Assorted OOO Lectures and Videos Notes Sam Mickey on Speculative Realism Clip #1 of 1.

mov Sam Mickey: Speculative Realism in Three Minutes. (uploaded) April 29, 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A3L_8pXMhg Its a new movement emerging from 2007 at an event in Goldsmith College in London. Extremely fresh. Four people: Meillassoux (After Finitude, Correlationism). Correlationism comes back to the Copernical Revolution, that we can only talk about being insofar as it relates to thought, but not things-in-themselves without first referring to human consciousness. He has a problem with the finitude of the correlate. He infinitizes it so that we can talk about things themselves through our consciousness still but in a way that absolutizes them. The other people dont like the correlate at all that we can talk about things without going through the human. Graham Harman his is object-oriented ontology. Objects live in infinite relations and infinitely withdrawn. Ray Brassier basically a nihilist, but the cool kind transcendental nihilism. Ian Hamilton Grant using Schelling/Deleuze and philosophy that we can focus on the transcendental ground in the Earth. Were speculative because we bring back metaphysics after centuries of its rejection (language games, natural science, critical theory). Not your daddys realism: thats just a health inspector saying that there might be a real world out there. Our realism is speculative realism we are Jupiter, expansive, weird and strange.

Graham Harman defines Objects June 28, 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77peIcMXp58

Why objects? In many philosophies, objects are the butt of jokes. They can be undermined (pre-Socraticism): they are not fundamental; objects are made up of quarks or atoms, but no matter what they can be explored deeper. Then they can be overmined,

(modern European philosophy): objects are these falsely deep, unnecessary ghosts. Why say that theres a chair, rather than the experience of a chair? Or the concert of language, or perception? Theres nothing to the chair, they say. But these views skip over the object and ignore or belittle them. OOP says that objects exist at all levels you cant privilege tiny micro-particles and say those are the real objects that matter. You could name anything as an object: being eternal, being fundamental these arent necessary properties for something to be an object. However, objects do have to be unified or have a certain depth that isnt exhausted by certain relations they come into. Heidegger says that objects have to be deeper than purely their relations. Real objects come from human experience in a sort of hidden vacuum. Central objects are the objects we experience: people and chairs and trees.

Heidegger hated the word objects for him it was what you get when you falsely reduce reality to some model conceptual, scientific he thinks that acknowledging reduces things to objects, a new set of properties to be exploited by humans for their purposes. The founder of phenomenology (and one of the Austrians), Edmund Husserl, thought that the only way to save philosophy from the onslaught of natural science was to not invent theories, but rather to describe minutely and patiently exactly what we experience, and find subtleties in this. Heidegger was Husserls student and tried to challenge this by saying we dont perceive things by perceiving them theyre not objects in consciousness, because for the most part we dont perceive things. What about the floor youre sitting on you werent thinking about it, but if it collapsed youd fall and be killed regardless. What about these silent networks of withdrawn objects that you dont consciously access? Consciou sness is just a thin film. Usually we only notice things when they break your computer crashes, you have a heart attack. Usually here people say that Heidegger is putting practice above theory it becomes a pragmatist reading of Heidegger. But that doesnt work because human practice does not exhaust other things: if my looking at the chair fails to exhaust all its properties, sitting or smelling the chair doesnt exhaust all its properties either. The chair is deeper than my practical relationship to it. Something deeper than practice or theory: cannot be exhausted by our human access to objects. Now a controversial step: objects do this to each other too. They arent conscious (but in some way they are, Harman believes and explains elsewhere). To use the classic example: when fire burns cotton. The fire doesnt care about its smell or where it was

harvested or purchased from. It makes contact but does not exhaust its properties. Objects thus draw from each other too, not just us. This is a philosophy of access rather than correlation. Harmans relation to the microphone is no different of kind to the relation of a breeze to it. It might be more interesting or colorful or fascinating to talk about (for us), but its not different in kind. Everything here is put on equal footing.

