A lot of people ask what the political dimension of OOO might be. I don’t have an answer to that not because I believe OOO and politics are mutually exclusive, but because I think it’s egregious to speak on behalf of struggling people. The best philosophers can do is create weaponized concepts that might be taken up by others and deployed in their own projects. It is not for the philosopher to be telling the artist, activist, scientist, etc., what they should be doing. Just as the Lacanian analyst is an advocate of the analysand’s desire, creating a space in which the analysand might articulate her desire– the analyst does not give advice, harbor fantasies of what the analysand should be, etc –political articulation should arise immanently from within collectives themselves. Intellectuals should not play the role of a “vanguard voice” telling the people what they “really” should be concerned about. I suppose this is the influence of Ranciere on me.
I do think, however, that OOO can problematize our current political thought and open new avenues of political engagement and theorization. As it stands, cultural studies is dominated by a focus on the discursive. We hear endless talk about signs, signifiers, “positions” or positionality, narratives, discourses, ideology, etc. Basically we see the world as a fetishized text to be decoded and debunked. None of this should, of course, be abandoned, but I do think we’re encountering its limitations.
In the few years I’ve been writing on these issues, I’ve been surprised to discover just how hard it is to get people to sense that there is a non-discursive power of things; a form of power that is not about signs, ideology (as text), beliefs, positions, narratives, and so on. It’s as if these things aren’t on the radar for most social and political theorists. I get the sense that the reason for this has something to do with what Heidegger diagnosed in his analysis of the ready-to-hand. Heidegger argues that when the ready-to-hand is working it becomes invisible. We don’t notice it. It recedes into the background. Us academics live in worlds that work pretty well as far as material infrastructure goes. We are, for the most part, in a world where things work: food is available, electricity and water function, we have shelter, etc. As a consequence, all this disappears from view and we instead focus on cultural texts because often this is a place where things aren’t working.
Perhaps I’m a bit more attuned to these things because of things about my background. Around the age of 16 I went through a couple of months where I was homeless. Homelessness is not fun. In order to eat I had to work. In order to work I had to wear a uniform, be clean, and have some way of getting to work. But in order to get to work, have a clean uniform, and a clean body, I had to have money. And in order to have money, I had to work. During this period, existence itself was a form of contradiction and power. I was trapped in a very limiting physical network that severely structured my possibilities of movement and action. While all of this contained elements of discursivity, it was literally the things themselves that were exercising power here. Everything became a broken hammer.
I have no desire to abandon critiques of ideology and continue to practice them myself. However, discursive critique can only take us so far. It’s possible to wipe away the ideological mystifications, reveal the obfuscations, etc., and still have unjust social hierarchy remain intact. This is because there is also a power of things that structure action and social possibilities. It’s this power of things– what I call “gravity” –that I’m trying to draw attention to in my work. Such an attentiveness to the gravity of things requires that we cease speaking in generalities. Our thought needs to become geographical in a very literal sense. We need to know how this city is arranged, how the roads are organized, the fiber optic cables, water, food, education, train lines, foods produced and their qualities, etc. We need to take seriously the properties of rice because the way in which rice grows has tremendous consequences for the form labor takes in a particular social assemblage. Urbanists, design theorists, certain media theorists, materialist historians, and geographers have been doing these things for years. We need to listen to them more. Again, this is not a call to abandon discursive critique. It still has its place and has made significant contributions. But we do need to broaden our horizons and begin to see a world as if the hammers were broken.
July 11, 2012 at 6:04 pm
maybe this is obvious and has already been addressed somewhere else…. but it sounds as though a return to Foucault’s strategic analysis may be in order? a ‘politics of truth’ is precisely concerned with the local effects of force relations (non-discursive and discursive) that permit what can be said and not said, what counts as true or false on, of course, a discursive level. But what he was getting at, especially after his essay on nietzsche, was the relations of force enacted by non-discursive elements such as architectures, urban designs and every kind of technique which can be integrated into generalized political strategies which generate ‘truth effects’ at the level of discourse which cannot be grasped by an archeologico-discursive analysis… there is an excellent interview with pasquale pasquino from 1976 in which he seems to voice exactly your opinion on the position of the intellectual in political struggle. however as we know, the power of ‘things’ was precisely what he was attempting to unmask in all of his work.
