Oh how the humanists and human exceptionalists have bristled with outrage. “OOO/SR hates humans!” “OOO/SR wants to treat rocks as every bit as important as persons!” “OOO/SR denies the agency of humans!” “OOO/SR is nihilistic!” No, I don’t hate humans, nor do I think the rights of rocks should be treated as absolutely equal with those of humans. But perhaps, with this last charge of nihilism, the proper gesture is not one of disavowal, but embrace. However, the nihilism here is not the subjective nihilism described so well by Nietzsche, but rather an objective nihilism characteristic of the material reality of our times. It is our circumstances themselves, the material reality of our world, that has become nihilistic, not the thought of this or that thinker. Indeed, I suspect that many of us are terrified and anguished by this objective nihilistic darkness that approaches and that may very have happened, as Timothy Morton suggests. Perhaps we are already dead and we just don’t yet know it.
Everything hinges on asking why the critique of correlationism– the most contentious and controversial dimension of SR –has arisen at this point in history. Why have so many suddenly become impassioned with the question of how it is possible to think a world without humans or being without thought? It is such a peculiar question, such a queer question, such a strange question. Why, after all, would we even be concerned with what the world might be apart from us when we are here and regard this world? There are, of course, all sorts of good ontological and epistemological reasons for raising these questions. Yet apart from immanent philosophical reasons, philosophy is always haunted by a shadow text, a different set of reasons that are not so much of the discursive order as of the order of the existential and historical situation and which thought finds itself immersed at a given point in history. Over and above– or perhaps below and behind –the strictly discursive philosophical necessity for a particular sort of thought, is the existential imperative to think something. Here the issue is not one of establishing how a certain philosophical imperative demands a response to a strictly philosophical question, but of addressing the question of why a particular question begins to resonate at all at this point in history and not in others.
read on!
It is likely that answering this historical question entails always contending with overdetermination; with an overdetermination where many existential imperatives address us and no one answer is the answer. However, if I were to hazard a guess as to why the critique of correlationism, the thought of a world without humans, has suddenly become a burning one, then my suggestion would be that this is because we are facing the imminent possibility of a world that is truly without humans. If it has become necessary to think the possibility of a world without humans, then this is because we face a future– due to the coming climate apocalypse –of a world that truly is without humans.
As I wrote long ago, culturally this thought of the possibility of a world without humans has been approaching us for quite some time. Among the Christian right we have seen the rise of apocalyptic fantasies announcing the immanent destruction of a decadent and sinful world. During the 90’s and early 00’s, we saw the rise of apocalyptic natural disaster films. These films had not yet reached the full clarity of thought, but were instead yarns about how all of society must be destroyed to make the sexual relation possible (Timothy Richardson’s thesis), and about how man always triumphs in the face of alien invasions, climate chain, meteor impacts, etc. Yet in recent years, we’ve seen the full culmination of the thought of the possibility of a world without humans in films such as Children of Men, WALL-E, and above all Melancholia. Indeed, Melancholia marks the zenith of a cultural thinking of the possibility of our own absence… A depiction of that absence without exit, redemption, or escape. It is here that we see the possibility of our own annihilation without remainder. One wonders if von Trier’s did not consult Brassier when writing his script.
Culture can be seen as a symptomatic thinking through– veiled and concealed, while nonetheless present and on the surface right there before our eyes –of the Real of its historical moment. This seems to be the case with apocalyptic films and movements in recent decades. What we seem to be thinking through is the possibility of our own extinction or, at the very least, the extinction of the world as we know it. This thinking through that leads to cultural production is, in its turn, a reflection of the objective nihilism of the circumstances in which we live… An objective nihilism in which we see what is approaching us yet experience ourselves as utterly in capable of acting in response to it. Everywhere the traces of this objectively nihilistic situation are intensifying in their appearance. The pictures above are of my grandmother’s house destroyed in the derecho that swept the northeast United States last week, and the tornado that we experienced here in Texas a month or so ago. The weather has become strange, climate change now speaks with a bellow. This Real of our circumstances becomes registered in SR/OOO as the thinking of a world without humans or of a being without a suture to thought. The hope, however, if there is any, is that this terrifying thought of the Real might be a spur to action of some sort.
Larval Subjects . 
July 7, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Horrible about your grandmothr’s house. My deepest condolences. Hope no one was hurt.
On the last thought in your post — that OOO’s attention to the real might have some affect in spurring people to action — this is a line of argument I’ve considered and found troubling. Isn’t that simply a return to another kind of correlationism? Or else a kind of instrumentality with regards to objects that discourages exactly the kind of specific and speculative cnonsideration objects deserve?
