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.