Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism

Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism
Author: Brian Hisao Onishi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3031480279

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This book connects recent developments in speculative realism, new materialism, and eco-phenomenology to articulate an approach to wonder that escapes the connected traps of anthropocentrism and correlationism. Brian Onishi argues that wonder has explanatory power for the constitution of the world and the organization of meaning. To do this, he appeals to both fiction (speculative and Weird fiction in particular) and quantum physics. More specifically, he argues that the focus of Weird fiction on impossible experiences and a feeling of something just beyond the limits of one’s grasp dramatizes the speculative reach beyond the limits of our understanding. But more than a tool for knowledge acquisition, wonder is an organizing property of objects. Like the collapse of superposition in quantum physics, reality is constituted when objects reveal themselves to other objects and thereby organize themselves into complex objects. Since no relation is exhaustive, the capacity to wonder remains at a material level, and the possibility of reorganization is ever present. Ultimately, Onishi argues for a speculative eco-phenomenology with wonder as an engine for a Weird environmental ethics.

Strange Matter, Strange Objects

Strange Matter, Strange Objects
Author: Brian Hisao Onishi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2016
Genre: Materialism
ISBN:

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Wonder has had a rich and diverse history in the western philosophical tradition. Both Plato and Aristotle claim that philosophy begins in wonder, while Descartes marks it as the first of the passions and Heidegger uses it as a signpost for a new trajectory of philosophy away from idealism and nihilism. Despite such a rich history, wonder is almost always thought to be exhausted by the acquisition of knowledge. That is, wonder is thought of almost exclusively in epistemological terms and is discarded as soon as knowledge has been achieved. In this dissertation, I argue for an ontological reorientation of wonder that values wonder beyond its epistemic uses. To do this, I read the phenomenological and ontological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty through recent developments in object-oriented ontology and new materialism. Much of Merleau-Ponty's work is directed toward dissolving the distinction between subject and object. His insights regarding the mutual constitution of the world lead to the possibility of an operative wonder that occurs between subject and object. Both object-oriented ontology and new materialism radicalize these insights by articulating them in terms of a vibrant or quasi-agential material world. Objects and assemblages of objects are capable of performing the becoming of the world that includes human activity, but is not reduced to it. As such, the world is capable of both self-organization and practice. Ultimately I use the philosophy-physics of Karen Barad to argue that operative wonder acts like a kind of superposition of relations between objects, and thereby accounts for a concept of wonder that is both ontologically significant and acutely generative.

Object Oriented Environs

Object Oriented Environs
Author: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 069264203X

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Object Oriented Environs is the lively archive of a critical confluence between the environmental turn so vigorous within early modern studies, and thing theory (object oriented ontology, vibrant materialism, the new materialism and speculative realism). The book unfolds a conversation that attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism and examine nonhumans at every scale, their relations to each other, and the ethics of human enmeshment within an agentic material world. The diverse essays, reflections, images and ephemera collected here offer a laboratory for probing the mystery and potential autonomy of objects, in their alliances and in performance. The book is the trace of an event-space crafted over a day of conversation in two seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2014 in St. Louis and offers its nineteen essays as the end to the work-cycle of the collective we crafted that day. It is a noisy collation, full of bees, bushes, laundry, crutches, lists, poems, plague vectors, planks, chairs, rain, shoes, meat, body parts, books, and assorted humans (living and dead), and also a repertoire of dance steps, ways of configuring the relations between subject and object, actors or actants (human and otherwise). It is also a book that asks readers to ponder their environs, to consider the particularities of their world, of their reading experiences, and to consider what orders of meaning we might be able to derive from attending closely to all the very many things we come into being with. Contributors include: Lizz Angello, Sallie Anglin, Keith M. Botelho, Patricia A. Cahill, Jeffrey Cohen, Drew Daniel, Christine Hoffmann, Neal Klomp, Julia Lupton, Vin Nardizzi, Tara Pedersen, Tripthi Pillai, Karen Raber, Pauline Reid, Emily Rendek, Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Debapriya Sarkar, Rob Wakeman, Jennifer Waldron, Luke Wilson, and Julian Yates.

