As an ontological framework OOO prescribes no particular politics. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to escape the impression that there are political implications to this ontology. In declaring that being consists entirely of objects, in refusing a partition of being into two distinct ontological categories, the subject and the object, OOO seems to begin from the standpoint of equality. Its core spirit is one that rejects hierarchy such as we find in the infamous “great chain of being”. It will be noted that in the deployment of this ontology, OOO selects the lower term in the couplet of the subject and the object to take as its general ontological category. Historically, the category of the object has been conceived as the passive pole in the couple of the subject and the object. The object has historically be seen as that which is mastered by an active subject. This line of thought achieves its zenith in idealism, where the object is erased beneath the subject altogether. As such, subject-object ontology 1) inscribes hierarchy into being, and 2) implicitly develops a logic of mastery that pervades every branch of philosophy (the most troubling forms of mastery and hierarchy appearing in political theory and ethics where, again and again, philosophy rediscovers the need to posit a master that knows and a rabble in need of direction and subordination to this master: Plato’s philosoper-king as the dream inscribed unconsciously in nearly all phallosophy). OOO, by contrast, makes the strange claim that humans are objects among other objects (they have no ontologically privileged position and are not the crown of existence) and proposes the strange idea of active objects (objects that aren’t merely passive recipients of the acts of other entities but which are agencies in their own right).
This week it occured to me that there is a profound overlap between Ranciere’s political philosophy and OOO. Like OOO, Ranciere begins from an axiom of equality. Everyone, Ranciere says, is equal to everyone else. Where phallosophy begins from an axiom of inequality, arguing that there are some that are unequal and therefore in need of rule (phallasophy henceforth becomes the elaborate demonstration of this inequality and elaboration and justification of why it should rule and how positions should be organized in society based on this rule (think of Plato’s partition of society into roles of bronze, silver, and gold alloting different hierarchical forms of labor with the phallosopher at the top, or of Brandom’s obsessive meditations on rationality seeking to determine who is authorized to speak)) philosophy begins from the premise of equality and democracy. Here democracy is not a form of government or the state, but an action and a way of relating to others premised on equality. It is a form of relation that refuses to relate to others as ignorant students in need of a master to govern and instruct them, but that instead relates as equals in collaboration.
For Ranciere, politics refers to that form of practice, and that form of practice alone, where those elements that have been excluded from the social contest this hierarchical ordering and demand to be included as actors that can speak. To understand what Ranciere is getting at, it’s necessary to understand his concept of the “police”. For Ranciere, the police is not people with badges that pull you over for speeding. No, “police” refers to that order within society that allots positions and roles, establishes and naturalizes hierarchy, determines who is a member of the social and who is not, and, above all, who is authorized to speak and who isn’t. At base, the police is that order of inequality that determines who can speak and who can’t.
Ranciere illustrates this concept with respect to book one of Aristotle’s Politics in his brilliant Disagreement. In book one of the Politics Aristotle asks the question “are there natural born slaves?” Often this portion of the Politics is treated as tangential to the rest of the book, but Ranciere argues that it is crucial to Aristotle’s understanding of politics for it outlines the conditions under which one can legitimately rule over another. The question of whether or not there are natural born slaves spins, in Aristotle, on whether or not slaves have logos or the capacity for rational, self-directing speech. Aristotle contends that slave speech is largely akin to animal noise. Because certain persons are not capable of speech, it is just for them to be ruled by a master. This is the police. The police is that order that distributes the difference between speech and noise, determining who gets to participate and who does not. Politics is what contests these partitions and distributions of the social, working from the axiom of equality.
Ranciere’s schema for the police as the mechanism that partitions speech from noise works nicely to pinpoint a variety of sites of struggle. The police is not an entity nor a conspiracy, but an immanent machine within the social that distributes rulers and ruled. We might, for example, think of the place of the worker in the workplace as the one denied “speech” in how the workplace is run. We can think of the denial of speech to women prior to emancipation and those instamces where “female speech” continues to be denied such as the treatment women often receive from their male colleagues in phallosophy departments. We can think of the distribution of speech in the classroom between teacher and professor. In each case we have a hierarchy in which speech is authorized for one position and the other goes uncounted and is coded as noise. Politics is that moment where this distribution and partitioning is challenged and a demonstration of the power of speech for that uncounted part commences. The commencement of this sequence premised on axiomatic equality is what Ranciere calls “democracy”. Class struggle, for example, would be an instance of democracy. Much of what takes place in “democracies”, by contrast, would not be democracy as it is a procedure of the police, distributing noise and speech, and maintaining hierarchy. Democracy is a verb, not a noun. It’s not something you live in but that you do.