Thinking Ecology: The Mesh Tim Morton on ecological interdependence May 21, 2009 Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-mWCPa9y3c Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viiA5s8DV7I (and theres a third part too) Ecological thought is something of an emergent politics of the moment. Its not really thinkable so it must follow the mesh. Starts with the question: what is interdependence? The interdependence theorem: Axiom (1): For every A, the existence of A consists of things that are not not A. A is made of not A such that the only way to define it is negatively and differentially. Thus A is A because it isnt not A while not A is only not A because it isnt A. Axiom 1 states that things are only what they are in relation to other things. Axiom (2): Things derive from other things. While Axiom (1) is concerned with how things are synchronically, Axiom (2) talks about origins, diachrony. Things like A only exist such that a not A exists. Nothing exists by itself and nothing comes from nothing. Axioms (1) and (2) define an interdependence across a range of phenomena. They summarize structural linguistics because structuralisms model of language is that signs are interdependent. It also describes life-forms: diachronically, there is no life-form that didnt arise from another life-form, and synchronically life-forms are different from each other in arbitrarily negative ways: there is no human-flavored DNA different from daffodil-flavored DNA for instance. We should know that humans are 98% chimp DNA, but also 25% daffodil. They are different negatively: DNA after all is a language and can be modeled on structuralism.

The system of life-forms can be similarly subject to deconstruction as linguistics is. When we deconstruct language, we reveal the open-ended and arbitrary nature of language. We reveal that the structurality of structure has no edge or center: theres no sign that stands outside the system to find the meaning and stability of it. Language is infinite: we can never fully account for languages meanings or effect. Meaning depends on meaninglessness and language is a system, a network neither inside nor outside. The process of synchronic difference and diachronic deferment means that the meaning of a word is another word, and strings of signs get meaning retroactively not until after you hear it (elephant). Same for life-forms: They are made up of other life-forms (symbiosis) and life-forms derive from others (evolution). The ecological emergency re-invented compels us to take this into account.

Implications of the interdependence theorem (1) Life forms constitute a mesh that is infinite and beyond conceptunthinkable as such. a. This isnt because the mesh is too large, but its infinitesimally small: it goes to the genomic level (no human-flavored or daffodil-flavored DNA). Mesh can mean both the holes in a network and also the threading between them. By extension, mesh can mean a snare pitch perfect. If theres no definite background or foreground: Darwin examined an infinitely expanding tree of taxonomy. (2) Tracing the origins of life to a moment prior to life will result in paradoxes. a. You cant draw a rigid narrow boundary between life and non-life. RNA pulverizes the idea of a life-essence, or a sentient gel this existential substance is not a pre-requisite to idealisms coherence. RNA is structured like a language: empty formal relationships. (3) Drawing distinctions between life and non-life is strictly impossible, yet unavoidable. a. If pre-living life is necessary for imagining the origins of life, then life-assuch is untenable: when we start to think about life, we worry about nature. New beings called virions, smaller than viruses, little bits of RNA that affect our transcription-machinery of our genes; its submicroscopic almost, but are they alive? A virus is just a huge crystal (macro-molecular) that tells your DNA to make copies of itself. If viruses are alive, then so is a computer virus: self-replicating, binding to your

machine. (4) Differentiating between one species and another is never absolute. a. Darwinism teaches this us: it humiliates the human. Species dont exist as-such; they can only be indicated or labeled retroactively. We have discovered a lemur 45 million years old with fingernails and opposable thumbs but you cant draw a definitive line and say THAT is the origin of our species! Darwin undermines the categories of species and monstrosity. He declared that his observations of mockingbirds and turtles might undermine the stability of species understatement of the millennium. (5) There is no outside of the system of life forms. a. Once life gets going, everything else becomes linked with it. When we think ecologically, we imagine ourselves linked to everything else. It implies there is no environment-as-such, but the phenotypical expression of DNA: Dawkins The Extended Phenotype is important. If Levinas and Dawkins met each other in a dark alley, theyd kill each other. DNA doesnt stop expressing itself at the end of your fingers; neither does a beaver at the end of its whiskers but at its dam. Crushed, liquefied dinosaur bones and highways of animal-bits: your environment is the old-fashioned nature. (6) The Interdependence Theorem is part of the system of interdependence and thus subject to deconstruction! a. This is recursivity in action: since the Interdependence Theorem describes language itself, it falls prey to its own premises. We cant rigorously differentiate between one species and another (implication 4), but things are made of other things (axiom 1) and things come from other things (axiom 2). Thus, we have to draw some distinctions between things: then theres no way one species could arise from another species. b. Zenos paradox at work: A dinosaur is distinct from a bird, and yet it is a bird theres a continuity after all. Axiom 2 is in trouble as it applies readily to, say, a candle and its flames: if there was no difference, then the flame would never arise from the candle in the first place. c. Now consider axiom 1: things are made up of other things. Cars are made up of all its components. But theres no commonness: but there are particular components that must make up the car. Human beings are made up of heads and brains and cells and legs. Cells contain organelles and chloroplasts and mitochondria and DNA and viral code-insertions. There is no human-flavor, but the particular assemblage constitutes

