Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P

[Timothy Morton]

Thank you Michael. Tim


http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 16, 2012, at 6:41 PM, "Michael O'Rourke"  
wrote:

> 
> Hi Tim! Cheers for your responses. Take a look at Christina's work here:
> 
> http://www.christinamcphee.net/ 
> 
> I think it resonates in many ways with yours. 
> 
> M.
> 
> 
> --- On Sat, 16/6/12, Timothy Morton  wrote:
> 
> From: Timothy Morton 
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P
> To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Date: Saturday, 16 June, 2012, 23:25
> 
> Hi Everyone, 
> 
> This is my first (or possibly second if the other got through) message to the 
> list, and I'm responding to a brief discussion of the notion of flat ontology 
> initiated by Michael O'Rourke (hi Michael!) and Frederic Neyrat. 
> 
> OOO comes in various flavors and is not necessarily flat. Mine and Graham 
> Harman's has two levels. Levi Bryant's and Ian Bogost's have one, but differ 
> in how that one level works. 
> 
> Other forms of realism such as Manuel De Landa's are flat, or flatter, than 
> OOO. 
> 
> Frederic I'm a Derridean and the idea of the singularity is my idea of the 
> strange stranger, which is Derrida's arrivant. 
> 
> Just apply this notion of arrivant to non-life and you get the OOO "object." 
> 
> You can have all the singularities you want in a non-all and by definition 
> non-hierarchical set, which is the OOO universe. 
> 
> Yours, Tim
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Ecology without Nature
> 
> 
> -Inline Attachment Follows-
> 
> ___
> 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-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P

[Michael O'Rourke]

Hi Tim! Cheers for your responses. Take a look at Christina's work here:
http://www.christinamcphee.net/ 
I think it resonates in many ways with yours. 
M.

--- On Sat, 16/6/12, Timothy Morton  wrote:

From: Timothy Morton 
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Date: Saturday, 16 June, 2012, 23:25

Hi Everyone, 

This is my first (or possibly second if the other got through) message to the 
list, and I'm responding to a brief discussion of the notion of flat ontology 
initiated by Michael O'Rourke (hi Michael!) and Frederic Neyrat. 



OOO comes in various flavors and is not necessarily flat. Mine and Graham 
Harman's has two levels. Levi Bryant's and Ian Bogost's have one, but differ in 
how that one level works. 

Other forms of realism such as Manuel De Landa's are flat, or flatter, than 
OOO. 



Frederic I'm a Derridean and the idea of the singularity is my idea of the 
strange stranger, which is Derrida's arrivant. 

Just apply this notion of arrivant to non-life and you get the OOO "object." 



You can have all the singularities you want in a non-all and by definition 
non-hierarchical set, which is the OOO universe. 

Yours, Tim


-- 

Ecology without Nature





-Inline Attachment Follows-

___
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-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P

[Clough, Patricia]

I am not sure this got throughsince I am also missing some of Tim's  I 
think  but I will put it here below but first.   Just to say that objects in 
OOO are not objectifications   or mere things or commodities.   A  turn to 
ontology  (whether OOO or feminist queer ones) is to give us a sense that 
objects differ from themselves; they exude temporality.  They are lively before 
or without human consciousness.   I think this arouses more respect for the 
environment and the cosmos not to mention human beings and other living things. 
  This seems especially important in raising questions about the boundary 
between species and organic and nonorganic.   If those technosciences we worry 
about are doing what they are doing that worries us  we need to imagine an 
ontology that meets their capacity in order to think the possibilities of 
politics.But of course OOO/SR isn't everything that is needed.   And so I 
am interested in how we write or argue or philosophize   We need poetry a
 nd  artistry  so we can have hesitancy and allusion  where causality is 
alluring  And so the reference by Michael ( I think)  to transitional 
objects is something I want to take up.   I prefer  Bollas's transformational 
objects that Lauren Berlant makes such good use of  in her work  recently again 
in Cruel Optimism.Patricia 

(repeat maybye )
Well starting off in the last week is difficult.   So much going on over the 
last three weeks.   Thanks to Zach and Micha for the invite and  to everyone 
else offering some great thoughts  to ponder.


