SR/OOO literary theory: where ontology meets poetry (perhaps)

There's never a shortage of hybridism in contemporary literary criticism: and (if you'll allow the analogy) the root stock from which every new theory derives is, of course, the reigning poststructuralist critique of the text (literary or otherwise). The 'family resemblance' among them is unmistakable. I've recently discovered (thanks to John Bloomberg-Rissman) two very interesting appropriations of traditional postmodernist theory (with dashes of traditional ontology, Husserl & Heidegger) in the forms of Speculative Realist Literary Criticism (SR), and Object Oriented Ontology literary analysis (OOO). It's to the views of Levi Bryant and Eileen S.Joy, as I've discovered them in recent online discussions (here and here), we can turn for a full explication of the principles underlining their SR/OOO analyses of the 'text'. I believe the scope and limits of this new poststructuralist wave can be fairly simply elucidated.

Firstly, the common denominator in both is the emphasis on 'realism' or a strictly 'object-oriented' approach towards textuality. And of the text they say, oddly enough, there's nothing before it that can be said to transmit or codify traditional meaning, nothing ontologically nor historically prior from which discussion of 'textuality' can begin. (I'm inclined to read this as a wilful destruction of an Arnoldian humanist tradition). In Bryant's sense of inquiry, "content seems to come after." Presumably SR/OOO proponents will put something in its place: like the 'text' refashioned in some radically newer posthumanist (e.g., cybernetics, avant-garde poetics or systems theory) form or anything that serves as a theory's own operating system. Or perhaps even a more syncretistic view of humanism itself, such as that offered by Joy, will do the trick. For Joy 'humanism' as a critical concept is looking, Janus-like, at two directions at the same time, both a "troubling" and "heroic" one:

While we are fully aware that, historically, humanism and the human have a long and troubling history that implicates them in violent exclusions, as well as in deprivations and disenfranchisements of all sorts, we would also aver that humanism (of different philosophical varieties) has also been responsible for heroic acts of psychic and material sustenance, rescue and redemption, mutually-productive alliance and overcoming, and personal freedom. It is not a question of having some sort of scale that allows us to measure whether humanism has led to more atrocities than it has to social and other boons, but rather, of acknowledging that it has done both, in separate times and places, and simultaneously...

Secondly, now that the possibility of a traditional source criticism has been abolished, it looks as if we are living in a "Year O" world in which SR/OOO 'post-texts' potentially thrive. But to arrive here the hard work of literary analysis must begin. If the traditional (Arnoldian) text has been 'deracinated', certainly reduced to Joy's troubling sense of humanist tradition in general, anything we put in its place will have to both cover the Tradition deficit and put in its place a new 'Object-Oriented Ontology' of text and reading practice. It is a question of 'origins' in a  more radically 'speculative' sense. Bryant proposes an answer to the question, 'What is the ontological nature of things?' in his essay "The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology" (OP) in which he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique so that the look for origins, tentative in nature, may begin anew. As he says,

Faced with such a bewildering philosophical situation, what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naïvely and pre-critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access?

Engagement with the world, textually and existentially, means to meet it and the material objects in it (like literary artifacts) as objects of open-ended enquiry. SR/OOO theorists are, Bryant says, "speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers [who] will see any secure foundation we might discover as an outcome of inquiry rather than as an αρχή governing our inquiry from the outset". Borrowing terminology from Saussure and Derrida, Bryant gives the "Ontic Principle' in terms of a pre-critical encounter with a world of objects marked primarily by a positive affirmation of their significant "differences" (causes, interrelations and entailments among things to be finetuned in the course of inquiry itself). The nature of the textual object begins with this basic assumption (αρχή ) of the ontological (metaphysical) priority of significant differences in all discoverable 'things'. A 'thing' like a poetry text 'is' regardless of whatever's been said or thought about it, and so in that sense nothing's come before the text. A poetic text existing simpliciter is, upon encountering it, to make a significant 'difference' to the reader or it simply doesn't exist.

