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"Consequently, operational closure need not be a tragic thesis that we are forever doomed to completely misunderstand one another. Our ability to enter into the world of others– animal, social, human, and technological –can grow and develop, even if it will never be complete."
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What Hume articulates here in the portion I have bolded is a variant of why, as Lacan liked to put it, all communication is miscommunication. Put in terms of the theory of relations between objects I advocate under the title of onticology, Hume is here articulating the principle of operational closure characteristic of all objects. Drawn from autopoietic theory but extended to all objects, autopoietic and allopoietic, operational closure is the idea that external stimuli do not determine internal states of an entity, but rather only trigger them. The determination of internal states in an entity results from the internal structure and dynamics unfolding within the object.
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The upshot of this is that our interpretations of others say more about us than they say about us. When we interpret another what we are doing is making a statement about the sort of things that would motivate us.
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"Exploded view diagrams open up– a little –these black boxes so as to discern the multiple-composition that objects or units are as complexes of relations. What we discover is that every object is both a unit and a crowd of other objects or units."
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This is why there is not only a democracy of objects where every object is on equal ontological footing despite there being hierarchy and inequality among units, but also a democracy in objects. In Irreductions Latour notoriously says that “we will never do better than a politician” (1.2.1). Here Latour is referring not to state leaders (though them too), but objects or actants in general. Every entity that enters into relations with other entities is a politician insofar as it must navigate the tendencies or singularities of the other entities to which it relates.
"Tim seems to conceive world as a container that entities are in. For me, by contrast, the world is anything but a container. Ultimately there are no containers, there are just relations between entities. And as a consequence, in the framework of my ontology, a world is nothing but a network of relations between structurally coupled entities. "
"It’s no exaggeration to suggest that Darwin’s account of speciation is the most revolutionary idea in the last two hundred years. In claiming this, I am not original, for this is also the thesis of Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. I will never have words fine enough to capture the greatness of Darwin, but nonetheless it is important to at least attempt the articulation of what is so revolutionary in his thought."
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1) Nature is not supposed to be something. The great and most fundamental Darwinian ontological thesis is that nature is without teleology. In this declaration Darwin continues a long tradition characterized by thinkers such as Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Spinoza. All of these thinkers, each in their own way, declare that nature is without purpose.
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2) Difference is creative, not deviant. In the old Platonic-Aristotlean-Thomist model of nature, difference was seen as a deviation from form or essence. Organisms were measured or evaluated in terms of how closely they approximated an ideal form of what organisms are supposed to be.
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One of the reasons why I think OOO is so compelling for a lot of people is because we intuitively sense the importance of thinking ‘the many’ (as substances or “objects”) at the same time as acknowledging ‘the one’ (as immanence or flat ontology). I’m not sure overemphasizing the objectal features (e.g. temporal consistency) of reality at the expense of process, as some versions of OOO seem to do, is the best way forward, but I certainly respect the notion of irreducibility and individuation at play in the work of certain authors.
"Kant’s Copernican revolution has enjoyed, in diverse ways, a reconceptualization in much current philosophy. I’m interested in doing a quick taxonomy of some of the ways Kant is being thought anew in three different contexts: A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Brett Buchanan’s onto-ethology. "
"A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves "see" the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation--even to art. "
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My version of object-oriented ontology, outlined in my new book Alien Phenomenology, or What it's Like to Be a Thing, concerns the experience of objects. What is it like to be a bonobo or a satellite or a pixel?
There's a reason I start from aliens instead of computers, and from phenomenology instead of aesthetics. We usually understand alien either in a political or a cosmological sense: a terrestrial alien is a foreigner from another country, and an extraterrestrial alien is a foreigner from another planet. Even when used philosophically to refer to otherness more generally, aliennness is assumed to be a human-legible intersubjectivity. The other is someone we can recognize as enough like ourselves to warrant identification.
But the true alien might be unrecognizable; it might not have an intelligence akin to our intelligence, or even one we could recognize as intelligence. Rather than wondering if alien beings exist in the cosmos, let's assume that they are all around us, everywhere, at all scales. Everything is an alien to everything else. It is ultimately impossible for one thing to understand the experience of another, but we can speculate about the withdrawn, inner experience of things based on a combination of evidence--the exhaust they leave behind--and poetics--the speculative work we do to characterize that experience.
