Paul Ennis has founded a new blog devoted to Object-Oriented Ontology or (OOO) designed to mirror Speculative Heresy’s blog devoted to Speculative Realism and focusing on the speculative materialist orientations of SR coming out of Nick Srnicek, the brilliant Reid Kotlas, Ben Woodward, Taylor Adkins, Ray Brassier, Meillassoux, and others. Paul has described me as a “notoriously prolific blogger“. This is probably accurate. As Asher Kay has suggested to me in private correspondence, it’s likely that I’m a bit manic depressive in my orientation to the world, oscillating between periods of extreme fecundity and demoralization. When first reading Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle I thought I was reading a theoretical version of my own autobiography. At any rate, it looks like I need to get a draft of The Democracy of Objects completed soon so I can sit at the “big kid” table with Ian, Graham, Bruno, Isabella, and the now deceased yet still active objects, Alfred, Xaviar, Martin, and Ortega. Hopefully I’ll have a draft of this completed by January.

It is my ardent hope that Paul’s new blog will be what I’ve called a “difference engine” or a machine that produces differences and new orientations of thought rather than a hub of dogma. Certainly there are a number of differences between Graham, Ian, and myself. Graham’s emphasis is on the withdrawal of objects. Ian might be described as a “Badiousian object-oriented ontologist”, focusing on the unit-ization of objects (I haven’t yet read Persuasive Games and am still working through the stellar Unit Operations. My own orientation focuses on flat ontology and the manner in which objects translate one another when they interact with one another, underlining how OOO provides us with a post onto-theological metaphysics, rather than remaining within the rut of representational realism. Bruno Latour and Whitehead are relationists, treating objects as their relations. Whereas, I think, Harman, Bogost, and myself are united in the thesis that objects are independent of their relations. In short, there’s a lot of room for variation here. If there is anything that unites OOO it is a sort of ontological promiscuity desiring to make things more real rather than less real, wishing to proliferate the sorts of objects that exist rather than assert the hegemony of one type of object. Beyond that it’s all fair game.