Fracturedpolitics.com - Critical theory about current events

Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events

2012-05-10T11:02:13Z

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?

Interstitial Journal will also consider submissions on topics unrelated to interstitiality, but still within the orbit of modern culture and events. Additionally, we accept reviews (approximately 2,000 words) of recently published theoretical works. Queries about the relevance of a given topic or potential review are welcome. Deadline for submission of papers and reviews for our inaugural issue is December 31, 2012.

In Memoriam: Marisol Bate

2012-01-17T00:39:08Z

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.

PrOOOblems

2012-01-16T11:43:03Z

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?

Object Criticism, Sans the Literary

2011-12-24T12:23:02Z

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

In part, this stems from an aversion to the 'literary bias', by which I mean the idea that a text always involves an act of 'reading' to be dissected, decoded, or deconstructed ad nauseum. As Levi Bryant points out in an exquisite post on the topic, however, meaning--the decoded and deconstructed subject(ivity), if you will--is post-textual, in that the being of a text precedes the derivation of any given meaning. In other words, reading a text--from, for example, the vantage point of critical animal studies--is architectonic, a construction of the reader relating to the textual entity, of both derivative meaning and wholly new objectal arrangements. Note that for this to happen, both the reader and the text must precede the reading, such that the two entities retain their objectal independence from one another. A reading, then, is inherently, utterly contingent. To be a bit cheeky about it, a reading involves is localized manifestation of a text's inhered power to be 'read' a certain way at a given spatiotemporal locus, under highly particular conditions.

Literary criticism--dare I say all lit crit--on the other hand, recuperates meaning within the perceptual and ideological dominion of the reader. It's not that Derrida, Culler, and Kristeva aren't making productive use of a text for aesthetic or ideological critique. Far from it. Instead, these and other theorists close off the relational possibility of a text as a thing-in-itself, bringing it always already within the frame of the ideological anthropos. For these thinkers, there can be no ontopolitics of the text. Rather, the text can only inform ontopolitical considerations, its own being be damned. Ironically, the act of literary criticism is always, in some sense, performative, if only because it involves the invocation of historically and/or ideologically situated chains of iteration to constitute the power to enact by naming. For what is performative force, after all, but the power to establish what qualifies as 'being' through exclusion and abjection, leaving abjected being(s) to haunt the boundaries of the performance? This--this--is why, as Morton maintains, horror is a hallmark of an enmeshed being.

Or becoming, I should say. It's important to note that if a text can be discussed as a text-in-itself, then its being is no less being than other beings. To reiterate, it is finite. It is agential. It obtains existential independence. It is withdrawn. And that's a funky thought for literary critics--how can the inner being of a text be epistemologically inexhaustible and unnarritizable, given that texts are a putative media through which knowledge is propounded? To this, I pose a counter-question: How does the autonomy of the text prevent one from holding certain beliefs? Put simply, it doesn't. Be a Marxist. A Deleuzean. A romantic. A new historicist. A postcolonialist. By all means, investigate those critical angles, from whence we've derived a plenitude of insights into humanity's political, social, economic, and aesthetic condition. Recognize, though, that the text doesn't need you to speak for it. It's perfectly capable of speaking for itself. Literary critics are merely one type of entity that may serve as an audience, as the text circulates throughout myriad assemblages, constantly flowing, cleaving difference wherever it goes.

So, why does this imply the impossibility of an object-oriented literary criticism? One reason, as I said, is the standardization of the 'literary' as an act of domination, whereby the text exists only insofar as its meaning for a given reader exists, reducing the text to an agonizing--very seldom agonistic, mind you--debate over whose claims of domination are superior, who has the prettiest flag. At the same time, specifically literary criticism reduces the text to a prototypically anthropomorphic system of signification about signification, correlating the text to its constituent signifiers and remolding it as-signifier, therein valorizing its ability to function as an aporia bearing the threat of epistemological inconsistency. In place of such a stance, I propose an 'object criticism', sans adjectives and prefixes. No -ary, -al, or -ive. No, this a criticism founded on a relation between distinct, equal partners, human or nonhuman. In an object criticism, the focus shifts from the form of a text to the form of a relation between the text and its others, where the form of the text is a manifestation of potentiality, not a frame dictating interpretation and actancy. As the inner being of a text becomes, its form shifts. Thus, textual form, too, is contingent, or 'formless', if form implicates a quasi-static structure. Interpretation is no longer an act of mastery, but an encounter, an agential act between discrete entities translating each other. While a literary criticism speaks of material effects in terms of consequences resulting from exegetical synthesis, an object criticism mines material traces for virtual processual recursions. Perhaps most importantly, object criticism deploys mereological reasoning, parsing parts of the text--images, signifiers, prosody--and wholes--the text encountered as a whole or totality. And this is key, since the distinction of parts and wholes as distinct entities entering into autonomous sets of relations allows for the preservation of literary insight as a relational form, while (re)partitioning sensibility as dissensual differentiation, uncompliant with any predeterminative epistemic regime.

Democracy of Objects: The Paradox of Substance

2011-12-16T11:31:00Z

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?

I know, I know. More science. Easily extended to the sociopolitical realm, though, so I look forward to your linkage. Next week, we'll be discussing chapter three, "Virtual Proper Being," where we will encounter one Bryant's most innovative and important contributions to object-oriented studies.

