on object-oriented stuff, with Hegel and Adorno
Music: Juta Takahashi: Seabound (2009)
Yesterday in graduate seminar we spent the better portion of class engaging Hegel's theory of experience and his critique of all things Kantian and transcendental. It has been some years since I've reengaged Hegel earnestly, and I was surprised as I was reviewing my notes on the Phenomenology of Mind and the Science of Logic how much better I understand the Hegelian project (with no help from Zizek, frankly). The older I get, the more I realize learning is a retrojective endeavor: "a-ha!" moments often happen years after the moment I have read or pondered something. So it is with Hegel's critique of Kant.
The key was reading Adorno's "Subject and Object" this week, which is really a quite a bear. Whenever I read something this difficult, I have to sit down and outline the essay, sometimes even diagram sentences. It took a whole work day to read and outline Adorno's essay, but there was a good pay off: I now better understand what Adorno is taking from Hegel, and what he is critiquing. He gets down with Hegel's critique of Kantian dualism, but of course opposes Hegel's absolute idealism with a firm materialism. What Hegel did---and why Marx et al. got down with him---was historicize philosophy in a way that brought culture to bear on philosophical endeavor. There are multiple modes of experience that philosophy simply bracketed and with Hegel argued should be brought into the domain of thinking. If philosophy is "thinking about thinking," then it only makes sense to historicize thinking in a way that doesn't exempt the subject who thinks.
Adorno, though, takes this one step further in his version of negative dialectics. I don't have the time (or desire) to explain how I understand this except to say that the critique of identitarian logic is in play, and that Adorno's central claim in "Subject and Object" is that the "subject-who-knows" is an object constituted by the socious. No big revelation there, as this has been the principle difficulty of rhetorical theory since the 1970s, I think---coming to terms with the illusion of the transcendental subject. But I think for 1969 such a claim was a major-big-deal, and it still is in a way.
What I'm wondering is how the "object-oriented ontology" Ken introduced here last week squares with Adorno's arguments in favor of the primacy of the object to negative dialectics. There's a growing number of posts over at Larval Subjects under the heading of "object-oriented philosophy," but I’m skeptical: is this the wheel, reinvented?
It seems to me that the genius of Adorno's negative dialectics is that the primacy of the object is ultimately an ethical primacy. If it is the case that the epistemic subject negates the "non-identity" of objects in our present identitarian regime to function in the paradigm world or whatever, Adorno suggests (I think) that the task of thinking is to make room for the non-identity of objects (and by extension, difference, and so on). Adorno argues that the subject-object relation has itself become reified and dominates thinking in a way that causes suffering. His negative dialectics is object-oriented, in the end, to temper the arrogance of the paradigm subject that obliterates difference in the name of Same.
Admittedly, I've not read all the posts on Larval Subjects on OOO or OOP, but I guess I'm just much more moved by the ethical urgency of Adorno's prose (as opposed, say, to the cool aloofness of the egalitarianism of objects or whatever). Anyway, just thinking aloud. Next week we take up "thing theory," so I hope to have the relationship between Adorno's thinking about the object and OOO figured out in a way that is more satisfying than my skeptical disposition today.