In response to my post on Nature and Its Discontents, Joseph C. Goodson posts a terrific comment on what he sees as the significance of OOO/SR. Joseph writes:
Precisely. As Gould puts it, the history of our evolution is a history of catastrophes, one after the other. I wonder, thinking along these lines, that in the wake of the death of God, this transcendentalizing of our fissures, breaks, discontents, etc, was done in such a way that the effect was one of making the human (so to speak) another exception (even if this exception is fundamentally “negative”). “Man” was still allowed this exceptional place even though the theological backdrop was lost. Part of what is exciting about SR and OOO in particular, and why the continuing backlash against it is so interesting, is that it takes these fundamental antagonisms of Marx, Freud, Lacan, et al, completely seriously — if anything, *its* wager seems to be that we have not taken them far enough, and that the death of God must imply, at one and the same time, the death of a theological concept of nature (this self-consistent sphere which would allow the -1 of humanity to appear).
Another very productive thing I have noticed about OOO is that, even in order for this ontology to begin, in its positivity, it also critiques much of these unsaid philosophical prejudices which, even in some of the most critical philosophies, still operate. This often subtle culture/nature hierarchy is one such prejudice that is very nicely displaced in a flat ontology.
Joseph here gets at one of the key aims or ambitions of the flat ontology I’ve tried to formulate in my version of OOO. I restrict this flat ontology to onticology because Graham, in the past, has expressed reservations about just how flat my ontology is. This difference, for example, comes out in our respective differences with respect to fictional entities. Graham draws a distinction between sensual objects (roughly intentional objects) and real objects. The latter are, if I’ve understood Graham correctly, dependent on minds to exist. In my case, however, symbolic entities are real actants or objects no less than rocks or stars. In my view there are collective entities like symbolic entities, pure mental relations, and nonhuman objects or actors like technologies, stars, quarks, cells, etc. I do not think that symbolic entities can be properly thought by reducing them to a mind-intention sort of relation. This, I suppose, is part of my debt to structuralism and semiotics. If I’m interested in fictions and the ontological status of fictions then this is not out of any sort of perverse wish to say that fictions are real, but rather because fictions provide a sort of exemplary case of a purely symbolic entity that is not a representation of something else. As a consequence, fictions shed light on what symbolic entities are in general. Hopefully Harman and I will work through some of these issues together at the Object-Oriented Ontology event at Georgia Tech in April (please come if you’re able! You’ll get to see me, Shaviro, Harman, and Bogost go at it!).
read on!
Setting all this aside, one of the striking things I’ve noticed in Lacanian secondary literature is precisely what Joseph alludes to in this post. Now my primary sources for Lacanian thought tend to be books written by clinicians or practicing analysts, not so much Zizek, Zupancic, Dolar and the rest of the crew. My view has been that to properly understand Lacan and psychoanalysis you should consult the analysts to see how the theory works. Within this secondary literature one of the striking themes I’ve noticed is a deep hostility to biology, neurology, and evolutionary theorists. Van Haute, of course, writes his book Against Adaptation, presenting a rather ridiculous picture of what evolutionary theory claims with respect to natural selection. He is to be excused, I think, because among the so-called ego psychologists you find a rather absurd picture of therapy as “adapting us” to the world. Then again, Johnston will tell you in private conversation that “ego psychology” as portrayed by Lacan and Lacanians is a myth and that the theories Lacan often makes the target of his critiques are far more sophisticated and nuanced than the Lacanian literature suggests.
Yet in addition to van Haute you will often find celebrations of “anti-evolutionary thought” with some Lacanians going so far as to champion “creationism”. Of course, the creationism that is here defended is a creationism of the signifier or the power of the signifier to bring non-being into being (and here they’re right in a sense), rather than Young Earth creationism. Nonetheless, there is a persistent strain in the secondary literature of wishing to treat man as an exception and as the condition of everything else (through the power of the symbolic and the subject). Here I think Joseph is right on the mark in suggesting that there is a residual theology at work in those that choose the culture side of the nature/culture debate and a tendency to wish to treat man in Ptolemaic terms as being at the center of being. OOO, of course, recognizes that there are differences between objects and therefore differences between humans, rocks, avocados, and other animals. However, differing from and requiring system specific analysis and serving as a condition for all other things are two entirely different claims. If Nick and company will still allow me to contribute to the Inhumanities Event sponsored by Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities, I hope to say more on this in the next couple weeks. Unfortunately I am currently swamped with other obligations so I can’t get to it immediately.