A Note On Translation: The Really

2011-12-15T12:23:54Z

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

Cool, but are all translations the same? Of course not. To be is to differ, meaning that translation inheres processes of becoming. Even from an anti-materialist trajectory, objectal being is individualized and withdrawn, such that an object's 'sensual' profiles, to borrow Graham Harman's jargon, deploy their own terms. Perhaps something can be said about the similarity of terms deployed by categorically comparable objects, like books, but the being of my copy of The Quadruple Object, as it rests on my table in Starbucks, is agentially distinct from all other copies of the book distributed across the globe. While the relation between my copy of the text and the text sitting in, say, Timothy Morton's office exist under disparate spatiotemporal conditions, their relations with other objects differ because they are, in fact, wholly different beings. This would be true under any spatiotemporal condition, including situations in which the texts were relating to the same object. For the record, it is also true of beings relating to each other across time and space, as being, time, and space each undergo processes of becoming.

Thus, translations differ as being differs, a maxim that holds true if you're a proponent of Harman's vicarious causation, Bryant's systems approach to prehension, or any other theory of the encounter. That said, what can we deduce about the act of translating, which precedes any particular translation? First, if signifiers and the signified can be said to exist independently of one another, it follows that no logic of signification can replicate an 'original' being. Rather, if the signifier, itself, obtains independent being, then it, too, must engage relationally with the signified as a fully agential object. In this way, translation avoids universalization, as there can be no deep, subsuming experiential structure or pure nomenclature undergirding objectal encounters, contorting their agency to conform to its own qualia and occluding their independence.

Additionally, in contradistinction to language adaptation, objectal translation is a sequestered soliloquy. Many practitioners of linguistic translation, an admittedly admirable and necessary craft for intellectual exchange, contend that translation only becomes recognizable as such within the social parameters articulated by a given community. Gabriel Rockhill, for example, who first translated Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics into English, contends that:

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.

What A Mesh

2011-12-12T13:50:17Z

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.

Democracy of Objects: Hiatus Redux

2011-12-09T11:59:00Z

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.

Democracy of Objects: Paperbacked!

2011-12-03T19:23:11Z

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.

Democracy of Objects: Realist Ontology

2011-11-27T14:39:41Z

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?

I apologize for the inconsistent scheduling of reading group "assignments." The last few weeks have been trying, not least because of the Asia Pacific Economic Catastrophe that overtook Hawaii's shores. This week, I've been battling illness. I think my antibody armies have found a new commander, since they're finally stemming the pathogenical onslaught. And that's setting aside the artsy, filmsy, singingy responsibilities that will consume me through next Wednesday. After that, things should be back to normal-ish. I hope. Next week: "The Paradox of Substance, Bryant's second chapter.

Hey, how are your projects going, by the way? Anyone making progress?

Discussion Question #4: OOO and Nazism

2011-11-25T09:38:31Z

Object-oriented philosophy, in its original form, stems largely from Martin Heidegger's famous tool-analysis, in which the German thinker argued that tool-beings are usually encountered as ready-to-hand within equipmental systems, appearing as individuals only upon breakage or other cessation of utility to humans. Naturally, this analysis takes into account Heidegger's overall account of being, or dasein, which some ~~myopic~~ historians view as imbued with totalitarian, even Hitlerian, affinities that extend through theorists influenced by Heidgger, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Take, for example, the following quotes from Emmanuel Faye's ~~hyperbolic and asinine~~ Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy:

Therefore we must take seriously what authors such as Heidegger or Schmitt spell out in their writings or express in their lectures and classes. When they use the word "extermination" (Vernichtung), it is no mere idle fancy. Coming from much-heeded sources, these statements catch on and prepare the future, pending their translation into deeds, and history has shown how rapidly these fatal statements are implemented in Hitlerism...It is impossible to overemphasize this point after having seen the author of The Politics of Friendship (which has unfortunately contributed to the planetary dissemination of the ideas of Schmitt and Heidegger), allowing himself to be caught up in all the smears devised by these two Nazis. Taking the case of Heidegger alone, Jacques Derrida affirms that "Heidegger never names the enemy," although the texts in which he designates "the Asiatic" as the enemy--that is, in the language of the period, mainly the Jews--are legion. The author also declares in several instances that the Heideggerian polemos is "certainly not" a "human war," and he goes so far as to magnify "the originary...Kampf."...Now even if Derrida could not have had access to all the texts now published in the so-called complete edition, the courses already published, such as those of 1934-1935 on Holderlin's hymns, should have alerted him to the danger of the doctrine and its true objectives, since their racial content is clear and the designation of the adversary as "the Asiatic" is explicit (p. 171-172).

And again, from a discussion of the three "waves" after Heideggerian influence that have washed over the intellectual, and specifically metaphysical, community:

The second wave, quite different and even in opposition to the first in its presuppositions, followed the publication of the letter to Jean Beaufret in 1947 known as the Letter on Humanism. This was the "anti-humanism" of the generation of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, who, in their last years, acknowledged the ascendance exerted on them by Heidegger. It was a time when his influence led many to challenge all philosophy of man and consciousness. It was fashionable to brush aside Sarte's "humanism" with disdain. The fact that Heidegger had begun by writing to Sarte and commending him, even inviting him to Todtnauberg, was generally not known. It was not until after having understood that Sarte was not going to lend him his support that, in an about-face whose motives were strategic rather than philosophical, Heidegger set about attacking him publicly...The third wave, inspired mainly by the collection of lectures published in 1968 in Questions I and by the publication of the translation of Nietzche in 1971 (the reading of which also left its mark on Foucault), was the result of a more insistent reading of Heidegger. His representatives imposed the theme of the "end of metaphysics" and of its being "gone beyond," without any deep inquiry into the real meaning of "metaphysics" in his writings, especially in the years 1939-1942. This is the provenance of "deconstruction," which, translating Heidegger's Abbau and Destruktion, departed France in conquest of the "humanities departments" of American universities, at first with the critical support of Paul de Man. The endeavor made it possible for Heidegger to expand to the United States and subsequently to the entire world, to the point of making him appear to be the chief representative of what has been called "continental philosophy." The Heideggerian hermeneutics also penetrated large domains of academic life in France, even in the area of Cartesian studies, where it spread the view...that Heidegger represented the "end" of metaphysics and the "only path" for thought, whereas we know today that his doctrine is a journey without return, in which philosophy's contribution is discredited and destroyed (p.320).

