Banging Against the Window

OK, so I've really been trying to engage the object-oriented ontology (OOO, God) lately, partly because the OOOers and I share some affinities -- mostly Husserl, though, I get the impression they dig Bergson too; wonder if they read James much? -- and because I have a soft spot for speculative, well, anything (when speculative and systematic philosophy became taboo, philosophy lost much of its vitality, its life and connection there to), but mostly because I'm fascinated by the internet's role in its development, and I want to see what a set of serious philosophical ideas (or a set of sets of ideas) that has in large part come out of the blogosphere ends up looking like.

The problem is that, each time I start to engage the OOOers ideas, I quickly become frustrated. You know that scene in Bee Movie in which Seinfeld's bee keeps banging up against the window and saying, "This time! This time! This time!"? That's how I feel. I can see what's on the other side of the pane, but every time I try to get there I run into something that's difficult to see, but that completely impedes my progress. I've been struggling to figure out exactly why this is. The most obvious reason, I think, is that I don't really know why anyone should care about OOO. It's in its infancy, to say the least, and the more I read of Harman, the more I feel like his monadology for the 21st century is pretty arbitrary (it's as though he just digs Leibniz more than, say, Spinoza), and seems to create more problems that it solves, particularly with causation, which for Harman, like for Leibniz, doesn't involve objects (or individual substances, or whatever) interacting, because they never actually interact. It seems to just push causation back a step. Or as one blogger put it:

[Graham's theory of vicarious causation] not only possesses almost no explanatory value of what causation might be, but actually invents in perhaps a non-Occamian profusion, a host of objects imagined to interact in ways that are yet revealed by their author.

But to ask of a philosophy in its infancy that it solve big problems seems a bit much, and maybe I'm just missing the positive motivations (the negative ones, like doing away with anthropomorphism, are clear, even if it's not clear why the things OOO rejects are bad), so I don't think this is the reason I feel like I'm banging into a window. I think it's something else: the OOOers and I seem to speak a different literary language. I find it striking that someone like Levi Bryant can write about the "black boxes" through which we interpret the input of experience, and mention only Continental thinkers (plus Kant, a pre-empirical science of the mind thinker):

The sadly departed Levi-Strauss will claim that our black boxes contain structures of mind, Lacan will claim they contain the symbolic, Derrida the trace and differance, Foucault structures of power and discourse, Kant a priori categories and forms of intuition, and so on. The key point not to be missed is that our own black boxes are every bit as “withdrawn” as objects themselves.

If this were the only example, it would seem odd, but not, for someone whose education slices through Continental and analytic philosophy, frustrating. But it's a pretty common phenomenon for many OOOers: they will say "everyone" or "no one," but what they mean is "everyone/no one in the Continental tradition." I can't help but feel like it limits the problems they address and the potential solutions they consider. But maybe that's just me.