Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[frederic neyrat]

About OOO and politics, this interview of Graham Harman, "Marginalia
on Radical Thinking: An Interview with Graham Harman",
(http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/marginalia-on-radical-thinking-an-interview-with-graham-harman/)
seems political - but not obviously on the left side...

Besides, there are sometimes confusions between politics and the
condition of possibilities of politics (cf Vibrant Matter, a very good
book about these conditions of possibilities)

Best,

Frederic Neyrat

2012/6/14 Michael O'Rourke 
>
>
>
> Thanks to Zach for mentioning my article “Girls Welcome!!!” which made an 
> initial attempt to sketch the potential affinities between speculative 
> realism, object oriented ontology and queer theory. My forthcoming book with 
> Punctum called simply Queering Speculative Realism will be a more ambitious 
> sortie in this general direction. Zach correctly recalls that I say (in this 
> interview: 
> http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke/Papers/1272839/X_Welcome_A_Conversation_with_Michael_ORourke_by_Stanimir_Panayotov)
>  that there is a possible argument to be made for linking up Quentin 
> Meillassoux’s notion of “hyperchaos” and “gender”. I admit in the interview 
> that I really haven’t fully worked that through. And I still haven’t although 
> I find what Zach has to say about the necessity of contingency and queerness 
> really helpful in getting me moving. The impression that Meillassoux’s 
> hyperchaos might help us to think about gender struck me upon reading an 
> interview he gave with Robin Mackay and Florian Hecker 
> (http://www.urbanomic.com/archives/Documents-1.pdf). I guess I will return to 
> that to help me formulate what it is that I think is going on there.
>
>
>
> Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the 
> apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see the 
> interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are right.  To 
> take just a few examples: How could Tim Morton’s work on ecology be 
> considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s democratization of objects? It is 
> even harder to argue that Jane Bennett’s writing on vibrant materiality which 
> emerges directly out of political theory fails to advance an ethics or a 
> politics.  The challenge as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been telling us is to 
> extend the notion of the biopolitical in our work. What, Jeffrey would ask, 
> would a more generously envisioned zoepolitics (or zoeethics or zoeontology) 
> look like? And why would or wouldn’t we desire it?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Hi all,

I just (finally) joined this list and am jumping into the middle of a 
conversation I haven't fully read. So bear with me, and forgive me if I'm 
covering ground that has been done already.

Judith Halberstam wrote:

> The theories that count and that get counted in OOO and SR tend to be 
> masculinist most of the time and tend to cluster around enlightenment and 
> post-structuralist theory or a particular, continental stripe: Hegel, 
> Heidegger, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, with a Butler or Braidotti thrown in for 
> good measure but nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking.

I'm not sure what you mean by "masculinist most of the time" and would invite 
you to clarify such a characterization in the interest of more productive 
discussion.

As for  "nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking," one of the 
interesting puzzles in the formula "SR/OOO are a kind of continental 
philosophy" is the fact that continental philosophy has such a strong 
association with matters of human identity, and SR/OOO/etc. are interested in 
various non- or extra-human matters, and are therefore moving in slightly 
different directions than continental philosophy has done in recent decades. 
The assumption—which seems to be prevalent—that this means "abandoning" 
questions of human identity is an interesting one. 

It reminds me a bit of the criticism Nick Montfort and I still get when we 
suggest that it's worthwhile to investigate the material construction of 
hardware and software platforms as a part of the study of computational media. 
Reactions tend toward accusations of determinism. But, the truth is, the 
microprocessors and integrated circuits are as extant as the social factors 
that drive their design. I've written about this conundrum a bit, both in 
relation to computation and, in my latest book, in relation to philosophy.


Michael O'Rourke wrote:

> Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the 
> apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see the 
> interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are right.  To 
> take just a few examples: How could Tim Morton’s work on ecology be 
> considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s democratization of objects? It is 
> even harder to argue that Jane Bennett’s writing on vibrant materiality which 
> emerges directly out of political theory fails to advance an ethics or a 
> politics.  The challenge as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been telling us is to 
> extend the notion of the biopolitical in our work. What, Jeffrey would ask, 
> would a more generously envisioned zoepolitics (or zoeethics or zoeontology) 
> look like? And why would or wouldn’t we desire it?


In this respect, it seems that there's been an assumption about what "being 
political" means, i.e. a particular flavor or so-called radical leftism, which 
is not so much about its beliefs or premises as it is about a particular 
modality of activity, a particular community of practice, a particular kind and 
rhetoric of work, and so forth. The comments in answer to Levi Bryant's recent 
question "Ethics and Politics, What are You Asking" are interesting in this 
regard: 
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/ethics-and-politics-what-are-you-asking/

In any event, I think this whole set of questions about politics and ontology 
has to be seen as something more along the lines of a (potential) shift in the 
attention of philosophy and theory. And that's probably why it's so charged a 
topic.

Ian

Ian Bogost, Ph.D.
Professor
Director, Graduate Program in Digital Media

Georgia Institute of Technology
Digital Media/TSRB 320B
85 Fifth Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30308-1030

ibog...@gatech.edu
+1 (404) 894-1160 (tel)
+1 (404) 894-2833 (fax)

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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Judith Halberstam]

Hmmm, I actually was trying to push us towards a "more productive discussion" 
precisely because the kind of abstraction we use when we write theory (or code) 
may not be the best medium for conversation. I agree of course that the move 
away from the focus on the human is a large part of the appeal of OOO and SR 
but that does not or surely should not mean abandoning any particular notion of 
politics or urgency. In fact, the most urgent work in SR seems to concern the 
mess that humans have made of the world because of their/our tendency to never 
think in relation to and in collaboration with the non-human, extra-human 
entities with whom we share the planet.

Why is it "productive" to wonder about the political investments of OOO and SR 
as Michael O'R does and Galloway has but not to recognize that the theories 
that count in these areas "tend to be masculinitist"...not sure I get that? 

So much of the critique of the centering of the human and the othering of the 
non-human, after all, depends upon queer and feminist formulations of 
self-other, subject-object and center margin. An incomplete list of the 
relevant thinkers here would include but not be limited to: Gayatri Spivak, 
Jacqui Alexander, Saba Mahmood, Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison, Kara Keeling, 
Ann Balsamo, Jose Munoz, David Eng, Roderick Ferguson, Sara Ahmed...and the 
list goes on and on but rarely does this theoretical archive surface in the 
work we are discussing. I believe that this is why Michael O'Rourke's 
intervention into SR from a queer perspective is so important...



On Jun 14, 2012, at 8:54 AM, Ian Bogost wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I just (finally) joined this list and am jumping into the middle of a 
> conversation I haven't fully read. So bear with me, and forgive me if I'm 
> covering ground that has been done already.
> 
> Judith Halberstam wrote:
> 
>> The theories that count and that get counted in OOO and SR tend to be 
>> masculinist most of the time and tend to cluster around enlightenment and 
>> post-structuralist theory or a particular, continental stripe: Hegel, 
>> Heidegger, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, with a Butler or Braidotti thrown in for 
>> good measure but nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking.
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by "masculinist most of the time" and would invite 
> you to clarify such a characterization in the interest of more productive 
> discussion.
> 
> As for  "nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking," one of the 
> interesting puzzles in the formula "SR/OOO are a kind of continental 
> philosophy" is the fact that continental philosophy has such a strong 
> association with matters of human identity, and SR/OOO/etc. are interested in 
> various non- or extra-human matters, and are therefore moving in slightly 
> different directions than continental philosophy has done in recent decades. 
> The assumption—which seems to be prevalent—that this means "abandoning" 
> questions of human identity is an interesting one. 
> 
> It reminds me a bit of the criticism Nick Montfort and I still get when we 
> suggest that it's worthwhile to investigate the material construction of 
> hardware and software platforms as a part of the study of computational 
> media. Reactions tend toward accusations of determinism. But, the truth is, 
> the microprocessors and integrated circuits are as extant as the social 
> factors that drive their design. I've written about this conundrum a bit, 
> both in relation to computation and, in my latest book, in relation to 
> philosophy.
> 
> 
> Michael O'Rourke wrote:
> 
>> Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the 
>> apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see the 
>> interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are right.  To 
>> take just a few examples: How could Tim Morton’s work on ecology be 
>> considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s democratization of objects? It is 
>> even harder to argue that Jane Bennett’s writing on vibrant materiality 
>> which emerges directly out of political theory fails to advance an ethics or 
>> a politics.  The challenge as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been telling us is to 
>> extend the notion of the biopolitical in our work. What, Jeffrey would ask, 
>> would a more generously envisioned zoepolitics (or zoeethics or zoeontology) 
>> look like? And why would or wouldn’t we desire it?
> 
> 
> In this respect, it seems that there's been an assumption about what "being 
> political" means, i.e. a particular flavor or so-called radical leftism, 
> which is not so much about its beliefs or premises as it is about a 
> particular modality of activity, a particular community of practice, a 
> particular kind and rhetoric of work, and so forth. The comments in answer to 
> Levi Bryant's recent question "Ethics and Politics, What are You Asking" are 
> interesting in this regard: 
> http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/et

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Hi Judith,

I can see that I didn't explain myself well. Let me try again.

I cannot think of any instance in which calling something "masculinist" is 
meant as a compliment. Therefore, it is hard for me to read your short 
paragraph surrounding that statement as anything other than a not-so-subtle dig 
without any examples or supporting argument or even a clarification of what you 
really mean. That's what feels unproductive to me. But as I said, I just joined 
the conversation, so perhaps I'm missing something.

As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what you 
say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a slightly 
different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as much as human 
subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this work for what it is, 
at least for starters, rather than for what it isn't? And only part of what it 
is can be sufficiently captured by the political/ecological matters you rightly 
cite here.

Ian


On Jun 14, 2012, at 1:09 PM, Judith Halberstam wrote:

> Hmmm, I actually was trying to push us towards a "more productive discussion" 
> precisely because the kind of abstraction we use when we write theory (or 
> code) may not be the best medium for conversation. I agree of course that the 
> move away from the focus on the human is a large part of the appeal of OOO 
> and SR but that does not or surely should not mean abandoning any particular 
> notion of politics or urgency. In fact, the most urgent work in SR seems to 
> concern the mess that humans have made of the world because of their/our 
> tendency to never think in relation to and in collaboration with the 
> non-human, extra-human entities with whom we share the planet.
> 
> Why is it "productive" to wonder about the political investments of OOO and 
> SR as Michael O'R does and Galloway has but not to recognize that the 
> theories that count in these areas "tend to be masculinitist"...not sure I 
> get that? 
> 
> So much of the critique of the centering of the human and the othering of the 
> non-human, after all, depends upon queer and feminist formulations of 
> self-other, subject-object and center margin. An incomplete list of the 
> relevant thinkers here would include but not be limited to: Gayatri Spivak, 
> Jacqui Alexander, Saba Mahmood, Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison, Kara 
> Keeling, Ann Balsamo, Jose Munoz, David Eng, Roderick Ferguson, Sara 
> Ahmed...and the list goes on and on but rarely does this theoretical archive 
> surface in the work we are discussing. I believe that this is why Michael 
> O'Rourke's intervention into SR from a queer perspective is so important...
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 8:54 AM, Ian Bogost wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I just (finally) joined this list and am jumping into the middle of a 
>> conversation I haven't fully read. So bear with me, and forgive me if I'm 
>> covering ground that has been done already.
>> 
>> Judith Halberstam wrote:
>> 
>>> The theories that count and that get counted in OOO and SR tend to be 
>>> masculinist most of the time and tend to cluster around enlightenment and 
>>> post-structuralist theory or a particular, continental stripe: Hegel, 
>>> Heidegger, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, with a Butler or Braidotti thrown in for 
>>> good measure but nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking.
>> 
>> I'm not sure what you mean by "masculinist most of the time" and would 
>> invite you to clarify such a characterization in the interest of more 
>> productive discussion.
>> 
>> As for  "nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking," one of the 
>> interesting puzzles in the formula "SR/OOO are a kind of continental 
>> philosophy" is the fact that continental philosophy has such a strong 
>> association with matters of human identity, and SR/OOO/etc. are interested 
>> in various non- or extra-human matters, and are therefore moving in slightly 
>> different directions than continental philosophy has done in recent decades. 
>> The assumption—which seems to be prevalent—that this means "abandoning" 
>> questions of human identity is an interesting one. 
>> 
>> It reminds me a bit of the criticism Nick Montfort and I still get when we 
>> suggest that it's worthwhile to investigate the material construction of 
>> hardware and software platforms as a part of the study of computational 
>> media. Reactions tend toward accusations of determinism. But, the truth is, 
>> the microprocessors and integrated circuits are as extant as the social 
>> factors that drive their design. I've written about this conundrum a bit, 
>> both in relation to computation and, in my latest book, in relation to 
>> philosophy.
>> 
>> 
>> Michael O'Rourke wrote:
>> 
>>> Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the 
>>> apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see 
>>> the interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are 

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Rob Myers]

On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:


As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
isn't?


The "as much as" is precisely the problem.

Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:

http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/

But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's 
philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its 
embracing of contingency and possibility.


- Rob.
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list 
strives to support? 

If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back, 
please let me know so I can unsubscribe.

Ian

On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>> 
>> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>> isn't?
> 
> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
> 
> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
> 
> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
> 
> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's 
> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its embracing 
> of contingency and possibility.
> 
> - Rob.
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Ok, sigh, let me try this again. 

The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the 
fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work and 
in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many things. 
I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not all objects 
exist equally."

