Ben over at Naught Thought has an interesting post up on new trends in Continental thought. Writing about the regnant status of OOO/OOP compared to other variants of Speculative Realism, Ben asks:
OOO/OOP will no doubt continue to grow and I often wonder why (besides having multiple prolific internet presences) it is the strangest/strongest of the SR factions. I think the best explanation is that the approach and even name of OOP reeks (justifiably) of novelty and this is only supported by the fact that Harman and others take what they need from philosophers and move on. This is not an attack but a high form of praise. For instance, it would be hard to call any user of OOO/OOP Heideggerian, Whiteheadian or even Latourian (though the latter would be the most probable) whereas Grant could easily be labeled Schellingian, Brassier Laruelleian (though less and less so over time) and Meillassoux Cartesian, Badiouian or, against his will but accurate I think, Hegelian.
I have a somewhat different theory. While the strong internet presence of OOO/OOP certainly doesn’t hurt, this is an effect rather than a cause. In my view a successful philosophy has to create work for others and for other disciplines outside of the philosophy. This work is not simply of the commentary variety, but of the variety that allows others to engage in genuine research projects according to– I hate the word, but have to use it –a paradigm.
read on!
This thesis, I think, accounts for the success of phenomenology.
Phenomenology opened an infinite domain of actual inquiry
rather than simply commenting and explicating
on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, etc. The
case is similar with the French post-structuralists. Through their
investigations of signs and language they opened up a fecund region for
textual analysis that is literally inexhaustible given that a text
ranging from actual novels to clothing and architecture. Deleuze and
Guattari’s thought opened all sorts of fecund forms of research
in the humanities, while psychoanalysis, and, in particular, Lacanian
psychoanalysis, opened up all sorts of forms of critical analysis.
Something similar could be said about the pre-Habermasian days in
critical theory.
In certain respects this is my problem with both Badiou and Zizek. In the case of Badiou it seems to me that we get little in the way of viable research projects. Rather, one is condemned to either repeating the major points of his philosophy or “declaring the event”. The philosophy provides little for the emerging scholar to contribute something new. The emerging phenomenologist could always contribute something new, if only in a small way, but it’s difficult to see how Badiou has created a democratic philosophy that opens new paths of research. What we instead get is dogmatic discipleship. This situation is aggravated by his celebration of axiomatics that forecloses novel paths of investigation. It’s impossible to imagine a Badiousian Lingis. Similarly, with Zizek we can marvel at his somewhat sensitive cultural and political analyses, but it’s difficult to imagine a form of “critical psychoanalysis” that doesn’t always already find what it was looking for according to the metatheory that guides it. Where genuine psychoanalysis holds open the possibility of completely transforming psychoanalysis as a consequence of the encounter with a new patient, this doesn’t seem possible with critical psychoanalysis insofar as texts cannot respond.
When I look at the variants of Speculative Realism, it seems to me that OOP/OOO is the only variant that opens genuine possibilities of work for those outside of philosophy. The vitalist trends of OOO/OOP strike me, for all their grandeur, as warmed over versions of Deluezian thought in Schellingian guise. Why this new variation of Deleuzian thought is needed is an interesting question– what’s wrong with Deleuze? –but I don’t see it going much further beyond what Deleuze and Guattari already accomplished.
The trajectory of the scientistic materialist strains of SR are pretty predictable. Here what we’re going to get are increasingly reactionary, epistemological (and superfluous) apologia to various branches of the sciences (in particular, neurology and quantum physics) that contribute little to these sciences (because they’re just doing epistemological grounding work) and that contribute even less to the various branches of the humanities. Not only is this variant of SR mostly a militant-boys-no-girls-allowed-in-our-club-house style of thought (you can thank Mel for this characterization)– the tone is pretty macho and insufferable –but the inevitable consequence of this trend is a scientistic celebration of the hard branches of the sciences that provides little in the way of the cultural sciences. While it’s always dangerous to make predictions as to where intellectual movements will go, I suspect we’ll see, with time, an increasing “Dawkin’s style” form of thought emerging out of these movements that rejects all the genuine contributions of the humanities and social sciences out of a “hard-nosed” scientistic approaches that treats all these things as mere epiphenomena. We’ve been there and done that, so there’s little that’s new here.
The rationalist materialist version of SR is perhaps the most interesting, but here, I think, the problem is similar to that encountered in the case of Badiou. As fascinating as the argument from the arche-fossil and the principle of facticity are, it’s difficult to see what research avenues these theses open up. Rather we’re stuck with either adhering to the principles of the philosophy or simply moving on. Perhaps this will change with time.
In my view– and certainly I’m partial –OOO/OOP is the only domain of SR that opens up genuine research possibilities for those outside the field of philosophy. By virtue of its anti-reductivist stance and its multiply-tiered conception of objects, it refuses a conception of the real that restricts the real to natural or material objects and clears the way for all sorts of new questions about social and cultural objects without the baggage of anti-realist positions. The key point here is that OOO/OOP is able to integrate the elements of the scientistic reductivists without falling into their dogmatism or position as handmaidens. Moreover, within the framework of OOO/OOP, the question of what objects are is very much open, allowing people to come to the table with new articulations of object-oriented ontology rather than simply slavishly following a master. With its refusal of scientistic reductivism, it affords those working in other domains a set of vital tools for articulating their questions whether speaking about literature, social structures, animals, or technology. In my view it is this, not our web presence, that accounts for the regnant status of OOO.