As for discussion around feminism, queer and OOO/ SR  There are (still/even 
more)  worrisome issues  of oppression, exploitation and repression   that come 
to mind with queer, feminist, postcolonial, anti-race, debility 
theoretical/political formations  but there also are troubles which are before 
us,  feminist neoliberalism or  pink washing and queer, for examples.  
Politically, institutional arrangements are much more complicated than identity 
politics sometimes presented itself as being  in the demand for subject  
recognition  which led to decades of debate on the truth of representation and 
the deconstruction of  the authority of discourse with a hesitancy  to 
reference the real in support.   Here a certain Althusserian/Lacanianism played 
a weighty part  and then add   Derrida  Spivak Butler Foucault Berlant, 
Sedgwick  and more. For many of us this work has been a go to intellectual and 
political resource for some time.  Clearly these authors  put philosophy  
intimately i
 n play with a politics (often  Marxism, and then Marxism plus) that was easily 
felt in their work.   In  OOO/SR , this tight connection is less obvious if 
there at all.  What I do not want to overlook however is that OOO/SR came when 
the former (not necessarily the thinkers themselves) was not easily working as 
an intellectual resource in the face of several issues:  what to be said about 
political economy except to say again and again neoliberalism or even 
biopolitics (even though I keep saying those);  what is to be said about 
subjectivity and the unconscious after deconstruction and along with a profound 
transformation in social media;  what is to be said about the human, the 
organism as figure of life, about matter  after posthumanism and with the 
development of various technologies we should call biotechnologies (but now all 
technology seems to have always been) or even more incredible nanotechnologies? 
 What to say about the persistence but varied forms of racism oppre
 ssion exploitation?  How to let all this feed back to rethinking our 
philosophical assumptions?

I think that for some of us OOO/SR made us think again about the intellectual 
resources for our work and how to address some of the questions I just raised 
by turning us to ontological issues beyond constructivism asking us to 
critically address the assimilating act of human consciousness embedded in most 
of our materialisms (thus the new materialisms and  a recent paper by Liz Grosz 
on matter and life is exquisite here) .  This new materialisms  comes in part 
as a response to recent developments in technoscience  and as a social 
scientist (of sorts) I am so aware that social science leans on scientific 
assumptions if not ideals that need updating to say the least. But I think this 
is the case for many of our materialisms. This rethinking of technoscience 
including digital technologies has in part raised interest in OOO/SR   and  
that is the case for me.   But I am not sure that  the elective affinity 
between  digital technologies,  the growth of computational studies  and al
 gorithm studies etc.  and OOO/SR yet has been well stated.  I do not think 
that all OOO/SR thinkers find this to be  central while some do.   Debates 
around OOO/SR with which Steven Shaviro is involved usually speak to digital 
technology  (and Bogost of course) All this to say that the 'affect' that I 
have most wr

Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P

[Michael O'Rourke]

Hi Tim! Cheers for your thoughts. Take a look at Christina's work here:
http://www.christinamcphee.net/ 
I think it resonates in many ways with yours. 
M.



--- On Sat, 16/6/12, Timothy Morton  wrote:

From: Timothy Morton 
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Date: Saturday, 16 June, 2012, 23:25

Hi Everyone, 

This is my first (or possibly second if the other got through) message to the 
list, and I'm responding to a brief discussion of the notion of flat ontology 
initiated by Michael O'Rourke (hi Michael!) and Frederic Neyrat. 



OOO comes in various flavors and is not necessarily flat. Mine and Graham 
Harman's has two levels. Levi Bryant's and Ian Bogost's have one, but differ in 
how that one level works. 

Other forms of realism such as Manuel De Landa's are flat, or flatter, than 
OOO. 



Frederic I'm a Derridean and the idea of the singularity is my idea of the 
strange stranger, which is Derrida's arrivant. 

Just apply this notion of arrivant to non-life and you get the OOO "object." 



You can have all the singularities you want in a non-all and by definition 
non-hierarchical set, which is the OOO universe. 

Yours, Tim


-- 

Ecology without Nature





-Inline Attachment Follows-

___
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-] Subject: Re: Meillassoux / Harman

[ashok sukumaran]

I just noticed how a phrase there christina
   to sing our house.

>  We must have a poetics of relation, as Glissante said,  or we die.
>
-christina
>

slipped so literally close to tim's onetime post on dancing about
architecture,
here:
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.in/2010/10/dancing-about-architecture.html

That is very much a poetics of relation, dont you think?

bests
ashok






>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> http://christinamcphee.net
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 19:15:46 -0700
> From: Judith Halberstam 
> To: soft_skinned_space 
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
> Message-ID: <70ce80ea-580a-43d6-b7a9-320db6fa3...@usc.edu>
>
>
>
>
>
> . 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?
>
> ___
> 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-] the real and reality in speculative realism and OOO/P

[Timothy Morton]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first (or possibly second if the other got through) message to
the list, and I'm responding to a brief discussion of the notion of flat
ontology initiated by Michael O'Rourke (hi Michael!) and Frederic Neyrat.

