Gender & Ontology

Yesterday afternoon – after having read Brandy’s post, as well as Anthony’s recent post on ontology – I followed a link on Facebook to Eigenfactor’s breakdown of the gender balance in scholarly publications between the years of 1665 and 2011. The data apparently comes from JSTOR (I didn’t know that they’d stockpiled publications from the 17th century! Do they really?!) This isn’t necessarily relevant. But I decided to check out the stats in philosophy. In a broad sense, they are – not surprisingly – pretty bad: only 9.4% of the total publications are by women, as opposed to, say, 37.3% in education. But things get a little more interesting when you link to the philosophy publications page where the data breaks down into more nuanced detail. Relevant here: only 3.6% of all publications on ontological arguments are by women. By way of contrast, 19.3% of works on moral philosophy have been published by women.

While I share Anthony’s distaste for the muscular “hard core” discourse on ontology, I have to confess that I am also pretty fixated on ontological claims and issues. I will admit to being a little geeked about the fact that new strains of “speculative thought” proclaimed an interest in ontology. 

The ontology of Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin characters do not exist in themselves. Their function is to serve as occasions for snappy lines of dialogue. In the last analysis, it does not matter which character delivers which line. All are equally quick-witted, and all speak in two and only two cadences — either sardonic rapid-fire or expansive sermonizing.

Just as lines can land on any character, the cadences can land on any situation. One might think that sardonic rapid-fire is particularly suited for high-stress work situations, but it can work equally well for an elevator ride or a drink after work. Similarly, there is no necessity that expansive sermonizing be reserved for moments that, in our world, would “naturally” lend themselves to leisurely reflection — it can just as easily arrive in the midst of a stressful situation in which every second counts. After all, how will the audience know what’s really at stake in that situation if they are not explicitly told?

The imperative is always: tell, don’t show.

Peter Gratton and the Critique of OOO

Readers may be interested in Peter Gratton’s sketch of a longer critique he is making of OOO. Gratton is co-authoring a survey of “Speculative Realism” with Michael Austin for Continuum where the longer critique I expect will be found. Since we’ve seen a political critique published here I thought folks would be interested in a more metaphysical one as well.

A response to Graham Harman’s “Marginalia on Radical Thinking”

First let me say that, while this post will likely come across as confrontational, I do have a respect for Harman, particularly for his intellectual energy and literary output. I’ve never met him and can’t count him a friend, but I have corresponded with him on a few occasions. I must admit that his philosophy and politics (or lack thereof) leave me cold. A bit of context: my dissertation of 2001, which became my first book in 2004, is an analysis of networks as political systems, so I feel I have a lot to say about the topic of objects and networks. I’m also a computer programmer and, similar to someone like Ian Bogost, have actually coded the kind of object-oriented systems that OOO describes. (To his credit Harman rejects this association, claiming that “his” OO has nothing to do with computer science’s OO. But that’s a flimsy argument in my view, particularly when the congruencies are so clear. As Zizek might say, channeling Groucho Marx: if it’s called a duck, and quacks like a duck, don’t let that fool you — it really is a duck!)

The paradoxes of political ontology

Christian Thorne has a brilliant, challenging post up about the impasses of political ontology. The guiding question is simple: If you’ve figured out how things are, then where does the politics come in? His example is an ontology wherein everything is made of fire — what political program would correspond to this? Are we supposed to make more fire somehow, or…?

Of particular interest is his discussion of Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, which as I recall was the subject of a book event around these parts (though I can’t find a link at the moment).

Naturally, I found this challenging since I put forward an ontology in Politics of Redemption that I claim issues in some normative commitments. My way out of the impasse, in retrospect, was to embrace a special role for humanity, which I could hardly fail to do given that my ontology was developed out of the Christian tradition. Yet I’m not getting off scot-free here, as I notice that Thorne’s paradigm renders me suspiciously close to the hierarchical ontology that I’m trying to fight against.

In short, read it. Everyone should find something to ponder in it.

What is Creaturely Theology?

First, just a “thanks” to aufs for hosting the livestream of our divinanimality conference at Drew this past weekend. While the event is still fresh, I also thought I might pose a couple of questions that began to gestate over the course of this four day conference. My ears are selectively attentive. So whatever I report will (naturally) be told a bit slant. But, nonetheless, I’m interested in broad questions, about how religious studies and theology might infect/intersect with the ever-expanding storehouse of scholarship in animal studies.

