Over at Pagan Metaphysics Paul Reid-Bowen has his abstract up for the upcoming Dundee conference:
Thinking Sex(es)/Object(s): Feminist Metaphysics as Object Oriented Ontology
Three main claims are advanced and defended in this paper, albeit with some brevity and increasing gradations of tentativeness. First, it is noted that feminist philosophers, in both analytic and continental traditions, have been reluctant to engage with metaphysics, or, far more commonly, they have been active critics and opponents of it. This attitude may be explained, in part, by the masculinist and misogynist use of “essentialism” in the history of women’s oppression, although a number of other reasons can be mobilised with relative ease. Second, contra these considerations, I propose that the marginalisation of metaphysics by feminists has been overly hasty. Indeed there are good reasons to move the discipline of metaphysics towards the centre of feminist philosophy. Third, I identify some feminist philosophers whose work may be read as metaphysics and whose commitments mark them out as holding realist ontologies (e.g. Christine Battersby, Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray). I then bring to the table of continental metaphysics some concepts developed by those selfsame philosophers and propose that an Object Oriented Ontology may be the most appropriate means of developing and exploring these ideas. The irony and/or perversity of proposing this alliance, given the history and weight of feminist analyses of sexual objectification, is not lost on me. However, I contend that an Object Oriented Ontology does not run afoul of ethical, political and social feminist critiques of objectification; rather, it delivers fertile resources and research possibilities for tackling a pre-existent feminist interest in the status of objects.
Personally I do not like the idea of feminist metaphysics as I think there’s just metaphysics, but I do think Paul is on to something here (which comes as no surprise as I recently suggested something similar in comments to my post on Inhuman Ethics). In the world of cultural studies and the humanities, I think there have been a number of privileged sites that have been directed towards bucking the primacy of anti-realist or correlationist thought than other disciplines by virtue of the nature of the objects that constitute their object of investigation. These theorists have not, of course, in most cases baldly stated their work as a debate between realism and anti-realism, but their work has nonetheless inevitably led them to thinking being in such a way that it is not simply a discourse, language, or a correlation with the human.
read on!
Paradoxically, these privileged sites have largely been marginalized in the world of academia and the humanities; no doubt because of the hegemony of anti-realist thought or the status of correlationism as the establishment position. Among these privileged sites I would include environmental philosophy and thought, science and technology studies, critical animal theory, geographical studies, writing technology studies, media studies, queer theory, and, of course, feminist philosophy and thought. I am sure that there are many others that don’t immediately come to mind for me. If these have been privileged sites for the development of significant conceptual innovations in the field of realist ontology, then this is because all of these sites of investigation force encounters with real and nonhuman objects and actors that cannot be reduced to correlates of human thought, language, perception, or use but that have to be approached in their own autonomous being to properly be thought.
Thus, for example, setting aside feminist thinkers such as Butler that place almost all their emphasis on discourse and discursivity, feminist thought (and here I am not even beginning to do justice to the richness and sophistication of this thought and what has arisen out of these inquiries) forces an encounter with the real of the biological body and the difference it introduces into the world, the real of the sexed body, that exceeds the being of the phenomenological lived body and the discursive body, while somehow still being intertwined with these other two bodies. The real of the sexed body becomes something that must be thought and that cannot be reduced to a discourse or a lived experience. Moreover, feminist thought inevitably requires a forced encounter with nonhuman technological actors like various forms of birth control or aspects of abortion and fertilization technology that, at the social level, produce profound effects in the status of subjects (creating or generating new types of social subjects), that exceed the mastery of discourse and intentionally structured lived experience. If there is genuine justification for the thesis that ontotheology, the metaphysics of presence, correlationism, and anti-realism are necessarily masculinist forms of thought, then this is because the conception of the subject upon which these orientations of thought are founded are premised on a forgetting of the real of the body. It is only on this condition that other beings could be reduced to a correlation with cognition, perception, language, discursivity, signs, and so on. The forgetting of the real is always a masculine gesture. The same point could be made with respect to Marxist thought. The idea of a correlationist, anti-realist, or idealist Marxism is a contradiction in terms, an utter impossibility, as Marxist thought necessarily requires the thought of production, distribution, and resources as actors in their own right irreducible to mere correlations. Legible in these forms of thought is the hegemony of the bodies and class of the subjects that developed these anti-realist positions.