OOO comes in various flavors and is not necessarily flat. Mine and Graham
Harman's has two levels. Levi Bryant's and Ian Bogost's have one, but
differ in how that one level works.

Other forms of realism such as Manuel De Landa's are flat, or flatter, than
OOO.

Frederic I'm a Derridean and the idea of the singularity is my idea of the
strange stranger, which is Derrida's arrivant.

Just apply this notion of arrivant to non-life and you get the OOO
"object."

You can have all the singularities you want in a non-all and by definition
non-hierarchical set, which is the OOO universe.

Yours, Tim


-- 

Ecology without Nature 
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi All,

If this already went in, sorry. Ignore. I'm pasting a post I wrote here,
because Jack Halberstam kindly suggested I do.

Just to introduce myself, I'm Tim Morton of Rice University and I'm an
OOO-er.

Yours, Tim

OOO, Gender, Sexuality
 I can't sleep. I was up grading so by rights I should be knackered. But
I've also been up having the best conversation ever, with the best ever,
and elements of it are beeping away in my head.

So I double checked my Internet and noticed Judith Halberstam, Ian Bogost,
Michael O'Rourke, Rob Jackson and others were having a detailed discussion
on empyre.

Now I don't belong to it and I'm too busy to get with it right now--also
these thoughts are fizzing in me.

So I hope some kind person(s) will paste this or the link to the discussion
list?

Okay. I've written essays on queer theory and ecology and on OOO and
feminism (that last one is forthcoming). I am and have been considered a
deconstructor, and my most recent talk (soon essay) was on OOO and race.

Of the 6 Ph.D. students of mine explicitly doing OOO (out of about 15),
three are women, one of whom is working on gender and sexuality. Two are
men, both gay, working on performativity.

If you think about it, OOO provides a very beautiful way to think gender
and sexuality issues at the ontological level--Levi Bryant has done some of
the heavy lifting there, as well as Michael O'Rourke.

Withdrawal--no object is subsumed by its use-by any (other) entity--surely
accounts for gender switching, non-genital sexuality, BDSM and queerness
(for want of a better word) at a deep level.

Now my next remarks are addressed to those scholars who like Judith
Halberstam (did I meet you when I was at USC last year?) are concerned
about OOO.

I use y'all, for some weird reason. I'm actually English but was recently
kidnapped by Rice!

Y'all are a bit scared of "ontology" because it was the province of the
metaphysics of presence and all that it entails. Correct.

But OOO is explicitly designed to account for a reality without this
presence, yet without evaporating everything into (anthropocentric) powder.

Although I did just write on Karen Barad, etc etc., we look like we are
sidestepping some recent theory because we believe that it contains some
weird code that goes all the way back to Heidegger, weird unnecessary code
that affected Lacan, and through him Barthes, Derrida and Foucault--and on
up to now.

The bug is why Derrida was so leery of ontology as such, for instance.

That's why Harman went back to Heidegger. He dismantles the code from that
point. That's why he's so important.

This is a big deal. We are not ignoring you. We are going back to the
Heidegger U-Boat and debugging it from the inside. Y'all are floating
around above a gigantic coral reef of beautiful things we call "objects,"
including you (look it's you down there!).

But you can't see it cos this Heidegger bug has got your windshield all
fogged up.

In no way does OOO try to yank you back up to the surface of prepackaged
ideologemes of race, class and gender. We are simply asking you to look
down.

I should have more conversations like that.

-- 

Ecology without Nature 
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Subject: Re: Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi all,

It's Tim Morton of Rice University here. I'm going to take Jack's suggestion 
and paste this post I wrote here. I am an OOO person who writes on ecology and 
philosophy.

Tim

OOO, Gender, Sexuality
I can't sleep. I was up grading so by rights I should be knackered. But I've 
also been up having the best conversation ever, with the best ever, and 
elements of it are beeping away in my head.

So I double checked my Internet and noticed Judith Halberstam, Ian Bogost, 
Michael O'Rourke, Rob Jackson and others were having a detailed discussion on 
empyre. 

