After the hectic week I’ve had I’m not firing on all cylinders this evening so hopefully I’ll be somewhat coherent here, but I wanted to draw attention to Peter Gratton’s interview with Paul Ennis where he heavily discusses speculative realism. Already Ennis’s post has generated a lot of discussion (here, here, here, here, and Complete Lies well thought out remarks here). Without repeating Harman’s own remarks, I wanted to zero in on a particular passage in Ennis’s interview. Ennis remarks,
Hegel, and I think Meillassoux quotes him on this, said we cannot sneak up on the ‘thing itself’ to see what it is really like or put differently consciousness cannot get around itself to know the really real (the correlationist circle in Meillassoux’s terms). Hegel has a wonderful solution to this problem in the Phenomenology of Spirit. He simply says that discussions of the ‘in itself’ is something that is only ‘really’ happening for consciousness so when it comes down to it the ‘in itself’ is ‘really’ a feature of thinking and so, technically, there is no in itself object out there to be understood. The ‘in itself’ is not something consciousness is unfamiliar with – it is something that belongs to thought itself…
I more or less agree with Harman’s analysis to the effect that this thesis expresses the quintessence of what OOO opposes. However, approaching Ennis’s remarks from another angle, I also think it is suggestive of the wrong sort of question. In other words– and here I’m not trying to single out Ennis by any means –we have to ask if Hegel is a wonderful solution to a particular problem, what is the problem and question to which this solution responds? And here I think there can be no doubt, the problem to which Hegel’s “solution” responds is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to know the thing-in-itself.
However, it is precisely here, among other sites, that Hegel and OOO parts ways. While it is certainly true that there are variants of speculative realism that are almost entirely concerned with questions of epistemology (Brassier comes to mind), when OOO defends realism what’s at stake is not epistemology but ontology. In other words, it’s of crucial importance to an understanding of OOO that we distinguish between epistemological realism and ontological realism. Epistemological realism is a thesis about knowledge to the effect that objects out there in the world are “really like” our representations of them or that there is a correspondence between intellect and thing. Ontological realism is the thesis that objects are independent of human culture, language, cognition, and perception, that they would be what they are regardless of whether we regard them through any of these agencies, and that they exist in their own right rather than simply being constructions of humans. For OOO the question and problem is not that of how we know entities or the in-itself, and this because all objects already withdraw from any relation they enter into such that they are in excess of these relations.
read on!
In this regard, there’s a sense in which OOO sides with Kant rather than Hegel. Kant’s virtue was to have preserved the in-itself over against any representations, whereas Hegel attempts to establish the identity, in the strongest possible sense, of representation and the represented. Kant’s vice was his failure to recognize that what is true of the human-world gap is true of any relation between two or more objects regardless of whether or humans are involved.
What OOO wishes to understand is something of the being of objects. It is not after a representational knowledge of these objects. Now all of this certainly seems very paradoxical. For how can you say what objects are without first knowing objects? This would be a variant of Hegel’s famous criticism of Kant: In drawing a distinction between the in-itself and phenomena must we not already know both sides of the distinction? Perhaps. But what OOO is claiming is precisely that it belongs to the being of objects to withdraw from relation, whether cognitive or otherwise, or to exceed any relation that the object enters into. The desire to establish an identity between intellect and thing– an adaequatio rei et intellectus –which culminates in Hegel’s system as its most radical formulation (the identity of knowledge and being, of substance and subject, of identity and difference, etc) is at the heart of ontotheology insofar as it is premised on presence as the ultimate mark of being. Yet this ontotheological premise of premise is radically undercut by OOO insofar as no object, for OOO, ever comes to presence either “in itself”, for cognition, or in relation to other objects.
Žižek, speaking of Wagner, likes to speak of us as being healed by the spear that smote us and it is in this context, I believe, that OOO is particularly interesting. When Žižek speaks of the spear that smote us as healing us he is alluding to the way in which the wound, far from being the problem, is, in fact, the solution. In a psychoanalytic context, for example, your symptom is not something to be eradicated, but rather, over the course of analysis you undergo a subjective transformation with respect to your symptom, coming to discover that it is the very secret of your desire and source of your jouissance, such that the removal of the symptom would amount to the removal of the very principle of your subjectivity. It is not that you continue to live your symptom in the same way– washing your hand three hundred times a day, for example –these sorts of minor symptoms do in fact disappear. Rather, it’s that the fissure that generated those “empirical symptoms” is itself transformed.
