[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

Sun Jun 17 03:50:03 EST 2012

Well starting off in the last week is difficult.   So much going on over the last three weeks.   Thanks to Zach and Micha for the invite and  to everyone else offering some great thoughts  to ponder. 

As for discussion around feminism, queer and OOO/ SR  There are (still/even more)  worrisome issues  of oppression, exploitation and repression   that come to mind with queer, feminist, postcolonial, anti-race, debility theoretical/political formations  but there also are troubles which are before us,  feminist neoliberalism or  pink washing and queer, for examples.  Politically, institutional arrangements are much more complicated than identity politics sometimes presented itself as being  in the demand for subject  recognition  which led to decades of debate on the truth of representation and the deconstruction of  the authority of discourse with a hesitancy  to reference the real in support.   Here a certain Althusserian/Lacanianism played a weighty part  and then add   Derrida  Spivak Butler Foucault Berlant, Sedgwick  and more. For many of us this work has been a go to intellectual and political resource for some time.  Clearly these authors  put philosophy  intimately in play with a politics (often  Marxism, and then Marxism plus) that was easily felt in their work.   In  OOO/SR , this tight connection is less obvious if there at all.  What I do not want to overlook however is that OOO/SR came when the former (not necessarily the thinkers themselves) was not easily working as an intellectual resource in the face of several issues:  what to be said about political economy except to say again and again neoliberalism or even biopolitics (even though I keep saying those);  what is to be said about subjectivity and the unconscious after deconstruction and along with a profound transformation in social media;  what is to be said about the human, the organism as figure of life, about matter  after posthumanism and with the development of various technologies we should call biotechnologies (but now all technology seems to have always been) or even more incredible nanotechnologies?  What to say about the persistence but varied forms of racism oppression exploitation?  How to let all this feed back to rethinking our philosophical assumptions?

I think that for some of us OOO/SR made us think again about the intellectual resources for our work and how to address some of the questions I just raised by turning us to ontological issues beyond constructivism asking us to critically address the assimilating act of human consciousness embedded in most of our materialisms (thus the new materialisms and  a recent paper by Liz Grosz on matter and life is exquisite here) .  This new materialisms  comes in part as a response to recent developments in technoscience  and as a social scientist (of sorts) I am so aware that social science leans on scientific assumptions if not ideals that need updating to say the least. But I think this is the case for many of our materialisms. This rethinking of technoscience including digital technologies has in part raised interest in OOO/SR   and  that is the case for me.   But I am not sure that  the elective affinity between  digital technologies,  the growth of computational studies  and algorithm studies etc.  and OOO/SR yet has been well stated.  I do not think that all OOO/SR thinkers find this to be  central while some do.   Debates around OOO/SR with which Steven Shaviro is involved usually speak to digital technology  (and Bogost of course)     All this to say that the 'affect' that I have most written about is the Spinoza Deleuze Whitehead Masssumi  Parisi version (although I want to talk more about feelings and emotions this week).  The Spinoza Deleuze Whitehead Masssumi  Parisi version of affect I believe has always required an ontological shift (which is central to the Affective Turn volume). That  ontological shift has everything to do with the way affect is experienced through a technological intensification  since it is otherwise preconscious if not nonconscious and a-social   While language generally is an intensifier  I have been more interested in intensifications that did not necessarily raise to consciousness but simply intensified experience  inciting resonances rhythmicities   oscillations etc.  and which then could be about bodies other than human ones or organic ones--queering body.  This seemed to require an ontological shift, one involving  matter.  I have been arguing for some time that matter is affective or informational (well maybe we should just say energy) and this  led me to OOO/SR.   But before checking out OOO/SR  I was much indebted to Deleuze and the others   and  since  studying OOO/SR  I feel the noteworthy tension  between Deleuzians and  OOO/SR (although there are those trying to negotiate the tension as I am).   During the next week  I want to offer some thoughts (and can't wait for response and interventions) about  this tension in relationship to affect.  I hope we can discussion  more the recent focus on aesthetics which has enabled me to think in the tension rather than against it  and find a way as well to dwell  in rather than  simply put an end to the  aporia between ontology  and epistemology that affect and non-human perception produces.   I think  aesthetics and the turn to Whitehead's rereading of Kant points to a way to engage the liveliness of  what Eugene Thacker calls a world without us  or not for us.    

