The Democracy of Objects is now listed at the Open Humanities Press Website. The picture to the right is a bit of the gorgeous cover that Tammy Lu designed. Somehow she managed to perfectly capture the affect of what I’m trying to think, weaving motifs that are simultaneously cultural, natural and that have an Asian feel in a tangled network. As I was growing up, our Korean, Chinese, and Japanese friends would always remark that our house was more Asian than theirs. Perhaps this aesthetic comes out in my writing or perhaps it’s just Tammy Lu’s work. Either way I’m delighted.
A number of people have written me asking when it will finally be released. The answer is that I don’t know. At this point, we’re very close. There are a few editorial changes to be made and some formatting issues to be fixed, but overall it’s ready to go. Remember, this is the first open access book that University of Michigan Press has put together and that it’s all been done through volunteer work. I like that. I like all of it. I like it that it’s democratic in the sense that no one will have to buy it if they’re not so inclined and that they’ll still have access to it if they want that access. I like it that it will leave a minimal ecological footprint. I like it that it will be able to circulate throughout the world in both digital and paper form. I like it that we all did this together. I hope that others will also follow in my gesture and contribute to the New Metaphysics Series with Open Humanities Press. It will come out in three forms: HTML for easy reading online, .pdf so you can download it on your readers, and in a paper form with that beautiful cover.
I like this book and I like myself much more in this book. The tone is my own, but it is far less antagonistic and polemical than the tone that inhabited Difference and Givenness. Difference and Givenness was the book of a graduate student. I don’t mean to demean graduate students by any means. Yet reflecting on my own experience, I think our work is often characterized by a certain tone and set of concerns. Insofar as we then exist in a certain unpleasant social circumstance (joblessness and namelessness) we often enact what might be called “prison logic”. It is sometimes said that the person newly incarcerated in prison should pick a fight with the biggest guy in the yard so as to establish respect for ourselves in prison. This is often how it is with early writing. You want to take on everyone, pick fights, to establish your place in the prison yard. You puff your chest up to show how big you are (and, of course, you don’t know you’re doing this) so as to establish a place for yourself. On the other hand, youthful writing is often motivated by a desire to gain mastery of the field and tradition. Thus the tendency is to trace everything in a thinker or a discussion back to the work of others that have come before. The graduate student is to be forgiven for these ways of relating to others and philosophy because they’re in their own milieu of individuation that generates its own singular problems specific to that form of social life and the problems it faces, but this is not an attitude or form of relation that should be celebrated, encouraged, or reinforced.
read on!
The tone of Difference and Givenness, much to my embarrassment now, manifests both of these tendencies. I implicitly take on the secondary literature on Deleuze, trying to police Deleuzians (it’s a work filled with microfascist desires) and I am constantly trying to domesticate Deleuze in terms of the history of philosophy by reterritorializing him on his influences. I am not proud of this, though hopefully I managed to say something of value. The values embodied in the connotations of my tone are definitely not values I wish to instill or promote in others. There is a form of this book, I believe, that stands in contradiction to its content.
The Democracy of Objects, I think, is a different style of book. There are arguments to be sure. There are polemics as well. But I believe it’s a much kinder book. My hope is that there will be a lot of surprises here for readers of this blog. It’s not simply a repetition, regurgitation, or summary of themes I’ve discussed here. I think there are a lot of new things. Where Difference and Givenness sought to appropriate uses of Deleuze, my ardent hope is that this book will be more of a “workbook”. It’s systematic and organized, but the concepts I develop here are arrows that I want others to put to work in their own unexpected ways. These are things that I want to be used, not to restrict use. And here, above all, it should be borne in mind that use is never rote application but genuine invention and surprise. Entities always become otherwise and inventions always take place in their use. We become otherwise in our use. And here I possess no special authority over my work, but am as much an interpreter as anyone else… Especially under the circumstances in which this book was composed.
