As I was saying.

Since I last posted, I've become the editor of a new (and dare I say exciting?) journal devoted to democratizing the academic sphere. Peer-reviewed, open access, and post-disciplinary, Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events will explore the myriad expressions, impacts, and genealogies of modernity, while drawing no distinction between the merits of pop culture and high culture or minor happenings and seismic evental shifts. Emphasizing the "public" in public university, Interstitial Journal seeks to problematize outmoded intellectual hierarchies and rigid boundaries for scholarship, focusing on the quality, rather than the academic status, of the work we present. Our central question is: How is the event of, or are the events comprising, modernity unfolding for multiple forms of being, and what new forms of knowledge are being produced? To read the CFP for our inaugural issue, see below.

Call for Papers

In the modern era, interstitiality, or the space between one boundary and the next, has become an urgent area of investigation. Existing within and between entities, interstices challenge conventional understandings of boundedness, inviting us to rethink the space between objects and ideas as an erupting site of transformation. From this view, rigid divisions can no longer be taken for granted, whether political (as in the case of national borders) or scholarly (such as the emphasis on discrete academic disciplines). Instead, theoretical scholarship must think through the continual creation, re-creation, and hybridity that govern the tempo of modern times, while accounting for the contingent impact of individual actors upon one another in the unfolding of modernity as an event.

For the inaugural edition of Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events, authors are invited to submit essays (5,000 to 8,000 words) on the myriad manifestations of interstitiality birthed by modern events. Situated within a post-disciplinary academic framework, we invite submissions from any field, including political theory, philosophy, literary studies, law, sociology, and cultural studies. We are especially interested in works that traverse multiple theoretical trajectories, including media archaeology, literary criticism, speculative philosophy, critical theory, game and film studies, posthumanism, new historicism, post-colonialism, and political aesthetics, among others. Potential topics might include:

• How is the line between human and nonhuman being blurred by speculative philosophy and posthumanism, and what implications might this have for social, political, and literary studies?

• How must political space be re-mapped, if at all, to account for the “in between-ness” of social identities, governance, and security? 

• In what ways might media studies theorize interstitial space, particularly with regard to new media, emergent technology, and gaming? 

• What textual function does the space of transformation, or “liminal space,” possess, and how is it represented in literary, cinematic, and other narrative forms? 

• Within what interstices do so-called “queer” sexualities unfold and what challenges do they pose for predominant means of moral ordering?  

• What effect might considering interstices have on democratizing the university and/or the production of knowledge(s)?

• How can modern political protests, like the Occupy and Arab Spring demonstrations, be thought of in terms of the re-creation and hybridization of sovereign power, especially at the level of everyday life?

• How can colonial and post-colonial periods be understood as interstices, if at all? 

• Do events create their own space and time, and how can we rethink the space and time in which events become meaningful?

Marisol Bate, a friend to many who've commented on this site, passed away, this morning, due to an as yet undetermined illness and infection. Please feel free to share any thoughts or feelings in the comments section below. 

There are five major debates raging with/in and with/out the object-oriented studies spectrum, in my opinion. When we pull back the curtain, we see (in no particular order of importance): 

