Occupy Fiction(al Objects): A Theoretical Outline
When Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were evicted from Zuccotti Park, this week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg offered a one-word reason: Security. Sure, he used an entire press conference's worth of words to justify the action, but the gist of his statement can be boiled down to that one lonely term. Cleanliness of the park? Security of the protestors. Removal of the protestors? Security of the citizenry. Permanent police presence? Security of the flows of capital, particularly Bloomberg's $17 billion personal fortune. While many people are adjudicating the mayor's move according to popular political ambitions (how many terms does it take to turn a bureaucrat into a dictator?), promising conclusions might also be gleaned from evaluating the fictions at play, especially those relating to—you guessed it—security.
Security fictions are nothing new to political scholarship. Postcolonial theorist Himadeep Muppidi describes a security imaginary as a dynamic field of signification providing "an organized set of interpretations for making sense of a complex political system," in which ambiguous security constructs are left purposefully ambiguous to allow for mutual constitution of social identities and relations, as well as reproduction through performative bounding of representational thoughtworlds. In this way, security is treated as co-constituted with sovereignty and citizenship, such that the three concepts, along with their genealogical lineages, form a sovereignty-security nexus around which all other policy concerns are said to circulate, be they micro- or macroeconomic, sociopolitical, or martial. Postmodern and post-structuralist research, a la Muppiddi, exposed the discursive and performative foundations of sovereign assertions—including the deterritorialization of sovereignty advocated by activists—during the latter half of the twentieth century, especially with regard to critiquing disciplinary practices of social control (exemplified by the early morning police crackdown on the Occupy encampment), biopolitical exploitation (for example, the normalization of bodies for industrial alientation), and normative textual fields (the coding of certain discourses and practices as intelligible or unintelligible, moral or deviant). Yet, despite the deeper understandings of statist instrumentalization of power/knowledge binaries gained by postmodern theorists, these forms of inquiry too often remain wedded to constitutive ideological problematics, whereby deconstruction of forms of discursive domination devolves into ideational or historiographical dogmatism, in which the 'unenlightened' masses become dependent upon an 'enlightened' master for intellectual guidance. Even worse, interrogration methods traditionally resistant to suppressive discourses, postcolonialism and critical economics included, frequently appropriate deconstructive techniques wholesale, without thinking through the way such techniques re-capitulate anti-democratic binaries articulated by the structures of domination that they purport to historicize and undermine.
Correcting the methodological oversights of postmodern theory, while retaining its myriad groundbreaking insights, requires the adoption of a new critical mode that accounts for the narrative dimension of political concepts, as well as the inexhaustibility of their existential independence from relational regimes to which they correspond in popular political imaginaries. Enter object-oriented ontology, a philosophical position that holds, among other things, that all objects, including fictional objects, exist on equal ontological footing with one another. Employing an object-oriented framework anthrodecentrizes the sovereignty-security nexus, revealing its core components to be wholly agential beings engaged in contingent, rather than hyperrelated, sets of relations, whose apparent qualities at any specific spatiotemporal locus reflect an actualization of their intrinsic potential. Accordingly, sovereignty, citizenship, and security, typically treated as performative identity signifiers, are, instead, engaged with as things-in-themselves, capable of producing affirmative material differences external to human provocation and consciousness.
Oh, by the way, if you're wondering where citizenship fits into a conversation about the Occupy movement, consider the number of times they've been called "un-American," as if the actions partaken by people in New York City, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, Albuquerque, Chicago, Washington D.C., Honolulu, and beyond were so farfetched as to call their national origin and residency into question.
To complement and politicize existing strains of object-oriented philosophy, it is necessary, in my view, to propose a comprehensive theory of fictional objects that not only accounts for such objects along an immanent ontological spectrum, but the manner in which fictional objects are instrumentalized as nonfictional for real objects. In my view, the sovereignty-security nexus revolves around the state's capacity to regulate an aesthetic assemblage that the renders barbaric the finitude of nationalist fictions, such that the homeostatic organization of the state becomes predicated upon the maintenance of an infinite state of indeterminacy. Fictional objects, for me, are classified according to two contingent dichotomies: referential (fictions with real world referents, like the movie Frost/Nixon) and nonreferential (fictions without real world referents, like Harry Potter), as well as resonant (affirmative fictions) and desonant (negational fictions). Combining these two dichotomies yields four types of fictional objects: rational (referential + resonant), irrational (nonreferential + resonant), crepuscular (referential + desonant), and transfinite (nonreferential + desonant). From there, two processes by which fictional objects are manifested by, for, or within nonfictional assemblages may be detailed: vibration, through which a fictional object presents itself by entering into and dissociating from sets of relations according to its own agency, and superimposition, whereby nonfictional objects attempt to appropriate the agency of and redeploy fictional objects for their own instrumental purposes.