Of course, Faye, professor emeritus of French and philosophy ~~and probably ass kissing~~ at Berry College, heaps high praise upon himself for choosing "a very different path," having "long concentrated [his] research on humanist thought, in order to show the remarkable contribution to modern philosophy of thinkers as different as Charles de Bovelles, Michel de Montaigne, and Rene Descartes, whose efforts resulted in a better understanding of the evolution of the human being and the achievement of his own perfection, without confining him within a preconceived doctrine or system." So, today's question: How might object-oriented philosophy, of any kind, respond to allegations that in borrowing from Heidegger, we're carrying forward Nazi trajectories? Moreover, in what ways can object-oriented thought contextualize historical events, including Heidegger's role in the Nazi Party?

Reciprocating Fictions

2011-11-22T04:23:17Z

Levi Bryant was kind enough to note my earlier post about fictional objects on his blog, today, while clarifying his own view of object-oriented fictions. Read: The Reality of Fictions. Great stuff on the role of fictions in the entropic regulation of autopoietic systems, which the reading group for Democracy of Objects will be getting to in a couple of weeks. On a personal note, fictional objects are really difficult to think through, precisely because they're fictional. I'm often asked by peers, "How you can you be a realist and say that fictions are ontologically equal to real objects, like dogs or birds or Monsanto?" Without getting into the specifics of the question (I've done that elsewhere, as has just about every other object-oriented thinker around), the conceptual paradox is a hurdle. One question that has come up in my comment threads and courses drives the difficulty home: If objects are existentially independent from one another, how can something like a dream be considered an entity, and if dreams aren't considered an entity, how do you qualify their effects? Good question. My answer--coming sometime this week, as I continue to parse out my theory--leaves even me deeply unsatisfied, as the implications contravene much accepted psychological thought. I say this not to sound whiny, but to impart an axiom of pluralism. Obviously, pluralization speaks to my democratic ethos. At the same time, one of the grounds of specifically agonistic pluralism is that no one can lay claim to all possible lines of object-oriented flight--not Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, Jeffrey Cohen, Elieen Joy, Paul Ennis, myself, or others. Rather than being a "movement" in the sense of reified doctrine, object-oriented philosophy can only be described as such in the sense that it is constantly in motion, just as it stands against the hyperrelated fixation of entities. Don't feel shy about positing a new idea. We're an ocean, not a pool, so we love it when people make waves.

Next Week: Reading Group Returns

2011-11-20T08:32:50Z

Yeah, I've been negligent. Actually, I've been busy--really busy. Between academic responsibilities, journal expansion, and A Pending Economic Catastrophe (APEC), my posting time has been limited. Additionally, online access to Levi Bryant's Democracy of Objects has been intermittent over the past week, even for me. This Friday, however, we will be resuming our reading group with the first chapter from the book, which sets the stage for Bryant's more detailed autopoietic objectal theory. Good stuff, I promise. And it's never to late to join.

In the meantime, please answer the following question: What types of subjects would you like to see covered on 'OO Frequency', the new video channel at O-Zone Journal's website? We're trying to post at least one video each week and would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to submit, too, if you feel so inclined!

Occupy Fiction(al Objects): A Theoretical Outline

2011-11-17T13:31:25Z

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.

Interview: Jack Zipes

2011-11-13T11:38:27Z

Weddings. Adventures. Romances, both committed and otherwise. Dreams. Sports endings. Success stories involving the mass accumulation of money.

These are just a few of the items our society often describes with the signifier "fairy tale." Contrast them with a common refrain from irked parents toward idealistic youth: "You're not living in a fairy tale!" Apparently, we can have it both it ways in a capitalist democracy.

For Jack Zipes, however, the resonance of fairy tales extends far beyond adjectival colloquialisms. In fact, the history of fairy tales undermines their rhetorical misappropriation, which beds with the urge to consume. Weddings? Better have the best photographer and a designer gown. Romance? Only as real as the cost of the wedding. Sports endings? Municipal competition at the expense of impoverished citizens, a few of whose children may populate the teams, but the majority whom could never afford a ticket. As for mad money, what better example than Disney, the penultimate purchaser of great artists for the purpose of perverting classical narratives? In the interview below, Zipes explains, among other things, the difference between foundational fairy tales and their modern adaptations, as well as how both play out in our current epoch of social spectacles.

Q: To begin, you've often discussed how fairy tale trajectories reflect shifting social dynamics, including adaptation to the insertion of new technologies into people's daily activities. Given that fairy tales articulate and reinforce social codes, how is the normative power of fairy tales being challenged and/or reinforced by the proliferation of new media, and how is the ethos of new media technologies reflected in the modern presentation of fantastical tropes?

What ethos? Do the new technologies contain an ethos? Do mechanical inventions contain an ethos? Well, I suppose some do, like guns and bombs and missiles. But, for the most part, technologies are marvelous inventions that can be used ethically or unethically, depending on who controls them. Walter Benjamin pointed this out many years ago in his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechancial Reproduction." To the extent that most technologies are in the hands of large corporations, we can expect that the new technologies will basically function to make money and deplete the normative power of storytelling and fairy tales. I recently gave a talk about the hyping of fairy tales by the mass media, and if you don't mind, I shall answer your question by quoting a longish excerpt from this talk.