• Aesthetic criticism: By 'aesthetic', I mean sensory. That said, I find virtue in relating this question back to standard aesthetic discussions, such as art and textual critique, if only to employ a common site of analysis. Recently, I've argued against the idea of an object-oriented literary criticism, claiming that the idea of the 'literary' reduces the being of a text to a meta-aporia about signification. An alternative move promoted by Levi Bryant and Eileen Joy, however, seeks a middle ground between postmodern historicism and deconstruction (new historicism and new criticism, more specifically), in which the text is viewed as a thing-in-itself productive of multiple histories, an autopoietic actant capable of affecting other entities, similar to other objects. Criticism, then, moves from an excavation of meaning to an exploration of construction, of what is "built" from the the relations into which a text enters. This is an invaluable move away from what Bryant and Joy call 'humanist criticism', or reading strategies that close textual being by positing texts as carriers for encoded discursive meaning. For me, though, this brilliant—and I mean that sincerely—strategy recuperates textual affectivity within the frame of a conscious reader, albeit in a radically pluralized form. While disavowing authorial intent in favor of machinic productivity, anti-humanist criticism nevertheless avoids the becoming of a text, sytematically or objectally, by positing, say, The Brothers Karamazov as a homogenous entity, sans self-generated spatiotemporal specificity. Sans anatomy. Sans any anthrodecentric relation, like signifier to shape. In contrast, I contend that object-oriented ontology—and perhaps all aesthetic criticism—signals the birth and primacy of 'object criticism', which focuses on the point of relation, or translation, between the text-in-itself and other entities that it contacts. There is certainly a retained history here; Bibles have circulated throughout many assemblages in varying historical epochs, with consequences for humans and nonhumans alike. And Bryant and Joy's lit crit proposal is exactly the kind of analytical methodology necessitated for object-oriented literary insight. What is important to remember, I maintain, is that it is only one type of relation involving the text, though admittedly an important one. In its simultaneous restriction of textual relation within the realm of human reading and exploration of textual affectivity on entities other than human consciousness, such a reading can be described as post-correlationist. It is the perfect complement to object criticism (a term that does not imply criticism of objects categorically, I should note), which investigates the way sensibility is partitioned at the point of translation between objects extant within a regime of attraction, where the text is merely one relating entity among others. To extend this discussion into a controversial realm, I'll pose the following question: How would an object-oriented ontologist answer the question, "What is art?"

• Fictional objects: For me, the whole game. Briefly, any metaphysics of objects must not only account for putatively imagined objects—like citizenship, security, and borders—to reflect an accurate representation of agential artifacts, but the manner in which these objects are made or become real for real objects, or circulate within the real world. Otherwise, one is left with a metaphysical parlance that can only account for shapative difference and becoming, and recuperates being, experience, and potential solely within objectal form. And that wouldn't be much of a realist philosophy, would it? That would just be an utterly nonsensical variant of accidentalist naiveté in which the politics of be(com)ing is viewed as inconsequential. 

• Mereology: If you've never seen this word, here is a quick gloss: It indicates the relationship of parts to each other and the larger wholes that they comprise. One of the problems that comes up in discussions of object-oriented philosophies, particularly with newcomers, is the challenge of accounting for the independence of so-called substrate objects, like atoms, molecules, or cells. Since object-oriented ontology contends that every object is withdrawn from the relations into which it enters and retreats, and therefore obtains a reality in excess of any relation or set of relations, it must also account for how the being of a whole entity and its constituent parts can retain a non-relational reality without falling apart. To be fair, one could argue that real objects exist on equal footing with all other objects in the world because of relational equivalency, where no one relation is privileged above others. From what Levi Bryant calls a subtractive object-orientation, however, objects must be able to exist independent of their relations, meaning that whole entities and component entities each have autonomous being (in fact, the concept of a 'whole' entity can be somewhat misleading, in this sense, since the parts of one entity are wholes in and of themselves). As Bryant notes, this is easy enough to realize in the realm of social relations. I am currently writing this post from Hawai'i Nei, the state in which I reside. I, as a citizen of Hawai'i, am, thus, a part of my state, but the state would continue to exist, even if I moved. As a another example, consider Facebook. As someone with a Facebook account, I am (a little ashamedly) part of the Facebook community, but deactivating my account doesn't destroy Facebook's being. It's a bit harder to conceptualize at the organic level, where hearts, tissues, and chloroplast would seem to be causal vectors of organic being. Yet, upon closer inspection, this is not the case. Much of a human's body chemistry, to cite just one case, changes almost completely every seven years. Epidermal cells are lost; new ones take their place. According to my current age, that's happened to me four times since my first birthday. Nonetheless, here I am. We can deduce, then, that a person's body exists as an entity apart from its cells. The same if true of the cells, of course, as they don't cease being cells just because they've been flaked off by scratching an itch or placed under a microscope. What is difficult to think through, though, is numerological mereology—how many objects comprise a syzygy, even at the level of every human consciousness?—and what justifications can be extrapolated from mereological analysis to describe the process of objectal formation and motility? We're not used to thinking of armies, democracies, and ecosystems as objects with their own agency, independent of how their parts function. From the perspective of object-oriented mereology, however, this is exactly the case. Want an even more striking brain-teaser? Consider the mereology of a fictional object, like Emma Bovary or national security. Weird, huh?