humanity. Which is a legitimate DNA the natural DNA or the virallyinserted code? Its impossible to tell which being is parasite and which the host or, organs without bodies. d. After all, we are only here, because your mom didnt spontaneously abort you thanks to a virus in your DNA wanting to make a copy of itself in you. e. At the DNA level, the biosphere is permeable. How do we know we havent learned how to sneeze just because viral information coded it within us to spread viruses? Yet we have bodies, legs, and so on as if we are not an undifferenciated goo. (7) Since we cannot know in advance what the effects of the system will be, all life forms are theorizable as strange strangers. a. The Interdependence Theorem doesnt reduce things to sameness: things exist, but not that much and how they exist is miraculous. We say strange stranger because the strange stranger is uncanny, but strangely so they could be us. Weve got Others, yet others have us, under their skin.

Dawn of the Hyperobjects Tim Morton June 13, 2011 Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS8b87jnqnw&list=PL70427836EA4E7F95&index =1 Dawn of the Hyperobjects somewhere between Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and Dawn of the Dead. Tectonic plates, global warming, nuclear radiation, evolution: these are hyperobjects, entites that are massively distributed in time and space, at least compared to human scales. Hyperobjects appear in the human world as a product of our thinking through the ecological crisis: the moment at which massive non-human, non-sentient entitites make decisive contact with humans, ending various human concepts such as world, horizon, nature, even environment. Art isnt just art about hyperobjects, but that strives to invoke hyperobjectivity in its very form. Post-modern art is the first truly ecological art.

1. Viscosity: The more we know about hyperobjects, the more we know were glued to them: there is no epistemological escape-velocity to escape their density. Wikipedia: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes. 2. Molten Temporality: Salvador Dali depicts how any massive object distorts spacetime. Few objects actually do this, but all objects ripple and melt time like this: no rigid bodies stand in space and time for that reason. The speed of light sets limits on what objects can comprehend. Wikipedia: Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. 3. Non-locality: Hyperobjects cant be localized: even rain becomes a local manifestation of these hyperobjects. The wet stuff falling on my head is no less real than the global warming killing us all already. Wikipedia: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming is a hyperobject that impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formation. According to Morton, though, objects don't feel global warming, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations they produce. 4. Phasing: Hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space, this is why theyre partly invisible to us 3D humans (they come and go like seasons to us) but they continue unfold elsewhere, really. Wikipedia: Hyperobjects occupy a higher dimensional space than other entities can normally perceive. Thus, hyperobjects appear to come and go in threedimensional space, but would appear differently to an observer with a higher multidimensional view. 5. Interobjectivity: Hyperobjects are shared by several entities in a shared space that is non-local the Mesh (notes above). Subjected phenomena occupy small regions of this space of interobjectivity. Every interobjective phenomena requires 1+n real objects for every objective system, one object is withdrawn. When a tone is canceled by another team, or the gap between two tones makes a beat. Interobjective reality is just the sum total of all footprints, criss-crossing. The print of a dinosaur in the mud is seen as a whole in a rock by humans 6.5 Million years later, through some sensuous connection