The Grimms promoted the collecting of all sorts of folk tales throughout the nineteenth century, and they were certain that if other educated men and women began gathering tales from the common people, these stories, especially the fairy tales, would resonate among young and old from all social classes. Indeed, to a great extent, they were right. The nineteenth century, especially in Europe and North America, became the golden age of fairy-tale collecting that led to the foundation of folklore societies. By the twentieth century, the fairy tale and other simple folk genres began to thrive not only by word of mouth and through print, as they had for centuries, but they were also transformed, adapted, and disseminated through radio, postcards, greeting cards, comics, cinema, fine arts, performing arts, wedding ceremonies, television, dolls, toys, games, theme parks, clothes, the Internet, university courses, and numerous other media and objects. Among the modes of hyped advertising were posters, billboards, interviews, window dressings, department store shows, radio, tv, and Internet interviews, ads in newspapers, magazines, and journals, and all the other kinds of paratexts that accompany a cultural product. As I have argued in my book Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, the classical fairy tales have become memes, cultural bits of relevant information, and the paratexts of fairy tales have formed memeplexes, that is, groups of variants that add to the meaning of the meme. In correspondence with Michael Drout, who has written a significant book about memes, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the AngloSaxon Tenth Century, he has suggested: "In memetic terms, I think a para-text is a meme-plex that forms around a text, and the para-textual material can provide extra data about how to interpret what's inside the text. That material, because it stays in its own form, can become separated from its original cultural context, which evolves more quickly than something in a fixed form can. The para-text, then, provides meta-data about how ambiguities in the main text should be interpreted. The most obvious place where this happens is when we get a particular image of an actor or actress (or animation) of a traditional tale, and that image is thereafter fixed in place even when some of the written descriptions might be more ambiguous, but I'm thinking that material like toys, posters, etc., also works to form around the text in this way (I have a box in the basement filled with my daughter's Disney princesses; these dolls lock into place a particular look for fairy tale characters whose descriptions are not quite as fixed as the icon designed to sell merchandise to little girls)."

Today we are inundated by fairy tales that are not only present in the home but are also taught from pre-school through the university in the UK and North America. They are in all walks of life, and to some degree, we even try to transform our lives into fairy tales. They have become second nature, or as Roland Barthes might say, fairy tales have become 'mythic.' They appear to be universal and natural stories of the way life should be while concealing their artistic constellations and their basic history and ideology. In my book Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, I remarked that it is impossible to grasp the history of the fairy tale and the relationship of the fairy tale to myth without taking into consideration the manner in which tales have been revised, duplicated, adapted, and manipulated to reinforce dominant ideologies and often to subvert them. To be more precise, the evolution of the fairy tale as a cultural genre is marked by a process of dialectical appropriation involving imitation and revision that set the cultural conditions for its mythicization, institutionalization, and expansion as a mass-mediated genre through radio, film, television, and the Internet. For the most part, the history of this memetic process is obscured if not negated today by hyping newly produced fairy-tale films, books, musicals, and other products as extraordinary achievements that actually cheapen the meaning of fairy tales that the Brothers Grimm and other nineteenth-century collectors sought to preserve. Hyping is the exact opposite of preservation and involves, as I have argued, conning consumers and selling products that have a meager cultural value and will not last.

Some recent fairy-tale films produced by the mainstream culture industry reveal how filmmakers and producers hype to sell shallow products geared primarily to make money. They use the mass media to exploit the widespread and constant interest in fairy tales that has actually deepened since the nineteenth century. For instance, in December of 2010, the Disney corporation dubbed the Grimms' "Rapunzel," called it Tangled, and announced: "Disney presents a new twist on one of the most hilarious and hair-raising tales ever told." Actually, the Disney promoters should have called the film Mangled because of the way it slaughtered and emptied the meaning of the Grimms' and other "Rapunzel" folk tales. When viewed closely, Tangled is yet another inane remake of Disney's Snow White. The major conflict is between a pouting adolescent princess and a witch. The Disney films repeatedly tend to demonize older women and infantilize young women. Gone are any hints that "Rapunzel" might reflect a deeper initiation ritual in which wise old women keep young girls in isolation to protect them.

Gone, too, are any hints in Catherine Hardwicke's recent 2011 film Red Riding Hood that "Little Red Riding Hood" is a serious and complicated tale about rape. Here much of the hype, which cost millions of dollars, began long before the film was even shown. For instance, last November, The Los Angeles Times proclaimed: "'Catherine Hardwicke understands impetuous teen heroines the way George Lucas reverse-engineers robot sidekicks. In March, the director of Twilight and Thirteen will unleash her newest troublemaker upon the world with a dark, sensuous spin on 'Red Riding Hood.'" However, the only thing that Hardwicke demonstrated is that she understands neither teens nor fairy tales, and her theme-park sets, stereotyped characters, and father-turned-werewolf gave rise to a ridiculous, convoluted plot that bored audiences. The only thing she understands is how to hype and sell herself and all the products connected with the film. Writing on March 8, 2011 in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Carpenter reported about the novel and e-book which were issued before the film: "The book debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times children's paperback bestseller list when it was released in late January, serving as a sort of multimedia prequel and pump-primer for the film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke. As an e-book, Red Riding Hood includes video interviews with Hardwicke and her many collaborators, an animated short film, audio discussion about the set design and props, costume sketches, and Hardwicke's hand-drawn maps of the world where Red Riding Hood takes place, among other things...To novelize Red Riding Hood, Hardwicke got the OK from her publisher, Little Brown. She just needed an author to write it. For that, she turned to a 21-year-old graduate of Barnard's creative writing program named Sarah Blakely-Cartwright." Neither the print novel nor the e-book are worth the paper or screen on which they are printed or beamed. Somehow, however, the celebrity Hardwicke and her producers had to keep trying to make money, and of course, there was a DVD issued in June with special features including an alternate ending to the film, which depicts Valerie, alias Red Riding Hood, with a newborn child in her arms at her grandmother's house, where her lover unites with her. If this were not enough, there was a sequel book to the film and prequel to the DVD, Red Riding Hood from Script to Screen, written by Hardwicke and David Leslie Johnson, and published on April 12, 2011. It contains an introduction, notes, and sketches by Hardwicke, the screenplay by Johnson, 96 pages of color concept art, storyboards, and costume evolution and illustrations, and behind-the-scenes photographs. The synergy was completed later in June by the DVD. Profits for a planned blockbuster, which was a critical flop and commercial fiasco, have to be obtained several weeks after the premiere. But nothing could save Hardwicke's film, not even her vapid comments about the tale or the ridiculous hyperbole to foster consumerism.

