“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, May 3, 2012

Erin Manning on OOO

At The Nonhuman Turn, Erin Manning has fired a shot across our bows, us OOOers I mean.

The mishearing is provocative. I'm not sure if I'm going to intervene yet. But it seems to me that what happens is that, hamstrung by the metaphysics of presence, process philosophy thinks OOO posits relations as somehow outside of things. Things are really present, and processes are really present, so relations must be outside things for OOO, which means that it's evil.

In sum, processes are present in a better way than present objects.

The difference is that OOO is not a metaphysics of presence. For us, process philosophy just is reductionism.

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