May 30, 2012
Levi Bryant v. Graham Harman

towerofsleep:

sterwood:

Levi Bryant and Graham Harman have just posted some responses and reflections to each others’ philosophical positions. I think this is an important moment for both of them, as neither has really engaged with the other all that much, even though there are definitely points of contention present. I’d like to make a response post to both of theirs, if I get the time, but who knows if I’ll get around to that. In the meantime, I’ll just link to both posts, as they’re really great reads, and worth taking the time to go through.

Levi’s Post: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/harman-withdrawal-and-vacuum-packed-objects-my-gratitude/

Harman’s Response: http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/on-bryants-philosophy/

And, equally important, is Levi’s post that started this discussion in the first place, which was a response to David Berry’s horrible mischaracterization of Speculative Realism: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/worries-about-ooo-and-politics/

Finally, Graham hints in the article posted above that he plans to do a more sustained critique and engagement with Levi’s philosophy when the latter posts a more coherent presentation of his own position (though, I must ask, what does Harman regard “The Democracy of Objects” as then?). That hint is really exciting to me honestly, because I see much more fruit in the exchanges between Bryant and Harman than I do in the Harman/Meillassoux divide that’s much more common to see discussed (the more I read Meillassoux, the less reason I see for continuing to read him).

Great stuff! I’ve made no secret of the fact that Brant is by far my favourite object-oriented philosopher and I’m almost always on board with what he has to say. I’m less interested in Harman by himself, but the man is a great mover. Without Harman’s influence, Bryant wouldn’t be following the leads that he is. In fact, without Harman, it’s doubtful that anyone would be talking about OOO in the way that they are. My problem with Harman is that I think the essential problems he cares about aren’t that interesting — unlike Bryant, he doesn’t really like to talk about politics or ethics or even relations. He seems almost maniacally focused on his main idea of withdrawn, vacuum-sealed, individual objects. The ramifications of that idea, however, are far-reaching. As a scholar of Heidegger, Harman likes to talk about Heidegger’s pedantry. Heidegger, he argues, barely had more than a single idea, laid out over and over again in varying guises, but it’s a very deep idea that had an incalculable influence on 20th-century philosophy. Harman might turn out to be a similar figure, himself.

[emphasis mine]

I agree with pretty much everything here, except I wish to comment on the bolded part. I mean, isn’t it weird? He talks about politics quite a lot on his blog and elsewhere (especially with the Egyptian elections going on; he was posting a lot on that), but that’s just it: he posts on politics, not on the politics of OOO, or even the political possibilities of his philosophy more specifically. I have to wonder if it’s because he’s so indebted to Heidegger - maybe he sees something very dangerous about connecting his ontological theories with an explicit politics, as was the case with Heidegger. Maybe that’s why he’s so reluctant. I think Bryant’s right here though: there’s poltical/ethical/etc. consequences to Harman’s thought, and those consequences should be fleshed out and explored.

12:18pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyMR0nZh
(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: OOO Graham Harman Levi Bryant speculative realism philosophy 
May 30, 2012
Levi Bryant v. Graham Harman

Levi Bryant and Graham Harman have just posted some responses and reflections to each others’ philosophical positions. I think this is an important moment for both of them, as neither has really engaged with the other all that much, even though there are definitely points of contention present. I’d like to make a response post to both of theirs, if I get the time, but who knows if I’ll get around to that. In the meantime, I’ll just link to both posts, as they’re really great reads, and worth taking the time to go through.

Levi’s Post: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/harman-withdrawal-and-vacuum-packed-objects-my-gratitude/

Harman’s Response: http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/on-bryants-philosophy/

And, equally important, is Levi’s post that started this discussion in the first place, which was a response to David Berry’s horrible mischaracterization of Speculative Realism: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/worries-about-ooo-and-politics/

Finally, Graham hints in the article posted above that he plans to do a more sustained critique and engagement with Levi’s philosophy when the latter posts a more coherent presentation of his own position (though, I must ask, what does Harman regard “The Democracy of Objects” as then?). That hint is really exciting to me honestly, because I see much more fruit in the exchanges between Bryant and Harman than I do in the Harman/Meillassoux divide that’s much more common to see discussed (the more I read Meillassoux, the less reason I see for continuing to read him).

