I am pleased to announce the existence of a new blog, orbis mediologicus. For this onticologist, media studies holds a special and privileged place insofar as it often does in practice, what I’m trying to articulate abstractly. While I have a great love for my brothers and sisters in literary theory, media studies has been a privileged site for object-oriented ontology, as they have perpetually had to theorize the mess of interactions between new technologies and signs, placing them all on equal footing. Like the critical animal theorists, the media studies crew created object-oriented ontology before object-oriented ontology existed, carefully tracing networks of objects ranging from signs, to images, to technologies and economics, being forced to forge new concepts as a result, and increasingly drifting away from anything like eliminative idealism by virtue of the demands of their object. I eagerly look forward to what comes out of this blog.
September 21, 2009
orbis mediologicus
Posted by larvalsubjects under Communication, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Technology[7] Comments
Larval Subjects . 
September 21, 2009 at 10:08 am
If I see a large spider on the wall and decide not to kill it – my decision (assuming I ‘really’ made one – I’m not a zombie) made a difference. Is my decision an ‘object’ for 000?
I’m assuming the answer is ‘yes’…
I ask because I am interested by onticology’s speculative thought.
Whitehead was compelled by his cosmology to introduce a philosophical concept of God. Would onticology manage without it?
Latour says somewhere (I think in Pandora) that ‘science’ just manages to be ‘cumulative’ – we do know more about the ‘world.’ (I could put everything in ”)
I what sense could we say that philosophy is ‘cumulative’ – we hear a lot about what is wrong with such and such a theory – by what criteria?
Stengers once remarked that what is interesting is not what is ‘wrong’ about x or y’s phil but rather how they went about addressing/solving a problem.
In what sense could we ever say that onticology or Whitehead’s cosmology was ‘wrong.’
We could only ever appeal to some kind of logical argument?
September 21, 2009 at 12:03 pm
“Latour says somewhere (I think in Pandora) that ’science’ just manages to be ‘cumulative’ – we do know more about the ‘world.’ (I could put everything in ”)”
That’s only half of his answer. The other half is that much is forgotten, and in that sense science is not totally cumulative.
September 21, 2009 at 12:08 pm
[…] And I agree with the following statement by Levi: “While I have a great love for my brothers and sisters in literary theory, media studies has b… […]
September 21, 2009 at 5:36 pm
“I what sense could we say that philosophy is ‘cumulative’ – we hear a lot about what is wrong with such and such a theory – by what criteria?”
I just recently finished re-reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Kuhn is all over this issue with respect to science. His take is that a lot of the cumulative-ness is a sort of revisionist idealization of science.
Kuhn’s is an interesting framework to keep in mind when thinking about the question you’re asking. It’s pretty obvious that philosophy is a lot different from science in Kuhn’s view. There are broad paradigms in philosophy, and one could say that there are even “revolutions” of a sort — but philosophy doesn’t often involve the consensus of large groups of people who accept a paradigm. In a way, one could say that philosophy is perpetually pre-paradigmatic. The most you get in the way of universal acceptance of a paradigm is a large majority of philosophers taking something like, say, the questions that Kant posed as being fundamental to philosophical investigation. It’s arguable, of course, whether that really happened.
September 21, 2009 at 8:00 pm
You wouldn’t consider, say, “analytic” and “Continental” traditions (or whatever names you prefer) to be paradigms? Or the various currents within them, like reductive physicalism and deconstruction and phenomenology? They certainly seem to involve consensus of large groups of people working within established traditions.
September 21, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Dr Zamalek writes:
‘That’s only half of his answer. The other half is that much is forgotten, and in that sense science is not totally cumulative.’
Yes, which is why I wrote ‘just manages’.
But what does philosophy manage to do?
Could Whitehead’s god ever be said to be wrong? If his philosophical concept of god achieves what he feels it has to achieve within the cosmology he proposes it can never be wrong.
The most we could say is that a philosopher’s interests are not ours, or that there is an illogical or false move within the philosophical edifice.
” Indeed, when people, their experiences, their dreams, hopes and crimes are concerned, it is not endurance as such, but endurance and potentiality, what is and what could be, or could have been which are relevant.
The problem is no longer the risk of instability, or death, it entails potentiality, or the destruction of potentiality. It led Whitehead to the obligation of introducing God, since without God he could not define potentiality, what could be, as a primordial, insisting, ‘fact’.” (Stengers, Whitehead and the laws of nature).
I take the liberty of including this quotation from the same paper, available at: http://www.sbg.ac.at/sathz/1999_2/stengers.pdf
“During the last forty years many theoreticians have tried to construct formal languages which would make adequately explicit the difference between a physical function and a biological function.
It started with cybernetics circular causality and feedback, but we now have also much more sophisticated proposals.
For instance, the so-called autopoietic logic with self-referential fixed points or the “edge between order and chaos” theories both try to take into account the way patterns may endure and change, be it along biological evolution or in learning processes.
I would state that such theoretical languages confirm Whitehead’s point, as they all make explicit that the abstract concepts which are needed in order to describe living functions and systems, must depend on, and celebrate, what succeeded in enduring.
However they miss a very important point as they all try to formulate laws or rules which would produce some kind of a theoretical biology.
If theory is, as in physics, what goes beyond individual facts, we should not anticipate any general theory going beyond the enduring achievement of organisms.
What biologists should try and cultivate instead would be what Whitehead calls the habit of art, meaning the concrete appreciation of the distinct individual beings, the habit of enjoying the vivid values associated with biological achievements.”
About 90% of the comments on LS are about whether onticology is logically correct. For example we might say that analysing all objects in terms of ‘phase spaces’ might be an inappropriate extension of this function…
But hey, does anyone really care?
September 22, 2009 at 4:54 am
The lovely revolutionary spirit of the 60s…
In retrospect there were only two revolutionary shifts in science ever – the transition from an observational to an experimental and a qualitative to a quantitative science which is expressed using mathematical models. Those transitions were not in phase. The latter started earlier and we can see it in Egyptian as well as Mayan astronomy. However, it took time to realize that heaven = earth and that the same mathematical tools applied to the planets and stars could also be applied to everyday phenomena like falling bodies. This required some preparation of things and an abstraction from the way how things behave in the observable nature. The abstract behavior was attempted to be captured within experiments which reproduce an ideal nature. Mathematical tools like differentiation / integration could then be used to approximate observable behavior from an abstract one with arbitrary accuracy.
This isn’t something which simply goes away because it lead us into the industrial age – the age of machines – which is beyond pure intellectual discourse.
Philosophers / culture critics suspected for long that something went deeply wrong in this move, that we lost ourselves ( got alienated ) once we started to view us through the prism of mathematical science and treated nature as a resource. I don’t think OOO or SR sets apart from this criticism, it rather puts it from a different angle. It is not so much about a subject which is never identical with its models but it rather liberates objects from the human subject: the tree communicates with the fungus, something which matters far more to both than our own relationship to them and what we hold them for. We have to think our own exclusion from this relationship. It doesn’t mean we don’t know about it, but rather that we cannot transform it into our knowledge as if this was it, what finally matters.
The new anti-humanism with its rejection of human importunity comes up right at a moment where some other people suggest a move from the Holozene to the Anthropozene. I wonder what the SR protagonists have to say about that?