What Troubled Me

A list of quotes from Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, Chapter One, that caused troubles.

  • 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.
  • If things exist, they do so only for us – Quentin Meillassoux
  • All beings are given equal absolute value and moral right to the planet – so long as they are indeed living creatures.
  • The world exists for human discovery and exploitation. And for the cultural relativist, humans create and refashion the world.
  • all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally
  • If any one being exists no less than any other, then instead of scattering such beings all across the two-dimensional surface of flat ontology, we might also collapse them into the infinite density of a dot.
  • The density of being makes it promiscuous, always touching everything else, unconcerned with differentiation.
  • But we can no longer claim that our existence is special as existence”
  • If things exist, they do so only for us
  • To put things at the centre of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist for us.