Applying this theory to the three components of the sovereignty-security nexus, sovereignty can be classified as a rational fiction, whereas citizenship is characterized as a crepuscular fiction. Since the primary distinction between these two types of fictions is their capacity for self-agential actualization of withdrawn potential, this gesture allows me to suggest a non-normative notion of sovereignty, in which sovereign acts are regarded not simply as nationalist simulacra, but affirmative expressions of objectal self-differentiation. In contrast, citizenship is theorized as an intentional performance of proscriptive institutional cartographies, in which the state arrests the generative capacity of both citizen-subjects and the collective citizenry as self-determining entities in order to reproduce its internal equilibrium across spatiotemporal loci. Connecting the concepts of affirmative sovereignty and intentional citizenship to the processual objectification of municipal and national custody, security regimes, apparatuses, and signifying codes are, thus, cast as transfinite objects. Here, the state's homeostatic regulation is said to require the disciplining of how transfinite fictional objects enter into and withdraw from sets sets of relations with other objects, insofar as the finitude of such objects is obfuscated by the state's representation of perceptual threat as infinite. Ergo, the mereological contingency of security networks, as well as security-as-object, is made unintelligible, as these objects remain existentially independent of other objects, but are instrumentally extensified as infinite and boundless, in a move through which infinity itself is infinitized, accounting for the state's proliferation through cosmological indeterminacy and disorientation. To counter superimpositional infintiization, an irruption of irrational fictions within modern political imaginaries is necessary. Defining politics as the agential disfiguration of an established assemblage of relations of relations by a subnumerary object for the purpose of evincing previously incoherent relational regimes, irrational fictions are posited as vehicles for re-imag(in)ing conditions of agential possibility by opening space between the exploitative transfinitude of the state and manufactured rationalism of present forms of being for thinking temporality immanent to potentiation, fostering an object-oriented politics that radicalizes objectal becoming, while rejecting totalizing relations that collapse into enforced stagnation.
And that is exactly what the Occupy protests do, both at the local and national level. In spite of increasing calls for the leaderless movement to enunciate a clarion set of legislative goals, its followers remain committed to amoebic vitality, animated by a desire for new, more affirmative political fictions. Legislative acts are, in their factional exclusivity and eventful immediacy, dissonant, even in the rare cases that these acts propound democratic pluralism. Unwavering, the demonstrators seek not a new platform or partisan agenda, but a renewal of dissensual politics, and all that it entails. They are, in a sense, turning statist indeterminacy back on itself by mirroring its ceaseless presence, though in a fashion that unmasks the synthetic entrapment of security as a finite object between the opposing poles of radical finitude and absolute infinity. In so doing, they open space for elaborating political concepts that, while strictly nonreferential in their lack of correspondence to any withdrawn essence of extant social realities, nonetheless affirm the possibilization of more agonistic and egalitarian futures for all forms of being, both human and nonhuman.
Categories: Politics
Tags: object-oriented ontology fictional objects occupy wall street ows
Wow, Kris. That's...one heck of a contribution to object-oriented thought, at least as far as my humble mind has read. Is this the same theory you're using to critique international relations?
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Yes, absolutely. Much of this post is identical to my book proposal to Punctum regarding the sovereignty-security nexus at the international level. Should hear back in a few weeks about whether or not it's gone through, at least to the level of needing to submit a draft chapter. At any rate, the theory is the same, with only the scalar level and, of course, objects, relations, and assemblages changing in the case of IR.
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Great job, Kris! I love the voacbulary! I assume you'll be fleshing this out in more detail in future posts, giving examples of each type of object?
