Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
On Jun 28, 2012, at 1:30 PM, Rob Myers wrote: The problem is that the defenses of OOO against charges of failing to illustrate Marxism indicate that OOO aesthetics is probably a category error as well. Sorry, how so? ib___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Simon--it's De Man's argument. A certain aesthetic feature is turned into a metaphysical substrate of things, in this case, fuzziness. I think OOO would give you all the fuzzy you want, since everything is interconnected at the sensual level. That, and the fact that the rift between sensual and real is not locatable in ontically given space. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 28, 2012, at 2:52 AM, Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk wrote: Aesthetics, ideology? I was thinking of Lotfi Zadeh's work when I mentioned that - not fur balls. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 18:04, Timothy Morton wrote: Dear Simon, OOO objects are far more fuzzy than your metaphysically present fuzz. They are ontologically fuzzy. To say fuzzy things are better than smooth things--this is just aesthetic ideology run mad. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 26, 2012, at 6:34 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further. Ian ___ 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 Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Rob, Since for OOO causality just is aesthetics, I'm afraid you're not right on that score. I'll send you this essay on it I just wrote for New Literary History if you'd like. There are some other pieces by me on that, online in Singularum and Continent. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 28, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Rob Myers r...@robmyers.org wrote: On 06/28/2012 05:56 AM, Timothy Morton wrote: Lots of artists and musicians are now tuning into OOO. Yes Ian's book contains some interesting examples. The problem is that the defenses of OOO against charges of failing to illustrate Marxism indicate that OOO aesthetics is probably a category error as well. You wrote: The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop furiously. That's almost the opposite I'm afraid. It *wouldn't* cause them to? ;-) Back to the lab! http://www.famousmonstersoffilmland.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/sjff_01_img0077.jpg - 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 / Kosuth
Hi Everyone, I just posted this on melancholia and objects on my blog, and since it's apropos I thought I'd share it. It's the essence of how as an OOO'er I see appearance or form. Tim melancholy doesn't imply anything about subjectivity. All you need for melancholy are various kinds of object. This is what makes it different, in traditional psychoanalytic theories, from other affects. Indeed, melancholy speaks a truth of all objects—recall that I here use the term “object” in a value-neutral way, implying any real entity whatsoever, not objectification or subject–object dualism. But melancholy doesn't require fully formed subjectivity. Indeed, subjectivity is a result of an abnegation of the melancholic abject (Kristeva). The melancholy coexistence of objects predates the existence of the ego. Egos presuppose ancient layers of beings, fossilized remains. On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Jon Ippolito jippol...@maine.edu wrote: Hi Simon, As I'm sure you know, Kosuth's essay Art After Philosophy seemed to imply a platonic solution to that conundrum. His essay claims what's important about chairs (and art) is the unique idea conveyed to us by their varying manifestations, whether dictionary definition, photo, or wooden furniture. I had the opposite impression standing in front of One and Three Chairs. What struck me--and indeed seemed highlighted by the work's presentation--was how different each of the versions were, and how ludicrous it seemed to pretend details like the smell of wood, the pale black-and-white print, and the dictionary typeface were just incidental projections of the same higher concept into our reality. When I mentioned the disparity between what I saw in his work and what he wrote in Art After Philosophy, Kosuth told me to forgive the immature proclamations of a 23-year-old or something to that effect. Occasionally people view the variable media paradigm as similarly platonic--an approach to preservation that only applies to conceptual art. But just as One and Three Chairs is about the differences that inevitably emerge among difference instances of the same concept, so media and performative artworks are never the same from one viewing to another. I think Euro-ethnic culture needs more practice accepting difference. One of the few useful nuggets I've gleaned from Jacques Lacan (via Joline Blais) is his division of the world into theory (Lacan's symbolic), what we take for real (Lacan's imaginary), and what we don't realize we are leaving out (Lacan's real). I like to lob this self-damning formulation at philosophers who busy themselves nailing down ontologies in their head instead of nailing down shingles on an ecovillage home somewhere. OK, back to building my own ecovillage on the coast of Maine. jon http://MaineCohousing.org Simon wrote: Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Ecology without Nature http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Aesthetics, ideology? I was thinking of Lotfi Zadeh's work when I mentioned that - not fur balls. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 18:04, Timothy Morton wrote: Dear Simon, OOO objects are far more fuzzy than your metaphysically present fuzz. They are ontologically fuzzy. To say fuzzy things are better than smooth things--this is just aesthetic ideology run mad. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 26, 2012, at 6:34 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further. Ian ___ 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 Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
It's been a long time since I was flamed on a list. Didn't think that happened anymore and that we had learned how to behave in such public spaces. I don't think patronising condescension is appropriate. Why do you think I'm a conceptual artist? (I'm not). best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 17:11, Ian Bogost wrote: Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. You suggest that what is worth doing—but not even doing, just reading, even—only *will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it can be judged on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist economics for intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst. As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if and when you choose read the works that make those connections very explicitly. The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my breath. Good luck with your conceptual art. Ian On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: Hi Ian Maybe I'm a little old, but 10 to 15 years seems, in terms of human thought, extremely recent. I have read some OOO texts though, during that short period of time. I've also had a little time to digest Kosuth's work, since it was made forty odd years ago. In retrospect his chairs might seem a simplistic reading of semiotics but I'd argue there is more to them than that. They're not just about signs and signifiers but also mediality, sociality and the performative. In the 1960's not many artists were addressing those issues. I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest about popularity, or the value of a lack of it. Seems to me that OOO is popular - even fashionable, like the new aesthetic. I can also see links in OOO to Latour, although more so to Heidegger. Perhaps it is a non-phenomenologist's take on Heidegger? Whatever, it isn't fuzzy. Are things that simple? Can we assume there is some kind of residual and irreducible thinginess in things? A toaster can be an octopus - and whatever it might be, from moment to moment, it is rarely a toaster. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 00:34, Ian Bogost wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Dear All, Ok - so if the academic banter is to continue - lets make it somewhat jovial. @Edurado No-ones really being disrespectful or denying the importance of conceptual art. The flurry of activity both in conceptual art and it's twin contemporary; systems art was directly aimed at formalism (and especially Greenberg). So considering that OOO privileges unified objects beyond all context and relational construction, it does - in my opinion - arrive at a formalist Greenbergian standpoint where the artwork transcends its context. (in discussions with Harman earlier this year, we agreed as much, although I'm more of a Fried guy). So what I'm saying is, don't be surprised if we criticise conceptual art because of this reason. There are other links too, regarding qualities, style, irreducibility, etc., and I posted something about them here [http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/05/homemade-philosophy-bogosts-carpentry-and-greenberg/] But clearly, I'm the first to admit that any OOO/Greenberg semblance hybrid cannot repeat the traps that Greenberg found himself in. We aren't idealists. Nor do proponents of OOO privilege the type of work that the formalist critic did. We don't privilege one unit - or a set of units - and insert quality into them, rather it must work the other way round; that bad, vacuous, art without quality is the result of bad construction. What we take for being mundane, must be filled with depth, at all times - and not because of a conceptual twist of attitude which makes it so, but because all units are aesthetically equivalent. @Rob If we're still going down this route of opposing a realist flat ontology because its market friendly, then I doubt there's anything I can say to make this conversation move forward. All I can suggest is, don't expect (or choose to not expect) a movement - which in it's current iteration is not even a few years old - to be held responsible for this or that regime of power. Yes it's fun to try and ruin those who wax lyrical about a new methods and approaches, but you can't dismiss all future iterations of what is still a very young set of approaches (I'm usually bemused in conferences when someone tells me that 'OOO is over' and then someone else says 'everyone's doing OOO' - when in reality, hardly anyones actually read any of it). Regarding Duchamp - the legacy of Duchamp isn''t just irony or negative valences, he did something more fundamental to art production, the remnants of which the mainstream artworld is unable to shake off. He brought the necessary art object into line with its contingent reception. For this, we can be thankful, but its now indirectly responsible for some of the most boring art-come-participatory-events going, precisely insofar as the art market is obsessed with making contingent spectators the standing reserve for its own mediocre games. I'm not saying that OOO has an alternative to this, (I have a few ideas) but lets, at least, see if there is one. best Rob On 28 Jun 2012, at 05:47, Eduardo Navas wrote: Dear Ian, Perhaps the irony of your comment and critical position between conceptual art and OOO is that you appear to do to conceptual art what you claim Simon and others are doing to OOO. I would suggest that if you are to dismiss conceptualism as you have been doing in the last few posts that you also put the time in understanding the history of conceptual art and its importance. Or at least be more respectful of a field that is clearly not your specialization, and learn something from others in the process. Anyone who has spent enough time studying the history of contemporary art is likely to be skeptical of your comments on conceptualsim just like you are of other people’s questioning of OOO who are not as familiar with it as you are. I hope the discussion turns more insightful in the next few posts. Cheers, Eduardo Navas On 6/27/12 12:11 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. You suggest that what is worth doing—but not even doing, just reading, even—only *will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it can be judged on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist economics for intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst. As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if and when you choose read the works that make those connections very explicitly. The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my breath. Good luck with your conceptual art. Ian On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: Hi Ian Maybe I'm a little old, but 10 to 15 years seems, in terms of human thought, extremely recent. I have read some OOO texts though, during that short period of time. I've also had a little time to digest Kosuth's work, since it was made
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
On 06/28/2012 05:56 AM, Timothy Morton wrote: Lots of artists and musicians are now tuning into OOO. Yes Ian's book contains some interesting examples. The problem is that the defenses of OOO against charges of failing to illustrate Marxism indicate that OOO aesthetics is probably a category error as well. You wrote: The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop furiously. That's almost the opposite I'm afraid. It *wouldn't* cause them to? ;-) Back to the lab! http://www.famousmonstersoffilmland.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/sjff_01_img0077.jpg - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Dear empyreans, Thank you for the discussion. I have been in enjoying its queer turns and scaling effects, stretching out on the multiple planes of ontology, shrinking down to the nano. Drink this. Eat this. I can't get off this chair! I would like to add this text for its pertinence, less an intervention, than a distraction: http://squarewhiteworld.com/dear-visitor/ Best, Simon Taylor ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further. Ian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all three things together, and you have a chair which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously. On the other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a chair within a game, for instance, can be very real to the other objects in the game). Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work, etc)
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman / Kosuth