Now I don't belong to it and I'm too busy to get with it right now--also these 
thoughts are fizzing in me. 

So I hope some kind person(s) will paste this or the link to the discussion 
list? 

Okay. I've written essays on queer theory and ecology and on OOO and feminism 
(that last one is forthcoming). I am and have been considered a deconstructor, 
and my most recent talk (soon essay) was on OOO and race. 

Of the 6 Ph.D. students of mine explicitly doing OOO (out of about 15), three 
are women, one of whom is working on gender and sexuality. Two are men, both 
gay, working on performativity.

If you think about it, OOO provides a very beautiful way to think gender and 
sexuality issues at the ontological level--Levi Bryant has done some of the 
heavy lifting there, as well as Michael O'Rourke.

Withdrawal--no object is subsumed by its use-by any (other) entity--surely 
accounts for gender switching, non-genital sexuality, BDSM and queerness (for 
want of a better word) at a deep level. 

Now my next remarks are addressed to those scholars who like Judith Halberstam 
(did I meet you when I was at USC last year?) are concerned about OOO.

I use y'all, for some weird reason. I'm actually English but was recently 
kidnapped by Rice!

Y'all are a bit scared of "ontology" because it was the province of the 
metaphysics of presence and all that it entails. Correct. 

But OOO is explicitly designed to account for a reality without this presence, 
yet without evaporating everything into (anthropocentric) powder.

Although I did just write on Karen Barad, etc etc., we look like we are 
sidestepping some recent theory because we believe that it contains some weird 
code that goes all the way back to Heidegger, weird unnecessary code that 
affected Lacan, and through him Barthes, Derrida and Foucault--and on up to 
now. 

The bug is why Derrida was so leery of ontology as such, for instance. 

That's why Harman went back to Heidegger. He dismantles the code from that 
point. That's why he's so important. 

This is a big deal. We are not ignoring you. We are going back to the Heidegger 
U-Boat and debugging it from the inside. Y'all are floating around above a 
gigantic coral reef of beautiful things we call "objects," including you (look 
it's you down there!).

But you can't see it cos this Heidegger bug has got your windshield all fogged 
up. 

In no way does OOO try to yank you back up to the surface of prepackaged 
ideologemes of race, class and gender. We are simply asking you to look down. 

http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

[-empyre-] Subject: Re: Meillassoux / Harman

[naxsmash]

"After Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to pass 
through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation. "  - Judith 
Halberstam


As I was reading this thread yesterday I was struck by how a chasm opens when  
as, mentally,  I make the move from 1- acknowledging that all things have 
'life' to 2-what are the relations between these things of 'life'.  
I feel immensely sad when I realize that what was formerly known as the new 
media rhetoric- a vigilante version of cybernetics ('everything is 'info") has 
now blasted via 'object-oriented programming', into (everything is 'object').  
Into this 
routine binary, comes an antagonist-- someone like Jack insists on something 
like this question--, "but wait: 'who is the object?"  - and where. 

Earlier this month I visited the nanotechnology building at UC Santa Barbara.  
There is what they call an 'allosphere' inside, a black box sans-theatre, with 
a catwalk suspended in a large dark space, illuminated by contiguous high 
definition video screens. 
Here, programmers connect colours to algorithms, in the name of  data sets of 
various etiologies.  The director of the allosphere explained: "we are agnostic 
to the data." 
A phrase poignant in its poverty, and unintentionally so.  The content to which 
we are agnostic  is evidently an object of speculation vis a vis no ethics will 
derive.  inside the black box. 

What keeps the allosphere dark is the lack of cash to allocate to the 
facility+staffing budgets, so funding has to come from outside artists and 
others who bring funding with them. 
When the allosphere blazes it costs 3000 dollars an hour to run. The purpose of 
the  shining is said to be to map a set of algorithm into sounds and light in 
predictably encoded geometries.  
These geometries based on the programmer's generalizations of complex number 
fields, are described by the director as information mapping to enhance 
scientific understanding of data sets. And pretty, too. 
These are the objects the audience on the catwalk contemplates in silence. No 
speech, boredom, reverence, no drinks in case liquid gets on the equipment, 
already nearly obsolete after only 3 years.
The director is in a panic to get new machines.  Data must be visualized by 
somebody somehow, if we can just get the money. New projectors at 6 grand a 
pop, if we can sell these ones on e bay cause they don't keystone right. 

