the most absurd of all critiques of OOO

It runs something like this: “OOO favors individuals, and so does neoliberal capitalist ideology. Therefore, OOO is a form of neoliberal capitalist ideology.”

What makes this critique frankly so idiotic is that it is unable to make a simple distinction between different senses of the word “individual.”

When OOO speaks of individuals, it is speaking of many different layers of individuality. That includes atoms, it includes bodily tissues and organs, it includes individual people, and it also includes societies and (why not?) social classes. It’s a very inclusive sense of “individual.”

“Neoliberal capitalist ideology,” by contrast, does not focus on all these levels of individuality. Thatcher: “Society does not exist.” But you will never, ever find an object-oriented ontologist who says that society does not exist. [ADDENDUM: When Latour says that society does not exist, he doesn’t mean that there are only individual people. He means that there is not some absolute and ell-embracing context called “society” that would not be built up out of individual actors. But remember, those actors include subhuman and non-human entities too for Latour, not just neoliberal consumers and voters.]

In short, no privilege whatsoever is granted by OOO to individual people as opposed to individual societies or individual classes. This is so blatantly obvious from reading any 5 pages of my work at random that I find it difficult even to be polite to this criticism any longer. Especially when it keeps coming from the same people to whom the point has already been explained ad nauseam. When you reach that point in a conversation, you realize that it was never meant to be a conversation in the first place.