In a recent post over at An Un-canny Ontology, Nate argues the object-oriented ontology must necessarily confront the figure of the zombie.
Because of this need to place all things on an equal playing field, Object-Oriented philosophy and ontology (hereto referred to as OOP/OOO) is forced to deal with its own creature.
Where, according to Nate, postmodernism encountered the figure of the cyborg, object-oriented philosophy necessarily finds the figure of the zombie at the center of its meditations. As Nate puts it,
Zombies are the uncanny kernel of the Real, they are not the object which leaves a remainder, they ARE the remainder. Zombies are Das Ding, the Thing, human qua object. And because of this, OOP/OOO must deal with the zombie much in the same way Postmodernism (especially in Haraway and Lyotard) had to deal with the cyborg. However, instead of talking about how humanity will have become, OOP/OOO will have to talk about in what ways humanity is not unique – how we are all zombies. They must take up the zombie as a human representative since only in the zombie do we find the human as it “really” exists, without any obfuscation.
First, the zombie IS – of this there can be no mistake. The zombie is just as real as the computer in front of me. For OOP/OOO all objects are as real as all other objects. Second, the zombie exists as pure desire, it moves with a single purpose and without known agency. And finally, every zombie is the same. A zombie biker is no more or less threatening than a zombie baker or zombie dog. But essentially the zombie is an empty desire, an object with no name except pure existence. Why do they hunger for brains? Who knows. Will they ever stop looking for brains? No. And in a world where all objects are on the same level playing field, stripped away of our agency as subjects, we find ourselves in an awkward position, as non-human humans alive in a world of networks and alliances. We are all zombies. And the only question that remains in a this philosophy that deals with fidelity and allegiance is, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”
While I am extremely interested in the figure of the zombie as a cultural symptom, I confess that I am deeply perplexed by Nate’s meditation on zombies in relation to object-oriented ontology. How did I or Graham for that matter, ever give the impression the object-oriented ontology sees humans are zombies? First, I think there is some confusion here as to just what flat ontology entails. Flat ontology is not the thesis that all beings are on equal footing– which would be a normative thesis –but that insofar as a being makes a difference it is. Nonetheless, among beings there are all sorts of inequalities. Deleuze articulates this point nicely in Difference and Repetition:
The words ‘everything is equal’ may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equally in this equal, univocal Being: equal being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary, even though things reside unequally in this equal being. (37)
If something makes a difference then it is, but the degree to which a being makes a difference on other beings can range from nil to perhaps infinity. A being in some remote corner of the universe busily plods away making its difference in being itself, but insofar as this entity is unrelated to other entities, the difference this entity makes is rather sleight. It is thus necessary to distinguish between making a difference simpliciter and making a difference in relation to other entities. Insofar as an entity is, it necessarily makes a difference simpliciter, even if that entity is unrelated to any other entity. To be is to simply be this difference in the way that it is. By contrast, what we’re generally interested in when speaking of differences are those relational differences or the difference that one thing produces in another thing. In this latter case, not all differences are equally relevant as they range from rather minor differences that make little impact on other entities, to the extensive differences that tend to make up the object of investigation.
read on!
There are a few things flat ontology is strategically designed to target. On the one hand, flat ontology targets forms of “vertical being” where some element makes a difference on another element without the element acted upon, in turn, making a difference on it. This formulation is indequate, but goes some of the way towards articulating what I’m trying to get at. Platonic forms are an example of vertical being. Platonic forms enact all their difference on the world of appearances, but the world of appearances makes no difference to the forms. The relation here is unilateral. Eternal and unchanging, the forms are, as it were, sterile insofar as there is nothing that could change or affect the forms. Certain theistic conceptions of God exemplify the structure of vertical being in that God exercises all the difference without anything else producing a difference in God. In my view, Kant’s epistemology has the structure of vertical being in that the categories of the understanding, the forms of intuition, and the Ideas of reason exercise their difference without the matter of intuition producing any difference in these structures. They plod along as they always did, unchanging and beyond all change. Likewise, some versions of structural linguistics are organized in this way as well. In the distinction between langue and parole, langue exercises all its difference on parole without parole being able to make any difference to langue. Similarly, in gene-centric biological theories have the structure of vertical being in the sense that the genes are treated as exercising all the difference, without anything else exercising difference on the genes.