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The compendium is a better model than the aggregate. A list of things is most useful when it is large enough to show diversity and juxtaposition, but small enough to provide coherence: a tiny bestiary, not an infinite zoo.
I've suggested the term ontography as a name for creating lists, groups, or other collections of things for the purpose of documenting the repleteness under one tiny rock of existence. Ontography is an aesthetic set theory: it can take the form of lists, photographs, collections, even tumblrs, perhaps, with enough practice. Collection is aesthetically productive, but a collection that strives to trace an asymptote toward infinity creates obligation instead of clarity.
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"As Morton points out, in the age of ecology there is no clean transaction you can walk away from. The fact that everything is connected isn’t something you can turn off when it’s inconvenient. There’s always something still owed, a remaining debt. Morton describes this as the viscous quality of the hyperobject, the more you know about it the more it sticks to you. And as Graeber shows, capital fails to capture the full extent of a transaction because it doesn’t fully represent the object. In the social context of the transaction, there’s always a remainder, the market never fully clears. At the level of capital and pricing, the numbers always add up, but the object of the transaction is broadcasting on multiple frequencies. And if you hold the concept of capital in abeyance for just a moment, you’ll find there were many more parties to the transaction than you had assumed, and if you listen closely, you can hear that the non-human has continued its relationship with you. "
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One of the laugh lines in Morton’s talk is “anything you can do I can do meta.” The idea behind this quip is to characterize the move to “undermine,” or in Graham Harman’s phrase, to “overmine” an opponent’s position. Either some atom is the basic building block to which all things can be reduced; or some system is the foundation from which all things extend. Generally what is taught in the Academy are the particulars around these atoms and systems. In his talk, Morton reviews the historical progression of these “particulars” in an effort to get to the present ecological moment. The strange thing about Morton’s talk is that he’s not trying to lay out a new complex conceptual framework that wraps up everything that precedes it. Instead he brings up a series of examples of the rift between appearance and essence—the remainder that each of these conceptual transactions always generates as it tries to snugly fit around the contours of the real. For students trained in memorizing and recapitulating particulars, the process of discarding conceptual frameworks to see more clearly must seem counter intuitive. In a line of thought that operates in a space without a center or edges, sometimes it’s difficult to know when it’s arrived at it’s topic. And further, once there, what is the listener meant to take away? What kind of transaction is this?
"O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies is a peer-reviewed, open-access, and post-disciplinary journal devoted to object-oriented studies, both situated within and traversing the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts. The journal aims to cultivate current streams of thought already established within object-oriented studies, while also providing space for new pathways along which disparate voices and bodies of object-oriented knowledges might encounter, influence, perturb, and motivate one another."
in list: Journals of Interest
"It has just occurred to me that Latour’s interest in description in his domain—“No scholar should find humiliating the task of description“—and my interest in description in mine stem from the same root, the need for objectification. Description is a way of providing objects for one to think about. Mathematics can do this as well, that is, whatever mathematics may be to the pure mathematician, other thinkers use is as tool for description. "
"One of the things that I’ve found most stunning, that in certain ways I somewhat regret, is my claim that fictions are real. Now there’s something about me that seems to create a ruckus wherever I go– and that’s been above all true of my pronouncements on this blog –but there have been few things I’ve said that have generated more heat than this thesis."
"Timothy Morton is Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard UP, 2007), seven other books and over seventy essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music. "
"The real, then, is that which holds open the potential for the new. We can never fully know what’s real. The more we look, the more we see. Endlessly. It’s turtles all the way down, but not quite the same turtles. They keep morphing. And become doves.
All the way down.
And, that, I believe, is what object oriented ontologists are driving at when they make these strange assertions about how objects are withdrawn, how they withhold themselves – not merely from us (for it’s not about us at all, this is not us-oriented ontology, after all) – but from one another. There’s always more object there. Our nervous system can never fully assimilate an object, a real object, to its familiar patterns – which is, incidentally, what nervous systems are ‘designed’ to do, more or less, but not always, not in emergencies.
Objects are withdrawn. They withhold themselves. There’s always something more."
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