Hi all!
I'm revving up for next week, but I would like to add some things to the
discussion among Ian/Michael/Jack. I hope this will be useful. (Many of you are
friends or friends-in-law, and I am showing fidelity to that by speaking and
speaking frankly.) I imagine that Patricia, having come to speak speculative
realism, will have lots to say about this discussion too. Me, I work on
affects of attachment and the ways those dynamic movements within proximity
engender forms of life--I'm on the Latour side of things, resonating with it
through Laplanchean anaclitic psychoanalysis and an aesthetics derived from,
without being orthodoxly, Spivak (unlearning), Deleuze ([un]becoming), and
Cavell (ordinary language philosophy). Or, I'm a materialist queer writing
sentences to induce some arts of transformation, which is I think why I am
here, although I've wondered about that during the last few weeks.
1. Re the Bogost/Halberstam convo.
Ian writes that "all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist
equally," and I couldn't agree more. But like Jack I think it matters to attend
to the relative impact of both clauses of this statement. If you believe it
then you have also to account for your own prioritization of things that seem
normatively to be things over things that normatively seem to be human. As Jack
points out, there's a complex political and definitional history there.
2. But more interesting to me--and addressed to us all, not just Ian--why
should thinking about things in relation not be interfered with by other
idioms? Recalling Zach's entries and my own inclinations too, where does
interference (the glitch suspending the movement of the system, the noise that
proceeds within which form manifests, take your pick) make its way into our
methods, imaginaries, or concepts? Why is Jack's attention to the history of
what classes are served by disciplinary conventions deemed some kind of threat
to productive conversation?
Those of us who write from queer/feminist/antiracist/anticolonial commitments
have debated a lot whether, how, and when it matters that some statements are
held true as though the second clause,"but not all objects exist equally,"
didn't exist (this is, I think, Jack's argument against abstraction and
universalism). I like abstraction and universalism more than Jack does, but
that's because my orientation is to want more of everything. not less of some
things. I want the terms of transformation to proceed through idiomatic
extension and interruption, huge swoops and medial gestures, the internal
frottage of contradiction and irreconcilable evidence... I'm an impurist. What
are the incommensurate ways we can address the scene of that thing in a way
that changes that thing?
As Jack writes, it matters who is cited: who we think with and the citations
that point to them build and destroy worlds, they're both media and bugs in
world-building. The clash of intellectual idioms is a political question too
because it shapes the imaginary of description and exemplification. The clash
of idioms is inconvenient, and I would like also to say that it's part of a
queer problematic represented here certainly by Zach and Michael and Jack and
me too, although I sense that where Jack and I are looking for discursive
registers that allow us to say everything we know in all the ways we know it,
Zach and Michael's fantastic written work is more likely to make arguments in
specific idioms (sometimes sounding all cultural studies, sometimes critical
theory, sometimes arguing in the modes of disciplinary philosophy) depending on
the conversation. We might also talk about polemics v analytics. I'm less
polemical than some of us here.
I think it's important that we talk about this question of knowledge worlds (of
accessibility, of purity [high/low,
disciplinary/transdisciplinary/undisciplined/syncretic epistemologies and
idioms]), in a discussion of queer new media and of how its criticality can
operate.
3. Re Michael/Jack's argument about masculinism, Warner, etc. I kind of agree
with Michael and Ian that calling something masculinist (from you, Jack, that's
kind of astonishing, but of course it was a shorthand for the elevation of
abstraction over sensual life in all of its riven contestations) is probably
not too clarifying or accurate, but it is pointing to something important,
which has to do with "all objects equally exist, but not all objects exist
equally." Warner's practice has always been to posit queer as a practice and
orientation as against identity politics, which he takes to be over-bound to
the signifier (as does Edelman). My orientation has been to attend what
happens when we mix things up, or remix things up, and as I have written
collaboratively with these two guys and been cast as the vulgarer in both
cases, all I can say is it's always instructive to enter into the affective
space where some things are anchors so other things can change. That's true for
all of our practices, which is why I've spent some time here pondering what
kinds of argument have gotten bracketed or foreclosed so that other things can
seem innovative and productive...
Ta! This is fun!
LB
Lauren Berlant
George M. Pullman Professor
Department of English
University of Chicago
Walker Museum 413
1115 E. 58th. St.
Chicago IL 60637
-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Bogost <ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Thu, Jun 14, 2012 8:50 pm
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
Joe,
Thanks for these great comments.
I think it is because this resonance seems so fruitful to me that I am
perplexed by some of the claims by proponents of OOO that the political can be
separated from claims about the ontological if we are constrained in our own
ways by our as-structures, then right from the outset we encounter the world of
human and non-human objects as profoundly political, raising uncanny questions
of co-existence whether we are human subjects or neutrinos or cypress-flames.