In one way or another, all variants of vertical ontology follow the classical schema of the form/matter distinction. Form is treated as the active principle capable of contributing difference, whereas matter is treated as the passive principle capable of receiving difference. If the matter contributes anything of its own, it is a contamination of the purity of the form or a perversion of form. If, for example, Plato places dianoia below episteme, then this is because dianoia as used in mathematical reasoning relies on drawn diagrams or figures as props for its thought. Since it is impossible to draw a perfect circle, say, the diagram contaminates the perfect form of the circle by introducing imperfections into our thought of the circle. A pure thinking or episteme would dispense with the diagram altogether, instead arriving at a direct intellectual intuition of the form of the circle itself. Across more than twenty centuries Saussure repeats this Platonic gesture in his own way, seeing speech or parole as something that must be bracketed as it contaminates the purity of langue.
In opposition to this sort of unilateral causation, flat ontology wishes to think imbroglios of difference. Where vertical ontology places all agency on the side of the form, an imbroglio is a tangle of different actors each contributing differences in the production of the result. On the one hand, onticology holds that ontologically this is the “way things are”. We live in a world of tangled difference. The distinctiveness of a wine grape lies not in the genes of that grape alone, but in the other plants growing in the soil, the weather and light conditions under which it grows, the insects, how it is cultivated, how it is fermented, and so on. On the other hand, onticology arises from a sort of theoretical schizophrenia that arises from reading too much, from exploring science and technology studies, rhetoric, biology, Marxist thought, media studies, deconstruction, phenomenology, semiotics, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, etc., and finding it impossible to choose. In this situation a disquiet begins to emerge. Recognizing a merit to all of these various approaches, the suspicion arises that they are not opposed theoretical stances, but rather microscopes that isolate a particular type of difference for investigation, bracketing the other differences. To choose one of these positions would be dogmatic in the sense that it would confuse a theoretical exigency– the necessity of bracketing certain differences for the sake of inquiry –with an ontological truth: that these differences are the only difference that make a difference.
What onticology wants is a multi-faceted form of analysis capable of recognizing the role played by a variety of different differences, rather than unilateral modes of analysis that treat only one sort of difference as making a difference and actively denying all the other differences. What onticology takes away with its left hand it always gives back with its right. The onticologist, for example, will say “no, objects are not mere signs, but signs are certainly interesting objects.” The onticologist recognizes that we can never capture all the differences that play a role in a phenomena, that inquiry requires a bracketing of certain differences as well as a hierarchialization of differences in terms of their relative degree of contribution, but also believes that it is good to have, lurking in the back of one’s mind, this bramble of differences underlying any phenomena so as to avoid reifying ones theoretical concepts.
If onticology has been particularly hostile to correlationism and treats human actors as one object among other objects, then this is because correlationism tends to stack the deck on the side of the subject as the active agent, thereby rendering all sorts of other differences invisible. But in treating humans as one object among other objects, it is in no way suggested that this object is the same as all others, that it has no specific properties, or that it is a mere zombie without agency. One could only arrive at this conclusion on the assumption that agency requires complete independence from imbroglios and complete transcendence with respect to our relation to other objects. But where has anyone ever experienced this? Moreover, if there is no difference that does not make a difference, how could human actors or objects fail to contribute differences of their own? Perhaps the better question would be not whether or not we are agents, but under what conditions we manage to attain agency.
Larval Subjects . 
August 20, 2009 at 9:54 pm
I’m perplexed too. Though Nate’s contributions are much appreciated, he seems to be making a strange assumption– that if humans are no longer a pampered ontological elite, then human consciousness must not exist.
We saw a variant of this back in the spring– “if OOO claims that politics is not the center of all ontology, then it must be claiming that humans and politics are sh*t”. Why?
