OOO and anthropos

Recently I linked to Knowledge Ecology’s interesting review (the first of which I’m aware) of The Quadruple Object.

Now FOOTNOTES2PLATO seems largely in agreement with the spirit of that review.

To some extent I think it’s important to let people have discussions about one’s own work and not intervene that often, which can be a difficult policy to follow in the blogosphere where it’s so easy to see everything people say about you, whenever you have enough time on your hands to check.

So I’ll confine myself to a brief comment on this passage from footnote2plato’s post:

“But in order to avoid spinning into the nihilism of some speculative realists, where human values are a fluke in an uncaring and fundamentally entropic universe… I think OOO needs to unpack its own theological and anthropological implications.”

I’m certainly not a nihilist, as footnote2plato openly recognizes in the post.

But I think we need to distinguish between two problems here, a positive one and a negative one.

The negative point should not be underestimated. Namely, by placing all objects on the same footing, OOO disallows inscribing human being as a full half of some ontological dualism: on the one hand there are humans, on the other hand there’s everything else. We’re very familiar with such philosophies: res cogitans/res extensa, for-itself/in-itself, Dasein/intraworldly entities.

Since footnotes2plato doesn’t seem inherently opposed to the OOO project, I assume that when he says that “OOO needs to unpack its own theological and anthropological implications,” he doesn’t mean that the way to do this is by restoring human being to its previous grandiose eminence. I don’t think footnotes2plato means that nihilism automatically results form putting all beings on the same footing, and if he did mean that I would argue against it.

However, this negative point –that humans are just one entity among others– still has plenty of power, since the vast majority of continental philosophy continues to ignore it through maneuvers of greater and lesser sophistication that I’ve critiqued here in the past.

But then there’s the positive question… Once objects have been more or less flattened out so that humans have no special ontological status in comparison with flutes, dust grains, and pinwheels, what sorts of theories might allow us to work within this flatness and still do justice to the obvious richness of human reality compared with most other kinds?

Oddly, this sounds a lot like Greenberg’s discussion of Braque and Picasso developing collage as a manner of escaping the increasing flatness of analytic cubist painting, which I just reread yesterday by chance. They had to be very inventive to escape that flatness without retreating into the academic illusionist 3-D painting that had become so banal by their time. By the same token, it’s also challenging to balance the need for a (relatively) flat ontology with the need to recognize that there’s something very interesting about humans. But the solution is not to jump back into an ontology that places the subject at the heart of things.

One contrary position is offered by Žižek. There are many things I love about Žižek, but perhaps most of them can be summed up in the single word candor. For a generation like mine that was nursed on postmodernist waffling and evasiveness, it is refreshing that Žižek always simply comes out and makes blunt claims and takes responsibility for their consequences.

One of the best examples: Žižek is so committed to the primacy of the subject as a special rip or tear in the fabric of the universe, and this requires him to posit an “ontological catastrophe” in which the subject emerged.

I happen to think this is an utterly impossible notion, but at at least Žižek comes out and asserts it and prepares to defend it to the hilt. Because that’s what you’re ultimately committed if you ontologize the human into half the universe or more.

OOO takes the other route (and here it shares common ground with naturalism): there’s nothing ontologically special about the human. But just because the human is no longer everything doesn’t mean that it’s nothing, any more than the fact that dolphins and corn are just two objects among others warrants a nihilistic attitude about the worthlessness of dolphins and corns. They aren’t worthless, after all. They’re simply finite. But so what?

[ADDENDUM: The only thing I really disliked about footnote2plato’s post is its flirtation with the old Heideggerian chestnut that humans can experience objects “as” objects, whereas other entities cannot. This reached an absolute dead end for Heidegger in the 1929/30 course and was never clarified further. I don’t see it as being any more useful than saying that animals hunt “by instinct.” It’s a placeholder pretending to be a solution. It’s better, I think, to admit that all we have are placeholders– the absolute ontological distinction between human and non-human cannot be sustained, and we are left with the somewhat puzzling mission of clarifying the special status of the human, which is not a special ontological status. Something about language is probably the best bet, but not language as the transcendental condition of everything else. That’s been tried.]