p.s.

p.s. Actually, it looks like there are plenty of uses of the term afoot. James’s story doesn’t even show up near the top of a web search. But I’ve never heard the term used in philosophy circles before.

What’s wrong with “object-oriented philosophy”? Nothing, except that it’s a bit long and bulky. I’m perfectly happy to keep using it. Ultimately, it’s the public that decides these things. Once you get labelled in a certain way, there’s little chance of shaking it, so you may as well see the bright side of whatever you get called.

It’s rare to hear Heidegger called an “existentialist” anymore, but he was saddled with the term for decades, despite his objections.

word in use

Peter Erdélyi notes that “ontography” was already used by Michael Lynch of Cornell. I’m just up with a brief bit of insomnia and have only half-scanned the paper, but Lynch’s very nice paper is obviously in complete opposition to my own views about things. He’s one of those STS people who happens to think everything should be done empirically. He says, for instance:

“Ontography would involve the same sort of mundane, deflationary transformation as suggested by epistemography and ethigraphy. To put it in practical terms, the first step is to establish the salience of ontology to some case under study. This step presupposes that ‘ontology’ is not always and everywhere salient, and that when it is salient it remains to
be determined just how it is salient.”

Also no mention of M.R. James’s comical use of the term, so unless it turns out that “ontography” in Lynch’s sense has really caught on in the STS lexicon, I’ll go ahead and use it in my different sense (with a footnote to Lynch).

Thanks, Peter.

fun with PhotoBooth 3 (final one)

And this, the spooky “glow” option. The ship is much clearer here than in the thermal photo.

fun with PhotoBooth 2

With the thermal option, it becomes clear that I do not yet have swine flu. You can also see my chandelier, and the never-explained ship on the mantelpiece. An old mariner must have lived here once.

fun with PhotoBooth 1

Towards the end of the big party late Saturday night in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England.

ontography: the rise of objects

When I speak of “the rise of objects” it’s partly wishful thinking, but also partly fact.

Latour is old news in most disciplines in the humanities, but he’s still unspoiled wilderness for philosophy. (In fact, analytic philosophers generally seem to l now more about him than continentals. He’s had serious discussions with Putnam and Searle, among others, but from continental figures outside France the most I usually get in response to his name is: “Who? Bruno Latour? Oh yeah, I think he’s a philosopher of science.”

This is really a mistake. And I wrote Prince of Networks to help change this situation.

Latour is an unusually powerful writer and thinker, long misunderstood in ways that were only clouded further by the Sokal-era “science wars.”

Latour doesn’t actually use “objects” in a positive sense; he’s a bit like Heidegger that way. But his “actors” or “actants” is a term that does a lot of powerful philosophical work. (My criticisms of the failings of this term are on record– essentially, I think he has an excessively relational model of what a thing is. But the virtues of his position far outweigh the negatives as I see them.)

Recently, LEVI HAS BECOME A POWERFUL CONVERT TO THE CAUSE. So has Nick at The Accursed Share, though the results of that interest have been less visible so far than in Levi’s case.

The situation is really quite simple, as I see it. We have tried so many permutations of the post-Kantian option that places the human-world relation at the center of all philosophy, with object-object relations tossed aside to the natural sciences. Philosophy in many circles has come to be identified with the primacy of the human-world relation over all others. (See for example the statements of Zizek, whom I greatly admire, that “Kant was the first philosopher.” And he really means it.)

Ultimately, the only way to escape a tiny, crowded room is not to find new ingenious twists for looking at our imprisonment, but simply to leave the room.

Yes, I’m well aware that many people think phenomenology already turned that trick. As a passionate admirer of phenomenology, I feel qualified to say “nonsense” to that claim.

Saying that we are not isolated Cartesian subjects, but are always already involved with a world, and things of that sort, does not solve the problem. It still leaves human and world as the two personae in every philosophical drama, even if the human part is given dehumanized names such as “Dasein” or “subject.”