August 20, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Graham,
At the risk of causing myself all sorts of trouble, if anything, I think, OOO allows for the possibility of a new sort of humanism. I have to be careful here. In suggesting a new sort of humanism I am not talking about a human centered ontology, nor the idea of humans as sovereigns that maintain a transparent relation to themselves. Rather, when you look at the anti-humanisms and proclamations of the death of the subject during the last century in Nietzsche, Lacan, the structuralists, and the post-structuralists, they always proceed through a reduction of the human to something else or a subordination of the human under something else like the signifier. Insofar as OOO at least in the Leibnizian variants common to both yourself and me begins from the premise of the autonomy of objects or from the position that objects cannot be reduced to their relations, it follows that humans are independent actors within the social field. They too contribute their differences and cannot be reduced to anything else. No longer can it be said that subjects are effects of the play of the signifier or ideological state apparatuses. To be sure, humans are embroiled in imbroglios with these other things, but they cannot be reduced to them. There are certain aspects of onticology that I almost find embarrassing in their simplicity. At a certain level all I am claiming is that humans are among beings not at the center of beings or included in every relation, that beings other than humans play a role in the constitution of humans and human formations just as humans play a role in the constitution of things and that we aren’t sovereigns that unilaterally impose form on everything else but are also formed by a variety of nonhuman actors, and that there are all sorts of relations independent of humans or anything related to the human. I would think this would be obvious and to go without saying, but perhaps not. I can only imagine how I’m now going to be characterized as a result of writing this.
August 20, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I think there is a nice mirroring of Heidegger here. Like the humanists who lamented Heidegger’s elevation of Seyn the humanist today looks at OOO and sees a distinterest in the human and human concerns.
To put it bluntly if you and Graham are spending all day talking about cars, bookshelves and milk cartons then the human seems to disappear from view.
Of course the missed point is that extending ontology to objects does not equate with eliminating humans from ontology. However this is very likely to be the immediate worry of most non-OOO so it is always worth highlighting that a flat ontology is always inclusive and not attempting some kind of deflation of the subject in revenge for the effacing of the object etc.
Personally I see no reason why an OOO must be drawn into politics (must we all; why do political people need to bring everyone else along for the ride?).
August 20, 2009 at 11:23 pm
In discussion on Paul Ennis’s blog I asked whether OOO would eventually take on the task of characterizing the differences between objects while retaining the overall flatness. If everything is different without further characterizing those differences, then difference seems ironically to merge into sameness — like a whole sidewalk full of individually unique snowflakes. Here, after listing various disciplines that study the world, you make what for me is a pivotal clarification about onticology vis-a-vis disciplines that investigate particular kinds of differences:
“Recognizing a merit to all of these various approaches, the suspicion arises that they are not opposed theoretical stances, but rather microscopes that isolate a particular type of difference for investigation, bracketing the other differences. To choose one of these positions would be dogmatic in the sense that it would confuse a theoretical exigency– the necessity of bracketing certain differences for the sake of inquiry –with an ontological truth: that these differences are the only difference that make a difference.”
So from an ontological POV the Lacanian image and ego and petit objet a and subject are all equally different from each other, which seems to flatten them psychologically to equivalent status. Under the Lacanian microscope, though, these different sorts of objects get sorted hierarchically into a structured scheme, with the subject holding the position of prominence.
Why the presumed zombification of the human subject? I can speak only for myself here. Graham uses words typically reserved for humans — allure, sincerity, intentionality, and so on — and applies them to inanimate objects. I get the sense of a flattening of agency, such that human allure really isn’t significantly different from cotton allure or rock allure. It’s as if, in deploying these words usually assigned to human subjectivity, the distinctively human psychological characteristics are being flattened to insignificance. Hence zombification: humans that subjectively seem little different from rocks and cotton. Does that make sense?
August 20, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Levi and Graham,
Please do not take my post to be in any way insulting, I wished only to begin to work out my thoughts on how OOP/OOO would deal with human consciousness. For me the zombie was the best way to start such a journey, not because it is void of consciousness (which I would argue it is not), but primarily because it is with the zombie that I find a Real human object, driven by pure desire for some thing (objet petit a?) without any ideology, fantasies, or cuteness to cover it up with. The zombie is a non-political human/object, and in this clarity, I yearn only to begin a discussion.
I will hopefully flesh this and other thoughts out in a later post. But ultimately, I intend to work out an understanding of how OOP/OOO attends to those characteristics/objects that correlationists hold dear to defining humanity. And to answer questions like: Is consciousness an object? Is imagination? Are hate, love, and uncaniness all objects? What are the ramifications if they are?
