Larval Subjects . ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE Object-Oriented France: The Philosophy of Tristan Garcia | Harman | continent. continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet,1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. The present article is confined to Forme et objet. 1. Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. 2.
Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones | Morton | continent. continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos). Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy. Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. An object withdraws from access. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. How does this happen? Objects emit zones.
What is Object-Oriented Ontology? Recently I was speaking to a writer about my recent work. She's doing a feature for a local magazine on creativity research and design practice in the region. I've been fortunate to get a lot of press over the years, and it's become increasingly important to me to find ways to make my work comprehensible and applicable to a general audience. We talked about a number of projects, from games at the studio to my recent Atari work to my forthcoming book on newsgames. But wait, you might say, there's a section about OOO in the Wikipedia entry for Speculative Realism. But wait, you might say, why would a discipline of philosophy need or want to explain itself to a general population? So, I thought I'd try to work on a simple, short, comprehensible explanation of object-oriented ontology so I don't find myself in this bind in the future. Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Update: Here's an alternate version, crafted based on some of the excellent discussion below.
Object-Oriented Philosophy Graham Harman As twentieth century philosophy enters its final months, there have been fewer retrospective surveys of its past one hundred years than might have been expected. Whether this is due to widespread disorientation, or simply to the understandable wish to avoid melodrama, is anyone's guess. But at least one historical model of philosophy is being aired on a regular basis. This is the view that the great philosophical achievement of our century lies in its "linguistic turn." One of the usual selling-points of this model is that it is equipped to offer praise to both of the rival strands of analytic and Continental philosophy. But this version of twentieth century philosophy contains a notable flaw. Meanwhile, beneath this ceaseless argument, reality is churning. Best of all, there is no need to start from scratch. I will begin with Heidegger, as generally the better known of the two figures mentioned. The tool-analysis itself can be summarized rather easily. This is fine. 1.
Onticology– A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology Part I Context We live in a world pervaded by objects of all kinds, yet nowhere do we have a unified theory or ontology of objects. Whether we are speaking of technological objects, natural objects, commodities, events, groups, animals, institutions, gods, or semiotic objects our historical moment, far from reducing the number of existing objects as alleged by reductive materialisms, has actually experienced a promiscuous proliferation and multiplication of objects of all sorts. Moreover, this proliferation has caused massive upheaval and transformation all throughout planetary, human, and collective life. In light of this situation one is reminded of the epigraph to Heidegger’s Being and Time: ‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being”. This epigraph could just as easily be rephrased substituting the word “object” for “being”. 1781: The Failure of Philosophy Kant sums up this inversion and its spirit early in the Critique of Pure Reason:
Object Lessons