I’ve been drawn towards a similar rhetoric in the public debate about the New Aesthetic, which I’ve characterized as a subset of OOO that’s specifically concerned with new objects. (http://thecreatorsproject.com/blog/in-response-to-bruce-sterlings-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic#4) I’ve felt a temptation to defend this object-oriented approach by suggesting that it might help us come to grips with our new political and cultural condition — that an attention to drones, guidance algorithms, CCTV sensors, distributed data storage systems, and image compression techniques might inform a political or personal response to our contemporary world.
I worry, though, that making this kind of instrumental argument for attention to objects will circumscribe this work within the correlationist circle by leaving humans as its center and its reason. This is especially challenging when bringing OOO into more “applied” fields of study than philosophy and critical theory. The participants in the conversation around the New Aesthetic are artists, critics, designers, technologists, and technology pundits. They have an inherently more skeptical attitude towards theoretical or indirect approaches to their material. They want to know why it’s worth learning a new way of thinking. I believe that OOO offers great promise in these fields in particular. Their practitioners are already carpenters in Ian’s sense and hence richly engaged with objects in their work. However until we develop specific methods of criticism and making that clearly arise out of OOO’s alienness rather than it’s ability to answer the same old human-centric questions it will be hard to make a case to them on our own terms, a case that doesn’t lose OOO promise by falling back into the correlationist circle.
July 7, 2012 at 8:43 pm
Great points, Greg. I do worry a bit about your use of the term “instrumentalism” though. It does not seem to me that all spurs to action are instrumentalist. Rather, instrumentalism seems to be something more specific: the reduction of all beings of the world to bare matter (shades of Agamben’s bare life here) for human use and exploitation. Hopefully I’m not suggesting anything like that!
July 7, 2012 at 9:19 pm
Thanks, Levi. I didn’t mean to suggest you’re advocating any kind of generalized instrumentalism. More specifically I think the danger (and it’s one I fall into myself in the NA discourse) is in instrumentalizing OOO itself: making it into a toolkit for understanding objects in order to make human action more effective.
I’d love to hear more about how you’d construct a spur to action that is clearly not instrumentalist. I agree with you that it’s possible and I think it’s exactly what I’m trying to strive for, but I’m struggling with the language for it. In the case of NA, my struggle is to advocate for a speculative exploration of the inner lives of “New Objects” in a manner that claims a value for that activity in itself, but also contextualizes it so that its results might inform other types of consideration. For example, a specific goal for me would be that the nascent political resistance to the use of drones in both military and domestic contexts be based in a detailed speculative imagining of the positioning algorithms, autopilot hardware and software systems, etc. rather than solely a warmed over critical theory vocabulary stemming from a mix of Foucault-ian panopticism, Mulvey-ian politics-of-the-gaze, and Saidi-an Orientalism. While these (and other) critical frameworks may have a role to play in this analysis, my fear is that their knee jerk adoption will actively prevent a speculative engagement with these new objects or, worse, pre-judge such a process of speculation as a regressive techno-fetishism with an inherent bias towards the military industrial complex that produces these drones.
This is an attitude I’ve already encountered in debates. And defending against it is exactly where I’ve felt the temptation to instrumentalize OOO by responding something like: “No, no, no. This isn’t really about the objects! We’re only looking closely at the objects in order to construct a better political critique!” which is not the position I really want to take. There must be a way to effectively advocate for both of these (seemingly contradictory positions) simultaneously. Help!
July 8, 2012 at 12:51 am
Out right now, but I’m struggling with these things myself. Collective project?
July 8, 2012 at 2:18 am
Greg, this is a very real concern, and it’s not only a concern in the familiar context of OOO vs. radical leftism. In science and engineering, we’re constantly trying to answer the question, “what is this good for?” and an answer like “for its own sake” or “for the sake of the objects” seems only to work for theoretical physics these days (depressing). But saying “it’s good for nothing!” satisfies neither party. The irony there is that the same so-called radical leftists who demand philosophy service specific, predetermined political ends will also argue for the humanities as a domain “off the books” of society, requiring no specific returns. And it’s not just the humanists; science will also claim that it’s worth is both done just to understand the nature of the universe, but also to advance the station of humanity.
Obviously, what we want is to be able to do both, and not to be stuck in self-contradiction. And to know what balance to strike between them. The problem, I fear, is not this problem so much as the way people approach it… namely by concluding either that OOO wants to destroy all humans or that if it doesn’t, it’s internally inconsistent.
