Endolith

I think I might be an extremophile. At least in terms of the music I like. Here's an endolith, a life form that enjoys living inside crystal. Jarrod Fowler's music and emails are provoking these thoughts.

The OOO Lexicon of Synaesthetic Onomatopoeia

Okay, here's part of my talk on OOO for tomorrow. I'm arguing that real objects enter into language all the time, most conspicuously in the form of onomatopoeia. We all know guns go bang in English and pan in French, but in neither do they go squish. Something real is translated.

Maybe it's simply that the acid hasn't worn off yet but I'm convinced that onomatopoeia can cover a lot more than mere sound. Why not? If language can translate objects, then sound can translate smell etc.

So I'll start off this list, which I hope we will all expand (to make this post into a monstrous hybrid far bigger than any other post on this blog). I'll start with what I'm calling visual onomatopoeia:

glitter
sparkle
shimmer
twinkle
scintillate

Of course this also leads to fascinating interstitial onomatopoeia. Here are some between seeing and hearing:

sputter
clatter
splat


Come on readers, it's fun!

Genius Jarrod

You like hyperobjects?
You like music?
You like harmonics?
You like forestsfull of gigantic crystals?
A forthcoming post will ease your pain!

Sleazy Death

I just found out a few days too late that Peter Sleazy Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil...) had died on November 25.

I'm not sure what to say about it yet. Instead I'm listening to Music to Play in the Dark 2 (and it's pitch black in here).

Here is a good interview with Coil. They talk about the early days of acid house:

JB: We've been taking MDMA since 1980 when it was first brought into the country. Our circle of friends were taking it constantly — there was no context to take it in. It took to 88 for a context to arrive or 87 maybe. . . it was a sacred situation and some sort of sacred ceremony was happening, for a while anyway. Then the focus shifted and the scene dispersed.

PC: It's like there was a moment when album covers were art and then they became packaging and I kind of feel the same about the Acid House scene. There was a time when it was sacred and then there was a time when it was packaging - getting bums on filthy floors.

Object-Oriented Nightmare Before Christmas

Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas is about Halloween objects translating Christmas objects. With disturbing and hilarious results. Simple as that. It's rather wonderful to see these stop-motion objects, magically uncanny as stop motion so often is, encountering one another so bizarrely and intimately. Burton's delightfully moody goth expressionism fits these objects perfectly and the melancholia never fails to make me smile. My favorite: Jack's girlfriend, who sews herself together when her creator rips her arms off...

The protagonist, Jack, here sings his amazement at the primordial fact of object withdrawal. The withdrawal is modulated through his puzzlement as to their telos: what are they for?

Jack makes two mistakes. The first is a real mistranslation: he thinks Santa Claus is Santa CLAWS. The second is a correlationist mistake. He gets it into his head that Christmas will be all about him, just as Halloween is all about him (he supposes).

This song, “What's This?” is as close to anything to musical comedy bliss. It's That Song in any musical, the one Eric Idle calls “The Song That Goes Like This” in Spamalot.

The OOO translation thing works on many levels here. There is the horrifying sensuality of Halloween and Christmas both—what Graham calls allure. Christmas Land is everything, in all its detailed particularity, sensual and real objects jumbled together in Burton's fantasy. So is Halloween, necessitating the fiction that these worlds inhabit different dimensions accessible through doors in trees in a strange forest.

And it is of course marvelous fun to see a death's head bursting out of a snowman and so on... Totally weird juxtaposition.

The OOO Flyer That Wasn't

It was mooted that “Hello Everything” should have a Squarepusher-like cover (viz. the above). So Levi, Graham, Ian, Nathan Brown and I submitted images.

Graham: a raspberry and the Boston Celtics

Levi: a Women's Suffrage march, an underwater Roman shipwreck viz:

Ian: 4K Mask ROM with Board, The Cook Out

Nathan: the atomic IBM logo and Malevich's Black Square and Red Square

Tim: the chunk of ice that broke off of Greenland recently and Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Sadly it wasn't to be. But we can dream...and we have Photoshop...

Food Studies is Still Partying Like It's 1799

This claims to be new and groundbreaking but I assure you it isn't. From a recovering food studies guy this so reinvents the wheel that I'm freshly reminded why I got out of it.

The big conclusion is “You are what you eat”—something that we've been saying to ourselves since the Romantic period (the phrase was invented twice, separately, like all good things, once in France and once in Germany). Stir in some Lacan (your identity is looped through your jouissance) and you have the recipe for things as they are.

This is precisely what we need LESS of, not more. It turns eating into fetishistic identity politics and it's a big reason for anorexia and the kind of beautiful soul environmentalism against which I've been arguing.

What I'll be wearing to "Hello Everything" OOO Symposium

Not really. But I sort of promised Ken Reinhard that I would.

