I love this shout out to Finnegans Wake! Here are Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg being interviewed by the Los Angeles Review of Books.
It's funny you know, when you think about OOO. When one hears the word “object,” one often sees (we have noticed) a mirror reflection of one's own ideas about objects. Usually those ideas are quite degraded. So you think we are objectifying or reifying or fetishizing or something, something bad.
When's Dark Ecology out? Is it Melancholia all way the down?
ReplyDeleteSomebody needs to get to work on the psychology of object interaction. Clearly there's a lot of transference and counter-transference going on here. From the perspective of the varieties of idealism, the object can only be what is projected upon it. From a political perspective, that becomes a question of who gets to do the projecting. When a subject projects its own objectivity and provides a set of guidelines for viewing to the others, this meant to restore the balance in the conflict of projections. Projections from the outside, according to the idealist stance, always already get it wrong.
ReplyDeleteBut then Rimbaud steps forward and says, "I is another."
An alternative SR stance would be to say that objects are like radios--transmitting of a multitude of frequencies. People, and other objects, tend to attune themselves to particular frequencies. Culture is like the pre-set buttons on your car radio, they make it easy find and return to a certain set of attunements. In this scenario, politics becomes a question of who's allowed to broadcast on what frequencies--and what frequencies we're allowed to tune in.
The "Object Lessons" series could be viewed as primers for teaching us to play with objects using a new tuning.