Something like this, I think, is at the heart of OOO’s ontological gesture. For the last 300 or so years we have had variants of skepticism. Philosophy has grown to be equated with epistemology tout court (Althusser, in Reading Capital for example, treats “philosophy” and “epistemology” as synonyms) and this epistemology has largely been skeptical in nature. These skepticisms take a variety of forms. Sometimes they are radical skepticisms like Hume’s, showing us that knowledge is impossible. At other times they are more subtle skepticisms like Kant’s, arguing that knowledge is restricted to appearances or phenomena for humans. And then we get all the heirs of Kant such as the linguistic idealists, the social constructivists, the Wittgensteinians, etc., etc., etc. Kant’s move was to restrict knowledge to images on the wall of Plato’s cave (appearances) arguing that we can never escape the cave. We are all heirs of this move today. Between Kant and later Wittgenstein, for example, there is not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. What Kant and Wittgenstein disagree about is the mechanism by which appearances or phenomena are constructed for us. For Kant it is the a priori categories of the understanding, the a priori forms of intuition, and reason. For Wittgenstein it is language games. At heart the thesis, however, is the same. That we are restricted to appearances or the “for-us”. And in all these cases, in this infinite variety of anti-realisms, what is everywhere and always being argued is that presence cannot be attained or established.
OOO’s move is not to stubbornly claim that “no, our representations correspond to things in themselves!”, but rather OOO makes the Wagnerian gesture of healing us on the sphere that smote us. It’s thesis is not some new-fangled attempt to attain presence or an adaequatio rei et intellectus, it is not an attempt to square the circle purporting to show that relations don’t change things. Rather, OOO challenges the central ontological premise of these epistemic skepticisms: the thesis that objects are present to themselves or to other objects. And in arguing that objects withdraw from all relations, whether humans or otherwise, OOO is simultaneously able to integrate the claims of these skepticisms (albeit in a properly ontological register) and turn what appeared as a vice (the impossibility of knowing objects) into a virtue (the very being of objects). Where previously the wound was seen as residing in us (objects withdraw from us because of the manner in which our cognition actively reworks them), the cut, the withdrawal, is now located in the things themselves.
But really, at the end of the day, what is the “cash-value” of all this. In many respects I think Jane Bennett sums up the importance of this move best in her newly released book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things in her “critique of critique”. This is all the more satisfying in that while Bennett’s thought displays a great affinity for OOO, she is not herself an OOO theorist and, at least in this book, does not even seem aware of object-oriented thought. In this connection it is always pleasurable to encounter others arriving at similar conclusions and claims. Speaking of the Enlightenment project of demystification, Bennett writes:
For this task [uncovering the volcanic inner life of things], demystification, that most popular of practices in critical theory, should be used with caution and sparingly, because demystification presumes that at the heart of any event or process lies a human agency that has illicitly been projected into things. This hermeneutics of suspicion calls for theorists to be on high alert for signs of the secret truth (a human will to power) below the false appearance of nonhuman agency. Karl Marx sought to demystify commodities and prevent their fetishization by showing them to be invested with an agency that belongs to humans; patriotic Americans under the Bush regime exposed the self-interest, greed, or cruelty inside the “global war on terror” or inside the former attorney general Alberto Gonzale’s version of the rule of law; the feminist theorist Wendy Brown demystifies when she promises to “remove the scales from our eyes” and reveal that “the discourse of tolerance… [valorizes] the West, othering the rest… while feigning to do no more than… extend the benefits of liberal thought and practices.”
…
What demystification uncovers is always something human [my emphasis], for example, the hidden quest for domination on the part of some humans over others, a human desire to deflect responsibility for harms done, or an unjust distribution of (human) power. Demystification tends to screen from view the vitality of matter and to reduce political agency to human agency. (xiv – xv)
What Bennett says here of critical theory and the project of demystification holds, mutatis mutandis, for all variants of anti-realism or correlationism. Indeed, the elementary gesture of critical theory (broadly construed) is derived directly from Kant’s “Copernican turn”. Putting it in metaphorical terms, this gesture consists in arguing that our relation to all objects in the world is really a reflection in a mirror where we don’t recognize ourselves in the image we see, and then proceeding to show how that image in the mirror, that image that seems to be something other, is really ourselves. Critical vigilance thus consists in coming to recoup that image, to see that it was really us all along. And in this respect, all critical projects more or less aspire to the Parmenidean dictum to establish the identity of thinking and being; a project anathema to any and all realisms. And what is found in this gesture is always the human, nothing but the human.
It is this problem I was getting at when I proposed “the hegemonic fallacy” as treating one difference (in this case the human) as overdetermining all other differences. Alternatively, Harman has proposed the fecund concepts of overmining and undermining where objects are erased or reduced to something else in the case of undermining.