Early Heidegger vs. University Cuts

Cor blimey, this series of lectures on Aristotle is a cracking read. What happened to the older Heidegger? Early Heidegger is super duper good. He sure could teach, there's no doubt of that, as Graham has remarked.

Here he is with some useful language about how science, if pressed to justify itself, couldn't do it:

If the sciences were not seen ... from the outside and in terms of their progress and results, i.e., according to a merely apparently proper but in fact wrongheaded theory of science, then it would have to become clear that every science, at its birth, has made a decision of principle and now lives on that basis, and conversely, from there each science also derives its characteristic way of going astray. It is never asked whether the sciences, either in general ... or in particular ... can actually furnish the idea of concrete research.

What does this mean? For starters it means that the pressure put on humanism to justify its existence all the time would easily cause science to collapse if the same pressure were applied.

Also unmissable: his critique of “worldview philosophizing,” in particular scientistic genres. Respect!

Hyperart about Hyperobjects

I quite enjoy these. In particular I like how massive they are and how you can't see them fully on the ground. Reminds me of the Nazca lines. Like global warming itself, they are designed to loom over you like giant shadows. Makes me think of Shelley's “A Defense of Poetry”: poets are “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows that futurity casts upon the present.” That guy should've been a speculative realist.

350 EARTH highlights 27 Nov 2010 from 350.org on Vimeo.

Dennis Hopper vs. Badiou

“You can't go out into space with fractions...what are you going to land on, one quarter or three eighths?”

Graham on Continental vs. Analytical

I'm not sure how I missed this but it's spot on. The way those guys at Oxford et al. used to say “nonsense” is still ringing in my ears. They have a nasty “I refute it thus sir” streak—if you don't know that's when Doctor Johnson “refuted” Hume by kicking a stone. In other words, a lot of their supposedly precise argumentation actually has to do with tone—a tone “up with which I will not put” as Churchill once said, and which makes them hypocrites for believing that they alone are right because they argue so well. This goes hand in hand with their freezing-cold-douche style, which they rigorously ignore. Like I want to read Jerry Fodor rather than Plato (as Graham memorably puts it.)

Harman vs. Badiou

I literally can't wait to see this project Graham promises for 2011. (Read through the post.) My very small corner of it has to do with a study of why on Earth Zizek would be so hostile to Buddhism (it has to do with withdrawn objects). In general I share the sense that Badiou is massively, massively overrated and really “wrong” as Graham puts it. When you're reduced to saying “transfinite sets, therefore I am correct” you are not too far from the kids in my daughter's playground at school who shout “googleplex!” to stop an argument. (And I'm pretty sure Cantor wouldn't be a Badiouian to save his life.) That and Graham's much stronger argument that until we see right Badiouians, we have to doubt the view.

Another great reason to do this: the “meta” syndrome and trumpery evinced by Zizekians and Badiouians.

Rhetoric and OOO and me

As you'll hear on Wednesday I hope, OOO rhetorical theory marks a decisive break with almost 500 years of a dominant rhetorical paradigm that even recent developments such as deconstruction failed to shift. This is BIG NEWS because it has to do with the institutions of art, aesthetics...and science. There will also be some fun stuff involving a children's story.

The OOOwl of Minerva

So here we are on the eve of the second OOO symposium. For all his faults Hegel was right about this: for something to happen it has to happen twice. OOO has arrived.

Jackson weighs in again

Robert Jackson adds considerable intellectual heft to my algorithms talk.

Response to a Badiouian

My response to some comments on this are worth repeating here. Check the comments then come back here.

[Lacan] has more respect for Buddhism than you or Slavoj. Your attempt to go meta has also been noted. “Anything you can do I can do meta” is indeed classic Zizek. “Engagement and generosity”? I think not. Classic nihilist one-upsmanship? Why yes. Here's a thought: les non-dupes errent.

In any case, the attempt to go meta fails as you only produce synonyms for letting go of clinging (or whatever)—ding! Correct!

There's a very good reason why Buddhists tell you that it's not desire they are getting rid of—desire in that blurry Zizekian sense is not on their cognitive map. They're not evading your cleverness. They are simply pointing out that they're talking about apples and you are talking about oranges. Or bad photocopies of apples.

You could easily argue that “never give up on your desire” is quintessentially Buddhist. Theravada Buddhism included, Buddhism is not about “getting rid of desire”—that may be Schopenhauer (a classic orientalist misprision) but it's not Buddhism.

All forms of Buddhism are about letting go of ego clinging. It's an elementary fact of Buddhism, the Third Noble Truth. Not the same thing as “getting rid of desire.”