It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if your 
idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both Galloway's 
post and my limited experience thusfar here on empyre, then perhaps you can 
explain why that a model worth aspiring for? Why that is virtuous and righteous?

Ian

On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>> 
>> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>> isn't?
> 
> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
> 
> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
> 
> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
> 
> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's 
> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its embracing 
> of contingency and possibility.
> 
> - Rob.
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

___
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Al Matthews]

There is a certain collegial self-soothing of the ABDs to it all, if
that's what you mean.

Al Matthews
M.S., Digital Media
Georgia Institute of Technology

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost  wrote:
> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list
> strives to support?
>
> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back,
> please let me know so I can unsubscribe.
>
> Ian
>
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>
> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>
>
> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>
> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>
> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>
> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>
> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>
> isn't?
>
>
> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>
> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>
> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>
> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's
> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its
> embracing of contingency and possibility.
>
> - Rob.
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Jacob Gaboury]

Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your
contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look
at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month
is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of
the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what
queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting
and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made
on what is missing, rather than what is there.

That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as
Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or
our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical
objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope
is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other
topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what
you have to say about these other approaches.

It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory
and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on
issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier
discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and
practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to
decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the
field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the
computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of
understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to
look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked
to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed"
objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low
theory".

I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different
canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think
it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear
more from all of you on this approach.

- Jacob








On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost  wrote:
> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list
> strives to support?
>
> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back,
> please let me know so I can unsubscribe.
>
> Ian
>
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>
> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>
>
> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>
> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>
> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>
> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>
> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>
> isn't?
>
>
> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>
> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>
> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>
> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's
> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its
> embracing of contingency and possibility.
>
> - Rob.
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
___
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Jacob,

Thanks for this clarification. I apologize if I was thread-hijacking. 

Not sure if you're aware, but the empyre list website is very slow to respond, 
and I can't find any archives thereon, so it's hard to go back and see the 
conversation that's already taken place...

Ian


On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote:

> Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your
> contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look
> at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month
> is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of
> the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what
> queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting
> and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made
> on what is missing, rather than what is there.
> 
> That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as
> Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or
> our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical
> objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope
> is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other
> topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what
> you have to say about these other approaches.
> 
> It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory
> and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on
> issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier
> discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and
> practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to
> decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the
> field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the
> computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of
> understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to
> look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked
> to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed"
> objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low
> theory".
> 
> I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different
> canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think
> it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear
> more from all of you on this approach.
> 
> - Jacob
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost  wrote:
>> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list
>> strives to support?
>> 
>> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back,
>> please let me know so I can unsubscribe.
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>> 
>> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>> 
>> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>> 
>> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>> 
>> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>> 
>> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>> 
>> isn't?
>> 
>> 
>> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>> 
>> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>> 
>> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>> 
>> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's
>> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its
>> embracing of contingency and possibility.
>> 
>> - Rob.
>> ___
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ___
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Jacob Gaboury]

No worries, it's an important discussion and I'd imagine Michael and
others will want to contribute later tonight. I'll forward you some of
the earlier threads so you can check them out.

- Jacob




On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Ian Bogost  wrote:
> Jacob,
>
> Thanks for this clarification. I apologize if I was thread-hijacking.
>
> Not sure if you're aware, but the empyre list website is very slow to
> respond, and I can't find any archives thereon, so it's hard to go back and
> see the conversation that's already taken place...
>
> Ian
>
>
>
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote:
>
> Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your
> contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look
> at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month
> is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of
> the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what
> queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting
> and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made
> on what is missing, rather than what is there.
>
> That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as
> Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or
> our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical
> objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope
> is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other
> topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what
> you have to say about these other approaches.
>
> It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory
> and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on
> issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier
> discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and
> practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to
> decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the
> field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the
> computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of
> understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to
> look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked
> to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed"
> objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low
> theory".
>
> I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different
> canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think
> it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear
> more from all of you on this approach.
>
> - Jacob
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost 
> wrote:
>
> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list
>
> strives to support?
>
>
> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back,
>
> please let me know so I can unsubscribe.
>
>
> Ian
>
>
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>
>
> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>
>
>
> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>
>
> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>
>
> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>
>
> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>
>
> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>
>
> isn't?
>
>
>
> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>
>
> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>
>
> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>
>
> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's
>
> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its
>
> embracing of contingency and possibility.
>
>
> - Rob.
>
> ___
>
> empyre forum
>
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
>
> ___
>
> empyre forum
>
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[frederic neyrat]

Hi,

I would like - if possible - to get one or two examples about the
objects concerned by your statement:"all objects equally exist, but
not all objects exist equally." I guess - but I just guess - that the
first part of the sentence is ontological and the second part could be
political, but maybe I'm wrong. Thanks in advance.

Best,

Frederic Neyrat

2012/6/14 Ian Bogost :
> Ok, sigh, let me try this again.
>
> The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the
> fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work
> and in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many
> things. I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not
> all objects exist equally."
>
> It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if
> your idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both
> Galloway's post and my limited experience thusfar here on empyre, then
> perhaps you can explain why that a model worth aspiring for? Why that is
> virtuous and righteous?
>
> Ian
>
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>
> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>
>
> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>
> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>
> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>
> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>
> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>
> isn't?
>
>
> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>
> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>
> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>
> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's
> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its
> embracing of contingency and possibility.
>
> - Rob.
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Robert Jackson]

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

On 14 Jun 2012, at 21:06, Ian Bogost  wrote:

> Jacob,
> 
> Thanks for this clarification. I apologize if I was thread-hijacking. 
> 
> Not sure if you're aware, but the empyre list website is very slow to 
> respond, and I can't find any archives thereon, so it's hard to go back and 
> see the conversation that's already taken place...
> 
> Ian
> 
> 
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote:
> 
>> Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your
>> contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look
>> at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month
>> is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of
>> the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what
>> queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting
>> and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made
>> on what is missing, rather than what is there.
>> 
>> That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as
>> Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or
>> our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical
>> objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope
>> is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other
>> topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what
>> you have to say about these other approaches.
>> 
>> It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory
>> and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on
>> issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier
>> discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and
>> practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to
>> decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the
>> field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the
>> computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of
>> understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to
>> look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked
>> to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed"
>> objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low
>> theory".
>> 
>> I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different
>> canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think
>> it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear
>> more from all of you on this approach.
>> 
>> - Jacob
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost  
>> wrote:
>>> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list
>>> strives to support?
>>> 
>>> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back,
>>> please let me know so I can unsubscribe.
>>> 
>>> Ian
>>> 
>>> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>>> 
>>> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>>> 
>>> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>>> 
>>> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>>> 
>>> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>>> 
>>> isn't?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>>> 
>>> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>>> 
>>> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>>> 
>>> But I wouldn't 

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Joe Flintham]

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 m

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Just in case anyone else is looking, I found the archives:

http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/

On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:13 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote:

> No worries, it's an important discussion and I'd imagine Michael and
> others will want to contribute later tonight. I'll forward you some of
> the earlier threads so you can check them out.
> 
> - Jacob
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Ian Bogost  wrote:
>> Jacob,
>> 
>> Thanks for this clarification. I apologize if I was thread-hijacking.
>> 
>> Not sure if you're aware, but the empyre list website is very slow to
>> respond, and I can't find any archives thereon, so it's hard to go back and
>> see the conversation that's already taken place...
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:02 PM, Jacob Gaboury wrote:
>> 
>> Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your
>> contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look
>> at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month
>> is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of
>> the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what
>> queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting
>> and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made
>> on what is missing, rather than what is there.
>> 
>> That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as
>> Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or
>> our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical
>> objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope
>> is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other
>> topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what
>> you have to say about these other approaches.
>> 
>> It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory
>> and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on
>> issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier
>> discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and
>> practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to
>> decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the
>> field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the
>> computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of
>> understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to
>> look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked
>> to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed"
>> objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low
>> theory".
>> 
>> I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different
>> canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think
>> it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear
>> more from all of you on this approach.
>> 
>> - Jacob
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost 
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list
>> 
>> strives to support?
>> 
>> 
>> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back,
>> 
>> please let me know so I can unsubscribe.
>> 
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> 
>> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>> 
>> 
>> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>> 
>> 
>> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>> 
>> 
>> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>> 
>> 
>> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>> 
>> 
>> isn't?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>> 
>> 
>> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>> 
>> 
>> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>> 
>> 
>> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's
>> 
>> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its
>> 
>> embracing of contingency and possibility.
>> 
>> 
>> - Rob.
>> 
>> ___
>> 
>> empyre forum
>> 
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> 
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ___
>> 
>> empyre forum
>> 
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> 
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
>> ___
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ___
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

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 

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Sorry to try to kill two birds with one stone, but I hope my previous post may 
answer this question indirectly.

In any case, despite Galloway's comments, it sounds like that Animal Farm quote 
but it isn't—not at all.

Ian

On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:16 PM, frederic neyrat wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I would like - if possible - to get one or two examples about the
> objects concerned by your statement:"all objects equally exist, but
> not all objects exist equally." I guess - but I just guess - that the
> first part of the sentence is ontological and the second part could be
> political, but maybe I'm wrong. Thanks in advance.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Frederic Neyrat
> 
> 2012/6/14 Ian Bogost :
>> Ok, sigh, let me try this again.
>> 
>> The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the
>> fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work
>> and in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many
>> things. I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not
>> all objects exist equally."
>> 
>> It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if
>> your idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both
>> Galloway's post and my limited experience thusfar here on empyre, then
>> perhaps you can explain why that a model worth aspiring for? Why that is
>> virtuous and righteous?
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>> 
>> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what
>> 
>> you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a
>> 
>> slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as
>> 
>> much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this
>> 
>> work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it
>> 
>> isn't?
>> 
>> 
>> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>> 
>> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>> 
>> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>> 
>> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's
>> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its
>> embracing of contingency and possibility.
>> 
>> - Rob.
>> ___
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ___
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Judith Halberstam]

Ian - I am reading and enjoying very much your book Alien Phenomenology right 
now so no offense meant in terms of the masculinity orientation of many of the 
OOO conversations. But to try to flesh out why we might worry about such an 
orientation and to respond to Michael briefly here are a few elaborations on 
that theme:

1. As I said the archive of citations does matter and the fact that many of the 
female and or queer authors mentioned by me earlier and by Michael below don't 
surface as often as they should is not the problem in and of itself so much as 
a symptom of a larger problem. 

2. What is that larger problem? Well, as any Feminism 101 course will show us, 
the gender hierarchy that assigns male to the 1 and female to the 0 in the 
binary coding of gender, also assigns male to the status of subject and female 
to the status of object. Hence, having occupied the status of "object" for some 
time within both the symbolic and the imaginary of the cultures within which we 
participate, surely the category of "female" should allow for some access to 
the question of what is it like to be an object. 

3.  Think of Butler's critique of Lacan here - in the lesbian phallus, she 
basically takes on those who would argue that feminist and queer critiques of 
Lacanian psychoanalysis miss the point. Arguing that if all bodies lack and 
female bodies are deployed metaphorically to represent that lack, and if all 
phallic bodies only possess the phallus contingently but male bodies are 
deployed metaphorically to represent that possession, Butler points to a 
heteronormative foundation to Lacan's mapping of the subject. Offering instead 
a "lesbian phallus" that is both detachable and mobile (what does OOO have to 
say about lively objects such as the dildo?), Butler shows that male narcissism 
leads to a) misrecognition of the penis as the phallus and b) the inability to 
theorize the object and the abject. After Butler, object oriented philosophy, 
it seems to me, would have to pass through the gendered territory of the 
subject/object relation. 

4.  And since Michael believes that the onus of representation/critique falls 
to those who say they have been left out, one word: Fanon! Indeed, again, as 
with Butler, we have an elaborate racial critique of the subject/object 
relation already mapped by Fanon in the "Fact of Blackness" and in Fred Moten's 
work on the elaboration of the Black subject as commodity and in Hortense 
Spiller's work on the "American Grammar" of race that assigns whiteness to the 
subject position and blackness to the perpetual object. 

 So, ok, if women and racialized bodies have all too often been rendered as 
"things" in the marketplace of commodity capitalism, and if a lot of the work 
on on Object Oriented Philosophy leaves the status of the human unmarked even 
when rejecting it in favor of the object and relations between objects then 
surely we need a queer and or feminist OO philosophy in order to address the 
politics of the object. 


--What are the relations between slaves and farm machines?


--How might a dildo elaborate a sexuality of the object that does not presume a 
master subject?

--What is the phenomenology of the queer - see Ahmed - and what orientations 
are queer and which are straight. A better way of answering michael's question 
about who can do queer theory. 

 ps. Is Zizek doing "low theory" - in a word, no. Even his low archives are put 
to work to prove Lacan "right."


 I hope this counts as a "carefully worked out critique" in Michael's words. 
And I look forward to more alien phenomenology. 