The case is similar with media studies and science and technology studies. Here the technologies are themselves autonomous actors that need to be thought in their autonomy (as Bogost’s work on video game platforms has so nicely shown). If the media theorist restricts herself to the discursive content of forms of media, then she will miss the decisive role played by the media themselves in informing the structure of these phenomena. Here the conditions of phenomenality or manifestation are themselves a-phenomenal and in-human, even if these technologies issue from the human. As Simondon demonstrated so beautifully in his meditations on technology (and Stiegler has continued this work in his own way in his monumental Time and Technics), there is a technosphere that has its own autonomous development and life not unlike the manner in which Althusser conceives social structures as having an autonomous life in Reading Capital.
The point here, then, is that these privileged yet marginalized sites of realist thought are, in so many respects, ground-zero for object-oriented ontology. The conceptual innovations and creations, the ontological discoveries, that inhabit these sites require, demand, from object-oriented ontologists the most careful scrutiny and attention for there is a wealth of ontological riches to be found in these sites. Here OOO/OOP learns from these sites of research and engagement, not the reverse. For these thinkers were all object-oriented ontologists before anyone thought to name themselves “object-oriented ontologists”.
Meanwhile, over at Anotherheideggerblog, Paul Ennis announces his topic for the Dundee conference (damn I wish I could be there!). It looks like it will be a terrific engagement with Harman’s OOO, however with Harman I have to voice my considerable doubts about the thesis that OOO/OOP is in any way nihilistic. As I see it, an ontology can only be nihilistic if it is founded on the anthropocentric and correlationist distinction between nature and culture as two absolute domains. Nihilism emerges when the thinkers sides with the “nature” side of the distinction, reducing the cultural to the causal order of natural phenomena and thereby evacuating the cultural and human order of any meaning. If I describe this distinction as anthropocentric and correlationist, then this is because it dictates the order of being in drawing the distinction between these two orders and thereby necessarily attaching it to the human. This is why, for example, the Enlightenment was always also a humanism and will always be a humanism in any form, regardless of how nihilistic it becomes. Because the nature-culture distinction is not operative in OOO/OOP, because the “really real” is placed on neither side of the natural, nor the human, these sorts of nihilistic consequences cannot follow. There is just the world and being such that humans are in and among beings. It is not the case that there are two distinct and fissured ontological realms such as this Enlightenment mythology argues.
January 22, 2010 at 5:04 am
Excellent post, and I largely agree, especially that, he forgetting of the real is always a masculine gesture. I mentioned this over on Brown’s page too, but Karen Barad and Elizabeth Grosz are two more ontologically/realist oriented feminists.
Part of me is hesitant to abandon the specific practice of feminism, because one of its most important achievements has been to show how ontology is a political, boundary-drawing practice. It seems like some philosophers do not much care about the political implications of ontology, although I wouldn’t necessarily direct this claim towards the OOO/OOP crowd.
I am less sold on the comparison to Marxism, but that’s another discussion…
January 22, 2010 at 11:50 am
[…] 22, 2010 Instead of linking directly to Reid-Bowen’s page I’ll link you to LEVI’S COMMENT ON IT, both because it was Levi’s link that I noticed, and because his comments are worth […]
January 22, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Interesting post, I’ll try and generate a lengthier reply tonight as I have to go and teach soon.
Three quick points, I understand the ambivalence about feminist metaphysics, but simply note that there is often less concern about prefixes such as Neo-Platonist metaphysics, Marxist metaphysics etc. It is essentially shorthand for a point of origin; and it is probably most problematic because it suggests all members of a particular group or movement are suitably unified on a particular topic or subject, which frequently is not the case.
It doesn’t look as if I’ll be delivering the paper at Dundee now, apparently there have been a lot papers and there is a strong desire to avoid parallel sessions (just got my ‘Dear John’ e-mail from Michael). So I think I’ll be working the paper up in an extended version for Speculations or Hypatia. I’ll probably still be making the trip to Dundee, though, as it will be good to soak up the SR/OOO ambience and papers.
Lastly, quick name check, Reid-Bowen (not Reid-Brown). No problem, but these things can go viral on the web; plus I’m sensitive from correcting my name on some recent undergrad essays.
I enjoy the blog and I’m looking forwards to the Democracy of Objects, it will hopefully help me decide whether your or Graham’s brand of OOO sits with me most comfortably. I do wonder whther analytic philosophy could produce a viable third route into OOO (although I guess that would be Whitehead).
Paul
January 22, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Ack Paul,
Sorry about this… I really need to get better about proofing these posts!