Ranciere’s politics, of course, is human centered in that it is occupied with analyzing those moments of politics where the uncounted assert amd demonstrate their power of speech, transforming the social order as a consequence. None of this disappears in OOO as humans do not somehow cease to be beings within OOO. The OOO flattening of being only entails that humans are not ontologically privileged beings. We are, of course, important to ourselves– just as dolphins are important to themselves –but we are not the summet of existence. However, when Ranciere’s political theory is conjugated with OOO we get an interesting result. We get the question “do nonhuman objects speak?”. Latour has taught us how to ask this question in texts like Science in Action and We Have Never Been Modern, where he shows how a certain nonhuman speech takes place in the laboratory. With the possibility of nonhuman speech, it becomes possible to include nonhumans such as animals and flourocarbons within the domain of the political, thereby making them voices in a democracy. In other words, nonhuman objects could no longer be treated as mere passive recipients for our use.
July 22, 2011 at 1:08 pm
If all objects are equal, not just the human ones, then democracy forces the principle of sacrifice — which object is to be destroyed? This seems to frame a basic ethical question correctly.
July 22, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Though I think it’s still slightly ambiguous within Ranciere, his concept of equality as developed by Badiou and Zizek is always taken as an example of the capacity for the absolute negativity of the subject to seize upon universality or genericity directly. Because of this, it seems difficult to disjoin Ranciere’s concept of radical equality from its Enlightenment roots. It seems merely to return to the Enlightenment concept and give it the proper context and corrective through the subject-as-negative-capacity. I am curious how THIS aspect of Ranciere’s equality is dealt with in OOO.
This ties, I think, to a larger issue I have with OOO and politics. It seems that so much of valuable political ontology today focuses around the subject, yet it is not at all the subject that OOO seems to be critiquing (this always seems to be the more traditional, positive subject, the subject which is the over-weighted counter to the object). But today’s subjectivity is simply the capacity for absolute negativity, for access to universality or genericity through engagement with the Null term. Does OOO have a horror vacui which prevents it from acknowledging nullity proper? If so, how does political engagement exist if access to absolute equality is not given THROUGH this very null or subjective experience? How can you, in short, flatten the void??
July 22, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Rancière points to montage as a demonstration of the most recent shift in the aesthetic regime and this focused attention on the commensurability of all images seems to inform his thinking about the nature of the politics/police division. I wonder if commensurability is a better term than equality for discussing the contemporary situation?
Rancière’s concern for commensurability makes sense because the (a) public is created in the circulation of a text (broadly understood). What seems promising in OOO is a sense that all objects are capable of being exchanged with, communicable, or able to be engaged with.
July 22, 2011 at 10:17 pm
>> With the possibility of nonhuman speech, it becomes possible to include nonhumans such as animals and flourocarbons within the domain of the political, thereby making them voices in a democracy.<<
Doesn't that equate the voice and speech with the enunciation of truth? And is democracy the only valid or even best political system? Perhaps within a state modality, but this is why I find OOO difficult to accept: by ditching subjectivity and cultural relativism – albeit with some good reason – it curiously seems to insulate itself from non-western philosophies, while immersing itself in the kinds of themes dominated by western hard science. That has to be a 'political orientation' in itself, surely?
July 23, 2011 at 12:04 am
nto,
There’s so much mistaken in your comment, I don’t know where to begin. 1) I don’t equate speech with truth, so I’m not sure where you get this idea. I don’t even mention truth. 2) In the post, I mention multiple times that democracy as Ranciere conceives it is not a political system or form of government. Maybe you skipped those parts? 3) OOO is not a “objectivism” nor does it eradicate subjectivity, rather each object is a point of view on other objects. This is a point made in nearly every OOO publication. What OOO does refuse is the reduction of entities to any particular point of view. They have their own independent existence. 4) How does OOO exclude Eastern thought and what theheck is “eastern thought”? You’re talking about a portion of the earth’s population that is well more than half the population and that is more ancient as if it can be reduced to a single thing and set of positions. That’s rather reductive.
