Being, Been, Beans

Joss has notes on Object Orientated Ontology and notes that it puts things at the centre of being. Yeah, it does, but we’re less interested in OOO than in materialism more broadly. But in relation to the brief discussion from Thursday on ontology. Being was thought to be a problem of what the essence of what it is/was to be human. So it was a specifically human quality/capacity, and it was all about essences.

Theoretically and practically we should all be deeply sceptical of anything that involves an essence. (Being a ‘true’ Australian, a ‘real’ man/woman, or it is ‘natural’.) Joss’ note about stuff and materialism is quarter way there. We are interested in thinking like this because of environmental catastrophe, hundreds of thousands of people migrating informally (we call them refugees), and the realisation that because everything is so implicated by everything else our hierarchies don’t really work. That talk is cheap, action hard. Again, for us. If we lived on Pandora where all is living we’d have a world view that automatically accepted the ethical inter-relation of actions and things. Because we separated out spirit from action (brain from body) we have a view of the universe that lets us not treat ideas as not actions, and so it is easy to not have to think about the inter relation of our actions and things. Once we realise the ideas are things, the mind is embodied, and so on, (all extremely important to feminism) things begin to change. These topics are participating in the beginning of this change. Personally I blame the internet. It is a giant electricity machine that literally joins up a lot of stuff in an emergent network that has become the largest work of human infrastructure in history. It is only about relations between. That is how these theories understand the world to be. One it is relations between privilege and hierarchy tumble.