Critical theory has, I believe, its place and should be retained in some form. However, the problem is that in treating all other objects in the world as mere reflective surfaces for “alienated” human reflections, the agency of nonhuman objects, whether animate or inanimate is lost and completely obscured from view. As Bennett puts it, what we forget is “…the capacity of things– edibles, commodities, storms, metals– not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii). We are today intoxicated by the demystificatory gesture of critical theory to such an extent that we have become blind to the manner in which objects are actants or actors in their own right, quite independent of how humans refract them in their representations. And just as the intoxicated person is incapable of seeing certain things, we are so drunk with the critical gesture that we have trouble even seeing that we’re making it.
No wonder then that ecophilosophers, media and technology theorists, a number of feminist theorists, animal theorists, and so on are often suspicious of critical theory. For what possible use can this demystificatory gesture have for the ecophilosopher or the media and technology theorist who isn’t simply trying to determine the way in which humans reflect themselves in alienated form in objects behind their backs, as it were, but who is genuinely trying to understand what difference the lightbulb makes in the world we live in, how ecosystems work and function, or what impact fiber optic cables make on social relations? These are complex relations that far exceed how we represent or signify objects, and where objects are not simply “inert and passive lumps of matter”, but where they are actants or actors in their own right, surprising ourselves in all sorts of way, generating all sorts of unintended consequences, generating possibilities of human action that they weren’t explicitly designed for. These complex fields need to be thought and the thinking of these fields requires something other than the anti-realist gesture of recognizing that we are the ones in the mirror.
If flat ontology means anything, then it entails the fostering of a sensibility in which objects are treated as actants in their own right, contributing their own differences, such that they aren’t simply vehicles for human representations or alienated reflections projected outward into the world. And this is perhaps also what a communism of objects would be, for where Marx placed all his emphasis on human economic production, treating things as merely passive matter to be reworked into human commodities, a flat ontology treats objects as themselves being active forces in these relations, contributing their own differences, such that the world of nature, the animal, the technological, etc., cannot be separated from the world of the social. What a flat ontology rejects is the unilateralization of the human-object relation where all the important differences are seen as issuing from the human side of that relation, such that the object side is seen merely as a passive stuff to be formed in our own image like God creating man. What is ironic is that the anti-realist gesture, which so often decries the will to power, the will to domination, the technocratic attitude that sees mastery of nature embodied at the heart of technology, fails to recognize that it’s central thesis is the highest exemplar of that posture that would reduce all the other beings to nothing other than beings for-us.
Larval Subjects . 
February 19, 2010 at 4:19 am
Dr Bryant, I’m not a philosopher, but I find all this extremely interesting. If you can pardon an amateur question, it concerns something you write, which confuses me. I believe I’ve read something similar in Harman.
You write: “But what OOO is claiming is precisely that it belongs to the being of objects to withdraw from relation, whether cognitive or otherwise, or to exceed any relation that the object enters into.”
It’s with the word “withdraw” that I begin to wonder if I follow. To me, “withdrawing” implies volition; it’s as if the “being” of the object shirks, so to speak, relation, like some sort of shy animal.
Does OOO suggest this kind of agency? Or should I be understanding something like “it belongs to the being of objects to never come to relation, whether cognitive or otherwise”??
Or? Sorry if this is a really stupid question.
February 19, 2010 at 4:40 am
Thanks for the question, John. Not a stupid question at all. Within the framework of my ontology, objects “withdraw” by virtue of the fact that they can always manifest themselves in other and different ways than the way they do, in fact, manifest themselves at any given point in time. The idea is that when the object enters into relations with other objects, human or otherwise, certain potentials are manifested in the object, but not others. As a consequence, the object is always more than any of its actualizations or local manifestations. Take the example of fire. Fire behaves in very different ways depending on whether it burns on the planet earth or whether it burns on the space shuttle in outerspace. In the former case it reaches towards the sky, whereas in the latter it flows almost like water. Likewise with iron. The iron on the planet Saturn behaves very differently than the iron on the planet earth due to the intense pressures of the former environment. The conclusion, then, is that objects are always more than any of their local manifestations or actualizations. The proper being of an object, as I refer to it, is always this field of potentialities and tendencies, not any of the actual states the object is in. Following Harman, I thus use the term “withdrawal” not to denote any intentionality or volition on the part of objects (though there are objects that are structured intentionally like animals, humans, social systems, certain computers, thermostats, etc), but rather to refer to the way in which any object is in excess of its actual states.
February 19, 2010 at 5:07 am
Thank you. I get it now.
February 19, 2010 at 5:54 am
[…] 19, 2010 In the usual place, LARVAL SUBJECTS. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment […]
February 19, 2010 at 6:00 am
Being + any preposition you can think of:
Being for us is stoicism. Being by us is collective solipsism (INCOHERENT). Being by me is solipsism. Being in itself is realism. Being in and for itself is egoism.
