OOO and Correlationism

It may be that the most of the first wave of object-oriented philosophy bloggists have moved on to other concerns, but since most of them are neither posting nor commenting it’s hard to know. I suspect they’re working on books and chapters and journal articles — activities that generate greater academic exchange value than blogging, which now seems dedicated mostly to announcements of new journal issues, conferences, etc. And then there’s me, still publicly trying to come to grips with OOO on my own terms, entirely divorced from academic philosophy. But I think I’ve gotten it figured out now, so after this post I can leave it alone until some new major development arises. In this post I’m clarifying, summarizing, and elaborating on what I wrote in my last post and comments thereto.

I begin with a brief imaginary conversation about what Levi Bryant identifies as OOO’s first Core Claim:

OOO: “Objects are radically withdrawn from all interaction with other objects.”
Me: “How do you know?”
OOO: “Ah, but now you’ve moved from ontology to epistemology, from what things are to how you know about them. Stick with ontology please.”

This conversation can go no farther:

(1) Objects withdraw from all interaction, and
(2) knowing-about-something is a form of interaction between knower and thing; therefore,
(3) objects withdraw from being known; therefore,
(4) one cannot know that objects withdraw, because knowing is itself a form of interaction from which objects withdraw.

It seems that OOO wants to offer a description of objects without explaining how it came into awareness of this description. Is it sheer speculation? transcendence? revelation? Science isn’t boxed in like this. Scientists can tell you what they’ve discovered about objects AND how they discovered it. Of course it’s possible to critique science’s knowledge claims and methodologies, but at least science specifies its truth claims and makes them directly accessible to critique.

OOO purports to escape what Meillassoux termed correlationism, or “the thesis of the essential inseparability of the act of thinking from its content” (After Finitude, p. 36). How is this escape perpetrated? On the one hand there’s the assertion of the radical withdrawnness of objects from all interactions, which we just talked about. This idea of withdrawnness can be thought, just as the idea of objects being matter participating in pure and eternal form can be thought, or the objects’ withdrawn essences all living secretly together on Pluto can be thought. Anything can be thought; the question is whether the content of these thoughts can be validated outside of thought. By what means can anyone be assured that the content of what they’re thinking about is real? Here it seems to me that OOO’s assertion is only a negative, apophatic one: the essence of the real is that it cannot be known. Consider these two assertions: “We cannot know what objects are really like” and “The essence of real objects is that they cannot be known.” Is there any meaningful distinction between those two assertions? I don’t believe there is: with respect to the relationship between minds and the objects of thought, OOO’s radically apophatic ontology seems interchangeable with a radically agnostic epistemology.

According to OOO, objects encounter one another only indirectly and relationally. The qualities or properties of an object which another object encounters — its mass, chemical make-up, color, beauty, etc. — occur only as part of the inter-object relationship. These relational properties are not essential to the real object which, per Core Claim One, is radically withdrawn from all interactions with other objects. What Meillassoux calls the Correlation refers to one particular kind of object-object interaction, namely the interaction between a conscious mind and some other object which that mind is trying to understand. OOO thus reaffirms the Correlation — what the mind discovers about objects cannot be separated from the mind doing the discovering. Not only that, but OOO extends the Correlation to all object-object interactions: water’s encounter with the salt it dissolves cannot be separated from the water doing the dissolving, etc. This is what I would regard as strong Correlationism.

So where does that leave us? According to OOO, the Correlation is inescapable with respect to any and all properties that any object might manifest in its encounters with any other object. However, the Correlation is purportedly escaped by each and every object’s real essence, which never manifests itself inside correlational encounters with other objects. But how can I know that this withdrawn essence exists outside of the Correlation? To pose this question is, it is argued, to remain bound by the terms of the Correlation, by the relationship between real objects and my thinking about them. The real withdrawn essence is, regardless of how I think or know about it. And I’m sorry, but this just sounds too much like a statement of faith to me, some tenet I might have memorized from the Baltimore Catechism when I was a lad in Sunday school.

OOO is an evolving and complex set of ideas that goes far beyond the issues addressed in this post. I tentatively conclude, though, that the OOOlogists should consider withdrawing radical withdrawnness as its first Core Claim. Then they can either look for some other way out of the Correlation, or go ahead and build out the radically strong Correlationism that’s implicit in their inter-object relational ontology.

I’ll entertain questions or disputes or discussions, and I’m eminently willing to be schooled further on the failings of my conclusions. After that, though, I hope to exit the correlation between my mind and OOO for the foreseeable future as I pursue other concerns. Thank you, and good afternoon.