PrOOOblems
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):
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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?"
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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.
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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?
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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...
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(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?
Categories: Politics/Theory
Tags: object-oriented ontology
I think the main problem people have with OOO is the attitude of its practitioners. It seems like OOO philosophers believe that everything they've ever done led naturally to their work with OOO, like OOO is the inevitable consummation of their theoretical process. They then try to work in all of their old work into their OOO work. It doesn't always work very well because a lot of pre-OOO work doesn't jive with OOO, unless you're really broadening the horizon of what OOO can encompass. So I think there's an ego to it.
Look at the Jussi Parikka incident for example. It's not just the people who didn't like OOO that got all hot and bothered. Levi Bryant made extremely sarcastic remarks that he had to retract and were completely uncalled for. Graham Harman berated Jussi for comments he made on a BLOG! Apparently you can't even question OOO philosophers without them getting all hot and bothered. I think the biggest OOO problem is the last one. That's by far the most important. If you want to engage with other object-oriented scholars, don't bite their heads off every time they disagree with you.
Thanks for the opportunity to get this off my chest.
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I actually think the biggest problem of the five you mentioned is mereology. I honestly think we get so thoroughly trapped in overcoming the reduction of objects to appearances that we tend to focus on only those objects we prehend, so that we forget about the parts entirely. One of the things I've been trying to do in my papers is use examples of objects that are beyond my prehension, like water molecules, because that forces me to consider a fuller range of object-oriented relations. I also think it's sometimes so difficult to convince people of the basic merit of OOO, the whole move away from the human, that we tend to argue those points over and over, and so we haven't made much progress in unpacking what it means for a part to relate to a whole, or a whole to escape epistemological representation by its parts. To what extent can a part represent a whole or even make epistemological statements about something vastly larger than itself? How does scale impact epistemology? That's the kind of thing I'm getting at.
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I agree with Andrea - perhaps the biggest problem is not the philosophy itself, but its adherents. There is a definite sense that the critique is not exactly welcome, and relative to other movements there is a hint of insecurity. Now, I say that as someone who likes OOO in general, but finds the atmosphere off-putting. It really needs to be aired out a little.
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I think that's an unfair criticism and not at all what Kris was saying. What he was saying - and I've heard him say this in other places - is that there's an unintended and not self-imposed hagiographic component to OOO. Each time one of the OOO guys makes a declarative statement, OOO haters graft that on to all other OOO philosophers. So for example, Levi Bryant wrote a post about the division between materialist and realist in object-oriented ontology today. Undoubtedly, his position about the divide will be grafted on to Ian Bogost, Tim Morton, Graham Harman, Kris and others, as if this is a giant problem for them all, and one that they all see through the lens that Bryant described. When you look at what those guys are actually doing and saying though, it's not the case. There's the new O-Zone journal, which incorporates a veritable Latour Litany of object-oriented philosophies. There's Kris's and Bryant's comments about radical democratization. There's Harman's discussion of people who work on roads similar to, but not in sync with his own, like Tristan Garcia. What more can these guys do to air out the atmosphere? I understand their frustration. They're constantly being misperceived and attacked, and I'm not surprised that it makes them a little defensive.
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It's a perfectly accurate criticism. Have you read Levi Bryant's comment threads and comments on other people's threads? He talks down to everyone who doesn't agree with his views. He comes across as very insecure and suppressive, especially when it comes to the work of people who aren't already established in the philosophical community. He's always talking about the problem of the APA being too analytic, but doesn't do anything to open space for dissenting views from his own. It's all about his own views, 24-7, and no one dare disagree or they'll get their heads chopped off.
Harman is a bit better, but his riff on Jussi was way out of line. He's HEARD that Jussi has spoken ill of him and therefore proceeds to tear him to shreds in multiple posts on a well-read philosophy blog? That's just shameful. Jussi should be able to pose whatever questions he wants on his blog without getting his head chopped off. It's a BLOG. And that is exactly the kind of thing that occurs with some regularity in the OOO world. They really need to clean up their act.
I'd say the most important "prOOOblem" is definitely the last one. Hands down.
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This is really unconvincing. Rather it is the other way around - one opposes a small element of OOO and all of a sudden Levi, Harman, Bogost, and Morton come calling (Kris is clearly not quite accepted by them either, just as Jackson is not, they are not useful/established enough, have you seen the list of rising OOO people that have disappeared?). There is a desire to create this idea of an OOO ecosphere with lots of possible OOO precursors and even other living OOO people, but we really just have 4 and those 4 are protecting their circle. That is just how it is.
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I'll admit that I haven't seen the list of rising OOO people that have disappeared. Can you explain what you mean by that? The people that I think of as "rising OOO people" are still around. Kris works on an object-oriented journal with Levi Bryant and Eileen Joy. Michael O'Rourke is working on a couple of books I believe. Robert Jackson just published a video with O-Zone Journal. I'm sure he's going to be publishing in other places, too. But that's my perception. Why do you think the contrary? I think the idea of a quartet is somewhat misleading. All of the main four have disagreements with each other. Bryant has been critical of Harman on several occasions, at conferences and on his blog.