9:05am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyMQUmrj
(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: Levi Bryant Graham Harman OOO Materialist-Oriented Ontology Object-Oriented Philosophy philosophy speculative realism 
May 17, 2012
Larval Subjects: Speculative Realism, the Commons, and Politics

dropouthangoutspaceout:

I do think, however, speculative realism and onticology are able to exclude certain ethico-political positions or, at least, substantially modify the terms of the debate.  For example, it’s clear that under an onticological and new materialist approach to being, the normative axiomatics of liberalism and neo-liberalism can no longer be sustained.  Since Locke and probably before, that ethico-political framework has been based on the idea that our body is our property and that therefore we enjoy sovereign rights over our body (a position probably worth preserving), but more importantly that through the entanglement of our bodies with other entities in our labor we transform these beings into our property.  My land and my products are mine because my labor in working them over transformed them and made them extensions of my body.  Yet this idea is premised on the assumption that the products of my labor that result from interactive entanglement with the labor of my body remain in place, infringing on no other bodies.  I can do whatever I like to “my property”, the story goes, because it doesn’t affect any other body; or, more colloquially, it doesn’t affect anybody else.

This is a great post! FUCK YOU NEOLIBERALISM YOUR SHIT DONT STAY IN PLACE THAT SHIT IS IN THE COMMONS.

9:39pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyLhMmsi
(Notes: 14)
  
Filed under: ONTICOLOGY WUT OOO SPECULATIVE REALISM NEOLIBERALISM LEVI BRYANT 
May 8, 2012
"I want to have my social constructivism and have my realism too. In fact, I want to go so far in my realism that I even count social constructions as real. They are all too real for those who live with their negative effects and like an ecosystem they regulate the possibilities of lives, our ability to respond to pressing problems like climate change, and the lives of countless nonhuman beings. However, recognizing that a theoretical framework is limited and that more theoretical work needs to be done broaching different domains of analysis does not leave the original theory unchanged."

—

Levi Bryant - Social Constructivism Again: What SR Means to Me (via dropouthangoutspaceout)

I saw this post earlier but wasn’t able to get to it. Need to do that.

But…Yes! This is exactly why I get so excited about SR and am slowly falling in philosophy-love with Bryant. So many people under the “speculative realism” tag don’t want to engage with politics (in the widest sense), because it has to deal with people, and SR is supposed to focus on objects only (even though political structures are objects for them, but whatever). Bryant realizes that the point of this branch of philosophy is to expand the possible realm of philosophy though - to talk about objects and humans (as objects). If all objects have the same ontological grounding (flat ontology), then this has extra-ontological consequences for things like politics, race, gender, etc. Bryant’s the only one I see engaging with this element of all these ontological propositions (and maybe Grosz? I saw her labeled under the SR header once, but I don’t know if that’s an accurate description of her philosophy. She is at least trying to be realist in some sense.)

9:40pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyL96usa
(Notes: 12)
  
Filed under: Levi Bryant Social Constructivism Onticology OOO Speculative Realism 
May 2, 2012
"Being is the absence that appearances conceal."

—

Bataille; Guilty, p.84 (via meta-mash)

Damn, this is Object-Oriented as hell. Hella Object-Orientated.

I really need to stop being so focused on SR and OOO, but whatever. Maybe I’ll do that by trying to read Bataille. There was a paper about him at that conference I went to, and I’ve been interested ever since.

(via autochthones)

12:34pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyKlIgLz
(Notes: 41)
  
Filed under: bataille speculative realism OOO object oriented philosophy too much SR in my life right now 
April 17, 2012
"Faced with decades of content-based cultural criticism that implicitly, at least, adheres to Marx’s formula that the aim of philosophy is not to represent the world, but rather to change it, it is peculiar that such theory doesn’t seem to recognize that such cultural critiques seem to be fairly unsuccessful in producing their desired change. Here one would think that social and political theorists would become aware that this absence of change suggests that perhaps meanings, signifiers, signs, narratives, and discourses are not the entire story. One would think that in addition to these semiotic actors that play a role in collectives of humans and nonhumans, greater attention would be directed at the role of nonhuman actors in human collectives and the role they play in constraining the possibilities of existence. Such an attentiveness to these nonhuman actors would provide us with the resources for thinking strategies of composition that might push collectives into new basins of attraction. Whether or not a village has a well, a city has roads that provide access to other cities, and whether people have alternative forms of occupation and transportation can play a dramatic role in the form collectives take. However, in much of contemporary cultural theory, these sorts of actors are almost entirely invisible because the marked space of theory revolves around the semiotic, placing nonhuman actors in the unmarked space of thought and social engagement."

—

Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, p. 288-9.

Fucking. Yes.

11:03am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyJq7U4p
(Notes: 23)
  
Filed under: critical theory speculative realism object oriented ontology levi bryant continental philosophy 
March 31, 2012

hodos-ano-kato:

Okay I need to ask an honest question… Are these ‘speculative realists’ ontological, epistemological, platonic, scientific, mathematical or naive realists? Are they ALL of them? How do they qualify ‘reality’? Do they not know there’s a distinction? It makes their philosophies incredibly unclear (especially as regards representation and materiality)?