between that dinosaur and that human despite the time. What we find is another region of interobjective space, where some aspect of the dinosaur is transmitted even across this time: even the dinosaur doesnt know herself (just at a rough translation). The mosquitor or asteroid has their own unique sample of this dinosaur. Wikipedia: Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive to the imprint, or "footprint," of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. For example, global warming is formed by interactions between the Sun, fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide, among other objects. Yet, global warming is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and ocean levels, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than an object that predated its own measurement. Your video of a black hole isnt a black hole they are real and they exist elsewhere. What you watch as you watch a video is not only a quicktime movie and its sampling of visual images and sound at certain time. A hperobject: the wind in the bamboo, the bamboo stems clicking one another; a quicktime movie of it, translating them into a version of themselves; Tim Morton moving his hand slightly as his muscles quiver and fail to maintain stillness; and the chloroplast bacteria in the chutes of bamboo. (at this point he shows the described video). The sum total of the all the sampled events by which an object inscribes itself on other objects is a history that could mean events and recording: hyperobjects have their own history and NOT insofar as they interact with humans. Rain-drops in west California record the history of El Nino and how the Japanese Tsunami scooped it up and dropped it on the object of the USA and was influenced by the object called global warming. The quake destroyed nuclear reactors that inscribed themselves in soft tissue: we are textbooks, living and moving, the history of hyperobjectivity. This changes everything: we contain an intrinsic irony of postmodernity. This is a historical era in which humans achieve ecological awareness, an increasing sense about the innumerable interrelationships between life and non-life. First, that awareness tells us that we are living in an environment. No entity can exist beyond or behind this environment. It stares us in the face: the object is already-there, before we look at it. Its hard to see as a unique entity, and yet it is there: global warming is raining on us, burning down on us, spawning hurricanes, and quaking on us. In some deeply rigorous sense, hyperobjects and objects in general invest in human Art forever: we have simply dropped something, a concept that our art is about them and for them. Non-humans are responsible for the next big events, but we leave behind the strange strangers without a world or nature.

What does this mean? Art that includes non-humans in a wider configuration-space. Its almost a return of Platos art as inspiration. Hegel said that Art had four phases: 1. Symbolic art: the interplay between what we know, and what objects are. Hegels history has quirks and charms, but since hyperobjects exert their overwhelming powers against precisely those western fantasies of power and perception, it seems appropriate to trace Hegels narrative, especially since hyperobjects kick it in the end. Phase One is when humans see non-humans. Non-humans appear to have godlike powers: stones speak! This art shows how objects tower over human knowledge and mastery. We just bow down to it: not simply fetishism, but the Dark Ages. Phase Two: classical art. A harmony emerges that a later age can only regard as an illusion: humans and non-humans meet half-way, making such sweet music as Beethoven and such: the non-human no longer towers over us, but we still dont comprehend the depths of the human space. Phase Three: romantic art. Hegels telling the story from the Absolute, but we are realists, not idealists here. This is a story about the evolving human understanding. In Hegel, there is no end-point: we recognize the infinite depths of our own space, and its impossible to embody it. This romantic art talks about the failure to embody that space, yet we embody it in that sublime discussion. Christian art can now express the gap between the divine idea and fallen human flesh embodied in Christ. The story of this failure is in the avant-garde: the failure to change the social conditions of capitalism. One march of romanticism after another. Art needs manifestos and philosophical justification because of its failures: it cant put the genie back in the bottle. Irony: the aesthetic exploitation of gaps: gapsloitation! Aesthetic exploitation of a gap between (1+n) levels of signification: irony needs more than one thing in the presence: something must already be there for irony to be. But perhaps this knowledge is only available to us now in the dicussion of hyperobjects. They share a weird sensual space in which everything is entangled: (1+n) entities are drawn for the encounter to take place. As Phase Three continues, art becomes more abstract and strident: subjectivity is liberated from appearance, then trapped in realist narration, and then that collapses and naturalism emerges, and then interior monologue comes. Poetry becomes an island in the ocean of prose, when the roles had previously been reversed. Monet started to paint the space in which water seemed to float: or at least the rippling flowing space of the canvas itself. Jackson Pollock put drips and brushes free from the representation they were supposed to be. Its hard to discern when these objects emerged, but non-humans stopped speaking about the human failure to access them. This human style of subjectivity can evaporate, and leave behind objects in a solution.

