Manifesto
I might be wrong, but if ever there will have to exist a manifesto for OOP, a good old angry ideological statement, I think Ian Bogost just wrote it.
And it is scorching.
I just read it and I’ve got mixed feelings about it, since it kicks quite hard. I’ll let it settle for a while before taking a position on it. There is just one bit I like too much not to quote:
A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs.
Fabio Cunctator
One possible reply to this: There are already plenty of disciplines that deal with those commonplace things. There’s physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, linguistics, etc. Those fields can tell you a lot about jello salads, chewing gum, cement, rust and photosynthesis. Many of them emerged from philosophy, only to leave it behind. What, if anything, can philosophy add to what all those fields are already doing?
Hi Ben,
well I guess there are several ways to answer your question. I’ll give it a shot. You are right about the fact that there are plenty of disciplines that deal with ‘corners of reality’ so to speak. And you are also right in saying that many of them originated from ‘philosophy’ or ‘natural philosophy’.
But I guess the issue is precisely here, the fact that human knowledge has been fragmented and chopped along lines which (according to the Latourian spirit at the heart of OOP) are arbitrarily imposed upon an always already mixed up world. If we are to play along with the sociopolitical metaphor or ‘democracy of objects’ (to which I prefer ‘democracy of actants’) then disciplines like physics and chemistry appear like ‘guilds’ that retain the monopoly of a certain field of knowledge thanks to an artificial segregation.
I can see that in Ian’s piece there is a jump from ‘humanities’ to ‘philosophy of tomorrow’ as if they were the same thing, which might perplex the non-philosopher. But I guess that the point is precisely that the philosophy of tomorrow is not philosophy as we know it. Again, Latour is publicly known as a sociologist more than as a philosopher. But he is a ‘new philosopher’ in the sense that he turns his attention to a world considered as a complex network of actors which cannot be detached.
I don’t think it is a call for trans/multi/cross- disciplinarity. To see it like that is still to buy into the disciplinary divides (as if they mirrored the way the world is split out there). It is a call to look at the world as it is (rotting, rusting, rattling, rolling, rioting, revolving, reasoning, relationing) without drawing lines which, translated in academia, become departments, walls, and at times ivory towers.
Ian indicates the ‘digital’ as the hybrid space for excellence, i.e., the place in which we cannot hide from the world. I largely agree with that, hence my (philosophical?) interests with all things internet.
I assume Ian was quite upset when writing the piece, and it emerges from the tone, which is voluntarily harsh. But I think he puts his finger onto something quite important, which in a future, and in my own work I would like to link to the issue of an exquisitely western way of academic ‘steaming-shit gazing’. As a matter of fact, I like to read Ian’s piece together with a recent, equally scathing, article by Hamid Dabashi titled ‘The Discrete Charm of the European Intellectuals’. Let me quote at length some parts:
Can the two messages, these two requests to encounter the world as it is out there in its hybirdity and complexity and materiality, meet into the production of a new kind of ‘humanist/philosopher’? It’s what I like to believe.
This is reminding me of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:
Rorty argues that philosophy has no grounds for claiming this foundational position. It sounds like you’re suggesting that philosophy should be responsible for reuniting different sorts of knowledge that have been divided by the “artificial segregation” of academic fields. What qualifies philosophy to perform that task? Aren’t you claiming for philosophy the “foundational” position that Rorty argues it can’t have?
No, no. I completely agree with Rorty’s quote here (even if I’d like to highlight again how not only philosophy enjoyed the split: yes philosophy has labeled itself with ‘foundational’, but at the same time science has benefited of the newly acquired independence. Whatvever philosophy thinks of itself today, the average person would today consider science to be foundational for the ‘real world’).
Again, the idea is a reconfiguration of the humanities as a whole, which does not necessarily mean a melting up of all the disciplines into their original philosophical matrix.
In a way, the comparativist spirit can help here. On what intellectual ground should/could a cultural encounter happen? In this perspective I don’t think we can talk about ‘disciplines’ but more about something like Foucauldian ‘epistemes’.
Perhaps we can ask Graham, Levi and Ian to work on one when they meet up at the American conference in a few months? I’d say it’d take them a few hours to put it together and post it online.
Well, it perhaps would do good to draw some basic lines regarding those things on which they actually all agree. Could end up in an appendix of ‘Speculations’?
BTW, I just read your ‘defense’ of it on your blog. I think you make perfectly sensible points. I hate to be associated with -isms of any kind too, yet I never believed that your goal in life is nothing more than set up a ‘Graham Harman fanclub’ in print
Well I hope I can wrangle something from those conferences for sure! Also it might be nice to have a mini-manifesto for the first edition. In fact I’ve been toying with some ideas on that front for a bit. I’ll make a general e-mail about it.