The litmus test is always quite simple: are you willing, as Whitehead was willing, to say that the relation between cotton and fire plays by the same rules as the relation between human and fire? If so, then welcome aboard– you are one of my people.

The reason many people resist this suggestion is that it sounds like “positivism,” by which the critics really mean naturalism. In other words, it sounds like I’m suggesting that the human-world relation be reduced to the plane of brain chemistry or the motion of atoms.

No. This would be to privilege the sole reality of a physical micro-realm and claim that the human world is merely derivative thereof. That’s not what I’m claiming at all. Instead, I’m claiming that just as the reality of a hammer withdraws from human Dasein in Sein und Zeit, so too does the reality of cotton withdraw from the fire; the fire does not access all aspects of the cotton. (Or even any of them, but that’s a more complicated point for a different time.)

What I’m arguing for, in other words, is not a scientific naturalism that can be used to reduce Dasein to a brain governed by physical laws. I’m arguing instead for a globalized Heideggerianism, pushed even into the so-called inanimate realm, in which the being of beings lies concealed even from raindrops and wood.

Levi doesn’t accept all of these points, but he accepts enough of them that it is already possible to speak of a small new “movement” in this already post-speculative realist age(two people is enough to count as a conspiracy in the judicial system, so it should be enough to count as a movement in philosophy),.

I say “post-speculative realist age” partly for perversity’s sake, and partly in the continued awareness that speculative realism was always a loose grouping of four highly different orientations united mostly by shared enemies, and was never going to hold together very easily.

Levi has already been using the term “object-oriented philosophy,” and it’s good enough. (There was already a “theory of objects” in the Austrian philosophy of the late 19th century, but it was a bit different– not as concerned with inanimate causation, and obviously not inhabiting a post-Heideggerian landscape, which for me at least changes a good many things. I like reading Alexius Meinong, but he doesn’t send chills down my spine the way the best passages of Latour or Husserl do.)

I’m also going to add another term to the mix, in a half-joking spirit… While in Suffolk last weekend, I picked up that collection of M.R. James ghost stories. Another party guest and I were trying to remember the academic discipline of the pedant character in “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” In the film version he’s a pompous ordinary language philosopher, but we both knew he was something else in the written story. I thought it was in the natural sciences, but in fact it was in a discipline called– Ontography.

Ontography.

M.R. James meant it as an absurd term, not as a compliment. But the same was true of “impressionist,” “fauvist,” “queer,” and many other such terms. It’s often a good idea to pick up an insult and use it as the name for a school or a discipline.

And isn’t “ontography” a pretty good name for what I’m doing? Geographers who make maps have a limited number of basic personae to deal with: rivers, woods, highways, mountains, and the occasional giant television towers.

By analogy, “ontography” would deal with a limited number of dynamics that can occur between all different sorts of objects.

But terms are not worth obsessing over. I say that not because they are misleading or “worthless,” but because they are merely practical. I don’t mind if people call what I do speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, or guerrilla metaphysics, because all of these terms are accurate too.

Any system of philosophy should have at least 4 or 5 different names, because the brain is easily bored or tired by repetitions of a single technical term, over and over.

needs to be more covered

This story has gotten so little coverage that even Peter Hallward hadn’t heard of it when I mentioned it to him (and he’s usually a walking encyclopedia of stories of political outrage against minority groups).

An innocent Egyptian woman was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom by a man she’d complained about for calling her a “terrorist” on the playground where she’d taken her son.

The accused somehow was able to stab her 18 times and kill her in the courtroom. He then attacked her husband as he tried to protect her.

Worse yet, the security guard dashing into the room seems to have assumed that the Arab guy must have been the assailant, and shot him in the leg rather than the white guy who was actually wielding the knife.

It’s the most sickening story I’ve read in a long time.

http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-articles/6786-egyptian-woman-s-death-germany-outrages-egyptian-blogosphere

Actually, there are many stories on the incident if you check Google. This just happens to be the most recent one I found.