July 11, 2012 at 8:07 pm
From an initial training in literary theory and a side step to philosophy I have turned to other practices, out of necessity, and my adventures have taken me from working in city development, to research in innovation, to regional marketing, to participatory democracy. I keep swinging between management sciences, marketing and consumer research, social realism, systems theories, human geography. Discursive approaches are often considered seriously in social sciences, equally often they are not. Action research and ethnography as an answer to localization seemed to me a useful methodology, yet discursiveness gets in the way even there. I stand for the particularity and the localization of meaning and yet I don’t seem to have a place and a space to practice that. In a way it is an intellectual homelessness that has taken over me and made me a drop out. To be able to be part of intellectual and academic discourse I need to use something else than processes, systems, or narratives, yet places (as things) have not found a place yet. In your work you address philosophers, where do you advise I could find a home?
July 11, 2012 at 8:42 pm
I totally agree with the emancipatory power of objects. By taking the risk of over-simplistic examples, I d like to illustrate: A socialist auction is the one where producers, sellers, experts use computers, algorithms, boxes, vans, storage places, reports, physical and virtual meeting areas….etc. to create a forum which reduces information asymmetries, transaction costs, increases interaction and egalitarian trading arrangements and does not contribute to the making of the law of value. A democratic workers’ organization is the one where people use again interfaces, blogs, mobile phones, transport, notes, video cameras, notebooks, skype, updated communication forms, training materials…etc. to enable real participation. If you just want to criticize/protest/resist, then crowds invading streets and articles debunking some neoliberal ideology are fine. But if you want to create sustainable, long-term alternatives, you have to learn how to play with available objects and materials everywhere. Without several and sometimes failed attempts to create assemblages of people and objects, there is no way out of capitalism, I believe. You go to streets against pension reform or cuts (as I do myself), or you find the subtleties of neoliberal governmentality (as some people keep doing) but then the existing assemblage is likely to incorporate, encroach and many times even change itself with some of your demands, yet still reviving itself… That is why in the last four months while I ve been supporting the organization of building workers in Turkey, we not only discuss how to get economic and social rights, but also how to build a new construction industry in the future with a new computation system for the value of labour, with new residential units for workers which will help not only their safety, but also new forms of sociality….etc. Such thinking, I argue, has to be made integral of any working class organizing. Technical, artisan, philosophical knowledge should be inseparable for working class struggle too. By which I mean, object oriented philosophy does not need to have a politics itself. It is by toying with objects with new purposes that we can create such emancipatory politics. Along with Nicole, Levi has become a good source of inspiration for this. So, thank you.
July 11, 2012 at 11:56 pm
Levi,
This was terrific. Grounded, sensible, and patient—all the things that most of the CAN OOO HAZ POLITICS?1? debate has lacked. Thanks for sharing your story.
I’m trained in cultural studies but am moving increasingly in this direction just because the things I work with are mostly things and not texts. Much of this work is looking at broken hammers or otherwise trying to break them–human-computer interaction being a terrific example. So of course we have enough trouble with the ‘this book is a text and can never be an object’ crowd, but I’d love to hear what you, and others, think about how the sacrosanct categories of cultural studies can also become objects. How can race be an object? Gender? Said’s Orient? And I don’t just mean how the discourse we experience as race is made up of an assemblage of objects such as skin, clothes, and guns; but how race might have a thingness in itself, an unknowable materiality that frustrates description. Is this a track worth pursuing? Or is it just re-fighting cultural studies’ battles? I know Tim Morton has tried making some inroads here.
July 12, 2012 at 2:17 am
I suppose I don’t see how the things you are describing are not “cultural texts.” These “things”—if truly apart from culture—don’t “care,” do they? I’m thinking of the flow of a river or the wind. Can we suggest that these things are “broken”? Surely, there’s a reciprocal relationship amongst all things, but, no matter what, the river or the wind doesn’t “care” about its power or mine. So I’m not entirely sure what you mean.
You give an example of homelessness, suggesting that “existence itself was a form of contradiction and power.” The existence to which you’re referring, though, was inextricably wrapped up in the cultural, wasn’t it? Does a rat, for instance, have the same problems? But maybe I’m misunderstanding your meaning. What do you mean by “physical network”/”literally the things themselves”? Are you talking about cleanliness, transportation, and money? Those, to me, seem to be part of the overarching social structure, not entities that, in and of themselves, would deter anyone from “gainful employment” (or, better, “productive existence”) outside of the social framework that values them. One could argue that these things aren’t life-sustaining deterrents, unless we only view life within our own social structure (which I imagine most of us do, but your previous post seemed to be looking for a way out). How do these things have power outside of our social hierarchy? They seem only to be powerful because of the social hierarchy, not in spite of it or independent of it. (Again, maybe I’m missing the point…?)