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Thanks, Kerri! I appreciate the compliment. Yes, I'll been fleshing this out in more detail in future posts and essays - and hopefully a book, too! I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks discussing each type of object in depth, as well as the processual distinction I make between 'vibration' and 'superimposition'. First, though, I plan to explain why I think a comprehensive theory of fictional objects is, basically, the holy grail of object-oriented ontology. Or perhaps more aptly, the missing link.
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Was this at all inspired by Levi Bryant's work? Your reading of fictional objects as something to made real is more complex than his reading of fictions-as-texts, as it was discussed in the comment thread of the previous post, but seems to stem from a similarly flattened ontology.
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Levi is a constant inspiration and influence upon my work, someone with whom I hope to study one day. Fictional objects is what interests me most in terms of OOO because I come from a political theory background, where "imaginaries" - security, social, political, sexual, etc. - are in vogue, at least among postmodern and deconstructive theorists. You're right, we do practice similarly flat ontologies, though I'm a bit more radical than he is. In my theory, for example, I don't have a problem with an object existing for a single entity and still be equally objectal to other entities. Surprisingly, I don't find this problem in Levi, either. Dreams have been tossed around as an example of where his theory of fictional objects falls short (and Marisol provided an interesting point of departure for how to reconcile such singular objects within onticology), but I think we too hastily discount the possibility of dreams existing for multiple objects, if the dream-object itself is included as one of those objects. The problem, then, becomes whether or not such an entity is dependent upon another entity for its existence, though I'm keen on viewing this as unnecessary semantic interference with mereological parsing. But that's a debate for a later date, and a thesis whose merits I'm still considering.
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I very much like your theory and what I've now read from Levi Bryant's blog (the two posts mentioned by Marisol Bate in the prior thread). Just to bridge from the other discussion, can you clarify the distinction you make between yourself and Bryant by NOT positing fictions-as-texts that circulate ad nauseum? A couple of other questions. Do you hold that a distinction exists between real and fictional objects in more than just semiotic form, or hold this in a different way than Bryant? Also, are you focusing on the practical side of objects too, the making real of a fictional object? If so, what are the implications of your theory on this process? Just clarifying, sorry if I seem brickish.
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First, I think you'd be hard pressed to find an object-oriented philosopher, or any realist thinker, who doesn't hold a distinction between real and fictional objects, or reality and fictions more generally. Neither Levi nor I hold that this distinction is purely semiotic, since signifiers, themselves, are objects. The difference between he and I, I think, is our processual focus. While I don't deny the textuality of fictions - texts are objects, too - my political theory background compels me to say that it's not enough to say fictions are real, but unpack the implications of such a claim. So, in that sense, yes, I'm elucidating a practical theory of fictional objects.
One of my key points, however, is that the agency of an object can be appropriated, trumped, impugned, etc., such that the object becomes 'transfinite'. This leads to a startling conclusion: Transfinite objects are indeterminate in that they're relationally withdrawn, like other objects, but also agentially directed. In other words, they're made to appear correlationist, made into an object-toward (or for)-something. One could argue, I think, that the correlationist inability to decouple being from thought pertains the statist deployment of objectal being for the advancement of a specific thoughtworld, such that a specific form of being can never be decoupled from a specific form of thought, arresting an object's ability to move and 'become', at least at the level of representation.
Accordingly, we have to account for power relations, for sociopolitical assemblages. Levi brilliantly analyzes the mereological consistency and aims of political systems using autopoietic theory. I'm focusing on what they do, and for that, one needs a robust account of fictional objects, as such objects are important means by which political assembles, to put it in Bryant's terms, regulate entropy.
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"Fictional objects, for me, are classified according to two contingent dichotomies: referential (fictions with real world referents, like the movie Frost/Nixon) and nonreferential (fictions without real world referents, like Harry Potter), as well as resonant (affirmative fictions) and desonant (negational fictions)."
I'm wondering about the possibility of this referential/non-referential distinction, it seems to me that it obscures as much as it clarifies. Sure there is no scarred adolescent for Harry Potter to refer to, but do such fictions not refer to the world in some sense? They take up themes that exist in both material and social reality. Conversely, it is difficult to see how Frost/Nixon refers to a real-world object given that the event is no longer in the present.