As for other ridiculously hyped films, there is Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil, touted on one of the official websites on October 28, 2009, a year and a half before the film was even released: "This is a film that all children should watch! A fun, exciting movie with a lesson to be learned by the end. The animation is quite exceptional, and the actors as well as actresses do a great job in displaying their roles within the film. The story is a must have for those who enjoy good happy endings. Not to reveal too much, but the story of Hood vs. Evil is a very attractive one. Keep your eye on this film because it could be something to talk about for sometime." Yet, this computer animated film is nothing less than an uninspired sequel to the 2005 Hoodwinked, which features Red Riding Hood and the Wolf as sleuths, called upon to work together to rescue Hansel and Gretel from a witch. As the AP reporter Jake Coyle has written, "Such mash-ups of fairy tales have become commonplace since Shrek and children's books like David Wiesner's The Three Pigs."

What is also commonplace, of course, is hype. Ever since the end of World War II, advertising and publicity have exaggerated and distorted the value of all products. We live in a world of hype, but it is also a world that manages to produce works of art that take fairy tales and the Brothers Grimm seriously--and not only the Grimms, but many of the writers of classical fairy tales such as Charles Perrault, Madame d'Aulnoy, Hans Christian Andersen, Collodi, and Lewis Carroll. Their works continue to resonate with us not because of hype, but because of their integrity: They have tapped into our utopian need for the "corrective" worlds of fairy tales. In respecting the integrity of past fairy-tale artworks, numerous contemporary filmmakers such as Michel Ocelot and Catherine Breillat in France, Hayao Miyazaki in Japan, Christoph Hochhäusler in Germany, Yim Phil-Sung in South Korea, Garri Bardin in Russia, and Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton in the US have re-created fairy tales with such verve and imagination that, though they need advertisement, do not depend on hype to appeal to audiences. They depend on our hope for changing the world in a meaningful way. The same can be said for some of the remarkable fairy tales written by such talented authors such as Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, A.S. Byatt, Marina Warner, Tanith Lee, Philip Pullman in the UK, Margaret Atwood in Canada, and Robert Coover, Jane Yolen, Donna Jo Napoli, John Barth, Francesca Lia Bloch in the U.S. They do not need hype to be recognized as storytellers who are keeping the profound tradition of the fairy tale alive. Thanks to them the Grimms can rest peacefully in their graves, for hype can never destroy the substantial quality of meaningful fairy tales.

Q: To extend my previous question, American networks now air two primetime television series that are based on fairy tales, Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Both shows attempt to bridge fairy tales with reality by bringing the conflicts of the former to bear upon the latter, with fairy tale characters becoming inhabitants of the modern world. What, if anything, do these shows say about society's changing affect with regard to its sociocultural condition, as well as our perception of the uncanny?

Well, I really wouldn't say that Grimm and Once Upon a Time attempt to bridge fairy tales with reality. Both shows, slickly produced as spectacles, exploit fairy-tale motifs and plots to sell the products (peripherals) that surround the actual screenplays. There is nothing relevant in either of the shows that enables viewers to gain a better understanding of fairy tales or the reality of the viewers. One show maintains that fairy tales are real (ABC) and the other, that reality is not a fairy tale (NBC). The fact is that both shows are conventional and predictable, if not trite, bricolages of fairy tales. Once Upon a Time is perhaps the most trivial and continues a sexist depiction of women fighting other women over men and basically demonizes the witch figure in a Caucasian world that bears little resemblance to any town I have ever encountered in America. Grimm has the now typical multicolored detective buddy team, a sentimental story about a young male, whose love for his beautiful girlfriend might endanger the sweet thing, an assortment of werewolves, who never played a role in the Grimms' tale or world, and gruesome scenes that are purposely made to chill our bones, though we know that our heroes will always triumph in the end. These shows only reveal that the major tv corporations merely want spectacles to crreate more profit and to detract us from the more crucial social issues that touch our everyday lives.

Q: In one of your most famous essays, "Breaking the Disney Spell," you argued that Disney recasts fairy tales through the gaze of mass mediation, specifically with an eye toward consumption and commodification. In what ways have fairy tales as a literary genre further collapsed into commodification with the inception of new animation techniques and studios, like Pixar (now owned by Disney, of course) and Dreamworks?