I am also terrified by this book. Those who have been gracious enough to read it have been especially positive about the fourth chapter which deals heavily with Luhmann. Going back through the text last week– a strange experience as it had now become an object in its own right and an alien one at that –I was both filled with loathing at the fact that I didn’t develop the arguments of the fourth chapter with greater clarity (it will be hard going for those with no background in autopoietic theory and Luhmann) and with the enormity of what this chapter commits me to in social and political analysis. How can we even begin to pose the questions of social and political theory if we don’t yet know the entities that compose “the social”. That, in certain respects, is the lesson I draw, as a reader, from this fourth chapter… That we don’t yet know the actors that compose a society. With that said, I am deeply pleased that there’s a strong social and political content to this book.
Today, as I was writing my post on quasi-objects, I came across this post by Eileen Joy. It made me think this: metaphysics, ontology, has never died, but has rather shifted form. Those of us that followed the Kantian critical tradition resolutely abandoned metaphysics on the grounds that it asked questions beyond the scope of our experience. Yet interestingly, metaphysics came to lead a subterranean life. It wasn’t, in other words, eradicated, though we all said it was. On the one hand, the theoretical physicists, in their popular science writings, began to take up the banner of metaphysics, even if they didn’t use that word. On the other hand, we heirs of Kant began to cheat. We no longer wrote directly about metaphysics, but instead wrote monographs on others that did write about metaphysics: Books on Aristotle, Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza, Ockham, Scotus, etc. We wrote metaphysics from one step removed. We said we were simply writing studies of these things (thereby protecting ourselves from the charge of being “naive metaphysicians”) while all the while writing metaphysics in the form of these studies. We secretly committed while overtly or publicly remaining “critical”. Metaphysics, ontology, in its non-correlationist form, lived on, but as commentary.
Today it feels like things are changing. I few years ago I credited Deleuze and Badiou with the possibility of this change. Badiou dared to raise the question of Truth. Deleuze refused to dissolve metaphysics in the social sciences in the form of a discourse about economics, linguistics, history, etc. I’ve written a lot criticizing the culture of commentary that inhabits SPEP. But we shouldn’t think of commentary as an essence that is functionally identical in all historical constellations. Commentary did real work in the opening pages of Aristotle’s metaphysics, or in the way in which Islamic thought appropriated Aristotle (and then in the way European scholastic thought appropriated Islam). The culture of commentary is changing. Harman writes page after page on Heidegger, Zubiri, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Lingis. You’ll find much commentary by me in The Democracy of Objects. Eugene Thacker returns to the tradition of medieval thought in his meditation on life. What has changed, I think, is the function of commentary in the SPEP culture. There was a bad faith that accompanied the culture of commentary throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties. One wished to claim that they still adhered to the critical Kantian tradition, that they were not practicing metaphysics, that they were merely doing scholarly work on these metaphysical thinkers, thereby refusing to avow the claims they were making. “This is what Spinoza says, not me!”
Now it feels as if commentary is becoming more “Aristotlean”. It is no longer the bad faith of the scholar that wants to embrace metaphysics while disavowing that embrace, but rather is an “existentially committed” engagement with those texts where one takes actual positions. The point is not to abandon the venerable and important tradition of commentary, but rather to acknowledge what and why we’re really engaging in these activities… And to acknowledge that we’re talking about something more than the sense or meaning of texts. The point is to recognize, avow, and realize that we’re truly making claims about the world, that we’re truly realists, and that we cannot escape this drive to metaphysics. This seems to be what’s taking place in the New Metaphysics series… A mode of metaphysical thinking that readily recognizing and embraces the restrictions that Kant placed on speculation– that we can know nothing of the soul or God –but that speculates nonetheless.
June 19, 2011 at 1:53 am
Oh, how totally splendid.
June 19, 2011 at 2:38 am
congrats on all fronts, can’t wait to read it.