February 19, 2010 at 6:05 am
[…] on OOO Realism Now, it’s time to turn to that quotation from the previous post by Larval Subjects: Ontological realism is the thesis that objects are independent of human […]
February 19, 2010 at 8:30 am
Levi, my only complaint is that hideous photo, the worst you’ve ever displayed.
February 19, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Things, not objects, are outside of us. Objects are paradigms of the subjective and “objective” form, an interdepencency of empirical and imaginative patterns.
February 19, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Great post. Can’t get any work done because I’m reading all these damn philosophy blogs.
A couple quick thoughts regarding Critical Theory and the rhetoric you deploy here. Zizek, in my reading, is not too different from this politically, but would deploy a different rhetoric. He’d say something along the lines of “The task today is to push the logic of Critical Theory to its end” or deploy one of his ingenious rhetorical reversals that still ends up with a somewhat-diminished stance for Critical Theory. He would definitely agree that the Critical gesture of “unmasking” the evil machinations at work in every political procedure, every institution, is such a common gesture in postmodernity that it loses its power.
This is not a post about politics, but my political reading is this. I think the Badiou/Zizek Event-politics crowd ends up in a similar spot politically but the rhetoric they deploy is demotivating for political subjects. Why? Because the Event is something that we seem to have to wait for. I mean seriously. Event with a capital E.
When you straight up suggest that Critical Theory should have a diminished role in political analysis, this is an honest taking-stock of the constellation of actors in our political world. That there’s too much critical theory is obvious. The OOO rhetoric is one of action. The theory you propose necessitates the naming of names (Latour litanies?) and the enumerating of powers and the tracing of relations. This last bit is a little vague, but I have to get back to work.
The phrase “communism of objects” might confuse some, though. I have reservations about that.
Okay, seriously gotta get back to wage-earning.
February 19, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Jack,
Here I’m inclined to evoke the “arbitrariness of the signifier” and cry foul. There’s nothing essential about the term “object” that renders it a paradigm of subjective and objective form. That’s a purely stipulated use in certain discourses. I personally use object and thing interchangeably in the sense you use the term “thing”.
February 19, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Yeah Graham, pretty awful photo. That’s a nod at the first collection of objects Bennett talks about in her book.
February 19, 2010 at 3:25 pm
Dr Bryant, since you were so kind, if you have the patience to bear with me a little further … I’ve been thinking about your explanation of the withdrawal of objects all night (well I was thinking about it as I fell asleep and I was thinking about it again when I woke up a while ago).
Using your example of the fire on earth displaying some possible fire-attributes and the fire in space displaying others, I (mis?)read you as suggesting, since neither fire is (apparently) displaying all its possible attributes, maybe we’re talking something like substance-and-modes, or that there’s a platonic fire-form, or that there are universals and particulars. In other words, the two fires are somehow one.
If I’m not utterly confused, why is that an apparently necessary move? (I had the same thoughts while reading Harman’s Tool-Being …) Why is the notion of “withdrawal” important?
I think of a story John Cage told about a conference session in which DT Suzuki was present as the “zen expert”. He was asked whether the table the folks were sitting around was real. He said “yes.” “In what sense?”, he was asked. “In every sense.” That seems pretty object-oriented to me (if all possible “conscious” observers ceased to exist there would be no effect on the table), and there was no need for any sort of notion of “unrealized potentialities” …
I don’t have any “problem” with this move, I just don’t get why it’s needed.
Perhaps you can point me to OOO For Dummies, or something, that might explain this, and other basic assumptions … and yes I’ve read Dr Harman’s statements to the effect that this field is about to shatter into sects, so I get that whatever I read will of necessity be controversial …
Thank you.
February 19, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Regarding the photo, my first thought was “What’s Levi letting his kids do in the backyard?!”
Kidding, kidding.
February 19, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Hi John,
Harman and I are related in these claims, though we do have slightly differing positions. Harman has allergic reactions to the concept of potentiality in metaphysics and begins to twitch whenever it’s evoked (endorsing Latour’s thesis that the concept of potentiality is the original sin of philosophy), I think it’s absolutely necessary to retain the concept of potentiality as a feature of the real. Thus, I think, we both hold that objects withdraw, but for different reasons. For me withdrawal has to do with unactualized potentialities that inhabit an object in its proper being. When I argue that objects are split between their local manifestation and their internal structure as withdrawn, I am not making a claim about the relationship between universals and particulars, but about individual entities themselves. If universals do exist– I’m agnostic on the question at this point –they would also be individual objects split in this way. My point, then, in the case of fire is that any object can actualize itself in an infinite number of ways beyond the manner in which it does actualize itself at any given point in time. In other words, there’s always more to the being of an object beyond its appearance to the world in any particular point in time at a particular place.
