Levi on Reid-Bowen on feminism and OOO

Instead of linking directly to Reid-Bowen’s page I’ll link you to LEVI’S COMMENT ON IT, both because it was Levi’s link that I noticed, and because his comments are worth reading.

And I agree that there’s certainly a lot more feminist potential in OOO than there is in the “All-Things-Shall-Be-Destroyed-By-Science” wing of SR, which drags its juggernaut through cities, forests, museums, and zoos, crushing all entities and leaving in their wake only the powder of mathematical structure.

Let me just comment supportively on one point from Reid-Bowen’s abstract:

“The irony and/or perversity of proposing this alliance, given the history and weight of feminist analyses of sexual objectification, is not lost on me. However, I contend that an Object Oriented Ontology does not run afoul of ethical, political and social feminist critiques of objectification…”

Perhaps I should start addressing this point more often… the objects of object-oriented philosophy have nothing to do with objectification. In fact, they are what resist all objectification.

To objectify someone or something is to limit it, to reduce it: “You are nothing but slave labor– gather my crop, under penalty of death!”, “You, supposed mind, are nothing but a physical brain!”

Objectification = reductionism. By contrast, object-oriented philosophy is by definition an anti-reductionist philosophy. It holds that all things must be taken on their own terms.

The reason for complaints about “objectification” is that a false split is made between people and maybe animals who cannot be objectified, and inanimate objects which can.

My thesis, by contrast, is that even inanimate objects should not and cannot be objectified. It’s not about “reducing people to objects,” but about raising the status of objects to the level of people.