As I wrote in a comment to John Doyle, “What does OOP/OOO do with these characteristics? My guess – like the zombie, it has to cannibalize them, turn them into similar differences, none more important or “more different” than another.” But what then? In other words, when do we start talking about humans? Or can we?
August 21, 2009 at 12:06 am
John,
I think one of the issues here is that of the role played by ontology in inquiry. As I understand it, ontology inquires into being at the most abstract level, seeking to determine, in the most general terms possible, what beings are. As a consequence, ontology tells us very little about the world that is specific. However, it does help to orient inquiry and direct us to the right sorts of questions. When you speak of things merging into sameness, I think you are confusing levels of inquiry. The degrees of specificity you want are found in more detailed domains of inquiry where theorists stake out their object of inquiry and the differences that inhabit the field they’re engaging with. Perhaps an analogy to a microscope will be illuminating. As I turn the knob of the microscope towards me the detail of what’s on the plate disappears, whereas as I turn it away from me, the image grows in clarity. If I turn it too far away from me the image becomes entirely homogeneous. The relationship between ontology and more specific domains of inquiry can be thought in analogy to the microscope. Ontology is like turning the knob of that microscope towards you, such that the specificity of objects gradually disappears and you’re simply talking about objects in their most general structure. A specific inquiry is like turning the knob away from you, bringing specific differences into relief that characterize the domain of phenomena in question. I have clarified some of how I think this activity of specification takes place in my posts on circulating reference. There’s more work to be done on those dynamics.
One of the things that has motivated my own inquiry is the asking of better and more nuanced questions. In other words, I want to avoid precisely the sort of snowflake scenario you describe where we get a “night in which all cows are black” precisely because everything is a bewildering chaos of differences. As far as my own interests go, this has been particularly the case in French inflected cultural studies and social science. In these domains there’s been a tendency to privilege the role played by one type of difference– in particular, signifiers and signs –to the detriment of other differences that play a crucially important role in the phenomena being analyzed. This leads to bad questions and poorly posed problems. I think this is particularly the case in political philosophy that misses all sorts of strategic opportunities by virtue of over-emphasis on the discursive and the signifier. Something as simple as the ontic principle and the hegemonic fallacy can free up inquiry to enable the exploration of the role played by these other differences.
As for your remarks about Lacan as statement like “…the Lacanian image and ego and petit objet a and subject are all equally different from each other” is meaningless within the framework of OOO. What are the differences? How are they organized? How do they function? What do they do? Is it reasonable or charitable to interpret me as claiming that somehow all these things are equivalent given all that I’ve written on these things? That is, aren’t you jousting here with a monster of your own making? The whole point of beginning with a principle of difference is to draw attention to the how and what of differences. The Lacanian image and ego, petit objet a and subject all equally are, but they share specific relations to one another in the topological space of subjectivity and are handled in a particular way in the analytic setting. Whoever said or suggested otherwise? Whoever denied this? What would lead to this conclusion? If anything, from the standpoint of onticology Lacan’s nuanced distinctions are commendable precisely because they cultivate the analyst in a manner similar to the wine taster an attentiveness to salient differences at work in the analytic setting and the role they play.
I can’t speak for Graham, but I suspect that he would find the suggesting that he believes that cotton, rocks, and humans are the same to be absurd. Again, the suggestion that he somehow thinks they’re the same is rather uncharitable as far as interpretations of his claims go. If Harman continuously evokes examples like rocks and cotton, then this is because he is responding to a philosophical framework that has focused obsessively on the human to the detriment of everything else. But as Paul notes in this comment, this shift in focus does not somehow entail the reduction of everything to the same or equivalence.
August 21, 2009 at 12:17 am
My reading of Levi’s ‘rustle of being’ was as something exactly opposed to undeadness. I imagined it as the life encountered precisely when ‘undead life’ is drained of it’s life, such that a new life can emerge in which differences really begin to matter. I began to see this space where differences make a difference as a breathtakingly vibrant space, and in some ways perhaps that zombification was a refusal of this life.
I apologise to Levi in advance if this was not what he had in mind.