Phase Four: Ecological Art like phase one, objects exceed the human, but with a phase-three sense of irony. The object of ourselves is abyssal and so is the object. Irony now means that we are glued to objects: the more we try to pull away, the more glued we become. We are the criminals of human activity, the uncanny valley of ourselves: as entities slip into the valley with us, we exist more with strange strangers as well. This isnt a hippy paradise, but its the set of images that is strange and horrifying to humans. Like racism, the slightly-dehumanized occupants of this zombie trough can only be made more tolerable the less they resemble humans. The valley diagram is racist: who decides when the slope ascends again? All entities slip into what appears to be a valley, but is actually totally different: the robot version of your mom doesnt help a healthy human but because your mom is already a robot. These entities are intimate hyperobjects: the atmosphere is uncanny too we find ourselves in Jonahs whale, and these hyperobjects are so exotic and unlike a life-form that they seem shielded away from our earths atmosphere. The atmosphere is twinkle-twinkle, and no longer like a glass-like screen: it attacks us with radiation, shooting ultraviolet at our sensitive skin. The art about hyperobjects must train in this pain: jliat.com. JLiat is a composer who makes sonic hyperobjects: art pieces are recordings of hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, devestating and frightening (not the least for its massive volume). Pieces like this force us to get a close look at gigantic objects that make up the universe: it is made of objects but what are they? We can explore object-oriented ontology which has arrived just in time for the ecological emergency. Objects are unique and can not be resolved into smaller objects. Objets are like the TARDIS: larger on the inside than outside. They are a non-totalizable set that can not be totally grasped. There are more parts than there are wholes (Bryants strange mereology). Even if you bracket off most of reality, there is no talk about the object in a small demarcation of reality: you will find no top or bottom objets: its like a magnet, where the two halves will still have a north/south pole: theres no such thing as half a magnet. Both-And thinking can make the parts greater or at least not lesser than the whole. BOGO Free Consumerism, almost. The open-ended something house, for OOO, this is another object, or it doesnt exist except as another object. Parts are not replacable components of the whole: the more objects you look into the Russian dolls, the more objects (dolls) are inside. Instead of object, think entity. Value-set theory in which any infinite amount of objects could be drawn. Childrens books can help: A House is a House for Me. A Latour Litany: Cartons are houses for crackers. Castles are houses for kings. The more that I think about houses, The more things are houses for things.

This dizzying array of objects presented find themselves inside of other homes, which just describes how some object experiences the object within which it finds itself: A mirrors a house for reflections... A throat is a house for a hum... ... A Book is a house for a story A Rose is a house for a smell My head is a house for a secret, A secret I never will tell. A flowers at home in a garden, A donkeys at home in a stall. Each creature thats known has a house of its own And the earth is a house for us all. The time of the hyperobjects is a time in which we find ourselves inside of other objects: the last two lines make this very clear in the context of ecology. City fun houses are presented as we set the record straight about the real house of the Earth but this is NOT the case the Earth is no more real than any other, they are the same. An essential object is an object necessary for another: the table for my dinner or pencil. Causality happens here: the magic of appearance occurs as A mirrors a house for reflections Yes, the mesh (interrelatedness of everything) is an object, and the strange strangers are real objects. What is real, such as nature, appears as what they are. They are as structured (even as they seem to be a background for human events). Saying that A house is a house for me is like saying that bread really is a house for jam and jam alone an idea that can only slather me in jam rather than the unnatural parasite of marmalade or the illegal alien of peanut butter. For OOOists, reification is the reduction of the object to its central appearance for another object if you want to be poetic, reification is the reduction of one to anothers fantasy about it. Nature is a reification in this sense: we need an ecology without Nature. Emergence is important as we can think of it as an un-reified, flowy kind of thing. Emergence falls where Nature begins: but Emergence is a criterion for realness. Emergence sways the way the flower falls, the height of the ceiling, etc. This is only counter-intuitive if you already think that things need two essential floors like a basement at the bottom and a pretty living room on top. But for OOO, when we talk of being, we are talking of central objects as previously explained. The creeping realization that GW is real is also the uncanny sensation of waking up inside an object: climate surrounds earth and includes the Sun and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Humans dont exist in an environment or Nature now GW spells the end of the world, the absence of a meaningful life-world; the world is a gigantic object and we exist like Russian Dolls inside another Russian Doll. If you eat something gross you feel morally gross too this is psychological. Even when other life-forms are threatening or disgusting, we have to examine ourselves. This correlationism that were stuck in correlates meaningfullness to human meaning, and that whole edifice operates through the aesthetic. thus we have to investigate that. Even the sublime good taste of humans can only make the strange strangers abject

and we should explore the lack of access to humans, and discover how the aesthetic is the blood of causality.