Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi all! I'm revving up for next week, but I would like to add some things to the discussion among Ian/Michael/Jack. I hope this will be useful. (Many of you are friends or friends-in-law, and I am showing fidelity to that by speaking and speaking frankly.) I imagine that Patricia, having come to speak speculative realism, will have lots to say about this discussion too. Me, I work on affects of attachment and the ways those dynamic movements within proximity engender forms of life--I'm on the Latour side of things, resonating with it through Laplanchean anaclitic psychoanalysis and an aesthetics derived from, without being orthodoxly, Spivak (unlearning), Deleuze ([un]becoming), and Cavell (ordinary language philosophy). Or, I'm a materialist queer writing sentences to induce some arts of transformation, which is I think why I am here, although I've wondered about that during the last few weeks. 1. Re the Bogost/Halberstam convo. Ian writes that "all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist equally," and I couldn't agree more. But like Jack I think it matters to attend to the relative impact of both clauses of this statement. If you believe it then you have also to account for your own prioritization of things that seem normatively to be things over things that normatively seem to be human. As Jack points out, there's a complex political and definitional history there. 2. But more interesting to me--and addressed to us all, not just Ian--why should thinking about things in relation not be interfered with by other idioms? Recalling Zach's entries and my own inclinations too, where does interference (the glitch suspending the movement of the system, the noise that proceeds within which form manifests, take your pick) make its way into our methods, imaginaries, or concepts? Why is Jack's attention to the history of what classes are served by disciplinary conventions deemed some kind of threat to productive conversation? Those of us who write from queer/feminist/antiracist/anticolonial commitments have debated a lot whether, how, and when it matters that some statements are held true as though the second clause,"but not all objects exist equally," didn't exist (this is, I think, Jack's argument against abstraction and universalism). I like abstraction and universalism more than Jack does, but that's because my orientation is to want more of everything. not less of some things. I want the terms of transformation to proceed through idiomatic extension and interruption, huge swoops and medial gestures, the internal frottage of contradiction and irreconcilable evidence... I'm an impurist. What are the incommensurate ways we can address the scene of that thing in a way that changes that thing? As Jack writes, it matters who is cited: who we think with and the citations that point to them build and destroy worlds, they're both media and bugs in world-building. The clash of intellectual idioms is a political question too because it shapes the imaginary of description and exemplification. The clash of idioms is inconvenient, and I would like also to say that it's part of a queer problematic represented here certainly by Zach and Michael and Jack and me too, although I sense that where Jack and I are looking for discursive registers that allow us to say everything we know in all the ways we know it, Zach and Michael's fantastic written work is more likely to make arguments in specific idioms (sometimes sounding all cultural studies, sometimes critical theory, sometimes arguing in the modes of disciplinary philosophy) depending on the conversation. We might also talk about polemics v analytics. I'm less polemical than some of us here. I think it's important that we talk about this question of knowledge worlds (of accessibility, of purity [high/low, disciplinary/transdisciplinary/undisciplined/syncretic epistemologies and idioms]), in a discussion of queer new media and of how its criticality can operate. 3. Re Michael/Jack's argument about masculinism, Warner, etc. I kind of agree with Michael and Ian that calling something masculinist (from you, Jack, that's kind of astonishing, but of course it was a shorthand for the elevation of abstraction over sensual life in all of its riven contestations) is probably not too clarifying or accurate, but it is pointing to something important, which has to do with "all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist equally." Warner's practice has always been to posit queer as a practice and orientation as against identity politics, which he takes to be over-bound to the signifier (as does Edelman). My orientation has been to attend what happens when we mix things up, or remix things up, and as I have written collaboratively with these two guys and been cast as the vulgarer in both cases, all I can say is it's always instructive to enter into the affective space where some t
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Ian - I am reading and enjoying very much your book Alien Phenomenology right now so no offense meant in terms of the masculinity orientation of many of the OOO conversations. But to try to flesh out why we might worry about such an orientation and to respond to Michael briefly here are a few elaborations on that theme: 1. As I said the archive of citations does matter and the fact that many of the female and or queer authors mentioned by me earlier and by Michael below don't surface as often as they should is not the problem in and of itself so much as a symptom of a larger problem. 2. What is that larger problem? Well, as any Feminism 101 course will show us, the gender hierarchy that assigns male to the 1 and female to the 0 in the binary coding of gender, also assigns male to the status of subject and female to the status of object. Hence, having occupied the status of "object" for some time within both the symbolic and the imaginary of the cultures within which we participate, surely the category of "female" should allow for some access to the question of what is it like to be an object. 3. Think of Butler's critique of Lacan here - in the lesbian phallus, she basically takes on those who would argue that feminist and queer critiques of Lacanian psychoanalysis miss the point. Arguing that if all bodies lack and female bodies are deployed metaphorically to represent that lack, and if all phallic bodies only possess the phallus contingently but male bodies are deployed metaphorically to represent that possession, Butler points to a heteronormative foundation to Lacan's mapping of the subject. Offering instead a "lesbian phallus" that is both detachable and mobile (what does OOO have to say about lively objects such as the dildo?), Butler shows that male narcissism leads to a) misrecognition of the penis as the phallus and b) the inability to theorize the object and the abject. After Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to pass through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation. 4. And since Michael believes that the onus of representation/critique falls to those who say they have been left out, one word: Fanon! Indeed, again, as with Butler, we have an elaborate racial critique of the subject/object relation already mapped by Fanon in the "Fact of Blackness" and in Fred Moten's work on the elaboration of the Black subject as commodity and in Hortense Spiller's work on the "American Grammar" of race that assigns whiteness to the subject position and blackness to the perpetual object. So, ok, if women and racialized bodies have all too often been rendered as "things" in the marketplace of commodity capitalism, and if a lot of the work on on Object Oriented Philosophy leaves the status of the human unmarked even when rejecting it in favor of the object and relations between objects then surely we need a queer and or feminist OO philosophy in order to address the politics of the object. --What are the relations between slaves and farm machines? --How might a dildo elaborate a sexuality of the object that does not presume a master subject? --What is the phenomenology of the queer - see Ahmed - and what orientations are queer and which are straight. A better way of answering michael's question about who can do queer theory. ps. Is Zizek doing "low theory" - in a word, no. Even his low archives are put to work to prove Lacan "right." I hope this counts as a "carefully worked out critique" in Michael's words. And I look forward to more alien phenomenology. Jack On Jun 14, 2012, at 6:30 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: > Sorry to try to kill two birds with one stone, but I hope my previous post > may answer this question indirectly. > > In any case, despite Galloway's comments, it sounds like that Animal Farm > quote but it isn't—not at all. > > Ian > > On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:16 PM, frederic neyrat wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> I would like - if possible - to get one or two examples about the >> objects concerned by your statement:"all objects equally exist, but >> not all objects exist equally." I guess - but I just guess - that the >> first part of the sentence is ontological and the second part could be >> political, but maybe I'm wrong. Thanks in advance. >> >> Best, >> >> Frederic Neyrat >> >> 2012/6/14 Ian Bogost : >>> Ok, sigh, let me try this again. >>> >>> The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the >>> fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work >>> and in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many >>> things. I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not >>> all objects exist equally." >>> >>> It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if >>> your idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both >>> Galloway's post and my limited experience thusfar
