Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Harman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Human Contact ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is an intellectual movement in the arts and humanities sharing certain affinities with both phenomenology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It is a philosophically realist position often at odds with existing currents in postmodernism and critical theory. The best-known idea of OOO is that objects “withdraw” from all direct human and non-human contact, so that relations between things are always indirect and must be accounted for rather than taken for granted. More broadly speaking, however, OOO is a theory of two kinds of objects (real, sensual) and two kinds of qualities (real, sensual). Real objects and qualities are not directly accessible to thought, perception, practical use, or even causal relation, and must be approached by more allusive means. Sensual objects and qualities, by contrast, exist only for some other entity, human or otherwise. Each type of object has troubled relations with each of the two forms of qualities, resulting in four basic tensions, the analysis of which is the heart of object-oriented method in every field and not just literature. OOO literary theory has a special fondness for the weird: especially the writings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose work is taken to exemplify two of the key ontological tensions. Dante and Edgar Allan Poe are also key OOO figures, due to their manner of theatrically investing their characters and readers in sincere relations with objects. OOO’s relation with the formalist aesthetics of Immanuel Kant is ambivalent, since Kant is admired for cutting off the aesthetic object from its surroundings but challenged for his modernist assumption that the human and non-human must never be mixed.

scholarly journals Living and Nonliving Occasionalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Weir
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
Real Object ◽  
Virtual Particles ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

AbstractGraham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology has employed a variant of occasionalist causation since 2002, with sensual objects acting as the mediators of causation between real objects. While the mechanism for living beings creating sensual objects is clear, how nonliving objects generate sensual objects is not. This essay sets out an interpretation of occasionalism where the mediating agency of nonliving contact is the virtual particles of nominally empty space. Since living, conscious, real objects need to hold sensual objects as sub-components, but nonliving objects do not, this leads to an explanation of why consciousness, in Object-Oriented Ontology, might be described as doubly withdrawn: a sensual sub-component of a withdrawn real object.

scholarly journals A Questionnaire on Materialisms

October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 155 ◽  
pp. 3-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Apter ◽  
Ed Atkins ◽  
Armen Avanessian ◽  
Bill Brown ◽  
Giuliana Bruno ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

scholarly journals Superficiality and Representation: Adding Aesthetics to “Knowledge without Truth”

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-57
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Vaillo
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Epistemological Model ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

Abstract This article has two parts. The first one compares the ontological and epistemological implications of two main philosophical stances on how reality relates to appearance. I call the first group the “plane of superficiality,” where reality and appearance are the same; there is no gap between what a thing is and how it manifests itself. I call the second group “volume of representation,” in which reality is beyond appearances; there is an insurmountable gap between the thing and its phenomena. The second part of the article focuses on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as the second group’s contemporary position. Within the OOO epistemological model of “knowledge without truth,” Harman’s schema of the observer’s participation in the object’s knowledge production is questioned. Alternatively, based on the notion proposed here of “flat representativity” in which each appearance is equally valuable to represent different aspects of the object, I argue for the full spectrum of the sensual as the basis for “knowledge without truth.” In particular, the aesthetic method, excluded from Harman’s concerns about knowledge, is suggested as another contribution to the episteme.

scholarly journals The Twofold Limit of Objects: Problematising Timothy Morton’s Rift in Light of Eugenio Trías’s Notion of Limit

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 493-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Vivaldi
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Ontological Framework ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe ontological abyss that separates real objects from sensual objects is one of the central principles of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), which has its most explicit and profuse modulation in Timothy Morton’s notion of rift. This article argues that, despite succeeding in explaining the radical difference that inhabits every object, Morton’s rift fails to explain the object’s unification, rendering the overall theory inconsistent. An alternative approach that accounts simultaneously for disjunction and conjunction between essences and appearances can be found in Eugenio Trías’s philosophy of the limit, a term widely ignored in OOO despite its deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things. The article further argues that the reinterpretation of Trías’s twofold liminal approach in light of OOO successfully addresses the inconsistencies found in Morton’s rift, paving the way for a theory of limits within Harman’s ontological framework.

