[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman

[Rob Jackson]

Dear All,

Ok - so if the academic banter is to continue - lets make it somewhat jovial. 

@Edurado 
No-ones really being disrespectful or denying the importance of conceptual art. The flurry of activity both in conceptual art and it's twin contemporary; systems art was directly aimed at formalism (and especially Greenberg). So considering that OOO privileges unified objects beyond all context and relational construction, it does - in my opinion - arrive at a formalist Greenbergian standpoint where the artwork transcends its context. (in discussions with Harman earlier this year, we agreed as much, although I'm more of a Fried guy).

So what I'm saying is, don't be surprised if we criticise conceptual art because of this reason. There are other links too, regarding qualities, style, irreducibility, etc., and I posted something about them here [http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/05/homemade-philosophy-bogosts-carpentry-and-greenberg/]

But clearly, I'm the first to admit that any OOO/Greenberg semblance hybrid cannot repeat the traps that Greenberg found himself in. We aren't idealists. Nor do proponents of OOO privilege the type of work that the formalist critic did. We don't privilege one unit - or a set of units - and insert quality into them, rather it must work the other way round; that bad, vacuous, art without quality is the result of bad construction. What we take for being mundane, must be filled with depth, at all times - and not because of a conceptual twist of attitude which makes it so, but because all units are aesthetically equivalent.

@Rob 
If we're still going down this route of opposing a realist flat ontology because its "market friendly", then I doubt there's anything I can say to make this conversation move forward. All I can suggest is, don't expect (or choose to not expect) a movement - which in it's current iteration is not even a few years old - to be held responsible for this or that regime of power. Yes it's fun to try and ruin those who wax lyrical about a new methods and approaches, but you can't dismiss all future iterations of what is still a very young set of approaches (I'm usually bemused in conferences when someone tells me that 'OOO is over' and then someone else says 'everyone's doing OOO' - when in reality, hardly anyones actually read any of it). 

Regarding Duchamp - the legacy of Duchamp isn''t just irony or negative valences, he did something more fundamental to art production, the remnants of which the mainstream artworld is unable to shake off. He brought the necessary art object into line with its contingent reception. For this, we can be thankful, but its now indirectly responsible for some of the most boring art-come-participatory-events going, precisely insofar as the art market is obsessed with making contingent spectators the standing reserve for its own mediocre games. I'm not saying that OOO has an alternative to this, (I have a few ideas) but lets, at least, see if there is one.

best
Rob



On 28 Jun 2012, at 05:47, Eduardo Navas wrote:

> Dear Ian,
> 
> Perhaps the irony of your comment and critical position between conceptual art and OOO is that you appear to do to conceptual art what you claim Simon and others are doing to OOO.  I would suggest that if you are to dismiss conceptualism as you have been doing in the last few posts that you also put the time in understanding the history of conceptual art and its importance.  Or at least be more respectful of a field that is clearly not your specialization, and learn something from others in the process.
> 
> Anyone who has spent enough time studying the history of contemporary art is likely to be skeptical of your comments on conceptualsim just like you are of other people’s questioning of OOO who are not as familiar with it as you are.
> 
> I hope the discussion turns more insightful in the next few posts.  
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Eduardo Navas
> 
> 
> On 6/27/12 12:11 PM, "Ian Bogost" <ian.bogost at lcc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Simon, this conversation is a fool's bargain and I refuse to continue it. You suggest that what is worth doing—but not even doing, just reading, even—only *will have been* worthwhile after enough time has passed that it can be judged on the historical scale. This gambit amounts to a rationalist economics for intellectual work at best, and a terrorism against it at worst.
>> 
>> As for OOO, you'd see the links to Latour and Heidegger even more clearly if and when you choose read the works that make those connections very explicitly. The same is true for its take on toasters. I won't hold my breath.
>> 
>> Good luck with your conceptual art.
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
>> On Jun 27, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi Ian
>>> 
>>> Maybe I'm a little old, but 10 to 15 years seems, in terms of human thought, extremely recent. I have read some OOO texts though, during that short period of time. I've also had a little time to digest Kosuth's work, since it was made forty odd years ago. In retrospect his chairs might seem a simplistic reading of semiotics but I'd argue there is more to them than that. They're not just about signs and signifiers but also mediality, sociality and the performative. In the 1960's not many artists were addressing those issues.
>>> 
>>> I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest about popularity, or the value of a lack of it. Seems to me that OOO is popular - even fashionable, like the new aesthetic. I can also see links in OOO to Latour, although more so to Heidegger. Perhaps it is a non-phenomenologist's take on Heidegger? Whatever, it isn't fuzzy. Are things that simple? Can we assume there is some kind of residual and irreducible thinginess in things? A toaster can be an octopus - and whatever it might be, from moment to moment, it is rarely a toaster.
>>> 
>>> best
>>> 
>>> Simon
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 27 Jun 2012, at 00:34, Ian Bogost wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Jun 26, 2012, at 3:01 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> But Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point.
>>>> 
>>>> Kosuth's One and Three Chairs is about language, about semiotics. Like everything else has been, for so long. The fact that there are chairs, and there are photographs, and there are words—this is what interests me. The fact that conceptual artists can play pranks on the rich benefactors of museums and galleries is not very interesting to me. It's too bad, because when enacted, One and Three Chairs actually DOES begin to draw our attention to things in an appealing way. But not because the real is unsustainable. Rather, because the real is, well, real.
>>>> 
>>>>> I admit I've not read much about OOO and am yet to be convinced it is worth the effort. I've never been an early adopter - prefer to see the bugs ironed out of things, at least for one cycle, before buying the gizmo in question (and I'm mean with my money, so most often I never buy).
>>>> 
>>>> Harman has been writing under the shingle "object-oriented philosophy" since 1999. His first systematic take, the book Tool-Being, was published in 2002. That's a decade ago. Countless other books and articles on and peripheral to OOO have been published in the intervening time. Like it or not, his work and that of others has had an impact on many fields, even if particularly in recent years. 
>>>> 
>>>> If you aren't interested, fine. If you don't want to do the work, fine. But own up to it. Otherwise, it is too tempting to conclude that you wish only to adopt the ideas that prove popular, that become fungible among the same communities for the same purposes.
>>>> 
>>>>> My initial apprehension of OOO is that it doesn't seek to address the ontology of things as things but their relationships with one another.
>>>> 
>>>> This is precisely the opposite of the main contention of OOO, which holds that something is always left over in things, not used up in their relations. It also addresses, in various and sometimes conflicting ways among its proponents, how things can possibly relate given this basic fact.  
>>>> 
>>>>> The downside of OOO though is that it doesn't seem very fuzzy. I like fuzzy things. They are soft. I also don't like black boxes - and OOO, by its nature, will create black boxes (which brings us back to Plato - damn!).
>>>> 
>>>> OOO rejects the idealism of Plato (it's more like Aristotle, another tragically unpopular figure)—you won't find universal forms in OOO, nor even universal properties, or what Whitehead sometimes calls eternal objects. You're right though that OOO embraces the black box, just as Heidegger and Latour do, in different ways.
>>>> 
>>>> In any case, I think we've really hit on what's really going on here. OOO is threatening to many popular theories of art, culture, identity, politics, and so forth because it holds that a toaster is not an octopus. Somehow, we got so turned around in the last half-century, that we decided that a toaster not being an octopus is oppressive and dangerous. This is a fascinating lesson for me and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I'll have to consider it further.
>>>> 
>>>> Ian
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Simon Biggs
>>> simon at littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk
>>> 
>>> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
>>> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
>>> 
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>> 
>> 
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