'If I can be a bit glib, it asks, essentially, how can you just stare at toasters while children are starving in Africa?'

I love this line.

Ian. I don't see the drawback of understanding politics as a pragmatic, configurable act. Badiou of course can be said to operate such a politics, albeit a pseudo-transcendent politics wrapped in a Hegelian immanent mathematical sphere. The uncomfortable aspect for many is the ultimate sin of suggesting that a right-wing politics operates in reality.

Heres what I think OOO brings to the table: firstly its take on how objects are configured and given, Secondly, theres the pragmatic of interrogating the object's operations.

So what if our ontology 'looks like' like a FedEx network, its also 'looks like' a non-profit open source system. This is the point - the reality of a given system can be abused for exploitation but it must also be negotiated and reconfigured.

"The reality of a given system can be abused for exploitation but it must also be negotiated and reconfigured."

Yes, but isn't this also the point? OOO pauses and does not on a conceptual level make claims for who or what is exploited, nor how that might even occur. There doesn't seem to be any coordinates for establishing the difference claimed in that statement. For Bogost, it apparently goes so far as to cast doubt on whether 'suffering' can be really established as such. In this way, OOO appears to me as a weird variant of aesthetic philosophy for our times, especially to the extent that it implies a kind of subjectivity, but remains suspended between conditions of heteronomy and autonomy.

For Bogost, it apparently goes so far as to cast doubt on whether 'suffering' can be really established as such.

This is precisely the trajectory of contemporary critical theory. It has, over time, expanded and altered its understanding of suffering to accommodate ever-different circumstances, ones previously left unseen or unconsidered. I'm not proposing a rejection of this principle, nor ignoring it, but exploring what happens when we take it to its logical conclusion.

In Alien Phenomenology, I talk about this issue at greater length, with special attention to the ethics of objects, and the difficult, even aporetic challenge anyone (or anything) faces in truly considering the rights of another or the right way to act in relation to its interests.

I wonder what texts and authors you're referring to by contemporary critical theory here. Certainly there's the kind of trajectory that, for instance, Timothy Campbell traces through post-Heideggerian conceptions of thanatopolitics and technicity (Agamben, Esposito, Sloterdijk, Foucault).

But the trend in Latourian-influenced frameworks and neo-assemblage theory, for instance, has in my understanding been an explicit departure from critical theory in a classic sense. In fact, there is a rejection of critique, negation or even historical materialism to then arrive at the kind of aporia concerning political decision-making that you accurately describe (I'm also thinking of Jane Bennett's concluding problematic for political action in the chapter on rolling North American blackouts). This kind of trajectory is one that might be described, as Hal Foster puts it, as 'post-critical' (and explicitly as such, in fact, criticality is often claimed itself as perpetuating suffering itself).

I don't mean to be pedantic or anything, but just wondering who you're thinking of here and on what terms.

Hi Michael - Yup, Latour and Jane Bennett are definitely fellow travelers! I rely on those two in particular quite a bit.

btw @ Robert Jackson. I read elsewhere on 'An und für sich' that you've got a book due soon on these questions. Look forward to checking it out.

Does sound like a bit of a departure from computational art theory and criticism, tho!

HI Ian,

You said: "all things (including people)" - and that's just the thing. Most people that have thought about this don't consider human beings (or sentient beings generally) as mere "things", on the same ontological level with toasters and computers.

There are many reasons for this. An important one is that we don' find rocks or toasters behaving like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ctjlROdNcc

Now, another level, it's true that not even "mere things" are "mere things". Because even "mere things" have being in time and space - and "being", "time" and "space" are not themselves objects. They may SEEM like objects, if you're only talking about time and space that takes place on a computer screen and has primary existence, for you, as a quantifiable piece of information. But the world outside - and especially self-conscious beings - are lot more complex than that. Infinitely more complex.

Most people who have thought seriously about this, understand this intuitively, so the minute they come across a sentence like "all things (including people)" they sense immediately that there is something wrong.

I hope in the future you won't have to be baffled about this.