I agree that in order for us to even begin to think about social change, we need to take a more focused, intense, and deliberate look at the systemic, but I’d add the underlying values that bolster the social structure/hierarchy as a prerequisite, perhaps. Which, I think, means better understanding or at least deconstructing/criticizing, the “things” that supposedly have power. But, from my purview, the “things” we tend to talk about seem only to have power because that power isn’t questioned as an underlying value of culture/civilization.
Who’s the “we” that are meant to be taking these “things” seriously? The intellectuals you’ve already suggested have no place delegating the tasks of activism? Or is it the lay person? Intellectuals and academics have many tendencies, some of which you’ve pointed out. Another is the tendency to privilege thought and education as though it’s always the answer to these problems, forgetting that most objects (disadvantaged or otherwise) don’t have the access or the social capital to engage in this type of recourse. How, then, are they supposed to act?
If these problems are, at their very core, byproducts of our cultural/social system (which I think they are), then it seems to me that making strides to alter our perceptions of things-in-and-of-themselves is, not just an ameliorative option but, the only option. (This is of course why I find OOO so valuable.) In other words, how do we expect to be able to reevaluate the industrial food system or urban design or the transition from copper to fiber-optic cables that supply electricity (to the fortunate few) if our underlying values don’t motivate us to do so? If I’m going to prioritize a potential employee’s cleanliness or address (cardboard box?) over her/his ability to do the job, what’s going on? If I’m an acolyte of the “boot-strap” mentality so prevalent in America, why should I care that property taxes fund public education? These underlying/unexamined values, to my mind, are the most insidious barriers to change—ones that need addressing before genuine, physical action can take place.
July 12, 2012 at 2:23 am
Thanks Daniel! This is a question I’ve been struggling with as well and I don’t have a definitive position as of yet. So far there are two ways in which it might be approached. One way of approaching the question would be to treat things like race as what I’ve called “spectral objects“. Spectral objects are objects that are not materially real in their own right (like “the Market”), but which nonetheless exert real effects on people via belief in them. Thus, for example, all people belonging to a “race” are different, yet nonetheless belief that they share a common being has real effects on how they cultivate themselves. Likewise, belief that race is something real has real effects on people not of that “race” treat members that fit this category.
Another way to go about it– that’s maybe similar –is to refer to these objects as machines of normalization or “normalized objects”. In my new ontology, I argue that the world is composed not of objects, but of machines (or rather, “machine” and “object” are synonyms for me). A machine is something that transforms flows from another machine into a new form. For example, my body transforms food into a variety of different cells. A normativized object is an object that is absolutely real and physical, but that does not occur “naturally”. Most of the chemical elements are normalized objects because they don’t occur in their pure form in “nature”, but must be “decanted” in the lab. Likewise, scientists have created new elements that occur nowhere in “nature”. Agricultural biologists are normalizing corn by selecting that genotype that has the most consistent phenotype in the widest range of regimes of attraction or environments (thereby threatening us with a repeat of the Irish potato famine).
We can think of human practices, institutions, nationalisms, etc., as attempt to produce normalized objects or normalized humans. A philosophy department is a machine that tries to form its graduate students according to a particular philosophical doxa. Nationalisms is a machine that tries to form a very diverse geographical population into a shared identity. Various emancipatory politics are machines that do not so much give voice to their subjects, as create new subjects: “black american”, “gay american”, “worker”, etc. Here the subject does not precede the machine but results from the machine. Just as genotypical strains of corn selected by agricultural biologists are entirely real, just as human-made elements are entirely real, so too would human products of these machines be real. I don’t know if this gets at what you’re asking or not. An important point here is that normalized objects are not necessarily bad things. They can be bad, they can be good. It depends on how they’re acting in a particular assemblage.
July 12, 2012 at 2:53 am
Pan,
First, I explicitly state that text and these other things are entangled. Second, the point is that the differences something like cholera, malaria, or the bubonic plague introduce are not of the order of signifying systems. Sure, we create texts about them, but they introduce differences that are not themselves textual. Likewise with roads and whatnot. I understand the will to hegemony among academics would like it to be otherwise; that’s the problem.
July 12, 2012 at 2:55 am
It’s also astonishing and the height of conservative to suggest that infrastructural arrangements have nothing to do with a person getting gainful employment. You must be very fortunate.
