Tim Morton in The Guardian
Timothy Morton is putting environmental philosophy on the front pages! At least of The Guardian. Morton's work is chock full of great insights on environmental theory and culture. Such as the notion that the old concept of "Nature" breaks down when it starts slithering, swimming, or crawling toward you... That is one that stuck with me. The weirdest work the nature concept has done is to naturalize animals as "wildlife." The animal question, Morton observed, may be the key question of post-natural naturalism. An important insight, but only one of many in his work.
I'll use this occasion, though, to air my critique the "Object Oriented Ontology" (OOO) that Morton embraced several years back, and which makes an appearance in the Guardian piece.
My question is, "why an ontology of 'objects' rather than process, action, becoming, or relationality."
OOO founder Graham Harman uses the example of fire burning cotton. He suggests the fiery consumption of the cotton is a kind of meeting of two objects: fire and cotton. But it seems much more reasonable to say that what is ontologically primary is the transformation itself cotton-burning--an event, an action, a becoming. On what grounds is fire an object? It seems much more like a process. Of course the same could be said about cotton, but I think fire, for our human perception, much more convincingly belies the object-oriented claim.
So the first objection is just that objects seem like something we merely posit, or 'make up' out of a more fluid "material." The world is a verb, on my view, on which we impose nouns for convenience. I can see an epistemology of objects, or a poetics of objects, but I'm not yet convinced on the ontology of objects. Philosophers from Heraclitus to Nietzsche and beyond have found that when you set down to think ontologically, objects don't make sense. So much the worse for ontology, OOO folks might say. But I find myself coming to the same Heraclitian conclusion over and over again.
My second objection is that it seems like with OOO we end up positing an infinity of objects that is precisely mapped to the infinite possibilities of naming in our languages. It seems, that is, that in fact there is no noun in the English language or any other language that would not count as an object in the OOO system. ("Noun" here to include gerunds. OOO insists that actions are objects too.)
This second 'objection' which I have been thinking on for some time in relation to Harman's and Morton's work and the work of other "speculative realists" and OOO-ists, leads me to a further question. I wonder about whether the world is ontologically fundamentally divided into actions and objects, verbs and nouns, on some level. I read that nouns and verbs are a grammatical universal in human language. And according to some people who study such things, even prairie dogs and other animals might use nouns and verbs.
My hypothesis is that the world is not fundamentally so divided, but rather than the 'double articulation' made possible by a language with two parts of speech is needed for communication given our (humans' and maybe animals') particular 'modes of life' in our particular world.
But if the world is not so divided, and if we must choose whether the world is more like an infinity of nouns or an infinitely variegated verb, I guess I come down in favor of verbs.
But I'm not entirely convince even of this. At the end it seems to me we actually have a choice, as ontologists, of which metaphor to apply at this first philosophical level. So then if we have a choice it becomes a normative question. Ontology as a branch of ethics... I find Deleuze approaches ontology in this way: " 'The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road," cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we need to feel." (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 263). For Deleuze and Guattari at least, it seems, ontology is about how we conceptually comport ourselves toward the real. A question of how we should feel…
In other words, perhaps the ontological question is a normative one. What metaphor ought we apply at the most general level? So at the end I do not necessarily have an objection to OOO. Maybe I love it. But maybe it should be defended on these grounds. "This is how we should feel..."
OOO founder Graham Harman uses the example of fire burning cotton. He suggests the fiery consumption of the cotton is a kind of meeting of two objects: fire and cotton. But it seems much more reasonable to say that what is ontologically primary is the transformation itself cotton-burning--an event, an action, a becoming. On what grounds is fire an object? It seems much more like a process. Of course the same could be said about cotton, but I think fire, for our human perception, much more convincingly belies the object-oriented claim.
So the first objection is just that objects seem like something we merely posit, or 'make up' out of a more fluid "material." The world is a verb, on my view, on which we impose nouns for convenience. I can see an epistemology of objects, or a poetics of objects, but I'm not yet convinced on the ontology of objects. Philosophers from Heraclitus to Nietzsche and beyond have found that when you set down to think ontologically, objects don't make sense. So much the worse for ontology, OOO folks might say. But I find myself coming to the same Heraclitian conclusion over and over again.
My second objection is that it seems like with OOO we end up positing an infinity of objects that is precisely mapped to the infinite possibilities of naming in our languages. It seems, that is, that in fact there is no noun in the English language or any other language that would not count as an object in the OOO system. ("Noun" here to include gerunds. OOO insists that actions are objects too.)
This second 'objection' which I have been thinking on for some time in relation to Harman's and Morton's work and the work of other "speculative realists" and OOO-ists, leads me to a further question. I wonder about whether the world is ontologically fundamentally divided into actions and objects, verbs and nouns, on some level. I read that nouns and verbs are a grammatical universal in human language. And according to some people who study such things, even prairie dogs and other animals might use nouns and verbs.
My hypothesis is that the world is not fundamentally so divided, but rather than the 'double articulation' made possible by a language with two parts of speech is needed for communication given our (humans' and maybe animals') particular 'modes of life' in our particular world.
But if the world is not so divided, and if we must choose whether the world is more like an infinity of nouns or an infinitely variegated verb, I guess I come down in favor of verbs.
But I'm not entirely convince even of this. At the end it seems to me we actually have a choice, as ontologists, of which metaphor to apply at this first philosophical level. So then if we have a choice it becomes a normative question. Ontology as a branch of ethics... I find Deleuze approaches ontology in this way: " 'The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road," cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we need to feel." (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 263). For Deleuze and Guattari at least, it seems, ontology is about how we conceptually comport ourselves toward the real. A question of how we should feel…
In other words, perhaps the ontological question is a normative one. What metaphor ought we apply at the most general level? So at the end I do not necessarily have an objection to OOO. Maybe I love it. But maybe it should be defended on these grounds. "This is how we should feel..."
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