July 23, 2011 at 12:14 am
Stanley,
I think your point holds for Badiou, but not for Zizek. In Badiou we get a truly “objectless subject”, but in Zizek we still get a subject/object dyad because of how he links his account of the subject with German idealism. Cf., for example, the first chapter of The Parallax View. I don’t have a horror of the void or nullity, but I also don’t think it’s particularly needed. To see this, it’s necessary to look at the problematic in which the void arose and why that problematic necessitated the void. That problematic is Althusser’s structural account of ideology where ideology pervades everything and there is no point of escape because all social relations are internal. The void promised a free point that would allow escape and that promised something undetermined by the social system. However, insofar as OOO argues 1) that objects are withdrawn, and that therefore 2) all relations are external it doesn’t encounter this problem. Here OOO is closer to Badiou than Zizek. With Badiou it rejects relational internalism such as we find in Hegel and structuralist thought. It’s this that allows for “subtraction”.
July 23, 2011 at 12:24 am
>>what the heck is “eastern thought”<<
I don't know! I didn't use the term. Which is kind of interesting in itself.
July 23, 2011 at 1:02 am
I like the idea of objects being able to speak and I’ve been thinking along the same lines this last week trying to digest Harman’s “Quadruple Object.” Harman talks a lot about real objects “emitting” and I was having trouble squaring this emitting (a sending towards) with withdrawal (a going away). The only model I have for tying these two together is Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said. Of course for Levinas this only works with people, but the other person who with draws from me still disturbs the surface of the said by the influx of their saying behind it. It seems like OOO requires something similar on the level of every object.
My lingering issue with the implicit politics of OOO that you’ve laid out here is how the “ought” could have any claim over the “is” in this model. Based solely on this post it would look like OOO is a kind of social Darwinism on the level of matter itself. Every given state of affairs is always the result of a kind of democratic compromise, the state of equilibrium between all of the different forces of trillions upon trillions of different objects pushing against each other, a war of all objects against all objects. But the real world really is wrong, things really should be otherwise. How could this ought ever assert itself? It seems to be a powerless virtual hovering over an omnipotent actual war of objects. Physics, red in tooth and claw.
Even hierarchies and inequalities themselves would be produced by this kind of democracy of objects. The Pope and the Emperor are themselves maintained by this clashing of objects against each other. A hierarchy would be just one equilibrium that objects reach, and such a democracy of object would seem neutral about this. It might be equal on a foundational level, but it seems neutral towards equality and equality between people. Under this model of an OOO of politics, why should one state of affairs any better than any other? All states of affairs, no matter how just or unjust, would equally be equal on the level of object relations.
July 23, 2011 at 3:06 am
Thomas,
What is your proposal to resolve this issue? First, I don’t think this is an accurate characterization of my views of normativity. Nothing prevents various objects adoptjng normative standards that allow them to evaluate the world. Second, and more importantly, what do you see as the ground of normativity? There was just an intense cross blog discussion on this issue with respect to the nihilism debate. What exactly is it that you’re asking for here? If you’re asking for a theistic account of normativity that inscribes it as an essence in the fabric of being, you’re not going to get it frome me. I’ve outlined my arguments against such an approach in detail. Clearly OOO will lead to a normative pluralism because the norms octopi, humans, and frogs use to evaluate the world will be different. I don’t see how that leads to the sort of “social darwinism” you’re talking about though. For any discussion to proceed here you need to 1) clarify what you have in mind by normativity, 2) indicate what exactly you’re asking for, and 3) indicate what type of theory would satisfy you. In other words, don’t begin by attacking OOO on these grounds before specifying what, exactly, you’re looking for. Any naturalistic ontology is going to have the sort of form I describe in my response to you here. Given that naturalism is the only credible philosophical position today, any account of normativity must be formulated within that framework, refusing any divine transcendence or guarantees.
July 23, 2011 at 3:10 am
Levi,
I think the point about Zizek only holds when he is being a little too lax in his language. I don’t think one can read Zizek’s subject in the context of german idealism, one must instead read german idealism in the context of Zizek. His entire purpose in engaging with German idealism is precisely to re-work it, inserting the fully negative subject in the place of the positive — it is an essential part of his concept of retroactive novelty, his history is a participatory one. This is the basis of his reading of Hegel’s “night of the world,” of the Cartesian cogito and its political implications, and, of course, of the French and Haitian revolutionary events. I don’t think the major difference between his and Badiou’s subjectivities is whether or not they are part of a dyad but simply a question of their rarity. Zizek’s attachment to German idealism and to the psychoanalytic subject forces him to acknowledge that the subjectivity he is talking about is general human subjectivity, not just the explicit and rare form of evental or revolutionary subjectivity used by Badiou. But it has always struck me as just as negative — unless one is inflecting German idealism onto Zizek. Otherwise, it is difficult to understand what Zizek hopes to gain by positively addressing the cognitive philosophy of someone like Metzinger (who also argues for a subject as pure, self-reflexive negativity or a phenomenological “hole” or “tunnel” through reality).