Hi Simon, As I'm sure you know, Kosuth's essay Art After Philosophy seemed to imply a platonic solution to that conundrum. His essay claims what's important about chairs (and art) is the unique idea conveyed to us by their varying manifestations, whether dictionary definition, photo, or wooden furniture. I had the opposite impression standing in front of One and Three Chairs. What struck me--and indeed seemed highlighted by the work's presentation--was how different each of the versions were, and how ludicrous it seemed to pretend details like the smell of wood, the pale black-and-white print, and the dictionary typeface were just incidental projections of the same higher concept into our reality. When I mentioned the disparity between what I saw in his work and what he wrote in Art After Philosophy, Kosuth told me to forgive the immature proclamations of a 23-year-old or something to that effect. Occasionally people view the variable media paradigm as similarly platonic--an approach to preservation that only applies to conceptual art. But just as One and Three Chairs is about the differences that inevitably emerge among difference instances of the same concept, so media and performative artworks are never the same from one viewing to another. I think Euro-ethnic culture needs more practice accepting difference. One of the few useful nuggets I've gleaned from Jacques Lacan (via Joline Blais) is his division of the world into theory (Lacan's symbolic), what we take for real (Lacan's imaginary), and what we don't realize we are leaving out (Lacan's real). I like to lob this self-damning formulation at philosophers who busy themselves nailing down ontologies in their head instead of nailing down shingles on an ecovillage home somewhere. OK, back to building my own ecovillage on the coast of Maine. jon http://MaineCohousing.org Simon wrote: Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Ian Maybe I'm a little old, but 10 to 15 years seems, in terms of human thought, extremely recent. I have read some OOO texts though, during that short period of time. I've also had a little time to digest Kosuth's work, since it was made forty odd years ago. In retrospect his chairs might seem a simplistic reading of semiotics but I'd argue there is more to them than that. They're not just about signs and signifiers but also mediality, sociality and the performative. In the 1960's not many artists were addressing those issues. I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest about popularity, or the value of a lack of it. Seems to me that OOO is popular - even fashionable, like the new aesthetic. I can also see links in OOO to Latour, although more so to Heidegger. Perhaps it is a non-phenomenologist's take on Heidegger? Whatever, it isn't fuzzy. Are things that simple? Can we assume there is some kind of residual and irreducible thinginess in things? A toaster can be an octopus - and whatever it might be, from moment to moment, it is rarely a toaster. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 00:34, Ian Bogost wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further. Ian ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
I have an article that I wrote about a year ago which discusses black boxes, poetics, and default settings: Inside Out of the Box: Default Settings and Electronic Poetics http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2010/heckman/heckman.htm It might be a nice complement to the conversation. I will take a look at Graham's quadruple object. Davin On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Thanks for this Rob. It makes a lot of senseWhat is coming with art after philosophy but again will be interesting. What do you think of the queer stuff we have been viewing and discussing int his regard? Patricia From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Robert Jackson [robertjackson3...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 6:07 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman Hi All, It's worth noting that Kosuth was a conceptual artist who explicitly followed in the lineage of Duchamp and the 'demonstration' of idea: that is to say, the conceptual delivery of art as information and the separation of 'art' from 'aesthetics' - (his famous Art Forum essay 'art after philosophy' says as much). Hardly any of these elements chime with the privileging of the discrete object in OOO. As Ian mentioned - The fact the OOO is threatening a lot of 40 - 50 year old structuralist-poststructuralist assumptions doesn't stop at philosophy or cultural theory. In the arts - pretty soon we'll start seeing bigger conflicts between proponents of the Duchamp lineage and whatever manifestation OOO and art happen to collide in. IMO Duchamp has a lot to answer for, especially in the dross of conceptual creative malaise which contemporary art can't get out of. Duchamp is now no longer avantgarde - but what Greenberg accurately described as 'avant gardist'. It's consists not of sincerity but of demonstration - and its expiration date is nigh. Besides the inevitable disagreements/agreements on what objects are, or how they relate, I think OOO has brought depth back into the heart of discrete entities, with a realist equivalent twist. best Rob On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.commailto:timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.comhttp://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.commailto:davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edumailto:ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. You suggest that what is worth doing—but not even doing, just reading, even—only *will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it can be judged on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist economics for intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst. As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if and when you choose read the works that make those connections very explicitly. The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my breath. Good luck with your conceptual art. Ian On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: Hi Ian Maybe I'm a little old, but 10 to 15 years seems, in terms of human thought, extremely recent. I have read some OOO texts though, during that short period of time. I've also had a little time to digest Kosuth's work, since it was made forty odd years ago. In retrospect his chairs might seem a simplistic reading of semiotics but I'd argue there is more to them than that. They're not just about signs and signifiers but also mediality, sociality and the performative. In the 1960's not many artists were addressing those issues. I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest about popularity, or the value of a lack of it. Seems to me that OOO is popular - even fashionable, like the new aesthetic. I can also see links in OOO to Latour, although more so to Heidegger. Perhaps it is a non-phenomenologist's take on Heidegger? Whatever, it isn't fuzzy. Are things that simple? Can we assume there is some kind of residual and irreducible thinginess in things? A toaster can be an octopus - and whatever it might be, from moment to moment, it is rarely a toaster. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 00:34, Ian Bogost wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Dear Simon, OOO objects are far more fuzzy than your metaphysically present fuzz. They are ontologically fuzzy. To say fuzzy things are better than smooth things--this is just aesthetic ideology run mad. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 26, 2012, at 6:34 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point. Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real. I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). Harman has been writing under the shingle object-oriented philosophy since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes. My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways. In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further. Ian ___ 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
Thanks for this Davin. I have it queued up. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:53 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: I have an article that I wrote about a year ago which discusses black boxes, poetics, and default settings: Inside Out of the Box: Default Settings and Electronic Poetics http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2010/heckman/heckman.htm It might be a nice complement to the conversation. I will take a look at Graham's quadruple object. Davin On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out Realist Magic go into this. Each entity times in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida reserves to the trace. Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair,