Poor Marwa, poor poor Marwa.

Composition of Philosophy. July 14.

I’ll do one of these posts per day, discussing progress on the manuscript, as well as the problems and breakthroughs that arise.

I’ve mentioned the title and background of this project several times, but here is a brief review.

The project was supposed to be a French translation of my first book, Tool-Being. When the calculations were done, Tool-Being turned out to be far too long for a translation to be affordable.

So, we proceeded with the financial problem foremost in our mind. I could write a brand new book. An abridgment of Tool-Being doesn’t interest me in the least, and was never suggested anyway; it would probably take more time than simply writing a new book. Besides, Tool-Being was essentially in its current format on the day of my dissertation defense on March 17, 1999. Though many of the central themes of the book are still valid, I’ve learned a lot over the past decade. A new book was the right decision.

Another constraint– a translator would be needed for the new book. I can’t possibly write a good book in French. I was happy to be able to write one intelligible lecture in that language for the ENS in January.

Obtaining the grant should have been easy, but turned into a silent two-month political battle for reasons not suitable for recounting here. Projects can have human enemies, and I agree with Latour that these political battles are not different in kind from battles to shape the arguments in the book itself. The only difference is that the political part may not be appropriate for sharing on a blog, at least not until many years have passed. Otherwise, such battles are just as much a part of the book as the chapters found within its covers. They are part of the “constraints” that have a fruitful impact on any project.

Once the grant was obtained, calculations were redone. This will be a short book at 43,000 words. Actually, the French calculate translator payment by the number of characters. This is a more logical system than the number of words, but one that is not familiar to me, and I’ll have to force myself to do character-counts along with the usual word-counts.

43,000 words is one constraint. The other constraint is a limited number of days in which to do the writing. We agreed on September 1 as a submission date. Certainly, I could probably string it out a bit longer than that, since the translator is unlikely to be finished by the end of August. (For all I know, he might be on vacation and in no mood to start the project until Fall Semester.)

However, I don’t want to push it past September 1. I have to speak at the conference in Manchester in early September, and once school starts in the fall I’ll be unbelievably busy.

My summer travels only ended last night. Today and tomorrow belong to administrative duties. This means that I can’t start writing until Thursday, which is July 16. All told, that makes 47 days in which to write 43,000 words. It’s not too tough, when you think about it– around three double-spaced pages per day.

However, I’m not going to go at the pace of three double-spaced pages per day. That’s not how I work. On writing days, I generally write 7-12 double-spaced pages, and it doesn’t feel that hard, as long as I have an outline prepared for those pages in advance. 15 pages is not too much of a strain. 20-25 pages is my upper limit. I don’t think I’ve ever written more than 25 pages of philosophical work in a single day. (On certain days I write a lot more e-mail than that, but obviously one can afford to be a lot sloppier with e-mail than with philosophical writing.)

What will I do instead of slowly writing three pages per day?

Early on, I noticed that 43,000 words is roughly the same length as the first third of Tool-Being. That first third consists of nine sections. For the purely arbitrary sake of familiarity and the don’t-mess-with-success principle, I thought I’d divide this new book into nine sections as well. Let’s call them chapters.

In any book project, I think it’s important to start off with a clearer recapitulation of past results, and then move into new material. Like Foucault (I agree with so much of his practical advice despite not being a great fan of his philosophy) I think it’s important not to know in advance exactly where the book is going to end up. The sense of uncertainty adds a bit of passion to the authorial advice in the earlier chapters. Even more importantly, I find that most of my most valued breakthroughs come from addressing intellectual obstacles that arise during the writing itself.

In this particular case, initial outlines showed the following picture:

Chapters 1-4: knew exactly what I want to say

Chapters 5-8: knew sort of what I want to say

Chapter 9: knew exactly what I want to say

Now, I think it’s important to create the bulk of a manuscript as quickly as possible. The main problems I faced in writing my dissertation (otherwise known as Tool-Being) is that I continually rewrote the first five sections for several years. Life was starting to pass me by. My friends were starting to finish faster than I was. My morale was sinking. I was reading too much (granted, I was reading Heidegger Gesamtausgabe volumes, which were directly related to my project, but there was no real need to finish them all before finishing my dissertation– though in fact I did so). [ADDENDUM: I use the term “Gesamtausgabe” loosely here. There aren’t 84 individual volumes in the official Klostermann edition yet; I’m counting the volumes of correspondence put out by other publishers.]

Because of that horrible experience of continually rewriting the same sections, I changed my writing methods forever. Now, I try to reach a critical mass of pages as quickly as possible, even if they are not yet polished. You can always go back and polish them later, and usually it is far easier than you can imagine. 100 rough pages are infinitely better than 20 polished pages, in terms of keeping morale high.

For this reason, I couldn’t avoid the temptation to move chapter 9 backwards so that it immediately follows the other four chapters where I already know exactly what I want to say.

That gave me the following new picture:

Chapters 1-5: know exactly what I want to say

Chapters 6-9: know sort of what I want to say

Experience has shown that the momentum built up from writing Chapters 1-5 as quickly as possible will provide a great impetus for structuring Chapters 6-9.

There’s one other point, though. Chapters 6-9 are not a suitable close to the book. The reason is that they are all on the same level: all talk about the same problem from one of four different angles. Thus, they do not give the sort of sequential development that would lead to a proper conclusion. It would be like writing a nine-chapter book on The Beatles and having the last four chapters be individual profiles of each of the four band members. Do you see what I mean? It wouldn’t really work. You need a more overarching conclusion that isn’t limited to just one topic such as “Ringo.” What a ridiculous way that would be to end a book on The Beatles.

So, I really need a tenth chapter. This needs to be a summation of everything that has been said, and also needs to set the table for the possible doubling of the book. (A French cultural agency might give us a matching grant to double the length of it, but we can’t even apply for the grant until 20% of the translation is completed. So, I have to write the 43,000 words ambiguously in such a way that they can either be a self-contained book or the setup for a more daring second half of the book. This will be tricky, but it can be done.)

Having ten chapters has a certain pleasing simplicity to it. It means that the other nine chapters will have to be slightly shorter, but I enjoy that constraint as well, since I think I sometimes overexplain certain points in my book (it’s the teacher in me), and it probably wouldn’t hurt to become just slightly more allusive on certain points. One should never go too far with that, but a good balance is necessary.

There is also the matter of an Introduction. They are good to have, but generally go on far too long. Think of a book Introduction the way you would think of the person introducing a visiting speaker. The point is to give the audience some taste of what they are about to hear, but in the end the audience came to hear the speaker, not the introducer.

For this reason, I was delighted by the accident that the number of words is not exactly 43,000, but rather 43,388. This gives me an arbitrary reason to shoot for a nice brief Introduction of 388 words. In point of fact, I’ll have to edit the final version of the book looking at the number of characters, not words, but 388 words is an excellent target for an Introduction.

Then, 10 chapters of 4,300 words apiece.

How easy is it to write a 4,300 word chapter in a single day? Incredibly easy, if you know exactly what I want to say.

So, my new (and modifiable) plan is to write the first half of this book in just five days. If all goes well, just one week from now I will have not the current zero pages of this book written, but somewhere around 60-70 pages.

Once that’s done, the rest of the summer will feel like a breeze. Stress will fall to a minimum. I can go up to Alexandria for 3 or 4 nights and enjoy the winds off the ocean and the clang of the streetcar. I can take the 60 or 70 pages with me to edit. Or better yet, I can just take an empty notebook and brainstorm exactly how to organize the tricky Chapters 6-9. (The summarizing Chapter 10 should be no trouble whatsoever once the first nine are finished.)