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Sorry to try to kill two birds with one stone, but I hope my previous post may answer this question indirectly. In any case, despite Galloway's comments, it sounds like that Animal Farm quote but it isn't—not at all. Ian On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:16 PM, frederic neyrat wrote: > Hi, > > I would like - if possible - to get one or two examples about the > objects concerned by your statement:"all objects equally exist, but > not all objects exist equally." I guess - but I just guess - that the > first part of the sentence is ontological and the second part could be > political, but maybe I'm wrong. Thanks in advance. > > Best, > > Frederic Neyrat > > 2012/6/14 Ian Bogost : >> Ok, sigh, let me try this again. >> >> The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the >> fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work >> and in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many >> things. I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not >> all objects exist equally." >> >> It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if >> your idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both >> Galloway's post and my limited experience thusfar here on empyre, then >> perhaps you can explain why that a model worth aspiring for? Why that is >> virtuous and righteous? >> >> Ian >> >> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: >> >> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: >> >> >> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what >> >> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a >> >> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as >> >> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this >> >> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it >> >> isn't? >> >> >> The "as much as" is precisely the problem. >> >> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: >> >> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ >> >> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's >> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its >> embracing of contingency and possibility. >> >> - Rob. >> ___ >> empyre forum >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre >> >> >> >> ___ >> empyre forum >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Joe, Thanks for these great comments. > I think it is because this resonance seems so fruitful to me that I am > perplexed by some of the claims by proponents of OOO that the political can > be separated from claims about the ontological if we are constrained in our > own ways by our as-structures, then right from the outset we encounter the > world of human and non-human objects as profoundly political, raising uncanny > questions of co-existence whether we are human subjects or neutrinos or > cypress-flames. So OOO, far from allowing us to discuss "what exists" in > politically neutral spaces, rather radicalises the political questions of > ecology and "being-with" into the realm of the non-human, so that all objects > are trying to 'work out' how to exist with each other whether to congregate > or flee, embrace or destroy, swap DNA and code sequences, or annex and > withdraw. This doesn't prescribe a particular flavour of politics, but it > does seem to make the political at least "equiprimordial" with the > ontological. I'd love to hear people's responses to these thoughts if you > have anything to share. I don't think I find anything objectionable here, save the (perhaps?) implied conclusion that objects "working out" of mutual co-existence is best called "politics." Sure, we can call it that, words are words after all, and perhaps it's an appropriate metaphor. After all, as you rightly say, those of us who embrace the tool-being as a fact of all things also acknowledge the incompleteness of this grasping of other objects. However, this is a very different idea than the usual one, that politics is *our* politics, is a normative or descriptive account of human social behavior. It's this conceit that bothers OOO, that politics-for-humans could be taken as first philosophy. If I can be permitted the indulgence of quoting myself at absurd length, here's how I attempt to address the matter in Alien Phenomenology (pp 78-79), on the topic of ethics rather than politics: > Can we even imagine a speculative ethics? Could an object characterize the > internal struggles and codes of another, simply by tracing and reconstructing > evidence for such a code by the interactions of its neighbors? It’s much > harder than imagining a speculative alien phenomenology, and it’s easy to > understand why: we can find evidence for our speculations on perception, like > radiation tracing the black hole’s event horizon, even if we are only ever > able to characterize the resulting experiences as metaphors bound to human > correlates. The same goes for the Foveon sensor, the piston, the tweet, and > the soybean, which can only ever grasp the outside as an analogous struggle. > The answer to correlationism is not the rejection of any correlate but the > acknowledgment of endless ones, all self-absorbed, obsessed by givenness > rather than by turpitude. The violence or ardor of piston and fuel is the > human metaphorization of a phenomenon, not the ethics of an object. It is not > the relationship between piston and fuel that we frame by ethics but our > relationship to the relationship between piston and fuel. Of course, this can > be productive: ethical principles can serve as a speculative characterization > of object relations. But they are only metaphorisms, not true ethics of > objects. > > Unless we wish to adopt a strictly Aristotelian account of causality and > ethics, in which patterns of behavior for a certain type can be tested > externally for compliance, access to the ethics of objects will always remain > out of reach. It is not the problem of objectification that must worry us, > the opinion both Martin Heidegger and Levinas hold (albeit in different > ways). Despite the fact that Levinas claims ethics as first philosophy, what > he gives us is not really ethics but a metaphysics of intersubjectivity that > he gives the name “ethics.” And even then, Levinas’s other is always another > person, not another thing, like a soybean or an engine cylinder (never mind > the engine cylinder’s other!). Before it could be singled out amid the gaze > of the other, the object-I would have to have some idea what it meant to be > gazed on in the first place. Levinas approaches this position himself when he > observes, “If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be > other.” That is, so long as we don’t mind only eating one flavor of otherness. > > Timothy Morton observes that matters of ethics defer to an “ethereal beyond.” > We always outsource the essence of a problem, the oil spill forgotten into > the ocean, the human waste abandoned to the U-bend. Ethics seems to be a > logic that lives inside of objects, inaccessible from without; it’s the code > that endorses expectation of plumbing or the rejoinder toward vegetarianism. > > We can imagine scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent > into the sensual interactions
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Just in case anyone else is looking, I found the archives: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:13 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote: > No worries, it's an important discussion and I'd imagine Michael and > others will want to contribute later tonight. I'll forward you some of > the earlier threads so you can check them out. > > - Jacob > > > > > On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: >> Jacob, >> >> Thanks for this clarification. I apologize if I was thread-hijacking. >> >> Not sure if you're aware, but the empyre list website is very slow to >> respond, and I can't find any archives thereon, so it's hard to go back and >> see the conversation that's already taken place... >> >> Ian >> >> >> >> On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote: >> >> Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your >> contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look >> at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month >> is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of >> the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what >> queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting >> and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made >> on what is missing, rather than what is there. >> >> That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as >> Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or >> our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical >> objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope >> is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other >> topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what >> you have to say about these other approaches. >> >> It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory >> and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on >> issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier >> discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and >> practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to >> decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the >> field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the >> computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of >> understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to >> look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked >> to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed" >> objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low >> theory". >> >> I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different >> canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think >> it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear >> more from all of you on this approach. >> >> - Jacob >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost >> wrote: >> >> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list >> >> strives to support? >> >> >> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back, >> >> please let me know so I can unsubscribe. >> >> >> Ian >> >> >> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: >> >> >> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: >> >> >> >> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what >> >> >> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a >> >> >> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as >> >> >> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this >> >> >> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it >> >> >> isn't? >> >> >> >> The "as much as" is precisely the problem. >> >> >> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: >> >> >> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ >> >> >> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's >> >> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its >> >> embracing of contingency and possibility. >> >> >> - Rob. >> >> ___ >> >> empyre forum >> >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre >> >> >> >> >> ___ >> >> empyre forum >> >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre >> >> ___ >> empyre forum >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre >> >> >> >> ___ >> empyre forum >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre > ___ > empyre forum > empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hello Forgive me I'm a first time poster with a long history of lurking here and a some-time fascination with SR/OOO, and thankyou to everyone here for an exciting discussion. I wanted to write something both as a way of thinking it through and asking the contributors about the possibility of separating the political from the ontological. Tim Morton recently in one of his podcast classes on OOO summarised the development of SR/OOO as a response to correlationism, noting that where the Meillassoux strand of SR admires the correlationist approach and attempts to ground or legitimise the correlate, OOO instead accepts the correlationist limit but extends it to all relations, human and non-human. Perhaps I could borrow from the Heidegger legacy that comes through Harman to this analysis and say that OOO acknowledges the 'as-structure' that characterises being, and radicalises it to be a feature of all relations, rather than just human Dasein. I encounter you *as* something, as you encounter me; the cotton encounters fire *as* something, just as fire encounters cotton. I therefore understand OOO not as a way to provide an ontology that is independent of epistemology, but as a transformation of the question of "how we know what is in the world" from being 'merely' a methodological problem, to a fundamental feature of being both an "individual" or "object" (such as a human, a toaster, or a quasar) as well as a component in an assemblage or world. Everything is interconnected, albeit while negotiating a fundamental inner rift in which we also encounter ourselves *as* something. Again following Harman and Morton's reading of y Gasset, relations are tropes rather than literal. In this sense the as-structure that runs through OOO thus seems to me to be very consonant with queer theories. No object is able to engage with other objects except through its own functional colouring, its own perceptual morphology, its own heritage and identity, whatever material or discursive agencies have been made to bear on that history. I understand Morton's take on the uncanny ecology in OOO to mean all objects confront each other suddenly as strangers, that we have no 'natural' categories to rely on, and no normative criteria to which we can appeal - we can't even be certain of the extent to which we are either concrete individuals in our own right or fleeting instances playing the role of components within some larger being - perhaps we are both - both representatives of a form or type, but also withdrawn and thus always capable of being something else, someway else. In this respect it very much means that markers of the normal are awash and abandoned. Perhaps some of the tropes that have characterised the development of SR - horror, the weird, anxiety - resonate with the experiences of abjection that make queer such a powerful resource. I think it is because this resonance seems so fruitful to me that I am perplexed by some of the claims by proponents of OOO that the political can be separated from claims about the ontological - if we are constrained in our own ways by our as-structures, then right from the outset we encounter the world of human and non-human objects as profoundly political, raising uncanny questions of co-existence whether we are human subjects or neutrinos or cypress-flames. So OOO, far from allowing us to discuss "what exists" in politically neutral spaces, rather radicalises the political questions of ecology and "being-with" into the realm of the non-human, so that all objects are trying to 'work out' how to exist with each other - whether to congregate or flee, embrace or destroy, swap DNA and code sequences, or annex and withdraw. This doesn't prescribe a particular flavour of politics, but it does seem to make the political at least "equiprimordial" with the ontological. I'd love to hear people's responses to these thoughts if you have anything to share. Thanks, Joe On 14/06/2012 23:35, Robert Jackson wrote: Hey All, - I've been subscribing to this mailing list for a while now, so I'm glad this debate is getting aired - I just hope it doesn't inherit the unfortunate slippage of tone that the blogosphere features typically in these types of discussions. So, I really don't understand this criticism of OOO, which tars the ontological 'equivalence' brush with capitalism or neo-liberalism. This is straightforward reductionism in my eyes. There are plenty of political questions which need asking. But asking the question 'what is' need not be a politically contentious one. This is what SR is precisely getting away from, no matter what anti-correlationist critique one advocates. The key issue here is sovereignty. If a current position can articulate contingent surprise within an ontology that's a start (even the early zizek took the correlated 'Real' has a sovereign theoretical given, to which ideology conceals or masks). For my m
[-empyre-] unsibscribe
** This electronic email and any files transmitted with it are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. The views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender and may not necessarily reflect the views of the Christchurch City Council. If you are not the correct recipient of this email please advise the sender and delete. Christchurch City Council http://www.ccc.govt.nz ** ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] -empyre- archive
Everyone can access the -empyre- archives at .cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2012-May/author.html > > spacehttp://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre > > > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] MIA to IA
Hello Jack! I'll respond very briefly to your key points since I don't want to
frustrate the possibilities for dialogue (even if I am always for more and not
less thought I do realize I tend to go on a bit...)
(1) I'm assuming that you are here setting up an opposition between OOO/SR's
perceived attachment to high theory and "grand theoretical narratives" as
opposed to your own low theory? I'm not sure this really holds given that much
of the work which has happened so far in SR/OOO happens on the blogosphere, on
Twitter, on Facebook, in all sorts of places which are para- or non-academic
(and a lot of the work is being done by graduate students). And Ian Bogost's
work is all about "carpentry" and "making things". Isn't that a kind of "low"
practice?
It may be true that the archive of figures you list are the predominant ones
but it is far from exhaustive and it unfortunately repeats some of the way the
history of SR has been framed so that many of the female figures who paved the
way for it get written out of the narrative. I'm thinking of Katerina Kolozova,
Sadie Plant, Juliet Flower MacCannell but there are many others besides.
Levi Bryant has consistently said that the job of OOO and SR's main figures is
to create work for others. The constant objections that they don't address race
or class lead precisely nowhere because those doing the objecting haven't, as
far as I can see, mounted any sort of a critique. The burden is on those who
say these facets have been left out of the picture to actually do the work,
right? I have much the same response to people who say OOO/SR are "masculinist"
domains. I would like to see a carefully worked out critique which actually
engages with what is there and takes it off in the directions of critical race
theory, feminist theory, queer theory (part of my own work tries to do this),
postcolonial theory, Marxist theory and so on.
That said, there have been plenty of discussions about race and class on
Bryant's Larval Subjects blog. And his formulation of "dark objects" might be
useful for those working on race and OOO (a grad student from Canada wrote to
me the other day asking about a project on racial poetics and OOO and I
suggested that he read Sara Ahmed's Queer Orientations which actually
anticipates many of the features of OOO) and Bryant has also tried to think
with Spivak's theory of subalternity and OOO. A start has been made here and
there. But it is really up to others who have expertise in other fields to do
the work now.
(2) I don't think my argument about the reception of Warner's piece has been
misleading. For example, in a recent discussion on Bullybloggers
(http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/bullybloggers-on-failure-and-the-future-of-queer-studies/) you
don't even name him when you refer to the piece ("While some people, no names,
have been pronouncing queer studies dead and done, there are meanwhile a whole
slew of amazing new books by younger scholars that prove this pronouncement to
be premature and even immature!") . Why the refusal to engage with him
directly? It doesn't matter to me that he teaches at Yale. My sense of his
demonization, largely based on academic gossip (but why would gossip not be a
productive critical mode?), arises from the recent neglect of his work from
both *before* and *after* the Gay Shame event. Whatever went on there shouldn't
lead to a dismissal of his work tout court or a failure to read him carefully.
That would, I
think, be a terrible shame.
Having said that, I found the discussion of new work emerging in queer studies
on Bullybloggers very refreshing and energizing and I know that you think we
(in Europe and elsewhere) need to engage more with the queer of color critique
debates. I agree and that is already happening. However, it would have been
nice if some of the work referred to by you, Duggan, Munoz et al was being
produced outside of the US. The latter--however important and vital-- is a
really very narrow corpus of texts and ignores, as you say, what is going on in
the rest of the world.
