On the topic of Steven Shaviro and Graham Harman’s recent conversation/debate about object-oriented aesthetics, Mikhail Emelianov over at Perverse Egalitarianism perspicaciously notes:

If I understand Shaviro’s point about OOP being an essentially aesthetic position (and Harman himself, I think, said that much), then it doesn’t seem as though anyone is really pretending to sell anything to anyone. I think there’s a certain amount of realpolitik going on here, especially in terms of Harman’s advices on how to become a successful philosopher – all those things are true, it’s just that they are usually discussed behind-the-scenes and not on blogs. Maybe he is doing us all a service with his advice columns? I mean his real advice columns, not that stuff when under the mask of giving advice he simply describes his own way of doing things (like the disappointing “Composition of Philosophy” series that I followed for a bit until I realized I’m reading Harman’s writing diary and don’t see how it would apply to me at all).

My real point is simple – I do sometimes react in a way that shows my conservative side: “Stop making things up, play by the rules” but in reality I know that philosophy is making things up, the only difference is how we do it and whether those who read us are in on it. I don’t think much will come out of SR/OOP/OOO as a philosophical position (I just don’t think it’s very interesting), but I’m sure it will create a new kind of cynical philosopher who knows how to play the game (wasn’t there a book of advices announced some time ago that Harman/Bryant were going to publish? I forget)…

Although I typically find myself in agreement with Mikhail, especially when it comes to all things OOP-related, I sort of feel the opposite way about the OOP cadre and their work. Mikhail writes (or at least implies) that his distaste of their work comes from a kind of “conservative” impulse that they “play by the rules,” to cease inventing and stick to the tradition of scholarship, etc. For me, however, it’s almost the opposite. What I dislike about OOP is that, for all of their talk about revolutionizing philosophy and changing coordinates, I actually don’t think they go far enough: something about their philosophies appears incredibly doctrinaire, and I think it shines through in their techniques for reading different philosophers, which is always a good way to gauge someone’s level of inventiveness and “sharpness” (good readings, for me, are always sharp and minimal ones). The OOPistas either:

• Engage in certain hermeneutical practices that often feel archaic or silly (Harman’s “One Great Idea” approach to reading Husserl and Heidegger, and to which he himself seems to aspire towards)

• OR they tend to analyze philosophers didactically, as teaching tools (quite a bit of Levi’s commentaries over at Larval Subjects feel like this—though I don’t necessarily intend this as a sure critique, his explanations can be incredibly useful for explaining new things to people like me). This is what I think is most upsetting about their reading of Kant: not that it misidentifies the central problematic of the Transcendental Dialectic in KdrV, Rev. B or something, but rather that, if anything, they try to hold Kant too close to the text, as some sort of out-dated anthropocentric epistemologist, without thinking him anew, without breathing new life into his works. This is also why I like Shaviro’s claim, contra Levi and Harman, that he is a “Kantian Speculative Realist.”

• OR Whenever they offer genuine attempts at crafting daring new readings of old philosophical works, they end up sounding absurd and unbelievable. A good example would be Levi’s ridiculous claim over at an older Perverse Egalitarianism thread: “See, Marx is an object-oriented philosopher!,” which entirely presupposes its own conclusion. So not only do the OOPistas eschew authentic “symptomatic reading” to excavate new meanings out of ostensibly out-dated texts or ideas that, taken at face value, seem to oppose their own, but when they do, they tend to fail at it.

This leads to my next point: compare the latter group’s ability to provide a unique and powerful new reading of some work of philosophy that has been discussed ad nauseum to Louis Althusser’s reading of Marx in Reading Capital. Now, undoubtedly Althusser’s reading is heterodox, and obviously Marx himself never mentions “overdetermination,” “epistemological break,” “problematic,” or “combinatory,” but Althusser’s commentary is so powerful and so exciting that it draws the reader in and makes one say, “I can’t believe I never noticed this before, this is surely right!” This, I think, is because Althusser’s construction of a new set of theories does not occur outside of certain textual practices, nor solely within them: he is neither “inventing” a new philosophy, nor dryly trying to give meaning to traditional Marxian concepts like “socially necessary labor time.” Rather, Althusser’s genius is that his work occurs between textual practice and active theoretical construction: in the gap or difference they expose. He turns reading into an active, politicizing, and revolutionary tactic, rather than a passive, didactic task, which is something that I don’t think deconstruction was ever able to live up to.

So to recapitulate: I am all for radical new constructions and readings of texts, but I find OOP’s to be dull, unconvincing, and, lastly, aesthetically baroque. I would consider myself an aesthetic minimalist, which is why I believe Lacan’s formalization of Freud appeals to me, and also why I find Zizek’s notion of “minimal ontological difference” appealing (not to mention that Zizek is a brilliant “symptomatic reader” of texts). OOP, for me, is simply too doctrinaire, too willing to take common sense positions, too willing to draw lines in the sand to strengthen group identity at the cost of “real philosophy,” and too willing to ignore the authentic problem of contradiction exposed by different systems of thought.

