[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

Sat Jun 16 15:17:22 EST 2012

Thanks to you too Jack for the conversations. Much of the debate we have been having will shape my Queering speculative Realism book this summer so its been really productive for me.
Cheers!Michael.

--- On Sat, 16/6/12, Judith Halberstam <halberst at usc.edu> wrote:

From: Judith Halberstam <halberst at usc.edu>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Date: Saturday, 16 June, 2012, 6:06

Soft Skinned Space people and particularly Lauren:
thanks for a great conversation this week, can't wait to see what comes next. Thanks Lauren, so much for picking through the thickets of miscommunication and mixed idioms and finding the threads of some important conversations. I love the idea of a distinction between people who want "more of everything" versus those who want "less of some things." I can definitely find myself in that binary and could make a long list of things I want less of...but I won't.
Thanks also to Ian for the direction to Tim Morton's blog, great post there that he should maybe bring over here about bugs (something to do with Heidegger) in the philosophical systems that pull us back to certain repetitive conversations when we might want to move on to others.
Loved all the Turing talk and look forward to next week's soft-skinned-spaces.Over and out,Jack
On Jun 14, 2012, at 10:29 PM, lauren.berlant at gmail.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

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