(3) I didn't say that the quotation was offensive (and I hope my question
didn't offend in turn). I rather found it puzzling and troublingly essentialist
(even if I can, in a way, understand where that essentialism comes from). One
could counter that my question is just as binaristic but I'm curious as to how
straights leaving queer theory to the queers does not delimit. Surely for all
that gets included by your "queer" still the straights are left out? Or maybe
I'm missing something. I would have thought that queerness (like Bersani's
"homoness") included everyone and was a positionality anyone--regardless of
their orientation--could take up. Since we are talking about queer theory (in
your quote) then I'm really just asking why a *theoretical* orientation which
is surely available to anyone gets delimited?
(4) For all the problems we might have with
Re: [-empyre-] Homay's Faces
Thanks for these supplementary thoughts Homay, I've really enjoyed this thread on faces and faciality (and am glad it continued on from last week into this). Some other artworks which might be interesting in terms of this idea of "giving face" might be Sebastiao Salgado's "Children of Exodus" exhibition and Bill Viola's "Observance". Cheers,Michael. --- On Thu, 14/6/12, Homay King wrote: From: Homay King Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Homay's Faces To: "soft_skinned_space" Date: Thursday, 14 June, 2012, 21:44 A quick response to Michael's remarks on the face, for those still following that thread (carried over from last week): On "giving face" and prosopopeia: this trope, I think, keeps us in closer company with the nonhuman than do related ones like anthropomorphism and projection, which seem to perform a nearly opposite gesture (the eradication of the object's radical otherness in favor of an idiopathic identification, rather than a recognition of that otherness, which is what giving face in the ethical sense is about). And the idea of the planet having a face, a surface, extends the idea of the nonhuman face yet further. Michael, I would be interested to read your essay should you wish to share it, and to those thinkers you mention I would add Balász (Theory of Film, the section called "anthropomorphic worlds") and Agamben's Means without End (the section on Notes on the Face). On facial non-recognition: Coincidentally this arrived in my inbox this week; I'm sure many on this list have seen it already. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/jun/11/artist-profile-adam-harvey/ Cheers, Homay - Original Message - From: "Michael O'Rourke" To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2012 11:47:51 PM Subject: [-empyre-] Homay's Faces I really enjoyed reading about Homay's project on faces and love the line: " Perhaps they also suggest an aspect of the human face that is queer, transitional, collective, and/or impersonal". I have j ust a couple of quick thoughts about this in terms of queer theory and the non/human. Firstly, I think we could link up some of this work on faces with Eve Segwick's collection of her former student Gary Fisher's poetry where she talks about "giving face". Which, in turn, gets me thinking about Paul De Man on prosopopeia (a kind of giving face) and his later turn to the inhuman. I wonder what we could do with De Manian materialisms in the face of a claim like "all language is inhuman"? Jacob's remark about the "incomputible" got me to thinking about the unrecognizable too. Scott Wilson has written a lot recently about prosopagnasia which is the inability to recognize faces. And I've been trying to connect this idea of Scott's up with the fear of human extinction and the puzzlingly hypo-affective response to the prospect of "our" being wiped off the face of the planet. The affective fatigue in the face of impending extinction (Colebrook and Hillis Miller both write about this in Theory and the Disappearing Future ) seems to me to be a kind of "global amnesia" which misrecognizes the traumatic wound on the face of the earth (this would of course be indebted to Reza Negarestani's speculative psychoanalysis and his writing on dark materialisms and geotrauma...) I have a very long unpublished essay on faces and faciality in Zizek, Irigaray, Deleuze, Stiegler, Sedgwick, Butler, Levinas, Hansen and several others which touches on many of the issues being discussed this week. I recall that it ended by saying, in an iterative twisting of Deleuze on Spinoza, that we don't yet know what a face can do. I'm learning a lot this week about what facial futures might look like... ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hey All, - I've been subscribing to this mailing list for a while now, so I'm glad this debate is getting aired - I just hope it doesn't inherit the unfortunate slippage of tone that the blogosphere features typically in these types of discussions. So, I really don't understand this criticism of OOO, which tars the ontological 'equivalence' brush with capitalism or neo-liberalism. This is straightforward reductionism in my eyes. There are plenty of political questions which need asking. But asking the question 'what is' need not be a politically contentious one. This is what SR is precisely getting away from, no matter what anti-correlationist critique one advocates. The key issue here is sovereignty. If a current position can articulate contingent surprise within an ontology that's a start (even the early zizek took the correlated 'Real' has a sovereign theoretical given, to which ideology conceals or masks). For my money OOO (which Levi Bryant has argued), has an interesting proposition in that one could potentially argue that all real objects have an ambigious sovereign inner core of surprise which can never be fully articulated, by anything: whether benvolent dust mite or proprietary software. This might be a starting point for discussion. Best Rob On 14 Jun 2012, at 21:06, Ian Bogost wrote: > Jacob, > > Thanks for this clarification. I apologize if I was thread-hijacking. > > Not sure if you're aware, but the empyre list website is very slow to > respond, and I can't find any archives thereon, so it's hard to go back and > see the conversation that's already taken place... > > Ian > > > On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote: > >> Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your >> contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look >> at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month >> is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of >> the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what >> queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting >> and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made >> on what is missing, rather than what is there. >> >> That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as >> Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or >> our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical >> objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope >> is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other >> topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what >> you have to say about these other approaches. >> >> It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory >> and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on >> issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier >> discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and >> practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to >> decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the >> field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the >> computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of >> understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to >> look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked >> to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed" >> objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low >> theory". >> >> I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different >> canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think >> it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear >> more from all of you on this approach. >> >> - Jacob >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost >> wrote: >>> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list >>> strives to support? >>> >>> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back, >>> please let me know so I can unsubscribe. >>> >>> Ian >>> >>> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: >>> >>> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: >>> >>> >>> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what >>> >>> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a >>> >>> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as >>> >>> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this >>> >>> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it >>> >>> isn't? >>> >>> >>> The "as much as" is precisely the problem. >>> >>> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: >>> >>> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ >>> >>> But I wouldn't
Re: [-empyre-] Homay's Faces
A quick response to Michael's remarks on the face, for those still following that thread (carried over from last week): On "giving face" and prosopopeia: this trope, I think, keeps us in closer company with the nonhuman than do related ones like anthropomorphism and projection, which seem to perform a nearly opposite gesture (the eradication of the object's radical otherness in favor of an idiopathic identification, rather than a recognition of that otherness, which is what giving face in the ethical sense is about). And the idea of the planet having a face, a surface, extends the idea of the nonhuman face yet further. Michael, I would be interested to read your essay should you wish to share it, and to those thinkers you mention I would add Balász (Theory of Film, the section called "anthropomorphic worlds") and Agamben's Means without End (the section on Notes on the Face). On facial non-recognition: Coincidentally this arrived in my inbox this week; I'm sure many on this list have seen it already. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/jun/11/artist-profile-adam-harvey/ Cheers, Homay - Original Message - From: "Michael O'Rourke" To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2012 11:47:51 PM Subject: [-empyre-] Homay's Faces I really enjoyed reading about Homay's project on faces and love the line: " Perhaps they also suggest an aspect of the human face that is queer, transitional, collective, and/or impersonal". I have j ust a couple of quick thoughts about this in terms of queer theory and the non/human. Firstly, I think we could link up some of this work on faces with Eve Segwick's collection of her former student Gary Fisher's poetry where she talks about "giving face". Which, in turn, gets me thinking about Paul De Man on prosopopeia (a kind of giving face) and his later turn to the inhuman. I wonder what we could do with De Manian materialisms in the face of a claim like "all language is inhuman"? Jacob's remark about the "incomputible" got me to thinking about the unrecognizable too. Scott Wilson has written a lot recently about prosopagnasia which is the inability to recognize faces. And I've been trying to connect this idea of Scott's up with the fear of human extinction and the puzzlingly hypo-affective response to the prospect of "our" being wiped off the face of the planet. The affective fatigue in the face of impending extinction (Colebrook and Hillis Miller both write about this in Theory and the Disappearing Future ) seems to me to be a kind of "global amnesia" which misrecognizes the traumatic wound on the face of the earth (this would of course be indebted to Reza Negarestani's speculative psychoanalysis and his writing on dark materialisms and geotrauma...) I have a very long unpublished essay on faces and faciality in Zizek, Irigaray, Deleuze, Stiegler, Sedgwick, Butler, Levinas, Hansen and several others which touches on many of the issues being discussed this week. I recall that it ended by saying, in an iterative twisting of Deleuze on Spinoza, that we don't yet know what a face can do. I'm learning a lot this week about what facial futures might look like... ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi, I would like - if possible - to get one or two examples about the objects concerned by your statement:"all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist equally." I guess - but I just guess - that the first part of the sentence is ontological and the second part could be political, but maybe I'm wrong. Thanks in advance. Best, Frederic Neyrat 2012/6/14 Ian Bogost : > Ok, sigh, let me try this again. > > The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the > fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work > and in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many > things. I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not > all objects exist equally." > > It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if > your idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both > Galloway's post and my limited experience thusfar here on empyre, then > perhaps you can explain why that a model worth aspiring for? Why that is > virtuous and righteous? > > Ian > > On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: > > On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: > > > As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what > > you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a > > slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as > > much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this > > work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it > > isn't? > > > The "as much as" is precisely the problem. > > Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: > > http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ > > But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's > philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its > embracing of contingency and possibility. > > - Rob. > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > > > > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
No worries, it's an important discussion and I'd imagine Michael and others will want to contribute later tonight. I'll forward you some of the earlier threads so you can check them out. - Jacob On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: > Jacob, > > Thanks for this clarification. I apologize if I was thread-hijacking. > > Not sure if you're aware, but the empyre list website is very slow to > respond, and I can't find any archives thereon, so it's hard to go back and > see the conversation that's already taken place... > > Ian > > > > On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote: > > Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your > contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look > at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month > is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of > the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what > queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting > and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made > on what is missing, rather than what is there. > > That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as > Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or > our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical > objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope > is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other > topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what > you have to say about these other approaches. > > It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory > and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on > issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier > discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and > practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to > decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the > field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the > computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of > understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to > look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked > to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed" > objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low > theory". > > I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different > canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think > it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear > more from all of you on this approach. > > - Jacob > > > > > > > > > On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost > wrote: > > Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list > > strives to support? > > > If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back, > > please let me know so I can unsubscribe. > > > Ian > > > On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: > > > On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: > > > > As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what > > > you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a > > > slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as > > > much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this > > > work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it > > > isn't? > > > > The "as much as" is precisely the problem. > > > Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: > > > http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ > > > But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's > > philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its > > embracing of contingency and possibility. > > > - Rob. > > ___ > > empyre forum > > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > > > > > ___ > > empyre forum > > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > > > > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Jacob, Thanks for this clarification. I apologize if I was thread-hijacking. Not sure if you're aware, but the empyre list website is very slow to respond, and I can't find any archives thereon, so it's hard to go back and see the conversation that's already taken place... Ian On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote: > Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your > contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look > at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month > is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of > the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what > queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting > and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made > on what is missing, rather than what is there. > > That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as > Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or > our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical > objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope > is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other > topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what > you have to say about these other approaches. > > It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory > and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on > issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier > discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and > practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to > decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the > field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the > computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of > understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to > look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked > to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed" > objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low > theory". > > I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different > canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think > it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear > more from all of you on this approach. > > - Jacob > > > > > > > > > On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: >> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list >> strives to support? >> >> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back, >> please let me know so I can unsubscribe. >> >> Ian >> >> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: >> >> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: >> >> >> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what >> >> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a >> >> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as >> >> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this >> >> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it >> >> isn't? >> >> >> The "as much as" is precisely the problem. >> >> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: >> >> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ >> >> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's >> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its >> embracing of contingency and possibility. >> >> - Rob. >> ___ >> empyre forum >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre >> >> >> >> ___ >> empyre forum >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made on what is missing, rather than what is there. That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what you have to say about these other approaches. It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed" objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low theory". I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear more from all of you on this approach. - Jacob On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: > Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list > strives to support? > > If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back, > please let me know so I can unsubscribe. > > Ian > > On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: > > On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: > > > As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what > > you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a > > slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as > > much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this > > work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it > > isn't? > > > The "as much as" is precisely the problem. > > Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: > > http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ > > But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's > philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its > embracing of contingency and possibility. > > - Rob. > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > > > > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
