Levi on OOO and relations

When his book is out you’ll get an even better sense of his reading of recent French philosophy as found in the current post. Sometimes you hear people say that the obsession with the “production of the new” is a hangover from May ’68, but Levi’s explanation in the book that it reflects an obsession with structuralism and other relationist philosophies makes a lot more sense.

“In many respects, my way to object-oriented ontology arose through an impasse I had encountered as a consequence of relationism. As a reformed Zizeko-Badiousian… and I still am very influenced by these thinkers and value their work –I had increasingly come to feel that interpretation of cultural artifacts, the Act, the Event, and truth-procedures were inadequate for producing change. As Scott Barnett has nicely put it, social and political theory seems pervaded by ‘missing masses.’

Increasingly I came to ask myself what these missing masses might be, but also how concepts like the Subject, Event, Act, and truth-procedure could come to look like solutions. Here I was following a sort of Deleuzian methodology, asking myself what problem these concepts respond to or how such concepts might appear to be a solution. The answer that I arrived at is that these problems were responding to the problem of internal relations. If the social field is composed of internal relations, then the question became one of how it is possible to find a point within the social that isn’t already overdetermined by these relations. Hence talk of the Void and the Subject (in Zizek’s sense) as points of freedom in a field already synchronously structured by a set of internal relations. The problem is that these solutions seem to turn attention away from analysis of that social field, focusing on the nature of the Act and the declaration of a truth alone.

But what if it’s the case that relations aren’t internal in this way? What if this was a fiction from the very beginning?”