July 8, 2012 at 11:46 am
For my part, I’m simply puzzled by this “what is OOO good for?” line of critique. People are already answering that question for us by making use of OOO in the arts, architecture, choreography, archaeology, the social sciences, geography, literary theory, and other disciplines. Why not ask those people what they are doing with OOO.
Few brands of ontology are *less* guilty of being “useless” to other disciplines. It’s a hypothetical question that doesn’t realize it has already been rendered moot by reality.
Much of this critique is coming from “political” poseurs who dislike ontology altogether, not just OOO. They want politics (in their version) to be the transcendental condition of access to all reality, and that is why they are bothered by the de-centering of the human. To judge from their critiques, most of them know of OOO only what they’ve read on WIkipedia; their mistakes are often shockingly basic, betraying no first-hand acquaintance with actual texts written by any of us. My days of responding to Wikipedia-fuelled critique are over. The price of admission to the debate is that one must read at least some of the actual texts.
July 8, 2012 at 11:43 pm
[…] realism and/or object-oriented ontology. Now here is something I can affirm. Read the full article here. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. Published: July 9, 2012 […]
July 9, 2012 at 3:44 am
@ doctorzamalek — I think the concern Greg raises is that OOO does NOT effectively decenter the human at the point where it involves action.
July 9, 2012 at 8:38 pm
@Levi:
Another brilliant post. I think you are spot on with regards to how we seem to be working through a growing but mostly subconscious realization of the possibility (probability) of extinction. North Americans tend to hide in consumerism (pornography or crystal meth no less than simply commodities or watching T.V) to sooth the pain of this existential fear and resentment.
I’m reminded of Ernest Becker’s work here:
“Full humanness means full fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the cloak of someone else’s power, what joy can you promise him with the burden of his aloneness? When you get a person to look at the sun as it bakes down on the daily carnage taking place on earth, the ridiculous accidents, the utter fragility of life, the power¬lessness of those he thought most powerful—what comfort can you give him from a psychotherapeutic point of view? Luis Buimel likes to introduce a mad dog into his films as counterpoint to the secure daily routine of repressed living. The meaning of his sym¬bolism is that no matter what men pretend, they are only one ac¬cidental bite away from utter fallibility. The artist disguises the incongruity that is the pulse-beat of madness but he is aware of it. What would the average man do with a full consciousness of ab¬surdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror. Sartre has called man a “useless passion” because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one’s existence—how take it away from people and leave them joyous?” (Becker, The Denial of Death, p.58-59)
I believe the task of theorists (and not just philosophers) is to indulge in rather than mask the nihilistic forces of contemporary life – forces that manifest in both subjective and objective ways – enough to render thought strictly earthly, or creaturely – that is to say materialist. We could take up the lines purposed by Laurelle or Brassier, or the eliminativists, or cleanse our phantasies in the rhetorical psychedelica of Tim Morton, or come up with some other codes and performances capable of limiting thought (and thus affording speculative opportunities) and opening to the intercorporeal facticity of life. But that would be just a start. The important work to be done will be decidedly practical, and not necessarily academic (as you note above). The important work must be done at levels that effectively integrate the facticity of matter as matter and renders it mutually understandable among participants (or at least those of us left behind, so to speak).
Thinking the visceral and consequential facticity of intercorporeality entails thinking about our intimate connections as immanent achievements (our continuity with ‘nature’) and our vulnerability (or precarity with-in ‘nature’) simultaneously. This is at the heart of wilderness thinking / ecological thoughts in my opinion.
@Dave and Greg:
I think OOO perfectly decenters the human without obliterating our ‘withdrawn’ achievements of depth and explosive specificity. Criticisms also come from the other end as well in that people suggest OOOers ‘hate humans’ by acknowledging how nonhumans have the same ontological status as us as existants. I don’t get that from these guys. The point is fairly simply: individuating objects, machines, units, assemblages must be understood, engaged and evaluated with respect to their irreducible compositionality – and not only with reference to their relational conditionings. This is an ontological claim that can be spun in a variety of politically oriented ways, but which does not itself entail a specific political agenda.
I do believe there are inherent psychological dangers with focusing one’s energies on detached metaphysical speculation – e.g., as evidenced by Heidegger’s simultaneous interest in pure, or decontented Being as such and his idiotic attachment to National Socialism – but a sensitivity to objectal integrity gives us an additional grip on where to begin building our accounts of how things are, and thus a place to start thinking about might be possible and/or advantageous.
