“Take (Meta)physic, pomp”: King Lear and (Dis)oriented Ontology

This essay uses Object-Oriented Ontology, a posthumanist theoretical model, to explore how King Lear’s use of and relation to objects can provide insight into his characterization. This essay provides a model for scrutinizing the role of objects—whether animate or inanimate—in performances of early modern drama; furthermore, it argues that King Lear’s use of objects reveals a consistent refusal to understand others, which upsets a redemptive arc in the play. To that end, the article proposes an ethical model—demonstrated by Kent—that responds to the play’s otherwise desolate worldview.

Williama Goldinga Siłą bezwładu w perspektywie ontologii zorientowanej na przedmiot

The paper applies selected devices of the methodology of Object-Oriented Ontology to study William Golding’s novel Free Fall. Particular attention is given to Graham Harman’s project, whose definition of an object accounts for all beings, humans included. Within the ontological structure of an object two components can be distinguished: the “sensual object”, which can engage in relationships with other objects, and the “real object”, which refrains from any connections. The author aims to show how the main protagonist of Golding’s novel is impacted on by material objects, how other humans are perceived by him as inherently dual beings, but most importantly how the protagonist himself discovers the thing-like quality of his own human condition.

The Object Gives Rise to Thought: Hermeneutics of Objects in Disco Elysium

The article presents an analysis and interpretation of Disco Elysium, an award-winning videogame published by ZA/UM studio in 2019. The main problem explored in the research concerns the ontological basis upon which the game builds the complex personality of its protagonist and his relationship with the storyworld. The main theoretical works utilized in the analysis and interpretation are Object-Oriented Ontology by Graham Harman and Existence and Hermeneutics by Paul Ricoeur. My thesis is that Disco Elysium presents time, events and history as the effects of various tensions between the protagonist and the objects. In doing so, the game offers a non-anthropocentric perspective on human being and gives rise to questions about objects as a basis for rethinking the human condition. The article concludes with the formulation of a possible new hermeneutical approach founded on Object-Oriented Ontology.

Dramaturgies of reality – shaping and being shaped by things

New dramaturgy expands beyond the theatre and stage, working on the ways in which things in each time and space are organised and produce meaning. I link this to object-oriented ontology (Morton, 2013; 2016; 2018) and the ethics of relating to things (Benso, 2000) in my discussion of three works of art in public space: House of Commons (2015) by Marianne Heske, Movimento HO (2016) by Eleonora Fabião, and The Viewer (2019) by Carole Douillard. All three works temporarily introduce specific material into a public space, working with time to open up the ‘thingliness’ (Heidegger, 2001/1971) of the material, thus changing the dramaturgy of the place and how people relate to it. The works subtly introduce the potential of experiencing reality in new ways, changing narratives through a reciprocal process of shaping and being shaped by things. This is the result of the fact that every thing is always in motion, morphing without purpose or direction. ‘Things rock’, as Timothy Morton puts it. I use Morton’s concept of tuning, and Silvia Benso’s concept of tenderness when discussing how the materials in the three works – a house, bricks and human bodies – tune into a place, and how the viewer also tunes through what Benso calls ‘tender touch’, sometimes touching the material concretely, at other times touching the common ground or breathing the same air.

