[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Timothy Morton]

Hi Davin,

We obviously treat different entities differently.

But this is not the same as saying that these entities are ontologically different.

Yours, Tim



http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

On Jun 20, 2012, at 5:51 AM, davin heckman <davinheckman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you Ian, for these thoughts.  My initial encounter with this
> work came via a brief discussion of "flat ontology," which I found
> somewhat offputting.  I followed up by reading through the re:press
> book.  What I like the most, I suppose, is the sense that the
> discussions are in motion with a lot of people participating.
> 
> Reading some of the discussion of mereology, I find they resonate with
> one of my favorite passages from Hegel.  Pardon me for cannibalizing
> another piece of writing (a draft of which can be found here:
> http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/disturbed-dialectic-literary-criticism).
> *
> In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the dialectical process:
> 
> "The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one
> might say the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the
> fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false
> manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of
> it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another,
> they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the
> same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in
> which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary
> as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of
> the whole." [1]
> 
> Viewed from within the Hegelian process, the Real is positioned
> outside its present manifestations, consisting, rather, of the dynamic
> processes that comprise its totality.
> 
> This insight, crucial to critical practice, requires revision in light
> of technical change. By revision, I do not mean that we need to
> fundamentally alter Hegel’s argument, I only mean to suggest that we
> see this passage with respect to new temporal modalities that have
> shaken up the pursuit of knowledge.
> *
> I come at many of the same issues, but my inclination lead me to
> embrace a kind of "humanism," but one which cannot easily understand
> as we continually muddle the conversations of humanism with an
> ontology that is expressed in our metaphors.  One grip I have with the
> use of Deleuze or McLuhan, is the idea that our capacity to
> personalize prosthetics has a tendency to be reduced to a situation in
> which it becomes possible to imagine that we see machines,
> interpersonal relationships, people with tools, etc. as the same
> thing.  When, in fact, my psychic investment in my bike or computer,
> while deep, is not nearly as deep or as complex as my psychic
> investment in my (which I can only refer to as mine with a sense of
> obligation to, rather than ownership over) child.  If my bike decided
> to bite me.....which it can't, even if it can hurt me....  I would not
> feel so simultaneously restrained in my response AND emotionally
> florid as I would if my 8 year old bit me for some crazy reason (but
> with my three year old, I he is only a missed nap away from engaging
> in something so obvious and horrible as biting someone).  A bike, on
> the other hand, can hurt me a lot more than a bite from a toddler, and
> I suppose I am not above kicking a bike and yelling....  but I have
> very limited feelings about a bike malfunction or hitting my thumb
> with a hammer.  On the other hand, a bike goes wherever I want it to
> go (except when there's an accident).....  a toddler, not so much....
> an eight year old, he usually comes with a counter proposal (and it is
> a monstrous adult that would treat kids like a bike, insist that they
> only go where told, speak when it is demanded).  A lot of really deep
> thinking about human subjectivty simply does not go this far....  and
> part of this has to do with a poor understanding of objects.  What is
> worse is when this understanding infects interpersonal relationships
> in the context of a Randian sort of world where there is "no such
> thing as society, only individuals" (yet, bosses treat workers like
> bikes and bad boyfriends treat their partners like robots).
> 
> I am very excited to read more.  I feel like it is important to free
> our thinking from patterns and habits of the past.  In particular, the
> culture of academic citation has gone from being about finding good
> ideas where they are to deriving authority from the aura of the great
> figure.  I also have no problem with accumulations of wisdom that
> translate into an inherited perspective, but this can't close us off
> to thinking.  So....  thank you for this!
> 
> Davin
> 
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lcc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>> Davin,
>> 
>> I'm about to disappear into a mess of meetings, but let me offer a brief
>> response:
>> 
>> What you're touching on here is what Levi Byrant sometimes calls the "weird
>> mereology" of OOO. The song isn't "just" the sound waves (what Harman calls
>> an underming position) nor is it just the social context of creation and use
>> (an overmining position). A song is a song, and indeed, the song in an MP3
>> file is a different thing than the song as an abstraction in human culture.
>> Neither is more object nor more real (well, "real" has a different meaning
>> for Harman than it does for Levi and me).
>> 
>> I talk about this a bit in the first chapter of Alien Phenomenology, and
>> Levi does as well in the mereology section of Democracy of Objects. Also,
>> here are a  blog post from Levi on the subject that weaves the two