So OOO, far from allowing us to discuss "what exists" in politically neutral
spaces, rather radicalises the political questions of ecology and "being-with"
into the realm of the non-human, so that all objects are trying to 'work out'
how to exist with each other whether to congregate or flee, embrace or destroy,
swap DNA and code sequences, or annex and withdraw. This doesn't prescribe a
particular flavour of politics, but it does seem to make the political at least
"equiprimordial" with the ontological. I'd love to hear people's responses to
these thoughts if you have anything to share.
I don't think I find anything objectionable here, save the (perhaps?) implied
conclusion that objects "working out" of mutual co-existence is best called
"politics." Sure, we can call it that, words are words after all, and perhaps
it's an appropriate metaphor. After all, as you rightly say, those of us who
embrace the tool-being as a fact of all things also acknowledge the
incompleteness of this grasping of other objects.
However, this is a very different idea than the usual one, that politics is
*our* politics, is a normative or descriptive account of human social behavior.
It's this conceit that bothers OOO, that politics-for-humans could be taken as
first philosophy.
If I can be permitted the indulgence of quoting myself at absurd length, here's
how I attempt to address the matter in Alien Phenomenology (pp 78-79), on the
topic of ethics rather than politics:
Can we even imagine a speculative ethics? Could an object characterize the
internal struggles and codes of another, simply by tracing and reconstructing
evidence for such a code by the interactions of its neighbors? It’s much harder
than imagining a speculative alien phenomenology, and it’s easy to understand
why: we can find evidence for our speculations on perception, like radiation
tracing the black hole’s event horizon, even if we are only ever able to
characterize the resulting experiences as metaphors bound to human correlates.
The same goes for the Foveon sensor, the piston, the tweet, and the soybean,
which can only ever grasp the outside as an analogous struggle. The answer to
correlationism is not the rejection of any correlate but the acknowledgment of
endless ones, all self-absorbed, obsessed by givenness rather than by
turpitude. The violence or ardor of piston and fuel is the human
metaphorization of a phenomenon, not the ethics of an object. It is not the
relationship between piston and fuel that we frame by ethics but our
relationship to the relationship between piston and fuel. Of course, this can
be productive: ethical principles can serve as a speculative characterization
of object relations. But they are only metaphorisms, not true ethics of objects.
Unless we wish to adopt a strictly Aristotelian account of causality and
ethics, in which patterns of behavior for a certain type can be tested
externally for compliance, access to the ethics of objects will always remain
out of reach. It is not the problem of objectification that must worry us, the
opinion both Martin Heidegger and Levinas hold (albeit in different ways).
Despite the fact that Levinas claims ethics as first philosophy, what he gives
us is not really ethics but a metaphysics of intersubjectivity that he gives
the name “ethics.” And even then, Levinas’s other is always another person, not
another thing, like a soybean or an engine cylinder (never mind the engine
cylinder’s other!). Before it could be singled out amid the gaze of the other,
the object-I would have to have some idea what it meant to be gazed on in the
first place. Levinas approaches this position himself when he observes, “If one
could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other.” That is, so
long as we don’t mind only eating one flavor of otherness.
Timothy Morton observes that matters of ethics defer to an “ethereal beyond.”
We always outsource the essence of a problem, the oil spill forgotten into the
ocean, the human waste abandoned to the U-bend. Ethics seems to be a logic that
lives inside of objects, inaccessible from without; it’s the code that endorses
expectation of plumbing or the rejoinder toward vegetarianism.
We can imagine scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent
into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission:
to characterize the internal, withdrawn subjectivities of various objects, by
speculating on how object–object caricatures reflect possible codes of value
and response. Object ethics, it would seem, can only ever be theorized
once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled
silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour,
caress, or murder one another.
Morton offers an alternative: a hyperobject, one massively distributed in
space-time. The moment we try to arrest a thing, we turn it into a world with
edges and boundaries. To the hammer everything looks like a nail. To the human
animal, the soybean and the gasoline look inert, safe, innocuous. But to the
soil, to the piston? Ethical judgment itself proves a metaphorism, an attempt
to reconcile the being of one unit in terms of another. We mistake it for the
object’s withdrawn essence.
This confusion of the withdrawn and the sensual realms allows us to make
assumptions about the bean curd and combustion engine just as we do with oceans
and sewers, drawing them closer and farther from us based on how well they
match our own understanding of the world. But when there is no “away,” no unit
outside to which we can outsource virtue or wrongdoing, ethics itself is
revealed to be a hyperobject: a massive, tangled chain of objects lampooning
one another through weird relation, mistaking their own essences for that of
the alien objects they encounter, exploding the very idea of ethics to infinity.
