Zachary Price has been prompting me to talk about it so here goes. For a kick off, there's no inherent politics to OOO and I for one think that's a good thing. One of us (Levi Bryant) is an avowed Marxist, and another is an avowed non-Marxist (Ian Bogost). Graham has argued in several places that one of the tests of a robust ontology is whether it can serve a number of different political masters. I agree with that. And hey we're talking about fundamental ontology here, not why the Tea Party should be resisted by any means necessary.
And I think there is a bigger picture here, in all seriousness. Hegelianism, in which ideas inevitably come bundled with attitudes, is a hugely dominant view when it comes to politics in scholarly circles, like it or not (and whether it's consciously held or not). I very much like the basic Hegelian idea that ideas come bundled with attitudes. (As long as you pare away the teleology.)
But if you're not careful this mode of thinking (“Spot the subject position,” like “Spot the ball” in pre-internet entertainment days) lands in you correlationism land. There's a kind of "attitude about attitudes" that defines correlationism, namely that the goal in life is to get exactly the right attitude about everything. “If we all just think really hard maybe the rain will stop” (MC at Woodstock). Left cynicism. You name it. This is what OOO has come to replace. So I'm not too keen to marry OOO to a politics right now thanks very much.
The 30-year-old me can't believe that I just said that and wants to take me outside for a slap. Too bad, 30-year-old me! You are a mere passing memory.
Okay. Let's just start with the notion that objects withdraw. This means that everything is unique, I think. It's my idea of the strange stranger applied to all entities. All entities are uncanny, even to themselves.
Unique doesn't mean individual. Think of a front lawn. It's an expression of individualism, but not uniqueness. As a matter of fact there are some very strict rules as to what counts as a proper front lawn, just as there are rules about proper individualism. In Colorado you can be arrested in certain towns for not trimming your lawn just right.
Since objects withdraw, there is no top object and no bottom object. No “matter,” no lava, no holistic web. Just a plenum of unique objects.
I don't know about you but that strikes me as an anarchy. So I'm going to put my foot in my mouth and live to regret this, and I can't believe I'm actually thinking this. But I might be an anarchist object-oriented ontologist. Now the 30-year-old me is becoming apoplectic and is about to have a cardiac arrest or murder me. I thought I had it all figured out and one thing I'd figured out was, anarchy was not cool.
16 comments:
pplease publish collection of essays from this blog; it would be marvelous. Hi Tim. yeah. it is like that. the end of the trying to find the attitude that fits/ codes all attitudes feels liberating. ..like expunging some subtle trace (yet it's not "expunged" it just, frankly vanishes). i'm definitely with you on this. it's now three months. the liberation has "stuck" and so it is absolutely clear "i'm not imagining it/it's not a self-soothing strategy or an exit" it's a genuine revelation.
nb: the striking shift in british TV programming began in 1999 I observed went into some new mode around 2002 onwards; i've been watching it ever since, but couldn't find any words to fit what i was experiencing. Upon reflection (now) it seems clear that OOO was already drifted into UK tv then and came into its full form over the last two or three years in a proliferation of bizarre and seemingly random object equations that make Mr Benn look like child's play. I have a sneaky suspishion that some clever spark drifted through LSE sometime around that time, and i'm quite sure that however it happened Spec Realism, GH et al were listened to. OF course, that's just the surface of OOO and the fact it makes for better TV doesn't negate the deeper and more complex ramifications that i certainly feel will be born out in time as we undergo what feels to me like a "final" (sic) removing unscaling peeling away from something that is beginning to feel like "an inheritance" that has run its course.
Nice one! Thanks for these Daz.