 Jack


On Jun 14, 2012, at 6:30 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:

> Sorry to try to kill two birds with one stone, but I hope my previous post 
> may answer this question indirectly.
> 
> In any case, despite Galloway's comments, it sounds like that Animal Farm 
> quote but it isn't—not at all.
> 
> Ian
> 
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 4:16 PM, frederic neyrat wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I would like - if possible - to get one or two examples about the
>> objects concerned by your statement:"all objects equally exist, but
>> not all objects exist equally." I guess - but I just guess - that the
>> first part of the sentence is ontological and the second part could be
>> political, but maybe I'm wrong. Thanks in advance.
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> Frederic Neyrat
>> 
>> 2012/6/14 Ian Bogost :
>>> Ok, sigh, let me try this again.
>>> 
>>> The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the
>>> fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work
>>> and in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many
>>> things. I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not
>>> all objects exist equally."
>>> 
>>> It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if
>>> your idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both
>>> Galloway's post and my limited experience thusfar

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[lauren.berl...@gmail.com]

d 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 
To: soft_skinned_space 
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 
fir

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Jack,

Thanks for these comments. Before I dive into you're comments, I'm going to 
point you to a reflection on the matter by Tim Morton, since he is not a member 
of the list but has been reading the archives, and hoped someone would link to 
him.

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/06/ooo-gender-sexuality.html
> Ian - I am reading and enjoying very much your book Alien Phenomenology right 
> now so no offense meant in terms of the masculinity orientation of many of 
> the OOO conversations. But to try to flesh out why we might worry about such 
> an orientation and to respond to Michael briefly here are a few elaborations 
> on that them
> 
That's very kind on both counts.
> 2. What is that larger problem? Well, as any Feminism 101 course will show 
> us, the gender hierarchy that assigns male to the 1 and female to the 0 in 
> the binary coding of gender, also assigns male to the status of subject and 
> female to the status of object. Hence, having occupied the status of "object" 
> for some time within both the symbolic and the imaginary of the cultures 
> within which we participate, surely the category of "female" should allow for 
> some access to the question of what is it like to be an object. 
> 
Surely! But—also surely, you don't think I disagree? Nor Harman, nor any of the 
others who have been mentioned in this context. Or do you? I'm not being coy, I 
think it should take more than a study of someone's bibliography to conclude 
that they are excluding a whole category of being. Particularly when their 
entire philosophy is built on the assumption that all that is exists equally. 
> After Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to pass 
> through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation. 
> 
Have you read Levi Bryant's account of objects in relation to Lacan's graphs of 
sexuation? It's in Democracy of Objects, which is available online, or here's a 
short post: 
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs-of-sexuation-and-ooo/
> 4.  And since Michael believes that the onus of representation/critique falls 
> to those who say they have been left out, one word: Fanon!
> 
I'm not sure what how to respond to this comment. All I think Michael meant is 
that the opportunity space for analysis is open, and those with different 
backgrounds, interest, and commitments can take it on. I know you don't mean to 
suggest that dropping names like Fanon and Spillers on an email list is 
sufficient rhetorical work, but neither is it  sufficient to conclude that all 
questions have been already answered by a favorite theorist. 
> So, ok, if women and racialized bodies have all too often been rendered as 
> "things" in the marketplace of commodity capitalism, and if a lot of the work 
> on on Object Oriented Philosophy leaves the status of the human unmarked even 
> when rejecting it in favor of the object and relations between objects then 
> surely we need a queer and or feminist OO philosophy in order to address the 
> politics of the object. 
> 
I have no objection to this. Why would I, right? Surely once more, you don't 
think I would, nor Harman, nor Morton, nor Bryant, nor anyone? You'll find at 
least one comment in Alien Phenomenology, albeit very brief and really just 
cursory, that touches on this issue, later in the book. Katherine Behar 
organized a set of Object Oriented Feminism sessions at the 2010 SLSA 
conference, to which I was fortunate to serve as one respondent. You can find 
the abstracts at the following link, along with my response from the 
conference: http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml. 

Behar is organizing a follow-up at this year's SLSA, which will include 
Patricia Clough, Katherine Hayles, Eileen Joy, Jamie Skye Bianco, Anne Pollock, 
Rebecca Sheldon, and others. Is this a sufficient measure? No, of course not. 
But it's a start of something, just as Harman tried to start something, rather 
than a quick judgement meant to fuel an engine of reprisal.

Again, I think this is what Michael was saying. Let's just do the work!

Ian

___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

rifying 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 
> To: soft_skinned_space 
> 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, thi

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Thomas LaMarre, Prof.]

 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 
To: soft_skinned_space 
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

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[davin heckman]

Ian,

Since we are on the topic of OOO, I was wondering what the ontological
status of something like a song is?  I have to admit, I have a real
hard time swallowing a pure ontology that essentially defines the
subjective as outside of being, as a sort of on or off proposition, as
opposed to also a turning on (or is it being turned on? Or simply to
be turned or to turn?) (I am generally skeptical about a variety of
posthumanisms that go beyond a critique of a monolithic Humanism,
because I think that consciousness carries specific tendencies that
seem to fundamentally frame all possibilities for knowledge).  However
it is entirely possible that I am missing out on a discussion that has
been unfolding without me.

But here's my thought:  With a song, you have something that can be
rendered in "objective" form  maybe an mp3 file or a sheet of
notes or record or something.  If this is what we mean by a song,
then, fine, that's an object.  But a song only really starts doing
something when it is unfolding within the context of memory and
anticipation.  It only is a song when it is listened to by a subject,
which is to say it is an object that has a singular temporal being as
it is listened to, which is distinct from how it is being listened to
and replayed even by the same user.  (And we aren't even beginning to
talk about non-recorded music).  The only way a song becomes a purely
discrete object is when it is removed from its temporal existence and
understood as a totality, and detached from an audience.  And while we
can sit around and all talk about, say, "Another One Bites the Dust,"
after we squeeze it into a conceptual file type and label it, the fact
that we can discuss something that can only mean something if is
experienced as a process AND an object within the context of a
experience, suggests that sometimes being is realized by the relations
of things, rather than the things themselves.  My suggestion is that
the ontological nature of the song cannot be described in objective
terms without missing what a song is.  Without the non-objective
component of its being, a song is just sound.  If we say, well, "Hey,
when this sound occurs, people do X, Y, and Z," we can find ourself
thinking that these effects are produced by the object, but this sort
of thought experiment only gives us half an understanding of the
object's being.  You also have to think of that song in relation to
the current context, to itself over time, to the individual and
collective experience of its audience, to the culture, etc. Again, a
great means to produce estrangement, but not the complete account of
what the thing is.  At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I can see
that it might be expedient to regard a distant moon without regard to
its historical relationship to the human.  It's useful to think of a
distant moon as a quantity of data.  But the closer we get to human
existence, the more likely we are to encounter types of things that
exist, but that cannot be understood properly as a bundle of discrete
data.  Maybe there are some texts that address precisly these sorts of
concerns.

This is where I think ontology cannot simply be objective.  It must,
of course, be able to establish the differences between things, to
render those things it claims to understand in discrete form, insofar
as they can be considered as such.  On the other hand, we know that
most of what the world is made of is common and that the laws of
physics, for instance, harness discrete things under a kind of
continuity.  So, along with the conditions of radical difference that
a philosophy of objects implies, there are the conditions of radical
connectivity.  Both features are equally present, which is to say they
offer us little in the way of productive knowledge EXCEPT insofar as
we can bind and sever, cut or tie, digitize or analogize within this
framework of matter.  The 21st century loves digitizing things.
it helps computers see the world, it helps them count us, predict our
behavior, weigh it, value it, direct it, etc.  But the digital is only
half of our existence  the analog process is equally present in
language and cognition  and it is just as equpped to help us
understand the world by creating categories of things and identifying
common qualities.  In "Notes on the Uncanny," Freud identifies this
struggle as productive of a kind of unsettling (the person that acts
like an object/the object that acts like a person)...  but it does not
simply have to be a "scary" process  the move from discrete to
connected or from one into multiple can also be deeply satisfying and
reassuring of being.  If both processes are equally useful, then what
presides over these two tendencies?  Temporal consciousness that can
mobilize processes of digitization and analogy?  Another place to
think through this is in relation to a variety of attempts at
taxonomy.  At some point, a poodle has to be a poodle and a wolf has
to be a wolf, but in relation t

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Davin,

I'm about to disappear into a mess of meetings, but let me offer a brief 
response: 

What you're touching on here is what Levi Byrant sometimes calls the "weird 
mereology" of OOO. The song isn't "just" the sound waves (what Harman calls an 
underming position) nor is it just the social context of creation and use (an 
overmining position). A song is a song, and indeed, the song in an MP3 file is 
a different thing than the song as an abstraction in human culture. Neither is 
more object nor more real (well, "real" has a different meaning for Harman than 
it does for Levi and me).

I talk about this a bit in the first chapter of Alien Phenomenology, and Levi 
does as well in the mereology section of Democracy of Objects. Also, here are a 
 blog post from Levi on the subject that weaves the two together: 
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/more-strange-mereology/

I'm not answering sufficiently but wanted to get something out to you rapidly.

ib

Ian Bogost, Ph.D.
Professor
Director, Graduate Program in Digital Media

Georgia Institute of Technology
Digital Media/TSRB 320B
85 Fifth Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30308-1030

ibog...@gatech.edu
+1 (404) 894-1160 (tel)
+1 (404) 894-2833 (fax)





On Jun 15, 2012, at 4:11 AM, davin heckman wrote:

> Ian,
> 
> Since we are on the topic of OOO, I was wondering what the ontological
> status of something like a song is?  I have to admit, I have a real
> hard time swallowing a pure ontology that essentially defines the
> subjective as outside of being, as a sort of on or off proposition, as
> opposed to also a turning on (or is it being turned on? Or simply to
> be turned or to turn?) (I am generally skeptical about a variety of
> posthumanisms that go beyond a critique of a monolithic Humanism,
> because I think that consciousness carries specific tendencies that
> seem to fundamentally frame all possibilities for knowledge).  However
> it is entirely possible that I am missing out on a discussion that has
> been unfolding without me.
> 
> But here's my thought:  With a song, you have something that can be
> rendered in "objective" form  maybe an mp3 file or a sheet of
> notes or record or something.  If this is what we mean by a song,
> then, fine, that's an object.  But a song only really starts doing
> something when it is unfolding within the context of memory and
> anticipation.  It only is a song when it is listened to by a subject,
> which is to say it is an object that has a singular temporal being as
> it is listened to, which is distinct from how it is being listened to
> and replayed even by the same user.  (And we aren't even beginning to
> talk about non-recorded music).  The only way a song becomes a purely
> discrete object is when it is removed from its temporal existence and
> understood as a totality, and detached from an audience.  And while we
> can sit around and all talk about, say, "Another One Bites the Dust,"
> after we squeeze it into a conceptual file type and label it, the fact
> that we can discuss something that can only mean something if is
> experienced as a process AND an object within the context of a
> experience, suggests that sometimes being is realized by the relations
> of things, rather than the things themselves.  My suggestion is that
> the ontological nature of the song cannot be described in objective
> terms without missing what a song is.  Without the non-objective
> component of its being, a song is just sound.  If we say, well, "Hey,
> when this sound occurs, people do X, Y, and Z," we can find ourself
> thinking that these effects are produced by the object, but this sort
> of thought experiment only gives us half an understanding of the
> object's being.  You also have to think of that song in relation to
> the current context, to itself over time, to the individual and
> collective experience of its audience, to the culture, etc. Again, a
> great means to produce estrangement, but not the complete account of
> what the thing is.  At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I can see
> that it might be expedient to regard a distant moon without regard to
> its historical relationship to the human.  It's useful to think of a
> distant moon as a quantity of data.  But the closer we get to human
> existence, the more likely we are to encounter types of things that
> exist, but that cannot be understood properly as a bundle of discrete
> data.  Maybe there are some texts that address precisly these sorts of
> concerns.
> 
> This is where I think ontology cannot simply be objective.  It must,
> of course, be able to establish the differences between things, to
> render those things it claims to understand in discrete form, insofar
> as they can be considered as such.  On the other hand, we know that
> most of what the world is made of is common and that the laws of
> physics, for instance, harness discrete things under a kind of
> continuity.  So, along with the conditions of radical difference that
> a philos

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[micha cárdenas]

s 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 
> To: soft_skinned_space 
> 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 cypre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[micha cárdenas]

 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 
>> To: soft_skinned_space 
>> 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
>>

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Judith Halberstam]

ng 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 
> To: soft_skinned_space 
> 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 percep

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Michael O'Rourke]

Levi Bryant responds here too:

https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/onto-cartography-ooo-and-politics-a-reply-to-judith-halberstam-and-cameron/ 



--- On Fri, 15/6/12, Ian Bogost  wrote:

From: Ian Bogost 
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
To: "soft_skinned_space" 
Date: Friday, 15 June, 2012, 13:53

