{"id":2291,"date":"2011-01-14T10:27:56","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T15:27:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=2291"},"modified":"2011-04-07T13:22:30","modified_gmt":"2011-04-07T18:22:30","slug":"reply-to-harman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/14\/reply-to-harman\/","title":{"rendered":"Reply to Harman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Graham Harman has written a post about me<\/a> in which he says that I was trying to “refute” OOO <\/a>in my “2 cheers”<\/a> post, and that I “claim[ed] quite frankly that OOO is wrong.”\u00a0I thought it worth pointing out that nowhere in that post did I mention OOO, or Graham’s philosophy under any other name. Those three magical letters appear in a quote from Tim, but I don’t take that part of the quote up in my comments afterward, which are about music. My entire post was a reply to Tim Morton’s 11-paragraph rejoinder <\/a>to four short sentences I wrote in a comment on Tim’s blog. Those sentences concerned stability and instability, stability being an achievement, and the role of his “lava-lampism” notion in OOO.<\/p>\n

I’m surprised that Graham took those comments as being a critique of him or his philosophy, since I’m aware that his ontology acknowledges the importance of change (as does Levi Bryant’s). Since I haven’t read enough of Tim’s work after his OOO “conversion,” I was dismayed that he seemed to be going so far over to the “other side,” i.e. dismissing change, fluidity, achievement, and process in favor of what appeared to be a singular focus on the stability of objects; ergo my brief comment on his blog followed by my post responding to his. Had my post been about<\/em> OOO, I would have tagged it “object-oriented philosophy,” “OOO,” or something like that. Instead I tagged it “lava lamps<\/a>, minimalism<\/a>, music<\/a>, ontology<\/a>.” I enjoy talking to Tim about music — he’s one of the two or three most musically astute ecocritics I know (and I know a lot of them) — and I hope those particular tags might see further dialogue between our different styles of thinking on music and aesthetics. But I hate getting into unnecessary arguments.<\/p>\n

Moral of the story: Write carefully, but be prepared for reactions you didn’t expect. Moral #2: The more personally you take things other people write about you, and all the more so when they’re not <\/em>writing about you, the more frustrated you will get with them. I can never be sure where the boundaries are between the various object-oriented ontologists, and so I get taken aback when something I say to one of them is taken so personally by another. But maybe that’s the nature of the beast (the beast being the philosophical blogosphere, with the particular kinds of group dynamics that form in and around new and emerging schools of thought, like OOO). Live and learn.<\/p>\n

Note also the conversations between Michael (of Archive Fire) and Tim here<\/a> and between Michael and Joseph Goodson here<\/a>. Goodson raises an interesting question to me (on Tim’s blog) about Whitehead, which I’ll try to answer when I have a chance. My next little while will be occupied with some rather pressing off-line life events.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Graham Harman has written a post about me in which he says that I was trying to “refute” OOO in my “2 cheers” post, and that I “claim[ed] quite frankly that OOO is wrong.”\u00a0I thought it worth pointing out that nowhere in that post did I mention OOO, or Graham’s philosophy under any other name. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977],"tags":[16805],"class_list":["post-2291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","tag-harman"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-AX","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5825,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/05\/04\/nt4-jane-bennett-walks-into-a-bar-with-an-ooo\/","url_meta":{"origin":2291,"position":0},"title":"NT4: Jane Bennett walks into a bar with an OOO","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 4, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Our morning plenarist is Jane Bennett, whose work has been discussed extensively on this blog before (e.g., here). Introduction by Kennan Ferguson: will Jane B. be throwing down a gauntlet? Jane Bennett: \"Systems & Things: a materialist and an object-oriented philosopher walk into a bar...\" Rich philosophical tradition of engaging\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1415,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/05\/conversions-convertibilities\/","url_meta":{"origin":2291,"position":1},"title":"conversions & convertibles","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"(I try not to edit things once they're published, but I couldn't resist adding a Chevy Impala to this blog.) It may not quite be Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, as Graham Harman's blog post title suggests, but Chris Vitale has clearly had a change of heart, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/12\/image002-240x147.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2326,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/15\/paradigms-productivity-perspective\/","url_meta":{"origin":2291,"position":2},"title":"Paradigms, productivity, perspective","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Levi Bryant responds to my last post (and by extension to Chris Vitale's) here. I agree with him that he and Graham Harman have made worthy efforts at addressing concerns that are central to process-relational philosophical communities (e.g., in Bryant's Difference and Givenness and in the books of Harman's that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blog stuff"","block_context":{"text":"Blog stuff","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/blog_stuff\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1308,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/29\/sr-whitehead-etc\/","url_meta":{"origin":2291,"position":3},"title":"SR, Whitehead, etc.","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm just catching up with this interesting exchange between Gary Williams (Minds and Brains), Graham Harman, and Tom Sparrow (Plastic Bodies). Williams takes issue with Harman's and others' portrayal of Speculative Realism as \"revolutionary.\" \"The narrative of 'finally' moving beyond the 'Kantian nightmare'\", he writes, \"is tired and overplayed.\" He\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5737,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/04\/29\/whiteheads-return-ecologys-boon\/","url_meta":{"origin":2291,"position":4},"title":"Whitehead’s return, ecology’s boon","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 29, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Ultimately, the thinking of speculative pragmatism that is activist philosophy belongs to nature. Its aesthetico-politics compose a nature philosophy. The occurrent arts in which it exhibits itself are politics of nature. \"The one-word summary of its relational-qualitative goings on: ecology. Activist philosophy concerns the ecology of powers of existence. Becomings\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2012\/04\/flock1-275x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8278,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/09\/harmans-reply\/","url_meta":{"origin":2291,"position":5},"title":"Harman’s reply","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Graham Harman's reply to my critical response to his book Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, which appeared as part of\u00a0a book symposium in\u00a0Global Discourse\u00a0earlier this year, is readable\u00a0online,\u00a0here.\u00a0 I won't address the details of that\u00a0reply here. Some of them relate to our divergent\u00a0interpretations of Latour, and since Harman has\u00a0now written\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2291"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2310,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions\/2310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}