the life of objects

I recently saw the frequent OOO metaphor “life of objects” described as a form of “vitalism.”

No it’s not. The statement is false, or at least very sloppy. There are real vitalist positions out there, and OOO is not one of them.

“Life” in “life of objects” functions purely metaphorically for us. It’s a way of shifting the focus to object-object interactions without humans being present as observers, and is thus an attempt to put all relations on the same ontological footing, without seeing human relations to the world as being primary.

Hence, OOO is in some ways exactly the opposite of a vitalism. It’s not a way of saying that rocks are like primitive humans, but rather a way of saying that humans are just highly advanced rocks.

However, OOO obviously means this in a very different sense from the sorts of materialists who want to reduce everything to the undulations of lifeless matter– because OOO holds that they don’t get matter right in the first place. By reducing the inanimate world to what the sciences tell us about it, they epistemologize the world (see Levi’s hilarious “Malkovich” section in The Democracy of Objects, forthcoming). The motive seems to be the simple fact that they like smashing everything to pieces and calling it worthless, and resent any philosophy that removes this possibility. Hence the strangely visceral hatred for Latour in some quarters– Latour being the one who described the mission of philosophy as making things more real rather than less real. Even more than an argumentative rebuke, it’s a temperamental challenge to the sort of reflexive angry critique that some see as the very essence of philosophy.