There is a certain collegial self-soothing of the ABDs to it all, if that's what you mean. Al Matthews M.S., Digital Media Georgia Institute of Technology On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: > Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list > strives to support? > > If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back, > please let me know so I can unsubscribe. > > Ian > > On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: > > On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: > > > As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what > > you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a > > slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as > > much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this > > work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it > > isn't? > > > The "as much as" is precisely the problem. > > Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: > > http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ > > But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's > philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its > embracing of contingency and possibility. > > - Rob. > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > > > > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Ok, sigh, let me try this again. The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work and in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many things. I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist equally." It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if your idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both Galloway's post and my limited experience thusfar here on empyre, then perhaps you can explain why that a model worth aspiring for? Why that is virtuous and righteous? Ian On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: > On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: >> >> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what >> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a >> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as >> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this >> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it >> isn't? > > The "as much as" is precisely the problem. > > Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: > > http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ > > But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's > philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its embracing > of contingency and possibility. > > - Rob. > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list strives to support? If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back, please let me know so I can unsubscribe. Ian On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote: > On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: >> >> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what >> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a >> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as >> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this >> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it >> isn't? > > The "as much as" is precisely the problem. > > Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: > > http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ > > But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's > philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its embracing > of contingency and possibility. > > - Rob. > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote: As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it isn't? The "as much as" is precisely the problem. Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why: http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its embracing of contingency and possibility. - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Judith, I can see that I didn't explain myself well. Let me try again. I cannot think of any instance in which calling something "masculinist" is meant as a compliment. Therefore, it is hard for me to read your short paragraph surrounding that statement as anything other than a not-so-subtle dig without any examples or supporting argument or even a clarification of what you really mean. That's what feels unproductive to me. But as I said, I just joined the conversation, so perhaps I'm missing something. As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it isn't? And only part of what it is can be sufficiently captured by the political/ecological matters you rightly cite here. Ian On Jun 14, 2012, at 1:09 PM, Judith Halberstam wrote: > Hmmm, I actually was trying to push us towards a "more productive discussion" > precisely because the kind of abstraction we use when we write theory (or > code) may not be the best medium for conversation. I agree of course that the > move away from the focus on the human is a large part of the appeal of OOO > and SR but that does not or surely should not mean abandoning any particular > notion of politics or urgency. In fact, the most urgent work in SR seems to > concern the mess that humans have made of the world because of their/our > tendency to never think in relation to and in collaboration with the > non-human, extra-human entities with whom we share the planet. > > Why is it "productive" to wonder about the political investments of OOO and > SR as Michael O'R does and Galloway has but not to recognize that the > theories that count in these areas "tend to be masculinitist"...not sure I > get that? > > So much of the critique of the centering of the human and the othering of the > non-human, after all, depends upon queer and feminist formulations of > self-other, subject-object and center margin. An incomplete list of the > relevant thinkers here would include but not be limited to: Gayatri Spivak, > Jacqui Alexander, Saba Mahmood, Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison, Kara > Keeling, Ann Balsamo, Jose Munoz, David Eng, Roderick Ferguson, Sara > Ahmed...and the list goes on and on but rarely does this theoretical archive > surface in the work we are discussing. I believe that this is why Michael > O'Rourke's intervention into SR from a queer perspective is so important... > > > > On Jun 14, 2012, at 8:54 AM, Ian Bogost wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> I just (finally) joined this list and am jumping into the middle of a >> conversation I haven't fully read. So bear with me, and forgive me if I'm >> covering ground that has been done already. >> >> Judith Halberstam wrote: >> >>> The theories that count and that get counted in OOO and SR tend to be >>> masculinist most of the time and tend to cluster around enlightenment and >>> post-structuralist theory or a particular, continental stripe: Hegel, >>> Heidegger, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, with a Butler or Braidotti thrown in for >>> good measure but nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking. >> >> I'm not sure what you mean by "masculinist most of the time" and would >> invite you to clarify such a characterization in the interest of more >> productive discussion. >> >> As for "nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking," one of the >> interesting puzzles in the formula "SR/OOO are a kind of continental >> philosophy" is the fact that continental philosophy has such a strong >> association with matters of human identity, and SR/OOO/etc. are interested >> in various non- or extra-human matters, and are therefore moving in slightly >> different directions than continental philosophy has done in recent decades. >> The assumption—which seems to be prevalent—that this means "abandoning" >> questions of human identity is an interesting one. >> >> It reminds me a bit of the criticism Nick Montfort and I still get when we >> suggest that it's worthwhile to investigate the material construction of >> hardware and software platforms as a part of the study of computational >> media. Reactions tend toward accusations of determinism. But, the truth is, >> the microprocessors and integrated circuits are as extant as the social >> factors that drive their design. I've written about this conundrum a bit, >> both in relation to computation and, in my latest book, in relation to >> philosophy. >> >> >> Michael O'Rourke wrote: >> >>> Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the >>> apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see >>> the interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hmmm, I actually was trying to push us towards a "more productive discussion" precisely because the kind of abstraction we use when we write theory (or code) may not be the best medium for conversation. I agree of course that the move away from the focus on the human is a large part of the appeal of OOO and SR but that does not or surely should not mean abandoning any particular notion of politics or urgency. In fact, the most urgent work in SR seems to concern the mess that humans have made of the world because of their/our tendency to never think in relation to and in collaboration with the non-human, extra-human entities with whom we share the planet. Why is it "productive" to wonder about the political investments of OOO and SR as Michael O'R does and Galloway has but not to recognize that the theories that count in these areas "tend to be masculinitist"...not sure I get that? So much of the critique of the centering of the human and the othering of the non-human, after all, depends upon queer and feminist formulations of self-other, subject-object and center margin. An incomplete list of the relevant thinkers here would include but not be limited to: Gayatri Spivak, Jacqui Alexander, Saba Mahmood, Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison, Kara Keeling, Ann Balsamo, Jose Munoz, David Eng, Roderick Ferguson, Sara Ahmed...and the list goes on and on but rarely does this theoretical archive surface in the work we are discussing. I believe that this is why Michael O'Rourke's intervention into SR from a queer perspective is so important... On Jun 14, 2012, at 8:54 AM, Ian Bogost wrote: > Hi all, > > I just (finally) joined this list and am jumping into the middle of a > conversation I haven't fully read. So bear with me, and forgive me if I'm > covering ground that has been done already. > > Judith Halberstam wrote: > >> The theories that count and that get counted in OOO and SR tend to be >> masculinist most of the time and tend to cluster around enlightenment and >> post-structuralist theory or a particular, continental stripe: Hegel, >> Heidegger, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, with a Butler or Braidotti thrown in for >> good measure but nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking. > > I'm not sure what you mean by "masculinist most of the time" and would invite > you to clarify such a characterization in the interest of more productive > discussion. > > As for "nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking," one of the > interesting puzzles in the formula "SR/OOO are a kind of continental > philosophy" is