Jack,
Thanks for these comments. Before I dive into you're comments, I'm going to 
point you to a reflection on the matter by Tim Morton, since he is not a member 
of the list but has been reading the archives, and hoped someone would link to 
him.
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/06/ooo-gender-sexuality.htmlIan - 
I
am reading and enjoying very much your book Alien Phenomenology right now so no
offense meant in terms of the masculinity orientation of many of the OOO
conversations. But to try to flesh out why we might worry about such an
orientation and to respond to Michael briefly here are a few elaborations on
that themThat's very kind on both counts.2. What
is that larger problem? Well, as any Feminism 101 course will show us, the
gender hierarchy that assigns male to the 1 and female to the 0 in the binary
coding of gender, also assigns male to the status of subject and female to the
status of object. Hence, having occupied the status of "object" for
some time within both the symbolic and the imaginary of the cultures within
which we participate, surely the category of "female" should allow
for some access to the question of what is it like to be an object. Surely! 
But—also surely, you don't think I disagree? Nor Harman, nor any of the others 
who have been mentioned in this context. Or do you? I'm not being coy, I think 
it should take more than a study of someone's bibliography to conclude that 
they are excluding a whole category of being. Particularly when their entire 
philosophy is built on the assumption that all that is exists equally. After 
Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to
pass through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation. Have you 
read Levi Bryant's account of objects in relation to Lacan's graphs of 
sexuation? It's in Democracy of Objects, which is available online, or here's a 
short 
post: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs-of-sexuation-and-ooo/4.
  And since Michael believes that the onus of
representation/critique falls to those who say they have been left out, one
word: Fanon! I'm not sure what how to respond to this comment. All I think 
Michael meant is that the opportunity space for analysis is open, and those 
with different backgrounds, interest, and commitments can take it on. I know 
you don't mean to suggest that dropping names like Fanon and Spillers on an 
email list is sufficient rhetorical work, but neither is it  sufficient to 
conclude that all questions have been already answered by a favorite 
theorist. So, ok,
if women and racialized bodies have all too often been rendered as
"things" in the marketplace of commodity capitalism, and if a lot of
the work on on Object Oriented Philosophy leaves the status of the human
unmarked even when rejecting it in favor of the object and relations between
objects then surely we need a queer
and or feminist OO philosophy in order to address the politics of the object. I 
have no objection to this. Why would I, right? Surely once more, you don't 
think I would, nor Harman, nor Morton, nor Bryant, nor anyone? You'll find at 
least one comment in Alien Phenomenology, albeit very brief and really just 
cursory, that touches on this issue, later in the book. Katherine Behar 
organized a set of Object Oriented Feminism sessions at the 2010 SLSA 
conference, to which I was fortunate to serve as one respondent. You can find 
the abstracts at the following link, along with my response from the 
conference: http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml. 
Behar is organizing a follow-up at this year's SLSA, which will include 
Patricia Clough, Katherine Hayles, Eileen Joy, Jamie Skye Bianco, Anne Pollock, 
Rebecca Sheldon, and others. Is this a sufficient measure? No, of course not. 
But it's a start of something, just as Harman tried to start something, rather 
than a quick judgement meant to fuel an engine of reprisal.
Again, I think this is what Michael was saying. Let's just do the work!
Ian

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___
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http://www.subtle.net/empyre___
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empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Michael O'Rourke]

There is also Levi Bryant's essay on Ranciere, queer theory and his onticology 
in the journal Identities and numerous well-thought blog posts at Larval 
Subjects on "phallosophy", queer theory and posthumanism and the Lacanian 
graphs of sexuation, Morton's "Queer Ecology" essay in PMLA and the essay on 
the mesh and the strange stranger in Collapse. As Ian says below he has engaged 
with OOF and been pretty instrumental in helping bring this sub-field of OOO to 
a wider audience (delighted to hear there is a follow up meeting in the works). 
And Harman has discussed feminism several times on his blog (while admitting an 
Object Oriented Feminism is not within his field of expertise) and he has 
tackled the object/objectification 
issue: http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/objects-and-objectification/ 

So, it would be fair to say that all four main figures associated with OOO have 
engaged with both feminist and queer thinking. Still, there's lots more to do!

Michael.



--- On Fri, 15/6/12, Ian Bogost  wrote:

From: Ian Bogost 
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
To: "soft_skinned_space" 
Date: Friday, 15 June, 2012, 13:53

Jack,
Thanks for these comments. Before I dive into you're comments, I'm going to 
point you to a reflection on the matter by Tim Morton, since he is not a member 
of the list but has been reading the archives, and hoped someone would link to 
him.
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/06/ooo-gender-sexuality.htmlIan - 
I
am reading and enjoying very much your book Alien Phenomenology right now so no
offense meant in terms of the masculinity orientation of many of the OOO
conversations. But to try to flesh out why we might worry about such an
orientation and to respond to Michael briefly here are a few elaborations on
that themThat's very kind on both counts.2. What
is that larger problem? Well, as any Feminism 101 course will show us, the
gender hierarchy that assigns male to the 1 and female to the 0 in the binary
coding of gender, also assigns male to the status of subject and female to the
status of object. Hence, having occupied the status of "object" for
some time within both the symbolic and the imaginary of the cultures within
which we participate, surely the category of "female" should allow
for some access to the question of what is it like to be an object. Surely! 
But—also surely, you don't think I disagree? Nor Harman, nor any of the others 
who have been mentioned in this context. Or do you? I'm not being coy, I think 
it should take more than a study of someone's bibliography to conclude that 
they are excluding a whole category of being. Particularly when their entire 
philosophy is built on the assumption that all that is exists equally. After 
Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to
pass through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation. Have you 
read Levi Bryant's account of objects in relation to Lacan's graphs of 
sexuation? It's in Democracy of Objects, which is available online, or here's a 
short 
post: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs-of-sexuation-and-ooo/4.
  And since Michael believes that the onus of
representation/critique falls to those who say they have been left out, one
word: Fanon! I'm not sure what how to respond to this comment. All I think 
Michael meant is that the opportunity space for analysis is open, and those 
with different backgrounds, interest, and commitments can take it on. I know 
you don't mean to suggest that dropping names like Fanon and Spillers on an 
email list is sufficient rhetorical work, but neither is it  sufficient to 
conclude that all questions have been already answered by a favorite 
theorist. So, ok,
if women and racialized bodies have all too often been rendered as
"things" in the marketplace of commodity capitalism, and if a lot of
the work on on Object Oriented Philosophy leaves the status of the human
unmarked even when rejecting it in favor of the object and relations between
objects then surely we need a queer
and or feminist OO philosophy in order to address the politics of the object. I 
have no objection to this. Why would I, right? Surely once more, you don't 
think I would, nor Harman, nor Morton, nor Bryant, nor anyone? You'll find at 
least one comment in Alien Phenomenology, albeit very brief and really just 
cursory, that touches on this issue, later in the book. Katherine Behar 
organized a set of Object Oriented Feminism sessions at the 2010 SLSA 
conference, to which I was fortunate to serve as one respondent. You can find 
the abstracts at the following link, along with my response from the 
conference: http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml. 
Behar is organizing a follow-up at this year's SLSA, which will include 
Patricia Clough,
 Kat

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Clough, Patricia]

#x27;t wait for response and interventions) about  
this tension in relationship to affect.  I hope we can discussion  more the 
recent focus on aesthetics which has enabled me to think in the tension rather 
than against it  and find a way as well to dwell  in rather than  simply put an 
end to the  aporia between ontology  and epistemology that affect and non-human 
perception produces.   I think  aesthetics and the turn to Whitehead's 
rereading of Kant points to a way to engage the liveliness of  what Eugene 
Thacker calls a world without us  or not for us.

Finally,  during the first week  I much enjoyed all the sites to which I was 
sent and all the efforts to make stuff, queer stuff, with  digital technology 
as well as with other technologies.   This doing along with thinking (crude way 
of putting it) seems important to a critical engagement with what we once would 
have called  knowledge production.Looking forward to ongoing 
conversation(s)   Patricia 




From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Michael O'Rourke 
[tranquilised_i...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2012 1:15 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

There is also Levi Bryant's essay on Ranciere, queer theory and his onticology 
in the journal Identities and numerous well-thought blog posts at Larval 
Subjects on "phallosophy", queer theory and posthumanism and the Lacanian 
graphs of sexuation, Morton's "Queer Ecology" essay in PMLA and the essay on 
the mesh and the strange stranger in Collapse. As Ian says below he has engaged 
with OOF and been pretty instrumental in helping bring this sub-field of OOO to 
a wider audience (delighted to hear there is a follow up meeting in the works). 
And Harman has discussed feminism several times on his blog (while admitting an 
Object Oriented Feminism is not within his field of expertise) and he has 
tackled the object/objectification issue: 
http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/objects-and-objectification/

So, it would be fair to say that all four main figures associated with OOO have 
engaged with both feminist and queer thinking. Still, there's lots more to do!

Michael.



--- On Fri, 15/6/12, Ian Bogost  wrote:

From: Ian Bogost 
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
To: "soft_skinned_space" 
Date: Friday, 15 June, 2012, 13:53

Jack,

Thanks for these comments. Before I dive into you're comments, I'm going to 
point you to a reflection on the matter by Tim Morton, since he is not a member 
of the list but has been reading the archives, and hoped someone would link to 
him.

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/06/ooo-gender-sexuality.html

Ian - I am reading and enjoying very much your book Alien Phenomenology right 
now so no offense meant in terms of the masculinity orientation of many of the 
OOO conversations. But to try to flesh out why we might worry about such an 
orientation and to respond to Michael briefly here are a few elaborations on 
that them

That's very kind on both counts.

2. What is that larger problem? Well, as any Feminism 101 course will show us, 
the gender hierarchy that assigns male to the 1 and female to the 0 in the 
binary coding of gender, also assigns male to the status of subject and female 
to the status of object. Hence, having occupied the status of "object" for some 
time within both the symbolic and the imaginary of the cultures within which we 
participate, surely the category of "female" should allow for some access to 
the question of what is it like to be an object.

Surely! But—also surely, you don't think I disagree? Nor Harman, nor any of the 
others who have been mentioned in this context. Or do you? I'm not being coy, I 
think it should take more than a study of someone's bibliography to conclude 
that they are excluding a whole category of being. Particularly when their 
entire philosophy is built on the assumption that all that is exists equally.

After Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to pass 
through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation.

Have you read Levi Bryant's account of objects in relation to Lacan's graphs of 
sexuation? It's in Democracy of Objects, which is available online, or here's a 
short post: 
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs-of-sexuation-and-ooo/

4.  And since Michael believes that the onus of representation/critique falls 
to those who say they have been left out, one word: Fanon!

I'm not sure what how to respond to this comment. All I think Michael meant is 
that the opportunity space for analysis is open, and those with different 
backgrounds, interest, and commitments can take it on. I know you don't mean to 
suggest that dropping names li

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi All,

If this already went in, sorry. Ignore. I'm pasting a post I wrote here,
because Jack Halberstam kindly suggested I do.

Just to introduce myself, I'm Tim Morton of Rice University and I'm an
OOO-er.

Yours, Tim

OOO, Gender, Sexuality
 I can't sleep. I was up grading so by rights I should be knackered. But
I've also been up having the best conversation ever, with the best ever,
and elements of it are beeping away in my head.

So I double checked my Internet and noticed Judith Halberstam, Ian Bogost,
Michael O'Rourke, Rob Jackson and others were having a detailed discussion
on empyre.

Now I don't belong to it and I'm too busy to get with it right now--also
these thoughts are fizzing in me.

So I hope some kind person(s) will paste this or the link to the discussion
list?

Okay. I've written essays on queer theory and ecology and on OOO and
feminism (that last one is forthcoming). I am and have been considered a
deconstructor, and my most recent talk (soon essay) was on OOO and race.

Of the 6 Ph.D. students of mine explicitly doing OOO (out of about 15),
three are women, one of whom is working on gender and sexuality. Two are
men, both gay, working on performativity.

If you think about it, OOO provides a very beautiful way to think gender
and sexuality issues at the ontological level--Levi Bryant has done some of
the heavy lifting there, as well as Michael O'Rourke.

Withdrawal--no object is subsumed by its use-by any (other) entity--surely
accounts for gender switching, non-genital sexuality, BDSM and queerness
(for want of a better word) at a deep level.

Now my next remarks are addressed to those scholars who like Judith
Halberstam (did I meet you when I was at USC last year?) are concerned
about OOO.

I use y'all, for some weird reason. I'm actually English but was recently
kidnapped by Rice!

Y'all are a bit scared of "ontology" because it was the province of the
metaphysics of presence and all that it entails. Correct.

But OOO is explicitly designed to account for a reality without this
presence, yet without evaporating everything into (anthropocentric) powder.

Although I did just write on Karen Barad, etc etc., we look like we are
sidestepping some recent theory because we believe that it contains some
weird code that goes all the way back to Heidegger, weird unnecessary code
that affected Lacan, and through him Barthes, Derrida and Foucault--and on
up to now.

The bug is why Derrida was so leery of ontology as such, for instance.

That's why Harman went back to Heidegger. He dismantles the code from that
point. That's why he's so important.

This is a big deal. We are not ignoring you. We are going back to the
Heidegger U-Boat and debugging it from the inside. Y'all are floating
around above a gigantic coral reef of beautiful things we call "objects,"
including you (look it's you down there!).

But you can't see it cos this Heidegger bug has got your windshield all
fogged up.

In no way does OOO try to yank you back up to the surface of prepackaged
ideologemes of race, class and gender. We are simply asking you to look
down.

I should have more conversations like that.

-- 

Ecology without Nature 
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Akshay]

Hi all,

I’m new to this place, but I thought I might write a little on this
topic as for better or worse, I have one foot in both social/critical
theory and metaphysics. I hope I'm using the list properly!

I think this discussion has taken many interesting turns and been rich
and varied, but I am also left with the sense that the stakes could be
clarified further in a way that might be productive for all involved.
Though I can’t claim to represent either queer theory or OOO, which
seem to have become primary threads, (theoretically, my area of focus
is in race and ethnicity, and metaphysically, I do subscribe to
philosophical realism, but of a different stripe,) I do find that many
of the contours of the discussion here are symptomatic of some larger
debates within the world of Continentally-inflected thought, and so I
would like to zoom out a bit and attempt an intervention at the level
of assumptive foundations. I’m drawing on the words of Zach Blas,
quoted by Micha Cárdenas, as a point of departure because I feel they
get to the heart of the matter. I hope zooming out this way doesn’t
detract from or stray too far away from the specifics at hand, and
feel free to shelve my comments if they do!

