[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Ian Bogost]

Joe,

Thanks for these great comments. 

> I think it is because this resonance seems so fruitful to me that I am perplexed by some of the claims by proponents of OOO that the political can be separated from claims about the ontological if we are constrained in our own ways by our as-structures, then right from the outset we encounter the world of human and non-human objects as profoundly political, raising uncanny questions of co-existence whether we are human subjects or neutrinos or cypress-flames. So OOO, far from allowing us to discuss "what exists" in politically neutral spaces, rather radicalises the political questions of ecology and "being-with" into the realm of the non-human, so that all objects are trying to 'work out' how to exist with each other whether to congregate or flee, embrace or destroy, swap DNA and code sequences, or annex and withdraw.  This doesn't prescribe a particular flavour of politics, but it does seem to make the political at least "equiprimordial" with the ontological.  I'd love to hear people's responses to these thoughts if you have anything to share.


I don't think I find anything objectionable here, save the (perhaps?) implied conclusion that objects "working out" of mutual co-existence is best called "politics." Sure, we can call it that, words are words after all, and perhaps it's an appropriate metaphor. After all, as you rightly say, those of us who embrace the tool-being as a fact of all things also acknowledge the incompleteness of this grasping of other objects. 

However, this is a very different idea than the usual one, that politics is *our* politics, is a normative or descriptive account of human social behavior. It's this conceit that bothers OOO, that politics-for-humans could be taken as first philosophy.

If I can be permitted the indulgence of quoting myself at absurd length, here's how I attempt to address the matter in Alien Phenomenology (pp 78-79), on the topic of ethics rather than politics:

> Can we even imagine a speculative ethics? Could an object characterize the internal struggles and codes of another, simply by tracing and reconstructing evidence for such a code by the interactions of its neighbors? It’s much harder than imagining a speculative alien phenomenology, and it’s easy to understand why: we can find evidence for our speculations on perception, like radiation tracing the black hole’s event horizon, even if we are only ever able to characterize the resulting experiences as metaphors bound to human correlates. The same goes for the Foveon sensor, the piston, the tweet, and the soybean, which can only ever grasp the outside as an analogous struggle. The answer to correlationism is not the rejection of any correlate but the acknowledgment of endless ones, all self-absorbed, obsessed by givenness rather than by turpitude. The violence or ardor of piston and fuel is the human metaphorization of a phenomenon, not the ethics of an object. It is not the relationship between piston and fuel that we frame by ethics but our relationship to the relationship between piston and fuel. Of course, this can be productive: ethical principles can serve as a speculative characterization of object relations. But they are only metaphorisms, not true ethics of objects.
> 
> Unless we wish to adopt a strictly Aristotelian account of causality and ethics, in which patterns of behavior for a certain type can be tested externally for compliance, access to the ethics of objects will always remain out of reach. It is not the problem of objectification that must worry us, the opinion both Martin Heidegger and Levinas hold (albeit in different ways). Despite the fact that Levinas claims ethics as first philosophy, what he gives us is not really ethics but a metaphysics of intersubjectivity that he gives the name “ethics.” And even then, Levinas’s other is always another person, not another thing, like a soybean or an engine cylinder (never mind the engine cylinder’s other!). Before it could be singled out amid the gaze of the other, the object-I would have to have some idea what it meant to be gazed on in the first place. Levinas approaches this position himself when he observes, “If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other.” That is, so long as we don’t mind only eating one flavor of otherness.
> 
> Timothy Morton observes that matters of ethics defer to an “ethereal beyond.” We always outsource the essence of a problem, the oil spill forgotten into the ocean, the human waste abandoned to the U-bend. Ethics seems to be a logic that lives inside of objects, inaccessible from without; it’s the code that endorses expectation of plumbing or the rejoinder toward vegetarianism.
> 
> We can imagine scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission: to characterize the internal, withdrawn subjectivities of various objects, by speculating on how object–object caricatures reflect possible codes of value and response. Object ethics, it would seem, can only ever be theorized once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour, caress, or murder one another.
> 
> Morton offers an alternative: a hyperobject, one massively distributed in space-time. The moment we try to arrest a thing, we turn it into a world with edges and boundaries. To the hammer everything looks like a nail. To the human animal, the soybean and the gasoline look inert, safe, innocuous. But to the soil, to the piston? Ethical judgment itself proves a metaphorism, an attempt to reconcile the being of one unit in terms of another. We mistake it for the object’s withdrawn essence.
> 
> This confusion of the withdrawn and the sensual realms allows us to make assumptions about the bean curd and combustion engine just as we do with oceans and sewers, drawing them closer and farther from us based on how well they match our own understanding of the world. But when there is no “away,” no unit outside to which we can outsource virtue or wrongdoing, ethics itself is revealed to be a hyperobject: a massive, tangled chain of objects lampooning one another through weird relation, mistaking their own essences for that of the alien objects they encounter, exploding the very idea of ethics to infinity.
> 
> We can imagine scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission: to characterize the internal, withdrawn subjectivities of various objects, by speculating on how object–object caricatures reflect possible codes of value and response. Object ethics, it would seem, can only ever be theorized once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour, caress, or murder one another.

