Just to sum up . . .

Just a quickie post, cause I posted a much longer response last nite. But now that the dust has settled a bit, a few things seem clearer.

For what its worth, I don’t think, nor was I trying to say, that the object-oriented approaches of Graham and Levi can be reduced to (as paraphrased by  Peter Gratton), “isn’t this just a commodity?” I don’t think I can say it better than Peter did: “commodities have but one face and aren’t hidden from view.” This is precisely what differentiates OOO/OOP from commodities and commodity fetishism. To dismiss OOO/OOP with an ‘isn’t this just a commodity?’ approach would be silly. I don’t think its what I said, and certainly not what I meant.

As I stated in my response from yesterday, “object oriented approaches, if I understand them correctly, want to safeguard the singularity of what exists against its possible subsumption by power. Object-oriented thought is about protecting what is precious, ephemeral, and easily trampled upon. At least, that is my understanding.”

While some of what I said could have been interpreted otherwise, my hope was that by surrounding the offending half sentence in question (namely, “capitalism makes us see objects“) with a bunch of disclaimers and contextualization, it would’ve been evident that I wasn’t making an ‘isn’t this just a commodity’ argument.

If that was unclear, its my bad, but it was either way certainly not what I meant, which was I believe a much more subtle point which deals with issues such as evolution, spacetime, embodiment, etc (for more explanation, see here). And the ‘eternal objects’ issue at the end of the post was actually on qualities, and only semi-related.

Either way I was certainly not trying to impugn Levi’s politics, or to state he’d been duped. Not my intent at all.

The full version of my response to all this is here, but its a bit lengthy. I agree with Graham, these things tend to happen on the internet, its easy for misunderstandings to happen.

Either way, my best wishes to Levi, and my apologies for any misunderstanding!

~ by chris on May 9, 2010.