Object Oriented Environs

Object Oriented Environs
Author: Julian Yates Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

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Object Oriented Environs is the lively archive of a critical confluence between the environmental turn so vigorous within early modern studies, and thing theory (object oriented ontology, vibrant materialism, the new materialism and speculative realism). The book unfolds a conversation that attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism and examine nonhumans at every scale, their relations to each other, and the ethics of human enmeshment within an agentic material world. The diverse essays, reflections, images and ephemera collected here offer a laboratory for probing the mystery and potential autonomy of objects, in their alliances and in performance. The book is the trace of an event-space crafted over a day of conversation in two seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2014 in St. Louis and offers its nineteen essays as the end to the work-cycle of the collective we crafted that day. It is a noisy collation, full of bees, bushes, laundry, crutches, lists, poems, plague vectors, planks, chairs, rain, shoes, meat, body parts, books, and assorted humans (living and dead), and also a repertoire of dance steps, ways of configuring the relations between subject and object, actors or actants (human and otherwise). It is also a book that asks readers to ponder their environs, to consider the particularities of their world, of their reading experiences, and to consider what orders of meaning we might be able to derive from attending closely to all the very many things we come into being with.

Onto-cartography

Onto-cartography
Author: Levi R. Bryant
Publisher: Speculative Realism
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Causation
ISBN: 9780748679973

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An investigation of how material agencies structure social and ecological relations and gives a defense of naturalism and materialism, showing how culture is formed by nature.

The Universe of Things

The Universe of Things
Author: Steven Shaviro
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2014
Genre: Realism
ISBN: 9781452949307

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"From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead's work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature and existence. Now Steven Shaviro maps this quickly emerging speculative realism, which is already dramatically influencing how we interpret reality and our place in a universe in which humans are not the measure of all things. The Universe of Things explores the common insistence of speculative realism on a noncorrelationist thought: that things or objects exist apart from how our own human minds relate to and comprehend them." "Bringing together a wide array of contemporary thought, The Universe of Things is an invaluable guide to the evolution of speculative realism and the provocation of Alfred North Whitehead's pathbreaking work."--Publisher's description.

The Democracy of Objects

The Democracy of Objects
Author: Levi R. Bryant
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2023-11-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

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Since Kant, philosophy has been obsessed with epistemological questions pertaining to the relationship between mind and world and human access to objects. In The Democracy of Objects, Bryant proposes that we break with this tradition and once again initiate the project of ontology as first philosophy. Drawing on the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, as well as the thought of Roy Bhaskar, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhman, Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, Bruno Latour and the developmental systems theorists, Bryant develops a realist ontology that he calls "onticology". This ontology argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations such that subjects themselves are a variant of objects. Drawing on the work of the systems theorists and cyberneticians, Bryant argues that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure. In this way, he is able to integrate the most vital discoveries of the anti-realists within a realist ontology that does justice to both the material and cultural. Onticology proposes a flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects. Contents: Towards a Finally Subjectless Object Grounds For a Realist Ontology The Paradox of Substance Virtual Proper Being The Interior of Objects Regimes of Attraction, Parts, and Structure The Four Theses of Flat Ontology

Realist Magic

Realist Magic
Author: Timothy Morton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-10-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781013284878

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Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Molecular Red

Molecular Red
Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2015-04-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781688281

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In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the scientific pioneers who were trying to transform science during the Russia Revolution, to visionaries contemplating cyborg possibilities and science fiction dreams in late 20th century California, Molecular Red not only looks at the crisis of climate change that we face but also how we might be able to understand it, and how we might salvage some hope out of the wreckage.

Vibrant Matter

Vibrant Matter
Author: Jane Bennett
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2010-01-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0822391627

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In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.