Afterwards I go to  Superica for a couple of tacos.  Here there are workers 
coming off a late shift.  The Spanish floats in arcs around my ears.  I watch 
their fatigue and their quiet relief in getting some food, very good food and 
not expensive.
The exchanges of food and talk from the kitchen through the food window to the 
tables ebb and flow under hanging exposed light bulbs from a ceiling made of 
rough white painted beams with turquoise colored trim. 
Most people don't even spring for a beer.

Up north a ways, where I live, I am trying to put together a 4 channel video 
installation. I have no spare change, so I am trying to buy 4 cheap projectors 
at various tech stores around the county which i'll return after i'm done 
making the install in my drawing shed.
I drive through the semi rural hills. The spectacular oak studded hills 
dropping to freeway.  I keep the AC on so I don't choke on the diesel fumes in 
the intake from the pickup trucks in front.
It's evening, long light makes everything delicious to the eye.Like the padres 
of the Entrada I move from one station to the next, from southeast to northwest 
along the Salinas River. 
The architecture in each shopping mall is Muscan (Mexican-Tuscan) with fake 
beige stucco.

 Not far north, towards the backside  of Big Sur, the freeway strip the oaks 
take over the landscape, especially in the military reserve of Camp Roberts, 
which flanks  San Miguel and San Antonio, the two great seventeenth century 
missions in our neighborhood. 

The Salinians were drafted out of these their oaks, and onto the flat plain of 
the Salinas River at San Miguel.  They were enslaved to a  dry agriculture.  
They were broken by the tools they were forceably given.  Now they live still 
here in rancherias in the midst of the strip malls.
San Miguel's interiors are recently restored after the earthquake of 
2004--without excessive decoration or revision. The interior volumes gain 
illumination from the large doorways flanked by massive oak doors.  The subtle 
ambient light is punctuated by votives. 

Without an ethics of subjects not as things, but as relations, these scenes are 
doomed. The Earth is dying.  To name objects as various sorts of things without 
within those naming-processes speaking the trace of the wounds and violence 
within their sites, their common ground, is to kill the very sensibility of
truth speech that drives song and generates the writing of a politics of the 
verb- the twist/clinamen- even, the queer.  What can we do about all this 
dying? About all thi

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Clough, Patricia]

Well starting off in the last week is difficult.   So much going on over the 
last three weeks.   Thanks to Zach and Micha for the invite and  to everyone 
else offering some great thoughts  to ponder. 


As for discussion around feminism, queer and OOO/ SR  There are (still/even 
more)  worrisome issues  of oppression, exploitation and repression   that come 
to mind with queer, feminist, postcolonial, anti-race, debility 
theoretical/political formations  but there also are troubles which are before 
us,  feminist neoliberalism or  pink washing and queer, for examples.  
Politically, institutional arrangements are much more complicated than identity 
politics sometimes presented itself as being  in the demand for subject  
recognition  which led to decades of debate on the truth of representation and 
the deconstruction of  the authority of discourse with a hesitancy  to 
reference the real in support.   Here a certain Althusserian/Lacanianism played 
a weighty part  and then add   Derrida  Spivak Butler Foucault Berlant, 
Sedgwick  and more. For many of us this work has been a go to intellectual and 
political resource for some time.  Clearly these authors  put philosophy  
intimately in play with a politics (often  Marxism, and then Marxism plus) that 
was easily felt in their work.   In  OOO/SR , this tight connection is less 
obvious if there at all.  What I do not want to overlook however is that OOO/SR 
came when the former (not necessarily the thinkers themselves) was not easily 
working as an intellectual resource in the face of several issues:  what to be 
said about political economy except to say again and again neoliberalism or 
even biopolitics (even though I keep saying those);  what is to be said about 
subjectivity and the unconscious after deconstruction and along with a profound 
transformation in social media;  what is to be said about the human, the 
organism as figure of life, about matter  after posthumanism and with the 
development of various technologies we should call biotechnologies (but now all 
technology seems to have always been) or even more incredible nanotechnologies? 
 What to say about the persistence but varied forms of racism oppression 
exploitation?  How to let all this feed back to rethinking our philosophical 
assumptions?