the fact that continental philosophy has such a strong > association with matters of human identity, and SR/OOO/etc. are interested in > various non- or extra-human matters, and are therefore moving in slightly > different directions than continental philosophy has done in recent decades. > The assumption—which seems to be prevalent—that this means "abandoning" > questions of human identity is an interesting one. > > It reminds me a bit of the criticism Nick Montfort and I still get when we > suggest that it's worthwhile to investigate the material construction of > hardware and software platforms as a part of the study of computational > media. Reactions tend toward accusations of determinism. But, the truth is, > the microprocessors and integrated circuits are as extant as the social > factors that drive their design. I've written about this conundrum a bit, > both in relation to computation and, in my latest book, in relation to > philosophy. > > > Michael O'Rourke wrote: > >> Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the >> apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see the >> interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are right. To >> take just a few examples: How could Tim Morton’s work on ecology be >> considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s democratization of objects? It is >> even harder to argue that Jane Bennett’s writing on vibrant materiality >> which emerges directly out of political theory fails to advance an ethics or >> a politics. The challenge as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been telling us is to >> extend the notion of the biopolitical in our work. What, Jeffrey would ask, >> would a more generously envisioned zoepolitics (or zoeethics or zoeontology) >> look like? And why would or wouldn’t we desire it? > > > In this respect, it seems that there's been an assumption about what "being > political" means, i.e. a particular flavor or so-called radical leftism, > which is not so much about its beliefs or premises as it is about a > particular modality of activity, a particular community of practice, a > particular kind and rhetoric of work, and so forth. The comments in answer to > Levi Bryant's recent question "Ethics and Politics, What are You Asking" are > interesting in this regard: > http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/et
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi all, I just (finally) joined this list and am jumping into the middle of a conversation I haven't fully read. So bear with me, and forgive me if I'm covering ground that has been done already. Judith Halberstam wrote: > The theories that count and that get counted in OOO and SR tend to be > masculinist most of the time and tend to cluster around enlightenment and > post-structuralist theory or a particular, continental stripe: Hegel, > Heidegger, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, with a Butler or Braidotti thrown in for > good measure but nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking. I'm not sure what you mean by "masculinist most of the time" and would invite you to clarify such a characterization in the interest of more productive discussion. As for "nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking," one of the interesting puzzles in the formula "SR/OOO are a kind of continental philosophy" is the fact that continental philosophy has such a strong association with matters of human identity, and SR/OOO/etc. are interested in various non- or extra-human matters, and are therefore moving in slightly different directions than continental philosophy has done in recent decades. The assumption—which seems to be prevalent—that this means "abandoning" questions of human identity is an interesting one. It reminds me a bit of the criticism Nick Montfort and I still get when we suggest that it's worthwhile to investigate the material construction of hardware and software platforms as a part of the study of computational media. Reactions tend toward accusations of determinism. But, the truth is, the microprocessors and integrated circuits are as extant as the social factors that drive their design. I've written about this conundrum a bit, both in relation to computation and, in my latest book, in relation to philosophy. Michael O'Rourke wrote: > Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the > apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see the > interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are right. To > take just a few examples: How could Tim Morton’s work on ecology be > considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s democratization of objects? It is > even harder to argue that Jane Bennett’s writing on vibrant materiality which > emerges directly out of political theory fails to advance an ethics or a > politics. The challenge as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been telling us is to > extend the notion of the biopolitical in our work. What, Jeffrey would ask, > would a more generously envisioned zoepolitics (or zoeethics or zoeontology) > look like? And why would or wouldn’t we desire it? In this respect, it seems that there's been an assumption about what "being political" means, i.e. a particular flavor or so-called radical leftism, which is not so much about its beliefs or premises as it is about a particular modality of activity, a particular community of practice, a particular kind and rhetoric of work, and so forth. The comments in answer to Levi Bryant's recent question "Ethics and Politics, What are You Asking" are interesting in this regard: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/ethics-and-politics-what-are-you-asking/ In any event, I think this whole set of questions about politics and ontology has to be seen as something more along the lines of a (potential) shift in the attention of philosophy and theory. And that's probably why it's so charged a topic. Ian Ian Bogost, Ph.D. Professor Director, Graduate Program in Digital Media Georgia Institute of Technology Digital Media/TSRB 320B 85 Fifth Street NW Atlanta, GA 30308-1030 ibog...@gatech.edu +1 (404) 894-1160 (tel) +1 (404) 894-2833 (fax) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] MIA to IA
OMG, I guess MIchael went from MIA to IA overnight! Hello Michael! There is just too much in these posts for a 'conversation' so i hope we can just find a few places that permit dialogue and go from there. It is nice to have a summary of your work Michael and I am sure we can all read through some of that material in a more lesurely way but since we are here to have a conversation, I will engage with a few of your more polemical interventions here. 1) The questions about the politics of OOO and speculative realism, it seems to me, are questions that I might also direct to you in terms of these 5 or 6 lengthy posts - it is not a matter of whether we can find points of political engagement, of course we can find many active arenas of contestation in terms of the environment, the centering of the human and so on but there is an apolitical drift that comes in to the form of a high theoretical commitment to grand narratives and normative modes of theorizing. The theories that count and that get counted in OOO and SR tend to be masculinist most of the time and tend to cluster around enlightenment and post-structuralist theory or a particular, continental stripe: Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, with a Butler or Braidotti thrown in for good measure but nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking. 2) Your piece on Michael W. being misread is a bit misleading I think. Michael had an opportunity in the Chronicle to point to all the new work on queer theory, to produce more anticipation and less nostalgia, to really engage the project of Series Q as intended by Sedgwick - to open up nor close down conversations. Instead he offered a eulogy of sorts and sang an old song about identity politics. He has hardly been vilified or marginalized, let's face it, the guy is the Head of English at Yale - nice kind of margin if you ask me (not that I consider the English department at Yale to be marginal to much). In many ways, he centers exactly the US, the white guy gay theory and so on that you, Michael O-Rourke remind us, conveniently ignores queer theory as produced by the rest of the world! 3) As for the question of who counts and the definition of "queer" - oh my goodness, we are surely not going back to queer = gay/lesbian are we? When I said the straight people should leave queer theory to the queers, that does not, in any way, delimit queerness to gay/lesbian or even trans people. If you identify with the phrase "straight people" then i would love to hear how and why and in what capacity. If you identify with the marker "queer" and all your posts indicate that you do, then why is this offensive? 4) Finally, in response to this: I am very slowly reading Zizek’s latest 1100 page magnum opus, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, which contains an anecdote about Turing (as an aside this book does have something to say about several of the issues under discussion here on Empyre this week: correlationism, speculative materialism, the Real, objects…) In his characteristically provocative introduction on stupidity and the differences between morons, idiots and imbeciles, Zizek writes: “Alan Turing was an exemplary idiot: a man of extraordinary intelligence, but a proto-psychotic unable to process implicit contextual rules” !! Only Zizek could squeeze 1100 pages out of "Less than Nothing..." I always wondered who read entire books by Zizek...I am not sure I find Zizek always provocative so much as repetitive but I like the idea of parsing out the differences between morons, idiots and imbeciles - Avital Ronell is way more interesting on Stupidity than Zizek could ever be but if Alan Turing was an exemplary idiot, then probably Zizek is a professional know it all - the moron and the idiot and the imbecile actually know stuff that is hidden from others who are "smart," the professional knower produces the knowledge structures that render others idiotic. The idiot after all is "one who lacks professional knowledge." Who produces professional knowledge, who knows in different ways? Who wants to know urgently, passionately and thrillingly? Who wants to know in order to be considered "knowing"? All for now, from A Jetlagged Idiot On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:35 AM, Michael O'Rourke wrote: > > When Zach first sent out the invitations to contribute to a week on > computation and the nonhuman I have to confess that I read "computation" as > pertaining to counting and that Zach must have meant who or what counts as > queer? > > With this misprision in mind I have a question for Jack stemming from my > unease about something he said on Bullybloggers recently > (http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/friends-with-benefits-the-kids-are-all-right-friends-with-kids/). > While I am more than sympathetic to the readings Jack undertakes of the > films it was the following sentence which gave me significant pause: > > "An
Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P
