Posts Tagged ‘speculative realism’
Thursday Night Bummerwatch
* With all the bad news today, this is the one that really breaks my brain: Texas Says It’s OK to Shoot an Escort If She Won’t Have Sex With You. That’s completely lunatic. I just can’t believe it’s a real event that happened.
* My friend Brent Bellamy has a working bibliography of U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction.
* Inequality, MOOCs and The Predator Elite.
Think about the writing-for-free model that has taken over journalism. His point can be supported by the millions made by Arianna Huffington, while many of her writers worked for little or nothing. Yes, writing is one of what Lanier is calling the “pleasant” jobs — as is teaching (I didn’t say easy. But dedicated writers and educators alike see what they do as rewarding and important work.) Why should journalists or educators be working for little to no money, living at the edge of poverty, while the people at the top of this sort of economic structure are reaping enormous fortune? According to Lanier, this is a conscious breach of the all-important social contract that not only provides what he calls the “hump” of middle class citizens — that middle area surge on the economic chart where the majority of people fall — but that large, sustained middle class keeps the rest of the system going. Without it, the economy fails, as does democracy itself.
* A Dangerous Supplement: Speculative Realism, Academic Blogging, and the Future of Philosophy.
* Silicon Valley’s Awful Race and Gender Problem in 3 Mind-Blowing Charts.
* And MetaFilter goes inside World War Z, a film “already being called the biggest flop in film history.” So at least there’s that.
The Philosophy Beat
Speaking of definitive takedowns, Alex Galloway may have just posted one for speculative realism/OOO at An und für sich.
I cite this as a textbook example of the liberal bourgeois position that people from the likes of Zizek to Carl Schmitt have called “depoliticization and neutralization.” It shows Harman’s anti-political position quite clearly. Today we might even call this an anti-badiousian position (although Harman of course has no interest in being badiousian in the first place!). The reason is because he has no opposition to the state of the situation. By his own admission, he only expresses revulsion *after* the confrontation with the state has taken place, after he witnesses the excesses to which the state will go to hold on to power. That’s a classic case of liberal neutralization (“don’t rock the boat,” “we just need to go along to get along,” “this is the best of all possible worlds,” “ontology shouldn’t be political,” etc.). This is thus not a political desire of any kind, merely an affective emotional response at the sight of blood. But such palpitations of the “sensitive” bourgeois heart, no matter how reformed, do not a politics make.
By contrast, Badiou’s position is so useful today because he says that it’s all about the *first* antagonism, not the last. To be political means that you have to *start* from the position of incompatibility with the state. In other words the political is always asymmetrical to the state of the situation. The political is always “trenchant” in this sense, always a “cutting” or polarization. Hence the appeal of Badiou’s “theory of points” which forces all of the equal-footed-objects in OOO into a trenchant decision of the two: yes or no, stop or go, fight or retreat. Hardt and Negri say something similar when they show how “resistance is primary vis-a-vis power.” For his part Harman essentially argues the reverse in this interview: ontology is primary (OOO “is not the handmaid of anything else”), power is secondary (Mubarak), resistance is a tertiary afterthought (the Arab Spring). Yes we should applaud the Spring when it arrives, Harman admits, but it’s still just an afterthought that arrived from who knows where.
If you’re still skeptical just use the old categorial imperative: if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman, the revolution would never have happened. That’s political neutralization in a nutshell. In other words there is no event for Harman. And here I agree with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s recent characterization of Tristan Garcia’s ontology, modeled closely after Harman’s, as essentially a treatise on “Being Without Event.”
The Emperor Has No Objects – 2
Even if you don’t care about all that you may get a kick out of the Speculative Realism blog generator. The best I got was “Dwindling Motifs.”
The Emperor Has No Objects
The last time I mentioned speculative realism on this blog I promised to do some more serious reading and thinking it about as a penance for undue glibness. And in fact I’m doing this; not only am I reading through The Speculative Turn with some similarly skeptical Duke folks, I’m planning on attending the local Speculative Aesthetics working group with some people who are a bit more into it.
More on that later, maybe. In the meantime I think this set of posts [1, 2, 3] from Chris Vitale is something like an emperor-has-no-clothes moment for OOO, both in terms of its proposed philosophical content as well as its general tone and style of argument. At the very least it suggests important philosophical questions for which OOOists need (and aren’t really providing) adequate answers, among them the self-defeatingly undefined definition of what actually constitutes an “object”:
1) what determines when/if an object changes into another (genesis, dissolution, transformation)? To say ‘it just happens’ doesn’t explain how. What is the process of change? Or do new objects emerge as if from a void, and the transition is ineffable, magical, etc? If not, why not? And where does this change come from? And if from inside objects, how then does ‘the new’ mediate what is between objects?