Edit: Wikipedia says they’re ‘metaphysical’ realists but this means literally nothing to me…

As I understand it, at least as far as Harman’s concerned (because he’s mostly who I care about), they’re definitely ontological realists (though it may cross over into other areas as well). The problem is that ‘speculative realist’ designates such a large area of philosophers, whose only bounding point is the rejection of ‘correlationism’ or ‘deflationary realism’ as Harman (referencing Dreyfus) has called it at times. As he put it himself:

“Speculative realism” is an extremely broad term. All it takes to be a speculative realist is to be opposed to “correlationism,” Meillassoux’s term for the sort of philosophy (still dominant today) that bases all philosophy on the mutual interplay of human and world.

That opposition to correlationism isn’t wholesale or homogenous though - that’s why the question you asked would have to be posed to every ‘speculative realist’ philosopher individually, because a lot of times what they’re defining ‘realism’ as can differ greatly, and even be directly opposed, to another speculative realist. As Harman put it in the next paragraph:

Please note that the speculative realists don’t even agree about what is wrong with correlationism! For example, what Meillassoux hates about correlationism is its commitment to “finitude,” the notion that absolute knowledge of any sort is impossible. But he doesn’t mind the correlationist view that “we can’t think an X outside of thought without thinking it, and thereby we cannot escape the circle of thought.” (He simply wants to radicalize this predicament and extract absolute knowledge from it. Meillassoux is not a traditional realist; German Idealism is his true homeland, just as it is for Zizek and to a slightly lesser extent Badiou.)

By contrast, I see the problem with correlationism as the exact opposite. I don’t mind the finitude part, which seems inevitable to me. What I hate instead is the idea that the correlational circle (“can’t think an unthought X without turning it into an X that is thought”) is valid. I see it as flimsy.

The problem is that ‘Speculative Realism’ was a coinage to label a group of thinkers as something preliminary. It’s like when a band is trying to think of a good name before their first show, and they kind of just throw one together because they run out of time, and then when they become famous they have to keep the name even if it isn’t fully appropriate or whatever. Most of the philosophers that were originally under that label have grown divergent from it, and that’s why the term is largely becoming more and more useless. Instead of designating a brand of philosophy, it’s more and more just designating “the philosophy of Harman, Meillassoux, Brassier, etc.”.

So, in short, the collective group designated by ‘Speculative Realism’ could be, and may in actuality be, all of those. But I don’t think any individual Speculative Realist is. That’s the difference (and probably why wikipedia would use a blanket designator like ‘metaphysical realists’ to describe them).

(I was pulling those Harman quotes from here, by the way, just for reference).

(Source: autochthones)

12:29pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyIsQkwe
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: hodos-ano-kato speculative realism harman meillassoux realism 
March 8, 2012
Corporations Are People Too: A Case for Object-Oriented Ecology

This is a really interesting (ecological) interpretation of corporate personhood. Instead of simply decrying the extension of personhood to non-human corporations, the post seems to see a legal/conceptual opportunity of taking similar ‘leftist’ steps in such a direction - i.e. that the space opened up by giving legal personhood to corporations creates the opportunity for such personhood concepts to be extended to things like the evironment, generally.

9:27am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyHfiYVj
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: ecology speculative realism object oriented ecology object oriented philosophy corporate personhood 
March 5, 2012
"There is always an unsounded suprlus in the things"

— Harman, Graham. “Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects”, p. 140.

8:53am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyHWElnO
(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: harman graham harman tool-being speculative realism ooo object-oriented ontology 
March 2, 2012

aporianonymous:

‘The brand of Latourian metaphysics advertising itself under the banner of ‘speculative realism’ strikes me not only as confused but as profoundly regressive. Those who, unlike Meillassoux and Grant, think they can afford to sidestep the Kantian problem of the relationship between conceptualisation and reality are peddling cartoon metaphysics for a philosophically benighted readership. Theirs is a ‘realism’ about anything and everything, as indiscriminate as it is inane. It is ‘speculative’ in the worst sense: arbitrary, self-indulgent, and frivolous.’

- Ray Brassier in interview with Nikola Andonovski (full text here)

Defending Harman because I like what he’s trying to do, and this is obviously about Harman (and a few others) and blah blah blah, it’s after a cut anyway, so whatever (I’m ambivalent/apathetic this morning it seems).

Read More

8:28am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZAjNTyHLCq8K
(Notes: 8)
  
Filed under: harman graham harman meillassoux quentin meillassoux brassier ray brassier speculative realism kant correlationism OOO object-oriented ontology tool-being Continental philosophy critical theory 
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