Parikka responds

HERE.

Essentially, he says that (a) people are getting too touchy, and (b) he doesn’t care much about this debate anyway.

But there was nothing touchy about my previous post. I was simply expressing surprise at the following facts, which Parikka completely sidesteps in his response.

To repeat, for the past two years I’ve ben hearing from various good sources in the UK that Parikka has been trash-talking me in conversation a bit (I’ve never met or corresponded with him). I have no problem with that. There’s plenty of trash talk in intellectual life, and it’s not always juvenile, locker room stuff. Quite often it’s simply the “sportive” side of intellectual life, generated by everyone’s aspiration to excellence.

During those two years, none of my sources were ever able to explain to me just what it was that Parikka found so blameworthy about OOO. For this reason, I was intrigued when I saw earlier today that Levi was responding to Parikka’s earlier post, HERE.

But I was then astonished to find him more or less admitting to not having read OOO texts at all. He’s heard about it from other people, and he also has some complaints about the usual connotations of the word “objects.”

In his follow-up post of this evening, Parikka refers in scare quotes to my call for a more “productive debate.” Sorry, but I don’t see that Parikka has the right to scare quotes here. We now see that his trash talk about OOO for the past couple of years (and it never sounded especially vicious, just for the record) was based on no reading of OOO sources.

On that basis, I would have to say that my call for a more productive debate is fully in order. Normally one reads something before attacking it, or at least before attacking it on and off for years at a time.

No hard feelings against Professor Parikka. I haven’t yet read his Insect Media either, primarily because the Amazon shipment to Egypt was lost and the replacement hasn’t arrived yet. But I certainly won’t be raising any “questions” about his work on my blog until I’ve actually read his book. That seems to me like fair play.

I’d also have to repeat the point that some of Parikka’s fans in his comment threads are out of their minds. But we can’t hold him personally responsible for that.