OOM / object-oriented materialism and Laurelle

Object-Oriented Materialism (OOM)

" Materialism is sometimes criticized on the grounds that we don’t have a well developed concept of matter. In my view, far from being a black mark against materialism, this is a point in its favor. In this connection, I’ve been increasingly influenced by Katerina Kolozova’s discussions and deployment of the thought of Laruelle. Among all that I’ve read on and by Laruelle, Kolozova’s treatments are the first that have helped me to see the importance and significance of his form of critique. Among other things, Laruelle locates a sort of circularity internal to philosophical thought wherein that concepts of that thought end up determining the real. Here the problem is that philosophy structurally becomes locked in a circularity that far from reaching the real, determines the real by thought. Viewed in light of this thesis, the absence of a concept of matter is a strength of materialism rather than a weakness. Were we to have a well developed concept of matter we would find ourselves locked in the correlationist circle, such that we end up claiming that thought and being are identical. The absence of a well-defined concept of matter indicates that while thought, like anything else, is material, matter is nonetheless radically alterior and foreign to thought. The concept of matter is not– as per Plato’s requirements in the Meno –something that we possess in advance, but is rather a moving target that grows with our exploration of matter over the course of history. It is not something that we have already, but rather something that we must discover."

Dumitrescu the spectralist

Watch "Iancu Dumitrescu - Cogito/Trompe l'Oeil (1/2)" on YouTube

make the accidental the essential

stratagem five: make the accidental the essential
In Ancient Greece, the sophists were consummate exploiters of the faults, disturbances and idiosyncrasies of language, its non-sense. Installing themselves within the cracks of language, the fissures which open up where one word could mean many things, two different words could sound exactly alike, where sense and reference was confused, sophistry sometimes humourously and playfully, sometimes with apparently more sinister demagogical intent, exploited the ‘semiurgical’ quality of language and the seething cauldron of affective charge it contained to make and remake our relations to the world. For this, history shows, they were vilified, slandered and excluded from the community of normal human users of language. Philosophy and the right (thinking) use of reason was the prime agent in this historical expulsion. By the genial invention of principles such as that of non-contradiction and entities such as rhetoric to absorb the excesses of language, philosophy not only created strong normative principles for communication arguably operating on a transcendental basis (recently rehabilitated by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel), it also created a perception of language and of logic in which faults, glitches and bugs started to be seen simply as accidents, trivial anomalies easily removed by means of the better internal policing of language. Short of being a two-headed monster or a plant of some sort, you could not possibly say one thing and mean two. The norms of reason precluded this: transparency should be the elimination of agonism, not its secret accumulation. But as the sophists knew and practised, double-speak was something which politicians did all the time, more or less knowingly, more or less well. Twenty-five centuries later, with the advent of deconstruction and other approaches, we discover that in fact double-speak is the ‘repressed’, disavowed norm of reasonx.

Towards an Evil Media Studies

the old, analytic way is replaced by new, synthetic one.

the old, analytic way is replaced by new, synthetic one.

A : Let's take an ecosystem - like a jungle for example. When you try to approach it, when you study an ecosystem, using top-down approach, you start with an ecosystem as a whole and then you begin dissecting it until you get to the final units, which are the animals and the plants. That is the method that science has used for 400 years now and it's called analysis or top-down analysis. The problem is that many of the properties of an ecosystem rise from the interaction between the animals - for instance the interaction between the predators and the preys, the parasites and hosts or between simbiots. When you dissect things and take them apart, the first thing you lose is these interactions. You reach the final units by dissecting things, but then at the end you end up with units that are separated from each other. In an ecosystem, society or any other system, many of the properties are what is called synergetic or synergistic properties, that are more than the sum of the parts. But when you do analysis, you end up with a bunch of units and then you want to add them up - everything that was more than the sum gets lost - almost by definition.

So, to complement analysis, we need synthesis, and that's what artificial life does. In artificial life, you do not analyze an ecosystem, you synthesize it. I we begin with several populations of virtual animals inside a virtual environment and set them to interact with each other, the synergistic properties of an ecosystem emerge from those interactions. So instead of using top-down, starting at the top of the whole ecosystem and working your way down to the animals and the plants, you start with the animals and the plants - at the bottom - and work your way up. The advantage is that you do not lose the properties of interactions because you created these virtual animals and put them together to interact with each other. So, an ecosystem should emerge from those interactions.

Another example would be a flock of birds or an insect colony. In an insect colony, the whole colony has a kind of swarm intelligence. The colony as a whole is kind of like a computer. One little ant finds food and then the others follow him as if the whole colony was an intelligent being. Or if you have a flock of birds - there are a few rules when flying ; keep the same speed as the bird next to you, if you're too close get farther away and if you're too far away, get closer. With those few rules - as long as you put enough birds together - flock behavior emerges. And the whole flock has a kind of gracefulness of its own. That is more than the sum of its parts, it's more than the sum of the birds.

Manuel De Landa and Karlo Pirc (Interviewer)