Thirdly, since a text is a "thing in itself" existing simpliciter, it's only one among a potentially myriad of things to which must be added the nonhuman, insensate, even robot objects. Bryant's completely undermined any notion of 'humanism' as a superordinate concept where Joy at least can entertain contrasting ideals. There's an unmistakable flattening of the metaphysical playing field here. In this radical 'posthumanity' objects live as 'ontic' equals, materially vital & meaningful to us and to each other only to the extent that they reveal their 'differences'. (We can set aside the technical aspects of this 'flat ontology' inference) What are the implications for literary criticism? Bryant may have provided his answer to that in the interesting "The Principle of Translation" section of "OP" where he states "there can be no object that is a mere vehicle for the acting differences of another object", destroying at a stroke the notion of authorial agency or any sense in which texts can serve as carriers of meaning. Tradition goes by the wayside. Since meanings cannot be transported through traditional avenues, literary transmission must be understood as a radicalization of the notion of 'affectivity' that's consonant with Bryant's "Year O" premise. More specifically,

‘translation’ should not be understood as a hermeneutic concept, but as an ontological concept.‘Transportation’ refers to the action of one object on another object. Not all transportations are of a causal variety, so it is important to employ terms capable of both capturing causality while allowing for other sorts of exercises of action. For example, the manner in which I am affected by a work of art differs from the manner in which a flower transports the differences of sunlight. And these manners of translating differences again differ from the manner in which the ocean transports the differences of the moon.

Fourthly, not just objects in the world but it follows from Bryant's 'onticology' that literary criticisms have been flattened as well. It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered. 'Code' is a word that's often used to designate both the agency & status of those properties in things with regards to which "manners of translating differences" can be registered. Alex Reid even goes so far as to give a literary reading the same ontical status as a "Google search spider", saying

Code is a characteristic that certain objects may have. It results from a particular kind of assemblage production. Other objects (e.g. humans) have the capacity to encode in their relations. This might mean literally marking a code or more abstractly naming objects. Clearly our encoding/naming of objects never fully captures them, but it can have an impact upon them, as when you name an animal your "food." In English Studies we use terms like "text" and "reading" quite liberally. This makes sense inasmuch as we encode the world we see and interact with that code. However, here I want to be more literal and think specifically about interactions between objects that are marked with codes and objects with the capacity to decipher those codes. So this could be a human reading a book, a Google search spider crawling this page, or a supermarket checkout counter scanning a bar code

 To call a reading of Yeats a literary interpretation in the first place, loaded as it will be with all the usual Yeatsian lore, is to trump "any differences that might be contributed by objects independent of language", by which Bryant might even mean Reid's "Google search spider". The differences in Yeatsian interpretation are not radical enough since any weighing of alternative readings will by nature privilege (or act as if it would like to privilege) one over another. Strictly literary readings of Yeats' poem—by which we mean one that's too human-centric & excludes its possible impact, say, on nonhuman objects, like robots— are too exclusive given the existence (as per the αρχή or the primary 'ontic' principle of an object-oriented ontology) of "inter-ontic relations or all interactions between objects", which is to say that in the act of translating "Second Coming" we exclude the possibility that the poem (enjoying the same 'ontic' status as the rest of the world) can just as materially translate us. An encounter with the 'differences' of Yeatsian poetry can spell changes from which we may never recover.

Here's a meeting of ontology and poetry that I find particularly interesting but insufficient. There are some problems with the SR/OOO as I've found it (and my reading of the literature has so far been rather limited), as well as some very real methodological strengths, that I'd like address in a future post. I'll need some time to familiarize myself more fully with 'critical realism' theory.