Blas states that the realities of OOO/SR “are always already
culturally parsed through class, gender, and race.” It seems to me
like insufficient attention to social realities, in particular, to the
ways they might condition or otherwise affect the ontologies in
question, is the basic charge that unites most of the theoretical
criticisms of the new realisms, whether Galloway’s, Halberstam’s, or
others. To cut to the chase, these criticisms ultimately concern the
role and jurisdiction of philosophy and/or theory, which is something
I noticed has not been addressed yet (if I’m wrong here, my
apologies!)

Blas’ position on the matter appears to be the one shared by most
people working within the Continental world, which we can find in the
final question of the excerpt: “what are one’s ethical and political
obligations when writing and constructing a conception of reality and
realism?"

As I understand it, this question contains two claims:

a. Ethical-political obligations are inseparable from metaphysics/ontology.
b. These obligations are a priori issues that ground ontology (ethics
as first philosophy as found in Levinas.)

We can bracket the first claim- whether or not it’s true that we have
ethical obligations, it seems that all of us here are invested in
ethical and political problems in our own ways, and believe that there
are important connections between ethics/politics and ontology.

The second claim is the relevant one, and where the real disagreement
between the realisms and their critics exposes itself. For most people
doing (queer, race, etc.) theory, forays into the ontological are
indeed prompted by ethics, and ultimately secondary to them. Such
theory has its origins in the experience of oppression and violence,
and has as its goal engagement with and resistance against them.
Marx’s famous quote from his Theses on Feuerbach springs to mind as an
historical epigraph: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world
in various ways; the point is to change it.”

The priority of ethics impacts the other regions of philosophy in a
number of ways, one of the most relevant being that ontology often
becomes instrumental- the servant of ethics (here referring to
specifically human concerns, though this is changing thanks to
Critical Animal Studies.) People who do theory (from here on, crude
and unfair shorthand for a vibrant multiplicity of thought-formations)
are interested in questions of what race, gender, society, etc, are so
that the violence and inequalities associated with them can be
resisted in some way. Occasionally, depending on the theoretical
approach, the “what is it?” question is extended further down the
ontological ladder, but once again, that extension is often a
byproduct of the ethical-political process or the adoption of some
larger philosophy for application in a particular area. Theory, as
Foucault and Deleuze have described it, is mostly conceived as a
“toolbox,” and its concepts are the tools we use to change the world.
Ontology becomes secondary, to speak with Deleuze again, “what
does/can it do?” emerges as the relevant question, and often, the
relation to any notion of truth is politicized. In its most extreme
instantiations, the priority of ethics makes “pure” ontology seem
unethical, as in part of Galloway’s criticism, or ontology is thought
to be literally decided by ethics itself.

Ontologists like those who make up the OOO camp (also an internally
diverse category) are committed to a reality that is not restricted
to, exhausted by, or inaccessible to the human (though it need not be
unmediated, of course,) and is thus irreducible to and not constituted
solely by the “dirty political battles” Blas cites. They hold that
ontology can be pursued, in opposition to those who argu

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[davin heckman]

Thank you Ian, for these thoughts.  My initial encounter with this
work came via a brief discussion of "flat ontology," which I found
somewhat offputting.  I followed up by reading through the re:press
book.  What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the
discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating.

Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with
one of my favorite passages from Hegel.  Pardon me for cannibalizing
another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here:
http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism).
*
In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process:

"The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one
might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the
fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false
manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of
it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another,
they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the
same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in
which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary
as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of
the whole." [1]

Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned
outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic
processes that comprise its totality.

This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light
of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to
fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we
see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have
shaken up the pursuit of knowledge.
*
I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to
embrace a kind of "humanism," but one which cannot easily understand
as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an
ontology that is expressed in our metaphors.  One grip I have with the
use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to
personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in
 which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines,
interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same
thing.  When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer,
while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic
investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of
obligation to, rather than ownership over) child.  If my bike decided
to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me  I would not
feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally
florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but
with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging
in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone).  A bike, on
the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and
I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling  but I have
very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb
with a hammer.  On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to
go (except when there's an accident).  a toddler, not so much
an eight year old, he usually comes with a counter proposal (and it is
a monstrous adult that would treat kids like a bike, insist that they
only go where told, speak when it is demanded).  A lot of really deep
thinking about human subjectivty simply does not go this far  and
part of this has to do with a poor understanding of objects.  What is
worse is when this understanding infects interpersonal relationships
in the context of a Randian sort of world where there is "no such
thing as society, only individuals" (yet, bosses treat workers like
bikes and bad boyfriends treat their partners like robots).

I am very excited to read more.  I feel like it is important to free
our thinking from patterns and habits of the past.  In particular, the
culture of academic citation has gone from being about finding good
ideas where they are to deriving authority from the aura of the great
figure.  I also have no problem with accumulations of wisdom that
translate into an inherited perspective, but this can't close us off
to thinking.  So  thank you for this!

Davin

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Ian Bogost  wrote:
> Davin,
>
> I'm about to disappear into a mess of meetings, but let me offer a brief
> response:
>
> What you're touching on here is what Levi Byrant sometimes calls the "weird
> mereology" of OOO. The song isn't "just" the sound waves (what Harman calls
> an underming position) nor is it just the social context of creation and use
> (an overmining position). A song is a song, and indeed, the song in an MP3
> file is a different thing than the song as an abstraction in human culture.
> Neither is more object nor more real (well, "real" has a different meaning
> for Harman than it d

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi Davin,

We obviously treat different entities differently.

But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically 
different.

Yours, Tim



http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman  wrote:

> Thank you Ian, for these thoughts.  My initial encounter with this
> work came via a brief discussion of "flat ontology," which I found
> somewhat offputting.  I followed up by reading through the re:press
> book.  What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the
> discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating.
> 
> Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with
> one of my favorite passages from Hegel.  Pardon me for cannibalizing
> another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here:
> http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism).
> *
> In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process:
> 
> "The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one
> might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the
> fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false
> manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of
> it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another,
> they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the
> same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in
> which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary
> as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of
> the whole." [1]
> 
> Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned
> outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic
> processes that comprise its totality.
> 
> This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light
> of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to
> fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we
> see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have
> shaken up the pursuit of knowledge.
> *
> I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to
> embrace a kind of "humanism," but one which cannot easily understand
> as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an
> ontology that is expressed in our metaphors.  One grip I have with the
> use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to
> personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in
> which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines,
> interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same
> thing.  When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer,
> while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic
> investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of
> obligation to, rather than ownership over) child.  If my bike decided
> to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me  I would not
> feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally
> florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but
> with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging
> in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone).  A bike, on
> the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and
> I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling  but I have
> very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb
> with a hammer.  On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to
> go (except when there's an accident).  a toddler, not so much
> an eight year old, he usually comes with a counter proposal (and it is
> a monstrous adult that would treat kids like a bike, insist that they
> only go where told, speak when it is demanded).  A lot of really deep
> thinking about human subjectivty simply does not go this far  and
> part of this has to do with a poor understanding of objects.  What is
> worse is when this understanding infects interpersonal relationships
> in the context of a Randian sort of world where there is "no such
> thing as society, only individuals" (yet, bosses treat workers like
> bikes and bad boyfriends treat their partners like robots).
> 
> I am very excited to read more.  I feel like it is important to free
> our thinking from patterns and habits of the past.  In particular, the
> culture of academic citation has gone from being about finding good
> ideas where they are to deriving authority from the aura of the great
> figure.  I also have no problem with accumulations of wisdom that
> translate into an inherited perspective, but this can't close us off
> to thinking.  So  thank you for this!
> 
> Davin
> 
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Ian Bogost  
> wrote:
>> Davin,
>> 
>> I'm about to disappear into a mess of meetings, but let me offer a brief
>> response:
>> 
>> What you're touching on here is what Levi Byrant sometimes cal

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Thomas LaMarre, Prof.]

Hi Tim,

I thought that the basic point was that these entities are ontologically
different but not substantially different.  In other words, there are
indeed different modes of existence but they are not ordered
hierarchically by reference to substance (substantialism) or divided by
recourse to dualism.

Best,

Tom

On 12-06-23 4:46 PM, "Timothy Morton"  wrote:

>Hi Davin,
>
>We obviously treat different entities differently.
>
>But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically
>different.
>
>Yours, Tim
>
>
>
>http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
>
>On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman  wrote:
>
>> Thank you Ian, for these thoughts.  My initial encounter with this
>> work came via a brief discussion of "flat ontology," which I found
>> somewhat offputting.  I followed up by reading through the re:press
>> book.  What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the
>> discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating.
>> 
>> Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with
>> one of my favorite passages from Hegel.  Pardon me for cannibalizing
>> another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here:
>> 
>>http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-critic
>>ism).
>> *
>> In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process:
>> 
>> "The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one
>> might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the
>> fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false
>> manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of
>> it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another,
>> they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the
>> same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in
>> which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary
>> as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of
>> the whole." [1]
>> 
>> Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned
>> outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic
>> processes that comprise its totality.
>> 
>> This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light
>> of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to
>> fundamentally alter Hegel¹s argument, I only mean to suggest that we
>> see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have
>> shaken up the pursuit of knowledge.
>> *
>> I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to
>> embrace a kind of "humanism," but one which cannot easily understand
>> as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an
>> ontology that is expressed in our metaphors.  One grip I have with the
>> use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to
>> personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in
>> which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines,
>> interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same
>> thing.  When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer,
>> while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic
>> investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of
>> obligation to, rather than ownership over) child.  If my bike decided
>> to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me  I would not
>> feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally
>> florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but
>> with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging
>> in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone).  A bike, on
>> the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and
>> I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling  but I have
>> very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb
>> with a hammer.  On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to
>> go (except when there's an accident).  a toddler, not so much
>> an eight year old, he usually comes with a counter proposal (and it is
>> a monstrous adult that would treat kids like a bike, insist that they
>> only go where told, speak when it is demanded).  A lot of really deep
>> thinking about human subjectivty simply does not go this far  and
>> part of this has to do with a poor understanding of objects.  What is
>> worse is when this understanding infects interpersonal relationships
>> in the context of a Randian sort of world where there is "no such
>> thing as society, only individuals" (yet, bosses treat workers like
>> bikes and bad boyfriends treat their partners like robots).
>> 
>> I am very excited to read more.  I feel like it is important to free
>> our thinking from patterns and habits of the past.  In particular, the
>> culture of academic citation has gone from being about finding good
>> ideas where they are to deriving authorit

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[davin heckman]

I agree, this is a good starting point  that all things that exist
have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are
not "not beings"), which is a sort of foundational ontological
similarity.  But if the only significant ontological claim we can make
about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this
means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there
is no difference between things.  If we admit difference, then we must
account for those differences in meaningful ways.  For instance,
waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1
differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes in the course of being
eaten, it is still in one meaningful sense the "same" waffle after it
has been bitten, but in another sense, it is a different waffle, too.
While both toasters and waffles are different from something like an
idea or a "memory" rendered in media (a waffle recipe or story about
waffles) or a process habituated in muscle memory (the habit of making
a waffle or eating one).

My concern is that if we reduce all that can be known about being to a
simple recognition of being, we commit to a kind of abstraction and
alienation from being of the sort that happens when markets try to
mediate everything through the common denominator of dollars.

Davin

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton
 wrote:
> Hi Davin,
>
> We obviously treat different entities differently.
>
> But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically 
> different.
>
> Yours, Tim
>
>
>
> http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
>
> On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman  wrote:
>
>> Thank you Ian, for these thoughts.  My initial encounter with this
>> work came via a brief discussion of "flat ontology," which I found
>> somewhat offputting.  I followed up by reading through the re:press
>> book.  What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the
>> discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating.
>>
>> Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with
>> one of my favorite passages from Hegel.  Pardon me for cannibalizing
>> another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here:
>> http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism).
>> *
>> In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process:
>>
>> "The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one
>> might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the
>> fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false
>> manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of
>> it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another,
>> they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the
>> same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in
>> which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary
>> as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of
>> the whole." [1]
>>
>> Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned
>> outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic
>> processes that comprise its totality.
>>
>> This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light
>> of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to
>> fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we
>> see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have
>> shaken up the pursuit of knowledge.
>> *
>> I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to
>> embrace a kind of "humanism," but one which cannot easily understand
>> as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an
>> ontology that is expressed in our metaphors.  One grip I have with the
>> use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to
>> personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in
>> which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines,
>> interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same
>> thing.  When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer,
>> while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic
>> investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of
>> obligation to, rather than ownership over) child.  If my bike decided
>> to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me  I would not
>> feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally
>> florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but
>> with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging
>> in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone).  A bike, on
>> the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and
>> I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling  but I have
>> very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb
>> with a hammer.  On the othe

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi--OOO is the least abstract and generalizing of any ontology in the West 
since the Pre-Socratics. 

Everyone else pretty much reduces things to substance, fire, water, atoms, 
quantum fluctuations, ideas, etc.

We don't--waffle maker a is irreducibly not b, and not simply because it looks 
different to me.