• Ontopolitics: Philosophy for philosophy's sake has its place. On the other hand, I've said on several occasions, "Philosophy that breeds complacency endangers all being, all forms of being, so that even the possibility of being collapses under its own immovable weight." Deliberately hyperbolic, the line is meant to indicate that philosophizing doesn't occur in a vacuum. Whether one is thinking in an Ivy League office or Tahrir Square, the space in which thought transpires is informed by (or relates to, if we're being properly object-oriented) other objects in motion, assemblages, and systems. Many object-oriented theorists (especially beyond the big four), however, are reluctant to bring object-oriented research into the political spectrum, I assume for fear that doing so will unnecessarily politicize a 'first principles' movement. Object-oriented ontology doesn't lead to any specific political commitments, after all, and more mainstream ontopolitical critiques are often predicated on the systems philosophies object-oriented theory stands against. Yet, suppression can't be wished away on a magical (belief) carpet. And an object-orientation is radically democratic, in its aggressive insistence on equality, equality, equality. All beings existing on an equal plane, and all that. If OOO is going to continue flourishing, it's practitioners, in my view, should embrace its emancipatory potential, even if mainstream political writers don't always replicate the movement's standard fare. Which brings me to my next point... 

• (Non-)ontological pluralization: More practical than theoretical, one can increasingly question the relation of object-oriented ontology to other philosophical schools of thought. Considered the most visible—and controversial—strain of speculative realism, OOO is not the only object-oriented theory gaining traction in academic halls, which have seen the emergence of vibrant materialism (Jane Bennett), thing theory (Bill Brown), and agential realism (Karen Barad), to name just a few. The concern, here, is the extent to which each of these ideas can coexist. In other words, does OOO's emphasis on being occlude insights and/or engagement with other theories of objectality? I mention this concern because of a recent conflagration over questions posed by Jussi Parikka. If you're unaware of what happened, Parikka, author of Insect Media, among other things, raised several concerns about OOO's approach, for instance the extent to which it can speak to science and its utility for media studies. None of the questions were hostile; at least half of the responses from non-OOO'ers were. In the world of scholarship, we debate our theories with a passion that, at times, borders on zealotry. That's great, so long as it remains agonistic, not antagonistic. At the heart of the tension, it seems, is the question of whether or not OOO is a systematic philosophy, a notion I reject. OOO'ers often appear systematic in the presentation of their ideas—Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy, Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology, Levi Bryant's use of systems theory in formulating 'onticology'—but one of the primary virtues of OOO, to me, is its injunctions against univocity. Makes sense, right? If there can be no single substance undermining objects, then there can be no single utterance articulating totalized understanding of objectality. Too often, though, misunderstanding obscures OOO's inhered tendency toward democratization and the promiscuity of being. To me, there is one, and only one, criteria for obtaining the title 'object-oriented thinker': anthrodecentrism. Membership in the field of object-oriented studies (that's studies, meaning "students" in the broad sense) requires an attempt to dislodge humans from positions of theoretical privilege. To be an object-oriented ontologist, one must decentralize being away from the exultation of human being, and there are a number of currently agreed upon points of reference for doing so (preservation of finitude, withdrawal, critique of correlationism, etc.). With the exception of disavowing correlationism and anthrodecentrism, however, whether or not those points will remain the standard for perpetuity is an open question, as is their relative importance to any given OOO'er. Therefore, we're compelled to speak to one another across disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, while concurrently confronting our own philosophical biases. Otherwise, we slip into reification, and foreclose the richness of our own theses from benefiting, and benefiting from, other forms of inquiry, sinking our philosophies beneath the same sands that undermine objects themselves.

My hope is that the preceding comments won't be taken as the presumptuous ramblings of a relative newcomer, but the genuine feelings of one working through his own object-orientation. What problems do you think punctuate OOO, today? Which do you view as the most urgent?

Here's a question: Can there be an object-oriented literary criticism? Here's my answer: Nope.