Humanisms, Posthumanisms, and Their Discontents

Reified Life ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
J. Paul Narkunas
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Financial Capital ◽  
Dynamic Processes ◽  
Smart Machines ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

The introduction outlines how we are living in an automated posthuman future with smart machines that blur boundary between human and non-human. The chapter also summarizes the general problems with humanism and posthumanism for instrumentalizing the human, and documents how both work too closely with neoliberalism and financial capital. How neoliberalism functions like culture and has created a world of economic ontology are also addressed. The author then traces problems with notions of agency based on subjectivity including the posthuman and object-oriented ontology, and proposes a different strategy for thinking agency along Gilbert Simondon’s notion of transindividuation that he calls ahuman. The ahuman is then defined as a stable figuration that embodies dynamic processes and forces that actually frame reality. The chapter ends with a discussion of the aesthetic as new figurations of existence that can be mobilized for alternative political purposes, as well as a brief outline of the chapters.

scholarly journals Two Ambiguities in Object-Oriented Aesthetic Interpretation

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 599-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Taxier
Keyword(s):  
Object Oriented ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Risk Ambiguity ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

AbstractThe aesthetic theory of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) revolves around the concept of allure, a nonliteral experience of an object’s displacement from its qualities that draws attention to a deeper reality. But applying allure to aesthetic interpretation is hampered in two ways. First, OOO necessarily moves between the constrained viewpoint of experience and a more global perspective. Yet mixing these “inside” and “outside” views can risk ambiguity. Second, the phenomenological difference between the parts and qualities of an object must be clarified before Harman’s model of wholes and parts can be incorporated into OOO aesthetics. Addressing these two ambiguities will make it possible to further develop OOO’s resources for aesthetic commentary. For instance, one conclusion is that allure itself has two varieties: a tension between the object and its qualities (“allusion”) and a tension between the whole and its parts (“collusion”). These options parallel Harman’s twofold critique of reductionism. Another conclusion is that the literal needs an explanation within the framework of OOO insofar as it is a genuine feature of experience.

scholarly journals Notes Toward an Extimate Materialism: A Reply to Graham Harman

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-123
Author(s):  
Russell Sbriglia
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Dialectical Materialism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Future ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

Abstract This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism. In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.”

The Bestseller, or The Cultural Logic of Postsocialism

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-635
Author(s):  
Bradley A. Gorski
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Data Gathering ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Collective Creativity ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

When the word “bestseller” entered post-Soviet Russia, it was invested with transformational power to remake postsocialist culture according to capitalist models of exchange. From its appearance in the early 1990s to its apotheosis as the name of a new literary prize in 2001, the bestseller demonstrated the active power of cultural categories. It built a data-gathering apparatus around itself, shifted the ways that authors, publishers, and audiences interacted with each other, and even generated new modes of collective creativity specific to capitalist markets for culture. Applying insights from actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology, this article focuses on the bestseller, decentering authors and other human agents. The bestseller is shown to be more than a mediator between market forces and other literary actors; it is an active force (a “real object,” in the terms of object-oriented ontology) that plays a central role in the postsocialist formation of “cultural capitalism,” or the system of cultural production and consumption based on market value, fungibility, and exchange.

scholarly journals On relations of objects in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology

2020 ◽  
pp. 5-13
Author(s):  
Georgiy G. Gaiko ◽  
Alina A. Boyko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Extensive Study ◽  
Real Object ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
Mechanism Of Interaction ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
Gain Access

The article aims to analyze the relations between objects in the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman. The authors consider Harman’s concept to be one of the main achievements of modern philosophy. This concept makes it possible to overcome the problem of objectivity as such and to gain access to the object uncorrelated by the subject of knowledge. Using the presented scheme of the object, the authors postulate the absence of the subject and subject-object relations based on correlations. Thus, the problem of objectivity is solved in a radical way. However, Harman’s object-oriented ontology does not explain how the relations between uncorrelated objects occur. It is essential to find the way to describe the mechanism of interaction between objects in which the object remains real, i.e. uncorrelated, and at the same time sensual, accessible for perception and interaction. That is why the authors turn to Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction. Its application to the analysis of relations between objects in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology allows the authors to deabsolutize correlationism as the only possible way of relations between objects, and at the same time to preserve it as a way of interaction between objects. The nature of the relations between objects can be logically explained by the philosophy of Albert Camus, through combining his method of cognition with the principle of deconstruction. Using this method, the authors come to a conclusion that correlations necessarily arise when objects interact, which allows them to manifest themselves as accessible. However, the existence of objects by themselves takes place without correlations. They are a condition for the appearance of a sensory object, but they are not possible with the existence of real objects on their own. The method proposed shows that the relations of objects represent an inextricable duality of the sensual and the real object, which is manifested in their knowable-unknowable nature. Studying the nature of interaction between objects in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology with the help of this method allows better understanding of the problem of objectivity as such. This issue requires further, more extensive, study and discussion.

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