Tim


http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 24, 2012, at 4:44 AM, davin heckman  wrote:

> I agree, this is a good starting point  that all things that exist
> have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are
> not "not beings"), which is a sort of foundational ontological
> similarity.  But if the only significant ontological claim we can make
> about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this
> means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there
> is no difference between things.  If we admit difference, then we must
> account for those differences in meaningful ways.  For instance,
> waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1
> differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes in the course of being
> eaten, it is still in one meaningful sense the "same" waffle after it
> has been bitten, but in another sense, it is a different waffle, too.
> While both toasters and waffles are different from something like an
> idea or a "memory" rendered in media (a waffle recipe or story about
> waffles) or a process habituated in muscle memory (the habit of making
> a waffle or eating one).
> 
> My concern is that if we reduce all that can be known about being to a
> simple recognition of being, we commit to a kind of abstraction and
> alienation from being of the sort that happens when markets try to
> mediate everything through the common denominator of dollars.
> 
> Davin
> 
> On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton
>  wrote:
>> Hi Davin,
>> 
>> We obviously treat different entities differently.
>> 
>> But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically 
>> different.
>> 
>> Yours, Tim
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
>> 
>> On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman  wrote:
>> 
>>> Thank you Ian, for these thoughts.  My initial encounter with this
>>> work came via a brief discussion of "flat ontology," which I found
>>> somewhat offputting.  I followed up by reading through the re:press
>>> book.  What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the
>>> discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating.
>>> 
>>> Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with
>>> one of my favorite passages from Hegel.  Pardon me for cannibalizing
>>> another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here:
>>> http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism).
>>> *
>>> In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process:
>>> 
>>> "The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one
>>> might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the
>>> fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false
>>> manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of
>>> it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another,
>>> they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the
>>> same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in
>>> which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary
>>> as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of
>>> the whole." [1]
>>> 
>>> Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned
>>> outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic
>>> processes that comprise its totality.
>>> 
>>> This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light
>>> of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to
>>> fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we
>>> see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have
>>> shaken up the pursuit of knowledge.
>>> *
>>> I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to
>>> embrace a kind of "humanism," but one which cannot easily understand
>>> as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an
>>> ontology that is expressed in our metaphors.  One grip I have with the
>>> use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to
>>> personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in
>>> which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines,
>>> interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same
>>> thing.  When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer,
>>> while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic
>>> investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of
>>> obligation to, rather than ownership over) child.  If my bike decided
>>> to bite me.which it can't, even if it can hurt me 

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[davin heckman]

Ian and Tim,

Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with
ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the
different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects?

I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh
perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs
 highlight the ways
that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in
which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways.
 A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a
chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a
sculpture is not necessarily a chair.  yet, in some fundamental
way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and
recognition.  Put all three things together, and you have a "chair"
which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously.  On the
other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a
chair within a game, for instance, can be very "real" to the other
objects in the game).

Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the
chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work,
etc) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which
makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about
a chair have being, or if we afford the material object of the chair
primacy.  In which case, does a digital rendering of the chair carry
the same weight as an unexpressed idea about a chair, too.  At some
point, doesn't ontology lead into this thicket?

Davin

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Ian Bogost  wrote:
> There is no reason why holding that everything exists equally entails
> "reducing all that can be known about a being to a simple recognition of
> being."
>
> Ian
>
>
> On Jun 24, 2012, at 5:44 AM, davin heckman wrote:
>
> I agree, this is a good starting point  that all things that exist
> have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are
> not "not beings"), which is a sort of foundational ontological
> similarity.  But if the only significant ontological claim we can make
> about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this
> means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there
> is no difference between things.  If we admit difference, then we must
> account for those differences in meaningful ways.  For instance,
> waffle #1 differs from waffle #2 in a different way than waffle #1
> differs from a toaster (or waffle #1 changes in the course of being
> eaten, it is still in one meaningful sense the "same" waffle after it
> has been bitten, but in another sense, it is a different waffle, too.
> While both toasters and waffles are different from something like an
> idea or a "memory" rendered in media (a waffle recipe or story about
> waffles) or a process habituated in muscle memory (the habit of making
> a waffle or eating one).
>
> My concern is that if we reduce all that can be known about being to a
> simple recognition of being, we commit to a kind of abstraction and
> alienation from being of the sort that happens when markets try to
> mediate everything through the common denominator of dollars.
>
> Davin
>
> On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Timothy Morton
>  wrote:
>
> Hi Davin,
>
>
> We obviously treat different entities differently.
>
>
> But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically
> different.
>
>
> Yours, Tim
>
>
>
>
> http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
>
>
> On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman  wrote:
>
>
> Thank you Ian, for these thoughts.  My initial encounter with this
>
> work came via a brief discussion of "flat ontology," which I found
>
> somewhat offputting.  I followed up by reading through the re:press
>
> book.  What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the
>
> discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating.
>
>
> Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with
>
> one of my favorite passages from Hegel.  Pardon me for cannibalizing
>
> another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here:
>
> http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism).
>
> *
>
> In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process:
>
>
> "The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one
>
> might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the
>
> fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false
>
> manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of
>
> it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another,
>
> they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the
>
> same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in
>
> which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary
>
> as the other; and this mut

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Clough, Patricia]

Dear All   I agree with Ian   that reading is helpful and interesting Just 
finishing  Democracy of Objects  by  Levi Bryant  I can say there is quite a 
bit of exposition there.   Difference between him and Graham (and much that is 
similar)   Differences between him and Deleuze (also some similarities)  and 
Lacan and Zizek   all there  and clearly.   And all clarifying about ideas and 
materiality, objects and subjects  and even  politics.   I think what gets 
confusing is how to take this new upsurge in philosophical thought  and I think 
that is a matter of one's own intellectual searchWhile OOO has been 
accompanied by an interest in objects and animals  and computers  (in the 
rather conventional sense) OOO is not primarily about thatIt is an ontology 
and so has to be brought to those different inquires in a way that demands 
one's own desires interests  not to mention a subject matter that may be 
alluring.For me this is a matter of writing  or creating--to join with the 
creations shared over the past weeks.  Writing is my way of queering the 
intimacies  between philosophy, politics, aesthetics and my own field 
sociology. P

From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Ian Bogost 
[ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu]
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 11:28 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A definition 
of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but all have 
something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention. There are no 
planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some extent), who 
distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea of a chair is 
different from the real chair, which recedes from all encounters. I think this 
is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your second paragraph below.

NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical) chair 
primacy over the others. As for "the same weight" — well, that depends on what 
you mean by "weight." What do you mean?

I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress without 
reading some of this material in depth…

Ian

On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote:

Ian and Tim,

Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with
ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the
different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects?

I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh
perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs> highlight the ways
that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in
which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways.
A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a
chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a
sculpture is not necessarily a chair.  yet, in some fundamental
way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and
recognition.  Put all three things together, and you have a "chair"
which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously.  On the
other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a
chair within a game, for instance, can be very "real" to the other
objects in the game).

Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the
chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work,
etc) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which
makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about
a chair have being, or if we afford the material object of the chair
primacy.  In which case, does a digital rendering of the chair carry
the same weight as an unexpressed idea about a chair, too.  At some
point, doesn't ontology lead into this thicket?

Davin

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Ian Bogost 
mailto:ian.bog...@lcc.gatech.edu>> wrote:
There is no reason why holding that everything exists equally entails
"reducing all that can be known about a being to a simple recognition of
being."

Ian


On Jun 24, 2012, at 5:44 AM, davin heckman wrote:

I agree, this is a good starting point  that all things that exist
have being as their common condition of existence (that is, they are
not "not beings"), which is a sort of foundational ontological
similarity.  But if the only significant ontological claim we can make
about things is either yes or no, do they exist or not, then this
means all things carry this single quality, which is to say that there
is no difference between things.  If we admit difference, then we must
account for those differences in meaningful ways.  For instance,
waffle #1 differs from waf

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[davin heckman]

You are right  I should do more reading.  I find the thoughts
engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more
information where I can.

Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on
relationality and time.  You have all of these things that have to do
with chairs, but only the chair is the chair.  And there are these
things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own
right.  But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of
consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something
definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting
to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the
thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a
thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop.
Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object.
 Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing
them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our
imagination.  On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same
as digital iterations.  Less like a computer, we pull the modular
concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones.  I
wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the
other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which
are articulated and taken up into collective discourse  and even
still, a discursive "thing" gains a level of significance when it
represents some empirical process.

I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next.
 It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable
saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five.  In other
words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair.  In my mind,
"weight" might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability,
its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its
aesthetic elegance  though none of these qualities are directly
analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types
of being.

All these thoughts are a jumble  I'll take your advice and do some reading.

Davin

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost  wrote:
> A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A
> definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but
> all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention.
> There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some
> extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea
> of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all
> encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your
> second paragraph below.
>
> NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical)
> chair primacy over the others. As for "the same weight" — well, that depends
> on what you mean by "weight." What do you mean?
>
> I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress
> without reading some of this material in depth…
>
> Ian
>
> On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote:
>
> Ian and Tim,
>
> Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with
> ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the
> different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects?
>
> I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh
> perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs
>  highlight the ways
> that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in
> which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways.
> A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a
> chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a
> sculpture is not necessarily a chair.  yet, in some fundamental
> way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and
> recognition.  Put all three things together, and you have a "chair"
> which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously.  On the
> other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a
> chair within a game, for instance, can be very "real" to the other
> objects in the game).
>
> Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the
> chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work,
> etc) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which
> makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about
> a chair have being, or if we afford the material object of the chair
> primacy.  In which case, does a digital rendering of the chair carry
> the same weight as an unexpressed idea about a chair, too.  At some
> point, doesn't ontology lead into this thicket?
>
> Davin
>
> On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:08 PM, Ian Bogost 
> wrote:
>
> There is no reason why holding that eve

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Davin,

Based on these questions, I'd recommend Harman's Quadruple Object. 

Look forward to your further comments on an ongoing basis. 

Ian

Sent despite my iPhone

On Jun 25, 2012, at 4:15 PM, davin heckman  wrote:

> You are right  I should do more reading.  I find the thoughts
> engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more
> information where I can.
> 
> Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on
> relationality and time.  You have all of these things that have to do
> with chairs, but only the chair is the chair.  And there are these
> things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own
> right.  But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of
> consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something
> definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting
> to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the
> thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a
> thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop.
> Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object.
> Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing
> them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our
> imagination.  On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same
> as digital iterations.  Less like a computer, we pull the modular
> concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones.  I
> wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the
> other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which
> are articulated and taken up into collective discourse  and even
> still, a discursive "thing" gains a level of significance when it
> represents some empirical process.
> 
> I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next.
> It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable
> saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five.  In other
> words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair.  In my mind,
> "weight" might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability,
> its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its
> aesthetic elegance  though none of these qualities are directly
> analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types
> of being.
> 
> All these thoughts are a jumble  I'll take your advice and do some 
> reading.
> 
> Davin
> 
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost  
> wrote:
>> A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A
>> definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but
>> all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention.
>> There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some
>> extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea
>> of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all
>> encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your
>> second paragraph below.
>> 
>> NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical)
>> chair primacy over the others. As for "the same weight" — well, that depends
>> on what you mean by "weight." What do you mean?
>> 
>> I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress
>> without reading some of this material in depth…
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote:
>> 
>> Ian and Tim,
>> 
>> Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with
>> ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the
>> different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects?
>> 
>> I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh
>> perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs
>>  highlight the ways
>> that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in
>> which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways.
>> A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a
>> chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a
>> sculpture is not necessarily a chair.  yet, in some fundamental
>> way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and
>> recognition.  Put all three things together, and you have a "chair"
>> which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously.  On the
>> other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a
>> chair within a game, for instance, can be very "real" to the other
>> objects in the game).
>> 
>> Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture, instructions, the
>> chair as chair, chair as sculpture, three chairs as conceptual work,
>> etc) would suggest that each is a distinct object in some sense, which
>> makes me wonder then, whether or not all other possible thoughts about
>> a chair have

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[simon]

Dear <>,

Thank you for the discussion. I have been in enjoying its queer turns 
and scaling effects, stretching out on the multiple planes of ontology, 
shrinking down to the nano. Drink this. Eat this. I can't get off this 
chair!


I would like to add this text for its pertinence, less an intervention, 
than a distraction: http://squarewhiteworld.com/dear-visitor/


Best,

Simon Taylor
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

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

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime 
just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out 
Realist Magic go into this. 

Each entity "times" in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida 
reserves to the trace. 

Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of 
beings. 

Tim



http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman  wrote:

> You are right  I should do more reading.  I find the thoughts
> engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more
> information where I can.
> 
> Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on
> relationality and time.  You have all of these things that have to do
> with chairs, but only the chair is the chair.  And there are these
> things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own
> right.  But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of
> consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something
> definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting
> to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the
> thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a
> thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop.
> Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object.
> Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing
> them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our
> imagination.  On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same
> as digital iterations.  Less like a computer, we pull the modular
> concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones.  I
> wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the
> other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which
> are articulated and taken up into collective discourse  and even
> still, a discursive "thing" gains a level of significance when it
> represents some empirical process.
> 
> I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next.
> It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable
> saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five.  In other
> words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair.  In my mind,
> "weight" might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability,
> its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its
> aesthetic elegance  though none of these qualities are directly
> analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types
> of being.
> 
> All these thoughts are a jumble  I'll take your advice and do some 
> reading.
> 
> Davin
> 
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost  
> wrote:
>> A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A
>> definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but
>> all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention.
>> There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some
>> extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea
>> of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all
>> encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your
>> second paragraph below.
>> 
>> NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical)
>> chair primacy over the others. As for "the same weight" — well, that depends
>> on what you mean by "weight." What do you mean?
>> 
>> I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress
>> without reading some of this material in depth…
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote:
>> 
>> Ian and Tim,
>> 
>> Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with
>> ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the
>> different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects?
>> 
>> I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh
>> perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs
>>  highlight the ways
>> that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in
>> which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways.
>> A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a
>> chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a
>> sculpture is not necessarily a chair.  yet, in some fundamental
>> way, all are chairs in a general sense of their concept and
>> recognition.  Put all three things together, and you have a "chair"
>> which occupies all three planes of existence simultaneously.  On the
>> other hand, they can occupy niches within conceptual frameworks (a
>> chair within a game, for instance, can be very "real" to the other
>> objects in the game).
>> 
>> Each way of recognizing the chair (the picture,

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Simon Biggs]

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/

__

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[davin heckman]

I have an article that I wrote about a year ago which discusses black
boxes, poetics, and default settings:  Inside Out of the Box: Default
Settings and Electronic Poetics
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2010/heckman/heckman.htm

It might be a nice complement to the conversation.