As for the necessity of this move, I think the problem with treating objects as summed up by their actuality or local manifestation is that it fails to do justice to the manner in which objects actually behave in the world. Here I do follow Harman in part. An object is not simply a bundle of properties or qualities. Rather (and this is where Harman disagrees with me) an object is a structure of powers or capacities. What we call a “property” or a “quality” is just an actualization of these powers in a particular way at a particular point in time. It is an action or activity on the part of the object. For me, then, the substantiality of the object consists in this virtual domain of the object’s powers, not any particular actual state the object is in at a particular point in time. If this view is necessary, I think, then this is because objects manifest or actualize themselves in one way at one point in time and in another way at another point in time. And these variations in qualities or what I call local manifestations are a product of the relations the object enters into with other objects. For example, the pot of water on my stove is now placid and cool, now violent and bubbling. These actualized states of the water are actualizations of the powers belonging to the virtual side of objects, drawn out by the water entering into relations with the stove top. I now set the pot in my freezer and it becomes extremely hard and cold, losing its clearness and becoming an opaque milky color. We need an ontology capable of accounting for how this is possible or how substances can vary in their states so widely over the course of the adventure of their existence. An ontology that treats objects simply as bundles of qualities is bound to fail in accounting for this power of objects. Moreover, if objects are, in principle, infinite then this is because there is no limit to the relations they can enter into with other objects, actualizing themselves in an infinite variety of ways at the level of qualities.
I also think there are significant epistemological implications of this thesis or what it means engage in inquiry. Putting it crudely, a timeworn understanding of what it means to know is that to know is to mirror an object in our mind, such that we have a sort of mental list of the essential and accidental properties that compose objects. We arrive at this sort of knowledge, the story goes, through a sort of passive contemplation of the object before our gaze, such that we have a mental model of the object that maps on to the real object in a correspondence. However, if it is true that objects are split between their local manifestations and their virtual dimension as a system of powers or potencies, then while qualities cannot be excluded from the domain of knowledge, they are nonetheless not the proper object of knowledge. Rather, what is sought in knowledge is not the qualities of objects, but rather the powers of objects. And to know the powers of objects we can’t simply regard them or passively look at them, rather we must act on objects, placing them in a variety of different relations with other objects so that we might infer what subterranean powers the object possesses. Thus, for example, to know a particular species of plant is not to define genus, species, and differentia such that we mark out the distinguishing features of the plant in oppositional relations to other plants. Rather, to know a plant is to vary the conditions under which the plant grows, investigating growth in this soil and that soil, this temperature and that temperature, this set of lighting conditions and that set of lighting conditions, and this set of altitudes and that set of altitudes. As Deleuze so nicely articulated it, the aim is to find out what a body can do, and this can only be accomplished through action (not passive contemplation) and variation in inter-object relations. As a result of this we gradually come to infer the powers of an object and how they are correlated with particular local manifestations. However, again, this project is, in principle, infinite because there’s no upward limit of the relations or assemblages an object can enter into leading to the actualization of other surprising qualities or properties.
To get a broader picture of what I’m getting at you might consult these blog posts:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/object-oriented-ontology-a-manifesto-part-i/
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/onticology-a-manifesto-for-object-oriented-ontology-part-2/
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/attractors-phase-spaces-and-states/
February 19, 2010 at 7:12 pm
AMM,
I guess I think it is something a bit broader than rhetoric. The Zizekian mode of analysis focuses us almost completely on texts, signifying structures, and cultural artifacts. The nonhuman actors are reduced to mere vehicles for these signifying structure without really contributing any differences of their own. The sole task of politics then becomes the demystification of these cultural artifacts. That’s fine so far as it goes, it just doesn’t go far enough. OOO political activism, for example, would recommend holding protests– if one endorses protest politics as an effective strategy –on interstate highways (my friend Melanie suggested this once to me). Here highways, which are nonhuman actors, are recognized as being actants in an assemblage necessary for a certain form of social relations. The point of holding a protest on a highway is that it blocks all the traffic, shutting down commerce. And again, here it is being recognized that cars and trucks are also actants in their own right. The point here is that these sorts of actants are non-signifying actants that play a key role in organizing human relations amongst one another. The problem isn’t that demystifying critiques aren’t correct in many instances, but that these other actants become invisible once all the focus is placed on signifying structures. If protest politics has lost a good deal of its punch, then this is in part because it doesn’t really disrupt anything and therefore doesn’t force anything to be heard.