Hi Tim. There's a problem here, I think. To insist that OOO has come to replace (what it deems to be) "Left cynicism" and to say it isn't political inherently is to make two statements at loggerheads. Or, more precisely, it posits that Left cynicism is everything that OOO ontologically is not. My point here is not to impute a political agenda to OOO but to argue it can't simply be sincere inherently: that is to say, if OOO can serve many different political masters, which I believe it can, then it can serve cynicism just as effectively as it can sincerity - and not just Left cynicism either, but full-blown Right or liberal cynicism. It can be a philosophy of reactionaries, apparatchiks and functionaries, as much as geniuses, explorers and iconoclasts. In saying this, I'm not making an accusation against you or anyone else of bad faith but - to be frank - I'm also not altogether taken with the self-impressed air I feel palpable in all of this. The citation from Deleuze, for instance, about microfascisms reminds me of the point from Hegel that Zizek often cites: that Evil resides also in the innocent gaze perceiving Evil all around itself. You might be tempted here to respond that my criticism is displaying exactly the ambition "to be someone else's guilty conscience" Deleuze spurns, but it's also worth pointing out that when Deleuze speaks of "the militant Left", he's talking about a group with which he self-identified. In that respect, that moment is an admonition against himself, more than a sociological diagnosis of the problems with his peers. I may be wrong but I always took his 'Letter to a Harsh Critic' to be a letter to himself. At any rate, I find your triangulation of "the inveterate errors of their ways" in what it seems you also feel are your comrades on the Left to be confusing. Not because the habits of the Left don't warrant critique from within, but because it seems as though your drive to diagnose those habits as ills thrills itself with the very same sectarian impulse it spurns. If what you call going meta is a deceptive move, sabotaging the integrity of an argument through unearned claims to sophistication (and it absolutely is), then what I might call left libertarianism is the "carefully calculated animosity" of seeing only in the Left a neurotic bundle of carefully calculated animosities, petty spites and faux-radicalisms. This kind of thinking justifies a sort of epic view of one self as alone on a Leftist plateau, a cult of the Victim that ends up, again and again, as plain old entrepreneuralism. My argument here being not that the Left can't be hidebound and myopic but that commitment to the Left - whether you're a socialist, a communist, or an anarchist - should be commitment to its extending the reach of its vision, not the default libertarian luxury of being its autonomous interlocutor.
I should say: I've long followed your blog here, am a big fan of your work, and am really, really looking forward to Buddhaphobia, which I believe is going to be a massively valuable correction to a number of hugely problematic formulations Zizek and Badiou both have inspired in regards to religion and universality. But to me, the grooming of proof of Left hypocrisy at every turn feels like it is itself the major problem we have on the Left: the need to place critique before solidarity, as if the purpose of Leftist critique weren't meant to be solidarity.
Incidentally, the reason Zizek focuses so avidly on liberals is not because he sees them as a greater evil than the far Right. Liberals and the left aren't in disagreement about the priority of the danger of the far Right, or its epic, black reaction: a point Zizek more than appreciates. No one on the far Left of any intellectual credibility holds liberals to be worse from the perspective of radical Evil than, say, Sarah Palin. However, the point Zizek makes is that it is liberal hypocrisy and its post-political administrationism - its desire, above all, to freeze out the radical Left by governing from 'the centre' - that ends up not only aligning it with the Right against the Left, time and time again, but empowering the very reaction it genuinely (in terms of belief) opposes itself against. The beast gets so close to the gates, over and over, precisely because liberals don't see it as the greater evil, but one of two equal evil "extremes". The weakness in the liberal-Left - that apparent inability to marshal the rhetorical strength and agility, its perpetual enervation - as well as its constant propensity toward corruption, to "do deals", owes everything to the fact that its primary enemy - in placing it on equal if opposite footing with the Right - is not really the Right but the Left that would displace it. If anything, what makes the Left Left is that it refuses to see liberalism as an exterior evil, but as the capitalist compromise-formation it is struggling to overturn in itself. The "stable transition" rhetoric, when it comes to Egypt, and Blair's more candid admission of their being a need for "managed change", points to the fundamental liberal distrust of revolutionary democracy. What liberals lack, ideologically, is trust in the people. And liberal democracy - the formation that trustlessness leaves us with - forces us to modulate between two forms of capitalist victory: either a folkish authoritarian lockdown class plunder at all costs (as we see on the US Right today), or a liberal contractual elite exploitationism which makes stagnant incrementalism entirely synonymous with the social (the Democrats). In this sense, liberal hypocrisy ranks as the lesser evil even as it rates as the greater enemy: it is not the same as the committed Right, but it makes way for the Right, by giving way on the Left.