To return to my comment on Althusser, I hope that my remark, “This is surely right!” doesn’t come off as too naïve. My intention, rather, is to evoke the sense of awe in the face of the “theoretical Sublime” one experiences when reading a truly extraordinary interpretation of something, not so much the eternal Truth of the interpretation itself. I believe that this view agrees with Kvond’s when he writes:

There simply is no “this surely is right!” but merely the hope that someone finds it such. Harman when I first ran into him was suitably talking about the metaphysical gambler, the need for philosophy to start taking risks, to be a swashbuckler adventurer, to leave the sure ground. In this perhaps he can be awarded a fine point. But if you go to the roulet table and push $100,000 of monopoly money and declaim “Put it all on 00 black!” this isn’t gambling. If there is no fear of loss, if nothing is at risk, philosophical risk-taking becomes just making things up. Unless you can be proven wrong, or shown to be incoherent, there is no such thing as the metaphysical gamble.

Now, as to Harman’s own stated proposition regarding the virtue of “philosophical gambling,” I am of two minds on this: on the devil’s side of my shoulder lies Hegel, fully informed of the Kantian problematic, who approvingly nods in favor of speculative metaphysics; on the angels side of my shoulder lies Kant, who shouts “Within the limits of reason established by reason alone!,” sometimes to no avail. I find both convincing, but….

…There is undoubtedly a “bad” kind of speculation, which evokes the “spec”/”speculare” we find in political economy: risk taking for the sake of profit. Certain forms of speculative behavior, it seems to me, cannot be separated from their metaphysical counterpart. Here I think Harman’s thought becomes something of a mirror of contemporary American attitudes towards finance: his speculative gambling in search of that “one great idea” inevitably leads to the construction of a metaphysical “bubble” (his defense and support of panpsychism I read as a symptom of this) built on unsure ground and upon the continual deferral of the debt it accumulates. In that sense, OOP can be read, perhaps a bit too reductively for my tastes, but nevertheless as a form of packaged, repackaged, and traded collateralized debt obligations, which will inevitably collapse once the basis is revealed to have been nothing but a “toxic asset,” a transcendental illusion, a house of cards.

Kvond provides a further elaboration of this “political economic” interpretation of Harman’s appeal, which I would now like to quote:

This is brilliant and in fact goes to many of my intutions about Harman and his how to beat the philosophical system advice, not to mention is oft appeal to his All American mid-western ethics. His own metaphors (and aren’t we supposed to take his metaphors SERIOUSLY?) go exactly in this direction. More than once he has claimed (and shrugged legitimate discussion) that “Spinoza’s stock is over valued”. What on earth does that mean? His intellectual assessment is seemingly made entrenched within a “market place” concept of ideas, and he wants to “strike it rich” so to speak, with his “one great invention”. The whole world will catch on and be selling his one great idea, invest now while the stock is still low. Your comments upon “speculation” really set these aspects into bold relief.

Additionally they explain the very superficial nature of Levi’s alliance with Harman. He is buying some very low price stock. Never mind that Harman’s theory on causation and his ontology of objects (the four fold) causes Levi to “scratch his head”. He is just buying low.

Dutch tulips, like Beanie Babies, were also once “objects” of speculative mania.

I really like this elaboration, because I think it manages to convey, in much clearer prose than my own, much of my initial (and continued) apprehension with regard to OOP, the attitude of “striking it rich by jumping in early,” when the “stock price” is “still low.” I withheld my opinions, not only to spite Harman’s stupid “professor whisperer” advice about making positive contributions instead of “bad critique,” but also because I thought it was a somewhat premature formulation. Nevertheless, I think in some way the perspective of how Harman’s speculative metaphysics mirrors contemporary political economy also fits nicely with Kvond’s argument that he made over at Frames /sing, about how, in his very attempt to decenter and remove the human from the privileged point of access for any “first philosophy,” Harman actually naturalizes the human by smuggling it through the backdoor: he takes Husserl’s transcendental starting point of the Cartesian withdrawal-into-self through universal doubt and then extends it to the propositions that “all objects withdraw into themselves.” I am reminded of a hilarious/dialectical reading of “animal rights” that Fredric Jameson describes in his Valences of the Dialectic:

I will therefore preface this discussion with a remark about the paradoxes of Michel Foucault in a hypothetical Foucauldianism. Suppose we observed that one of the extensions of Enlightenment thought is to be found in nature itself, and in particular with an intensification of concern today with animals: it is a concern which goes well beyond the historical programs of vegetarian movements and has now been articulated in the concept of of animal rights, an ideal certainly to be welcomed when one thinks of the immemorial suffering of animals at the hands of human beings—a suffering no less great than that inflicted by human beings on each other.

But now we are abruptly called upon to rehearse the classic Foucauldian account of “capillary power”: the way in which in the modern age power refines and extends its networks through bodies by way of the effects of what Foucault called bio-power: such that the old brutality on bodies was now, beginning with the bourgeois era, transformed into ever more subtle forms of knowledge and control that penetrate ever more unexplored zones of the physical and of natural life.

It is a nightmarish (or dystopian) vision which will now with one strike suddenly transform our admiration for the animal rights movement itself; for we suddenly grasp the fact that “rights” are a human concept, and that by extending their way into hitherto uncolonized and untheorized zones nature and the animal world, we are preparing an intervention into non-human life and an appropriation of nature by human bio-power far more all-engulfing than anything the planet has hitherto known. “Animal rights” thus becomes the vanguard of bio-power’s totalitarian sway over the earth; and hitherto specialized philosophical minutiae such as the problem of whether a given virus should be made utterly extinct by human intervention are now cast in an altogether different and more sinister light.