July 12, 2012 at 3:00 am
“Boot strapping” is one of the most potent ideological myths. Remember that getting to work takes time, especially when you’re impoverished. You have to get from point a to b. a real material constraint. Remember that people have children they must care for so time dilation becomes a real issue. Where do they get the money for that care? Remember jobs of a certain sort also involve a semiotics of clothing, certain privileged linguistic styles, etc. material constraints again. Your remarks are just amazing for me to read and fill me with despair. Such blind ugliness toward the material realities of other that can only arise from a person where the hammer works.
July 12, 2012 at 3:16 am
I’m afraid there’s been an incredible misunderstanding. I was not at all trying to act as a contrarian to your post, but, rather, to better understand your line of thinking. (I’m quite the fan of all SR and OOOists) I didn’t mean at all to suggest that infrastructural arrangements have nothing to do with a person getting gainful employment—of course, it’s quite the opposite. What I meant to do was inquire as to how you meant them to have power outside of that arrangement. And maybe that’s not what you meant. I apologize for any confusion.
I have not been fortunate at all, as a matter of fact. And one of the points of me asking questions about underlying cultural values was to suggest that those very kinds of attitudes are the biggest barriers to change—the attitudes you seem to be accusing me of having. I suppose I need to work on my rhetorical flourishes.
July 12, 2012 at 3:28 am
A society for me is not just composed of people and their beliefs, but nonhumans as well. Washer machines are part of a society and coral reefs, until recently, were societies that didn’t involve humans at all. My point is that physical constraints introduce forms of power that aren’t about belief, semiotics, language, narrative, etc. a speed bump, as Latour observes, exercises a power on how you move with your car that isn’t signifying in character.
July 12, 2012 at 4:15 am
Nor is it for me (though I would suggest that while coral reefs may have composed a society apart from humans, that society absolutely involves/has been impacted by humans just as ours is by theirs.) I understood your point that physical constraints introduce forms of power, I thought. My contention was with the latter part: that they aren’t about belief, semiotics, language, etc. You yourself just remarked that certain jobs require a “semiotics of clothing.” My intention was to question whether or not these things have power (or even exist) outside of human society. I don’t think they do—do you? Maybe that doesn’t matter, except I think it’s a starting point for possibly reevaluating why the heck it is that these things are so important to us and our culture. Because they serve—literally—no purpose but to marginalize specific types of people/objects/things.
July 12, 2012 at 7:08 am
I don’t know what cultural studies you a reading but we have not been focusing on the discursive ‘as such’ for many years — or at least the discursive understood as somehow independent of matter (and actually the assumption of independence was always more made in critiques of CS than in CS at least as far as I can tell) or ‘decoding’. It was in the mid to late 1990s that a lot of us involved in the intellectual project of CS began working on objects (I think I first heard references to the ‘agency of objects’ at a CS workshops around 1995), materiality, and world making ie well in advance of OOO – after all STS and Cultural Studies have a long shared history. And even before then (in work of scholars like Raymond Williams) and in ethnographic work which has been one ot the primary research methods in CS, the emphasis has been on the materiality and lived nature of worlds. I point to this ‘well in advance’ not to diminism OOO or to imply it is derivative but to suggest we can tell the story of the relation differently. Perhaps we could learn to avoid creating straw targets (CS becomes straw as a way of making OOO matter) in making arguments.
July 12, 2012 at 12:08 pm
Susan,
I’m well aware of this and have written a good deal about it. Theorists such as Haraway, Stengers, and Latour do not fit this mould, for example. Nonetheless, these orientations have been rather minority positions in an academy dominated by deconstruction, Frankfurt School, and psychoanalytic models of criticism. There it is exactly as I describe. I also find that it’s important to be cautious with the term materiality. Nearly everyone throws it around, yet seldom does it’s use have much to do with real materiality. No doubt this has to do with a Marxist tradition that associated materialism not with material things but with practice opposed to knowledge.
July 12, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Susan,
I would also add that words like “dominant” in the second paragraph of the post matter. They signify that a statistical claim is being made about what predominates in a population. With these sorts of claims the fact that one can find counter-examples doesn’t undermine the validity of the generalizations. It’s very easy to say “but there’s this counter-example x!” The question however is whether that counter-example is representative. Further, if you take the time to read the introduction to The Democracy of Objects you’ll find that I’m very much aware of the tradition you mention (your charge of ignorance because I don’t mention it in a 1000 word post is rather galling; you could have searched the blog to see). If I’m doing nothing more than drawing more attention to that tradition and in making it stronger in political practice, I’m fine with that. Lord knows I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time promoting and publicizing work I’ve found important such as the new materialists, ANT, Pickering, etc, etc, etc. It’s ironic and disheartening to be accused of doing otherwise.