I think that for some of us OOO/SR made us think again about the intellectual 
resources for our work and how to address some of the questions I just raised 
by turning us to ontological issues beyond constructivism asking us to 
critically address the assimilating act of human consciousness embedded in most 
of our materialisms (thus the new materialisms and  a recent paper by Liz Grosz 
on matter and life is exquisite here) .  This new materialisms  comes in part 
as a response to recent developments in technoscience  and as a social 
scientist (of sorts) I am so aware that social science leans on scientific 
assumptions if not ideals that need updating to say the least. But I think this 
is the case for many of our materialisms. This rethinking of technoscience 
including digital technologies has in part raised interest in OOO/SR   and  
that is the case for me.   But I am not sure that  the elective affinity 
between  digital technologies,  the growth of computational studies  and 
algorithm studies etc.  and OOO/SR yet has been well stated.  I do not think 
that all OOO/SR thinkers find this to be  central while some do.   Debates 
around OOO/SR with which Steven Shaviro is involved usually speak to digital 
technology  (and Bogost of course) All this to say that the 'affect' that I 
have most written about is the Spinoza Deleuze Whitehead Masssumi  Parisi 
version (although I want to talk more about feelings and emotions this week).  
The Spinoza Deleuze Whitehead Masssumi  Parisi version of affect I believe has 
always required an ontological shift (which is central to the Affective Turn 
volume). That  ontological shift has everything to do with the way affect is 
experienced through a technological intensification  since it is otherwise 
preconscious if not nonconscious and a-social   While language generally is an 
intensifier  I have been more interested in intensifications that did not 
necessarily raise to consciousness but simply intensified experience  inciting 
resonances rhythmicities   oscillations etc.  and which then could be about 
bodies other than human ones or organic ones--queering body.  This seemed to 
require an ontological shift, one involving  matter.  I have been arguing for 
some time that matter is affective or informational (well maybe we should just 
say energy) and this  led me to OOO/SR.   But before checking out OOO/SR  I was 
much indebted to Deleuze and the others   and  since  studying OOO/SR  I feel 
the noteworthy tension  between Deleuzians and  OOO/SR (although there are 
those trying to negotiate the tension as I am).   During the next week  I want 
to offer some thoughts (and can't wait for re

[-empyre-] Week 4 - Affect

[micha cárdenas]

Much critical theory and art today can be said to be concerned with
affect, as demonstrated by the essays in The Affective Turn, a book
edited by Patricia Clough, one of this week’s guests.  Brian Massumi
states that “the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between
content and effect” in Parables for the Virtual, which was introduced
to me by one of our guests this week, Jordan Crandall. Much of
Jordan’s work considers and explores affect. Perhaps a wonderful
example of the kind of detail that evokes affect in Crandall’s work,
like the quality of light or the positioning of a gaze, can be seen in
his film “hotel”, which can be found here:

https://vimeo.com/7091631

Another guest this week, Lauren Berlant, describes the affective
landscape of precarity in her recent book, Cruel Optimism. She cites
Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadapoulos to describe the affects of
vulnerability, hyperactivity, post-sexuality, fluid intimacies,
restlessness and unsettledness as comprising a large part of
contemporary experience under neoliberal capitalism, “in order to
engage a broader range of physical and aesthetic genres that mediate
pressures of the present moment on the subject’s sensorium”.  In my
own work on Ke$ha Feminism and femme disturbance, forthcoming in the
June 2012 issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies, I claim that
femme is an affect, different than an emotion, something that is in
process, performative and challenges rigid definitions.  Affect also
has it’s critics, like Ruth Ley who says “if you don’t understand try
to feel. According to Massumi it works”.
[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/659353?uid=3739560&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21100855946111]

This week, we will consider what role affect plays in queer theory and
art today? How can it be used, if it exists outside of content as
Massumi claims? How has it been deployed by contemporary artists? And
how can we understand affect in relation to emerging forms of
resistance to neoliberalism?

This week's guests are:

Lauren Berlant (US) is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the
University of Chicago. Her national sentimentality trilogy — The
Anatomy of National Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 1991,
Chicago), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke
University Press, 1997, Durham), and The Female Complaint (Duke
University Press, 2008, Durham) — has now morphed into a quartet, with
Cruel Optimism (2011) addressing precarious publics and the aesthetics
of affective adjustment in the contemporary U.S. and Europe. A
co-editor of Critical Inquiry, she is also editor of Intimacy
(University of Chicago Press, 2000, Chicago); Our Monica, Ourselves:
The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York University
Press, 2001, New York); Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an
Emotion (Routledge, 2004, New York); and On the Case (Critical
Inquiry, 2007). She blogs at Supervalent Thought and is also a
founding member of the art/activist group Feel Tank Chicago.

