Levi on objects and capitalism

Amen to this (though unlike Levi, in this case I was more baffled than offended):

“This aside, there are a couple of serious problems with Vitale’s charges against object-oriented ontology. First, if Vitale is striving to situate himself within a Marxist framework I would suggest that he needs to spend a bit more time with Marx’s actual writings. Few things are more patently absurd than the suggestion that somehow capitalism leads to the primacy of objects over relations. In fact, the opposite is the case. Everywhere we turn when examining the dynamics of capitalism we, in fact, observe the erasure of objects in terms of relations. We see this above all in the logic of exchange-values, but we see it also in popular ideology– especially business manuals –which are replete with metaphors of networks, relationality, etc., etc., etc. Were the sort of pseudo-ideological critique Vitale is attempting to advance an accurate portrayal of the current moment, we would expect the last one hundred years of discourse to be dominated by tropes pertaining to objects. In fact, we’ve seen exactly the opposite, where objects have all but disappeared, being replaced instead by tropes pertaining to relations and extreme relationism.”

I can’t add any useful aspect to this post, which I think is definitive.

Saying that “capitalism teaches us to see objects rather than relations” is not only wrong (as Levi demonstrates). It’s also no better than my saying “artsy-fartsy New Age holistic ideology teaches us to see relations rather than objects.” It would just be an insult, not an argument.

Oh, just one thing to add… I am less sanguine than Levi is about Marx qua ontologist. I tend to think he picks up all the worst aspects of German Idealism, and that his “inversion” of it really is no inversion at all. For me, Marx is no realist precisely because he’s a materialist. (A bit of this was discussed in my Dundee paper.) I’m more with Iain Hamilton Grant on this one for now (for Iain, Schelling’s the genuine realist, not Marx). But I’m happy to keep an open mind about that, and Levi does make some interesting points about Marx.

[ADDENDUM: By describing the post as “definitive,” I meant the quality of Levi’s arguments. I don’t mean to imply that I was offended by Vitale’s post as Levi’s was. I did find it incorrect on a number of points, and also didn’t get why Vitale was talking about Whitehead’s eternal objects even though neither of us has ever defended them. Whitehead’s “eternal objects” are not objects at all. They are qualities. Our “objects” is a better fit for Whitehead’s “actual entities,” not for eternal objects. Nor are the objects of OOO “eternal” anyway. Aristotle already introduced the notion of substances that don’t last forever, and I see no reason to regress to before that insight, even though Leibniz unfortunately does.]