I like the affirmative/negative distinction, although surely it is more of an antagonism. I'm thinking of Marx's rope-walking between the creative and destructive tendencies of capitalism.
Maybe these are methodological distinctions rather than ontological ones. Even so, I would argue that the former is unsustainable.
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Mm, I completely disagree. In fact you, yourself, draw a distinction between referential and non-referential objects when you say that Harry Potter the character has no real world referent, but aspects of the text do. Moreover, I think the thematic referents to which you're referring are epistemological, not ontological, and perhaps a bit correlationist, depending on how you mean it. Remember, object-oriented ontology doesn't hold that the signifier "red," for example, directly corresponds to the color of an apple in sunlight. Both the signifier and object are independent entities, and the color is, in my view, a relational manifestation. Are there girls, boys, kisses, and elitist private schools in the real world? Sure. But Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Harry Potter kissing Hermione Granger, and Hogwarts? Not so much. You could, however, write a fictitious story about Barack Obama giving a speech on drone warfare at the United Nations. Obama, drones, and the United Nations are all real world entities unto themselves - entities that exist in the real world independent of other objects. Thus, the distinction.
Also, I'm not denying the materiality of "Harry Potter" as a text or the textual circulation of the fiction. I'm trying to go beyond that. As for "Frost/Nixon," your comment about presence posits a linear, teleological temporality to which I don't hold.
This post merely outlines my theory. I'll be fleshing in out in future posts, discussing each type of fiction and the agential processes of vibration and superimposition in greater detail. Hopefully, that will clear things up a bit.
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Thanks for the reply, I think I get what you are saying a little better now. Perhaps we can talk about something like the story of Harry Potter (we should really move on from Harry Potter...) as an assemblage of referential and non-referential objects? I have seen the concept of assemblage used in this fashion before.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say I'm positing 'a linear, teleological temporality.' I am raising a question that I have been thinking about for a while now (I'm a History MA you see) without coming to any real answers. This is the question of whether we can meaningfully talk about objects that existed in the past as objects that withdraw from our access to them. Harman specifies actuality as a condition of withdrawal. But, of course, dead and deceased objects are non-actual. The encounter, however, seems to me to have the same structure so maybe there is case for a "non-actual withdrawal". Anyway, as I said, I don't know enough about OOP to come to useful conclusions on this and I look forward to your future posts.
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As I said in another thread, wouldn't this be an infinitely regressive position, in which the only actual entities would then be fleeting moments? Moreover, doesn't this imply the static, linear temporality that Kris rejected, a temporal set-up in which we could dislodge a present "now" from all other moments. as if the time marched forward in a utterly progressive fashion?
Actually, the biggest flaw I see in the non-actuality of prior existence is that it seemingly reduces everything to textuality. If all that's objectal is a localized, isolatedable set of manifestations, whereby all prior existence - whether deceased family members, George Washington, World War II, or my first grade class - is non-actual because they recede into the fictional miasma of the symbolic realm, then all we can do is, at best, speculate about the construction and deconstruction of texts as the appear to, or are interpreted by, us. That strikes me as deeply correlationist.
I have serious trouble with the idea that my grandmother ceases to be real upon her death. Or that the reality of the Bush presidency ceases to be real upon his leaving office. Both my grandmother and the Bush presidency are still producing material effects, and while there are certainly textual components to each - the stories told about each, for example, which are imperfect, as my girlfriend stated - this historical or mimetic textuality doesn't abrograte, but exists apart from, the materiality of the entities "Marisol's grandmother" and "Bush" themselves.
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"As I said in another thread, wouldn't this be an infinitely regressive position, in which the only actual entities would then be fleeting moments?"
- No, not fleeting moments: it implies that only objects that exist are actual.
"Moreover, doesn't this imply the static, linear temporality that Kris rejected, a temporal set-up in which we could dislodge a present "now" from all other moments. as if the time marched forward in a utterly progressive fashion?"
- Again, i really don't think it implies any of this.