A long while back I wrote a post indexing rhetoric to Heidegger’s conception of truth as aletheia, showing how rhetorics both reveal and conceal. I think pointing out what critical theory conceals is paradoxically a sound critique of these philosophical orientations. At any rate, you can find the post here:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/the-alethetics-of-rhetoric/
February 19, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Here I’m inclined to evoke the “arbitrariness of the signifier” and cry foul. There’s nothing essential about the term “object” that renders it a paradigm of subjective and objective form. That’s a purely stipulated use in certain discourses. I personally use object and thing interchangeably in the sense you use the term “thing”.
An object is a perceptual formation. A thing has being, while an object is dependent upon being. A object is the formation within the representation, and Kant’s challenge has not been overcome if the thing and object are identical.
February 19, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Jack,
This is one of those discussions that has diminishing returns. As I tried to explain to you in my previous response, OOO does not use the terms “object” and “thing” in the way you are proposing. Unless there’s some transcendent Platonic essence of language floating about, your point is trivial and has no bearing on these discussions. To put it more bluntly, OOO theorists mean what Kant means by “thing” when they speak of “objects”. Feel free to substitute the word “thing” for object every time you encounter the word “object” in the writings of an OOO theorist if it suits you. I’m not sure what gave Kant the authority to stipulate that for all subsequent philosophy whenever a philosopher uses the word “object” they are referring to “a formation within representation”. When reading Kant it is, of course, important to understand how he uses the terms to understand his claims. When reading OOO philosophers it is important to understand how they are using their terms to understand their claims. Philosophers do not have a universally shared vocabulary in which terms are all used in the same way, thereby necessitating this hermeneutic activity. This is such a basic point of philosophical hermeneutics that I’m surprised I have to point it out at all. What you’re claiming here is a bit like claiming that Bergson is wrong because he uses the term “intuition” in a manner different than Kant uses the term “intuition”. Poppycock! They’re using the same word for entirely different concepts.
February 19, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Could you further explain what ‘object’ means? I’m trying to think of where Kant uses the word ‘thing’ but can only recall him talking about the ‘thing in itself’ and for him, subjects also have an ‘in itself’ – one though that is accessible to knowledge/can act directly upon the outside world.
In OOO terminology, can a subject also be an object? Would it be fair to say that, for you, the most important perspective in considering anything (and any person) is to look at it as an object? And if that is the case, does this not actually bear some resemblance to Hegel’s opposite conclusion that the most important perspective to is look at anything (and any person) is as a subject — keeping in mind that this subjectivity always includes the tension of negativity in its relations, a negativity which strikes me as similar to your ‘withdrawal’?
February 19, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Martha,
Yes, for OOO persons are one example of objects, with the caveat that objects differ amongst themselves and have different powers and properties. So clearly there’s quite a bit of difference between the types of objects persons are and the types of objects rocks are. However, one of the central claims of OOO is that this difference is a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. In claiming that this is a difference in degree, what I mean is that there is no fundamental ontological difference between how human cognition “distorts” other objects when it relates to them and how a rock “distorts” another object when it relates to it. What Kant said of the relationship between mind and world is true of all objects, not just the mind world object. That is, there are not too distinct domains such as the domain of the subject and the domain of the object, being is just made up of objects. You might want to follow the links I provided in response to John as those posts outline a bit more as to what I have in mind by objects.
I’m not sure I entirely understand your first paragraph. In Kant’s vocabulary he distinguishes between objects which are appearances or phenomena and things which pertain to the world entirely apart from humans. Kant’s central thesis is that we can never know things only objects or phenomena. This is true for him even of the subject’s relationship to itself (as can be seen in the way he resolves the third antinomy), where we have no access to the “in-itself” dimension of our own being. Is this what you were getting at?
I don’t think the analogy of withdrawal to Hegel’s negativity quite works. First, Hegelian negation entails that all objects are bundles of relations (as he argues quite forcefully and impressively in the doctrine of essence in The Science of Logic but also as early as the doctrine of being when treating Dasein and qualities. By contrast, OOO holds that while objects certainly enter into relations they are nonetheless independent of their relations. For Hegel, objects just are their relations to everything else. Second, withdrawal isn’t negating anything, unless the term “negation” is being used in a very loose sense. Withdrawal is a relation of excess (at least in my model), not opposition. It is the thesis that objects are always more than any of their local manifestations in time and space, and that objects are always more than any of their local relations to other objects.