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
On 06/27/2012 11:07 AM, Robert Jackson wrote: Hi All, It's worth noting that Kosuth was a conceptual artist who explicitly followed in the lineage of Duchamp and the 'demonstration' of idea: that is to say, the conceptual delivery of art as information and the separation of 'art' from 'aesthetics' - (his famous Art Forum essay 'art after philosophy' says as much). Hardly any of these elements chime with the privileging of the discrete object in OOO. The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop furiously. As Ian mentioned - The fact the OOO is threatening a lot of 40 - 50 year old structuralist-poststructuralist assumptions doesn't stop at philosophy or cultural theory. In the arts - pretty soon we'll start Having been at art school in the early nineties I have very little time for PS but I'm constantly surprised at how different OOO apparently believes its dryly authoritarian poetics are from PS. seeing bigger conflicts between proponents of the Duchamp lineage and whatever manifestation OOO and art happen to collide in. IMO Duchamp has a lot to answer for, especially in the dross of conceptual creative malaise which contemporary art can't get out of. Duchamp is now no Neoconceptualism (80s...) and relationalism (90s...) are in no small part about the pastoral ventriloquization of objects (...commodities or resources, obviously including human resources...). OOO poses no threat to this order, flat ontology is as market friendly (with apologies to everyone who has a sad at the trivial fact of OOO's literal and metaphoric market congruity, which it shares with Theory's identity politics) as suspension of judgement was. It is a managerial Hameau de la Reine. The error of Duchamp's reception by the art (market|world) is to assume that the ontological blasphemy of the creative act is repeatable. Badiou is useful here, or at least fun. longer avantgarde - but what Greenberg accurately described as 'avant gardist'. It's consists not of sincerity but of demonstration - and its expiration date is nigh. Duchamp is exquisitely ironic, introducing negative valences into aesthetics and negative space into the ontology of art. But he was reclaimed by the art market by the 1960s with the editions of his lost readymades. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6261 Besides the inevitable disagreements/agreements on what objects are, or how they relate, I think OOO has brought depth back into the heart of discrete entities, with a realist equivalent twist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Rob, Lots of artists and musicians are now tuning into OOO. You wrote: The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop furiously. That's almost the opposite I'm afraid. Back to the lab! Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 27, 2012, at 4:15 PM, Rob Myers r...@robmyers.org wrote: The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop furiously. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Davin, Based on these questions, I'd recommend Harman's Quadruple Object. Look forward to your further comments on an ongoing basis. Ian Sent despite my iPhone On Jun 25, 2012, at 4:15 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all three things together, and you have a chair which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously. On the other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a chair within a game, for instance, can be very real to the other objects in the game). Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work, etc) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about a chair have being, or if we afford the material object of the chair primacy. In which case, does a digital
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Dear All I agree with Ian that reading is helpful and interesting Just finishing Democracy of Objects by Levi Bryant I can say there is quite a bit of exposition there. Difference between him and Graham (and much that is similar) Differences between him and Deleuze (also some similarities) and Lacan and Zizek all there and clearly. And all clarifying about ideas and materiality, objects and subjects and even politics. I think what gets confusing is how to take this new upsurge in philosophical thought and I think that is a matter of one's own intellectual searchWhile OOO has been accompanied by an interest in objects and animals and computers (in the rather conventional sense) OOO is not primarily about thatIt is an ontology and so has to be brought to those different inquires in a way that demands one's own desires interests not to mention a subject matter that may be alluring.For me this is a matter of writing or creating--to join with the creations shared over the past weeks. Writing is my way of queering the intimacies between philosophy, politics, aesthetics and my own field sociology. P From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Ian Bogost [ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu] Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 11:28 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all three things together, and you have a chair which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously. On the other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a chair within a game, for instance, can be very real to the other objects in the game). Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work, etc) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about a chair have being, or if we afford the material object of the chair primacy. In which case, does a digital rendering of the chair carry the same weight as an unexpressed idea about a chair, too. At some point, doesn't ontology lead into this thicket? Davin On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edumailto:ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: There is no reason why holding that everything exists equally entails reducing all that can be known about a being to a simple recognition of being. Ian On Jun 24, 2012, at 5:44 AM, davin heckman wrote: I agree, this is a good starting point that all things that exist have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are not not beings), which is a sort of foundational ontological similarity. But if the only significant ontological claim we can make about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there is no difference between things. If we admit difference, then we must account for those differences in meaningful ways. For instance, waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1 differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
