OOO // Object Oriented Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.

Bringing some of its foundational figures together for the first time, this inaugural Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium marks an effort to brew a new flavor of post-continental philosophy for the twenty-first century.

The one-day event is free and open to the public.

rap off!

"I like DeLanda’s basic argument: which is to insist on the exteriority of relations. Traditionally, positivist, atomistic thought has pretty much denied the importance of relations between entities: the entities themselves are the absolutes, and all relations between them are merely accidental. Thus neoclassical economics adopts a “methodological individualism” according to which “all that matters are rational decisions made by individual persons in isolation from one another” . On the other hand, what DeLanda calls the “organismic metaphor” asserts that entities are entirely defined by the totality to which they belong, entirely constituted by their relations: “the basic concept in this theory is what we may call relations of interiority: the component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole”. Hegelian thought is the most powerful example of this tendency, thought Saussurean linguistics and the “structuralism” influenced by it could also be mentioned."

extracted from Shaviro's Post on: DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society

I would like to focus on two rather interesting points of this short quote:

the relations of exteriority and methodological individualism

The concept of relations of exteriority is what gives to an assemblage its machinic character. Those relations are coming to repose Autopoiesis as a machinic autopoiesis that is open both organizational and informational.

At the same time this short quote raises another issue that has to do with "methodological individualism" and Hayek's opposition on collectivism. Delanda's attempt to move obliquely from Hayek's individualism and Keynes' collectivism with a very insightful way will be extended to a project that he will call A New Philosophy of Society. it is not annoying for my understanding the use of the world new, since the last 50 years we tend to believe that nothing new and novel can be produced.

hypertrophic state

why those two approaches are so politically different?

creativity and experimentation are to be discussed...

but what does it mean to overlay one system on top of another without any intrinsic communication between the two and what does it mean to exploit a system? The failure of the system is its success. They did manage to push the system in a hypertrophic state... to maximize its virtual states, to push it beyond of what is meant to be. It is this possibility to think the impossible that marks the second example as political resistive.

I would like to close this post with what E. Dijkstra said in 1972:

“I have the feeling that one of the most important aspects of any computing tool is its influence on the thinking habits of those that try to use it.”

now replace computing tools with any technological machine and you would have them opened into a machinic field. Experimentation becomes the mode to generate and acquire knowledge.

algorithmic text as beyond text

"today to write theory means to write code"

Galloway & Thacker, The Exploit

theorization and its mode of experimentation. I will come back on this shortly, it is a field that we would like to exploit by putting forward an interdisciplinary web platform. The goal is not to destroy IT but to push IT into a hypertrophic state, further than IT is meant to go... this is resistance through an active experimentation

Architecture of Consequence

"Architecture of Consequence proves that any notion that architecture should be an "expression of its time," or should do no more than express the vanity of its commissioners, pales into insignificance when compared to its tremendous potential for resolving urgent societal problems".