I don’t know that OOO claims that the most important perspective is to look at all things as objects. Rather, I see OOO as resisting the trend to undermine objects as treating them mere products of other things, whether these other things be atoms to which are treated as the “really real” such that everything else is a mere derivative epiphenomenon, or whether these other things be signifiers such that all things are mere products of signifying relations, or mere social constructions, or mere fabrications of human perception, etc. What OOO resists then is that reductive move that undermines the being of particular objects by trying to evaporate the object into some other strata. Thus in the case of humans, for example, OOO would be strongly opposed to Althusser’s claim that subjects are mere “ideological illusions” produced as effects of social structure. OOO would recognize that people are indeed interpellated all the time, while denying the thesis that “being a person” is just an effect of social structure.
February 20, 2010 at 4:07 am
Thank you, Dr Bryant. This has been immensely helpful. I wish I could take a class with you! Instead, I will read your book on Deleuze, and try to stay patient waiting for your next book to come out.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve sampled some bits from you for a poem that appears on my blog at http://johnbr.com, and have performed some ekphrasis on the photo that accompanies this post.
February 20, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Do you have a cite for that Zizek reference? This is a very interesting post.
February 20, 2010 at 11:15 pm
I believe it’s in Tarrying With the Negative.
February 21, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Hi Levy,
After following some of your latest remarks it seems to me to be a perfect timing to ask you about a certain predicament that appears to sneak in whenever the ontological-epistemological distinction is invoked in the speculative context.
I’ll put it as briefly as possible (pardon me in advance for the lankiness).
You perfectly distinguish between the two wholly different orientations: (1) The epistemic question or the question of episteme-world correspondence, which peaks with the ultimately Hegelian gesture of absolutizing the various forms of this correspondence; and (2) the ontological question which – through the object-oriented operator – locates the object’s withdrawal from the episteme in the very being of the object itself.
Now, this fundamental distinction can even be interpolated – as I think your own formulation suggests, however surreptitiously – into the generic distinction between the field of the problem and that of the solution. For, as you so clearly put it, what the ontological objection to the epistemic formulation makes clear is that the they do not disagree about this or that solution, but rather “disagree about their very disagreement” (to invoke Zizek once again). And, insofar as the epistemic motivation is ever that of rectifying-tightening-absolutizing… the episteme-world correspondence, it is the ontological orientation alone that distinguishes between the (ontic) regime of competing solutions and the (ontological) realm in which these solutions first becomes questionable. It is here, of course, that the problem itself transfigures into its very solution; the wound into a spear…
This is indeed a salient point, and I hope I didn’t paraphrase you too irresponsibly here.
Now, my own concern regards the specific part of your argument that seems to comprise the two (above mentioned) orientations in a single gesture that is so often left ill-formulated or even unnoticed. It concerns precisely the gesture whereby (what first appears as) the epistemic failure (the ever abysmal episteme-world correspondence) is turned into a virtue when the impossibility is translocated to the side of the object itself. In your own phrasing:
OOO is simultaneously able to integrate the claims of these skepticisms (albeit in a properly ontological register) and turn what appeared as a vice (the impossibility of knowing objects) into a virtue (the very being of objects).
Now, as you correctly pointed out, this gesture (it is tempting to propose the name ontological sublimization for it) – formally speaking – is not unfamiliar to Hegelians like Zizek (but it can also be found extensively in Meillassoux’s Hegelian overtones). In fact, Zizek’s own classical move is precisely to reintroduce the Kantian schema of the sublime (the locus classicus of the epistemic failure) as an ontological limit (that is also the quantum leap he proposes from limitation to limit). We all seem to know the drill: “It is not that we fail to know reality, it is reality itself that forever withdraws from total knowability; and even: “Reality itself is nothing but this inherent gap in knowability”; or: “The true Ding-an-sich is not be found in the noumenal or the phenomenal realm, but rather it is the very gap between them…” and so on and so on. Now, of course, with Hegel as with Zizek, this gap is ultimately reserved for the human-world (co)relation and here the O-O-Ontologist rightfully protest that this withdrawal in fact pertains to the very nature of every encounter with an object. This democratization of the epistemic failure I find completely justified. However, the question still remains as to how this passage – from vice to virtue – is actually executed from the O-O-O perspective.
Here, I think it is clear that Kant can no longer be invoked against Hegelian absolutism, precisely because it is Kant himself who first enabled the fatal conflation of the collapse of the subject’s epistemic capacities with the discovery of an ontological limit – qua abyss and infinite withdrawal – in the structure of reality itself. And, it is here – it seems to me – that the worthy concern about the ontological univocity of the object’s withdrawal from the episteme (and that includes of course the epistemic capacities of other objects as well) misses the true danger of collapsing – once again – the fundamental distinction between the two original orientations. I.e. inasmuch as it is equally founded on the gesture of ontological sublimization.
