Object-Oriented Philosophy

OOP vs. eliminativism
via Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek on 2/27/09

Now here’s a debate well worth having. Splintering Bone Ashes seconds my feeling that a new eliminativist wing is on the rise. Opening paragraph:

“I think Graham Harman is right on the money with this post sketching possible future outcomes for Speculative Realism, (the latest issue of Collapse colliding with the brain like a series of brutalising punches, in the best possible way). Really it comes down to a simple issue (I think), of whether emergence between scales of structures is an actual ontological property or not, and the relation or articulation between the ontic and the ontological, between beings (of all different kinds, non-human and human) and being itself (and how far we can push such a distinction before it loses intelligibility). To what extent is emergence an epistemological constraint (we see a structure, formed from a subsidiary structure, the micro-level obeying certain laws, the macro certain other laws, and whilst one is certainly the result of the other, it appears to emerge in a dynamic manner, multiplicative rather than merely additive, but this is simply because our grasp of scientific modelisation is theoretically inadequate…)- or is it an actual ontological property (as Levi and Latour hold). Is this the final gasp of correlationist anthropism (freedom in a scientistic guise?) Can we have an ontic principle of irreduction alongside an essentially eliminativist ontological monism?”

And of course I’m with Levi and Latour (and DeLanda) on this issue– that emergence is an ontological property rather than just an epistemological constraint. But this is a debate well worth having.

Another debate well worth having is whether objects break down at some extreme micro- or macro-level, though I can already imagine myself unimpressed with what will be offered as the result of the breakdown: “heterogeneous continuum,” “field of pre-individual intensities,” or something along those lines. I’m never sure why individual objects are so vile that so high a price is paid to get rid of them.

But this would be great. What if I could wake up every morning and the big debate was between the eliminativist and non-eliminativist wings of the post-SR landscape?

“Iowa patriotism”
via Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek on 2/27/09

This is probably meant as a rip job, but it’s still fun:

“There is all sorts of overdone ‘Iowa patriotism’ in American culture. There’s ‘all I owe Iowa’, I think that may be from ‘State fair’, and then ‘The Music Man’, which has the song ‘Good Night My Someone’ in it, and I imagine Mr. Harman sings this to an extremely exotic Egyptian candle each night, reminding him of just how far he’s come.”

Iowa is also the butt of a lot of jokes, though we don’t get it nearly as badly as places like West Virginia and many Southern states.

It’s also a fairly misunderstood state in a couple of ways. It’s sometimes viewed as an utterly remote place, though it’s really not. (Though not too much is going on there specifically, there are a number of fairly major cities within striking distance in other states.)

Also, people imagine it as physically flat, which is not the case. It’s more rolling and glaciated. And there are many more trees than people think.

Finally, I was recently shocked to learn that Iowa has the highest percentage of people of any state who have travelled to a foreign country. That’s a big surprise to me and to the person who reported it to me.

The Obama Incident of January ‘08 helped put the state in a favorable light internationally. Iowa is probably best described as highly educated and tolerant, though in a sub-avant garde sense of educated.

And no, there are no candle rituals of any sort, but I do often reflect on how fortunate I’ve been. My late grandfather used to study maps and atlases with a gleam in his eye, and took such “vicarious” delight in the stories I was able to tell him about various countries; as a child of the Depression, he never got any further than just across the Michigan line, not even as far as Toronto. I’m more than willing to take a few shots from pseudonymous cynics in order to share my enthusiasm with others who are less cynical.

In fact, a good definition of philosophy would be: “the systematic production of naiveté.” That’s worth a post of its own someday.

Sloterdijk news
via Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek on 2/27/09

dreamduke:

“Society and Space just issued a special issue on Sloterdijk so perhaps this will change.”

Yes, it might. And on the continent it’s hard to miss the excitement in certain quarters about Sphären. (The fact that it doesn’t exist in English certainly doesn’t help its cause in Anglophone quarters, but the very fact of its not having been translated is revealing. No Zizek or Derrida book of that scope would have remained untranslated into English for this long.)

Here’s another thought I have…

The easy “critical” move to make is to mock the perpetual public taste for “the next big thing” in philosophy. It’s easy to look serious simply by posing as someone above all transient fashions.