>> together: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/more-strange-mereology/
>> 
>> I'm not answering sufficiently but wanted to get something out to you
>> rapidly.
>> 
>> ib
>> 
>> Ian Bogost, Ph.D.
>> Professor
>> Director, Graduate Program in Digital Media
>> 
>> Georgia Institute of Technology
>> Digital Media/TSRB 320B
>> 85 Fifth Street NW
>> Atlanta, GA 30308-1030
>> 
>> ibogost at gatech.edu
>> +1 (404) 894-1160 (tel)
>> +1 (404) 894-2833 (fax)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jun 15, 2012, at 4:11 AM, davin heckman wrote:
>> 
>> Ian,
>> 
>> Since we are on the topic of OOO, I was wondering what the ontological
>> status of something like a song is?  I have to admit, I have a real
>> hard time swallowing a pure ontology that essentially defines the
>> subjective as outside of being, as a sort of on or off proposition, as
>> opposed to also a turning on (or is it being turned on? Or simply to
>> be turned or to turn?) (I am generally skeptical about a variety of
>> posthumanisms that go beyond a critique of a monolithic Humanism,
>> because I think that consciousness carries specific tendencies that
>> seem to fundamentally frame all possibilities for knowledge).  However
>> it is entirely possible that I am missing out on a discussion that has
>> been unfolding without me.
>> 
>> But here's my thought:  With a song, you have something that can be
>> rendered in "objective" form....  maybe an mp3 file or a sheet of
>> notes or record or something.  If this is what we mean by a song,
>> then, fine, that's an object.  But a song only really starts doing
>> something when it is unfolding within the context of memory and
>> anticipation.  It only is a song when it is listened to by a subject,
>> which is to say it is an object that has a singular temporal being as
>> it is listened to, which is distinct from how it is being listened to
>> and replayed even by the same user.  (And we aren't even beginning to
>> talk about non-recorded music).  The only way a song becomes a purely
>> discrete object is when it is removed from its temporal existence and
>> understood as a totality, and detached from an audience.  And while we
>> can sit around and all talk about, say, "Another One Bites the Dust,"
>> after we squeeze it into a conceptual file type and label it, the fact
>> that we can discuss something that can only mean something if is
>> experienced as a process AND an object within the context of a
>> experience, suggests that sometimes being is realized by the relations
>> of things, rather than the things themselves.  My suggestion is that
>> the ontological nature of the song cannot be described in objective
>> terms without missing what a song is.  Without the non-objective
>> component of its being, a song is just sound.  If we say, well, "Hey,
>> when this sound occurs, people do X, Y, and Z," we can find ourself
>> thinking that these effects are produced by the object, but this sort
>> of thought experiment only gives us half an understanding of the
>> object's being.  You also have to think of that song in relation to
>> the current context, to itself over time, to the individual and
>> collective experience of its audience, to the culture, etc. Again, a
>> great means to produce estrangement, but not the complete account of
>> what the thing is.  At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I can see
>> that it might be expedient to regard a distant moon without regard to
>> its historical relationship to the human.  It's useful to think of a
>> distant moon as a quantity of data.  But the closer we get to human
>> existence, the more likely we are to encounter types of things that
>> exist, but that cannot be understood properly as a bundle of discrete
>> data.  Maybe there are some texts that address precisly these sorts of
>> concerns.
>> 
>> This is where I think ontology cannot simply be objective.  It must,
>> of course, be able to establish the differences between things, to
>> render those things it claims to understand in discrete form, insofar
>> as they can be considered as such.  On the other hand, we know that
>> most of what the world is made of is common and that the laws of
>> physics, for instance, harness discrete things under a kind of
>> continuity.  So, along with the conditions of radical difference that
>> a philosophy of objects implies, there are the conditions of radical
>> connectivity.  Both features are equally present, which is to say they
>> offer us little in the way of productive knowledge EXCEPT insofar as
>> we can bind and sever, cut or tie, digitize or analogize within this
>> framework of matter.  The 21st century loves digitizing things.....
>> it helps computers see the world, it helps them count us, predict our
>> behavior, weigh it, value it, direct it, etc.  But the digital is only
>> half of our existence....  the analog process is equally present in
>> language and cognition....  and it is just as equpped to help us
>> understand the world by creating categories of things and identifying
>> common qualities.  In "Notes on the Uncanny," Freud identifies this
>> struggle as productive of a kind of unsettling (the person that acts
>> like an object/the object that acts like a person)...  but it does not
>> simply have to be a "scary" process....  the move from discrete to
>> connected or from one into multiple can also be deeply satisfying and
>> reassuring of being.  If both processes are equally useful, then what
>> presides over these two tendencies?  Temporal consciousness that can
>> mobilize processes of digitization and analogy?  Another place to
>> think through this is in relation to a variety of attempts at
>> taxonomy.  At some point, a poodle has to be a poodle and a wolf has