It's commonly known as the "God particle," and according to new scientific reports, it might have been found. Alright, "found" is a bit strong, but physicists working at the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider announced, on Tuesday, that they have detected signatures of the long sought Higgs boson, an elementary particle that theoretically aids in the explanation of why other elementary particles have mass. More specifically, the Higgs is believed to assist in breaking the electroweak symmetry of the Standard Model, or Higgs mechanism, through which Nambu-Goldstone bosons are absorbed by gauge bosons, giving the latter non-vanishing masses. Even more technically, the Higgs mechanism deals with the masses of the W and Z (weak) bosons, positing a process that adds an extra Higgs field—an SU(2) doublet with a charge of -1—to gauge theory, in which three of four degrees of freedom from the gauge group SU(2)xU(1) mix with the weak bosons after symmetry breaking, with the one remaining degree of freedom becoming a new scalar particle, i.e. the Higgs boson. Despite mounting evidence for the veracity of the Higgs mechanism, the boson, itself, has yet to be observed, leading more than a few scientists, philosophers of science, and public policy advocates questioning whether or not the theoretical model giving rise to the Higgs is flawed, and unworthy of future funding. Keep that in mind as you answer this week's lone reading group question:

• In "The Paradox of Substance," Bryant makes the case that substance appears paradoxical from the standpoint of epistemological primacy, which precipitates the oxymoronic claim that a substance both is and is other than its qualities. In contrast, how might the search for the Higgs boson be addressed from a position of ontological primacy, whereby substances are 'split' between (self-)alienation and qualitative actualization in localized settings, and how might the re-privileging of being before knowledge impact our understanding the 'event', more generally?

It's such a staple of object-oriented discussions, it could be a catchphrase: All relations are translations. 

These parameters need not necessarily impose a single model or method of translation, but they define the general coordinates within which translation can be distinguished from other discursive procedures. Each community establishes a logic of signification that presupposes a specific understanding of what meaning is, how it operates, the normative principles it should abide by, its function in social discourse, etc. Communities do, of course, come into conflict—both with themselves and with other communities—but the basic point remains unchanged: just as the translator never works in a historical vacuum, translation is never...condemned to a solitary encounter with the intractable original (Rockhill, Politics of Aesthetics, viii).

Thus, for Rockhill, textual translation involves not a mediation of meaning between signifying codes, but reconfiguration of meaning through socio-historically conditioned representational relations. Grounding specific semiotic utterances is a signifying logic that determines what meaning and language are for a given community, as well as how meaning and language interact. Yet, the idea of communal determination is anathema to the object-oriented ontologist, who holds that the withdrawn nature of objects prevents their inner being from being perfectly reformulated in the semiological realm, preventing epistemological exhaustion of one object by another. For OOO'ers, therefore, the question is: What is communicated in an encounter between objects, if not the thing-in-itself? 

To begin, there's a Harmanian term for philosophies of absolute access that, concurrently, permit knowledge to completely, or dogmatically, model a world independent of the mind—naive realism—and it goes something like this: If I punch a naive realist in the face, the being of my fist directly encounters the being of the naive realist's face, with the two objects interacting as things-in-themselves in a violent burst of essential penetration that—and this is key—is completely replicable epistemologically. Following Kant's rejection of noumenal exhaustion by consciousness, naive realism has become a philosophical relic, more or less. Skip forward a few centuries to the age of object-oriented studies (damn right, it's an age) and you get the radicalization of this rejection to all objects, whereby, quoting Levi Bryant, "all communication is miscommunication," which is another way of saying that all relations are translations, if you view relation as a communicative act. Accordingly, all relations between entities implicate an ontological rift, whereby objectal encounters simultaneously affirm coexistence and finitude, without recuperating reality into any localized domain.