The ontology of musical objects in contemporary instrumental composition

<p>The musical object occupies a strange place in music criticism. The new musicology schools influenced by post-structuralist continental thought have shied away from the object’s autonomous existence, exemplified by Christopher Small’s view of music as a cultural activity: “musicking.” Other theorists, such as Dennis Smalley, have created taxonomies of musical sound. Smalley’s spectromorphology defines sonic typologies that he claims to be based on an experiential understanding of sound, while simultaneously undertaking the technical project of a systematic cataloguing of sounds. Both views inhabit quite opposite positions in relation to the sound object – either a total rejection of its reality or a positivistic attempt at a catalogue of sound types. Both of these approaches suffer from distancing the sonic object through their respective discourse: by reducing the importance of the object for the sake of viewing music as a network of cultural relations, or by reducing it to an idealized and rationalized object, seeing it as just the product of a bundle of auditory qualities unified by perception. These views introduce a distance from auditory experience, which is at its core an object-oriented experience. In other words, neither meets the musical object on its own level, and because of this, they deny or caricature the musical object’s ontology. Graham Harman’s philosophical study of Object-oriented Ontology is a radicalization of Heideggerian phenomenology. Through a new reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Harman argues that objects – whether real, living, non-living, ideal or abstract – are the primary location of ontological investigation, and that objects exist both discretely and as a part of a wider network of possible relationships. By viewing the object this way, and by recognizing the multifaceted and multidimensional features of the musical object, we may be able to account for features of music that the trends above are unable to recognize or assess, such as the twentieth century aesthetic practices of György Ligeti, Salvatore Sciarrino, and the Spectral school of composition. It is possible to read these composer’s aesthetics as object-oriented because they are so strongly focused on examining sonic objects themselves –whether it is a physical event or modeling a natural process – instead of examining objects only through their affective potential towards human beings. This practice suggests that these qualities and processes are themselves areas for possible contemplation. Historically, this move away from an emphasis on the human-world binary goes against the nineteenth century aesthetic of Romanticism, which relies on an object’s affective potential. Also, an object-oriented position rejects formalism, because of its reduction of music to an intellectual activity. An object-oriented approach to music traverses the line between these two positions, acknowledging the subtle and shifting relationships between the affective and the analytic or, to locate this within Harman’s approach, between the sensual and real. The thesis will explore the implications of an object oriented approach to music, trace the history of its development in relation to music – chiefly that of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – as well as make object oriented analyses of selected works, including my own compositions.</p>

The ontology of musical objects in contemporary instrumental composition

<p>The musical object occupies a strange place in music criticism. The new musicology schools influenced by post-structuralist continental thought have shied away from the object’s autonomous existence, exemplified by Christopher Small’s view of music as a cultural activity: “musicking.” Other theorists, such as Dennis Smalley, have created taxonomies of musical sound. Smalley’s spectromorphology defines sonic typologies that he claims to be based on an experiential understanding of sound, while simultaneously undertaking the technical project of a systematic cataloguing of sounds. Both views inhabit quite opposite positions in relation to the sound object – either a total rejection of its reality or a positivistic attempt at a catalogue of sound types. Both of these approaches suffer from distancing the sonic object through their respective discourse: by reducing the importance of the object for the sake of viewing music as a network of cultural relations, or by reducing it to an idealized and rationalized object, seeing it as just the product of a bundle of auditory qualities unified by perception. These views introduce a distance from auditory experience, which is at its core an object-oriented experience. In other words, neither meets the musical object on its own level, and because of this, they deny or caricature the musical object’s ontology. Graham Harman’s philosophical study of Object-oriented Ontology is a radicalization of Heideggerian phenomenology. Through a new reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Harman argues that objects – whether real, living, non-living, ideal or abstract – are the primary location of ontological investigation, and that objects exist both discretely and as a part of a wider network of possible relationships. By viewing the object this way, and by recognizing the multifaceted and multidimensional features of the musical object, we may be able to account for features of music that the trends above are unable to recognize or assess, such as the twentieth century aesthetic practices of György Ligeti, Salvatore Sciarrino, and the Spectral school of composition. It is possible to read these composer’s aesthetics as object-oriented because they are so strongly focused on examining sonic objects themselves –whether it is a physical event or modeling a natural process – instead of examining objects only through their affective potential towards human beings. This practice suggests that these qualities and processes are themselves areas for possible contemplation. Historically, this move away from an emphasis on the human-world binary goes against the nineteenth century aesthetic of Romanticism, which relies on an object’s affective potential. Also, an object-oriented position rejects formalism, because of its reduction of music to an intellectual activity. An object-oriented approach to music traverses the line between these two positions, acknowledging the subtle and shifting relationships between the affective and the analytic or, to locate this within Harman’s approach, between the sensual and real. The thesis will explore the implications of an object oriented approach to music, trace the history of its development in relation to music – chiefly that of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – as well as make object oriented analyses of selected works, including my own compositions.</p>

Materiality

This chapter offers an examination of sonic materiality from a perspective strongly influenced by various strands of contemporary ontology, in particular Graham Harman’s object oriented ontology, Karen Barad’s agential realism, and Timothy Morton’s synthesis of sundry speculative realist approaches. The core argument of the chapter, supported by aspects of each of the theorists just mentioned, is that sound exists as part of the energetic entanglement of objects, a ‘hyper-object’ (Morton) established in ‘intra-action’ (Barad), which reveals the otherwise withdrawn (Harman) qualities and propensities of these multiple participants, including the human auditor and the medium which propagates sound. In this way, sound can be described as a kind of fabric, both ‘something made’ (fabricated) and made of the interweave of multiple elements.