From the Documentary Ontography blog, Adrian asked us to work on these tasks:
‘From the Alien Phenomenology reading (Chapter One) please bring three quotes that:
- you enjoy
- trouble you
- intrigue you’
Here are my quotes:
What I enjoyed reading:
- ‘Quentin Mellassoux has coined the term correlationism to described this view, one that holds that being exists only as a correlate between mind and world. If things exist, they do so only for us.’
- ‘The second ontological system operation of our time, social relativism, descends from the humanistic and social scientifuc traditions.’
- ‘Can machines think?’
What troubled me:
- ‘From the perspective of cultural theory instead of philosophy, the OOO strain of speculative realism might bear some resemblance to more familiar arguments against anthropocentrism (such as post-humanism).’
- ‘Posthumanism, we might conclude, is not posthuman enough.’
- ‘Bryant has suggested that flat ontology can unite the two worlds, synthesizing the human and the nonhuman into a common collective. An ontology is flat if it makes no distinction between the types of things that exist but treats all equally, the spirit behind the name Bryant gives his OOO theory, the ‘democracy of objects’. In a flat ontology, the bubbling skin of the culinary history of the enchilada it is destined to top.’
What intrigued me:
- ‘To proceed as a philosopher today demands the rejection of correlationism. To be a speculative realist, one must abandon the belief that human access sits at the center of being, organising and regulating it like an ontological watchmaker.’
- ‘If ontology is the philosophical study of existence, then from Harman we can derive an object-orientated ontology (or OOO for short call it ‘triple O’ for style’s sake). OOO puts things at the center of being. We humans are elements, but not the sole elements, of philosophical interest. OOO contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally.’
- ‘Computers often do entail human experience and perception. The human operator views words and images rendered on a display, applies physical forces to a mouse, seats memory chips into motherboard sockets.’