Iceberg

Jussi Parikka's post and Graham's posts and Levi's post and Ian's post and all the others and the responses have got me thinking. What I'm thinking about is how counter-intuitive OOO is, yet how very simple. The combination is quite powerful.

I suggest that the reason why OOO is hard for some is not simply because it's new, but because it emits shockwaves like anything powerful, shockwaves that spread back through history.

The first shockwave spreads back through the 90s. Continental philosophy was then dominated by Derrida. It was the end of philosophy. We either needed to foment revolution, or succumb to scientism, or a bit of both, and mostly do huge elaborate critiques of everything, but definitely not think about kazoos and egg cartons and interstellar dust. I never thought that fifteen years later I would be using the term ontology or reading Aristotle. I had no reason to: Derrida liked my first book and I had arrived at NYU just in time to hear him give the talk that became Specters of Marx.

The second shockwave spreads back through the beginning of modernity—let's say 1790, a pivotal date: French Revolution, Kant, the beginning of the Anthropocene, in which a thin layer of carbon was deposited in Earth's crust from industrial processes. This is the moment of correlationism: things only exist when correlated with a (human) subject in, say, a priori synthetic judgments. Since then philosophy has kinda sorta been in an epistemology ballpark—how can we know what we know? And kinda sorta restricted to (human) meaning.

The third shockwave spreads all the way back to the 1500s, the separation of rhetoric from logic (by Peter Ramus for instance) and the beginning of modern science. Just before this boundary, you could use the term ontology in a non-embarrassed way; afterwards, not so much. Before this boundary, formal causation was not absurd.

That third shockwave is one reason I reckon medievalists are into OOO. They are working on the period directly before the boundary, whose name is a product of that boundary, a slightly sneering product at that.

There is even a fourth shockwave, spreading back to what Heidegger calls the forgetting of being. We have taken it for granted since the beginnings of agricultural nations that things just kinda are given, that there is not much mystery to a cudgel or a field of wheat. I find this in itself to be illuminating, since it speaks to the ecological era we are now entering in which we will most definitely need to think ourselves out of a 2500-year-old economic and social mindset. And a metaphysical one, which Heidegger calls onto-theology. Of course from our point of view, Heidegger himself makes the inverse mistake, forgetting beings in the name of (human) being. We don't think those two forgettings are unrelated. But let's proceed before things become too nebulous. Okay:

So when we use the word object, we OOO-ers aren't picking a fight with Deleuzians, in particular. We're not saying that we prefer the drapes with the hard outlined pattern to the ones with the flowing pattern. We're not even interested in drapes in some 90s condo. We're blowing up a settlement that has existed in Western thinking for five hundred years, with 2500-year implications.

Or rather: we are watching, ourselves amazed, as the OOO concept does that. Believe me it does it to our heads first: we are as confused and as weirded out as you! But we can't deny the soundness of the initial OOO arguments—Graham Harman's reading of Heidegger's tool-analysis. We have all gone through the experience you are going through, of finding ourselves surrounded by entities, objects, thingamajigs, all of which have suddenly become much more interesting than before. We're in the post-Heidegger, post-Derrida business and it is indeed kinda far out. Who would have thought that this post-Derrida business would have to do with spools of cotton, noodles and lava?

Why is this happening? For me, and this is an argument I'm making in Hyperobjects, the impetus comes 80% from nonhuman agents such as pollution, pilot whales, plutonium, carbon dioxide, the biosphere, Styrofoam. Some are produced by humans, others not. But suddenly we find ourselves surrounded by them. Guided into dangerous waters by the autopilot of nihilism, the Titanic of modernity is wrecked on the iceberg of reality. There, I said it.