We can imagine scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent
into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission:
to characterize the internal, withdrawn subjectivities of various objects, by
speculating on how object–object caricatures reflect possible codes of value
and response. Object ethics, it would seem, can only ever be theorized
once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled
silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour,
caress, or murder one another.
Ian
On Jun 14, 2012, at 9:02 PM, Joe Flintham wrote:
Hello
Forgive me I'm a first time poster with a long history of lurking
here and a some-time fascination with SR/OOO, and thankyou to everyone
here for an exciting discussion. I wanted to write something both as a
way of thinking it through and asking the contributors about the
possibility of separating the political from the ontological.
Tim Morton recently in one of his podcast classes on OOO summarised
the development of SR/OOO as a response to correlationism, noting that
where the Meillassoux strand of SR admires the correlationist approach and
attempts to ground or legitimise the correlate, OOO instead accepts the
correlationist limit but extends it to all relations, human and non-human.
Perhaps I could borrow from the Heidegger legacy that comes through
Harman to this analysis and say that OOO acknowledges the 'as-structure'
that characterises being, and radicalises it to be a feature of all
relations, rather than just human Dasein. I encounter you *as* something,
as you encounter me; the cotton encounters fire *as* something, just as
fire encounters cotton.
I therefore understand OOO not as a way to provide an ontology that
is independent of epistemology, but as a transformation of the question of
"how we know what is in the world" from being 'merely' a methodological
problem, to a fundamental feature of being both an "individual" or
"object" (such as a human, a toaster, or a quasar) as well as a component
in an assemblage or world. Everything is interconnected, albeit while
negotiating a fundamental inner rift in which we also encounter ourselves
*as* something. Again following Harman and Morton's reading of y
Gasset, relations are tropes rather than literal.
In this sense the as-structure that runs through OOO thus seems to
me to be very consonant with queer theories. No object is able to engage
with other objects except through its own functional colouring, its own
perceptual morphology, its own heritage and identity, whatever material or
discursive agencies have been made to bear on that history. I understand
Morton's take on the uncanny ecology in OOO to mean all objects confront
each other suddenly as strangers, that we have no 'natural' categories to
rely on, and no normative criteria to which we can appeal we can't even be
certain of the extent to which we are either concrete individuals in
our own right or fleeting instances playing the role of components within
some larger being perhaps we are both both representatives of a form or
type, but also withdrawn and thus always capable of being something else,
someway else. In this respect it very much means that markers of the
normal are awash and abandoned. Perhaps some of the tropes that have
characterised the development of SR horror, the weird, anxiety resonate
with the experiences of abjection that make queer such a powerful
resource.
I think it is because this resonance seems so fruitful to me that I
am perplexed by some of the claims by proponents of OOO that the political
can be separated from claims about the ontological if we are constrained
in our own ways by our as-structures, then right from the outset we
encounter the world of human and non-human objects as profoundly
political, raising uncanny questions of co-existence whether we are human
subjects or neutrinos or cypress-flames. So OOO, far from allowing us to
discuss "what exists" in politically neutral spaces, rather radicalises
the political questions of ecology and "being-with" into the realm of the
non-human, so that all objects are trying to 'work out' how to exist with
each other whether to congregate or flee, embrace or destroy, swap DNA and
code sequences, or annex and withdraw. This doesn't prescribe a
particular flavour of politics, but it does seem to make the political at
least "equiprimordial" with the ontological. I'd love to hear people's
responses to these thoughts if you have anything to share.
Thanks,
Joe
On 14/06/2012 23:35, Robert Jackson wrote:
Hey All, I've been subscribing to this mailing list for a while now,
so I'm glad this debate is getting aired I just hope it doesn't
inherit the unfortunate slippage of tone that the blogosphere features
typically in these types of discussions.
So, I really don't understand this criticism of OOO, which tars the
ontological 'equivalence' brush with capitalism or neo-liberalism.
This is straightforward reductionism in my eyes. There are plenty of
political questions which need asking. But asking the question
'what is' need not be a politically contentious one. This is what SR
is precisely getting away from, no matter what anti-correlationist
critique one advocates.
The key issue here is sovereignty. If a current position can articulate
contingent surprise within an ontology that's a start (even the early
zizek took the correlated 'Real' has a sovereign theoretical given, to
which ideology conceals or masks). For my money OOO (which Levi
Bryant has argued), has an interesting proposition in that one could
potentially argue that all real objects have an ambigious sovereign
inner core of surprise which can never be fully articulated, by
anything: whether benvolent dust mite or proprietary software. This
might be a starting point for discussion.
Best
Rob
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