All one has to do is view the more recent Disney, Dreamwork, and other commerical films -- Tangled, Hoodwinked Too, Puss in Boots, all the Shrek films after the initial one--to understand how the latest animation techniques are being used for commodification. The tales told are stale, even if the special effects are new. This is the contradiction in these productions--while technology makes great advances, the filmmakers dumb down fairy tales and use the technological innovations to cater to the lowest common denominators of taste in America. There are some films like How to Train Your Dragon and The Secret of Kells and the Russian Bardin's The Ugly Duckling, the Czech Barta's In the Attic, and the French Ocelot's Azur and Asmar that do manage to combine technological innovation with brilliant storytelling, but their films are not widely distributed.

Q: In the past, you've talked about fairy tales carrying forth an emancipatory political aesthetic, one that valorizes justice to the extent of, at times, being considered subversive. Can fairly tales challenge modern power relations and, if so, how can they be employed to critique the historical apparatuses upon which today's political discourses are based?

Fairy tales are by their nature subversive. Not all, but most. This is because they depict a counter world based on naive morality that stands in opposition to the corrupt "real" world based on on the notion that might makes right. The globalized network power is so strong that fairy tales cannot really challenge modern power relations or even be employed to critique present-day globalized capitalism. I don't mean that they cannot do this, that is, offer a critique, as Gari Bardin, Jiri Barta, Jan Svankmajer, Michel Ocelot and others do so creatively in their films. And, of course, there are large numbers of writers who have adapted fairy tales in extraordinary ways. But we cannot ask of art and artists to do what we must first do through social action in our daily lives. Fairy tales offer hope and plans for social action. We must realize them.

Q: I belong to a philosophical movement called "object-oriented ontology," whose basic tenet is that all objects, human and nonhuman, exist on equal footing with one another. Consequently, objects are said to have all sorts of qualities that are not exhausted by human usage. While this seems weird to a lot of people (and rightfully so), it occurs to me that fairy tales emphasize the life of objects more than many other literary genres, imbuing such things as lamps and mirrors with unique potential. Can you briefly discuss the way objects are used in fairy tales, especially with regard to how they comport or conflict with the actions of human characters, or take on lives of their own?

Among the great fairy-tale writers who first used objects were E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hans Christian Andersen, and Oscar Wilde. Of course, in the ancient oral traditions, objects were always endowed with magical, if not life-like, powers. There was a sense in pagan times and even up to the present that all objects and animals deserved to be revered or treated in the same way that humans treated each other. It is as though humans set the standards for normative behavior that is considered humane behavior. But as you and I know, we humans are not the most humane animals in the world. (My dog is more kind and humane than I am!) So, there is a tendency among fairy-tale writers and storytellers to endow objects with special qualities that humans must learn to appreciate, otherwise the objects will work against them. In many respects, this critical attitude can be seen in the way science fiction writers have developed stories that reflect how machines and robots rebel against deceitful and untrustworthy humans. In fairy tales, the magical objects that are acquired by oppressed protagonists come to their aid because these protagonists are kind and decent people.

Q: The last decade has seen a renewed focus on children's literature, owing largely to the commercial success of the Twilight and Harry Potter book series. Have these works extended the hegemony of the culture industry of which they are a part, and, more generally, how can more pluralistic forms of children's literature overcome processes of cultural homogenization in order to gain an audience?

You forgot to mention all the new tweeny books such as the Gossip Girls series or even the Grimm Sisters series. I don't think that the artful books for young readers will ever overcome the process of cultural homogenization, but I am not pessimistic because there are hundreds of superb writers and illustrators in the world, who still manage to be published and distributed. I have stated in a talk that 90 percent of children's literature tends to be schlock. Neil Gaiman criticized me and argued that even if children read shit, it's good for them because we use shit to fertilize the land and people. I think Gaiman's popularist attitude is stupid and silly because we don't use human shit, which is what these books are, to fertilize and cultivate the brains and imaginations of young people. Let's face it, if you dumb down children and keep dumbing them down, they will not learn to think for themselves and be encouraged to explore the world and their own talents. So, I think that we need to keep fostering provocative and controversial children's literature, and ironically, many of Gaiman's books fall into that category--not all, but enough so that he should know the difference between schock and quality literature and what causes cultural homogenization. As long as we support marginal work in the field of cultural production and resist and criticize schlock, there is hope that innovative books for young readers will not be neglected and will keep resistance to cultural hegemony alive.

Jack Zipes is a former Professor of German at the University of Minnesota. A renowned authority on the history and social significance fairy tales, he has published numerous books on the subject, including Fairy Tale As Myth/Myth As Fairy Tale, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, and Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre.

Democracy of Objects: Slight Delay

2011-11-05T22:26:40Z

Owing to access issues at the Open Humanities Press website and a very full plate, this week, the reading group devoted to Levi Bryant's Democracy of Objects will be pushed back one week. Review questions for Chapter 1, entitled "Grounds for a Realist Ontology," will be posted next Friday. Until then, please continue to post in the discussion thread covering the book's introduction.

Object-Oriented Wiki, Again

2011-11-03T09:19:09Z

Now that I'm not posting videos at the top of my posts, I feel more comfortable issuing short comments. Thus, this.

A few months ago, I ~~completely overhauled~~ revised the Wikipedia entry on object-oriented ontology, composing sections on the metaphysical idea's major proponents--Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, and Ian Bogost--along with an explication of tenets common to most, if not all, object-oriented thinkers. Additionally, I included links to blogs, journals, audio and video lectures, interviews, and a reading list. A reading list, for goodness sake. After ~~cringing at~~ enjoying discussion threads on larvalsubjects.com and bogost.com/blog, today, I felt the need to repost the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology. Okay, that's twice in a single blog.