I will take a look at Graham's quadruple object.

Davin

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Timothy Morton
 wrote:
> Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime 
> just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out 
> Realist Magic go into this.
>
> Each entity "times" in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida 
> reserves to the trace.
>
> Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of 
> beings.
>
> Tim
>
>
>
> http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
>
> On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman  wrote:
>
>> You are right  I should do more reading.  I find the thoughts
>> engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more
>> information where I can.
>>
>> Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on
>> relationality and time.  You have all of these things that have to do
>> with chairs, but only the chair is the chair.  And there are these
>> things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own
>> right.  But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of
>> consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something
>> definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting
>> to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the
>> thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a
>> thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop.
>> Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object.
>> Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing
>> them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our
>> imagination.  On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same
>> as digital iterations.  Less like a computer, we pull the modular
>> concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones.  I
>> wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the
>> other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which
>> are articulated and taken up into collective discourse  and even
>> still, a discursive "thing" gains a level of significance when it
>> represents some empirical process.
>>
>> I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next.
>> It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable
>> saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five.  In other
>> words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair.  In my mind,
>> "weight" might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability,
>> its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its
>> aesthetic elegance  though none of these qualities are directly
>> analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types
>> of being.
>>
>> All these thoughts are a jumble  I'll take your advice and do some 
>> reading.
>>
>> Davin
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost  
>> wrote:
>>> A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A
>>> definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but
>>> all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention.
>>> There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some
>>> extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea
>>> of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all
>>> encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your
>>> second paragraph below.
>>>
>>> NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical)
>>> chair primacy over the others. As for "the same weight" — well, that depends
>>> on what you mean by "weight." What do you mean?
>>>
>>> I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress
>>> without reading some of this material in depth…
>>>
>>> Ian
>>>
>>> On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote:
>>>
>>> Ian and Tim,
>>>
>>> Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with
>>> ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the
>>> different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects?
>>>
>>> I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh
>>> perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs
>>>  highlight the ways
>>> that discrete objects can differ from each other, but also the ways in
>>> which there are consistencies that can yoke them together in odd ways.
>>> A picture of a chair is not a chair, a definition of chair is not a
>>> chair, instructions about a chair is not a chair, a chair as a
>>> sculpture i

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Clough, Patricia]

Thanks for this Rob.   It makes a lot of senseWhat is coming with art  
after philosophy  but again  will be interesting. What do you think of the 
queer stuff we have been  viewing and discussing  int his regard? Patricia

From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Robert Jackson 
[robertjackson3...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 6:07 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

Hi All,

It's worth noting that Kosuth was a conceptual artist who explicitly followed 
in the lineage of Duchamp and the 'demonstration' of idea: that is to say, the 
conceptual delivery of art as information and the separation of 'art' from 
'aesthetics' - (his famous Art Forum essay 'art after philosophy' says as 
much). Hardly any of these elements chime with the privileging of the discrete 
object in OOO.

As Ian mentioned - The fact the OOO is threatening a lot of 40 - 50 year old 
structuralist-poststructuralist assumptions doesn't stop at philosophy or 
cultural theory. In the arts - pretty soon we'll start seeing bigger conflicts 
between proponents of the Duchamp lineage and whatever manifestation OOO and 
art happen to collide in. IMO Duchamp has a lot to answer for, especially in 
the dross of conceptual creative malaise which contemporary art can't get out 
of. Duchamp is now no longer avantgarde - but what Greenberg accurately 
described as 'avant gardist'. It's consists not of sincerity but of 
demonstration - and its expiration date is nigh.

Besides the inevitable disagreements/agreements on what objects are, or how 
they relate, I think OOO has brought depth back into the heart of discrete 
entities, with a realist equivalent twist.

best
Rob


On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Timothy Morton 
mailto:timothymorton...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime 
just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out 
Realist Magic go into this.

Each entity "times" in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida 
reserves to the trace.

Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of beings.

Tim



http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com<http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/>

On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman 
mailto:davinheck...@gmail.com>> wrote:

> You are right  I should do more reading.  I find the thoughts
> engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more
> information where I can.
>
> Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on
> relationality and time.  You have all of these things that have to do
> with chairs, but only the chair is the chair.  And there are these
> things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own
> right.  But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of
> consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something
> definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting
> to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the
> thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a
> thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop.
> Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object.
> Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing
> them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our
> imagination.  On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same
> as digital iterations.  Less like a computer, we pull the modular
> concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones.  I
> wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the
> other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which
> are articulated and taken up into collective discourse  and even
> still, a discursive "thing" gains a level of significance when it
> represents some empirical process.
>
> I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next.
> It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable
> saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five.  In other
> words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair.  In my mind,
> "weight" might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability,
> its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its
> aesthetic elegance  though none of these qualities are directly
> analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types
> of being.
>
> All these thoughts are a jumble  I'll take your advice and do some 
> reading.
>
> Dav

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. You 
suggest that what is worth doing—but not even doing, just reading, even—only 
*will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it can be judged 
on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist economics for 
intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst.

As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if 
and when you choose read the works that make those connections very explicitly. 
The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my breath.

Good luck with your conceptual art.

Ian

On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:

> 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, cult

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Dear Simon,

OOO objects are far more fuzzy than your metaphysically present fuzz. They are 
ontologically fuzzy. 

To say fuzzy things are better than smooth things--this is just aesthetic 
ideology run mad. 

Tim


http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 26, 2012, at 6:34 PM, 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
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Thanks for this Davin. I have it queued up. Tim


http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:53 AM, davin heckman  wrote:

> I have an article that I wrote about a year ago which discusses black
> boxes, poetics, and default settings:  Inside Out of the Box: Default
> Settings and Electronic Poetics
> http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2010/heckman/heckman.htm
> 
> It might be a nice complement to the conversation.
> 
> I will take a look at Graham's quadruple object.
> 
> Davin
> 
> On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Timothy Morton
>  wrote:
>> Hi---each entity (a thought, an amethyst geode, a bartender) emits spacetime 
>> just as Einstein argued . Graham's The Quadruple Object and my not yet out 
>> Realist Magic go into this.
>> 
>> Each entity "times" in the way Heidegger reserves for Da-sein and Derrida 
>> reserves to the trace.
>> 
>> Time and space are not neutral containers but are emergent properties of 
>> beings.
>> 
>> Tim
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
>> 
>> On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:15 PM, davin heckman  wrote:
>> 
>>> You are right  I should do more reading.  I find the thoughts
>>> engaging and, since I am in transit, I am eager to get more
>>> information where I can.
>>> 
>>> Ultimately, underneath my questions, I suppose, are some thoughts on
>>> relationality and time.  You have all of these things that have to do
>>> with chairs, but only the chair is the chair.  And there are these
>>> things that have to do with chairs, but which are real in their own
>>> right.  But an idea about a chair kind of flickers in and out of
>>> consciousness, never having a discrete edge, and only become something
>>> definitive when their edges are marked out in some way. It's tempting
>>> to think that one's writing about a thought is separate from the
>>> thought itself, but typically the act of writing or performing a
>>> thought tends to calcify and reinforce it through a feedback loop.
>>> Every time one thinks about a chair, one does not invent a new object.
>>> Similar to a computer program pulling modular entities and reusing
>>> them again and again, our thoughts repeat the concept in our
>>> imagination.  On the other hand, imaginary iterations are not the same
>>> as digital iterations.  Less like a computer, we pull the modular
>>> concept into action and interpret it with a variety of tones.  I
>>> wouldn't want to say these singular thoughts don't exist, but on the
>>> other hand, they don't have the same reality as those thoughts which
>>> are articulated and taken up into collective discourse  and even
>>> still, a discursive "thing" gains a level of significance when it
>>> represents some empirical process.
>>> 
>>> I care about this because a chair changes from one moment to the next.
>>> It becomes materially altered as time unfolds, yet we are comfortable
>>> saying that the chair on day one is that chair on day five.  In other
>>> words, each moment does not unleash a separate chair.  In my mind,
>>> "weight" might be its subjective intensity, its empirical durability,
>>> its social hegemony, its procedural utility, its digital ubiquity, its
>>> aesthetic elegance  though none of these qualities are directly
>>> analogous to the other, suggesting that there are a variety of types
>>> of being.
>>> 
>>> All these thoughts are a jumble  I'll take your advice and do some 
>>> reading.
>>> 
>>> Davin
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Ian Bogost  
>>> wrote:
 A chair is a chair. A picture of a chair is a picture of a chair. A
 definition of a chair is a definition of a chair. None are all chairs, but
 all have something to do with chairs. At least, that's the OOO contention.
 There are no planes of existence… except for Harman (and Tim, to some
 extent), who distinguishes sensual from real objects. For Graham, the idea
 of a chair is different from the real chair, which recedes from all
 encounters. I think this is maybe the conclusion you arrive at in your
 second paragraph below.
 
 NOTHING about OOO privileges the material (i.e., the tangible, physical)
 chair primacy over the others. As for "the same weight" — well, that 
 depends
 on what you mean by "weight." What do you mean?
 
 I hate to say it, but it's maybe not possible to make further progress
 without reading some of this material in depth…
 
 Ian
 
 On Jun 25, 2012, at 3:13 AM, davin heckman wrote:
 
 Ian and Tim,
 
 Do the differences with which we treat objects syncs up with
 ontological difference, and thus, is there something to some of the
 different categorizations we could possibly develop for objects?
 
 I do think there is plenty of room to see these things from a fresh
 perspective, but I also wonder if not, for instance, Kosuth's chairs
  highlight the ways
 that disc

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Rob Myers]

On 06/27/2012 11:07 AM, Robert Jackson wrote:

Hi All,
It's worth noting that Kosuth was a conceptual artist who explicitly
followed in the lineage of Duchamp and the 'demonstration' of idea: that
is to say, the conceptual delivery of art as information and
the separation of 'art' from 'aesthetics' - (his famous Art Forum
essay 'art after philosophy' says as much). Hardly any of these elements
chime with the privileging of the discrete object in OOO.


The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique 
(fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at 
reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that 
would cause its proponents to clop furiously.



As Ian mentioned - The fact the OOO is threatening a lot of 40 - 50 year
old structuralist-poststructuralist assumptions doesn't stop at
philosophy or cultural theory. In the arts - pretty soon we'll start


Having been at art school in the early nineties I have very little time 
for PS but I'm constantly surprised at how different OOO apparently 
believes its dryly authoritarian poetics are from PS.



seeing bigger conflicts between proponents of the Duchamp lineage and
whatever manifestation OOO and art happen to collide in. IMO Duchamp has
a lot to answer for, especially in the dross of conceptual creative
malaise which contemporary art can't get out of. Duchamp is now no


Neoconceptualism (80s...) and relationalism (90s...) are in no small 
part about the pastoral ventriloquization of objects (...commodities or 
resources, obviously including human resources...). OOO poses no threat 
to this order, flat ontology is as market friendly (with apologies to 
everyone who has a sad at the trivial fact of OOO's literal and 
metaphoric market congruity, which it shares with Theory's identity 
politics) as suspension of judgement was. It is a managerial Hameau de 
la Reine.


The error of Duchamp's reception by the art (market|world) is to assume 
that the ontological blasphemy of the creative act is repeatable. Badiou 
is useful here, or at least fun.



longer avantgarde - but what Greenberg accurately described as 'avant
gardist'. It's consists not of sincerity but of demonstration - and its
expiration date is nigh.


Duchamp is exquisitely ironic, introducing negative valences into 
aesthetics and negative space into the ontology of art. But he was 
reclaimed by the art market by the 1960s with the editions of his lost 
readymades.


http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6261


Besides the inevitable disagreements/agreements on what objects are, or
how they relate, I think OOO has brought depth back into the heart of
discrete entities, with a realist equivalent twist.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container

- Rob.
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi Rob,

Lots of artists and musicians are now tuning into OOO.

You wrote:

"The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) 
aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego 
of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents 
to clop furiously."

That's almost the opposite I'm afraid. Back to the lab!

Tim


http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 27, 2012, at 4:15 PM, Rob Myers  wrote:

> The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) 
> aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the 
> ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its 
> proponents to clop furiously.
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Eduardo Navas]

Dear Ian,

Perhaps the irony of your comment and critical position between conceptual
art and OOO is that you appear to do to conceptual art what you claim Simon
and others are doing to OOO.  I would suggest that if you are to dismiss
conceptualism as you have been doing in the last few posts that you also put
the time in understanding the history of conceptual art and its importance.
Or at least be more respectful of a field that is clearly not your
specialization, and learn something from others in the process.