August 21, 2009 at 12:19 am
Nate,
Why do you suppose that OOP and OOO holds that there aren’t differences that are more different than others or that it holds that all differences are similar? I have a difficult time seeing– and even find it a bit fascinating –what is controversial in holding that humans are objects. I mean, does anyone doubt that we are embodied individuals that are in the world? Are we objects that have a number of unique properties? Sure. I also don’t see what prevents OOO from talking about humans, but I also wonder why we should be compelled to? We have hundreds of years of great stuff talking about nothing but humans. Can’t we begin talking about something else for once? The whole set of questions is a bit like a discussion with someone who perpetually tracks everything back to themselves. “I went to a terrific restaurant yesterday. Let me…” “Oh my God, did I ever tell you about the five star restaurant that I went to in Paris? Blah. Blah. Blah.” OOO has not taken away any of the great insights about that unique object called humans. All it has pointed out– and it’s really a rather modest thing to point out –is that humans aren’t included in all inter-object relations and that in those relations they do enter into the relation isn’t the unilateral imposition of a form through consciousness upon a poor passive object that simply receives human intentions. The technology we use, for example, transforms us as much as we transform matter in making it. As for the questions about consciousness, no, it’s not an object it’s a property of certain objects. Hate, love, and uncanniness are forms of relation between humans and other objects. There’s all sorts of work out there dealing extensively with these issues. OOO doesn’t change any of that. In my own language, consciousness falls under the category of translation. It is the manner in which one kind of object, human objects, translate the differences of other objects it interacts with.
August 21, 2009 at 12:24 am
Nope Ghost, that’s pretty close to what I have in mind by the rustle of being. In the clinical setting, for example, the rustle of being is encountered beyond the imaginary. Where the specularity of the imaginary perpetually reduces others to semblables that are the same— like the zombies described by Nate –the rustle of the other is precisely that which is discordant in the other, unassimilable as a mirror complement, unrecognizable as like oneself. Similarly, this rustle would be that which is unassimalible in oneself with respect to one’s specular image of oneself. The discourse of the unconscious is the rustle of one’s self, at odds with the mirror images of ourselves we construct in representing ourselves. In the domain of nonhuman beings, the rustle of being is the capacity of beings to surprise and defy our categories and language, revealing the incompleteness of our ways of sorting the world.
August 21, 2009 at 12:30 am
To use your analogy, the specific distinctions between objet a and image and subject and so on come into focus under the specific microscope of psychoanalysis, which you operate skillfully but separately from your work in ontology. I get it; that was helpful. I said nothing about these Lacanian distinctions being nonexistent or indistinguishable; it’s that the specifications of how they differ from each other are elaborated in psychoanalysis, just as differences among carpentry tools are elaborated in the wood shop and those between galaxies are elaborated in astrophysics.
Absurd and uncharitable? Dude, I thought you asked why people might come away with the false impression that OOO promotes a zombified subjectivity. I was offering one possibility that had occurred to me; perhaps it has occurred to others as well. Ignore it if you like.
August 21, 2009 at 12:41 am
Ah, John, given your remarks over at Another Heidegger Blog and An Un-canny Ontology I took you to be saying that somehow OOO is claiming that none of these distinctions exist. This seemed to be the point you kept making about flat ontology, precious snowflakes, and when you remarked that “so from an ontological POV the Lacanian image and ego and petit objet a and subject are all equally different from each other, which seems to flatten them psychologically to equivalent status.”
August 21, 2009 at 12:42 am
Hmm. I didn’t read Nate’s post nearly as literally as you did Levi. I didn’t see him suggesting that human consciousness doesn’t exist (Graham’s worry), nor that humans and cotton and fire are identical (yours).
One of the charges of OOO is to resist the correlationist conceit that human thought is at the center of being. This resistance requires new perspectives, and one of those perspectives includes applying certain distortions upon the human as an object. The zombie offers one model for such a distortion, not to eliminate or reduce or otherwise do violence to the human, but to remind us of how it can be stripped of the affects (the very ones that would correlationist claims) while still remaining “apparently” human.
I suppose on rereading this post, perhaps I do understand how you are reading it, but I chose to take it differently, more informally. As I wrote about on my blog the other day, what interested me about Nate’s comments is the idea that the zombie as pop cultural icon may be tracing the same dissatisfaction that motivates the speculative realist project.