I should also add that this blog began by trying to think through the implications of the death of God or the possibility of a metaphysic beyond ontotheology (here and here). Soon a formalized version of these arguments in terms of Lacan’s graphs of sexuation (which I believe to be more about ontology than sex or sexual identity) will be published through Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory.
Larval Subjects . 
December 1, 2009 at 7:48 am
Wow, I didn’t think my comment warranted a post, but, well, to quote Emperor Joseph from Amadeus, “there it is.”
I think point about the reality and efficacy of symbolic entities is an important one. Again, what strikes me as so significant about OOO and the general tenor of this movement is how well it is, first, sweeping away some of these cobwebs. We all know philosophy must address the prevailing doxa, and this has to mean the doxa within philosophy itself. Often, the symbolic, does seem to function in a detached sort of way, almost spiritually, hovering above the planes of natural existence. (Reading through these blogs, I am surprised that the idea that a fiction is a kind of object, and therefore within the purview of ontology, would have detractors. To say fiction is an object, that it has being, that it is efficacious, etc, has nothing to do with whether the propositions or content of the fiction is accurate or verifiable, surely. This reminds of Hitchcock’s MacGuffin: an object whose content is utterly irrelevant, and whose existence is somewhat mind-dependent, but which produces vast differences in the world in which it is presented. Surely, in that we relate actively and interdependently with fictions, they are obviously real and objective. Maybe part of this is from my Catholic theological education, but the general theological notion of a sacrament carries with it this logic: symbols or fictions are not “just symbols,” feckless structures which pale in comparison to “real objects,” but, rather, they enter into the way we relate to ourselves and our world. By not admitting the objective structure of fictions, we get into a strangely dichotomous kind of reality.) Case in point: in a recent lecture (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuQFiQ9h8EA&feature=related) Badiou tries to navigate a fine point regarding logic and life which I think is worth quoting:
“The priority of logic is around the complexity of life. There is no opposition between life and logic. […] Finally, it’s a logical framework. The theory of life is a logical framework. And we cannot oppose a theory of life to logic. Logic is absolutely a form of the world, so it’s something which is concrete. There is not the existence of two separate worlds.”
It seems to be almost obvious to be a truism, logic is a form of existence, and therefore a part of the world. It has a deceptive simplicity, as well, because, as you argue rather cogently, theory (or in Badiou’s context, logic) is not something outside of life, outside of the infinite multiplicity of being and existence which then grounds that existence in a quasi-divine way. It is another way of concealing a transcendence, I think. The enjoyment of the constructivist is one of god-like control — if it isn’t named, it has no being. Or, at the other end, having the same hierarchical framework, but with a gestalt like change in the foreground/background, one then says that language does nothing to being, save pointing it out. But by leveling, not removing, this distinction, I think it produces a far more appealing philosophical situation where nothing of transcendence survives. We are then in an immanent plane in which theories, fictions, symbolic structures, logical structures, catastrophes, biological contingencies (and presumably an infinite array of other multiplicities) weave and interweave in a much richer world. And a richer philosophy. A philosophy, I suppose, risked without its god and conditions. It’s exciting! I also think it means a more responsible philosophy.
December 1, 2009 at 1:22 pm
What of those who use a language resembling that of human exceptionality, but who do not constrain this to the entity we call /homo sapien/? Tim Morton is the first one that comes to mind. Whether Morton is an advocate of this position or not even, is there something to the logic of (human) finitude that fails because it’s overly concerned with finitude /as such/?
July 27, 2010 at 1:52 am
“Graham draws a distinction between sensual objects (roughly intentional objects) and real objects. The latter are, if I’ve understood Graham correctly, dependent on minds to exist. In my case, however, symbolic entities are real actants or objects no less than rocks or stars.”
I’m pretty sure you meant to say ‘the former are…. dependent on minds to exist’. It’s sensual/intentional objects which would be confused to be mind dependent.
But in any case, I don’t think even sensual objects are meant to be mind-dependent, since Harman’s panpsychist thesis locates intentionality in non-human objects.
July 27, 2010 at 2:24 am
Also, it seems Badiou here is untrue to himself when he is quoted as saying:
“The priority of logic is around the complexity of life. There is no opposition between life and logic. […] Finally, it’s a logical framework. The theory of life is a logical framework. And we cannot oppose a theory of life to logic. Logic is absolutely a form of the world, so it’s something which is concrete. There is not the existence of two separate worlds.”
Although he’s correct to insist that there isn’t any principled opposition between logic and life, it makes no sense to say Logic is the form of THE world. He can only say logic is a form for worlds, in the plural, and that there is not an existence of two separate worlds in favor of one, but rather that there exist many worlds.