Levi on Jared Diamond

I ought to be pressuring Levi to finish The Democracy of Objects (which I eagerly await) not cheer on his blog posts. But he’s been on a roll in recent days, and has just posted ONE OF MY FAVORITE LARVAL SUBJECTS POSTS EVER.

Yes, I think he’s right that Diamond gives one third of what an OOO historical work would aspire to provide, but given that none of us has provided the other two thirds yet (and I think Levi is right as to what the missing two thirds are), a solid third will do.

My favorite passage in the post may be this:

“I quote these passages at length because they are so foreign to most of what we find in dominant strains of continental cultural, social, and political theory. Diamond’s history is a history of collectives that is as much a history of the role played by nonhuman objects as human actants in the genesis of associations between humans and nonhumans in these collectives. Ask yourself honestly, do you really see anything remotely like a discussion of these sorts of agencies in the social and political thought of the Frankfurt School, Zizek, Ranciere, Balibar, Laclau, Derrida, or Badiou? Stepping outside the continental tradition, do you find it in Rawls or Habermas? What about Luhmann? No, we find nothing remotely close to the discussion of these issues. Rather, to encounter a discussion of the role of these sorts of actors we need to turn to Latour and the ANT theorists, Marx, Deleuze and Guattari and their under-developed analysis of machinic assemblages, and thinkers like McLuhan, Castelles, Haraway, Hayles, Bogost, Ong, Kittler, and so on.”

DeLanda could be added to the “good” list here as well, and I’m sure Levi would agree.

This paragraph seems right on target. It’s increasingly hard to get excited about narrowly “people politics” books, and for me it’s been hard primarily because of what I get from Latour and McLuhan in particular.