If you want to be Theravadin about it, “desire” is way back on the Nidana chain from grasping—dig? You can desire all you want, as long as you don't cling. An action becomes karmic when you grasp. Not when you desire. This is first grade Buddhist logic. You want to drink that bottle of whiskey but you refrain? Great. You created zero karma. Those who don't understand the difference have simply not examined their minds closely enough. From a meditator's point of view “desire” a la Zizek is a blurry, vague concept.

All Buddhists agree on this. Check the Vajrayana version: “It's not perceptions that bind us, but clinging to perceptions—so cut your clinging, Naropa.”

The burden of proof is on your good selves to convince me that you know anything about Buddhism worth arguing with. I have studied all forms of Buddhism for thirty years. I've known Slavoj for about twenty and I've read all his books.

But none of this is why you are arguing. The reality is that you think that Buddhists are “inscrutable” faceless robots. If you don't, say so. Or perhaps they are too touchy-feely (rather than not enough)—provoking you with subtle phenomenological distinctions between states of mind you color uniformly as “desire.” And heaven knows we've all been trained that phenomenology is bunk...

Buddhists, in short, are queer.

I'm more convinced than ever that Buddhaphobia is a timely project.

Buddhaphobia Cover

Something like this, I'd wager. At least that's how I'll send it to Harvard.

Against Buddhaphobia

I continue my assault on Buddhaphobia here.

Hyperobjects Double Header with Levi

Levi Bryant and I promise to both be talking about hyperobjects this Wednesday at UCLA.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I think Graham feels the same way I feel about England.

Symbiotica Presentation

Symbiotica Talk

Symbiotica Presentation

Symbiotica Talk

Hello Everything OOO seminar Room Change

Our UCLA OOO seminar on 12.1.10 will now be in Hacienda Room in the Faculty Center.

Hello Everything OOO seminar Room Change

Our UCLA OOO seminar on 12.1.10 will now be in Hacienda Room in the Faculty Center.

Symbiotica Talk

Tech problems led to the talk being split into four. Sorry about that. If you hit Play the player will automatically cycle through the recordings.

The title is “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Animals but Were Afraid to Ask Vegetables.”

It Begins

This just in from Johann Hari:

Plant plankton are tiny creatures that live in the oceans and carry out a job you and I depend on to stay alive. They produce half the world's oxygen, and suck up planet-warming carbon dioxide. Yet this year, one of the world's most distinguished scientific journals, Nature, revealed that 40 per cent of them have been killed by the warming of the oceans since 1950. Professor Boris Worm, who co-authored the study, said in shock: "I've been trying to think of a biological change that's bigger than this and I can't think of one." That has been the result of less than one degree of warming. Now we are on course for at least three degrees this century.

Note that “begins” takes place before 1950...

Mesocosmic—Marina Zurkow animations here

Marina Zurkow gave me permission to post links to the animations that comprise Mesocosm here. Enjoy.

I'm intrigued by the relationship between the dark abstract zero space around the “nature” obelisk--it could be a kind of inner space, couldn't it? Or an in-between space? The Tibetans call it bardo, which is actually Tibetan for mesocosm. But more “cosmic” (or mesocosmic...).

Zurkow was inspired by some thinking in Ecology without Nature on mesocosms, an intriguing ecological concept.

Graham Tells It

Here. It would be a big shame if all we ever thought about was how to attack the other. This kind of thing is what turns academia into what the Buddhists call an asura realm, a realm of paranoid fighting demons who are constantly about to unleash violence, like characters in a kung fu movie. Or a Jane Austen novel.

Some of my colleagues look like old scarred samurai warriors covered in blood. On the inside.

Into This Pit of Time I Wish My Body Hurled

While listening to Martin Hagglund's quite beautiful talk on chronophobia here at UC Davis last week, I wondered whether an old friend of mine was “surviving.” He's really been an inspiration to me over the years, especially in terms of thinking about horror, flesh, the gothic. But we lost touch as I went to the States. We lived next door to each other the first year I did my Ph.D. and we talked about Blake, Francis Bacon, David Cronenberg and on and on. And about the pain of his split with his fiancée.

His name is David Prothero and I'm sorry to tell you that he's dead. He died in 2001. I found this out while listening to Martin talking about how mere survival was the ground of everything real.

David had the longest fingernails I'd ever seen and always wore his pretty much full on goth gear everywhere. To him it was a matter of “determinacy,” his favorite concept. When I am cut, I bleed. Somehow this was also a defense against his schizophrenic mother, who I imagine as frighteningly boundariless. He was the author of several essays on horror and an unfinished dissertation on Blake and horror. And he published a horror fanzine, Bloody Hell: The Horror Fanzine with a Brain in Its Head.

David and I were in a poetry group. He always wrote these incredible goth poems. One was about a vampire. The vampire is sick and tired of being immortal and wants to live and die. The last line of the poem is “Into this pit of time I wish my body hurled.” That's been in my mind like an undead spirit since 1989.