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That's because the early history is slowly being erased as it becomes more mainstream. Now everything looks a little neater. Put simply before Kris a number of young academics were considered OOO before being dispatched once Harman took a disliking to them. O'Rourke is not OOO either. Jackson remains on the edges. Never listed as one of the main four. Why is that? Their critiques are often mild when addressed to each other. It is a love in. That is why they can't handle real critique. Kris is an exception to this since he actually seems free of such nonsense. Have you seen how they treated Mikhail and the Perverse Egalitarianism people?
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For what it's worth, I've never felt intellectually disrespected or used by Bogost, Bryant, Harman, or Morton. On the contrary, I consider these folks intellectual allies and friends, and their thought inspires me each and every day. It's also worth noting that Harman's new edited series, Open Humanities Press, doesn't consider how established a potential author is, when evaluating manuscripts. They're open to anyone. Finally, I find that many "rising OOO people" are highly engaged, publishing regularly in a variety of formats. The video Melissa Meyer cites is a good example. Another would be the editorial board of SPECULATIONS, one of the premiere speculative realism journals around. It's almost entirely grad students or people who've recently completed their graduate work. To me, OOO is going through a growth spurt. There may be growing pains associated with the spurt, but it's definitely headed in the right direction.
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Maybe OHP is open but from what I see there is a book from Byrant and maybe one from Morton? Perhaps a Bryant/Bogost OOO collection. Hardly that open. What graduates are publishing there? Do the Speculaitions people consider themselves OOO?
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It would be inappropriate for me to speak about forthcoming OHP publications, though I can say that I've spoken with Graham Harman about the possibility of submitting a manuscript to the series. It works in reverse - they grant contracts after completion and acceptance of a manuscript. That enables them to focus solely on the quality of the work.
I think the Speculations crowd would consider themselves sympathetic to OOO. It was originally conceived as an OOO journal, but broadened to incorporate submissions from the wider speculative realism community because, when it began, the SR/OOO crowd was pretty small (and still is, in my view). That said, Robert Jackson, who has been mentioned multiple times in this thread, is an editor at Speculations.
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Mereology. One of the problems I've been having with thinking about object-oriented lit crit is how to account for the mereology of texts. I don't think Bryant and Joy have done this adequately enough, though they have just begun to articulate their views on this matter. As an English major, I'm very curious to know how they'd do that.
I have to say, I'm a little shocked by the other concerns. All of the OOO'ers, as Kris calls them, have been charitable with their time. Just read the interviews conducted with this site for more detail. How is it that anyone can say they're obnoxious? Holding fast to one's philosophy is not tantamount to suppressing beliefs.
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I'm going to make a plug for ontopolitics as the problem that's going to be the big issue moving forward. As you say, object-oriented ontology entails no specific political commitments. You can be an object-oriented conservative, in theory. But there's an increasing move by some object-oriented theorists toward political promouncements. Jane Bennett and Levi Bryant are prime examples. I think that's going to require a rehtinking of the political, and I don't think anyone has gone far enough in this direction. Bryant discusses how object-oriented ontology can reorient political possibilities, but still from within the concept of the political derived from anthropocentric Kantian paradigmatics. How can we move beyond this completely?
I also think you're missing a big debate, and that's the materialism/realism debate that Bryant mentioned on his blog today. I suppose it ties into the issue of pluralization, but there seem to be two competing object-oriented vectors, each vying for dominance. Look at Bryant's recent comments about Harman's lack of cogency. It's nice to see more ideas being brought under the fold, but I think the tensions are going to boil over at some point and you're going to end up with two completely different philosophical systems, and the need for more media that are amendable to multiple trajectories.
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The materialism/realism divide is a bit of a false dichotomy, as Bryant indicates toward the top of his post. A materialist can posit a reality external to thought, just as a realist does. The difference is in how positions must be accounted for. Take, for example, vicarious causation. Even if it works within Harman's framework, it might not work from within a materialist framework, where objectal interactions involve material encounters at various scales. As a different example, consider withdrawal. Harman accounts for objectal withdrawal almost entirely through a radical and brilliant interpretation of Heidegger's tool analysis - that's what started the whole object-oriented shebang. As a materialist, however, Bryant comes approaches the subject from a different perspective, involving the manner in which virtual proper being is held in excess of local manifestations, a heavily Deleuzean influenced account. So, in a sense, there are two different philosophies being articulated. That said, there is no reason why they can't speak to one another agonistically, even under the same tent. Acrimonious splitting need not- and hopefully won't - occur.
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Man, that's a lot to think about. I think the biggest debate isn't listed actually. It's how OOO accounts for processes. Relations between objects, manifestations, I get all of that. But there's still a big debate over how well OOO can account for something like electrolysis. The default response seems to be to say that it's just relations between objects without giving any sort of explanation for how those relations might work. Are the relations just given? What about a process of gradual transmogrification, like evolution? Are humans and their ancestors one and the same, only with minute changes over time caused be interactions with other objects?