Anyone who has spent enough time studying the history of contemporary art is
likely to be skeptical of your comments on conceptualsim just like you are
of other people¹s questioning of OOO who are not as familiar with it as you
are.

I hope the discussion turns more insightful in the next few posts.

Cheers,

Eduardo Navas


On 6/27/12 12:11 PM, "Ian Bogost"  wrote:

> Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. You
> suggest that what is worth doing‹but not even doing, just reading, even‹only
> *will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it can be judged
> on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist economics for
> intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst.
> 
> As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if
> and when you choose read the works that make those connections very
> explicitly. The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my breath.
> 
> Good luck with your conceptual art.
> 
> Ian
> 
> On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:
> 
>> 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
>>> tha

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Chuan Lim]

Fellow non -objects .,


There's some great information being posted on here [ re: -000 ] however
could folks please kindly refrain from "top -posting" or more commonly known
as "hitting reply without editing" and "adding one piddly non -sequitur" to
the
top of everybody else's thoughts?

It pains me virtually that there's much to be had from the febrile postings
on here. Yet its also buried under a morass of in: comprehensibility or just
plain poor communication. Please get your shit together.


Much appreciated,


-- Chuan

__

LN _ TAO


219 Weston St  +61 422 660 745
East Brunswick 3057   ABN 75 521 387 215
__
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Simon Biggs]

Aesthetics, ideology? I was thinking of Lotfi Zadeh's work when I mentioned 
that - not fur balls.

best

Simon 


On 27 Jun 2012, at 18:04, Timothy Morton wrote:

> Dear Simon,
> 
> OOO objects are far more fuzzy than your metaphysically present fuzz. They 
> are ontologically fuzzy. 
> 
> To say fuzzy things are better than smooth things--this is just aesthetic 
> ideology run mad. 
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
> http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
> 
> On Jun 26, 2012, at 6:34 PM, 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
>> ___
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> ___
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> 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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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Simon Biggs]

It's been a long time since I was flamed on a list. Didn't think that happened 
anymore and that we had learned how to behave in such public spaces. I don't 
think patronising condescension is appropriate.

Why do you think I'm a conceptual artist? (I'm not).

best

Simon


On 27 Jun 2012, at 17:11, Ian Bogost wrote:

> Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. You 
> suggest that what is worth doing—but not even doing, just reading, even—only 
> *will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it can be 
> judged on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist 
> economics for intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst.
> 
> As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if 
> and when you choose read the works that make those connections very 
> explicitly. The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my breath.
> 
> Good luck with your conceptual art.
> 
> Ian
> 
> On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:
> 
>> 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 (

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Rob Jackson]

Dear All,

Ok - so if the academic banter is to continue - lets make it somewhat jovial. 

@Edurado 
No-ones really being disrespectful or denying the importance of conceptual art. 
The flurry of activity both in conceptual art and it's twin contemporary; 
systems art was directly aimed at formalism (and especially Greenberg). So 
considering that OOO privileges unified objects beyond all context and 
relational construction, it does - in my opinion - arrive at a formalist 
Greenbergian standpoint where the artwork transcends its context. (in 
discussions with Harman earlier this year, we agreed as much, although I'm more 
of a Fried guy).

So what I'm saying is, don't be surprised if we criticise conceptual art 
because of this reason. There are other links too, regarding qualities, style, 
irreducibility, etc., and I posted something about them here 
[http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/05/homemade-philosophy-bogosts-carpentry-and-greenberg/]

But clearly, I'm the first to admit that any OOO/Greenberg semblance hybrid 
cannot repeat the traps that Greenberg found himself in. We aren't idealists. 
Nor do proponents of OOO privilege the type of work that the formalist critic 
did. We don't privilege one unit - or a set of units - and insert quality into 
them, rather it must work the other way round; that bad, vacuous, art without 
quality is the result of bad construction. What we take for being mundane, must 
be filled with depth, at all times - and not because of a conceptual twist of 
attitude which makes it so, but because all units are aesthetically equivalent.

@Rob 
If we're still going down this route of opposing a realist flat ontology 
because its "market friendly", then I doubt there's anything I can say to make 
this conversation move forward. All I can suggest is, don't expect (or choose 
to not expect) a movement - which in it's current iteration is not even a few 
years old - to be held responsible for this or that regime of power. Yes it's 
fun to try and ruin those who wax lyrical about a new methods and approaches, 
but you can't dismiss all future iterations of what is still a very young set 
of approaches (I'm usually bemused in conferences when someone tells me that 
'OOO is over' and then someone else says 'everyone's doing OOO' - when in 
reality, hardly anyones actually read any of it). 

Regarding Duchamp - the legacy of Duchamp isn''t just irony or negative 
valences, he did something more fundamental to art production, the remnants of 
which the mainstream artworld is unable to shake off. He brought the necessary 
art object into line with its contingent reception. For this, we can be 
thankful, but its now indirectly responsible for some of the most boring 
art-come-participatory-events going, precisely insofar as the art market is 
obsessed with making contingent spectators the standing reserve for its own 
mediocre games. I'm not saying that OOO has an alternative to this, (I have a 
few ideas) but lets, at least, see if there is one.

best
Rob



On 28 Jun 2012, at 05:47, Eduardo Navas wrote:

> Dear Ian,
> 
> Perhaps the irony of your comment and critical position between conceptual 
> art and OOO is that you appear to do to conceptual art what you claim Simon 
> and others are doing to OOO.  I would suggest that if you are to dismiss 
> conceptualism as you have been doing in the last few posts that you also put 
> the time in understanding the history of conceptual art and its importance.  
> Or at least be more respectful of a field that is clearly not your 
> specialization, and learn something from others in the process.
> 
> Anyone who has spent enough time studying the history of contemporary art is 
> likely to be skeptical of your comments on conceptualsim just like you are of 
> other people’s questioning of OOO who are not as familiar with it as you are.
> 
> I hope the discussion turns more insightful in the next few posts.  
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Eduardo Navas
> 
> 
> On 6/27/12 12:11 PM, "Ian Bogost"  wrote:
> 
>> Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. 
>> You suggest that what is worth doing—but not even doing, just reading, 
>> even—only *will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it 
>> can be judged on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist 
>> economics for intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst.
>> 
>> As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if 
>> and when you choose read the works that make those connections very 
>> explicitly. The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my 
>> breath.
>> 
>> Good luck with your conceptual art.
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:
>> 
>>> 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

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Rob Myers]

On 06/28/2012 05:56 AM, Timothy Morton wrote:


Lots of artists and musicians are now tuning into OOO.


Yes Ian's book contains some interesting examples.

The problem is that the defenses of OOO against charges of failing to 
illustrate Marxism indicate that OOO aesthetics is probably a category 
error as well.



You wrote:

"The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique (fnarr) 
aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at reflecting the ego of the 
gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that would cause its proponents to clop 
furiously."

That's almost the opposite I'm afraid.


It *wouldn't* cause them to? ;-)


Back to the lab!


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- Rob.
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

On Jun 28, 2012, at 1:30 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> The problem is that the defenses of OOO against charges of failing to 
> illustrate Marxism indicate that OOO aesthetics is probably a category error 
> as well.

Sorry, how so?

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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi Simon--it's De Man's argument. A certain aesthetic feature is turned into a 
metaphysical substrate of things, in this case, fuzziness. 

I think OOO would give you all the fuzzy you want, since everything is 
interconnected at the sensual level. That, and the fact that the rift between 
sensual and real is not locatable in ontically given space. 

Yours, Tim



http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 28, 2012, at 2:52 AM, Simon Biggs  wrote:

> Aesthetics, ideology? I was thinking of Lotfi Zadeh's work when I mentioned 
> that - not fur balls.
> 
> best
> 
> Simon 
> 
> 
> On 27 Jun 2012, at 18:04, Timothy Morton wrote:
> 
>> Dear Simon,
>> 
>> OOO objects are far more fuzzy than your metaphysically present fuzz. They 
>> are ontologically fuzzy. 
>> 
>> To say fuzzy things are better than smooth things--this is just aesthetic 
>> ideology run mad. 
>> 
>> Tim
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
>> 
>> On Jun 26, 2012, at 6:34 PM, 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
>> ___
>> 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, Univers

Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi Rob,

Since for OOO causality just is aesthetics, I'm afraid you're not right on that 
score. 

I'll send you this essay on it I just wrote for New Literary History if you'd 
like.

There are some other pieces by me on that, online in Singularum and Continent. 

Yours, Tim

http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 28, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Rob Myers  wrote:

> On 06/28/2012 05:56 AM, Timothy Morton wrote:
>> 
>> Lots of artists and musicians are now tuning into OOO.
> 
> Yes Ian's book contains some interesting examples.
> 
> The problem is that the defenses of OOO against charges of failing to 
> illustrate Marxism indicate that OOO aesthetics is probably a category error 
> as well.
> 
>> You wrote:
>> 
>> "The object in itself being accessible as simply the sum of its unique 
>> (fnarr) aesthetic properties valenced in terms of their efficacy at 
>> reflecting the ego of the gentlemanly spectator is a vision of OOO that 
>> would cause its proponents to clop furiously."
>> 
>> That's almost the opposite I'm afraid.
> 
> It *wouldn't* cause them to? ;-)
> 
>> Back to the lab!
> 
> http://www.famousmonstersoffilmland.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/sjff_01_img0077.jpg
> 
> - Rob.
> ___
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> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman / Kosuth

[Jon Ippolito]

Hi Simon,

As I'm sure you know, Kosuth's essay "Art After Philosophy" seemed to imply a 
platonic solution to that conundrum. His essay claims what's important about 
chairs (and art) is the unique idea conveyed to us by their varying 
manifestations, whether dictionary definition, photo, or wooden furniture.

I had the opposite impression standing in front of One and Three Chairs. What 
struck me--and indeed seemed highlighted by the work's presentation--was how 
different each of the versions were, and how ludicrous it seemed to pretend 
details like the smell of wood, the pale black-and-white print, and the 
dictionary typeface were just incidental projections of the same "higher" 
concept into our reality.

When I mentioned the disparity between what I saw in his work and what he wrote 
in "Art After Philosophy," Kosuth told me to "forgive the immature 
proclamations of a 23-year-old" or something to that effect.

Occasionally people view the variable media paradigm as similarly platonic--an 
approach to preservation that only applies to conceptual art. But just as One 
and Three Chairs is about the differences that inevitably emerge among 
difference instances of the same concept, so media and performative artworks 
are never the same from one viewing to another.

I think Euro-ethnic culture needs more practice accepting difference. One of 
the few useful nuggets I've gleaned from Jacques Lacan (via Joline Blais) is 
his division of the world into theory (Lacan's "symbolic"), what we take for 
real (Lacan's "imaginary"), and what we don't realize we are leaving out 
(Lacan's "real").

I like to lob this self-damning formulation at philosophers who busy themselves 
nailing down ontologies in their head instead of nailing down shingles on an 
ecovillage home somewhere.

OK, back to building my own ecovillage on the coast of Maine.

jon
http://MaineCohousing.org

Simon wrote:
> 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.

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Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman / Kosuth

[Timothy Morton]

Hi Everyone,

I just posted this on melancholia and objects on my blog, and since it's
apropos I thought I'd share it. It's the essence of how as an OOO'er I see
appearance or form.

Tim

melancholy doesn't imply anything about subjectivity. All you need for
melancholy are various kinds of object. This is what makes it different, in
traditional psychoanalytic theories, from other affects. Indeed, melancholy
speaks a truth of all objects—recall that I here use the term “object” in a
value-neutral way, implying any real entity whatsoever, not objectification
or subject–object dualism. But melancholy doesn't require fully formed
subjectivity. Indeed, subjectivity is a result of an abnegation of the
melancholic abject (Kristeva). The melancholy coexistence of objects
predates the existence of the ego. Egos presuppose ancient layers of
beings, fossilized remains.



On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Jon Ippolito  wrote:

> Hi Simon,
>
> As I'm sure you know, Kosuth's essay "Art After Philosophy" seemed to
> imply a platonic solution to that conundrum. His essay claims what's
> important about chairs (and art) is the unique idea conveyed to us by their
> varying manifestations, whether dictionary definition, photo, or wooden
> furniture.
>
> I had the opposite impression standing in front of One and Three Chairs.
> What struck me--and indeed seemed highlighted by the work's
> presentation--was how different each of the versions were, and how
> ludicrous it seemed to pretend details like the smell of wood, the pale
> black-and-white print, and the dictionary typeface were just incidental
> projections of the same "higher" concept into our reality.
>
> When I mentioned the disparity between what I saw in his work and what he
> wrote in "Art After Philosophy," Kosuth told me to "forgive the immature
> proclamations of a 23-year-old" or something to that effect.
>
> Occasionally people view the variable media paradigm as similarly
> platonic--an approach to preservation that only applies to conceptual art.
> But just as One and Three Chairs is about the differences that inevitably
> emerge among difference instances of the same concept, so media and
> performative artworks are never the same from one viewing to another.
>
> I think Euro-ethnic culture needs more practice accepting difference. One
> of the few useful nuggets I've gleaned from Jacques Lacan (via Joline
> Blais) is his division of the world into theory (Lacan's "symbolic"), what
> we take for real (Lacan's "imaginary"), and what we don't realize we are
> leaving out (Lacan's "real").
>
> I like to lob this self-damning formulation at philosophers who busy
> themselves nailing down ontologies in their head instead of nailing down
> shingles on an ecovillage home somewhere.
>
> OK, back to building my own ecovillage on the coast of Maine.
>
> jon
> http://MaineCohousing.org
>
> Simon wrote:
> > 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.
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 

Ecology without Nature 
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