Cheers David. You adjusted me.

Marina Zurkow's video art

She's a terrific video artist and I'm watching her Mesocosm right now. It's 144 hours of black and white animation rather like illustrations to a Nature book for kids but with strange, beautiful, disturbing overtones. The imagery takes place in an obelisk-like slice of space surrounded by black blankness through which a human figure walks (when he's not hanging out in the outside-world-inside-obelisk).

And it's punctuated by acousmatic sound, sometimes like birdsong, always electronic.

I've had it running on my machine for days and it's been blowing me away. In this setup you watch it frontally and in various states of Benjaminian Zersteuung, which is intriguing. It sort of happens alongside you.

Mesocosm is an intense, alluring piece. More soon including a link.

Some Posts on Buddhism and Zizek

I'm going to do a few posts over at Arcade on Buddhism and Zizek, starting with this one.

Hymn to Hyperobjects

It's almost a kind of inverted Platonism isn't it? Where the forms are real objects so massive and strange we can hardly see them. Time to break out the Shelley.

THE AWFUL shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,—visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,	5
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,—
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—
Like memory of music fled,—	10
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Symbiotica Blog

If you haven't done so already take a look at Symbiotica's blog. They are the organization I'm talking at on Friday/Saturday in Perth, Australia. There are some wonderful and disturbing artworks there. I like Scenocosme's plants that produce sound.

Hyper Booboo

Around 6:44 into my “Hyperobjects 3.0,” I should have made it clear that the sentence “I am smarter than you to the extent that I can see around mere objects” was in scare quotes. It's not what I think! I'm ventriloquizing someone who thinks “Anything you can do I can do meta.”

Unruly Ecologies Talk in Perth

This Saturday (this Friday CA USA time, 8pm) I'll be talking at Symbiotica “in” Perth—well actually via videolink. The conference is called Unruly Ecologies: Biodiversity and Art.

The physical location is Law Lecture Theatre, room 106, Law Building, The University of Western Australia.

My paper is called “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Animals but Were Afraid to Ask Vegetables.”

Algorithms will be involved.

Hyperobjects 3.0 Presentation (with extra added Einstein)

Rice Talk

Rothko Chapel

It's hard to describe just how fun it was to hang out with Cary Wolfe and Alexander Regier. Cary asked the most extraordinarily good questions and had very interesting things to say about my view of melancholy and objects, which I'll be pursuing further. Alex pressed me on the issue of humor and we had a good conversation about how Harman uses humor as a way into thinking about causality. It struck me that there are indeed many modes of humor in philosophy, the most obvious being the threatening eiron-style sarcasm of Socrates. Imagine him telling you how great your ideas were. You would know you were about to be toast.

Alex took me to the Rothko Chapel, which I've been thinking about for at least twenty years. It was far more affecting than I thought. I've sat in front of many Rothkos but this was something else. You could feel your insides beginning to resonate and you could begin to see magical colors emerging out of the velvety purple black darkness of the paintings. And the dark ceiling that radiates light around it from a skylight. I wasn't ready for that. Or the rugged simplicity of the place, the way it almost smelt of raw plaster. A highly sensuous place. And a black hole...that octagonal darkness floating below the skylight evokes a black hole smoking with light.

If you haven't already you should listen to Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. The embedded video is the third part of a series but it includes a shot of the chapel.

Hyperobjects 3.0: Physical Graffiti

Here's the lecture I gave at Rice today. Featuring extensive discussions of relativity and quantum theory. I'm particularly happy with the stuff on relativity, which I've been keeping under wraps for a while. Basically everything Graham says about time and space on the inside of an object is what Einstein also says in another key. Also featuring the work of Levi Bryant and Ian Bogost.

Around 6:44 into the talk I should have made it clear that the sentence “I am smarter than you to the extent that I can see around mere objects” was in scare quotes. It's not what I think! I'm ventriloquizing someone who thinks “Anything you can do I can do meta.”

Rice Grad Class on OOO and Speculative Realism

Great students, clearly having a good time at Rice, asked a lot of great questions and got me thinking about OOO as I presented some of my work and the final chapter of Graham Harman's Prince of Networks.

One significant emerging topic was the role of rhetoric in object-oriented ontology, a theme I'll be returning to in LA.

Levi on Class as a Hyperobject

He's done it again. Somebody call the police! This is just too many good ideas to have in a week. Levi Bryant is reading Sartre in a most invigorating way and he's just reformulated class as a hyperobject. I like this very much, because it enables us to think about class as an actual object. Just as Braudel discovers capitalism as a massively distributed network of pockets of capitalist production. In this way Levi avoids the idealism latent in (yes I'm going to say it) Marx.

I'm going to quote his swimming pool analogy from an earlier post just because I think it's so neat. I'm using in my Rice talk tomorrow. (Stay tuned.)