But I view that constant search for the next big thing as an unmitigated positive trait of the contemporary reading public. It ensures that lots of different people will get a fair hearing… If people are starting to get a bit sick of Deleuze and Badiou for the moment, then –hey!– maybe the Anglophone world will give Sloterdijk a try. I see no problem with that. There’s nothing wrong with trying new restaurants as long as we don’t delude ourselves and others about the nature of the meals. And in the long run, we’ll get a fairly honest of sense of how all the restaurants stack up against one another.

Much worse would be holing up somewhere like, say, Adorno, and sitting back and scoffing at everything new that appears. Not sure what that gains you other than the unearned opiate of feeling superior to everyone who’s running around and working hard looking under rocks for new treasures.

So, I’m all in favor of the frantic search for the new. Most new stuff won’t work out as well as hoped. So what? You have to try.

on renouncing former opinions
via Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek on 2/27/09

When going over these last pages of Prince of Networks, I found something in the “vicarious causation” essay (Collapse II) that I now think is simply wrong, and I’ll be including a different view on the matter in the forthcoming book.

In Guerrilla Metaphysics, I think my criticism of panpsychism (which is somewhat sloppily conflated there with vitalism) misses the point, and I view the term much more favorably than I did even a year ago. (Though I think the ‘pan’ in panpsychism is an overstatement.) This has already been addressed in my “Zero-Person and the Psyche” essay in the new Skrbina anthology.

In Tool-Being (in the Zizek section), I think I was too quick to sign up with the term “retroactive causation,” and in fact it works as a bit of a Trojan Horse against my position.

These are some of the things I’d like to change in what I have written. And I was realizing today that this is one of the real strengths of the culture of analytic philosophy. There is no problem in that culture with saying “I’ve changed my views on this subject,” and someone like Hillary Putnam is famous for having done so every few years.

In continental circles there’s always something slightly awkward about it, as though it were a sign of instability or inconstancy– “how can we trust your other views, then?” It’s never explicitly stated, but always faintly implied. More often people will brag that they’ve felt the same way about an issue for 35 years, or whatever.

“letter from a second extreme supporter”
via Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek on 2/26/09

“They don’t have lives. Therefore they like to advise sailors from the shore.”

“letter from an extreme supporter”
via Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek on 2/26/09

And today I’m repaid by nomination for the sainthood:

“I don’t want to belabor this moment too much or run the risk of excessive flattery(!) but I was reminded by the severe critics – in the negative, of course – of this sentence (posted once before two years back at Levi’s) from Zizek’s discussion of the problem of liberal multiculturalism in his Afterword to Revolution at the Gates (174):

“This indifference towards the Other’s jouissance, the thorough absence of envy, is the key component of what Lacan calls the subjective position of a ’saint’.”

Which reminded me, in turn, (here’s the flattery part) of this post of yours:

“If there is one area of ethics in which I can claim absolute sainthood, it is that I have never, ever told someone ‘not to get so worked up about’ this or that. Sincerity and absorption are the stuff of life, and I’d rather see somebody get really upset over a small thing than to listen to a pompous lecture about self-containment from someone who ought to be preaching to himself. There is a certain smugness in claiming to be above whatever happens to you.”

Thanks, man.

But it’s true that I like to see other people succeed.

which reminds me
via Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek on 2/26/09

Last post of the night.

And this one may be a quasi-senile repetition, speaking of strange combinations of events.

In April 2006, due to a weird series of missed and delayed flights, I probably became the only person in history ever to visit the centers of Reykjavik, Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Cairo on the same day. It would be very hard to do if you planned it that way, but airline miscues made it possible, leaving me just enough time to exit the Glasgow and Amsterdam airports and kill a few hours in those cities to complement the early morning in Iceland’s capital and the arrival in Egypt’s capital at around 11 PM.

In January 2003, due to an equally weird series of flight mishaps, I may have been the only human ever to take the following series of flights: Cedar Rapids-Minneapolis-Amsterdam-Budapest-Cairo

Trivial, to be sure, but I’m always fascinated by how easy it is to do something utterly unprecedented in human history. (Such as taking Kant’s Prolegomena into a wedding in Cairo’s Sultan Hassan Mosque, which I ended up not doing for various reasons related to the clothing I chose for the event.)

Or, how often we can catch ourselves using combinations of words that cannot possibly have been uttered before. I’ve already mentioned “smoked picnic and a water product” and “yes, did you just speak with my brother about a monocle?” as two such examples.

Another possible candidate was overheard by a friend of mine in Santa Fe: “That’s true of your apartment here. But for your apartment in Naples…”