January 23, 2010 at 1:16 pm
[…] Is there a way to decouple an ontological nihilism from a nihilism of meaning (values)? Levi claims that ‘nihilism emerges when the thinkers sides with the “nature” side of the distinction, […]
January 24, 2010 at 2:43 pm
It is interesting that you pick up Butler as an example of the “it’s all discourse” position because she wrote an entire book nearly twenty years ago now explicitly refuting this characterisation. “Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex'” argues for conceiving of materiality as a process of ‘materialisation’ that occurs through discourse. At this point the familiar accusation that materiality is excluded from such a philosophy in the fashion of anti-realism is perhaps understandable. However, I think this is a hasty conclusion.
Let’s the given example of the materiality of the body.
A realist-materialist account of sex asserts that men and women are biologically distinct in type (for instance: they have different shaped genitals) and this mandates a corresponding social categorisation. This does not necessitate ‘discrimination’ as such but it does demand the assertion of a culture-independent truth.
An idealist-relativist account of sex asserts that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are just words and exist in total separation from what we happen to assume are ‘bodies’ existing in ‘space’. In this version the attribution of sexual identity based on materiality is arbitrary and determined by language.
It would seem from Levi’s description that Butler (and others) would fall into the latter above category. However, this is not what I take from Butler’s work (she goes to some lengths to explicitly deny this sort of accusation). I don’t think that Butler holds the process of ‘materialisation’ (the process through which subjects come to understand material reality) as an entirely arbitrary, ideality-determined process. She doesn’t, for instance, deny the existence of biological difference as such (she might say that this is irrelevant), she rather demands that the materiality of the body can never be apprehended in a manner transcendent to cultural predisposition. It is not then that discourse determines the real but that the real is incomprehensible without discourse. This means that while the process is not material-arbitrary it can never be material-determined. Hence there is no true, correct or right account of sex, however ’embodied’, ‘physical’ and ‘material’ sexual identity may be.
A far more profoundly articulated version of this point can be found in a recently published conversation between Ernesto Laclau and Roy Bhaskar.
http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:MQ8PZD8nCq0J:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=2000
It is quite clear from Laclau’s account that ‘discourse’ is not ‘language’. He is quite clear on this point, as was Michel Foucault’s discussion of the concept of discourse decades ago.
Now, one might say that these accounts still demand an anthropocentric epistemology (knowledge involves and necessitates a human subject) and this criticism can be judged on its merits (I take it to be a perfectly accurate point but I’m on the fence as to its importance as a philosophical observation), however the statements ‘there can be no real without language’ and ‘the real is language’ are two very different things that are radically conflated too often and in the above discussion of Butler’s work in particular.
It now occurs to me that I could have made this point in far fewer words…
Butler: Correlationist? Yes. Idealist? Never. Is this a big difference? Massive!
January 24, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Perc,
In my view great caution has to be exercised whenever evaluating the use of terms like “materialism” as they’ve functioned in post-structuralist discourse since the 60s. These terms can’t be taken at face value. For example, the position here pretty clearly equates materialism with a focus on practice over thought, but that a materialism doesn’t make if the position is still intrinsically tied to the human. The question to be asked of Butler is whether despite these qualifications, the non-anthropological domain (language, discourse, texts, etc.), ever plays a significant role in her thought. And from what I gather based on my readings of her work, the answer to this question is a resounding no!. It is always discourse, language, and text that have the upper hand in these discussions. I’d be interested in hearing you flesh out your distinction between correlationism and idealism. In my view, if a form of thought is correlationist it is idealist. The two terms are interchangeable. What is the distinction you’re seeing here? Finally, the issue of the real is not an issue of comprensibility. To treat the issue of the real in terms of comprehensibility is to commit the epistemic fallacy, reducing the real to epistemological categories. The real is what it is regardless of whether anyone comprehends it. Many thanks for the link to the Laclau/Bhaskar discussion.
January 24, 2010 at 5:18 pm
[…] 2010 Bhaskar and Laclau Posted by larvalsubjects under Roy Bhaskar Leave a Comment In comments Perc has provided a link to a discussion between Roy Bhaskar (Critical/Transcendental Realism) and […]
January 30, 2010 at 11:38 am
I can only think through my argument sufficiently to respond to two points raised at this moment in time. I think they are the most important ones: (1) the epistemic ‘fallacy’; (2) the idealist/correlationist question.