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The boundary issue is what still gets me, and several people I know. What defines the bounds of an object? My saying so? Are objects differently defined for other objects? Ie., as a human object I identify a cup as an object, a text, a government; but to the cup, maybe the boundaries are quite different. Or maybe it's completely arbitrary, and incoherent.
That's the #1 issue for me, and as intriguing as some of the other insights are, they get nowhere until this one is at least somewhat resolved.
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Object-oriented ontology posits a reality external to human consciousness or the finitude of any given object. Thus, the bounds of an object exist outside of their prehension of representation, would they not? Moreover, I think this speaks to the emphasis on mereology, parts and wholes, and why I spoke about the fuzziness of the term "whole." A carbon atom and a tree exist as whole objects, independent of one another's existence, even though the former is a part of the latter. This doesn't mean that boundaries are static. Objects can grow, diminish, etc. Nonetheless, the totality of an object's being - or the movement of its systems, if you want to use Bryant's approach - isn't predicated about our recuperation of being into thought.
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See, to me that still dodges the question; why should a "tree" be an object, aside from the fact that I, as a human, perceive it as a "whole"? Defining boundedness seems to be a way of slipping anthropocentrism into OOO through the back door, but being incapable of defining boundedness collapses the framework entirely. We either speak of objects as we perceive them to be objects (but granting that our boundary definitions are subjective and arbitrary) or we find ourselves incapable of speaking at all.
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Mm, I see what you're saying and definitely find your critique intriguing, but I also think it's only a return to the anthropos if we conflate objects and their signifiers. In other words, the objectality of a tree isn't confined to it being labeled "tree," or even "object." Instead, the tree exists as a reality external to conscious experience. This is, again, why I think mereology is so important. I'm sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop, with my arm resting on the chair. So, even if we just account for those four objects, the desk, my arm, the chair, and the laptop form an objectal assemblage. I don't really see that as a difficult ontological problem - objects relating to one another form objectal assemblages. Topologically speaking, you could contend that the assemblage is an object, and OOO'ers often do - capitalism, an ecosystem, London are all objects, each composed of different parts. Yet London relates to its parts - streets, residents, the National Gallery, London Bridge - just as its parts relate to one another.
Maybe I'm still speaking around your concern, but I don't think so. If we account for objects mereologically, we can account for how objects in relation comprise larger objects. Obviously, we don't prehend every part of every whole, nor does any other object do so. When one speaks of a lack of boundedness, though, one runs the risk of undermining all objects by situating them as a singular assemblage with no differentiation, i.e. China and I are universally, cosmologically the same. Again, you can speak of China and I as part of the Earth, where the Earth is a hyperobject, but that doesn't mean China or I (or the Earth, for that matter) cease to exist as independent beings. So, signifiers are arbitrary, sure, but beings aren't.
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That makes a little more sense, but it makes OOO sound closer to DeLanda's virtual/actual assemblages [and the English terms coincide with intuition/general usage better than Bryant's, as much as I enjoy his writing].
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This isn't meant to upset you, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that you're making what Levi Bryant calls the correlationist move par excellence, in which one argues that we must identify objects in order to know objects, and that identification proceeds according to perceptual referents. This allows one to say that different beings encounter and prehend being in different way, and that while there may be an external reality, we must return to epistemological inquiry based on perception to distinguish between beings.
Here, I fully endorse Bryant's view that an object-oriented ontologist must privilege ontology over epistemology, in a reversal of the post-Kantian tradition. The problem with the question of boundedness, as you phrase it, is that it reduces ontological questions to questions of access, of how things are distinguished for us. Rather than discuss what being is, you're contending, we must instead limit ourselves to how we know what being is, and so beings, themselves, are transformed into something incapable of acknowledgement outside of thought. We're back into questions of, as Levi would say, access and givenness - what is given to a particular observer. Yet, as he would also say (I think), this line of questioning omits the observer as an object, while tacitly acknowledging that the observer prehends or distinguishes objects outside of the objects themselves. And that undermines the correlationist circle, through and through, even if at the level of the anthropos.
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I'm not offended in the least.
I get what you're saying, and I agree. What I don't understand is how we can then get from ontology to epistemology. Sure, objects exist before we know them; by that definition then, we don't know what or where those objects are.
I'm going to go back over my notes on The Democracy of Objects, see if I can wrap my head around the jump from the ontological to the epistemelogical.
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Hey I realise I'm late to the party but one PrOOOblem is see with OOO is language, namely objects, what are objects other than words and concepts - I tend to think Brassier is useful here, there is nothing pure nothingness. That doesn't mean there is aren't real things, but words and concepts return us to an anthropocentric world-view whether we want to or not (this my view not Brassier's). Harman's anti-holism and claims objects as haecceities seem to be in my view just buttresses to hold back criticism of OOO from claims of auto-antropocentricism or panphyscism. Happy to be proven wrong
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