I really don’t find OOO to be all that compelling…
A few caveats: I’m feeling academically jaded these days and I admit to not having read all that much about it. That said, it stills feels like a bit of a fad, and another in a long line of insular academic jamborees that purports to be about the real world while not actually offering much to those who actually live there.
(context, for everyone else: we have an Object Oriented Ontology reading group…. and right now we’re reading selections from The Speculative Turn)
I hear what you’re saying, Luke. In some ways it does have the flavour of a trend. The first couple of readings for this week really bugged me, especially Harman’s. I find it pretty insufferable when philbros posture dismissively about all the important stuff that came before them, and which holds ground as valuable right now. Harman’s article was especially insufferable because it was like he didn’t think he had to actually explain himself, it came off to me as a boringly insular little disagreement that shouldn’t have been placed at the beginning of an anthology that will likely be the very first introduction to this body of thought a lot of people have. It’s not a strong way to lead off an anthology.
Skip forward though, and Levi Bryant’s article, the one I quoted from last night, is truly delightful. In him I see more what I’m looking for in this stuff. He articulates the potential of it, which is taking THINGS seriously as agents. Disrupting anthropocentrism. Through these kinds of interventions lie the possibility of reimagining how we relate to the world and it’s diverse inhabitants (and achieving this without recourse to cheesy new-ageisms.)
You may not totally identify with Jane Bennett’s stuff either, but I think she also plainly articulates the practical potential of this kind of move…
The Shaviro is also pretty good so far, and has finally pushed me to conclude that I need to read Whitehead.
I still have a few articles left to read, but if you read any of them this week make it the Bryant. He explains himself. He’s not a dick. I can’t say for sure if you’ll love it as much as I did, but I think so far he’s probably my favourite figure involved in this whole Speculative Realism/OOO movement. So yeah, give him a shot and see how you feel.
Luke and Jen raise some good points here, although I’m on the other side of things in terms of Harman’s work, as I think he is delightfully playful and appropriately incisive. I don’t sense him being “a dick” even if he is very confrontational. It’s his style of writing, much in the vein of how Zizek writes (what other philosopher today is so totalizing in his statements, I ask?). Harman’s work is explained intricately in Tool-Being, so if you want to hear how he defines and builds his work off, while marking a huge break from Heidegger, that’s the place to go.
As far as it being a fad or not useful, it’s Metaphysics for (non-occasionalist) god’s sake! Ontology is the study of - being - and not necessarily directly concerned with what Heideggar pejoratively calls ontic, epistemological problems. All metaphysics, which forms the base of how we understand what exists, isn’t always directly applicable to politics. Instead it provides a bridge upon which we can make arguments about how things exist. It gives us a core principle of knowledge, which then lets us do all kind of things like, like, say, science. We can only argue that science is in any way a meaningful human practice with ontology. So that’s a thing.
Object Oriented Ontology, and Speculative Realism, more broadly, are just another way of building up a base of knowledge, one that, I hope, can then serve as a way of thinking about the universe without us at the centre of reality. Think about how other ontologies have been put to all sorts of political ends, as in the case of Baudrillard or Derrida, whose materialist/textual ontologies say a lot of very different things about the nature of reality, and the very political things that we have to draw from that. I find that OOO helps me articulate a strong commitment to an unrepentant realism about reality, which I think then for those of us interested in social justice or say, the environment, can move away from a dystopian, totalitarian way of viewing objects in the world as just ephemera constructed by our brains. One thing I think OOO can help us start to understand better is the idea of the commons, which I think Tim Morton’s work shows off well.
Ultimately, I think its dangerous of us interested in the higher values of academia to suggest that when philosophy appears to have no direct impact on us that it is a fad or a useless appendage of the ivory tower that just circulates boring introverted conversations around itself. I think we need the highly specialized knowledge, jargon and discussions of all kinds of philosophy mixed with a strong dedication to working in the world, which I think many of those working in and around speculative realism are doing.
