OOOIII was a fantastic success yesterday. It was terrific to see lots of old friends and meet new people. The event had, all around, a nice vibe to it with lots of great discussion. I especially enjoyed meeting Jane Bennett and Eileen Joy and I immediately felt as if I’d known Joy for years. Both are amazing people and thinkers. I think Bennett might be my long lost twin sister. This has been the first conference I’ve ever attended where each paper was excellent. McKenzie Wark did a great job organizing the event and was an excellent host.
One of the things I find interesting is that people have not yet seemed to notice just how bizarre the OOO ontology is. The thesis that objects exist, has, for whatever reason, been quite controversial among high humanities types (though this has seemed natural and obvious to media studies folks and artists). However, I think the truly bizarre and disturbing thesis has yet to register. Within the framework of my onticology, armies, cities, nations, activist groups, corporations, institutions, etc, are independent, autonomous, autopoietic objects that are independent of humans, have their own aims, are conscious, and are rational animals. These days we spend a lot of time asking whether artificial life on par with humans will arise out of our new technologies. My thesis is that non-human intelligences on par with human intelligences have existed for centuries. Just as it would be unlikely that we could communicate with an alien intelligence on par with our own intelligence due to differences in our being, these “aliens” have been amongst us for centuries, using us in the way cells use protiens to construct themselves, without us being able to communicate with them. Kafka was right when he described the Castle as being an intelligence in its own right. Like Joseph K. we can be entangled in the Castle, perpetually striving to communicate with it, without ever quite being able to make contact. I find this idea terrifying.
Larval Subjects . 
September 15, 2011 at 1:36 pm
What is controversial about the thesis that “objects exist” qua collectives (assemblages?), etc? I would think that your views on potency or Harman on vicarious causation would be, but those are the details.
September 15, 2011 at 2:04 pm
JH, it is far from obvious that there is anything like collective agents at work in the world, and as Levi says this is a bizarre/alien ontology/taxonomy. One would have to account for how they are organized/think/act, how they are separate/bounded entities and not just figures of speech. Not easy to do without positing some ghosts in/as the machines and so the novelty of Levi’s work.
September 15, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Jason,
The weirdness lies in the idea that humans are not elements of these collective objects, that they don’t control them, and they don’t direct them. I’ll have more to say about the relations between humans and these agents later, but I find this horrifying.
September 15, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Horrifying may certainly be an apt word. I’ve been reading Bakan’s The Corporation, Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World and Orrell’s Economyths recently, and OOO goes a very long way towards making sense, metaphysically, of the inertia and power of these hyperobjects. We don’t need Lovecraftian entities when we have these weird monstrosities consuming and transforming the world according to their own perverse logic. As Bakan puts it at one point, ‘[a]s a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognise nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.’ Overstated, perhaps, but for the most part corporations are decoupled from human intentionality.
September 15, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Levi – I continue to bounce all ontological ideas against the sorts of ecological (and socio-ecological) thinking that I have found to be implicit within contemporary environmental thought (a diverse brew, of course) and which I’ve been working to render more (defensibly) explicit. By those standards…
(1) that “non-human intelligences on par with human intelligences have existed for centuries” is not a controversial thesis, as long as “intelligence” is defined broadly and not anthropocentrically/anthropomorphically;
(2) that “these “aliens” have been amongst us for centuries, using us in the way cells use protiens to construct themselves, without us being able to communicate with them” is similarly not very controversial;
(3) but that “armies, cities, nations, activist groups, corporations, institutions, etc, are independent, autonomous, autopoietic objects that are *independent* of humans, have their own aims, are conscious, and are rational animals”
*is* controversial. Autonomy is one thing; independence is another. Ant armies may exist, and maybe ant cities, though it depends on the definition of the words “army” and “city.” The same could be said of “corporations,” but these words take their meaning from being human creations, and when most people speak of corporations they mean a specific kind of entity that is dependent on human understandings of its functioning, its rights and responsibilities, and so on — without the latter, the corporation fizzles out into nothingness. So I would argue on behalf of autopoiesis and autonomy (of various kinds), but not (absolute) independence. As for their “consciousness” and “rationality,” this also depends on how we define these two terms. As a pan-experientialist I don’t have any trouble with seeing “something like consciousness” and “something like rationality” at work everywhere. But there’s value in distinguishing different kinds of consciousness and rationality.