Morton’s hyperobjects are thus like our experience of a pool while swimming. Everywhere we are submersed within the pool, everywhere the cool water caresses our body as we move through it, yet we are nonetheless independent of the water. We produce effects in the water like diffraction patterns, causing it to ripple in particular ways, and it produces effects in us, causing our skin to get goosebumps and, if you’re a man, for parts of you to inconveniently shrink, yet the water and the body are nonetheless two objects withdrawn from one another interacting only vicariously.

Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change

An extraordinary documentary by Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro.


Take-away line of many: “I can't forecast the weather any more.”

Elizabeth Fraser

...and then there's this. Just when you thought you could never hear anything more from the Cocteau Twins...

Hey by the way when I first heard this I was living here:


My room was on the ground floor (the bay and french windows you can see at the bottom left of the building). Just outside was the lamppost where Mr. Tumnus is first seen by Lucy (for real, C.S. Lewis used to live a few hundred yards away).

When I heard this mix, it was as if I'd heard the song (“Heaven or Las Vegas”) for the first time one sparkling frosty snowy morning in early December 1989. Precisely because the mix was different. It's how metaphor (translation, OOO fans) can put you in touch with the molten core of an object.

La Selva

Can I highly, highly recommend reading Alphonso Lingis's The Imperative while listening to Francisco Lopez's La Selva? Lopez opens your ears to the enveloping sound of the jungle as I remember it from an all too brief trip to the Amazon in 1987. You are enveloped by life forms, totally. The temperature is 98 degrees—no difference between inside and outside. Day surges up like the sun in Shelley's The Triumph of Life. And night surges up just as rapidly. Minimal twilight. Far and near begin to lose definition. The jungle is a hyperobject. Intimacy with a massively distributed object. An object whose parts far outnumber the whole.

Lopez's work is the most stunning I've heard for a while...

And Lingis is the Lopez of philosophy. Intense, compelling objects that surround you like skin, that are your skin, that seduce you at every turn, that tell you how to listen to them, look at them, handle them. Not an aestheticized “lifeworld” with its distances and horizons, but something much more intimate and profound.

Lopez from his website:

Much against a widespread current trend in sound art and the customary standard in nature recordings, I believe in the possibility of a profound, pure, 'blind' listening of sounds, freed (as much as possible) of procedural, contextual or intentional levels of reference.

And he's spot on about sound art. It's not about realism as “rendering” some simulation of real-ness, but about producing what Pierre Schaeffer called sound objects. He thus opposes acoustic ecology, as do I, even though (because!) he is an ecologist...

The Trouble with Materialism

As I walked towards the car I formed a question for the brilliant Adrian Johnston, who's visiting today (isn't that always the way).

How come we can't tell scientists what to do? How come our position as humanists is simply to interpret science?

(Especially if the point is not to interpret the world but to change it.)

Because though he put a lot of Hegelian bells and whistles on it, the final point was: science reports, humanists decide (to parody the jingle of Fox News).

Why? Because in the end, Johnston smuggled ontic prejudices, scientistic factoids, into his argument that was supposedly so ontological.

Exhibit A: neuroplasticity. This may tells us, argued Johnston, that within matter itself is some kind of emergent something-else.

What if it were telling us something different? I don't know exactly what. But doesn't this factoid assume that first there is matter, then there is some strange autopoetic business that goes on within that, ontologically “after” matter?

What if, for instance, it was a function of the fact that THERE IS NO MATTER (devoid of form)? A la object-oriented ontology.

Autopoesis or Smoke and Mirrors

It's elementary to see how autopoesis is a smoke-and-mirrors exercise. For a Spencer-Brown style mark to exist, there has already got to be an inscribable surface. There is no auto, then, to do any poesis. There is already a system of meaningfulness in place.

This inscribable surface, in nuce, is Derrida's arche-writing.

Better then to start with this—there is NO NATURE, not even an autopoetic one.

What we then have, if we want to posit something (which I do) is an infinite regress possibility, or as Graham Harman says, objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects...so be it.

The mad dash towards emergence is, at least in the humanities, a regression back away from deconstruction, while OOO moves past it.

Kant vs. Burke: The Rematch

I had a good time teaching a class about Kant and Burke today. I found myself talking about how you could argue that the contradictions between capitalism and democracy, or between environmentalism and ecology, or between consumerism and religion, is also an aesthetic debate between Burke and Kant. We've been living in these guys' heads for two hundred plus years!

Burke sees the sublime embodied in some empirical X: a big mountain, a terrifying monarch. Bushco's “Shock and Awe” is the Burkean sublime—as long as you watch it on your TV and are not underneath it when the bombs start falling. An opponent of revolutions (unless they were happening at a safe distance across the Atlantic), Burke appealed to the weight of tradition as a sublime authority to which we should submit.