August 21, 2009 at 1:00 am
I’d be very interested in seeing more development of the thesis that the figure of the zombie is motivated by a similar set of concerns to those animating speculative realism. The reason I get nervous about the suggestion that OOO necessarily encounters the figure of the zombie, especially in terms of how the zombie is described in the post, is that already in the debates that have raged around OOO and SR, there have been continuous charges of “objectifying” humans, which I think the zombie image all too easily plays into. Speaking only for myself, the cyborg figure resonates much more deeply with what I have in mind when I think of exo-relations or inter-object relations, than the figure of the zombie. The figure of the cyborg as described by Haraway nicely captures the sense of agents as ecologically embedded, plugged in not only to technology as in the distopian images of the cyborg, but also plugged into the world in all sorts of ways where causation cannot be unilateralized from subject to object. Braudel, I think, nicely captures this sense of the cyborg as persons embedded in an ecological space consisting of technologies, diets, variations in harvests, techniques of production, epidemeologies, wars, trade routes, and so on. The problem with the subject-object model is that it illicitly simplifies all of this, reducing it to a subject facing an object and an object facing a subject, rather than capturing the bramble at work in all these relations. Latour’s term “actor” goes some of the way towards ameliorating this problem, but has its own problems.
August 21, 2009 at 1:16 am
The reason I get nervous about the suggestion that OOO necessarily encounters the figure of the zombie … is that already in the debates that have raged around OOO and SR, there have been continuous charges of “objectifying” humans, which I think the zombie image all too easily plays into.
Yes, I can see this perspective certainly. I’m not sure why it didn’t bother me as much. I’ve certainly spent far less time defending against this accusation than you and Graham, so perhaps that’s it.
I’m not sure about the cyborg, even though the way you use it above seems clear. Actually, I think the human is just fine as a model for exo-object relations, provided we have specific examples of such relations to allow us to see the very flatness of the ontological plane itself. This is also what motivates my interest in pragmatism vis-a-vis SR, but now I’m really steering the ship out to sea, and zombies can’t swim.
August 21, 2009 at 1:28 am
No matter how much I hate to say it, I increasingly find myself in the pragmatist camp where epistemological issues are concerned. I’m not sure whether that’s a bad thing. Certainly the word has a nice etymological lineage resonant with OOO, and certainly I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Dewey and Peirce.
August 21, 2009 at 2:10 am
I tend to agree with Ian, regarding the zombie as an ‘instrumental’ distortion of the human object. I did not read Nate’s post as proposing a direct equivalence between zombies and humans (nor did I in my own post about it). What I thought was the idea of the ‘zombie model’, which I tried to elaborate on, is precisely: what do we ‘fear’ in zombies and how is that close to the resistence to SR? And how is this adversion comparable to the cyborg one? And how to compare them can give an idea of the distancing of SR from postmodernism?
August 21, 2009 at 2:53 am
The ZOMBIE seems to be the perfect corpse-bride of the PESSIMIST, overcome with the NEGATIVITY of NIHILISM where, what Levi calls the “perversion of form” is seen as an irrationalist horror – so much so that, “At all levels, the systems of life … are repugnant and should be negated as MALIGNANTLY USLESS” (Ligotti, “Thinking Horror”). Or, see COMPLETE LIES today on “Transcendental Nihilism”. (Sorry, I’m a zombie at this point, bulemic with THE ITALIAN DIFFERENCE ; ) – Mark (off to sleep on Wilkerson’s “Whitehead’s Process Theory and Dreaming” : )
August 21, 2009 at 3:31 am
I have no clue why insisting on the study of differences, that is to say, the study of the different ways that different things make differences, you suddenly end up with the attack of the blob. That seems a silly way to make a claim.
I wish you wouldn’t use the term humanism, Levi. Yes, it allows you to exam humans, but that hardly makes it a humanism. You are clever with names, why not avoid this ism?
I am happy with the bashing of those gene-centric biologists, I can only agree too much there.
August 21, 2009 at 3:44 am
One more things, vis-a-vis the cyborg and zombie.