June 19, 2011 at 4:24 am
congrats. I rememember Deely precisely criticising Kant for his position on god and the soul.,…
I guess Whitehead would claim we do know something of ‘god’ given g’s importance for W.
Also looking forward to the discussion of autopoiesis….
June 19, 2011 at 4:36 am
You write of your sense of … regret? of feeling that you had not carried your ideas as far as they might go.. or as clearly… in the 4th chapter. It brought to mind in an instant W.C. Williams, Spring & All.. a work I return to again & again with a sense of discovery… as though reading it for the first time. One of those ‘like Adam in the morning’ works. No, it’s philosophy…it’s poetry… and Williams thinking about poetry, written at a time of transition for him, of something like a personal crisis of intent for where his work is going to go. He begins sentences… thoughts, paragraphs…often without finishing them. Sentences that trail off in an implied ellipses, or falling into blank white space.
Those falling off places are as powerful as anything he’s translated into words… and give & return power to the stated ideas again & again… & you can feel him working this out… whether he should or shouldn’t go on, toying with, and then rejecting the felt obligation of closure, to tie it all up for his readers. It’s the beginning of his life’s work… and that you can feel this– is incredibly moving. He goes back & forth from prose to verse… blurring the borders. Some of the verse doesn’t work so well… and some of it, the most memorable (and most frequently anthologized) pieces of American modernist poetry.
So philosophy isn’t poetry… or is it? I mean, there isn’t really any such thing as “Poetry”… only poetries… & philosophies… & maybe the most generative places of either are at these intersections with the unfinished… & with Something Else… where the reader is granted the most generous possible compliment… ‘this is as far as I could take this…I’m not going to patronize you by doing for you, what this silence, not when this pause, the nagging sense of insufficiency, is telling me.. to give you the next word”
It’s what I keep coming back to your blog for. Maybe why you’ve gotten positive response on that chapter is precisely because there was more to say, and to say more clearly… but this is a dialog. And it will come. When you’ve heard what it elicits in others. I know you get this without me telling you… but just want to say… there are others out here who get it too. That this hovers around something way powerful, that ain’t about poetry or philosophy or … please. keep it up… maybe what philosophical writing needs MORE of is a trusting restraint not to feel like the whole fucking thing has to be tied in a pretty bundle every time!
I think you’d enjoy Spring & All. It’s not philosophy… but it’s given me stuff to think about to last a life time. I’m way looking forward to reading Democracy of Objects. Fuck Plato! Poets and philosophers should spend more time talking back to each other over a little good wine!
June 19, 2011 at 5:23 am
Congatulations, dr. Sinthome; at first I thought it was LOVECRAFTIAN IKEBANA FOR DUMMIES, but that could just be my implicit preference for Phallic design.
June 19, 2011 at 8:38 am
[…] The book is now listed on OHP’s website, HERE. […]
June 19, 2011 at 1:16 pm
[…] for Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects which is forthcoming from Open Humanities Press. Here, Bryant discusses his motivations in Democracy and how it is different from Difference and […]
June 19, 2011 at 2:33 pm
[…] (stars like Radiohead who are going experimentally against the grain, but also mere mortals like Levi Bryant) who are pushing book publishers or music distributors to adopt a more open-access […]
June 19, 2011 at 3:27 pm
I’m looking forward to reading the final version, Levi.
June 19, 2011 at 5:45 pm
[…] And finally, Levi Bryant’s book The Democracy of Objects is up on the Open Humanties Press site. The book will be out soon, available in a couple of open-access formats and in printed form. Levi offers some thoughts on the book and the publishing model here. […]
June 19, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Looking forward to it, I imagine this will be on a lot of people’s fall reading list. It will be helpful also to many students to get their hands on what sounds like will be a classic of the emerging object-oriented ontology literature.