For Kant on the other hand, all such X's can only ever be triggers for the real experience of the sublime, which is inner freedom, total, unconditional, scary. The sublime is inner space. You're in a library: what's weird is, you're surrounded by infinities, universes of inner space.

Now for Kant this is part of the democracy virus (the other part is beauty) that he's trying to install in the European psyche.

WHEREAS consumerism embodies the sublime in some X: an SUV for instance is an experience of safe power on so many levels: you can just visualize the ad of the SUV driving through some wilderness, the occupants “safe” from the rigors of actually living in it (which would stop it being experienced as wilderness) and “powerful” as they take in the mighty grandeur. The SUV occupants are virtual version of us, the couch potatoes. An SUV is basically a huge sofa on wheels with a windshield TV screen.

LET IT BE KNOWN THAT ecology without nature sides with the Kantian sublime. It's not about preserving the abstract wilderness. It's about Freddie, the polar bear (let's give him a name), a real person who is really living on a shrinking piece of ice. It's not even about polar bears in the abstract. It's about this polar bear, this unique one here, and his inner space.

All I did to get there was to extend inner space to non-human sentient beings.

Then OOO extends inner space to non-sentient objects. Whoah.

Annakin Skywalker Weighs in on Global Warming

...courtesy of my daughter of 6 years...he's clearly been corrupted by the Emperor. Exasperated, Obi Wan tries to respond, but they're in the heat of battle and his question goes unnoticed:

Worms Translate Wood

Courtesy of Zimoun. Turn your volume up high. They are worming about some wood. Is this object-oriented art? HT Cameron Tonkinwise.

Climate Summit Livestream

HERE, featuring Harrison Ford and James Cameron, and David Cameron (boo).

Global Climate Summit at UC Davis today

Featuring David Cameron, wrecker of Britain, and idiots with denialist placards. Website here.

Levi on Sartre

HERE. I'll have to read through it some more to think about it properly. But I was thinking exactly the same thing about plate glass. Its invention in the early nineteenth century enabled us to be consumerists--all those window displays...environmentalism is seeing "nature" as a window display.

An OOO Art Project

On Twitter recently, @agfa8x alias Carl Douglas was ruminating on the joys of a book with uncut pages and I was ruminating on libraries as treasure troves of unseen, unknown stuff.

Seriously. All good librarians enjoy withholding objects from scholars. Some of the withdrawnness of objects has rubbed off on them, to good effect. A good university library should contain objects that almost no one, perhaps not even their owner or author, has ever examined. A great library contains mountains of crap that no one looks at or cares about. And the taxpayer should pay for it. I'm serious!

We need to stop thinking simply in terms of “access” and the serving of popular information like so much fast food, and start thinking of libraries as gifts rather than work houses. Places where you look at stuff without a clue as to what you are finding, or will found, or even what you have found. A good research library is a place of mystery where information has melted back into the objects that contain it. One almost expects the vellum to start morphing back into cows.

Access to information is democratic. However, from this can come arguments for saving money on top of that. Guess what? They are about destroying objects. Democracy doesn't mean 500 channels of shite visible all times to everyone--it could mean objects set free from use.

Librarianship provides a model for the optimal ethical stance towards hyperobjects.

So here is a really really neat OOO art project. Design a book with uncut pages and a beautiful paper knife.

Skholiast, Buddhism, Lingis, Levinas, Objects, Face, Emptiness, Longinus

Almost telepathic. But who is channeling whom?

Levi Bryant Hyperpost on Hyperobjects

Levi has just published three magnificent posts. What luxury. This one is on hyperobjects, and it's a pretty huge down-payment on an emerging project: Levi and I are hoping we can work together on them in greater detail. I really like the swimming pool analogy:

Morton’s hyperobjects are thus like our experience of a pool while swimming. Everywhere we are submersed within the pool, everywhere the cool water caresses our body as we move through it, yet we are nonetheless independent of the water. We produce effects in the water like diffraction patterns, causing it to ripple in particular ways, and it produces effects in us, causing our skin to get goosebumps and, if you’re a man, for parts of you to inconveniently shrink, yet the water and the body are nonetheless two objects withdrawn from one another interacting only vicariously.

Precisely. Actually an object like swimming pool water works beautifully to evoke another aspect of hyperobjects, which has to do with their distribution in time. I'm re-reading Einstein at present trying to get more of a handle on this. But it seems to me that hyperobjects sort of ripple and distort in time. So does everything, but hyperobjects are so massively distributed that it becomes obvious.

Framed: An Essay on Edward Abbey

My piece on Edward Abbey just came out in the rather lovely sparseness of Electronic Book Review. You'll see it's the first essay in which something like OOO starts to shine out, starting with the reference to Latour.