Deleuze once said that his philosophical corpus was more readily understood by those who took his scientific images literally, rather than metaphorically. Or maybe that was Guattari. Or Paul Patton. At any rate, it occurs to me that while object-oriented theory doesn't directly parallel the 'figurative' gesture embodied in Deleuzean thought, the principle for interpretation is similar. When I say 'hyperrelationality', I critically invoke the idea that everything is interconnected, intertwined with(in) the being of everything else to form a unified, undifferentiated totality. When Timothy Morton describes 'hyperobjects', he means objects that elude the grasp of any local manifestation or relation between entities. When Levi Bryant discusses 'virtuality' and 'actuality', he is referring to the expression of an object's qualities at a given spatiotemporal locus, in the case of the former, and potential (powers) retained by an object across spatiotemporal loci, in the case of the latter. I'm being a bit reductionist, but that's the gist, and it's not hard to understand...is it?

Clearly, object-oriented philosophy is counterintuitive and "weird," even to some people who claim otherwise. At the same time, however, its simplicity is elegant and attractive, unless one tries to recuperate objectal reality within the delimited realm of human consciousness, thereby anthropocentrizing object-oriented claims--a metaphysical oxymoron, if ever there was one. Moreover, the drive toward obscurantism, or the complementary belief that philosophy must be indescribably complex to be profound, strikes me as a precursor to unbridled negationism, in which thinkers attempt to outdo one another in their capacity to contradict ad nauseum. Contradiction, it should be noted, is not the same as problematization. To problematize is to engage in a dialogic exchange that reveals ideational stratum foreclosed by a theoretical claim, pointing the way toward alternative interpretations of an event or evincing agonistic loci of enunciation. Contradiction, on the other hand, involves the truncation of dialogue, such that the the contradictor's (often normative) claim is set antagonistically against a competing claim, or series thereof, in turn predicating truth-value on an 'us' versus 'them' binary. There's a place for that, as, for example, in cases where one perceives ethical infringement or human rights abuses. Overuse or misapplication, however, turns contradiction into a 'virtuous vice', meaning a an action or tool holding equal power to open and and close space for philosophical construction.

Stop. Take a mental breath. Now that you've relaxed, want good rule of thumb? Don't participate in discussions on a topic you haven't researched, unless you're willing to acknowledge your own ignorance. For serious.

Happy Halloween: Undead, In Debt America

2011-11-01T09:20:34Z

It's a truism of the Tea Party: America is dying. Buckling under the yoke of the Obama administration, the nation is about to collapse from monstrous debt, mounting sexual hedonism, mobs of illegal immigrants and the Prophet Mohammed. Be afraid, be very afraid. Also, don't Google for news on the deficit supercommittee negotations.

While some of the angst is genuine--U.S. debt is spiraling upward, for example, thanks to years of catering to the uber-crust--much of the rhetoric is overheated, meant to distract audiences from more deliberative disquisitions, while galvanizing nostalgia for a past that never existed. From whom, then, can we seek advice in crafting an answer to alarms about the unraveling of our star-spangled sweaters? Glenn Beck? The president? John Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

The latter duo attracted 200,000 people to the Washington Mall, last October, but another man may be more worthy of consideration, a man whose legacy shone the day after the Stewart/Colbert rally, on Halloween, like it does each year. No, not Freddie Kruegger. Bram Stoker, author of "Dracula," the world's most famous version of vampiric folklore. Though Irish, Stoker wrote a quintessentially American novel. Not for its depictions of bloodlust, mind you. We have Buffy for that. Instead, what is revelatory about Stoker's narrative is his extrapolation of falsehood from discourses of death, which, for the gothic author, involves the substitution of an inauthentic metaphysical struggle for a natural state of being. Stoker's portrayal of Lucy Westerna's demise provides an exemplar:

The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions...Finally, it lay still. The terrible task was over...There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in her life, with her face of unequaled sweetness and purity. True that there were, as we had seen them in life, the traces of care and pain and waste, but these were all dear to us, for they marked her truth to what we knew (Stoker, Dracula, 1997).

In the preceding passage, Stoker distinguishes between the truth of humanity and the fallacy of vampirism, marked by a totalizing, albeit extremely seductive, athanatos (ἀθάνατος) that truncates the individuation of the self from relations of resonance, leaving the individual languishing through an ever-present succession of post-primordial moments. Relieved from the burden of contemplating mortality, the self is unable to conceptualize the potentiality of its own being (or, more intersubjectively and detachedly, dasein), which, following Heideggerian inquiries, coalesces within the indeterminacy of a futuristic orientation. As Heidegger states:

Resoluteness, transparent to itself, understands that the indefiniteness of its potentiality-of-being is always determined only in a resolution with regard to the actual situation. It knows about the indefiniteness that prevails in a being that exists. But this knowledge must itself arise from an authentic disclosure if it is to correspond to authentic resoluteness. Although it always becomes certain in resolution, the indefiniteness of one's own potentiality-of-being always reveals itself completely only in being-toward-death (Heidegger, Being and Time, 1996).

If, therefore, resoluteness becomes primordial only through the possibilization of the impossibility of death, it is the anticipation of death that revalues being, allowing it to be reconsidered from the vantage point of its ownmost finitude. Modalized toward authenticity, anticipatory resolution resounds the call for conscience concealed by athanatosian power, freeing the self to articulate an identity that is always already differentiating.

Followers of the Tea Party movement are suffering from cognitive dissonance, accordingly, because of their paradoxical assertion that America is showing the symptoms of mortal decay, yet cannot empirically pass away. Viewed less as a nation than an enduring empire, the United States is said to be both the greatest civilization in history and the last, best hope for mankind. Military-industrial dominance notwithstanding, however, such claims of imperial exceptionalism remain athanatosian, in the vampiric sense, in their attempt to exile the actualization of death's immanence from the realm of thinkability propounded within the immortal borders of Pax Americana. Consequently, disclosures stemming from an authentic being-toward-death are rendered unintelligible, barring a free and open auscultation of democracy's potential from being fostered by the American political imaginary. What predominates, unfortunately, is inauthentic triumphalism parading as ontological certainty, sucking the lifeforce out of any identity that animates the exigent materiality of existence.

