Hi Ian Maybe I'm a little old, but 10 to 15 years seems, in terms of human thought, extremely recent. I have read some OOO texts though, during that short period of time. I've also had a little time to digest Kosuth's work, since it was made forty odd years ago. In retrospect his chairs might seem a simplistic reading of semiotics but I'd argue there is more to them than that. They're not just about signs and signifiers but also mediality, sociality and the performative. In the 1960's not many artists were addressing those issues.
I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest about popularity, or the value of a lack of it. Seems to me that OOO is popular - even fashionable, like the new aesthetic. I can also see links in OOO to Latour, although more so to Heidegger. Perhaps it is a non-phenomenologist's take on Heidegger? Whatever, it isn't fuzzy. Are things that simple? Can we assume there is some kind of residual and irreducible thinginess in things? A toaster can be an octopus - and whatever it might be, from moment to moment, it is rarely a toaster. best Simon On 27 Jun 2012, at 00:34, Ian Bogost wrote: > On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote: > >> But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions >> of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a >> fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and >> that was the point. > > Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like > everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and > there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The > fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of > museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because > when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention > to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. > Rather, because the real is, well, real. > >> I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth >> the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed >> out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question >> (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy). > > Harman has been writing under the shingle "object-oriented philosophy" since > 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. > That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to > OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and > that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in > recent years. > > If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But > own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to > adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same > communities for the same purposes. > >> My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the >> ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another. > > This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds > that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. > It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its > proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact. > >> The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy >> things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its >> nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!). > > OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another > tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even > universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. > You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and > Latour do, in different ways. > > In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is > threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and > so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got > so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not > being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson > for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider > it further. > > Ian > _______________________________________________ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au > http://www.subtle.net/empyre > Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
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