Editorial for the Topical Issue “Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics II”

Abstract

Volume 2 of Open Philosophy (published in 2019) contained a special issue entitled "Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics," consisting of thirteen articles on a variety of unresolved issues in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its relation to other currents of contemporary philosophy.¹ The number of submissions we received during the year exceeded expectations, and thus we decided to extend this topical issue into the current Volume 3, in what turned out to be the disruptive pandemic year of 2020. Amidst the medical and political chaos unleashed by the virus we somehow received fourteen submissions that were accepted by our referees, slightly more than last year's total. Along with a number of new authors, this issue also features a return appearance from 2019 author Arjen Kleinherenbrink and two new articles from fellow returnee Simon Weir.² As a matter of course, in my dual role as both the founder of OOO and Editor-in-Chief of this journal, I also contributed an article this year as well as last. Enough said. Let's get to work with a preview of all the articles in this year's issue, proceeding in alphabetical order by authors' surnames. We begin with Sean Braune's contribution, "Fetish-Oriented Ontology."³ There have been a number of misfired Marxist critiques of OOO as falling prey to "commodity fetishism," all of them forgetting that Marx introduced this notion as a social theory of value, not as an anti-realist ontology.⁴ For there is nothing "fetishist" about the notion that things can exist outside social relations, and Marx himself gives plenty of examples in the first dozen pages of his major work. In any case, Braune comes at the problem from a completely different angle. Building on the work of Columbia University anthropologist Rosalind C. Morris, Braune traces the standard modern conception of a movement from fetish to knowledge, but leading to a surprise ending in which knowledge is cracked in turn by a "sublated" form of the fetish.⁵ Since Morris is focused primarily on New Materialism, Braune expands the field to a consideration of OOO and Speculative Realism in the same light. In doing so he expresses a further debt to recent developments in posthumanism, especially the sort found in the work of Rosi Braidotti, New Materialist though she is.⁶ Recapitulating the classic account of the fetish by Charles de Brosses, Braune reflects on the varying degrees of sublated fetishization found in OOO, Bill Brown's thing theory, and Quentin Meillassoux's arche-fossil.⁷