(1) I think that Bhaskar’s ‘epistemic fallacy’ (perhaps deliberately) conflates two different things: the volitionalist-idealist and the discursivist. This is the core of my argument, which is basically this: to describe what-is in terms of what-is-for-me does not necessarily mean that ‘what-is is whatever I choose’ or that ‘what-is becomes through a state of dependency on what-is-for-me’. (This is the ‘pigs don’t fly just ‘cos I say so’ thesis.) I think this is Bhaskar’s claim and I disagree because…
(2) Simply, ‘discourse theory’ (or whatever) cannot be reduced to ‘idealism’ (the philosophy that determines what-is from what-is-for-me) since idealism supposes not just the pre-eminence of ideas and the impossibility of apprehending a reality external to this ‘realm’ but also a self-opaque (as in readily legible), rational (and thoroughly disembodied) subject that can fundamentally know itself and be realised coherently through ideality itself. I would argue that Butler et al. rather than being idealists assume the always-already materially embodied status of the self (the dismissal of the possibility of any categorical distinction between these two terms), the necessary transparency (as in ‘you see right through it’) of the self (see Butler’s work on Spinoza, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’, for this exact point) and, most importantly with regard to the correlationist question, a reality transcendent to the phenomenal because every ‘discourse theorist’ assumes the existence (at the absolute minimum) of a pre-existing language community (comprised of cultural beings which are lso assumed to be always-already embodied) into which we are ‘thrown’ (in Heidegger’s terminology) and which ‘has us before we have it’. It is not then that ‘discourse theorists’ utterly deny the extra-phenomenal (this would truly be an absurd volitionalist-idealism), they are in fact reliant upon an extremely ‘thin’ and ‘weak’ (in Stephen K. White’s terminology) extra-phenomenal ontology due to their ethical-political commitments, usually in the Derrida-Levinas vein of infinite deference to the future/possibility/otherness, etc.
Now, this does not mean that ‘discourse theory’ (or whatever) has not, hitherto, dwelled on the subject rather than the object or that it has not endorsed a sort of quasi-phenomenalism that is unable to engage with object-related questions but really the point is that this is not antithetical to the theory and so this theory needn’t be the big bad idealist wolf, rather its shortcomings should be highlighted and its strong-points developed.
Mostly, I think the commitment to such a ‘thin’ and ‘weak’ ontology is thoroughly questionable but it is a matter of purpose and politics rather than something fundamentally at odds within the philosophy. (Not to say it’s not a big difference between OOO/OOP, etc. and the ‘discurvist doxa’; there are clearly some fundamental differences, I just think that they are frequently overstated.)
I am, myself, thoroughly dissatisfied with the ‘discursivist doxa’ and my post-grad work (as inchoate as it is) is aiming to improve upon elements of this by a renewed focus on ontology. I am, however, reluctant to do this by ‘bracketing’ the subject in the style of the upside-down-Husserl or to seek to transcend it in the manner of a revivified Bhaskar. I am thoroughly unconvinced that this is either necessary or a radical improvement.
It remains to be seen whether this is possible; I think it is but I certainly lay no claim to possessing all the answers!
Hopefully this clarifies my position a little.
January 30, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Perc,
I simply don’t agree:
Disembodied subjects, and the primacy of thought are contingent features of particular idealisms. While there are certainly idealisms that organize their philosophy around such claims, these assertions aren’t what make an idealism an idealism. Rather, in order for a position to be idealist or anti-realist, all that’s required is the assertion that beings can only be thought in relation to the human or something human dependent (language, discourse, power, the social, etc), and that being can’t be thought independent of this relation. Ergo, discourse theory is an idealism or anti-realism. We can play with words, evoking practice, misusing the word “materialism” (I’ve always found evocations of “materialism” in these contexts particular egregious), speaking the body, etc., etc., etc., etc., yet at the end of the day these positions are all still idealisms of one sort or another. I mean, c’mon, Laclau himself, in the interview, comes out and says “when I evoke discourse I’m speaking of Wittgensteinian language games.” There are few things more idealist than a Wittgensteinian language game. I think Laclau, in the discussion with Bhaskar, is conflating intellectualism with idealism. He want’s to say that idealism is intellectualism (i.e., the assertion of the priority of ideas and disembodied subjects), but that’s only one variety of idealism that is quite secondary to the conceptual core of any and all idealist or anti-realist philosophies.
May 16, 2013 at 1:33 am
[…] it exists) for a class, I stumbled onto a collection of thoughts by Levi R. Bryant titled “Feminist Metaphysics as Object-Oriented Ontology– OOO/OOP Round-Up“. Buried deep within the post was a sentence that has utterly changed how I think about […]