If we think about the history of the cyborg essay (which I know you all know, I merely repeat this here as a rhetorical gesture for my point, forgive me this indulgence) Haraway had some obvious reasons for dealing with the figure of the cyborg. She was responding to ecofeminists like Daly that were becoming afraid that technology and science were destroying something innate about women and nature. The cyborg was certainly a negative figure (like the zombie is), and she wanted to push that figure into something from negative towards liberation. This was meant to respond to the concerns of ecofeminists, but also highlight the points where she also had concerns about technology in a period of patriarchal military capitalist technoscience. The cyborg was not a figure of pure hope, but a figuration (a trope) to allow us a way out. And the only way out meant not from an idealistic past, but from the contaminated present.
In this case, one could potentially see a manifesto for zombies that took the figure of the zombie for just such a trope of liberation. Zombies! Organize!!
Though, I doubt the zombie is the correct trope for OOO/OOPs/SR (seriously, we got to get the names under control). I don’t know what the correct figure is. I don’t think we can know (and I say this with all friendship) till you are also wanting to explicate a politics. That is to say, until you want a manifesto rather than just an observations of manifestations.
August 21, 2009 at 5:32 am
I second Scu’s post. Functional zombies who lack consciousness but act like humans are not a problem for SR; they are just another kind of object, making differences like other objects. Bloodthirsty zombies are difficult to use as leverage for a critique for several reasons. 1) There are many versions of these zombies running a contradictory gamut 2) Anyone can redefine zombiehood by making such a text 3) Texts about zombies are open to contradictory interpretations by viewers/readers. If “zombie” is supposed to entail “cannibal” or “brain hungry” it is a lot clearer just to say that SR, or the human as SR constructs it, has empty desire and cannibal desire than to import an overdetermined metaphor.
The zombie strikes me as more of a problem for people like Scu and myself working in critical animal studies. We are expected to politically situate ourselves out of the gate, even when lingering on the finer points of ontology might be more fun. When/where/how functional life takes on or loses ethical or political significance is very much the problem of CAS, and very much in flux in the zombie genre. In fact, SR seems unusually exempt from being troubled by zombies. Maybe it is in this sense that it is a special problem for SR.
August 21, 2009 at 1:28 pm
This…
“To be is to simply be this difference in the way that it is. By contrast, what we’re generally interested in when speaking of differences are those relational differences or the difference that one thing produces in another thing. In this latter case, not all differences are equally relevant as they range from rather minor differences that make little impact on other entities, to the extensive differences that tend to make up the object of investigation.”
…is why astrophysics and carpentry and psychoanalysis aren’t just epistemological categories that impose socially-constructed realities on unsuspecting objects that happen to find themselves pinioned under these different microscopes. Certain kinds of things and forces REALLY cluster together even before people start studying them and intervening with them.
August 21, 2009 at 5:47 pm
“At the risk of causing myself all sorts of trouble, if anything, I think, OOO allows for the possibility of a new sort of humanism. I have to be careful here. In suggesting a new sort of humanism I am not talking about a human centered ontology, nor the idea of humans as sovereigns that maintain a transparent relation to themselves.”
Agreed. Humans will *also* be liberated from the crushing correlational system.
This is where I dislike the tone of Brassier’s book. Instead of just taking humans out of the *otnological* center of the world, he also speaks rather aggressively at times about things like “pathetic human self-esteem.”
I don’t see why we have to choose between being the center of the universe and having no self-esteem. There is no contradiction between saying “humans are just one sort of entity among trillions of others” and “we are human, so we are especially interested in human things”.
August 22, 2009 at 3:20 am
I Prefer Not To…
On The Human-Centered Objection…
August 22, 2009 at 7:55 am
Yes, “pathetic human self-esteem” is a similar emphasis on the human just as inflating our importance is. From an outsider’s point of view, it sounds like some within the discipline of philosophy would like the freedom to “get over ourselves” as humans and shift a nuanced focus to the infinite stories unfolding in the physical universe. (Not that there aren’t times calling for a close inspection of how the observer’s gaze relates to her view.)
If we’re zombies it seems some have lost an appetite for human brains, (too much a good thing?) and want a wider buffet.
August 22, 2009 at 10:43 pm
After further reflection, I really empathize with the charge of objectifying or ignoring humans, even if I don’t see Nate’s comments at risk of such criticism. Some more of my thoughts on it here.