June 19, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Levi,
My name is Jason Bradford and I write poetry. I recently developed an interest in ecological thinking and philosophy, and a professor recommended that I look into Speculative Realism, which naturally led me to OOO. I found your post on black/dark ecology to be particularly inspiring. It reminds me of theories about the post-pastoral, though black/dark ecology clearly has more thought backing it up. I’m not well read in philosophy, so it takes me a while to fully comprehend the ideas behind Speculative Realism and OOO; however it has been inspiring to read your posts and journey into this world. I look forward to reading your book The Democracy of Objects, and continuing to read your blog.
June 19, 2011 at 10:12 pm
Excellent news though I’m getting very anxious. Obviously you’ve modified a good portion of your core ideas repeatedly over the past year since even finishing up the bulk of the text. No doubt you will look back upon the text and smash your head against a computer screen for forgetting to add something or changing your mind on something. So be it, at least you have something in book format now rather than a constant string of tangents on a blog. I can’t wait to read it :)
June 20, 2011 at 1:14 am
Congratulations! I look forward to reading it. And about the prison-logic you describe, I can only concur. I think the issue is also stemming from a sense of confusion very common during the graduate years: one is struggling to understand, and one feels the need to dissect every minute contraption in an argument, which often makes the act seem antagonistic without it being really motivated by anything but an attempt to learn.
Developing a position of one’s own is one of the things that can only emerge by letting certain things go and trying not to lose the big picture. Young students are often very jargony, and enjoy the feeling of technical mastery, since they feel they still need to learn more. Acquiring one’s own voice requires a certain degree of confidence, and an overarching sense of the field, beyond the locality of technical problems. At least, that’s what true philosophy does; and this is something people as dissimilar as Sellars and Badiou doubtlessly share. “How everything in the broadest possible sense hangs together in the broadest possible sense.”
Again, congratulations on your successes; looking forward to reading it!
Daniel
June 20, 2011 at 4:43 am
Interesting remarks, Levi. I’m not sure why you say it was Badiou who first raised the question of the Truth after Kant. I think you’ll recall that as early as Hegel the question was raised, in the ‘Introduction’ to his Phenomenology of Spirit. Of course, he proceeds both speculatively and critically (through dialectic); Marx takes a more consistently critical stance toward the present existence of things while retaining Hegel’s understanding of history and determinate negation.
But all this makes me wonder: why doesn’t anyone seem to buy Karl Korsch’s old argument in Marxism and Philosophy (1923)? For in that text he argued that following Kant there was a brief (but rapid) development of critical metaphysics the culminated in the Absolute Idealism of Hegel, followed by a sudden dropoff in original philosophical work. The Old and Young Hegelians merely riffed off of themes from Hegel’s vast system, concentrating on problems of the state and questions of theology. Korsch argues that it was only Marxism which took up the mantle of philosophy, all while offering a vigorous critique of it (The Poverty of Philosophy, etc.). He notes how, post-1860, all that one encounters is neo-Kantianism, efforts to revive the critical philosophy to its former dignity and forget the problematic systems-building of the later German Idealists. Philosophy, he argued, ended with Hegel, and the only worthwhile theoretical work that has been done since has been done by thinkers working within the Marxist tradition. And how true it is! Besides the best of the Marxist theoreticians in the late-19th and throughout the 20th century, what else has there been? Logical positivism, the primitivism of fundamental ontology and its intellectual offspring, and endless post-structuralist commentaries on thinkers from the past. And this proud tradition of epigonism has been thoroughly maintained by the Speculative Realist and OOO people, as you quite legitimately point out. I think that Korsch’s hypothesis is well worth revisiting.
June 20, 2011 at 8:39 am
i look forward reading this book.. congratulations
June 21, 2011 at 12:20 pm
You’ll be happy to know that Eileen (my co-blogger) is in the Prismatic Ecologies volume with you. She’s working on BLUE.
June 24, 2011 at 6:20 am
Congratulations on the book Levi, and for helping to launch Open Humanities Press: it’s all very exciting. Cheers!