I hope that sounds easy. If you’re around 25 years old and this sounds beyond your current rate of production, don’t worry, I couldn’t have done it myself until my late thirties. If you’re serious about your work and really want to do it, you will find a way to put it on paper. Just don’t give in to the waves of melancholia that can strike when you feel like a young student/slave.

In fact, you’re not a slave. It’s true that your professors aren’t listening to you very much, but that’s because they have their own concerns, and are usually more worried about the people above them them on the food chain than the ones below them. (Remember the rule: your careers are made by people older than you are, but your reputations are eventually made by people younger than you are. Your professors probably feel harassed by Chairs and Deans, and have no time to persecute you, except for a handful of well-known sadistic sickos, and the older grad students in your Department warned you about those fairly early. Why did you get near them, even though you warned not to do so? This one is your own fault! But it’s not too late to correct it. Choose an advisor you like and respect. Don’t choose a horrible person as your advisor for reasons of area, or what is far worse, because you think their famous name will help you on the job market. It’s not worth it. If you’re good, you’ll get a job eventually.)

Only in a few rare cases are you actually being persecuted or abused by your advisor. And if that’s the case, you simply need to find a new one, which is almost always possible. Most people stay with nasty advisors out of a private masochism. Ask yourself why you’re such a masochist, and figure out how to stop being one. Graduate programs want their students to finish. It makes them look stupid and feel a bit sad if they invest a lot of money in a student who never finishes. The “I got in an argument with my advisor” excuse for an unfinished dissertation is the saddest of them all, even though there’s usually a grain of truth in the complaint. Change your advisor. Or better yet, to repeat: don’t choose bad ones in the first place! Older students are a treasure trove of gossip about which professors are rotten people worth avoiding at all costs. (Don’t get your other professors involved in this. For one thing, it puts them in a tough position with their colleagues. For another, we honestly don’t always know which of our colleagues are rotten to students. I’ve been repeatedly shocked to find that students adore people I can’t stand socially, while valued friends turn out to be loathed by students, and apparently for good reasons.)

All right, away from that interlude and back to a few closing words about the book.

I’m not going to be giving detailed philosophical arguments in these posts. If you want those, read the book. But I’ll have to give some pointers as to what I’m up to, intellectually, or these posts might not even make sense.

One difficult tightrope for this book is Heidegger. The French public currently knows little to nothing about my reading of Heidegger. France remains fascinated by Heidegger. And after all, everything I do in philosophy comes out of a specific unorthodox reading of Heidegger. Tool-Being is what they wanted originally, and Tool-Being is mostly about Heidegger.

At the same time, I’m personally quite sick of Heidegger. Earlier today I finished reading the 84th volume of Heidegger in German that I have ever read, and currently there are no other volumes available. So I’ve done my Heidegger homework as well as anyone in the world, short of people like Theodore Kisiel who actually dive into the archives and read all the unpublished material years before it hits the shelves (more power to him, but it’s not who I am; I’m not an archivist by temperament, and over time you’ll learn your temperament). Many of my orthodox Heideggerian critics simply haven’t read as much Heidegger as I have. I spent my entire life from ages 19-29 thinking Heidegger was basically right about everything other than politics, so it was not the ambition of my youth to spraypaint his car with graffiti, and that’s not what I’m doing now. The point is simply this: I have fully earned my right to say that I am sick of Heidegger, admiring his genius though I do.

But “sick” is actually a little bit of an overstatement. I still like reading and rereading his books. What I’m actually sick of is beginning my own books with references to Heidegger. Partly it’s just fatigue. But partly it’s that it would be somewhat insincere of me to start this book with Heidegger. Why? Because he is no longer the actual point of approach to my own work.

In the old days, whenever I’d set myself to philosophizing, I’d always start by reawakening Heidegger’s tool-analysis in my mind, then follow to all the unorthodox conclusions to which I think it naturally leads, and then try to push it a few unpredictable steps further.