Jordan Crandall (US) (http://jordancrandall.com) is a media artist,
theorist, and performer.  He is a Professor of Visual Arts at
University of California, San Diego.  He is the 2011 winner of the
Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding theory and research-based
digital arts practice, given by the Transmediale in Berlin in
collaboration with the Vilém Flusser Archive of the University of
Arts, Berlin.  He is a collaborator  at Eyebeam art and technology
center in New York and the founding editor of the journal VERSION
(http://version.org). His current project UNMANNED is a work of
“philosophical theater”: a blend of performance art, political
allegory, philosophical speculation, and intimate reverie that
explores the ontologies of distributed systems and the changing nature
of masculinity in the face of automated technologies of war.

Patricia Clough (US) is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at
Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York. She is the co- editor with Craig Willse of Beyond Biopolitics:
Essays on the Governance of Life and Death and editor of The Affective
Turn: Theorizing the Social, both published by Duke University Press.
Her books include Autoaffection (2000), Feminist Thought (1995) and
The End(s) of Ethnography (1992, revised 1998).



-- 
micha cárdenas
PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California

New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research

MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
http://amzn.to/x8iJcY

blog: http://transreal.org
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Michael O'Rourke]

There is also Levi Bryant's essay on Ranciere, queer theory and his onticology 
in the journal Identities and numerous well-thought blog posts at Larval 
Subjects on "phallosophy", queer theory and posthumanism and the Lacanian 
graphs of sexuation, Morton's "Queer Ecology" essay in PMLA and the essay on 
the mesh and the strange stranger in Collapse. As Ian says below he has engaged 
with OOF and been pretty instrumental in helping bring this sub-field of OOO to 
a wider audience (delighted to hear there is a follow up meeting in the works). 
And Harman has discussed feminism several times on his blog (while admitting an 
Object Oriented Feminism is not within his field of expertise) and he has 
tackled the object/objectification 
issue: http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/objects-and-objectification/ 

So, it would be fair to say that all four main figures associated with OOO have 
engaged with both feminist and queer thinking. Still, there's lots more to do!

Michael.



--- On Fri, 15/6/12, Ian Bogost  wrote:

From: Ian Bogost 
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
To: "soft_skinned_space" 
Date: Friday, 15 June, 2012, 13:53

Jack,
Thanks for these comments. Before I dive into you're comments, I'm going to 
point you to a reflection on the matter by Tim Morton, since he is not a member 
of the list but has been reading the archives, and hoped someone would link to 
him.
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/06/ooo-gender-sexuality.htmlIan - 
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 themThat's very kind on both counts.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. Surely! 
But—also surely, you don't think I disagree? Nor Harman, nor any of the others 
who have been mentioned in this context. Or do you? I'm not being coy, I think 
it should take more than a study of someone's bibliography to conclude that 
they are excluding a whole category of being. Particularly when their entire 
philosophy is built on the assumption that all that is exists equally. After 
Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to
pass through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation. Have you 
read Levi Bryant's account of objects in relation to Lacan's graphs of 
sexuation? It's in Democracy of Objects, which is available online, or here's a 
short 
post: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs-of-sexuation-and-ooo/4.
  And since Michael believes that the onus of
representation/critique falls to those who say they have been left out, one
word: Fanon! I'm not sure what how to respond to this comment. All I think 
Michael meant is that the opportunity space for analysis is open, and those 
with different backgrounds, interest, and commitments can take it on. I know 
you don't mean to suggest that dropping names like Fanon and Spillers on an 
email list is sufficient rhetorical work, but neither is it  sufficient to 
conclude that all questions have been already answered by a favorite 
theorist. 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. I 
have no objection to this. Why would I, right? Surely once more, you don't 
think I would, nor Harman, nor Morton, nor Bryant, nor anyone? You'll find at 
least one comment in Alien Phenomenology, albeit very brief and really just 
cursory, that touches on this issue, later in the book. Katherine Behar 
organized a set of Object Oriented Feminism sessions at the 2010 SLSA 
conference, to which I was fortunate to serve as one respondent. You can find 
the abstracts at the following link, along with my response from the 
conference: http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml. 
Behar is organizing a follow-up at this year's SLSA, which will include 
Patricia Clough,
 Katherine Hayles, Eileen Joy, Jamie Skye Bianco, Anne Pollock, Rebecca 
Sheldon, and others. Is this a sufficient measure? No, of course not. But it's 
a s