You are right I should do more reading. I find the thoughts engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more information where I can. Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on relationality and time. You have all of these things that have to do with chairs, but only the chair is the chair. And there are these things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own right. But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop. Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object. Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our imagination. On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same as digital iterations. Less like a computer, we pull the modular concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones. I wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which are articulated and taken up into collective discourse and even still, a discursive thing gains a level of significance when it represents some empirical process. I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next. It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five. In other words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair. In my mind, weight might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability, its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its aesthetic elegance though none of these qualities are directly analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types of being. All these thoughts are a jumble I'll take your advice and do some reading. Davin On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below. NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair primacy over the others. As for the same weight — well, that depends on what you mean by weight. What do you mean? I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without reading some of this material in depth… Ian On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian and Tim, Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects? I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs highlight the ways that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways. A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a sculpture is not necessarily a chair. yet, in some fundamental way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and recognition. Put all three things together, and you have a chair which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously. On the other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a chair within a game, for instance, can be very real to the other objects in the game). Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work, etc) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about a chair have being, or if we afford the material object of the chair primacy. In which case, does a digital rendering of the chair carry the same weight as an unexpressed idea about a chair, too. At some point, doesn't ontology lead into this thicket? Davin On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: There is no reason why holding that everything exists
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Tim, I thought that the basic point was that these entities are ontologically different but not substantially different. In other words, there are indeed different modes of existence but they are not ordered hierarchically by reference to substance (substantialism) or divided by recourse to dualism. Best, Tom On 12-06-23 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Davin, We obviously treat different entities differently. But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-critic ism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel¹s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same thing. When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer, while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of obligation to, rather than ownership over) child. If my bike decided to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me I would not feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone). A bike, on the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling but I have very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb with a hammer. On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to go (except when there's an accident). a toddler, not so much an eight year old, he usually comes with a counter proposal (and it is a monstrous adult that would treat kids like a bike, insist that they only go where told, speak when it is demanded). A lot of really deep thinking about human subjectivty simply does not go this far and part of this has to do with a poor understanding of objects. What is worse is when this understanding infects interpersonal relationships in the context of a Randian sort of world where there is no such thing as society, only individuals (yet, bosses treat workers like bikes and bad boyfriends treat their partners like robots). I am very excited to read more. I feel like it is important to free our thinking from patterns and habits of the past. In particular, the culture of academic citation has gone from being about finding good ideas where they are to deriving authority from the aura of the great figure. I also have no problem with accumulations of wisdom that translate into an
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
I agree, this is a good starting point that all things that exist have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are not not beings), which is a sort of foundational ontological similarity. But if the only significant ontological claim we can make about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there is no difference between things. If we admit difference, then we must account for those differences in meaningful ways. For instance, waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1 differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes in the course of being eaten, it is still in one meaningful sense the same waffle after it has been bitten, but in another sense, it is a different waffle, too. While both toasters and waffles are different from something like an idea or a memory rendered in media (a waffle recipe or story about waffles) or a process habituated in muscle memory (the habit of making a waffle or eating one). My concern is that if we reduce all that can be known about being to a simple recognition of being, we commit to a kind of abstraction and alienation from being of the sort that happens when markets try to mediate everything through the common denominator of dollars. Davin On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Davin, We obviously treat different entities differently. But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same thing. When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer, while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of obligation to, rather than ownership over) child. If my bike decided to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me I would not feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone). A bike, on the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling but I have very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb with a hammer. On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to go (except when there's an accident). a
