[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[micha cárdenas]

Hi all,

I'm sorry i've been MIA in all of this wonderful discussion we've been
having in the past few days. I've been working on some deadlines,
sewing for hours, and am starting a performance workshop with pocha
nostra today and I'll continue to be lightly present.

BUT I do want to chime in here to say that I absolutely agree with
Lauren and Jack. Lauren's phrasing

> you have also to account for your own prioritization of
> things that seem normatively to be things over things that normatively seem
> to be human. As Jack points out, there's a complex political and
> definitional history there.

was very illuminating to me. And, at the risk of just repeating what
Jack said, but in the hope of adding to it, it seems to be that if
SR/OOO is a field concerned with theorizing beyond the bounds of the
human, or decentering humanity from our analytical frameworks, then
isn't the question of who or what gets to be human and who or what
doesn't absolutely central to that discussion? And the theorists that
Jack lists point out, the definition of humanness has always been
bound up with social categories like race and gender, but also
ability, despite the differently abled person's frequent designation
as less than human and ability to subvert the whole object/subject
distinction through prosthesis and nationality as more and more lives
now seem to matter less, like coltan miners and the many people killed
in Mexico daily because of the US hunger for illegal drugs. Can we
really move to go beyond human experience when the experience of so
many humans is already so ignored? Then aren't we at risk of just
reproducing our human structures of power and inequality in the form
taken by our very attempts to theorize the quasar?

I also think we should understand Jack's claims at OOO being
masculinist carefully, since he did write a book called Female
Masculinity, and yet I also think that it is a highly important claim.
It seems to me that femmes are also close to that category of people
who often don't count as people, and femmes and femininity are
constantly subject to being labeled as not productive, not part of the
conversation, not relevant, or illogical and overly affectionate.

As much as a deep consideration of all that is not human seems so
pressing in this time of ecological collapse, I think it is very
necessary to take the first step very carefully. As Ian cited Derrida
and Jack and Lauren are urging us back to Spivak, we might want to
return to Gyatri Spivak's preface for Of Grammatology where she states
"If you have been reading Derrida, you know that a plausible gesture
would be to begin with a consideration of 'the question of the
preface'". It seems like the question of who or what count as human is
stil a very important step that we're not at all done with and it's
hard for be to prance into the field of lilies that OOO is inviting me
to consider so deeply until that step is more complete.

I'd also like to share some reflections on humanness from Pocha Nostra
to enliven and embody this discussion a bit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luLE1dNJm6Q

thanks,

  micha


On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 10:29 PM, lauren.berlant at gmail.com
<lberlant at aol.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> I'm revving up for next week, but I would like to add some things to the
> discussion among Ian/Michael/Jack. I hope this will be useful. (Many of you
> are friends or friends-in-law, and I am showing fidelity to that by speaking
> and speaking frankly.)  I imagine that Patricia, having come to speak
> speculative realism, will have lots to say about this discussion too.  Me, I
> work on affects of attachment and the ways those dynamic movements within
> proximity engender forms of life--I'm on the Latour side of things,
> resonating with it through Laplanchean anaclitic psychoanalysis and an
> aesthetics derived from, without being orthodoxly, Spivak (unlearning),
> Deleuze ([un]becoming), and Cavell (ordinary language philosophy). Or, I'm a
> materialist queer writing sentences to induce some arts of transformation,
> which is I think why I am here, although I've wondered about that during the
> last few weeks.
>
> 1. Re the Bogost/Halberstam convo.
>
>  Ian writes that "all objects equally exist, but not all objects
> exist equally," and I couldn't agree more. But like Jack I think it matters
> to attend to the relative impact of both clauses of this statement.  If you
> believe it then you have also to account for your own prioritization of
> things that seem normatively to be things over things that normatively seem
> to be human. As Jack points out, there's a complex political and
> definitional history there.
>
> 2.  But more interesting to me--and addressed to us all, not just Ian--why
> should thinking about things in relation not be interfered with by other
> idioms?  Recalling Zach's entries and my own inclinations too, where does
> interference (the glitch suspending the movement of the system, the noise
> that proceeds within which form manifests, take your pick) make its way into
> our methods, imaginaries, or concepts?  Why is Jack's attention to the
> history of what classes are served by disciplinary conventions deemed some
> kind of threat to productive conversation?
>
> Those of us who write from queer/feminist/antiracist/anticolonial
> commitments have debated a lot whether, how, and when it matters that some
> statements are held true as though the second clause,"but not all objects
> exist equally," didn't exist (this is, I think, Jack's argument against
> abstraction and universalism).  I like abstraction and universalism more
> than Jack does, but that's because my orientation is to want more of
> everything. not less of some things. I want the terms of transformation to
> proceed  through idiomatic extension and interruption, huge swoops and
> medial gestures, the internal frottage of contradiction and irreconcilable
> evidence... I'm an impurist.  What are the incommensurate ways we can
> address the scene of that thing in a way that changes that thing?
>
> As Jack writes, it matters who is cited:  who we think with and the
> citations that point to them build and destroy worlds, they're both media
> and bugs in world-building. The clash of intellectual idioms is a political
> question too because it shapes the imaginary of description and
> exemplification. The clash of idioms is inconvenient, and I would like also
> to say that it's part of a queer problematic represented here certainly by
> Zach and Michael and Jack and me too, although I sense that where Jack and I
> are looking for discursive registers that allow us to say everything we know
> in all the ways we know it,  Zach and Michael's fantastic written work is
> more likely to make arguments in specific idioms (sometimes sounding all
> cultural studies, sometimes critical theory, sometimes arguing in the modes
> of disciplinary philosophy) depending on the conversation.  We might also
> talk about polemics v analytics. I'm less polemical than some of us here.
>
> I think it's important that we talk about this question of knowledge
> worlds (of accessibility, of purity [high/low,
> disciplinary/transdisciplinary/undisciplined/syncretic epistemologies and
> idioms]), in a discussion of queer new media and of how its criticality can
> operate.
>
> 3.  Re Michael/Jack's argument about masculinism, Warner, etc.  I kind of
> agree with Michael and Ian that calling something masculinist (from you,
> Jack, that's kind of astonishing, but of course it was a shorthand for the
> elevation of abstraction over sensual life in all of its riven
> contestations) is probably not too clarifying or accurate, but it is
> pointing to something important, which has to do with "all objects equally
> exist, but not all objects exist equally."  Warner's practice has always
> been to posit queer as a practice and orientation as against identity
> politics, which he takes to be over-bound to the signifier (as does
> Edelman).  My orientation has been to attend what happens when we mix things
> up, or remix things up, and as I have written collaboratively with these two
> guys and been cast as the vulgarer in both cases, all I can say is it's
> always instructive to enter into the affective space where some things are
> anchors so other things can change. That's true for all of our practices,
> which is why I've spent some time here pondering what kinds of argument have
> gotten bracketed or foreclosed so that other things can seem innovative and
> productive...
>
> Ta!  This is fun!
> LB
>
> Lauren Berlant
> George M. Pullman Professor
> Department of English
> University of Chicago
> Walker Museum 413
> 1115 E. 58th. St.
> Chicago IL 60637
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lcc.gatech.edu>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Sent: Thu, Jun 14, 2012 8:50 pm
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
>
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
micha cárdenas
PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California

New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research

MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
http://amzn.to/x8iJcY

blog: http://transreal.org