This rift, which I call the really, is differentiated from the principle of finitude by its insistence on the uncanniness of the encounter. Whereas finitude describes the distortion of relata by relations between non-transcendental entities incapable of complete presentation to themselves or other entities, the really magnifies the incertitude of encounters between objects that are, as I said in my previous post, neither reducible to signification nor instrumentality. The really can also be differentiated from Morton's mesh cartographically; while the mesh is the sum of all extant relations in a given spatiotemporal climate, the really is the gulf inhered in any given relation between objects. Furthermore, the really is not reducible to the mesh (a mini-mesh) or vice-versa, but, instead, connotes the space within which the relations comprising the mesh transpire. Just as Einstein's theory of general relativity demonstrated that gravity is the objectal warping and curvature of spacetime, so my contention is that objectal encounters involve a distortion of relational space, and that the constant motility of objects, or becoming, implies amplification of near perpetual distortion by agential actancy. For clarity, 'relational space' delineates a specific subset of general space, i.e. that in which objects relate to another, and operates at both the physical and conceptual level.

One caveat would be that, like Levi, I admit the theoretical possibility of 'dark objects', or objects completely withdrawn from relations with other objects. As a theoretical construct, though, these entities simply circumvent the need to cap agency and, thus, function in a manner similar to strings in M-Theory—an inferred entity, whose existence is more explanatory than observable. At any rate, the truly trippy trait of the really is that if relations between objects are real, then the relational space between, betwixt, and around objects must also be real. In this way, the really is not simply a third object functioning as an intermediary during an objectal encounter, a la Harman's thesis of vicarious causation. In contrast, the really is intimated by contingency, by the severability of encounters and assemblages. Hyperrelationism disavows the really, grinding all objects into a single, inextricable, deified relation. Contingency, on the other hand, ushers in an era of fluid dynamics, an ebb and flow of independent objects encountering absence and uncertainty, even unto encounters with the self. The anxiety induced by such uncertainty is, I submit, both horrifying and sublime. And this paradox of sublime horror is, perhaps, the really's predominant physical and conceptual theme.

Timothy Morton's ecological theory is meshy. Literally, actually. For Morton, mesh explains the interconnectedness of all living and non-living beings. infinite both in number of connections and scale of differentiation. He states: 

The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the truly wonderful fact of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped the Earth (think of oil, of oxygen—the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction (Morton, The Ecological Thought, 2010). 

At first glance, this idea doesn't seem to jive with object-oriented studies, which holds that all objects exist independent of other objects and possess agency, or the capacity to move in and out of relations (and assemblages of relations). If all objects are interconnected, however,  they lack agency and, instead, remain ensnared within a totalizing relational determination. Independence of preordained—so noted because absolute relationality implicates relations, themselves, in a clown walk of codependence—relational assemblages is impossibilized, precipitating the stacking of relations on top of one another to forge illusive teleological regimes. So, does that mean the concept must be discarded, now that Tim is an OOO'er? 

Not necessarily. He just needs to clean up his mesh. Rather than defining it in hyperrelational terms that undermine objects themselves, Morton should, in my view, define the mesh topologically, as the sum total of all relations extant in a given spatiotemporal frame. In this way, the mesh complements Morton's hyperobjects thesis, completing the object-oriented turn of the ecological thought. Hyperobjects are characterized by an ambiguous mereology, in that they cannot be locally manifested because of their massive distribution. In other words, manifestations of a hyperobject—for example, Earth—have achieved escape velocity for the objects they pertain. Hyperobjects remain fully objectal, however, despite their size, a point that is sometimes missed. Even though hyperobjects occupy a higher dimensional space than "smaller" objects to which they adhere, they are fully agential beings, capable of entering into and departing relations. Operationalizing the mesh as the summation of all objects, on the other hand, would undermine objects, turning the mesh into an ultimate hyperobject from which all other entities could never, even in theory, be severed. In effect, the mesh would become a single substance, an objectal form, with other objects being defined in terms of alienation from this ideal. Put simply, the mesh would be God, auscultating itself through the becoming-other of its constituent parts. 

