[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Jacob Gaboury]

Hello Ian. Thanks for joining the discussion, and for your
contributions. The goal of this week's conversation is a larger look
at computation and the nonhuman, and the broader theme of this month
is queer new media. SR/OOO is clearly important to any discussion of
the nonhuman, and I think one of the goals was to think through what
queer theory has to say to that field specifically, both in supporting
and critiquing it. This may explain the focus participants have made
on what is missing, rather than what is there.

That said there are other ways of discussing these issues, such as
Micha and Jack's conversation on the Queerreal and the Transreal, or
our earlier discussion of uncomputability and the failure of technical
objects. I think it's useful to continue this conversation but my hope
is that it doesn't stop other people from chiming in about the other
topics and questions we have covered this week, or even to hear what
you have to say about these other approaches.

It seems like part of the debate here is the notion that queer theory
and the tradition of continental philosophy focus a great deal on
issues of identity as they relate to the human. Part of our earlier
discussion was an attempt to theorize those nonhuman objects and
practices that we might productively understand as queer. That is, to
decouple the human, identity, and human-embodied experience from the
field of queer theory and apply it to the nonhuman and the
computational. Not as a way of "queering" these things but as a way of
understanding them as already queer to begin with. My impulse is to
look to uncomputable processes and super-Turing machines, Jack looked
to specific types of nonhuman objects such as animation or "stuffed"
objects in what I read as a continuing application of a kind of "low
theory".

I don't know if this gets us outside this debate over the different
canonical/historical approaches of these two disciplines, but I think
it's a useful way of bringing them into conversation. I'd love to hear
more from all of you on this approach.

- Jacob








On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lcc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> Look, I'm new here, but is this really the level of conversation this list
> strives to support?
>
> If this is just a place where like-minded folk pat each other on the back,
> please let me know so I can unsubscribe.
>
> Ian
>
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>
> On 06/14/2012 07:02 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>
>
> 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?
>
>
> The "as much as" is precisely the problem.
>
> Galloway's critique of OOO that Zach mentioned explains why:
>
> http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
>
> But I wouldn't lump Meillassoux in with Harman. I think Meillassoux's
> philosophy can indeed be interesting for this debate because of its
> embracing of contingency and possibility.
>
> - Rob.
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