Thank you for your thoughts Frederic. You will see that there is no confusion for me about SR and OOO. I call the latter an offshoot of SR. It just happens to be the most important one for my work because I see so many resonances with (my own) queer thinking. But if you look closely at my messages you will see references to Negarestani's dark materialism (another kind of SR) and Laruelle's non-philosophy (yet another kind) among others. Anyhow, could you say why flat ontology is "your nightmare"? And what the confusions are between politics and the "conditions of possibility" for politics? I would be really interested to hear more about these two points in particular. Best to you,Michael. --- On Thu, 14/6/12, frederic neyrat wrote: From: frederic neyrat Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P To: "soft_skinned_space" Date: Thursday, 14 June, 2012, 9:37 Sorry, I didn't see this email before my post... And thanks for the link to Galloway's "response to GH". It's very important to analyse OOO - before going beyond this weak - and really flat... - ontology (that is less a "réaction" than a "restauration" (cf. substance and so on)). By the way, it's important to avoid the confusion between Speculative Realism and OOO: fortunately, as Steven Shaviro says (in Milwaukee during a conference), OOO is only ONE kind of speculative realism. But, in any case, flat ontology is my nightmare, for sure the nightmare of Deleuze, of Simondon, of Derrida, of every lover of singularities, of absolute and definitive differences. Against flatness, long life to the relief of life. Best, Frederic Neyrat 2012/6/13 Zach Blas : > hi all-- > > thanks to jacob, jack, homay, and micha for these last few posts. > unfortunately, michael o’rourke seems to me MIA, which is too bad > because i’d love to hear his thoughts on the real and queerness in > relation to his work on speculative realism and object-oriented > philosophy. > > do any other empyre subscribers have any thoughts they’d like to share > on the real and what’s at stake in the real in speculative realism and > how that might relate (or not) to queerness? > > michael has a really interesting essay on speculative realism and > queer theory: > http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke/Papers/469661/Girls_Welcome_Speculative_Realism_Object_Oriented_Ontology_and_Queer_Theory_ > i can’t really speak on michael’s behalf but i can say that it’s clear > he finds something productively compatible (or incompatible) with > queerness and speculative realism that he is trying to work through. > for example, in meillassoux’s “after finitude,” meillassoux introduces > the necessity of contingency, that the only necessity of the world is > contingency. this certainly (conceptually) destabilizes any > normalization or stabilization of the real or a real real. and i know > i’ve read somewhere that michael finds this bit useful for queerness. > > however, alex galloway has recently written a strong critique of the > apolitical nature in speculative realism, specifically with > object-oriented ontology and graham harman: > http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ > galloway basically claims that their ontology perfectly aligns with > capitalism today. we can take from this that most (probably not all) > of the writers that fall underneath OOO/P are not concerned with this > “correlation,” (they’re concerned with another correlation). > > i think this brings up issues of not only politics but also desire. it > is a question and position about the reality/realities we desire and > our political commitments to thinking and enacting them. > > this seems to be a big trap with the theoretical work on the nonhuman > today. it easily falls into apolitical territory. > > so, now that we have speculative realism, OOO, glitches, animation, > cliches, transitional objects, and the queerreal & transreal on the > table, i wonder if we can think more about how we politically figure > the nonhuman in our work (such as technical / new media objects and > systems) and how that bears on conceptions and ontologies of reality > or the real. > > and please, we’d love for all you empyre subscribers to jump in and > share your thoughts with us! > > zach > > > > -- > zach blas > artist & phd candidate > literature, information science + information studies, visual studies > duke university > www.zachblas.info > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Who counts? A Question for Jack
When Zach first sent out the invitations to contribute to a week on computation and the nonhuman I have to confess that I read "computation" as pertaining to counting and that Zach must have meant who or what counts as queer? With this misprision in mind I have a question for Jack stemming from my unease about something he said on Bullybloggers recently (http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/friends-with-benefits-the-kids-are-all-right-friends-with-kids/). While I am more than sympathetic to the readings Jack undertakes of the films it was the following sentence which gave me significant pause: "And this, ultimately, is why straight people should leave the queer theory to the queers" If Jack really believes this then I'm wondering where this leaves people like me or Calvin Thomas or, more importantly, Eve Sedgwick? Do we or the work that we do count? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P
Sorry, I didn't see this email before my post... And thanks for the link to Galloway's "response to GH". It's very important to analyse OOO - before going beyond this weak - and really flat... - ontology (that is less a "réaction" than a "restauration" (cf. substance and so on)). By the way, it's important to avoid the confusion between Speculative Realism and OOO: fortunately, as Steven Shaviro says (in Milwaukee during a conference), OOO is only ONE kind of speculative realism. But, in any case, flat ontology is my nightmare, for sure the nightmare of Deleuze, of Simondon, of Derrida, of every lover of singularities, of absolute and definitive differences. Against flatness, long life to the relief of life. Best, Frederic Neyrat 2012/6/13 Zach Blas : > hi all-- > > thanks to jacob, jack, homay, and micha for these last few posts. > unfortunately, michael o’rourke seems to me MIA, which is too bad > because i’d love to hear his thoughts on the real and queerness in > relation to his work on speculative realism and object-oriented > philosophy. > > do any other empyre subscribers have any thoughts they’d like to share > on the real and what’s at stake in the real in speculative realism and > how that might relate (or not) to queerness? > > michael has a really interesting essay on speculative realism and > queer theory: > http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke/Papers/469661/Girls_Welcome_Speculative_Realism_Object_Oriented_Ontology_and_Queer_Theory_ > i can’t really speak on michael’s behalf but i can say that it’s clear > he finds something productively compatible (or incompatible) with > queerness and speculative realism that he is trying to work through. > for example, in meillassoux’s “after finitude,” meillassoux introduces > the necessity of contingency, that the only necessity of the world is > contingency. this certainly (conceptually) destabilizes any > normalization or stabilization of the real or a real real. and i know > i’ve read somewhere that michael finds this bit useful for queerness. > > however, alex galloway has recently written a strong critique of the > apolitical nature in speculative realism, specifically with > object-oriented ontology and graham harman: > http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/ > galloway basically claims that their ontology perfectly aligns with > capitalism today. we can take from this that most (probably not all) > of the writers that fall underneath OOO/P are not concerned with this > “correlation,” (they’re concerned with another correlation). > > i think this brings up issues of not only politics but also desire. it > is a question and position about the reality/realities we desire and > our political commitments to thinking and enacting them. > > this seems to be a big trap with the theoretical work on the nonhuman > today. it easily falls into apolitical territory. > > so, now that we have speculative realism, OOO, glitches, animation, > cliches, transitional objects, and the queerreal & transreal on the > table, i wonder if we can think more about how we politically figure > the nonhuman in our work (such as technical / new media objects and > systems) and how that bears on conceptions and ontologies of reality > or the real. > > and please, we’d love for all you empyre subscribers to jump in and > share your thoughts with us! > > zach > > > > -- > zach blas > artist & phd candidate > literature, information science + information studies, visual studies > duke university > www.zachblas.info > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
About OOO and politics, this interview of Graham Harman, "Marginalia on Radical Thinking: An Interview with Graham Harman", (http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/marginalia-on-radical-thinking-an-interview-with-graham-harman/) seems political - but not obviously on the left side... Besides, there are sometimes confusions between politics and the condition of possibilities of politics (cf Vibrant Matter, a very good book about these conditions of possibilities) Best, Frederic Neyrat 2012/6/14 Michael O'Rourke > > > > Thanks to Zach for mentioning my article “Girls Welcome!!!” which made an > initial attempt to sketch the potential affinities between speculative > realism, object oriented ontology and queer theory. My forthcoming book with > Punctum called simply Queering Speculative Realism will be a more ambitious > sortie in this general direction. Zach correctly recalls that I say (in this > interview: > http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke/Papers/1272839/X_Welcome_A_Conversation_with_Michael_ORourke_by_Stanimir_Panayotov) > that there is a possible argument to be made for linking up Quentin > Meillassoux’s notion of “hyperchaos” and “gender”. I admit in the interview > that I really haven’t fully worked that through. And I still haven’t although > I find what Zach has to say about the necessity of contingency and queerness > really helpful in getting me moving. The impression that Meillassoux’s > hyperchaos might help us to think about gender struck me upon reading an > interview he gave with Robin Mackay and Florian Hecker > (http://www.urbanomic.com/archives/Documents-1.pdf). I guess I will return to > that to help me formulate what it is that I think is going on there. > > > > Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the > apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see the > interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are right. To > take just a few examples: How could Tim Morton’s work on ecology be > considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s democratization of objects? It is > even harder to argue that Jane Bennett’s writing on vibrant materiality which > emerges directly out of political theory fails to advance an ethics or a > politics. The challenge as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been telling us is to > extend the notion of the biopolitical in our work. What, Jeffrey would ask, > would a more generously envisioned zoepolitics (or zoeethics or zoeontology) > look like? And why would or wouldn’t we desire it? > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ___ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