Ian

On Jun 14, 2012, at 9:02 PM, Joe Flintham wrote:

> Hello
> Forgive me I'm a first time poster with a long history of lurking here and a some-time fascination with SR/OOO, and thankyou to everyone here for an exciting discussion.  I wanted to write something both as a way of thinking it through and asking the contributors about the possibility of separating the political from the ontological.
> 
> Tim Morton recently in one of his podcast classes on OOO summarised the development of SR/OOO as a response to correlationism, noting that where the Meillassoux strand of SR admires the correlationist approach and attempts to ground or legitimise the correlate, OOO instead accepts the correlationist limit but extends it to all relations, human and non-human. Perhaps I could borrow from the Heidegger legacy that comes through Harman to this analysis and say that OOO acknowledges the 'as-structure' that characterises being, and radicalises it to be a feature of all relations, rather than just human Dasein. I encounter you *as* something, as you encounter me; the cotton encounters fire *as* something, just as fire encounters cotton.
> 
> I therefore understand OOO not as a way to provide an ontology that is independent of epistemology, but as a transformation of the question of "how we know what is in the world" from being 'merely' a methodological problem, to a fundamental feature of being both an "individual" or "object" (such as a human, a toaster, or a quasar) as well as a component in an assemblage or world. Everything is interconnected, albeit while negotiating a fundamental inner rift in which we also encounter ourselves *as* something.  Again following Harman and Morton's reading of y Gasset, relations are tropes rather than literal.
> 
> In this sense the as-structure that runs through OOO thus seems to me to be very consonant with queer theories. No object is able to engage with other objects except through its own functional colouring, its own perceptual morphology, its own heritage and identity, whatever material or discursive agencies have been made to bear on that history. I understand Morton's take on the uncanny ecology in OOO to mean all objects confront each other suddenly as strangers, that we have no 'natural' categories to rely on, and no normative criteria to which we can appeal we can't even be certain of the extent to which we are either concrete individuals in our own right or fleeting instances playing the role of components within some larger being perhaps we are both both       representatives of a form or type, but also withdrawn and thus always capable of being something else, someway else. In this respect it very much means that markers of the normal are awash and abandoned.  Perhaps some of the tropes that have characterised the development of SR horror, the weird, anxiety resonate with the experiences of abjection that make queer such a powerful resource.
> 
> I think it is because this resonance seems so fruitful to me that I am perplexed by some of the claims by proponents of OOO that the political can be separated from claims about the ontological if we are constrained in our own ways by our as-structures, then right from the outset we encounter the world of human and non-human objects as profoundly political, raising uncanny questions of co-existence whether we are human subjects or neutrinos or cypress-flames. So OOO, far from allowing us to discuss "what exists" in politically neutral spaces, rather radicalises the political questions of ecology and "being-with" into the realm of the non-human, so that all objects are trying to 'work out' how to exist with each other whether to congregate or flee, embrace or destroy, swap DNA and code sequences, or annex and withdraw.  This doesn't prescribe a particular flavour of politics, but it does seem to make the political at least "equiprimordial" with the ontological.  I'd love to hear people's responses to these thoughts if you have anything to share.
> 
> Thanks,
> Joe 
> 
> On 14/06/2012 23:35, Robert Jackson wrote:
>> Hey All, I've been subscribing to this mailing list for a while now, so I'm glad this debate is getting aired I just hope it doesn't inherit the unfortunate slippage of tone that the blogosphere features typically in these types of discussions.
>> 
>> So, I really don't understand this criticism of OOO, which tars the ontological 'equivalence' brush with capitalism or neo-liberalism. This is straightforward reductionism in my eyes. There are plenty of political questions which need asking. But asking the question 'what is' need not be a politically contentious one. This is what SR is precisely getting away from, no matter what anti-correlationist critique one advocates.
>> 
>> The key issue here is sovereignty. If a current position can articulate contingent surprise within an ontology that's a start (even the early zizek took the correlated 'Real' has a sovereign theoretical given, to which ideology conceals or masks). For my money OOO (which Levi Bryant has argued), has an interesting proposition in that one could potentially argue that all real objects have an ambigious sovereign inner core of surprise which can never be fully articulated, by anything: whether benvolent dust mite or proprietary software. This might be a starting point for discussion.
>> 
>> Best
>> Rob
>> 
> 
> 
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