Okay, now Google for the latest on the supercommittee negotiations.

Democracy of Objects: Introduction

2011-10-29T02:38:00Z

It's almost freezing in New York City. Don't tell the Occupy Wall Street protestors, though, who are fortifying their encampment like George Washington at Valley Forge. Apropos, since it's the founding general's principles of fairness and equality that they're fighting to preserve. Even as their chests chill, the demonstrators' hearts have likely been warmed by the national traction they've gained. Occupy groups now exist in all 50 states. While the level of action and direct confrontation varies from city to city, the rabid spread of the movement--coupled with rising favorability in opinion polls--testifies to the urgency of its ideas, which remain amorphous enough to resist partisan appropriation. Unlike the banks bailed out by the federal government's TARP program, Occupy has truly become "too big to fail," such that disciplinary violence committed against activists (like, say, Oakland police pelting an Iraq War veteran with rubber bullets) only aggrandizes the cause's appeal. That said, how can philosophy, and specifically Levi Bryant's onticological position, speak to the Occupy event? Questions to consider, when discussing this week's reading:

In the introduction to Democracy of Objects, Bryant issues the challenge of "unshackling" the being of objects from the human gaze. What might this imply for the formation and modern representation of political assemblages, particularly the collectives of commodification and industrial exploitation that Occupy Wall Street stands against?
Much post-Kantian sociopolitical philosophy revolves around the collocation of discursive or performative subjectivities, with the deconstruction of how subjectivities are reified posited as an authentically emancipatory gesture. How does Bryant invite us to expand ontological and political emancipation beyond human subjectivities, and in what way(s), if any, does the Occupy movement open space for considering the agency of nonhuman objects, in terms of both reconfiguring social signification and instigating actions/relations of their own accord?

As always, feel free to pose your own questions and update others on your projects, assuming you're still working on them. Next Friday, we'll be covering the book's first chapter, entitled "Grounds for a Realist Ontology." For now, hit the thread!

CFP and Journal Launch: O-Zone

2011-10-24T22:46:27Z

Mission control, we're ready for launch.

After three weeks of working through the details, O-Zone: A Journal of Awesomeness--er--O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies (that is to say, object-oriented awesomeness) is breathing fresh air. And we already have our first call for papers posted. Care to contribute? If so, see below.

Object/Ecology

O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies

Puncta 1

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in ecology in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, with exciting new conceptual innovations and critically reflective returns to the work of earlier ecological studies. If ecological thought, in its most broad definition, investigates the interrelations and interactions of entities with one another, then the concept and domain of ecology can be expanded significantly, referring not simply to the natural world apart from social structures and configurations, but rather to relations between entities of any kind, regardless of whether they are natural, technological, social, or discursive. In short, culture and society are no longer thought of as something distinct from nature, but as one formation of nature among others. Increasingly, a sensibility has emerged that views as impossible the treatment of society and nature as distinct and separate domains, and instead sees the two as deeply enmeshed with one another. Similarly, ecological and posthumanist developments have come to intersect with one another, jointly conceptualizing humans not as sovereign makers of all other tools, beings, and meanings, but as beings (or objects) among other beings (and objects)--animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman--entwined in a variety of complex contingencies.

The inaugural issue of O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies seeks to expand current ecological dialogues and open new trajectories for ecological engagement vis-a-vis the world of objects, or even world(s)-as-object(s). Authors are invited to contribute short meditations, of approximately 2,000 to 3,000 words, on any object-oriented ecological turn or (re)turn percolating through their current work. Authors might consider he following questions when composing their contributions:

How do the post-correlationist, post-Kantian, and materialist turns transform our understanding of the systems, operations, objects, and/or ontology of ecology?
What is an ecological politics, and what might certain political considerations bring to object-oriented and new materialist trends of ecological thinking? Conversely, how might an intensive focus on the singularity and autonomy of objects revise our conceptions of political domains?
Object-oriented theorists have proposed a number of new critical modes to expand ecological inquiry, like dark and black ecology. In what ways do these new approaches challenge the traditionally "green" orientations of ecological investigation? Further, what other new modes of ecological thought might we propose now, beyond green?
Ecology has traditionally been defined as the study of systems of interdependent relations, often with respect to natural environments. How might certain strains of object-oriented thought that take as a given the withdrawn nature and independent reality of objects give rise to new ecological thinking? Further, what would it mean to think the non- or para-"natural world" ecologically, such as new media, machinic and other technologies, artificial life, bioinformatics, cloning, and the like?
What is the relationship between posthumanism and ecology? Can there be a post-ecology, and how might that relate to the "life" of objects?
What would it mean to retrieve earlier ecological and materialist voices, especially from feminist, gender, and queer studies, and what might these voices contribute to object-oriented and new materialist modes of thought?

These questions are only suggestions for possible meditations. Authors are also invited to develop their own topics.

For its inaugural issue, or "puncta," O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies will also consider submissions on topics unrelated to ecology, but still within the orbit of object-oriented studies. These contributions might take the form of short essays, longer articles (of no more than 10,000 words), or digital media. In addition, we are accepting reviews of recently published works on object-oriented and new materialism subjects. Queries about the relevance of a given topic or potential review are welcome.

Deadline for submissions is May 30, 2012. Please send all submissions and queries to editors@ozone-journal.com.