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi--OOO is the least abstract and generalizing of any ontology in the West since the Pre-Socratics. Everyone else pretty much reduces things to substance, fire, water, atoms, quantum fluctuations, ideas, etc. We don't--waffle maker a is irreducibly not b, and not simply because it looks different to me. Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 24, 2012, at 4:44 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: I agree, this is a good starting point that all things that exist have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are not not beings), which is a sort of foundational ontological similarity. But if the only significant ontological claim we can make about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there is no difference between things. If we admit difference, then we must account for those differences in meaningful ways. For instance, waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1 differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes in the course of being eaten, it is still in one meaningful sense the same waffle after it has been bitten, but in another sense, it is a different waffle, too. While both toasters and waffles are different from something like an idea or a memory rendered in media (a waffle recipe or story about waffles) or a process habituated in muscle memory (the habit of making a waffle or eating one). My concern is that if we reduce all that can be known about being to a simple recognition of being, we commit to a kind of abstraction and alienation from being of the sort that happens when markets try to mediate everything through the common denominator of dollars. Davin On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton timothymorton...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Davin, We obviously treat different entities differently. But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same thing. When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer, while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of obligation to, rather than ownership over) child. If my bike decided to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me I would not feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same thing. When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer, while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of obligation to, rather than ownership over) child. If my bike decided to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me I would not feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone). A bike, on the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling but I have very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb with a hammer. On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to go (except when there's an accident). a toddler, not so much an eight year old, he usually comes with a counter proposal (and it is a monstrous adult that would treat kids like a bike, insist that they only go where told, speak when it is demanded). A lot of really deep thinking about human subjectivty simply does not go this far and part of this has to do with a poor understanding of objects. What is worse is when this understanding infects interpersonal relationships in the context of a Randian sort of world where there is no such thing as society, only individuals (yet, bosses treat workers like bikes and bad boyfriends treat their partners like robots). I am very excited to read more. I feel like it is important to free our thinking from patterns and habits of the past. In particular, the culture of academic citation has gone from being about finding good ideas where they are to deriving authority from the aura of the great figure. I also have no problem with accumulations of wisdom that translate into an inherited perspective, but this can't close us off to thinking. So thank you for this! Davin On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: Davin, I'm about to disappear into a mess of meetings, but let me offer a brief response: What you're touching on here is what Levi Byrant sometimes calls the weird mereology of OOO. The song isn't just the sound waves (what Harman calls an underming position) nor is it just the social context of creation and use (an overmining position). A song is a song, and indeed, the song in an MP3 file is a different thing than the song as an abstraction in human culture. Neither is more object nor more real (well, real has a different meaning for Harman than it
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi Davin, We obviously treat different entities differently. But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different. Yours, Tim http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you Ian, for these thoughts. My initial encounter with this work came via a brief discussion of flat ontology, which I found somewhat offputting. I followed up by reading through the re:press book. What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating. Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with one of my favorite passages from Hegel. Pardon me for cannibalizing another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism). * In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process: The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. [1] Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic processes that comprise its totality. This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have shaken up the pursuit of knowledge. * I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to embrace a kind of humanism, but one which cannot easily understand as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an ontology that is expressed in our metaphors. One grip I have with the use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines, interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same thing. When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer, while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of obligation to, rather than ownership over) child. If my bike decided to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me I would not feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone). A bike, on the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling but I have very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb with a hammer. On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to go (except when there's an accident). a toddler, not so much an eight year old, he usually comes with a counter proposal (and it is a monstrous adult that would treat kids like a bike, insist that they only go where told, speak when it is demanded). A lot of really deep thinking about human subjectivty simply does not go this far and part of this has to do with a poor understanding of objects. What is worse is when this understanding infects interpersonal relationships in the context of a Randian sort of world where there is no such thing as society, only individuals (yet, bosses treat workers like bikes and bad boyfriends treat their partners like robots). I am very excited to read more. I feel like it is important to free our thinking from patterns and habits of the past. In particular, the culture of academic citation has gone from being about finding good ideas where they are to deriving authority from the aura of the great figure. I also have no problem with accumulations of wisdom that translate into an inherited perspective, but this can't close us off to thinking. So thank you for this! Davin On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: Davin, I'm about to disappear into a mess of meetings, but let me offer a brief response: What you're touching on here is what Levi Byrant sometimes calls the weird mereology of OOO. The song isn't