Lassie, unfortunately it's not really possible for me to to respond because you're questioning some of the assumptions at the very heart of the philosophies I'm advocating for. That's certainly your right, but if you'd like to consider some of this material in greater detail, you should read some work in this area. Besides my book mentioned above, which is quite accessible and quick, you might look at Graham Harman's books Prince of Networks or the Quadruple Object, or Levi Bryant's The Democracy of Objects.

I'm sorry if this comes off as a condescending response.

"Thou shalt not talk about entities that the senses cannot see or touch, yet reason can compute. For these entities are products of capitalism, and that makes you a bourgeois ****"

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/12/thou-shalt-not.html

@ Michael Dieter

If it was the comment written today (can't think of any others I've written for AUFS) its not a book, but a short essay for the 'And Another Thing Expanded Exhibition Catalogue

Structurally speaking, its not that much of a departure(!!)

Yes we are a bit nihilistic, thank heavens:

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2012/12/staring-at-toasters-ian-bogost-on.html

"Structurally speaking, its not that much of a departure(!!)"

Ah, cool. Will keep an eye out then!

Ian,

So let me get this straight. First you were advocating for "tiny ontology":

Lately I've been working on my account of flat ontology, and I've just finished penning the first version of it. It bears similarity to both Graham and Levi's positions on being, but I've got my own take of course. I'm calling it tiny ontology, both for pragmatic and aesthetic reasons. Pragmatically: being is dead simple, and any ontology that belies such a claim is likely to be flawed. And aesthetically: despite the fact that I'm writing a book about it, I'm increasingly unconvinced that more description leads to more clarity. I want an aphoristic ontology. One that can be rendered via screen print on a trucker's cap.

http://www.bogost.com/blog/weird_media_and_tiny_ontology.shtml

***
But now you're saying one has to read your books to understand the justification for such sweeping reductions?

I can only conclude from this that you already know that your position is basically indefensible.

We already have the objectification of everything, Ian. It's nothing radical or revolutionary: its called commodity culture.

Hi Ian,

I think in many ways that the thrust of contemporary theory is less a questioning of the possibility of suffering as such, than a reframing of the concept given a multiplicity of subjectivities. One response to the question might be framed through an investigation of the term "human," and its potential to limit the scope of our investigation. We certainly have ample historical evidence that a concentration on "human" suffering at one time, for instance, excluded black or proletariat forms of suffering from its analysis. By choosing to remove the "human" locus from our ontological orientation, we allow suffering to be considered through a variety of subject and object positions free from the delimitations imposed by our understanding of "humanness". To follow your glibness, it allows us to see the starving African children as suffering regardless of whether or not we're the kind of racist assholes who think Africans are less than human.

As always this politics and OOO business baffles me. OOO is mostly academic business and it's primarily academics that raise these concerns. I would suggest going to a dissertation database and searching for humanities dissertations with Marxism (or whatever -ism) in the title. I would be willing to bet that whatever apolitical or counter-revolutionary complaints one might lodge against "staring at toasters," could just as easily be directed at work that arises from such methods. To me this is less about politics than it is about intellectual turf.

@lassie
What a charming interlocutor you are! I hope you'll continue posting comments with asterisks in them because I find them dashing and sparkly. Oh wait, am I just commoditizing again? LOLBURGERS.

@Joe
Right, a good point that extends, I think, the rationale I've described above. Why not just take everything as a possible subject of interest, and in so doing to remind ourselves of the times we've been mistaken in the past.

@Alex
No disagreement here.

I think something else that people are failing to realize here is that OOO doesn't amount to staring at toasters. Instead, it involves placing toasters and people on an ontologically level playing field. When one does so it becomes abundantly clear that starving children (African or otherwise) face an ontological threat in their starvation that toasters sitting on counters, in boxes, or even in garbage dumps do not face. This creates an ethical imperative for one to attend to the needs of children before toasters. Placing toasters before children in this situation is not the project of OOO, it's simply an inversion of the prejudices involved in humanism, and represents a very under-nuanced understanding of the implications of OOO.

@lassie
Appealing to both Marx and common sense all at once? Someone needs to reread their Althusser... "It is a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousness as obviousness, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the 'still, small voice of conscience'): 'That's obvious! That's right! That's true!'" (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses)