Object-oriented Philosophy Research Articles

Most Alive: Vibrant Taxidermy and Art as Futural Practice in Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things

ABSTRACT In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett asks “How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” In this essay, I consider a narrower version of this question by examining Kirstin Arnett’s novel Mostly Dead Things, focusing on how depictions of art in the novel may provide pathways for addressing public problems by engaging seriously with the vitality of nonhumans. While it would be naive to suggest that art or depictions of art might be a cure-all for contemporary concerns, art is, I contend, a site where we might better connect with nonhumans and with one another to solve public problems. Leaning broadly on both relational aesthetics and object-oriented philosophies, I argue that objects and actants, including the nonhuman animals in the novel’s taxidermy shop as well as the relationships between and among characters, contribute to a participatory aesthetic of collaboration and aesthetic embodiment. I suggest, further, that such aesthetic embodiment may be an effective path toward post-anthropocentric – and perhaps even post-androcentric – futures when approached as a collaboration among existents ranging from presumably inanimate objects to humans.

Textures of ecology: A flat ontology of things in Zachary Epcar’s Return to Forms

This article analyses Return to Forms with regard to Levi R. Bryant’s flat ontology, which eliminates any degree of hierarchy between things. Foregrounding the entanglements of different textures, Zachary Epcar’s haptic and sonic experiment echoes Bryant’s object-oriented philosophy and calls for a radical ecological sensibility through assembling the manifold fabrics of everyday life with an unusual tone. In this new materialist outlook, human and non-human, actual and virtual, body and matter coincide.

REALISTIC CAPACITY OF M. GABRIEL’S «NEUTRAL REALISM»

The article concerns Markus Gabriel’s philosophical conception —ontology and main thesesof so-called «neutral realism», while questioning the most significant arguments of the German philosopher and considering a few other positions that it has parallels with. For instance, with Frege’s conception of meaning, in which the notion of sense plays an important role, being one of the elements of the so-called «semantic triangle». Or with the notion of sense in post-structuralism, particularly in works by Derrida, who as-sumed sense as the horizon of the world, yet rejected any reality beyond it. Among others, G.Harman’s object-oriented philosophy and L.Bryant’s flat ontology appear to be to some extent relevant for compar-ing them with «neutral realism»: realism as a crucial point and anti-hierarchy of ontology seem to be a common place for each ofthem; however, the definition of reality and existence in each conception dif-fers essentially. Giving a brief overview of conceptual solutions supposed to label Gabriel’s philosophy as «new realism», the paper provides analysis of the notion of the «fieldof sense», as well as several on-tological principles of the aforementioned conception: neutrality, univocality of being, and anti-essentialism. A polemic interest is drawn by the problematic understanding of existence in Gabriel’s on-tology. There can alsobe seen a problem with reaching positive results of Gabriel’s realistic program, which is eventually supposed to give some sort of knowledge and explanation of what is real. The paper ends with some critical arguments (for instance, concerning an ambiguity of Gabriel’s ontology, in which the pluralistic and unifying strategies of defining any beings tend to intertwine with one another), thus calling into question the initial realistic tasks of Gabriel’s philosophical project.

Культурные трансформации цифровой эпохи в контексте объектно-ориентированной онтологии

The article highlights the main trends and factors of transforming the dominant cultural space at the present stage of information technologies development, accompanied by a permanent crisis in all spheres of public life. The subject of research is considered in the context of object-oriented ontology from the perspective of understanding the phenomenon of information culture, that, implementing to the space of modern culture, stimulates globalization and heterogeneity, forming ‘cyberspace’ territory that determines heteropolar dynamics of cultural transformation vectors: those which are created by a person, and those which are socially dangerous. The authors interpret the problems of transformations and risks of the formation of the information society cultural space as a dilemma of technologies (regulations) and value meanings of creating culture as a reality of human existence. The article notes the position of object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism in the problem field of philosophical thought and in the theoretical understanding of the socio-cultural aspects of contemporary digital space. The paper also focuses on fixation and comprehension of real and sensory objects as simulacra, foundations and origins of simulation in digital and non-digital cultural space and applications of certain social practices. Cultural space in a rapidly developing information technology society is fundamentally changing its axiological, cognitive and regulative coordinates. In conclusion, we systematize important factors of cultural transformations considered in the paper, and associated with the object-oriented comprehension of new variable possibilities of information and communication technologies in a digital society: interactivity of networks, virtualization of reality, ontologization and objectification of medial constructions of the image of the world, “cyber-performatization” of society, the dominance of digital mass culture, as well as challenges to man, new forms of alienations manifested in the location of the ‘interactive infosphere’ of cultural space.

“BACK TO THE ELEMENTS”? POSTMODERNITY’S COLLAPSE OF ONTOLOGICAL CATEGORIES

Although the posthumanist tag is applied to the society where men and machines compete for power, the mutation earning this name was the one that affected the perception of man’s identity through the collapse of ontological categories. Human nature changed as the historical self was replaced by deconstructionists with the instance saying “I”, man’s cognition was redefined as biological epistemology by Maturana and Varela (1972), quantum physics relegated relations of causation to invisible and unpredictable process at the subatomic level, phases of civilization made room for temporary plateaus generated by signifying particles within the eternal flow of things and energy Deleuze and Guattari (1980). What used to be perceived as reality has become an amorphous mixture of elements, in which bodies are no longer discrete entites but processes, emerging forms of life. If the Deleuzian “becoming animal” of 1980 stirred anxiety around the human body made into a site of various inscriptions and identities, The Shape of Water (2018), a novel written by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus, the homonymous movie (2017) directed by the former, or Robert Bolesto’s screenplay of the Polish movie The Lure (2015) have recently provided the companion pieces of elementary nature “becoming human” across the human/ animal divide The quantum picture of a world reduced to a flux of matter and energy in A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had somehow prepared the ground for this posthuman reversal of the Renaissance worldpicture with man at the top of creation. The process, however, had already started some decades before. We are moving back in time locating its origin in the rise of object-oriented philosophy.

Enabling Knowledge: The Art of Nurturing Unknown Spaces

This article is both an exploration and a reflection on the process of generating knowledge from an encounter with the unknown. It documents what practising the ‘ethics of the unknown’ (Eeg-Tverbakk 2016) consisted of and what insights it led to in relation to two projects: ‘Childism’ (2015), based on documents from an informant who experienced child abuse, and ‘Embodied’ (2018), a performance lecture presenting both research and lived experience of involuntary childlessness. To reflect the fluidity, multi-directionality and, at points, messiness- of the process of practising the ethics of the unknown, theory and practice are not as rigidly separated in the text as the conventions of academic publication would normally require. The text alternates analysis, the voices of the authors, as well as sound files and images designed to offer experiential glimpses into the performances and the arguments. Theoretically, the concepts outlined are inspired by quite different strands of materialist thinking (object-oriented philosophy and new materialism). The research takes liberties when relating to different philosophical concepts that have proven to be useful in the practice of staging documentary material. We are not proposing a ‘method’ but rather arguing along with Erin Manning for ‘research creation’, where methods have to be invented and developed for each project. As such, this article also places itself within the discussions on post-qualitative, non-representational and performative research.

Migrating Landscapes

Abstract This article, one element in a multifaceted art research project, explores the agency of the aircraft landing gear compartment (wheel bay) in global transfer. It takes as its beginning histories of human and other-than-human actors falling from aircraft wheel bays as aircraft descend into London Heathrow and asks what art research can bring to the problem of their political and ethical framing. Its theoretical touchstones include John Ruskin on dust and the object-oriented philosophies of new materialism. These are brought into conversation with an account of the process of modeling and exhibiting a wheel bay, as well as extracts from a microstratigraphic survey conducted on the original. The article ultimately contends that the wheel bay gives shape to otherwise intangible aeromobilities, knowledge of which is integral to a nuanced understanding of the political geography of airspace at London Heathrow.

NEW MATERIALISM: PROJECTIONS INTO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM

The article considers the recent (re)turn to materiality in philosophy and theory, in particular, such schools as speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. They offer rethinking of objects and criticism of anthropocentric worldview. The attention to materiality privileges matter, body, and nature. Theorists of New materialism reject the binary oppositions (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, etc.) and insist on intra-action as a new materialist orientation. The author argues that the new materialist critique of conventional critique will be useful for literary theory and criticism. According to Latour, critique should be productive and collaborative. As far as critical judgments rely on thelogic of representation that in its turn is based on similarity, analogy and opposition they restrict the analytic enterprise. Moreover, it is necessary to rethink conventional practices of interpretation and explanation. In this context, K. Barad proposes to substitute these strategies with the practice of ‘diffraction’. In the second part of the article, the author analyzes Graham Harman’s article The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer:Object-Oriented Literary Criticism. We pay attention to Harman’s critique of New Criticism, New Historicism, and Deconstruction in their contrast to object-oriented philosophy. In his analysis of New Criticism, Harman figures out the taxonomic fallacy within this theory. He argues against the idea that only poetry has all the non-prose sense while other disciplines have the literal sense. His second argument against New Criticism problematizes the unity of all the elementsin a literary work. Harman outlines the assumptions of New Historicism and points out that it turns everything into interrelated influences. Instead, he argues that contextuality is not universal. In his criticism of Deconstruction Harman underlines that Derrida wrongly believes that ontological realism automatically entails an epistemological realism. In his turn, Harman insists that the thing is deeper than its interactions are.

Of squalls and mutinies: emergency politics and black democracy in Moby-Dick and ‘The Heroic Slave’

ABSTRACT This article takes an object-oriented approach to the analogies between weather events and political events in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ (1853), arguing that marine weathers in these maritime fictions take the measure of the political without being reducible to it. I integrate political-ecological theories of emergency and ‘emergence’ with the analogic poetics of both object-oriented philosophy and critical race studies to show how stormy weather in these texts carries a special charge in articulating an emergent politics of Black democracy.

The Soul Might Well Have Been Dreamed by Cicadas: Inger Christensen’s Speculative Realism

In this paper, I reconstruct Inger Christensen’s poetical thinking in a dialogue with the speculative turn in contemporary continental philosophy. Christensen’s poetry has been philosophically interpreted in line with the Romantic tradition. However, I argue that by reframing the context to present day debates in continental metaphysics, Christensen’s position can provide the building blocks for a new hybrid model —an object-oriented philosophy of nature. First, the relation between language as a transcendental semiotic system and reality as a mind-independent realm is addressed not as a correlation between humans and world but as a companionship between two aspects of nature itself. Second, Christensen advocates a generic model of becoming where the engine is fueled by the irreducible “state of secrecy” that generates beings, forces, events on a flat ontological and political plane without ever itself being revealed.

What About Us? – On Archaeological Objects (or the Objects of Archaeology)

The introduction of Object-Oriented philosophies has resulted in the development of two main atti- tudes to the study of the past. Some scholars have suggested the development of archaeologies that fo- cus on the fragmentary nature of the archaeological record – inviting a more descriptive approach to doing archaeology – whereas others have used simi- lar frameworks to revitalize the study of social pro- cesses. Both tendencies lean towards archaeologies that embrace ontological enquiry, moving away from questions of human access. In a reflection re- garding things, archives and social processes, this article strives for enquiries which favour theoretical examination that encompasses the study of reality as well as the study of the ways in which archaeolo- gists gain knowledge about the past.

Applying Gloria Anzaldúa’s Creative Works to Speculative Realism: Bridging Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy

In a 1983 interview with Christine Weiland, Gloria Anzaldúa posited that human and nonhuman connectivity exists outside hierarchical arrangements. Some twenty years after Anzaldúa’s interview, the “Speculative Turn” emerged in continental philosophy which critiques anthropocentrism in modern philosophy and reconceptualizes nonhuman subjectivity. While Anzaldúa’s scholarship addresses core issues that are highlighted by the speculative turn, little scholarship exists that places her into conversation with these new trajectories in continental philosophy. In this essay, I aim to contribute to this nascent scholarship and explore the question, How can Anzaldúa’s creative work contribute to and expand scholarship of the speculative turn? I investigate how Anzaldúa’s work can help bridge connections between differing veins of speculative turn thought, specifically Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy (OOP) and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism (VM). Conversations between Harman and Bennett demonstrate a split in understanding nonhuman autonomy and relationality and represent incompatibilities between OOP and VM. Interested in these departures, I posit that Anzaldúa’s creative works, such as poetry and drawing, offer ways to challenge problematic human/nonhuman relations and bridge philosophical divides within the speculative turn.

A parallel, object-oriented framework for unsteady free-wake analysis of multi-rotor/wing systems

The development, validation, and applications of an object-oriented free-wake solver for multi-rotor and fixed-wing systems are outlined here. Advantages of utilizing the object-oriented philosophy for modeling the multi-rotor/wing free-wake problem are described. To explore the feasibility of utilizing conventional desktop workstations, the vortex lattice methodology’s time complexity is examined as an evolving n-body problem and the advantage gained from employing wake roll up models is demonstrated. Modifications in typical formulae to leverage features of multi-core systems and improvements in computational performance obtained from these modifications are illustrated using a roofline analysis. The free-wake solver incorporating these optimizations is then employed—after extensive validation—to simulate a distributed propulsion aircraft and a multi-rotor urban mobility vehicle. The paper also proposes a novel lattice skew parameter for monitoring instabilities in wake solutions commonly observed in rotorcraft free-wake analysis.

Negative Dialectics before Object-Oriented Philosophy: Negation and Event

AbstractAn important question in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its associated literature is how OOO relates to its competitor theories. This article is a meta-philosophical investigation into OOO and its grounding, which hopes to fully theorise this relation, deriving ultimately a “negative dialectic” that emphasises the irreducible differences between OOO and non-OOO. Beginning by analysing the use of OOO as a “starting point”, I consider Althusser’s various contributions to meta-philosophical debates. This leads me to focus on Harman’s notion of “hyperbolic reading”, and on how attempts to hyperbolically ground OOO force it to immanently include its competitors. Finally, I apply these insights to systematise both the negative dialectical relation between OOO and non-OOO and the becoming-OOO of thinking, by applying Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy.

Steamy

Steamy Jeffrey T. Nealon (bio) Let me begin with a blurb written by Rita Felski, author of The Limits of Critique, for Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, arguably post-critique's most successful venture: "This manifesto for a new materialism is an invigorating breath of fresh air. Jane Bennett's eloquent tribute to the vitality and volatility of things is just what we need to revive the humanities and to redraw the boundaries of political thought."1 If we survey what's happened in and around the humanities since 2010, when Bennett's book was published and new materialist post-critique debuted as the Terry Gross-style "fresh air" destined "to revive the humanities," we'd have to admit the obvious: rather than post-critique being the god that could save us now, the new paradigm that would sweep to dominance and make us relevant again, we've instead been vexed to nightmare by budget and tenure-line job cuts, disappearing students, and a number of self-inflicted Twitter wounds too numerous to elaborate. But I'm more interested here in the nomenclature of critical "steam"—insofar as, from its inception in Bruno Latour all the way to this journal issue, the steam metaphor is based on very recognizable marketing logic, or "next big thing" thinking: in short, the "Steam or No Steam?" gameshow format (as in, "affect studies—steam or no steam?") reinforces the sense that Kuhnian paradigm shifts (or less generously, neoliberal innovations in the product line) are the fuel for the engine of disciplinary progress, and more specifically that the entire academic enterprise is driven by steamy new scholarly publication protocols and their concomitant acronyms: ANT, OOO, various other OMGs, WTFs, and shiny innovative modes of adjectival reading (as in post-critical, distant, reparative, descriptive, surface, distracted, hyper, and so on). All this emphasis on critical "steam" (as newness or hotness) reinforces the sense that such heavyweight paradigm bouts are the central powering mechanisms of a discipline. So just let me say right out of the gate: from my point of view, it's not this or that theoretical paradigm that has run out of steam, but rather it's the very act of chasing the "next big thing" within critical paradigms that has run out of steam. Or it may be that, when it comes to thinking about theory and what makes it tick, chasing the next big idea was never anything other than a big ole Cleveland Steamer. [End Page 537] In any case, it seems clear that new materialism or post-critical realism is fashionable in theory today largely because its arch-nemesis social constructionism has run aground; there are just no new articles, books or dissertations to be written about the social construction of x or y. And to many jaundiced post-critical eyes, it looks like those social-construction years were tragically hubristic as well, with the tenets of the linguistic turn harboring a secret investment in what turns out to be an earth-destroying humanism. As Jane Bennett writes in "Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy," almost all of these recent post-critical models "share a critique of linguistic and social constructivism" and thereby "see the nonhuman turn as a response to an overconfidence about human power that was embedded in the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s" (Bennett 2015, 227). As an aside here, one might note that critique in the modern, Kantian sense is grounded in a severely austere humility concerning the power of human logos, not a celebration of its unbounded powers to know everything—the one point of agreement that made postmodernism and Kant such unlikely bedfellows. As Theodor Adorno insists, "The crucial feature of the Kantian work…is that it is guided by the conviction that reason is denied the right to stray into the realm of the Absolute. … The power of the Critique of Pure Reason resides not so much in responses to the so-called metaphysical questions as in its highly heroic and stoical refusal to respond to these questions in the first place" (Adorno 2001, 6-7). In fact, it completely escapes me how turning back toward realist metaphysical...

Between Mutation and Glitch

The following paper considers the immanent principles of digital media evolution. The features of the evolutional route of digital objects are conditioned by glitches, errors and bugs, which appear in media functioning, what in its turn gives birth to the new forms, structures and configurations of digital reality. The glitches are considered not only as a kind of digital mutations, but also as a sign of activity of media. Decisions elaborated from the programs’ failures enlarge the resolution capacity of new technologies. The paper provides an analysis of certain errors and glitches, which engineers, programmers, game designers faced with during their work with digital environment. The theoretical framework includes Henri Bergson’s theory of creative evolution, Gram Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, media philosophical approach to the problem of the activity of object proposed by Valery Savchuk and the theory of self-organisation and autopoiesis of the social systems worked out by Niklas Luhmann. The analysis of digital objects activity demonstrates two levels of functioning. The first one, fictional level, reveals mainly (but not only) in the computer games and concerns the content of media, when we gain a habit to interact with digital objects/characters as if they are real. The second level, operational, realises in the digital environment in general and concerns the form of media. On this level, glitches and bugs have crucial meaning, because they might evoke the changes in the digital world organisation, starting from the local decisions for the certain program (e.g. the elaboration of the new ways in solving locomotional tasks in simulations, which might be later use in other projects) and ending with the replacement of practices and representations typical for the human of digital era. The paper shows that it is possible to talk about digital evolution not in terms of the history of technological inventions, but in terms of the changes in digital objects caused by the inner logic of media, independently from the human will and expectations.

Czy firmonimy można rozpatrywać w kontekście projektowym? Wprowadzenie do problematyki badań

<p>Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie kwestii dotyczących nazw firmowych (chrematonimów) umiejscowionych w przestrzeni miejskiej, z wykorzystaniem teorii zwrotu ku rzeczom. Materiał w postaci zdjęć szyldów został zebrany podczas eksploracji terenu, w przeważającej mierze w Poznaniu. Płaszczyzną do umiejscowienia ich w kontekście projektowym jest funkcjonowanie nazw własnych w kontekstach komunikacyjnych zaczerpniętych z teorii komunikacji biznesowej (por. W. <em>Š</em>mid). Nowy kontekst projektowy, który warto według autora wyodrębnić w badaniach związanych z nazwami firmowymi (firmonimy) w „pejzażu miejskim (językowym)”, prowadzi nie tylko do wniosków związanych z estetyką, użytkowością czy prostotą formy, ale także uwypukla marketingowe oraz językowe walory i problemy omawianych onimów. Autor ukazuje także jeszcze jedną propozycję metodologiczną, której podstawę stanowi powstała w XVI wieku kompozycja słowno-obrazkowa, jaką jest emblemat.Wykorzystać ją można w onomastyczno-projektowym aspekcie, stosując literaturoznawcze pojęcia, takie jak <em>lemma</em>, <em>imago</em> czy <em>subskrypcja</em>, jako składowe emblematu, łączące obraz z tekstem. Przedstawione zagadnienie jest jedynie wprowadzeniem do szerszych badań z pogranicza onomastyki, szeroko rozumianego marketingu i dizajnu, których wynik zostanie przedstawiony w formie oddzielnej monografii.</p>

A real-time gas turbine simulation model for control logic evaluation

During our development of a gas turbine control system, we need to evaluate the correctness and completeness of the control logic before conducting a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test. For this purpose, a pure software simulation framework which includes virtual DPU (VDPU) and gas turbine model interfacing through OPC protocol was proposed. A real-time gas turbine simulation model for this framework was developed. This gas turbine model was written in C++ and employs the object-oriented philosophy for maintenance and further development and it uses a non-iterative method to ensure the real-time capability to run simultaneously with the control logic. From the result of preliminary tests on this model, it shows to be able to simulate the response of real gas turbine to the instructions from the control system and suitable to evaluate the control logic.

A Philosophy of Physical Education Oriented toward the Game as an Object. Showing the Inexhaustible Reality of Games through Bernard Suits’ Theory

ABSTRACT Although a large number of theories justify the presence of games in school, all of them converge in two of the educational functions described by Biesta, socialization and qualification. In contrast to this instrumental educational approach, the present article aims to develop the bases for a philosophy of physical education (PE) oriented toward the game as an object. This proposal is supported by Suits’ theory of games and the object-oriented philosophy (OOP) introduced by Harman. The text presents a justification for games in the school setting by defending its intrinsic value. First, the instrumentalist justifications for games are presented in order to establish the state of the art. Second, an explanation is provided about the degree to which the object-oriented philosophy can complement these justifications. Third, the article explains why Suits’ theory of games establishes the conceptual bases for developing what we could call a philosophy of PE oriented toward the game as an object. Finally, an example is provided of how this philosophy can guide the PE practice.

Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory

The philosopher Graham Harman argues that contemporary debates about the nature of reality as such, and about the nature of objects in particular, can be meaningfully applied to social theory and practice. With Immaterialism, he has recently provided a case-based demonstration of how this could happen. But social theorists have compelling reasons to oppose object-oriented social theory’s 15 principles. Fidelity to Harman’s aesthetic foundationalism, and his particular use of serial endosymbiosis theory as a mechanism of social change, constrain the very practices which it is supposed to enable. However, social theory stands to benefit from object-oriented philosophy through what we call posthuman relationism – characterised as a commitment to the reality of the nonhuman, but not divorced from the human. The emphasis in object-oriented social theory on how objects withdraw from cognitive or affective capture and representation needs to be tempered by an equal focus on how objects appeal.