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Hi all, I’m new to this place, but I thought I might write a little on this topic as for better or worse, I have one foot in both social/critical theory and metaphysics. I hope I'm using the list properly! I think this discussion has taken many interesting turns and been rich and varied, but I am also left with the sense that the stakes could be clarified further in a way that might be productive for all involved. Though I can’t claim to represent either queer theory or OOO, which seem to have become primary threads, (theoretically, my area of focus is in race and ethnicity, and metaphysically, I do subscribe to philosophical realism, but of a different stripe,) I do find that many of the contours of the discussion here are symptomatic of some larger debates within the world of Continentally-inflected thought, and so I would like to zoom out a bit and attempt an intervention at the level of assumptive foundations. I’m drawing on the words of Zach Blas, quoted by Micha Cárdenas, as a point of departure because I feel they get to the heart of the matter. I hope zooming out this way doesn’t detract from or stray too far away from the specifics at hand, and feel free to shelve my comments if they do! Blas states that the realities of OOO/SR “are always already culturally parsed through class, gender, and race.” It seems to me like insufficient attention to social realities, in particular, to the ways they might condition or otherwise affect the ontologies in question, is the basic charge that unites most of the theoretical criticisms of the new realisms, whether Galloway’s, Halberstam’s, or others. To cut to the chase, these criticisms ultimately concern the role and jurisdiction of philosophy and/or theory, which is something I noticed has not been addressed yet (if I’m wrong here, my apologies!) Blas’ position on the matter appears to be the one shared by most people working within the Continental world, which we can find in the final question of the excerpt: “what are one’s ethical and political obligations when writing and constructing a conception of reality and realism? As I understand it, this question contains two claims: a. Ethical-political obligations are inseparable from metaphysics/ontology. b. These obligations are a priori issues that ground ontology (ethics as first philosophy as found in Levinas.) We can bracket the first claim- whether or not it’s true that we have ethical obligations, it seems that all of us here are invested in ethical and political problems in our own ways, and believe that there are important connections between ethics/politics and ontology. The second claim is the relevant one, and where the real disagreement between the realisms and their critics exposes itself. For most people doing (queer, race, etc.) theory, forays into the ontological are indeed prompted by ethics, and ultimately secondary to them. Such theory has its origins in the experience of oppression and violence, and has as its goal engagement with and resistance against them. Marx’s famous quote from his Theses on Feuerbach springs to mind as an historical epigraph: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The priority of ethics impacts the other regions of philosophy in a number of ways, one of the most relevant being that ontology often becomes instrumental- the servant of ethics (here referring to specifically human concerns, though this is changing thanks to Critical Animal Studies.) People who do theory (from here on, crude and unfair shorthand for a vibrant multiplicity of thought-formations) are interested in questions of what race, gender, society, etc, are so that the violence and inequalities associated with them can be resisted in some way. Occasionally, depending on the theoretical approach, the “what is it?” question is extended further down the ontological ladder, but once again, that extension is often a byproduct of the ethical-political process or the adoption of some larger philosophy for application in a particular area. Theory, as Foucault and Deleuze have described it, is mostly conceived as a “toolbox,” and its concepts are the tools we use to change the world. Ontology becomes secondary, to speak with Deleuze again, “what does/can it do?” emerges as the relevant question, and often, the relation to any notion of truth is politicized. In its most extreme instantiations, the priority of ethics makes “pure” ontology seem unethical, as in part of Galloway’s criticism, or ontology is thought to be literally decided by ethics itself. Ontologists like those who make up the OOO camp (also an internally diverse category) are committed to a reality that is not restricted to, exhausted by, or inaccessible to the human (though it need not be unmediated, of course,) and is thus irreducible to and not constituted solely by the “dirty political battles” Blas cites. They hold that ontology can be pursued, in opposition to those who
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: From: Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 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-] Meillassoux / Harman
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: From: Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 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
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
for response and interventions) about this tension in relationship to affect. I hope we can discussion more the recent focus on aesthetics which has enabled me to think in the tension rather than against it and find a way as well to dwell in rather than simply put an end to the aporia between ontology and epistemology that affect and non-human perception produces. I think aesthetics and the turn to Whitehead's rereading of Kant points to a way to engage the liveliness of what Eugene Thacker calls a world without us or not for us. Finally, during the first week I much enjoyed all the sites to which I was sent and all the efforts to make stuff, queer stuff, with digital technology as well as with other technologies. This doing along with thinking (crude way of putting it) seems important to a critical engagement with what we once would have called knowledge production.Looking forward to ongoing conversation(s) Patricia From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Michael O'Rourke [tranquilised_i...@yahoo.com] Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2012 1:15 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman 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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu wrote: From: Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 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.html 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 them That'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
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
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 http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Davin, I'm about to disappear into a mess of meetings, but let me offer a brief response: What you're touching on here is what Levi Byrant sometimes calls the weird mereology of OOO. The song isn't just the sound waves (what Harman calls an underming position) nor is it just the social context of creation and use (an overmining position). A song is a song, and indeed, the song in an MP3 file is a different thing than the song as an abstraction in human culture. Neither is more object nor more real (well, real has a different meaning for Harman than it does for Levi and me). I talk about this a bit in the first chapter of Alien Phenomenology, and Levi does as well in the mereology section of Democracy of Objects. Also, here are a blog post from Levi on the subject that weaves the two together: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/more-strange-mereology/ I'm not answering sufficiently but wanted to get something out to you rapidly. ib 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) On Jun 15, 2012, at 4:11 AM, davin heckman wrote: Ian, Since we are on the topic of OOO, I was wondering what the ontological status of something like a song is? I have to admit, I have a real hard time swallowing a pure ontology that essentially defines the subjective as outside of being, as a sort of on or off proposition, as opposed to also a turning on (or is it being turned on? Or simply to be turned or to turn?) (I am generally skeptical about a variety of posthumanisms that go beyond a critique of a monolithic Humanism, because I think that consciousness carries specific tendencies that seem to fundamentally frame all