[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Hi Judith,

I can see that I didn't explain myself well. Let me try again.

I cannot think of any instance in which calling something "masculinist" is meant as a compliment. Therefore, it is hard for me to read your short paragraph surrounding that statement as anything other than a not-so-subtle dig without any examples or supporting argument or even a clarification of what you really mean. That's what feels unproductive to me. But as I said, I just joined the conversation, so perhaps I'm missing something.

As for queer and feminist formulations, I agree with the spirit of what you say, but I'll reiterate my observation that SR/OOO is moving in a slightly different direction—one that concerns toasters and quasars as much as human subjects (note the "as much as" here). Why not take this work for what it is, at least for starters, rather than for what it isn't? And only part of what it is can be sufficiently captured by the political/ecological matters you rightly cite here.

Ian


On Jun 14, 2012, at 1:09 PM, Judith Halberstam wrote:

> Hmmm, I actually was trying to push us towards a "more productive discussion" precisely because the kind of abstraction we use when we write theory (or code) may not be the best medium for conversation. I agree of course that the move away from the focus on the human is a large part of the appeal of OOO and SR but that does not or surely should not mean abandoning any particular notion of politics or urgency. In fact, the most urgent work in SR seems to concern the mess that humans have made of the world because of their/our tendency to never think in relation to and in collaboration with the non-human, extra-human entities with whom we share the planet.
> 
> Why is it "productive" to wonder about the political investments of OOO and SR as Michael O'R does and Galloway has but not to recognize that the theories that count in these areas "tend to be masculinitist"...not sure I get that? 
> 
> So much of the critique of the centering of the human and the othering of the non-human, after all, depends upon queer and feminist formulations of self-other, subject-object and center margin. An incomplete list of the relevant thinkers here would include but not be limited to: Gayatri Spivak, Jacqui Alexander, Saba Mahmood, Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison, Kara Keeling, Ann Balsamo, Jose Munoz, David Eng, Roderick Ferguson, Sara Ahmed...and the list goes on and on but rarely does this theoretical archive surface in the work we are discussing. I believe that this is why Michael O'Rourke's intervention into SR from a queer perspective is so important...
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 8:54 AM, Ian Bogost wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I just (finally) joined this list and am jumping into the middle of a conversation I haven't fully read. So bear with me, and forgive me if I'm covering ground that has been done already.
>> 
>> Judith Halberstam wrote:
>> 
>>> The theories that count and that get counted in OOO and SR tend to be masculinist most of the time and tend to cluster around enlightenment and post-structuralist theory or a particular, continental stripe: Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, with a Butler or Braidotti thrown in for good measure but nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking.
>> 
>> I'm not sure what you mean by "masculinist most of the time" and would invite you to clarify such a characterization in the interest of more productive discussion.
>> 
>> As for  "nary a mention of race, class or postcolonial thinking," one of the interesting puzzles in the formula "SR/OOO are a kind of continental philosophy" is the fact that continental philosophy has such a strong association with matters of human identity, and SR/OOO/etc. are interested in various non- or extra-human matters, and are therefore moving in slightly different directions than continental philosophy has done in recent decades. The assumption—which seems to be prevalent—that this means "abandoning" questions of human identity is an interesting one. 
>> 
>> It reminds me a bit of the criticism Nick Montfort and I still get when we suggest that it's worthwhile to investigate the material construction of hardware and software platforms as a part of the study of computational media. Reactions tend toward accusations of determinism. But, the truth is, the microprocessors and integrated circuits are as extant as the social factors that drive their design. I've written about this conundrum a bit, both in relation to computation and, in my latest book, in relation to philosophy.
>> 
>> 
>> Michael O'Rourke wrote:
>> 
>>> Both Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see the interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are right.  To take just a few examples: How could Tim Morton’s work on ecology be considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s democratization of objects? It is even harder to argue that Jane Bennett’s writing on vibrant materiality which emerges directly out of political theory fails to advance an ethics or a politics.  The challenge as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been telling us is to extend the notion of the biopolitical in our work. What, Jeffrey would ask, would a more generously envisioned zoepolitics (or zoeethics or zoeontology) look like? And why would or wouldn’t we desire it?
>> 
>> 
>> In this respect, it seems that there's been an assumption about what "being political" means, i.e. a particular flavor or so-called radical leftism, which is not so much about its beliefs or premises as it is about a particular modality of activity, a particular community of practice, a particular kind and rhetoric of work, and so forth. The comments in answer to Levi Bryant's recent question "Ethics and Politics, What are You Asking" are interesting in this regard: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/ethics-and-politics-what-are-you-asking/
>> 
>> In any event, I think this whole set of questions about politics and ontology has to be seen as something more along the lines of a (potential) shift in the attention of philosophy and theory. And that's probably why it's so charged a topic.
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> Ian Bogost, Ph.D.
>> Professor
>> Director, Graduate Program in Digital Media
>> 
>> Georgia Institute of Technology
>> Digital Media/TSRB 320B
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>> 
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>> 
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