>> to be a wolf, but in relation to squids, both can be canines.  We
>> could say that well, we are talking about layers of qualities that
>> enable us to categorize this object or that object.  But without the
>> history of the poodle we don't really know how one canine can be a
>> fashion accessory and the other is a part of a wild ecology, all of
>> which (domesticating work dogs, turning tool animals into fashion
>> animals, thinking about animals as people, killing wild animals,
>> restoring wildness, etc) radically alter the parameters of being based
>> on thoughts about being.  To take it back to queer thought, around the
>> bend of singular identities is the knowlege that such queerness does
>> not preclude deep relationality.  My reading is that the fruits of
>> this thought are an affirmation of the idea that the well-worn paths
>> of prescribed human behavior do not necessarily lead to earnest
>> relationships, it is not to reject relationship itself in favor of
>> individualism because capitalism has been doing this since the
>> transformation of labor into commodity.
>> 
>> Why does this matter?  I care about politics, but I am not going to
>> say that OOO cleaves to this or that kind of politics....  it doesn't
>> matter.  If a statement is discernibly true, then I have an obligation
>> to bend my ideas around the true statement.  And my sense, based on
>> very limited reading, is that OOO is trying to figure out what we can
>> know about being.  So, while it is worth considering the political
>> implications of speculative thought, I think Galloway is a bit wrong
>> to suggest that something is "bourgeois" or something just because
>> financial markets also offer a flat ontology via capital.  The only
>> thing that really matters is whether or not a philosophy can get us to
>> a mutually agreed upon knowledge of the world that can be transmitted
>> effectively from one context to another and continue to be useful.
>> 
>> I have been lazy about following this month's discussion, but I like
>> the idea of queering technology, of the productively broken tool.  It
>> is an area that has affinities with regards to my own reading of
>> electronic literature.....  taking Jakobson's discussion of poetics up
>> through Darko Suvin's discussion of "cognitive estrangement," and
>> looking at the ways that digital literary practices perform a similar
>> process with regards to instrumental languages. My thought is that OOO
>> is productive in that it asks us to engage in a thought experiment
>> about pure objectivitiy, and in doing so, reveals the critical
>> necessity of subjective and intersubjective aspects of human being
>> that are embedded in our broader assertions about being.  I think that
>> a lot of the "posthumanisms" try to simply go beyond something that we
>> have never understood in the first place: that being human is
>> essentially a kind of queer existence, all the much more so when we
>> insist that it is not. For my part, I want my human rights.  So while
>> I am sympathetic, generally, with many of the aims of the
>> posthumanists I encounter, I generally think that "Humanism" has yet
>> to adequately describe being human.  Like Habermas said of modernity,
>> it's daunting and messy and incomplete (like most things worth doing).
>> Living in Norway right now (moving in a couple weeks, unfortunately),
>> humanism seems to be working out pretty well here.  The problems of
>> the world do not stem from a love of humanity, they stem from our
>> growing estrangment from humanity and increased clustering into
>> paranoid, exclusionary enclaves (Why do you think everyone watches
>> Zombie movies? Blasting away at legions of dirty anthropoidal morons
>> trying to eat what you have, a perfect gospel for post democratic
>> capitalism).  In a world of Darwinian evolution, we are not entirely
>> selected, we alter the landscape of an objective process through our
>> dialogue with an objective sphere that exists, that we inhabit, and
>> that we think about, but which does not simply constitute us.
>> 
>> I admit these thoughts are poorly formed....  and I am very busy these
>> days....  so I might not be able to reply as quickly as I would
>> normally.  But am very interested in these conversations.
>> 
>> Davin
>> 
>> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 4:16 PM, frederic neyrat <fneyrat at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> 
>> I would like - if possible - to get one or two examples about the
>> 
>> objects concerned by your statement:"all objects equally exist, but
>> 
>> not all objects exist equally." I guess - but I just guess - that the
>> 
>> first part of the sentence is ontological and the second part could be
>> 
>> political, but maybe I'm wrong. Thanks in advance.
>> 
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> 
>> Frederic Neyrat
>> 
>> 
>> 2012/6/14 Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lcc.gatech.edu>:
>> 
>> Ok, sigh, let me try this again.
>> 
>> 
>> The "as much as" is not a judgement of value, but of existence. This is the
>> 
>> fundamental disagreement that played out in the comments to Galloway's work
>> 
>> and in the many responses elsewhere. The world is big and contains many
>> 
>> things. I've put this principle thusly: "all objects equally exist, but not
>> 
>> all objects exist equally."
>> 
>> 
>> It's possible that such a metaphysical position isn't for everyone. But if
>> 
>> your idea of "being political" is as exclusionary and deprecatory as both
>> 
>> Galloway's post and my limited experience thusfar here on empyre, then
>> 
>> perhaps you can explain why that a model worth aspiring for? Why that is
>> 
>> virtuous and righteous?
>> 
>> 
>> 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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