Hello Everything LA 12.1.10

Event will be livestreamed here and recorded too.

Hyperobjects are Nonlocal

In a previous post I argued that hyperobjects are viscous—they adhere to you no matter how hard to try to pull away, rendering ironic distance obsolete. Now I'll argue that they are also nonlocal. That is, hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space such that any particular (local) manifestation never reveals the totality of the hyperobject.

When you feel raindrops falling on your head, you are experiencing climate, in some sense. In particular you are experiencing the climate change known as global warming. But you are never directly experiencing global warming as such. Nowhere in the long list of catastrophic weather events—which will increase as global warming takes off—will you find global warming.

But global warming is as real as this sentence. Not only that, it's viscous. It never stops sticking to you, no matter where you move on planet Earth.

How can we account for this? By arguing that global warming, like all hyperobjects, is nonlocal: it's massively distributed in time and space.

What does this mean? It means that my experience of the weather in the hic et nunc is a false immediacy. It's never the case that those raindrops only fall on my head! They are always a manifestation of global warming!

In an age of ecological emergency—in an age in which hyperobjects start to oppress us with their terrifying strangeness—we will have to get used to the fact that locality is always a false immediacy.

London Underwater

The fabulous Museum of London (dig those medieval peasant shoes!) is hosting an exhibition of “postcards from the future.” There's a good piece on it (with a slide show) on the Huffington Post. Given the expected rise in sea levels the image I've selected doesn't seem too unrealistic. Parts of London such as Parsons Green are several feet below sea level.

Object-Oriented Relativity

I believe I've figured out a way in which special relativity talks about object withdrawal a la OOO. You'll have to wait until I do my talk at Rice to get hold of anything, in particular because I'm going to need to do some tweaking of the basic hypothesis to get it just right.

For now though, it looks like my talk will be about contemporary physical theories as non-atomist. It's going to be called “Hyperobjects 3.0: Physical Remix.”

Why Aristotle and Poetry?

Someone asked me why I'd mentioned recently that Aristotle had led me back to poetry. It's elementary, really. I'm holding this poem in my hand—I'm holding a substance. Isn't that amazing?

Snailies

A fond dream pop parody of George Harrison's “Piggies,” written the week he died by me and Mike Snyder (alias Rubyliquid). From our EP Vibraphoam. I kind of like my deadpan vocals.

Some Poetry

I was fortunate enough to meet with Jarrod Fowler, and now I'm being showered with poems. (I also owe Marina Zurkow some thinking on her work on her astonishing Mesocosm, which I'm working on, I promise.)

Christian Hawkey sent me Citizen Of out of the blue. And Mark Yakich gave me The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in the Ukraine (great cover!). More to follow.

I have a new found zest for poems now that I've more fully appreciated Aristotle's view of substances as formal causes. Thanks OOO!

I also owe Janelle Schwartz some thoughts about Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. Why can't they leave those 70s covers alone?

Jackson Composes Himself

Robert Jackson on “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” He brings in Latour, which is precisely where I was going with it.

Stand-out sentence (of many):

the exploration of the common or universal, that of building the composite whilst understanding the relative, heterogeneous basis of composition itself, namely, the grouping together of units that never form ‘the whole’ but a revisable unit.

Honestly I tell you over the last few months my head has been taken apart and reassembled. In a most pleasant way.

Object-Oriented Buddhism 28: The Specter of Nothingness

The going meta syndrome that I outline in a recent post is synchronized with Buddhaphobia. I find this more than a little interesting. I've thought for a while that the fear of Buddhism often has to do with an anxiety about a nothingness that is the West's own shadow, projected. This seems to put some meat on those bones.

Most conversations I've had about Buddhism recently, with scholars that is, have tended to involve assertions (by them) that Buddhism is claiming that this pencil doesn't exist, that in absolute reality it's just not there. I've been disagreeing, vehemently. The tendency to glorify the absolute over the relative is nihilism, pure and simple. A bad case of meta disease.

Thirsty Space Shuttle

Courtesy of my son. Now that's what I call translation.

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Meta

“I am smarter than you to the extent that I can see around mere objects.”

I'm growing more and more impressed one of Graham Harman's observations, one that he argues many times (just take a look at his blog, Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics, for instance). This is his case that for about two hundred years, the game of being right in philosophy has most often been one of going meta.

What does going meta mean? Let Monty Python explain:



If you've ever been in this kind of argument, you'll know how intense it can get. Going meta is a great way to sneer at someone. You remove the rug from underneath the other's feet. Their mere immediacy is always false. It's the deep structure, the numinous background, the possibility of the possibility of the horizon of the event of being, that is more real, or better, or just more rhetorically effective, than anything else. In this mode, the egg of potentiality comes before the chicken of the actual.