possibilities for knowledge). However it is entirely possible that I am missing out on a discussion that has been unfolding without me. But here's my thought: With a song, you have something that can be rendered in objective form maybe an mp3 file or a sheet of notes or record or something. If this is what we mean by a song, then, fine, that's an object. But a song only really starts doing something when it is unfolding within the context of memory and anticipation. It only is a song when it is listened to by a subject, which is to say it is an object that has a singular temporal being as it is listened to, which is distinct from how it is being listened to and replayed even by the same user. (And we aren't even beginning to talk about non-recorded music). The only way a song becomes a purely discrete object is when it is removed from its temporal existence and understood as a totality, and detached from an audience. And while we can sit around and all talk about, say, Another One Bites the Dust, after we squeeze it into a conceptual file type and label it, the fact that we can discuss something that can only mean something if is experienced as a process AND an object within the context of a experience, suggests that sometimes being is realized by the relations of things, rather than the things themselves. My suggestion is that the ontological nature of the song cannot be described in objective terms without missing what a song is. Without the non-objective component of its being, a song is just sound. If we say, well, Hey, when this sound occurs, people do X, Y, and Z, we can find ourself thinking that these effects are produced by the object, but this sort of thought experiment only gives us half an understanding of the object's being. You also have to think of that song in relation to the current context, to itself over time, to the individual and collective experience of its audience, to the culture, etc. Again, a great means to produce estrangement, but not the complete account of what the thing is. At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I can see that it might be expedient to regard a distant moon without regard to its historical relationship to the human. It's useful to think of a distant moon as a quantity of data. But the closer we get to human existence, the more likely we are to encounter types of things that exist, but that cannot be understood properly as a bundle of discrete data. Maybe there are some texts that address precisly these sorts of concerns. This is where I think ontology cannot simply be objective. It must, of course, be able to establish the differences between things, to render those things it claims to understand in discrete form, insofar as they can be considered as such. On the other hand, we know that most of what the world is made of is common and that the laws of physics, for instance, harness discrete things under a kind of continuity. So, along with the conditions of radical difference that a philosophy of objects implies, there are the conditions of radical
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
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 things are anchors so other things can change. That's true for all of our practices, which is why I've spent some time here pondering what kinds of argument have gotten bracketed or foreclosed so that other things can seem innovative and productive... Ta! This is fun! LB Lauren Berlant George M. Pullman Professor Department of English University of Chicago Walker Museum 413 1115 E. 58th. St. Chicago IL 60637 -Original Message- From: Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Thu, Jun 14, 2012 8:50 pm Subject: 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
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
as the vulgarer in both cases, all I can say is it's always instructive to enter into the affective space where some things are anchors so other things can change. That's true for all of our practices, which is why I've spent some time here pondering what kinds of argument have gotten bracketed or foreclosed so that other things can seem innovative and productive... Ta! This is fun! LB Lauren Berlant George M. Pullman Professor Department of English University of Chicago Walker Museum 413 1115 E. 58th. St. Chicago IL 60637 -Original Message- From: Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Thu, Jun 14, 2012 8:50 pm Subject: 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
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
]), 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 things are anchors so other things can change. That's true for all of our practices, which is why I've spent some time here pondering what kinds of argument have gotten bracketed or foreclosed so that other things can seem innovative and productive... Ta! This is fun! LB Lauren Berlant George M. Pullman Professor Department of English University of Chicago Walker Museum 413 1115 E. 58th. St. Chicago IL 60637 -Original Message- From: Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Thu, Jun 14, 2012 8:50 pm Subject: 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
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 tranquilised_i...@yahoo.com 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
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
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/ethics-and-politics-what-are-you-asking/ In any event, I think this whole set of questions
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 right. To take just a few examples: How could Tim Morton’s work on ecology be considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s democratization
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
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
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
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu 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
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu 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
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu 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
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu 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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu 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
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 money OOO
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu 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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu 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 ___ 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 of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission: to characterize
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu: 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
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 ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu: 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
Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
are anchors so other things can change. That's true for all of our practices, which is why I've spent some time here pondering what kinds of argument have gotten bracketed or foreclosed so that other things can seem innovative and productive... Ta! This is fun! LB Lauren Berlant George M. Pullman Professor Department of English University of Chicago Walker Museum 413 1115 E. 58th. St. Chicago IL 60637 -Original Message- From: Ian Bogost ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Thu, Jun 14, 2012 8:50 pm Subject: 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