"Actually, the biggest flaw I see in the non-actuality of prior existence is that it seemingly reduces everything to textuality. If all that's objectal is a localized, isolatedable set of manifestations, whereby all prior existence - whether deceased family members, George Washington, World War II, or my first grade class - is non-actual because they recede into the fictional miasma of the symbolic realm, then all we can do is, at best, speculate about the construction and deconstruction of texts as the appear to, or are interpreted by, us. That strikes me as deeply correlationist."
I wouldn't call this a flaw in the argument so much as an undesirable consequence of it. It's not a position I'm happy with either, this is why I'm interested in real arguments against it - which I have not come across yet.
"Both my grandmother and the Bush presidency are still producing material effects, and while there are certainly textual components to each - the stories told about each, for example, which are imperfect, as my girlfriend stated - this historical or mimetic textuality doesn't abrograte, but exists apart from, the materiality of the entities "Marisol's grandmother" and "Bush" themselves."
- This is more like what I was saying with the non-actual withdrawal. I think the big bang is the best example: it's an event that was actual long ago but its effects are still being felt.
Let me give you my argument against the "correlationist" position on past-objects. The traditional premise from which "correlationist" philosophers have discounted a realist conception of history is that we do not have direct access to past events. What OOP questions (of the G.Harman variety) is whether any two objects ever make direct contact. If this holds then the correlationist objection becomes a trivial one. This means that although historians are investigating non-actual objects, the structure of the encounter is pretty much the same.
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I say that you're referring to a linear temporality because you seem to be ipartitioning the past, present, and future into discrete, highly concrete segments. I think you're undervaluing vicarious causation, at least when talking about the manner by which objects interact. With regard to history, you're saying that historians-as-object interact with historical artefacts within a common space, from which both are partially withdrawn. Within this common space, itself a real object, the historian and artefact engage each other through sensual profiles. Is that correct?
I think your example of the Big Bang is a good one, as an example of an event that is still unfolding. And that's my point - if 'prior' relations between objects are construed as events, then these events are still unfolding. Moreover, the objects themselves don't cease upon what we'd putatively think of as nonexistence, something like death. My grandmother may be dead, but death doesn't exhaust her as object, nor the impact of the relations into which she entered, many of which are still unfolding. If they weren't, I wouldn't exist.
Hence, my problem with reducing everything to textuality. If we do that, it's a short step to reducing everything to social construction. Levi Bryant talks about fictions as circulating texts, such that the texts are real objects with real effects. But I don't think even he'd talk about, say, a desk in that way. There can be texts about the desk, but the desk itself stands apart from the text.
You seem to be conflating the narrative dimension of history with the objects themselves. For me, and I think this holds for most others in the OOO community as well, signifiers and the objects or relations they signify are separate entities, existing independent of one another.
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Though object-oriented philosophy posits objectal withdrawal, I wouldn't say that the structure of an encounter with history is the same for the both object-oriented realists and anti-realists. First off, as Marisol indicates, the anti-realist doesn't recognize the historical text as a withdrawn entity possessing existential independence from other objects, author and receiver including, nor would they mine history for objectal relations, instead viewing historical objects as mere means by which human agency enacted events. Finally, to say that the structure of the encounter is the same for both camps is to speak of history existing only under the umbrella of human consciousness. In contrast, an object-oriented historian might, for example, recognize himself as just one object interacting, or entering into relations, with whatever historical object is intended, be it text or artifact. Thus, an object-oriented historian wouldn't see himself as a master of or transcendent to past-objects - actual, non-actual, fictional, narrative, etc. - but would view the historical enterprise as an engagement of a multiplicity of objects, herself included. Here, temporality becomes important, and it's one of the next "frontiers" of object-oriented research, in my opinion.
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This may be a rather simplistic understanding of what Kris is saying, but I don't think he's every aspect of a fictional text is either one way or the other. I think he's arguing AGAINST this type of homogenization. Harry Potter the character is non-referential. England is referential. Speaking mereologically, both of these objects are subordinate to the larger text, yet exist independent of the text and, of course, each other.
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Great post! Quick question - are fictional objects capable of making a difference and/or becoming?
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You bet they do. With Levi Bryant, I hold that to be is to differ. Thus, if fictional objects are to have being, they must be capable of producing difference, of differing from themselves, of becoming, of moving, of agency, and of moving rhizomatically.
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