I just read the Wiki entry (I know, I know) for OOO yesterday, and have been reading Bryant’s blog a big, and am feeling sorta’ similarly ambivalent. Today when Bryant tweeted something about the rethinking the differences between macro and micro politics, and it seemed vaguely apolitical, as if it were solely a philosophical distinction.

That said, I think there’s something refreshing in OOO, even though I don’t really know that much about it. For the past 50 years, it’s been subject subject subject ad nauseum. Historically, of course, that has been crucial. Poco, feminist and queer theories have all necessarily focused on the subject, and the doubled, Althusserian of the sense of the subject - of simultaneously always being both the subject of, but yet subject to - has obvious and clear political ramifications. Meanwhile, I think that poststructuralism and deconstruction have also very usefully emphasised what Bryant et al seem to argue is a limited view of ontology as only human-object relations. That’s possible, but it seems like the post-x tends in critical theory were necessary articulations of the limits of language and signification and, therefore by extension, epistemology and ontology in general.

But there’s also a downside to the subject-focused nature of contemporary theory. There’s a reason that “yes, but where is resistance?” has been the dominant question amongst leftist academics for decades. According to “our” own critical discourses, the room for agency is extremely limited, and almost every grad student I know has gone through that phase of “oh shit, how do you do anything without reifying the very ideologies and overlapped material networks you’re trying to resist?!”. Once you articulate the material and ideological constraints on the subject as nearly totalizing, it becomes very difficult to find a subject-focused escape from the system of materiality, ideology and representation that Spivak articulated so well in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.

My own work (fuck, don’t you hate when academics use that phrase?) is about how digital spaces offer some hope because of the liminal spaces found in the disparities between bodily subjects and their virtual representations, assuming the virtual as a “legitimate” field of socio-political and material exchange. But I can also feel how naive and optimistic that is as I (half-heartedly) write it.

I guess I’m just saying that maybe OOO is just philosophical wanking. I’m having a tough time seeing how it’s all that different from Deleuzian thinking. But at the same time, it also feels nice to read something and just think “holy shit! This is the total opposite of everything I’ve been taught for the past 15 years!”.

Oh, by the way, if you read this far, this is @navalang from Twitter.

lukesimcoe:

A few caveats: I’m feeling academically jaded these days and I admit to not having read all that much about it. That said, it stills feels like a bit of a fad, and another in a long line of insular academic jamborees that purports to be about the real world while not actually offering much to those who actually live there.