That’s no longer how it works for me. By now, Heidegger is more of a “crucially important figure,” not a current mentor. The ideas I work with now are too far removed from Heidegger’s own concerns, and hence the tool-analysis is no longer the best starting point for any book I write.

Chapter 1, therefore, will use a different starting point, the same one featured in my recent lectures in Bristol and Zagreb– the three basic options of a philosophy of objects, or their respective undermining or “overmining” by positions that don’t regard objects as of fundamental importance.

Heidegger and Husserl are going in Chapter 2. For me, unlike for Latour, Husserl, or even Heidegger, there are two kinds of objects, and only two kinds. It is in this sense that I oppose a purely “flat” ontology.

The occasionalism/scepticism pair (and I do think they are a natural pair, as expressed in my recent lectures) go in Chapter 3. The history of philosophy starts looking very different once occasionalism and scepticism are seen as a natural pair. Kant looks even more paradoxical than he has seemed in my past scattered remarks on him in published books.

The fourfold structure of objects (the book is called L’objet quadruple, after all) goes in Chapter 4.

Chapter 5 is already a bit more strange– an argument not quite for “panpsychism,” but for “polypsychism”. While I don’t think it’s incorrect to say that “inanimate” entities perceive, I do think it’s wrong to say that all things perceive. In fact, many objects at any given time are “sleeping,” or in a technical term stolen from the French– dormant. Things perceive not insofar as they exist, but insofar as they relate to other things. And readers of Prince of Networks will recall my somewhat anti-Latourian conclusion that not all things relate.

Chapters 6-9 deal with the major theme of my lectures in the past two years: the time/space/essence/eidos quartet. All four of these really do all belong on the same level, and given that time and space are rarely grouped with anything other than themselves, a number of surprising conclusions emerge.

Chapter 10 is the summation and the setup for the possible second half of the book.

If all goes well, we will walk together through the writing of the entire first half of this book over the next week.

Incidentally, the length of this post is over 2,900 words even though it took not very long to write. I’m not sure exactly how long, but it wasn’t much over an hour. Granted, blogging (at least for me) is quite a bit faster than writing a work with publication in mind, but the point should be clear– it is possible to write at surprising length as long as you know more or less exactly what you want to say. That’s why an outline is useful, as the pre-existent spine of a still-uncreated creature.

preface to the Composition of Philosophy

Earlier, I announced plans to “live-blog” the writing of my next book. This was inspired partly by my rereading of Poe’s hilarious “The Philosophy of Composition,” which takes us step-by-step through the writing of “The Raven.” (But Poe did it after the fact, having no access to real-time readership in the blogosphere.)

It was also inspired partly by my increasing realization that the primary readership of this blog is made up of talented graduate students stalled by writer’s block, stress, or personal issues. My qualifications for addressing this readership is that I was once a member of the same demographic group, but have managed to reach the point where writing articles is about as easy as washing the dishes. This is no boast, but a sigh of relief. I was never sure if I’d get here. My dream since age 16 was to write interesting philosophy books, and now I am living that dream, and wish to share the experience with others who may have similar ambitions. I also benefitted greatly from the advice of older mentors during my twenties, and feel that I should return the favor in my own way, with my own voice.

I’ve been informed that a number of students will be reading these posts either of their own volition, or on the advice of their professors. It is for their convenience that I have created “The Composition of Philosophy” as a category in the right-hand column of this page. Return to these posts as you see fit. And if you miss a day or two, it won’t matter.

Manchester in September

Here are the initial details on CRESC IN MANCHESTER in early September, where I’ll be one of the plenary speakers.

I think there’s still a bit of uncertainty about who will speak on which day (namely, there was too close a call between my flight arrival time and my supposed speaking time, so either the flight or the speaking slot will be changed, and I should know the date soon).

However, the plan is that I’ll be paired up in a session with historian of science MARIO BIAGIOLI.