Forgive me if this comment comes over as heated or adversarial in any way. I must admit, I've been provoked to comment due to a certain agitation with the above mentioned points; but I speak only with the greatest respect for you as a thinker and comrade, from whom I'm learning lots.
All the best,
David
This doesn't seem right to me. Let us assume that, at the ontological level, there is no hierarchy of objects. Why should this leads us to the claim that, at the political level, there should be no hierarchy? Notice that the first claim is descriptive, whereas the latter claim is normative. I think a lot of the problem comes from how to give a proper account of values in an OOO perspective. In the case at hand (the Egyptian revolution), while it is certainly possible, even desirable, to describe it in terms of a materialistic standpoint (say, stressing the rise of food prices as a causal relevant factor in the process), it seems that something is missing from the picture unless we complement it with a human centered perspective (say, the people's desire for freedom, which they evidently hold as a good). Since the political is at least partially constituted by those kinds of (human) evaluations, it seems that a purely OOO account of the phenomenon in question will be inherently a-political (which would explain its capacity to accomodate all those different perspectives, from Levi's marxist leanings to Bogost's anti-marxist stance).
Slatted Light, I believe we are in substantial agreement. That's my favorite Zizek insight: that evil IS the eye of the beholder. I'm not convinced yet that Zizek has taken it to heart though. But I don't think OOO can serve cynicism. The phenomenological view of "sincerity" prevents it.
Daniel, yes. That is why I hedged my remarks with those first words about ontology vs. as you say the normative. I'm as surprised as you are with my thoughts here so I'm just going to let it sit for a bit.
Hi Tim,
You might re call but hey, probably don't, that i sent you an email with regard to 'Dark Ecology' and 'The Ecological Thought', that asked you to respond to my reading of those texts as an expression of anarchism, more precisely of mystical anarchism - The Free Spirit. Thanks for coming out of the closet, Stranger.I can now get on with my exegesis of your texts, within the context of this uncanny affinity. Rebel Love. KK
KK
I do remember Karen, but unfortunately I don't recall whether I responded properly! Did I? If not, I shall do so by email if you write me again. My apologies.
Yes, weirdly, The Ecological Thought cemented my anarchism. I think "Mystical" is a good adjective for it, as well.
I see an interesting possible link between the idea expressed here of an anarchy of objects and Simon Critchley's idea, expressed in "Infinitely Demanding," that "ethical anarchy is the experience of multiple singularities of the encounter with others that defines he experience of sociality. Each of these singularities overwhelms and undoes us and we can never do enough in response" [p. 123]--and of course you already know/detect the Levinasian overtones here.
I'm very much on board with the singular withdrawing-ness and "whateverness" of everything [per your but also per Harman's thinking], but I also wonder if this isn't *also* a kind of illusion of withdrawing, because everything is also always already here and now + the "same." I worry that notions of radical alterity also lead to the sorts of "politics of difference" that become so violent. I think your work is particularly important for actually saying both things are true" radical strangeness + intimacy = a way, not "out of here," but more "in." I'm still thinking through all of this.
Hi Eileen, I'm still working through this too but that's a very insightful idea. I'll think about this some more but yes, intuitively I agree.
Hello,
I've been following OOO for a while now to the best of my limited ability and I'm of the same mind set. My own thus far singular and inadequate way of thinking about this is here:
http://superfluousblog.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/object-oriented-anarchism/
Hello,
I've been following OOO for a while now to the best of my limited ability and I'm of the same mind set. My own thus far singular and inadequate way of thinking about this is here:
http://superfluousblog.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/object-oriented-anarchism/
All right! Thanks so much for this--I shall read.
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