….was a question emailed to me late last week. It’s made think quite a bit.

Considering Tim Morton’s joined the list of Bogost, Levi and the ‘G’ man as a self-confessed Object Oriented Ontologist, what’s my position here?

I’ve written a number of posts on the object oriented resemblance with certain artists, artworks and movements, but not actually clarified on where I stand on it philosophically speaking. OOO has, hands down, launched the most fertile philosophical period of my short, but colourful life, (hey, 26 is a long time!) and I’ve been tremendously lucky to cotton onto it at this stage of my PhD, as its carved open and (simultaneously) resolved some tricky issues.

I keep reminding myself of that short edit in the Zizek! documentary where an academic in crowd launches into Zizek for being too dogmatically Lacanian. As ever, the edit is picked because Zizek’s witty comeback is ‘You are knocking on an open door here… I am absolutely a cast iron Lacanian!! No need to deconstruct me, etc…‘ Similarly, one could have expected my response to the question would have been this ‘open door’ remark.

Lately I’ve been thinking that I’m in a similar position to Bogost, with Unit Operations. That work is, undeniably pre-OOO, with the argument for the rejection of systems. But the key thing here is that both of us are coming to philosophy from completely different disciplines. In Bogost’s case we have computational media and in particular Videogames, in my case, mainstream art criticism, digital aesthetics / practice. Both centre on units or to put it another way, fissures within systems that reveal systems not to be wholly relational.

But this post is also keyed into the latest debates between the ‘G’ man , Levi on one side and numerous bloggers on the other, arguing that OOO is nothing new and has been anticipated in advance by other historical figures. First we’ve had Derrida (which still registers as something inextricably misguided: objects do nothing other than differ or defer as appearance, surely?), now we’ve had Peirce and pragmatism! (Quite clearly thats also misguided, in OOO real objects have no meaning whatsoever, just because human objects can only ever experience appearance, certainly does not mean that there is just appearance. Not to mention we are still dealing with systems and relations.) One almost wants to invoke the work “ignorance” here, considering the number of trolls that offer ‘sit up and shut up’ posts just to require attention. But they haven’t even bothered reading the material they are critiquing. And yes don’t email me, saying its not ignorance, generally if you offer an absolutist opinion without any reading of the subject in hand, thats generally called being ignorant.

There is the case however that one could apply many other philosophers work into an OOO schema. Even in Tool-Being, Graham had a go at interpreting Zizek’s retroactive causation within objects, although this probably bores him to tears at this point in his career, as it is Husserl which takes the crown for sensual-object intentionality. You could interpret pragmatism from the point of view of objects, but Peirce never attempts to navigate his enquiry away from the human, in other words if you wanted to do that, it would take some considerable effort to do so, but this no way implies that Peirce anticipates OOO.

(Interestingly for those who are interested in blending Peirceian Semiotics with cybernetic-informational-cognitive science, check out Søren Brier’s CyberSemiotics, well worth a read in advance considering Levi’s use of Luhmann in The Democracy of Objects. Søren Brier attempts to combine Luhmann and Peirce into a weird 4 level semiotic -informational-system theory. Hat tip to David McConville for that one)

Anyway back to the matter in hand, whats my position? Of course I fully endorse OOO, but its worth stating that I’ve done so, proceeding from my own thoughts in aesthetics. For the last number of years, I have grown more and more suspicious of the forced choice between ‘ static objects of independence = bad’ vs. ‘difference, systems and relations = good’. As I have read more art criticism, I have become more and more convinced of non-relationality in artworks. As I have researched more and more into algorithmic artwork history, I have noticed more and more examples of the foregrounding of execution as something independent. More importantly, as I have read more and more Michael Fried, I have realised just how relevant his criticism is becoming not just for aesthetics, but even for philosophy. And I mean that in the sense of the last paragraph; that the recurrent themes of his criticism have a healthy relevance for both OOO and a new kind of aesthetics. I have always considered artworks as irreducible to human activity. I’m purposely not writing a lot on the relevancy of Fried and OOO at the moment for reasons I can’t comment quite yet.

In that sense, I have not always been an Object Oriented Ontologist, but in studying artworks I have always been Object Oriented. Although this might seem odd, considering that the stereotypical conception of an artwork is object based, that is far from the case in that last 30 – 40 years, we have seen aesthetics as information, aesthetics as systems or aesthetics as wholly embedded in social relations. Its time to focus on the independency of objects again, but objects that are capable of aesthetics themselves.