168. $20. ISBN: 978-0816678983

My father’s dog died soon after I finished reading Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology. And I also found myself angry with Ian’s discussion of The Wire in his final chapter, the displacement of the seriousness of social realism with the battered-realism of Cake Boss and Good Eats. I don’t know how, but those two events seem tethered in my brain at the moment, because I feel that (for a number of reasons that I am not conscious of yet) Alien Phenomenology is a game-changer. Ian’s book represents a real turning point in object-oriented philosophy. Whereas Latour and his lists abound in several of the books published by Bryant, Harman, Bennett, and many of the other OOO-philosophers, their work has still been primarily about human philosophers. Ian’s book forced me to wonder: could an engine piston actually practice philosophy?

I say this as someone who talks to animals. When I carried one of my childhood cats into the vet for the last time to euthanize him in 2004 (he had been suffering from a number of increasingly intense strokes, was crying softly. And my mother was whispering to him “almost there, almost there”), I remember feeling guilty for having treated him as a child – for having, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words – oedipalized him. I don’t know if it was a case of Bennett’s strategic anthropomorphism or not, but I kept apologizing to him – over and over again. Even as I heard the news on Facebook from my father, I tried to understand what feelings Leo had for our family, what it was like to smell the scents he smelled everyday, how it felt to be petted. He was named after the Spartan king Leonidas – but wasn’t like him at all.

Cats, dogs, and animals are, of course, not the only thing Ian covers in his book – but the idea that both of my pets withdrew from me (yet also communicated with me) is at the heart of the work Ian does. When, in the last chapter, he critiques the brand of social realism espoused by The Wire and celebrates the “unseen stuff of cookery,” he opens up a strange world where our most cherished humanistic values are overturned in ways that seem flippant, even irresponsible. And yet there is a bizzare, and powerful, ethical stance underlying the book. Consider the following:

Review of Supergods by Grant Morrison

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Aug 222011

Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Myths, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. Grant Morrison. Spiegel and Grau, 2011. pp. 264. $28. ISBN: 978-1400069125

The first time I knew I was reading Grant Morrison, he just completed his groundbreaking JLA #1 in 1996. I had, in all probability, read an issue or two of his Doom Patrol run or his Gothic arc from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight. Apart from the strange and surreal image of a painting eating Paris, or the horrific sequence in which Animal Man had lost his right arm after being attacked by a mutant rat, I did not know – really – what I was getting into. In Morrison’s hands, the Justice League was transformed from a boring slapstick comic into a modern day myth. Superman was no longer the vulnerable ninny who couldn’t catch Lex Luthor because he forgot to remember to gather evidence while destroying the villain’s robots. He wrestled with angels, fought a sentient sun, and defeated planet-sized alien starfish with the help of a dream god and the faith of a child.

Morrison has since penned some of my favorite superhero stories: New X-Men, The Invisibles, Seven Soliders of Victory, and All-Star Superman, and he is the author of what is – for me – a most anticipated forthcoming run on Action Comics with illustrator Rags Morales. I picked up his book on superheroes without hesitation. What begins as a fairly straightforward take on the history of the superhero (repeating many of the facts enumerated by Gerard Jones, Les Daniels, and David Hajou in earlier books on the industry) becomes an intricate, autobiographical, psychedelic, kabbalic, and even activist tour de force that only someone with the legendary confidence and ambition of Grant Morrison could complete.

Review of Queer Blake, ed. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly

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Dec 012010

Cross-posted at Zoamorphosis: a Blake 2.0 blog

Queer Blake. Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. Palgrave, 2010. pp. 264. $80. ISBN: 978-0230218369

Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly’s collection presents, for the first time, an encounter between queer theory and Blake studies. While authors have explored Blake’s relationship to masculinity, Steve Clark’s Sordid Images: The Poetry of Masculine Desire (1994); to homosexuality, Christopher Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality (2000); to androgyny, Tom Hayes’s “William Blake’s Ego-Ideal;” and to gender, Helen Bruder’s collection Women Reading William Blake (2007) and Magnus Ankarsjo’s William Blake and Gender (2006); no monograph or collection about Blake has focused exclusively on queer theory. On the one hand, readers of Blake’s work are convinced in a vision of Blake’s marital bliss, perhaps punctuated by the story Thomas Butts told of Catherine and William reading Milton’s Paradise Lost in the nude. On the other hand, scholars rightly point out that Blake includes scenes of sexual violence, repression, even rebellion in many of his prophetic books. “The whole situation is queer” say Bruder and Connolly, and I am convinced they are right (4).

Luckily for readers of Queer Blake, Bruder and Connolly boldly venture into the closet of queer Blakean sexuality. They suggest that Blake’s status as a masculine ideal in many readers, the “healthy, macho, rough and ready, ‘typical’ English working class” vision of a “William Bloke,” too often obscures the queer relationships formed between Blake and his contemporaries and even Blake and his academic readers (5). “Queer is for poofy-toffs; transgender softness for bleeding-heart liberals” (6). So, was Blake a normative sexual conservative, confining his sexuality to the marital bed; or was he a sexual libertine who explored beyond the safe “free-love” clichés given to most Romantic authors? There is enough evidence to titillate and suggest, if not prove, a queer Blake. In particular, Bruder and Connolly mention Blake’s description of Gothic artist Henry Fuseli. Blake describes Fuseli as “The only Man that eer I knew / Who did not make me spew” (E 507). They call the statement “as curious as it is hiliarious, expressing attraction by denying repulsion, in abject terms of bodily fluids (if he didn’t spew, presumably he swallowed)” (10).