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Michael O'Rourke]

Levi Bryant responds here too:

https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/onto-cartography-ooo-and-politics-a-reply-to-judith-halberstam-and-cameron/ 



--- On Fri, 15/6/12, Ian Bogost  wrote:

From: Ian Bogost 
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
To: "soft_skinned_space" 
Date: Friday, 15 June, 2012, 13:53

Jack,
Thanks for these comments. Before I dive into you're comments, I'm going to 
point you to a reflection on the matter by Tim Morton, since he is not a member 
of the list but has been reading the archives, and hoped someone would link to 
him.
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/06/ooo-gender-sexuality.htmlIan - 
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 themThat's very kind on both counts.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. Surely! 
But—also surely, you don't think I disagree? Nor Harman, nor any of the others 
who have been mentioned in this context. Or do you? I'm not being coy, I think 
it should take more than a study of someone's bibliography to conclude that 
they are excluding a whole category of being. Particularly when their entire 
philosophy is built on the assumption that all that is exists equally. After 
Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to
pass through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation. Have you 
read Levi Bryant's account of objects in relation to Lacan's graphs of 
sexuation? It's in Democracy of Objects, which is available online, or here's a 
short 
post: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs-of-sexuation-and-ooo/4.
  And since Michael believes that the onus of
representation/critique falls to those who say they have been left out, one
word: Fanon! I'm not sure what how to respond to this comment. All I think 
Michael meant is that the opportunity space for analysis is open, and those 
with different backgrounds, interest, and commitments can take it on. I know 
you don't mean to suggest that dropping names like Fanon and Spillers on an 
email list is sufficient rhetorical work, but neither is it  sufficient to 
conclude that all questions have been already answered by a favorite 
theorist. 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. I 
have no objection to this. Why would I, right? Surely once more, you don't 
think I would, nor Harman, nor Morton, nor Bryant, nor anyone? You'll find at 
least one comment in Alien Phenomenology, albeit very brief and really just 
cursory, that touches on this issue, later in the book. Katherine Behar 
organized a set of Object Oriented Feminism sessions at the 2010 SLSA 
conference, to which I was fortunate to serve as one respondent. You can find 
the abstracts at the following link, along with my response from the 
conference: http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml. 
Behar is organizing a follow-up at this year's SLSA, which will include 
Patricia Clough, Katherine Hayles, Eileen Joy, Jamie Skye Bianco, Anne Pollock, 
Rebecca Sheldon, and others. Is this a sufficient measure? No, of course not. 
But it's a start of something, just as Harman tried to start something, rather 
than a quick judgement meant to fuel an engine of reprisal.
Again, I think this is what Michael was saying. Let's just do the work!
Ian

-Inline Attachment Follows-

___
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-] to jacob & homay

[shu lea cheang]

hi, all

first i take a bow for much support of my work on this list.
a quick note to say, if you need to teach BRANDON, please write to 
guggenheim (or me)
to obtain the password for the website, if somehow they still have 
not got it back online by this fall.

a recent interview at Rhizome about this work
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/may/10/shu-lea-cheang-on-brandon/

I have been reading all the post with great interest...but was caught 
between macbeth and kurosawa with Moving Forest 2012 in london. to be 
launched june 22 with 12 day prelude, 12 hour performance and a CODA. 
http://movingforest.net
I have also invited Zach and Micha to participate in the project. 
(and yes, all of you can join)

question: where/who are the queers in the insurgency?

ah, sorry for the diversion...

indeed, my entry here follows Zach's question,
" how Turing's scientific and computational research could be infused 
with his erotic desires. "

and  jacob and homay's research notes.
Speaking of non-human and turing machine, check back on Blade 
Runner's turing test.

"Is this testing whether i am a replicant or a lesbian? Mr. Deckard"
Much cross references can be made here.
My own I.K.U. movie which picks up where Blade Runner left us in the elevator,
cast a transsexual to play Deckard in fully expressed (not repressed) 
xxx desire.
UKI as I.K.U. sequel dumps defunct (machine/code) replicants admist 
code hackers
I have been very interested in the parallel development of code/body 
viral writing.


do want to add on to Zach's virus book list also
Jussi Parrika 's 'Digital Contagions"
and Matthew Fuller's interview with JP
http://www.spc.org/fuller/interviews/jussi-parikka-interview-on-digital-contagions/

thanks all
quite notes for now

sl




___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre