Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican Books)

by Graham Harman

My response is that OOO means ‘object’ in an unusually wide sense: an object is anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things.

For this reason I would go so far as to hazard a guess that the mask was the original artwork, though the fragility of mask materials – so different from the durability of cave paintings and jewellery – ensured their disintegration and the resulting lack of evidence.

Bold

The successful metaphor, much like the successful joke, will occur only when the reader or auditor is sincerely deployed in living it.

Second, symbiosis need not be reciprocal as in Margulis’ biological theory. One object can exist in symbiosis with another without the reverse being the case. Lord Byron’s poetry is transformed by the Greek War of Independence without that nation really being altered by the poems; every soldier is transformed by the Vietnam War without each of them individually making much of a difference in the conflict.

OOO social theory holds that an object is mature as soon as it has no room for further symbiosis. The previous indeterminacies as to its ultimate fate have now been resolved by committing to irreversible bonds with other objects, and such irreversibility is precisely what symbiosis means.

For various reasons I suspect that most objects, of no matter what scale – and whether human or non-human – will pass through roughly a half-dozen symbioses before reaching mature form. This means that, on average, we should be looking for two symbioses belonging to each category of noun, with the symbioses being identifiable by their irreversibility and by their noticeable assistance in helping move the object to a new biographical stage.

Out to lunch

The judgement and action of individuals is often more important than the structural analyses of social scientists allow.

Revival of the "Great Man"?