I was recently shown this comment by Daniel Joseph from a discussion of chapter 1 of Alien Phenomenology.
The thing that Ian is doing here is positing that philosophy can be practiced for the pure joy of things, as a way into the thing for it the thing itself. It is the application of the theory of OOO to OOO. Bryant, Bennett, Morton, Latour etc, they all are interested in OOO at least in some instrumental way. The ontology is that things are for themselves, but beyond the ontology, practice and epistemology comes back to how this philosophy can add to human understanding of Important Issues like ecology, the environment, political economy etc. Bogost is basically like “nuts to that! Yay things!!!!” which is both admirable AND scary!
This account may short-change Levi and Jane and Tim and Bruno (can I call him Bruno?) a bit, but it’s an interesting take on the matter. Of course, we can have both: we can concern ourselves with Important Issues and we can also say nuts to that, sometimes at the same time. This is a perspective that some OOO critics can’t quite see, and I do understand why; it’s a mind-bender. But there’s no reason why we can’t simultaneously be humans concerned with human matters, humans concerned with toasters, and (if we really take seriously the plurality of “we”) toasters concerned with sourdough.
On a related note, I have to admit, I didn’t realize that Alien Phenomenology would be seen as taking such a radical position (radical in the sense of extreme, not in the sense of … well, you know). Perhaps its the specificity… for example, the discussion of The Wire in the last chapter really rankles some readers.
Comments
Greg Borenstein
Interesting. I’ve been wondering lately if part of the promise of OOO for downstream fields such as art and technology criticism and history is exactly the promise of saying “Nuts to that! Yay things!!!”, i.e. the possibility of bringing the actual things those fields study into the center of their focus for the first time. OOO offers a way to do that doesn’t reduce those fields to commodity fetishism and engineering education respectively.
I think the lack of this object-focus has been something that’s made these fields somewhat maddening for their stakeholders over time. Imagine. You fall in love with some art objects. For me it was walking into the Bill Viola retrospective in 1998, my senior year of high school at LACMA and seeing He Weeps For You, a piece that projects the image in a tiny droplet of water, blowing up the world in there to mammoth scale, and then, when the droplet drips, amplifying that drip into a world shaking boom. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8EkqHa7R8c This took me totally by surprise and made me wildly curious about art in a way that all that previous appropriate appreciation of impressionists and antiquities had never done.
But imagine my shock when I went on to study art history in college to watch the art objects themselves recede into the distance in favor of a focus on human social and class relations or, worse, other pet theories like psychoanalysis.
If my professors had found a way to keep our study about the objects without reducing the intellectual rigor or ambition I might have felt more like it lived up to the intensity of curiosity that tiny water droplet inspired in me in the first place.