July 12, 2012 at 12:47 pm
There are an awful lot of self-declared ‘materialists’ in the humanities and social sciences who are rather undeserving of the title.
A material thing that is just a blank canvas onto which immaterial social, cultural or linguistic representations can be projected isn’t much of a thing at all. It’s a prop, a crutch, just sitting there with its author trying to convince everyone that ‘hey, look! I’m not an idealist!’.
And this is the kind of ‘material thing’ that crops up in the humanities all the time. e.g. Judith Butler will talk about the materiality of the body but it always turns out to be little more than a tabula rasa for socio-linguistic projections. Merleau-Ponty may get a nod but, again, it’s all limited to the body and phenomenality. ‘Discipline and Punish’-era Foucault is of course sometimes popular but his materialism was always underdeveloped and hard questions are rarely asked of it.
‘Necessary but insignificant,’ seems to me to be the prevailing attitude with regard to things. It’s acknowledged that they need to be there (as a nod to our ‘being-with’ things) but they seldom amount to much in the course of the analysis (besides being a necessary precondition).
As Levi mentions, there are those such as Haraway, Latour, Stengers, etc. who break this mould but they’re the exception.
I, for one, may well be ignorant of others in cultural studies who don’t fall into the aforementioned categories but I’ve not come across many in my travels, I must say.
panimangia seems to be hung up on the notion of objects as social. Levi (nor Latour, who is the best known inspiration for this line of thought) doesn’t deny that society is made up of language, representations, meanings and so on. He doesn’t subtract anything from the social; on the contrary, he radically expands it to include all sorts of things. The redefinition is additive, not subtractive. Language, etc. remains important; however, it turns out, other things are important too.
e.g. roads are literally a social network. They’re not a blank canvas onto which social meanings can be projected — they’re as much part of the social as anything else. In rituals of gift exchange the gift itself is not just the passive carrier of an immaterial social relation, it IS the social relation; it is part of the social. Now, of course it has to be ‘enrolled’ in the social, it is not ‘always already’ social but so what?
If you want an accessible introduction to this kind of thinking I’d recommend Latour’s Paris: Invisible City, which is available from his website:
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/viii_paris-city-gb.pdf
He gives a whole swathe of examples of how the city of Paris as a social assemblage is put together and maintained, with bollards being no less important (and no less social) than words.
July 12, 2012 at 2:12 pm
Thanks for the reply Levi. I need to read your full talk when I have time but I guess the main objection I’d have to ‘normalized objects’ is that the ‘normalized’ seems to be from the human perspective. Most every object probably experiences itself as normal, or at least more or less normal than other objects–including its machinic outputs. With that said, I’m a rookie here and this may just be one place where you and, say, Bogost diverge.
July 12, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Daniel,
I think I need a better term for it. What I’m talking about is a process whereby diversity in a population is erased. There are all sorts of genetic variants of corn, but the agricultural biologist and industry of agriculture literally erase this variation so only ONE TYPE exists. This isn’t a question of human point of view, but is a real, material uniformalization of the corn.
July 12, 2012 at 7:53 pm
What about good old ‘homogenise’? Its more ambiguous than normalise insofar as normalisation implies a definite normaliser, usually a human being.
July 12, 2012 at 10:56 pm
That might be a better term. Need something sexy here.
July 13, 2012 at 3:05 am
…genocide…? Or geno-[insert your preferred synonym for "cleansing"] Or, maybe, “monoculturization.”
July 13, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Linealisation (note: lineaL, not lineaR).
In the sense of familial lineage but also of ‘bringing into line’ or disciplining (thus creating a lineage). More abstractly, in the sense of reducing a whole tangle of trajectories to a single one; a competing jumble of vectors straightened out into one. A reduction of complexity to a single telos. Also, distinct from non-linear. It implies homogeneity and combines metaphors of line and movement as well as those of biology and genetics. Also implies historicity and process.
But then I’m jus’ spitballin’ here!
July 14, 2012 at 8:41 am
when I’m chainsawing the chainsaw never becomes ‘ready to hand’ or somehow disappears….I’m sure I’ve missed something. did Heidegger ever use a hammer!
July 18, 2012 at 12:49 am
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