Also, although your point with regard to the void in politics and its connection to Althusser is entirely valid — I would look farther back to the void in its Epicurean and Stoic origins, either an intracosmic (Epicurean) or extracosmic (Stoic) void offering the only break from a Platonic (a la Timaeus) philosophy of process (Iain Hamilton Grant’s reading of Schelling avec Plato) or an Aristotelian denial of the void. These weren’t just reactions against the certainty of determination, although that of course played a part in the idea of the clinamen and free will. They were also reactions to the apparent ontological inabilities of the Platonic and Aristotelian system to account for things like alteration or movement, which is why Leibniz, in fidelity to a voidless system, had to deny these things entirely. Similarly, the Mutazili theologians in the Islamic tradition were not just introducing the possibility of the void to break with any determinism, since the Islamic notion of God readily accomodated indeterminate becoming and radical contingency. They were simply breaking with the notion of the One as such and with the simple duality or bad dialectic of symmetrical reflexive interaction between the transcendent and immanent.
July 23, 2011 at 5:23 am
‘Given that naturalism is the only credible philosophical position today, any account of normativity must be formulated within that framework, refusing any divine transcendence or guarantees.;
Hmm, can’t see why that would be so…but it’s a position
July 23, 2011 at 5:35 am
I wonder if your take on the potential politics of ooo has resonance in your mind to poststructuralist anarchism (in the vein of todd may), particularly with respect to the latter’s rejection of humanistic essentialism and views on power as creative and rhizomatically dispersed?
July 23, 2011 at 10:15 am
Levi,
I’m not trying to attack OOO, I’m just trying to figure things out for myself. I can’t always express my questions as clearly as I would like since I’m not able to draw upon a philosophical background. For example, I don’t understand how this has to do with normativity and maybe if I did I could express my question in the proper terms.
The best I can do is to say that what I’m looking for seems to have something to do with the relationship between virtual forces and actual forces with the ethical/political “ought” on the side of the virtual and the natural/physical “is” on the side of the real. I guess the kind of theory that would satisfy me is one in which these virtual forces can have some real teeth. Part of this stems from my interest in non-violence. Non-violence, in its strictest form, appeals to a purely moral force and is completely powerless on the level of the real. I can see how real forces grind against each other in OOO, I’m looking for a way to appeal to an ethical force from within OOO. Maybe this appeal would entail an appeal to something theological. During the civil rights movement this non-violent force was called soulforce.
July 23, 2011 at 1:34 pm
Thomas,
I didn’t take you to be attacking. I was just asking what you’re looking for. Traditionally norms are not forces but reasons. A norm doesn’t cause me to do this or that (as in the case of a match causing paper to burn), but gives me a reason to do this or that. Following Okrent in his wonderful book Rational Animals, I think norms are teleological in character. To be bound by norms is to be capable of evaluating things in terms of better and worse, accurate and inaccurate, true and false. Following Spinoza, nothing In and of itself is good or bad. There’s nothing about a rotton apple, for example, that makes it bad in and of itself. In order to evaluate the apple as bad a goal or aim has to be operative (sustenance, pleasure of taste, etc). I am acting normatively when I am acting based on a reason as a motive. Suppose, for example, I’m starving to death and there’s a semi-rotten animal before me. My biology might cause me to recoil from the apple. This might be a brute physiological reaction. I enter the domain of normativity, by contrast, whe I eat the apple anyway. Here it’s a reason that’s motivating my action (overcoming hunger), not a cause. Causality has a sense of inevitability to it that normativity doesn’t. I could choose, for example, to not eat the apple. Lot’s more needs to be said here, but I have a twelve hour drive ahead of me and need to head out the door.
July 24, 2011 at 12:49 am
Levi,
I think you should probably stick with the assertion you have repeatedly held earlier and throughout…that OOO doesn’t imply any particular normativity but that any ethical or political position is composed of objects in their own right. I agree that we shouldn’t read politics off of ontology and neither should we then say that OOO is somehow nihilistic because trees have different aims than people. There is nothing that could preclude a Republican OOO anymore than a Marxist OOO.
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