Furthermore, if – and indeed this seems to be one of O-O-O’s major demands – we have an epistemology of objects (a science the covers the epistemological interactions of objects with other objects), we can no longer identify the object’s infinite withdrawal (and that includes its irreducibility to any of its interactions, qualities, possibilities etc.) with the ontological axiomatics. That is to say: if the epistemic failure is indeed colossal, it can no longer serve as the basis for an object-oriented-ontology. Or, in other words (not mine): for us to be healed by the spear that smote us, or by making our wound a spear, we first have to recognize our true symptom.
I hope my question – or at least some of it – can still be extricated from this bundle.
Jonathan Soen
(Israel)
February 21, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Thank you very much for your thorough response!
February 21, 2010 at 7:07 pm
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for the comments. I didn’t intend my references to Zizek or Kant in anything close to the formal sense you’re proposing here. In other words, they weren’t put forward as arguments in support of the OOO position, nor was I proposing a dialectical gesture in support of the OOO position. You can find my arguments for the ontological claims my variant of OOO makes in the two manifestos on the side-bar.
February 21, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Just on the point of OOO political activism, with the specific example you give in regards to protesting on a highway. Doesn’t this already exist?
It may be a fairly unimportant point, that’s for you to decide, but I can immediately think of protest movements like ‘Reclaim the Street’ or, more in line with your example, ‘Critical Mass’ (the intention of which is fairly silly in its aspect of ‘showing a world without cars’ but does attempt to disrupt traffic).
In fact, these strategies stretch back to Luddism where the machinery that displaced the artisan worker was recognised as an actant in that displacement; sabotage always supposes that its object is an actor?
If that is the case, and I realise this is something that’s been levelled at OOO/P before, it contributes not very much to political activism at all- it merely gives a new line of argument for pre-existent forms (although unexpected consequences can always emerge).
February 21, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Hi Drone,
I gave that example because it nicely illustrates the role of non-human actors. By and large I’m pretty skeptical about the efficacy of protest politics as a model of the political. Here I’m in agreement with those that see protest politics as instances of hysterical demands that don’t expect to be fulfilled, and find the manner in which they coalesce together for a brief moment and then separate to be highly problematic.
The broader point isn’t that the things I evoke don’t exist, but that a focus on the semiological and discursive is obscured analysis of nonhuman and the role they play in the political field. The net result is that we give a demystifying critique of such and such an ideological formation, people are perhaps even persuaded, yet everything remains the same. Why? Because the discursive is only an element in how situations are structured and because the nonhuman elements have all but been ignored. Additionally, in my book the role of philosophy is not to say what should be done, but to reflect on what is being done outside of philosophy so that it can be better understood and certain forms of practice can be intensified. This, for example, is what Marx strove to do in his own analyses. He examined why sabotage, strikes, etc., were taking place in the factories. He didn’t propose a new model of practice, but rather uncovered the tendencies that were already there in these practices so that they might become more efficacious and better understand what they’re doing. It is not for intellectuals to sit on high and occupy the position of messiah telling all others what they should be doing. However, clarity about what we are doing can itself have a transformative effect on practices by assisting them in becoming more concentrated and strategic in their interventions. But again, here the critique is not directed at activists but about political theorists in academia that seem to treat demystification as the model of political engagement tout court.
Can’t say I much care for the tone of your comment (“you’re saying nothing new!”). Can you point me to those political theories that are saying something new? When Ranciere outlines the logic of disagreement out there in the world is he evoking something new? When Badiou talks about truth-procedures is he introducing something that doesn’t actually take place among political subjects? When Zizek speaks of acts of decision is he speaking of something that doesn’t occur out there among political subjects? It’s a strange sort of criticism you’re leveling here. I suppose that we’re supposed to find Zizek suspect for referring to the Paris Commune or for speaking of the immigrant activism in France according to your model.
February 21, 2010 at 9:19 pm
On the point of why demystifying ideological critiques don’t as a political motivators I agree again. I think this is similar to the point Zizek makes about Chomsky’s simplisitic “tell the people the facts and they’ll become engaged”.
I suppose that it is because the analysis of the nonhuman has been neglected that I have difficulty imagining what impact it might have when (re)incorporated. It would certainly seem proper to have this analysis in order to fully grasp the totality of any given situation.
I can only apologise for the tone of my comment, you’re quite right that it was unnecessarily- well I suppose hysterically demanding might be one way to put it ha ha … frustrated might be another.
I don’t expect to see philosophers legislating on how activism should be carried out, and wouldn’t want to, and agree that protest politics (and even the identification “activist”) are fairly exhausted. So thanks for picking me up on that.