My two cents… Cheers, Adrian
September 15, 2011 at 7:27 pm
Adrian,
It’s good to know there are antecendents and alliances on these matters. As for what “most people” mean I suppose I believe that’s philosophically irrelevant. Most people believe there’s a ghost or homunculous in their minds that governs their actions, but that doesn’t make it true. I believe the theory of closure and autonomy alloes us to pose the most basic question and problem of politics. If this closure isn’t taken into account that politics is doomed to be Quixotic. Humans can, of course, perturb these collective objects and are used as matter for these systems to construct themselves, but tyey are nonetheless outside thse systems. Experiences of bureacracy are a common experience of this. Environmental politics has constantly run up against this in dealing with social systems and government institutions.
September 15, 2011 at 9:44 pm
the horror and the terror that is spoken of is like a boulder that we construct and put before us, impeding our path. It may be strange, but it is not new. The ‘strange’ is located in us. Personally, the project is exciting.
September 15, 2011 at 10:37 pm
Hiya,
I know that Hegel is kinda anathema to the discourse floating around here, but – and, you know, bracketing the Charles Taylor-supergeist reading of him – he did have a really robust notion of collective agency AND, moreover, one that (at least on, say, Hyppolite’s reading) attributed to collective agents/objects their own directedness, intentionality, etc., irreducible to the individual human beings that at least partially made them up. Indeed, there is a real sense in which the collective agents/objects of the phenomenology or the philosophy of right AREN’T humans. The exciting difference that you’re bringing out, Levi, it seems to me is this: these collective agents/object don’t actually have humans as their constituents, but might have other non-human (and possibly inorganic) constituents in virtue of which the aims/goals of the whole are irreducible to human aims/goals. But I think Hegel’s point is that the structure of the whole (using structure/aim/goal relatively interchangeably) isn’t reducible to the parts AT ALL, regardless of whether those parts are human or inhuman. Which, if you crane your neck enough, looks even WEIRDER, doesn’t it?
September 15, 2011 at 11:03 pm
The major difference is that for Hegel there is an ovarching totality or whole. In my framework there isn’t.
September 16, 2011 at 12:33 am
Right – I get that. The post wasn’t meant as a challenge, but rather as an expression of this new sentiment that seems to be growing in certain philosophical circles, namely, to take a moment to enjoy the terrible strangeness of the world, a terrible strangeness reflected even in those thinkers who aim to reconcile us to it, and even where that reconciliation takes precedence over the sensation of dissociation. I really dig it, and it’s been nice, as a grad student in a relatively orthodox department, to be able to get a fix on your blog on a regular basis. So, thanks!
September 16, 2011 at 2:29 am
I’m with Adrian and Patrick, and saw this from the start. The basic outline is not new, although the details, motivations, etc. appear rather novel. To insist on its utter novelty, especially if we do not restrict ourselves to academic philosophy, is just to attest to one’s own lack of knowledge. That said, I presume that Levi’s point is to go well beyond the partial likenesses.
Dynamic systems, mob psychology, the behavior of collectives, etc. are not new. The flat ontology is likely newer by far, at least per its object-focus.
September 17, 2011 at 5:32 pm
I’m going to repeat and say what I was saying more forcefully concerning the
“weirdness lies in the idea that humans are not elements of these collective objects, that they don’t control them, and they don’t direct them.”
Weird to who? To philosophers? Have they been out to lunch? This is neither as weird or as novel as that on the whole. Hence, I rebutt to DMF and Levi that this is being exaggerated. I would say that we do not have near enough (western) *philosophical* development in this direction, especially since what little there is is environmental/animal ethics focused.
September 17, 2011 at 5:55 pm
Jason,
.given that the default ideology today is neoliberalism or, as Margaret Thatcher puts it “there are no societies only human individuals and families” i suspect the thesis that societies aren’t composed of humans at all is quite weird for many beyond just philosophers.
September 21, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Levi,
Point taken. I meant to say that we’re working out the consequences of a known view, but not widely adopted. If you extend beyond academics, then of course.
September 23, 2011 at 10:37 pm
[…] reef belongs to the environment of the submarine. People are outside social systems. As I’ve remarked elsewhere, I find this thought absolutely horrifying because it entails that the way social systems register […]