Weighing in at a whopping 509 single spaced pages or 253,000 words, here are the initial notes and sketches for The Democracy of Objects that I’ve put together over the last year or so. Next comes the process of winnowing and organizing, getting this monster down to between two and three hundred pages or 80,000 – 100,000 words. It shouldn’t be long now. And if anyone was wondering, yes that’s the blue coffee mug I’m always waxing poetic about.
March 4, 2010
The Democracy of Objects in the Buff
Posted by larvalsubjects under Boring Stuff About Me, Object-Oriented Philosophy[18] Comments
Larval Subjects . 
March 4, 2010 at 1:06 am
Congratulations Professor
March 4, 2010 at 1:16 am
Wow…impressive. As someone very appreciative of Latour’s Politics of Nature and a long time colleague of his, I’m really looking forward to what you have to say in the new book and how my developmental & molecular biologist’s reading of your work sits alongside my reading of Latour and of Graham’s Prince of Networks. I’m a philosophical novice and so it’s a challenge to follow OOO, OOP and the rest as it shows up in your weblog and the weblogs of your many colleagues. Still…I persist. And I patiently await The Democracy of Objects.
March 4, 2010 at 1:24 am
Michael,
If you send me some published stuff maybe I can find a way to fit it in. Right now I’m just trying to find a way to tie all these threads together so I’m not going to be able to do full justice to anyone (Politics of Nature, Pandora’s Hope, and Reassembling the Social are my favorites but they’re all so complex). Anyway, feel free to send things my way. I’ll do my best but now is crunch time and, as us Southerners like to say, time to githerdone.
March 4, 2010 at 1:27 am
I should add that I’m not necessarily hostile to what you’re proposing. I’m deeply influenced by the developmental systems theorists in biology. I just think that there are other types of actors besides biological actors.
March 4, 2010 at 2:42 am
Among them, frequent-flyer programs. And iron-on t-shirt appliqués. And treacle.
March 4, 2010 at 4:13 am
I see I’ve given the wrong impression. I’m a fan of all those other sorts of non-human actors…well, maybe not Ian’s treacle. Actually when I read what you, Ian, Graham and the others are saying and writing, what I meant to signal in talking about a molecular biologist’s “reading” (and none too clearly I’m afraid) is that I come to your work as a real outsider, as someone trained up on proteins, embryonic fate maps, and tissue interactions during organogenesis. I trail my earlier training; it’s not what I do now. It has been more than 35 years since I sat at my lab bench micro dissecting chick embryos, separating cells on bovine serum albumin gradients, isolating cell lines and the like. Now I try to figure out OOO, OOP,…and what all that might mean for teaching “upstream,” contestable science-in-the-making to non-science majors. I wish I had something to add to your mix. All I have to offer is an attentive reader’s eye and a taste for the philosophical.
March 4, 2010 at 11:22 am
Congrats Levi,
best of luck with that.
Something that I would really like to see one day is a blogpost (or a comment) about one related thing: to what extent (if at all), and in what way, has keeping this blog up while you were planning and writing this book contributed to the final product? Has the way you approach your arguments been modified? Have comments on this blog changed your perception of what the crucial issues to be unpacked were?
In other words: would you have written “another book” had this blog not existed? (and I am not talking much about content but more about the form, style and progress of your arguments).
March 5, 2010 at 1:12 am
No one could have written faster or thought harder. You have exceeded everyone’s expectations. I know, because you have been kind enough to bring me along on this voyage of discovery, that there are deep truths waiting for you in your draft. Truths for you to plummet and then share with us and I thank you in advance for that. I envy you, too, Levi. I envy you the fresh joy of what is immediately ahead, the deep plunge into compressed air.
If you find yourself in need of a most stimulating diversion, may I recommend to you Steven Augustine’s short novel, The Bomb Collector. http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/the-bomb-collector-a-serial-novel/ It’s hard for me to imagine you not intensely enjoying this. It’s divided into many brief chapters, so you can just come in and nibble when you need a bit of nourishment.
We’re all waiting for you in Calais.
March 5, 2010 at 2:01 am
righteous.
March 5, 2010 at 10:35 am
[…] 5, 2010 He writes an awful lot. Look at THIS STACK OF MANUSCRIPT PAGES. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment […]
March 5, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Citing “L. Bryant, Democracy of Objects, p.#” will be a lot easier than citing “http // larvalsubjects dot wordpress dotcom /postname dot html”.
I look forward to seeing the book.
March 6, 2010 at 8:06 am
Is a democracy of objects really possible at all? Because the word democracy doesn’t include every object. As you know what it means it really is kind of anthropocentic, and I thought that was something OOP was arguing against.
Not that I’m arguing against your position here, I’m just saying your title might be a contradiction in terms. Maybe the political side of this project is not democracy at all… it’s something way beyond that.
March 6, 2010 at 5:16 pm
“Democracy of objects” isn’t intended as a political thesis or concept, but as denoting or indexing an ontology in which objects aren’t subordinated to the sovereignity of the subject. Rather than objects being reduced to representations by humans, objects, as it were, “represent themselves” in such an ontology. In short, the term is figurative.
March 8, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Fantastic!
If at any point any chapter drafts would benefit from proofreading by a sometimes cranky and overcritical analytic philosopher who is nonetheless still capable of being a fan, definitely send things my way. In either case, I’m really hyped about this book.
I love the trope of object-object representation as a way to thematize your version of OOP.
Jon
March 9, 2010 at 7:07 am
This is probably goofy, but I’ve been trying to situate you and Graham with respect to each other (I’m just now coming out of a philosophical hiatus of new baby inspired sleep deprivation, and really happy to be thinking about Speculative Realism).
Is this fair? A workable credo for a lot of Graham’s work is “The carpentry of perception is only a special case of the carpentry of things” (from Guerrilla Metaphysics), whereas your work might be “The carpentry of reference is only a special case of the carpentry of things.” Both of you are taking relations that are representational and at the intersection of mind and world, and showing in detail how these things to be instances of broader relations that are already there in the world. But you tend to do this more with respect to linguistic relations and Graham with perceptual ones.
I know that is somewhat hamfisted, as you go into all sorts of other stuff, but one of the things I want to do as I work through the anthology, Graham’s other books (doing Guerrilla Metaphysics now) and then the book that is the telos of the above stack is to get really clear on how you and Graham’s work compliments each other and where the contrasts are. And sometimes cartoons are a useful place to start with a project like that.
March 9, 2010 at 9:48 am
[…] Assemblages, Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Philosophy Leave a Comment In comments Cogburn writes: This is probably goofy, but I’ve been trying to situate you and Graham with respect to each […]
March 28, 2010 at 1:09 pm
[…] This is, of course, also Heidegger’s move in Being and Time and it will be interesting in Levi’s new book to see how he works out a notion of translation that doesn’t fall in to the instrumentalist […]
May 2, 2010 at 12:41 pm
this looks great. congratulations! I’m very much looking forward to this.
stefan