Of course there were theological questions, calling attention to the sticky relations between creatures, creators, creations. But I think one of the most fruitful conversations—one that kept coming up over the course of the weekend—was the ontological distinction between the “animal” and the “creaturely.” While the conference intended to foreground the challenges that animals and divinities pose to humanist orthodoxies, many pointed to the “creaturely” as a plane of engagement that seems to do something different. I’ve actually given a lot of thought to this question (and have a forthcoming piece about it, in the volume resulting from the “Metaphysics & Things” conference at the Claremont Graduate University last December). But it was interesting to hear this conversation broadening. Kate Rigby suggested that the creaturely is a more “democratic” conceptual space—inclusive of both humans and animals, as well as plants, monsters. Perhaps even machines. This space isn’t unlike that given to “actors” in Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, Alfred North Whitehead’s “actual entities” or even OOO’s objects. But, of course, the creaturely has a theological genealogy. Which makes it easier to explore this concept in the field of religious ideas. In spite of the generic, egalitarian potential of the creaturely, however,

Nothing exists

Perhaps unadvisedly, I would like to clarify a point on the Hägglund/OOO discussion. Tim Morton quotes a commenter who supposedly disagrees with me but seems to me to be saying almost literally the same thing as me:

The point isn’t that time is broken into little bits; it’s that no instant is ever really present. All presence is an effect of a trace structure.

Tim then proceeds to draw bizarre conclusions:

This is great news for God. Time doesn’t exist at all, since there are no present moments that really succeed one another. Or it exists so flimsily that entities can pretty much do without it. This is about as effective against God as a wet wash cloth! In fact—all of us are outside time as a naive succession of instants. It’s also disastrous for Hägglund’s ethics of “survival.” Nothing survives without present instants. We’re all screwed/eternal!

Here’s the thing, though — if the standard for existence is self-identity, then for Hägglund, nothing exists. Neither time nor other entities “exist” in the sense of being self-identical. Time internally displaces all other entities, but time itself is also non-identical. It’s non-identity all the way down. There are no self-identical instants of time, there are no self-identical “objects,” there is literally nothing that fits the standard of “existence as self-identity.”

Other entities thus don’t have any advantage over time, and certainly not the ability to manipulate it as they please. Why this ontology (because that’s what it is: an ontology, an explanation of the way things are) undercuts the notion of survival or what any of it has to do with the plausibility of atheism — well, I have no idea, honestly.

OOO: A negative theology of the object?

As I’ve been working through Hägglund, I can’t help but recall this summer’s epic controversy with the OOO crowd over Derrida’s supposed correlationism. It seems to me that Hägglund’s contention that everything is necessarily non-identical bears some resemblance to the core OOO claim that “the object withdraws.” And I also think that Hägglund’s polemic against a “negative theology” reading of Derrida, while perhaps overdone in some respects, does provide a useful scheme for thinking about the relationship between Hägglund’s deconstructive claim and the OOO claim.

A thought on OOO and Aristotle

I have been following Graham Harman’s blog of late, and one of his repeated refrains is that we must recover the Aristotelian concept of “substance” — the common dismissal of the concept among contemporary philosophers is short-sighted and doesn’t adequately reflect the richness, weirdness, and appeal of Aristotle’s notion of “substance.”

Fair enough! It does seem to be the case that many people who would reject a substance metaphysics, myself included, do not engage in detail with Aristotle’s development of the concept of “substance.” There may be a reason for that, however. People have been working through Aristotle’s thought for well over two milennia at this point, including many centuries when he was the single most dominant intellectual influence in both Europe and the Islamic world. Many of the greatest minds in history — Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas, etc. — basically devoted their lives to understanding and applying his philosophy.

If after all that work it turns out that we don’t understand the concept of substance, maybe it’s because it just doesn’t make sense. If people grappled with it for milennia and then the whole thing fell apart after the rise of modern science, maybe it’s because it’s not compatible with what science tells us about nature. It’s not like we just dug up some manuscripts of this guy named Aristotle a few weeks ago, after all. There’s been plenty of time to think things through, and on the question of “substance,” there’s an amazingly broad concensus that Aristotle’s concept is lacking. I don’t see why anyone needs to relitigate this.

A question on correlationism: Or, Why I am not really into OOO

I will openly admit that I have not read very much on Object-Oriented Ontology, and that’s because I feel as though I have a very basic objection that isn’t the kind of thing further study or nuance would fix: the whole critique of correlationism basically makes no sense to me. From what I understand, correlationism seems to take the Kantian position that we can’t get at the things themselves apart from our human filters (the a priori structure of human experience) and then takes the next step and says that the only thing that’s important or even really real about things is what they are for us. So far, so good — I’m not 100% sure any major philosopher has actually held a correlationist position as described (though in practice obviously capitalism presupposes such an attitude), but I can agree that it’s a bad thing.

For me, the most intuitive next step to take is the Hegelian one: the apparent obstacle keeping us from the things is in fact inherent to the things themselves.