Deconstructing The Lulz

thanatropic:

In object-oriented ontology, what is the status of time? Is temporality only of the order of objects or does it exist independent of objects? Or is infinite process unthinkable to object-oriented ontology? Does every process have its Aristotelian telos built in? None of these dudes seem to care to talk about time but then make wild generalizations of antheopocentrism and it seems time and space would be central to this argument. Or are they simply pre-Kantian?

I’ve been wondering about the status of objects in relation to time as well, after reading Grosz’s book. I’m just going to bullet-point this to make life easier.

• I know Harman tries to separate SR/OOO by saying that the former is concerned with time (primarily, at least for Meillassoux), while the later is concerned with space. This is because Meillassoux find the contradiction of correlationism in the arche-fossil, in ancestrality, while Harman is primarily concerned with how objects, being non-present, are able to interact. (Side note: this is why I’m starting to get annoyed with claims that Harman doesn’t deal with the problem of access [partly his fault, he says he doesn’t]: how is vicarious causation not a direct response to the problem of access?). So, I think time could factor into OOO real easy, but the problem is that they see relations of objects in space as an ontological problem that’s “prior” to temporal relations. Considering Harman’s entire project is trying to establish this spatial relation, and OOO-directed theory of time would have to come after some of Harman’s insights (or any other philosopher that adequately addressed the problem of relations in space).
• I have no idea here. Keep in mind that objects only relate through a third mediator (as I’m understanding it, I’m really just getting to the stuff on Vicarious Causation now in Harman), though I guess that mediator could be time? Though, my personal feeling on this would be that objects exist independently of time - not in that they’re timeless, or not subject to time, but that time is a sort of ethereal space that objects relate to one another within. Any object would have to be separate, at least partially, from time, because every object withdraws from any network that it’s embedded into. Also, Harman has said that he rejects the notion that objects are always changing throughout every instant of time; an object persists, to some extent.
• Infinite processes are definitely thinkable within OOO and…
• Mostly every instance of OOO I’ve seen has rejected notions of telos, because a telos would imply some sort of “whole” that objects would possess, which just isn’t there.
• And they’re definitely not pre-Kantian - if anything, they’re fiercely post-Kantian.

Further, contra what interruptions said in reply to one of your posts (nothing against you, I’m just clarifying), Harman doesn’t talk about time in Tool-Being, at least as regards anything Heidegger said about time, because Harman explicitly states that Heidegger has no philosophy of time. He says if you want that, you’d be much better off reading Bergson.

Also, to reply to some of your other posts really fast (to conserve space), you say here that you have a problem with the phenomena/noumena divide. Fair enough, so does Harman. That’s actually his main problem with Kant: Kant says that the phenomena/noumena divide is too anthropocentric. He likes the notion of finitude present in it (the thing that Meillassoux wants to get rid of, by contrast) - that there’s always something in objects that escapes any experience of it (even self-reflexive experiences) - or, as Zizek put it, there’s always something in the object more than the object itself. All Harman really wants to do is explode the correlational baggage of only being able to think the correlation between world and being by focusing on objects and their relations to one another.

Keep in mind that Harman takes that dualism a step further though: there isn’t just presence/non-presence for objects, but also the objects existence as an individual thing and as a thing at all. Those are the two dualisms for Harman, and the crossovers between them is what makes his philosophy so dynamic, what makes the “quadruple object”.

Finally, I don’t totally buy that the anthropocentric remark doesn’t hold true for most of 20th century philosophy, or just post-Kantian philosophy in general. I really don’t think it’s just a critique of phenomenology/Husserl (especially since he says that Husserl is unique among continental idealists for being the only “object-oriented idealist”). I can’t think of anything I’ve read of poststructuralist, “postmodern”, post-phenomenological, post-whatever, philosophy that still doesn’t operate on the human-world axis (ontologically). Deleuze may break free of this, but I’m not sure on that one, but otherwise, I can’t really think of one. Foucault has his notions of power, yeah, but his power isn’t ever divorced from Human interaction in the world from what I’ve seen - there couldn’t be a notion of power given to objects themselves (and it seems to me, that even if social institutions are regarded as objects, Foucault wouldn’t be able to regard them as a single entity ontologically separate from the humans that make it up. So it still wouldn’t be the object exerting power, but the interactions between people at a different, but still-human centered, scale). And Zizek, the other main author I’ve read from that era, definitely is trapped in that bias, along with Baudrillard, Badiou, Derrida (from what I’ve seen), Lacan, etc.

I agree with Harman, from what I’ve seen, that a disregard for objects divorced from any sort of human experience of them has been an episteme of 20th century continental philosophy.

(I wanted to talk more about Grosz and why I think the notion of independently existing, non-inert objects are necessary for her theory of time, but this is running a little long as it is, so I’m just going to let it be and maybe talk about that another time. But yeah, as of now, this is where I stand on a lot of this, I think.)