July 9, 2012 at 9:17 pm
@ Dave—so? In that when humans act they are at some sort of center of activity, any approach to ethics based in an ontology that includes humans is going to, at some point or other, in some way or other, “NOT effecitively decenter the human at the point where it involves action.” In that OOO, as I see it expressed here, seeks what Levi calls a flat ontology, a human ethics, of whatever sort, need not priviledge humans over, say, the global ecology of which we are just a part, and are not the center save as all actors are at some center of activity or other. So too the kittens and Levi’s shark (and a very good shark it is too….great white, tiger, whale, basking etc….eating whatever s/he eats). That is, if we are to think about how we ought to act, given the world as best we understand it and as it exists despite how we understand it, we are both at the center and, but only potentially given folks can be greedy, selfish and so on, not at the center at the same time and, pace Aristotle, perhaps in the same way but not necessarily to the same end(s). All of this is provisional and depends upon the attitude we take, that is, it cannot be a forgone conclusion as long as I, like L’s shark, want to have lunch.
July 10, 2012 at 2:14 am
I’m not sure I agree with the underlying premise (or impetus, maybe) that OOO, or philosophers in general, should be operating from a space that prioritizes (or aims to produce) “ethical” or “political” anything—this seems to me to be, yet again, wholly anthropocentric. I, too, have struggled (still do) with these issues. My own thesis dealt with exploring how Morton’s “dark ecology” could inform an “ethical ontology” and affect politics/culture/etc., but what I’ve come to realize is that that’s very dangerous. As Mr. Borenstein points out, working from this general standpoint instrumentalizes OOO, which isn’t good for anything or anyone, least of all OOO. I’m inclined to suggest that these human-centric concerns should remain, as much as possible, apart from OOO and the thinking of and through it. Which is to say, any socio-political behavior or action that might result from OOO should be (again, as much as possible) independent of OOO itself. I think that detaching from the potential outcomes of embracing a philosophy like OOO will ultimately result in the kind of nihilism of which Brassier writes. Nihilism, as he contends, is (and I hope I don’t butcher it) “the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-dependent reality which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ that we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.” Even as much of the impetus for thinking OOO has been, to a certain extent, in response to the recognition of our ecological imbrication, that doesn’t mean it should be crippled by or shackled to the potential not-so-human(or any other object)-friendly future ramifications. (Or maybe it means that it’s inescapably so shackled/crippled.) The point I’m trying to make is that ethics and ontology don’t seem to mix. How can they?
July 10, 2012 at 12:05 pm
How can they (ethics and ontology) not mix in any lived world where those who live are conscious of their living in the world? Perhaps this gets at why I’m an anthropologist and not a philosopher (like Goethe Ich habe keine organ fur philosophie). But this attempt to keep is and ought separate (for whatever reason) strikes me as a pipedream, and a pipedream embedded in a very western metaphysics.
July 10, 2012 at 3:14 pm
“One wonders if von Trier() did not consult Brassier when writing his script.” nice.
however, privileged depressives don’t actually have much insight into what’s going to happen: ask rather, street people, & those living in the third world on $2 a day… we could use some pointers.
of course, if enough of us HAD cared about the “rights of rocks” (& animals & plants & the ocean & the atmosphere) we might not now be staring at planet Melancholia through our home telescopes.
no, it’s not the end of the world; it’s only the end of one particular folly. like Romulus Augustulus on all our coins, we are stuck in a dead paradigm–& loving it.
it’s a great time to wake up to what we have put the kibosh to, sort of a foretaste of the thousand-year remorse we’ll be leaving our descendants with. philosophy can explain it to the dead rabbit. “I and Thou”…& Peak Oil.
July 19, 2012 at 3:17 pm
This is an eminently sensible post. Forgetting the “shadow-text” of philosophy is precisely the kind of thing that reduces it to scholasticism, such as much of contemporary analytic thought. As someone who has his doubts about OOO/SR, I can at least sympathize with its move away from anthropocentrism. But I believe that the historical and existential impetus for this move comes not only from the horror vision of a world without humans, but also from the increasing degree to which contemporary life means having to interact with and understand nonhuman forces and agencies. Whether we die off or persevere will very much depend on how well we can make explicit the terms of this interaction. And here, I suppose, my beef with “realism” enters, because a philosophy of interactions entails a generalized notion of agency, and hence no need for abandoning “correlationism” (which I do believe, channeling the German idealists, is incoherent), but rather of imagining a generalized correlationism.