Svenska Twitteruniversitetet: a radical online university

I thought Twitter would amount to nothing more than a syncopated Facebook: with mainly impulsive & sporadic rapid fire speech from people who've whittled the one-liner down to a significant artform. I'd never have suspected to find in this language-hacking a possibility for anything like interesting academic debate. But I have recently discovered it in the form of a Twitter University. Here's The Swedish Twitter University but one shorn of academia's usual editorializing and chronic vetting, an online format that can be sustained only by views brought generously to the Twitter-symposium: here's a real 'democratic' forum, in short, for discussion begun by impassioned authors and theorists who allow their own ideas to grow & develop through response-tweets. In fact, the textbook's been turned into an active online university.

Perhaps it's not 'university' so much as the embodiment of a 'multiversity' ideal very attuned to contemporary Deleuzian understandings of the nature of things: a celebration, in particular, of the quintessentially open text as Barthes may never have imagined it. Administrator Marcus Nilsson spells out for us a 'concept' of the Twitter University almost as an Oulipo restrained-based exercise, with specific instructions as to number and character limit of tweets and even a recommendation not to allow responses, enjambment-style, to flow without full stops from one tweet to the next. Of which, more below:

The Swedish Twitter University: Mind-blowing Ideas in 25 Tweets

The Swedish Twitter University (@SvTwuni) is a place where interesting speakers — scientists, academics, etc. — tweet about exciting ideas from their respective fields in a certain well-defined format.
The presentation must comply with certain constraints, meant to stimulate creativity and challenge the tweeters to formulate their ideas as effectively and interestingly as possible:

• A presentation will be a maximum of 25 tweets long. Each tweet has a 140 character limit.
• Each tweet must be broken naturally—no ugly enjambement!(sic) That is, a sentence, clause or phrase may not overflow arbitrarily into several tweets. That’s not to say each and every tweet has to end with a full stop — follow the spirit and not the letter of the rule and be creative!

The tweeter should pay attention to questions from the audience for a total of at least one hour from the start of the presentation. Answer tweets do not count against the total 25. Both questions and answers should contain the hashtag assigned to the event by @SvTwuni. Each presentation will be archived together with the questions and answers from this hashtag.

It’s fine to blurt out all your 25 tweets at once and then take questions, but it might be more interesting if you exploit the fact that Twitter is a conversational medium: adding pauses and answering questions as you go breathes life into your lecture, and since answers don’t count towards your total 25 tweets, answering questions from the audience can give you a few extra tweets to develop your idea in further detail.

If we take Eileen A. Joy's December 20th "Notes Towards a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism" presentation (brought to my notice by John Bloomberg-Rissman), simple tweeting conventions turn into a fairly coherent and informative presentation of views on "speculative realist" literary criticism (to be permanently archived at Nilsson's site), comprising of the usual acknowledgments, academic terminology & data points (A fuller explication of SR theory can be found here). The format's rather simple, withTweeter, a STU room and, of course, a Twitter account to get things going.

In general, I'd say I'm impressed more with the 'how' than the 'what' of Joy's Twitter U. lecture (though I was drawn to this place on the recommendation of someone with whom I've been having an equally interesting discussion on the scope, and limits, of the literary work). Though the topic may have any number of diverse meanings and there is no shortage of critical schools to choose from (some of the more interesting newer ones being 'affect-theory', 'onticology', 'OOO' ), it's only as social media that the Twitter U. can allow Joy's views to take shape and find its audience. Certain online conventions may be mandated (as site owner Nilsson obviously makes clear), a format prescribed and a sort of screening process for Twitter presenter-applicants may be put in place but it's to the essential 'aleatoriness' of online communities that that both the attractiveness and efficacy of Twitter University is primarily due.

I might be tempted to say (in a McLuhanesque moment) that the strangeness of recent critical theory is a function of Twitter-like technology. Even a passing familiarity with some of the theory cited in Joy's Twitter lecture, with its talk of "multitudes", "discrete actions" & "propulsive mechanicity", gives it its own uniquely IT character: and doesn't OOO theory title itself rather resemble the on-off circuitry on which all online discourse depend?