Instead, the mesh can be understood relationally, as the aggregate of all encounters between objects in a given assemblage. Just as a hyperobject can be parsed in terms of parts and wholes, so can the mesh. Thus, the mesh can be adapted to describe objects relating in various scales. If capitalism is a fictive hyperobject for Western economic entities, then the mesh encapsulates all commodified relations occurring within a capitalist framework in a given temporal frame. Like hyperobjects, the mesh can be scaled up or down, depending on the entities in question. Importantly, the mesh is not, itself, a relation, but a fictive entity bounded by prehension (if all relations are translations, then relations comprising the mesh are always already 'sensual', in the phenomenological sense of being 'intentional' deployed by Graham Harman). The key, here, is in the uncanniness of the mesh that parrots hyperobjectal incertitude, the inherent unfamiliarity of even the most familiar objects, or what Morton calls 'strange strangers'. Meshed entities exist coexistentially, yet contingently, meaning that no matter how close they appear to one another, objects cannot achieve a speed great enough to outrun their finitude. Accordingly, when objects seemingly should be on a march toward intimacy through repetition of relations, the absence of each other's being is made more and more present, the gulf of becoming—indeed, awareness of the lack of total interdependence—widened. Repetition of the withdrawn essential chasm births both reverence and horror, rendering the mesh a field of relational anxiety, within which objects are neither reducible to signification nor instrumentality, but expose processes of projection as an objectal withdrawal masquerading as a structurally individuated subjectivity. 

Put a bit poetically, existence in the mesh implicates the contingent affirmation of an unseen Other refracted through the looking glass, instead of an enduringly entangled binary of self and not-self on either side of a prismatic plane. That said, relations within the mesh seek not the colorful space opened on the other side of the rabbit hole, but, in contrast, a fuller experience of descent, simply out of love for the act of falling. 

Yeah, I know. Unfortunately, this has been a week of pitching abstracts to journals, while advising students on final papers. What's more, I'm still waiting for my hard copy of the book, as the United States Postal Service has apparently decided to save money by stemming package delivery to my house. Next week, next chapter. Sorry for the wait. For now, continue discussing the first chapter—our previous threads are suspiciously barren. If you're having trouble with the book, ask questions. We're working through some tough, paradigm shifting stuff, and it's okay to interrogate the veracity of each claim before determining whether or not to accept it. Critical thinking is the whole point to this game, after all.

Again, several people wrote me, this week, to detail difficulties accessing the website of Open Humanities Press. I'm postponing discussion of the next section of Democracy of Objects, for that reason. To celebrate Herman Cain's suspension of his presidential campaign, however, I'm also suspending all postponements of our reading group for the foreseeable future, since Democracy of Objects has been released as a paperback via Amazon.com. Go get a copy. Hard copies have less trouble downloading. Then, read the second chapter before next Friday. Got that? Cool. 

Earlier this month, the Oscillation Project with Emulsion tRacking Apparatus, or OPERA, recorded neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. Again. Twice now, scientists working on the large scale experiment, originally intended to detect tau neutrinos from muon neutrino oscillations, have observed the anomaly, so deemed because special relativity impossibilizes speeds exceeding that of light in a vacuum. First, in March, researchers calculated that neutrinos produced at CERN arrived in Gran Sasso, Italy, approximately 60 nanoseconds quicker than light traveling the same distance. Then, to address concerns about the impact of global positioning system synchronization between testing locations and assumptions about energy distribution and particle production during proton beam spill, physicists replicated the event in October, affirming their previous results. Questions linger over methodology and internal data validity, which have yet to be independently recreated. An Italian team, for example, claims that superluminal velocities require the loss of energy through the release of photons and electron/anti-electron pairs, something they claim is missing from an analysis of the neutrinos' energy spectrum. Yet, true or not, the experiments provide a rich starting point for mining realist ontological propositions, as well as the utility of such theories for conceptualizing dispassionate inquiry. Ergo, this week's questions:

• What are empirical "constant conjunctions of events," and how do they relate to the 'transitive' and 'intransitive' domains of knowledge? Moreover, how might independent verification of scientific results challenge the transcendental idealism that gives rise to correlationism, if at all, and in what ways does it remain bound to anthropocentric exceptionalism? Hint: Consider how these two questions mesh.

• Why does Bryant, following Roy Bhaskar, conclude that the conditions under which experimentation becomes intelligible are ontological, rather than epistemological? What could an ontological emphasis on the conditions of being preceding experimentation contribute to the debate over the OPERA neutrino anomaly, if anything?