(Interestingly, this mode is exactly what Monty Python exploit, in particular in the skit above. For a contrary mode, have a read of Aristotle. For sure he thinks that chickens come before eggs. It's one deep reason why he's so invigorating.)

The syndrome of going meta is repeated in countless different philosophical modes. It makes Marxism more similar to deconstruction than it is to OOO, for instance. It makes Heidegger more similar to Adorno than to Ian Bogost. A fact that Adorno would have found disturbing.

I'm not sure which part came first, the thinking or the acting out, but this meta syndrome seems strangely parallel with the basic ontology of modern life.

For instance, it's deeply responsible for the beautiful soul condition from which we mock anyone who dares to actually do something—the condition Lacan noted when he claimed “Les non-dupes errent.” Those who sit up high on the mountain sneering at us poor saps beneath, because they think they can see through everything, are the most deluded of all.

Modern life presents us with a choice:

1) The essence of things is elsewhere (in the deep structure of capital, the unconscious, Being)
2) There is no essence

At present I believe that the restriction of rightness and coolness to this choice is one reason why planet Earth is in big trouble right now. And I believe that the choice resembles a choice between grayish brown and brownish gray.

That's why I believe in option 3):

3) There is an essence, and it's right here, in the object resplendent with its sensual qualities yet withdrawn

And that's why I believe we are entering a new era of academic work, where the point will not be to one-up each other by appealing to the trace of the givenness of the openness of the clearing of the lighting of the being of the pencil.

What will that look like? Not sure, but I know it'll be an immense relief.

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Meta

“I am smarter than you to the extent that I can see around your argument.”

Ian Bogost on Object-Oriented Feminism

HERE. Best line:

But today I think we've also been shown the value of looking for the outdoors inside

(In my humble ecocritical opinion...)

Abstracts HERE.

Ian Bogost on Object-Oriented Feminism

HERE. Best line:

But today I think we've also been shown the value of looking for the outdoors inside

(In my humble ecocritical opinion...)

That Rat Neuron Robot

HERE. Levi mentions it to great effect in his talk at RMMLA. Basically it's a robot controlled by a single rat neuron.

Hyperobjects 3.0: Nonlocality Remix

I do believe it's time for me to tackle my research on nonlocality in my next hyperobjects talk. This poses a problem of how to relate it to thinking about ecology. Nonlocal effects are now apparent in DNA and photosynthesis, so that's a beginning. Does anyone out there have any ideas? Don't say Karen Barad—I've already been there.

This is also apropos of my essay for a volume on ecofeminism, called “Treating Objects Like Women.” I'm going to use Levi Bryant's startling formulation on objects and sexuation.

Tara Donovan—Hyperobjective Art

HT Chris Schaberg, who put me on to Tara Donovan. She makes things with plastic cups. In her hands they turn into billowing foam. She brings out something that I hadn't ever seen in plastic cups, something that would be obvious in a gigantic pile of them in a garbage dump, perhaps, a kind of viscous malleability (see my previous on how hyperobjects are viscous).

Hyperobjects 3.0—by Hyperobjects

This pretty much speaks for itself. Thanks to Lisa Summers for finding it.

Two Morton OOO Q&As with Loyola Students

Because the mp3 recorder stopped recording after the first question of the q&a yesterday, I decided to switch it on in two of three classes I taught today. You'll hear many things discussed with the serious, open minded students of Loyola, New Orleans. Prominent among these is OOO.




Q&A 1




Q&A 2

Some OOO Q&As with Loyola Students

Because the mp3 recorder stopped recording after the first question of the q&a yesterday, I decided to switch it on in two of three classes I taught today. You'll hear many things discussed with the serious, open minded students of Loyola, New Orleans. Prominent among these is OOO.

Hyperobjects 2.0: Oil Remix Powerpoint

(Sadly, Scribd wouldn't let me upload the actual presentation, which had transparent, rippling section titles and underwater poetry...)
New Orleans Talk

Hyperobjects 2.0: Oil Remix mp3

Lecture recorded at Loyola University, New Orleans, November 11, 2010. As you'll hear, I added and changed a LOT of stuff (compare “Hyperobjects 1.0”). In particular I added some more thinking about what hyperobjects are (they're “viscous”), and a lot more material about object-oriented ontology.

Thanks so much to Chris Schaberg and Janelle Schwartz, two young superstars. And to the wonderful audience, in particular the students in Chris's and Janelle's classes, whose questions before and after the talk were really striking and helpful.

The q&a really was incredibly good. Unfortunately my recorder ran out of memory after I'd answered the first question. Sorry about that—I've adjusted the settings on the recorder so this shouldn't happen next time. If you've been following these talks, not an awful lot was different from other q&a's I've done recently, except, happily, for that first answer.

John Cage on I've Got a Secret

Jarrod Fowler put me on to this. Oh yes.