Finally,  during the first week  I much enjoyed all the sites to which I was sent and all the efforts to make stuff, queer stuff, with  digital technology as well as with other technologies.   This doing along with thinking (crude way of putting it) seems important to a critical engagement with what we once would have called  knowledge production.    Looking forward to ongoing conversation(s)   Patricia 

________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Michael O'Rourke [tranquilised_icon at yahoo.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2012 1:15 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

There is also Levi Bryant's essay on Ranciere, queer theory and his onticology in the journal Identities and numerous well-thought blog posts at Larval Subjects on "phallosophy", queer theory and posthumanism and the Lacanian graphs of sexuation, Morton's "Queer Ecology" essay in PMLA and the essay on the mesh and the strange stranger in Collapse. As Ian says below he has engaged with OOF and been pretty instrumental in helping bring this sub-field of OOO to a wider audience (delighted to hear there is a follow up meeting in the works). And Harman has discussed feminism several times on his blog (while admitting an Object Oriented Feminism is not within his field of expertise) and he has tackled the object/objectification issue: http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/objects-and-objectification/

So, it would be fair to say that all four main figures associated with OOO have engaged with both feminist and queer thinking. Still, there's lots more to do!

Michael.

--- On Fri, 15/6/12, Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lcc.gatech.edu> wrote:

From: Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lcc.gatech.edu>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Date: Friday, 15 June, 2012, 13:53

Jack,

Thanks for these comments. Before I dive into you're comments, I'm going to point you to a reflection on the matter by Tim Morton, since he is not a member of the list but has been reading the archives, and hoped someone would link to him.

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/06/ooo-gender-sexuality.html

Ian - I am reading and enjoying very much your book Alien Phenomenology right now so no offense meant in terms of the masculinity orientation of many of the OOO conversations. But to try to flesh out why we might worry about such an orientation and to respond to Michael briefly here are a few elaborations on that them

That's very kind on both counts.

2. What is that larger problem? Well, as any Feminism 101 course will show us, the gender hierarchy that assigns male to the 1 and female to the 0 in the binary coding of gender, also assigns male to the status of subject and female to the status of object. Hence, having occupied the status of "object" for some time within both the symbolic and the imaginary of the cultures within which we participate, surely the category of "female" should allow for some access to the question of what is it like to be an object.

Surely! But—also surely, you don't think I disagree? Nor Harman, nor any of the others who have been mentioned in this context. Or do you? I'm not being coy, I think it should take more than a study of someone's bibliography to conclude that they are excluding a whole category of being. Particularly when their entire philosophy is built on the assumption that all that is exists equally.

After Butler, object oriented philosophy, it seems to me, would have to pass through the gendered territory of the subject/object relation.

Have you read Levi Bryant's account of objects in relation to Lacan's graphs of sexuation? It's in Democracy of Objects, which is available online, or here's a short post: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs-of-sexuation-and-ooo/

4.  And since Michael believes that the onus of representation/critique falls to those who say they have been left out, one word: Fanon!

I'm not sure what how to respond to this comment. All I think Michael meant is that the opportunity space for analysis is open, and those with different backgrounds, interest, and commitments can take it on. I know you don't mean to suggest that dropping names like Fanon and Spillers on an email list is sufficient rhetorical work, but neither is it  sufficient to conclude that all questions have been already answered by a favorite theorist.

So, ok, if women and racialized bodies have all too often been rendered as "things" in the marketplace of commodity capitalism, and if a lot of the work on on Object Oriented Philosophy leaves the status of the human unmarked even when rejecting it in favor of the object and relations between objects then surely we need a queer and or feminist OO philosophy in order to address the politics of the object.

I have no objection to this. Why would I, right? Surely once more, you don't think I would, nor Harman, nor Morton, nor Bryant, nor anyone? You'll find at least one comment in Alien Phenomenology, albeit very brief and really just cursory, that touches on this issue, later in the book. Katherine Behar organized a set of Object Oriented Feminism sessions at the 2010 SLSA conference, to which I was fortunate to serve as one respondent. You can find the abstracts at the following link, along with my response from the conference: http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml.

Behar is organizing a follow-up at this year's SLSA, which will include Patricia Clough, Katherine Hayles, Eileen Joy, Jamie Skye Bianco, Anne Pollock, Rebecca Sheldon, and others. Is this a sufficient measure? No, of course not. But it's a start of something, just as Harman tried to start something, rather than a quick judgement meant to fuel an engine of reprisal.

Again, I think this is what Michael was saying. Let's just do the work!

Ian

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