clearing something up

Though I thought everyone knew this, ZSDP calls my attention to the FOLLOWING MISTAKE IN A BLOG COMMENTS SECTION:

“One person who is often associated with OOP is Ray Brassier.”

No, Brassier has nothing do with OOP. He isn’t even remotely sympathetic to it.

OOP and Speculative Realism are not synonyms. Speculative Realism was at first a “rigid designator” pointing to the four people (who do have a few things in common) who happened to be part of the first Goldsmiths workshop of that name. I suppose now the term is loosening up a bit in the blogosophere, and refers to just about anyone who follows certain recent trends in what used to be called continental philosophy.

“Object-Oriented Philosophy,” as far as I know, was first used by me as the title of a 1999 lecture near London. (It will be included in my forthcoming collection Towards Speculative Realism.) Brassier, Grant, and Meillassoux are not object-oriented philosophers, each for different reasons.

Bogost and Bryant can be called such, and both agree to the label, though we now call it “OOO” (largely due to Bogost’s objections to sharing an acronym with object-oriented programming; he finds the parallel misleading).

But I’m the only one of the original S.R. group who takes an object-oriented approach. You’ll see Grant’s objections to it in his response to my article in The Speculative Turn. Brassier thinks the object is an invalid category, for reasons I don’t quite grasp, but which evidently result from his eliminativist views. Meillassoux is perhaps the least object-oriented of them all, since he finds the correlationist argument to be basically correct. (And that’s why I think people are going to enjoy my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh… Our positions in some sense lie at the opposite extremities of S.R.)