2) It seems that whenever two entities link, they are an object. But what determines the boundaries of objects, or their difference from things like process or flow? Why are objects, and jumps and distinctions between them superior to flow/process which congeal/uncongeal into objects?
3) How do we determine what to call can object? If I say ‘my blue coffee mug’ over there, is this a shorthand for ‘that which appears to me as a blue coffee mug, but may in reality be different, to the point of even not ‘really’ being even a unified thing’? This is not asking whether or not qualities may be different, but whether the unity of what appears as a single object may be something which differs depending on one’s relation to what is. Yes, there are infinite objects, nested in each other, one of which is the blue coffee mug, and this is split into phenomenal/real objects. But are the boundaries and distinctions between objects flexible? Is the blue coffee mug an object, but the blue coffee mug and one oxygen molecule next to it not (or a less important or real object somehow?) Is the blue coffee mug and micky mouse an object? The critique articulated by process-relation folks is that OOO imports human seeming categories into ontology, bypassing questions of episemtology, while OOO says it has shifted the terrain. How is this shift accomplished? Where do the essences which anchor qualities come from? Is the answer any better than those given by Kant/Husserl, and how might OOO get beyond the critique leveled against ding-an-sich/eidos for these figures?
and
Where I differ is that while I think we can say that something exists in the vicinity of the blue mug, we shouldn’t say ‘the blue mug exists,’ at least not without a ton of qualifiers. For as soon as we say the blue mug exists, and call it the blue mug, we have qualified this existence with blueness, mugness, even a location in space and time, no matter how extended or fuzzy. And as soon as we do this, we move beyond ontology (sheer being, no?), and into the realm of qualities like blueness, mugness, etc. Now, aren’t these epistemological issues? There’s no denying the wavelengths emited by photons that bounce off the mug are in what humans call the blue spectrum. But this does not make the mug ‘blue’ to anyone but a human – and a human using the English language, for that matter.
Now, if you said ‘that being, which this human describes as blue’, I’ve got no issue. But as soon as you say the EXISTENCE of the blue mug, well, the blue mug AS SUCH does not exist anywhere except for those who have categories like blueness and mugness. Surely there’s SOMETHING there. But to call it a blue mug, and to talk about the ontology of the blue mug, AS blue mug, well, unless you are talking about the ontology of the IDEA of the blue mug, rather than the blue mug as such, well, then you’re taking over epistemology in the name of ontology, or, as I’ve said before, importing human categories into the realm of ontology.
If you follow Vitale’s links you can find some opening answers to some of these issues, though none that really satisfy the objection, as well as some counter-critique about the tone and method of OOO critics themselves…
Links for the Day after Christmas
* I consider myself extremely skeptical about the overall theoretical usefulness of object-oriented ontology (see Vu’s excellent Polygraph review for a primer)—frankly I consider claims like these to be so preposterous as to be self-refuting—but nonetheless I’ve downloaded the PDF for new anthology The Speculative Turn at the terrible risk of someday having to writing a conversion essay.
* Hippeism: pray for a cure.
* They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They? Informative, almost-SFW essay via this AskMe thread about the violence and ugliness of contemporary pornography.
* Biden says gay marriage is inevitable, and Obama is teasing that he may even soon stop pretending that he opposes it. Progress!
* Where Obama failed: Nearly One In Nine Federal Judgeships Are Now Vacant.
* Republicans say they just won’t bend on the DREAM ACT. Obama’s eleven-dimensional strategy of aggressive deportation hasn’t brought them around at all; maybe it’s time to give it up.
* UNC plans to take the fight to grade inflation. There’s a pretty dramatic collective action problem here; more informative transcripts would disadvantage UNC’s own students while doing little or nothing to combat any larger nationwide trends.
* The Scott Pilgrim Alternate Ending That Was Never Shot. The DVD also has the surprising original ending in which Scott goes back to Knives after all. I’m shocked this was really considered, much less lasted long enough to actually be shot.
* You had me at “Michelangelo painted a UFO.”
* And, at long last, the death panels are real.
SpecReal on MeFi
MetaFilter discovers speculative realism. I’m still waiting for Ryan’s upcoming definitive piece on this in Polygraph 22…
Labor Day Links
Labor Day links.
* An oral history of Art Spiegelman’s seminal alternative comic RAW, in two parts. Have I really never used the Art Spiegelman tag before? (via)
* Amusing Amazon review of Dollhouse.
* If you feel like you missed the boat on speculative realism and want to know what everybody is talking about, Larval Subjects says the Wikipedia entry is, as of today, a good place to start.
* Best of Wikipedia directs our attention to the mystery of the Bloop.
* Daily Kos goes deep inside White House plans to indoctrinate your children into European-style communofascism.
* Another post on status update activism.
* Then and Now with Goofus and Gallant.
Gerry Canavan 