Princess of Networks: Lisa Baraitser's Object-Oriented Maternities

Abstract

This response to Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) puts the book in conversation with recent speculative realist thinking and object-oriented philosophies. Drawing on the democratizing onticology of Levi Bryant, Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy, Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology, and Jane Bennett's political ecology of matter, I argue that Baraitser develops a “vibrant maternality” and an object-oriented feminism that gives nonhuman actants their due in a constellation of relations between maternal subjects and the objects they encounter.

Notes

¹Retrieved from http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychosocial/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/lisa-baraitser/research.

²Levi Bryant, Feminist Metaphysics as Object-Oriented Ontology—OOO/OOP Round-Up. Retrieved from http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/feminist-metaphysics-as-object-oriented-ontology-ooooop-round-up/ (emphasis added).

³Bryant continues: “Thus, for example, setting aside feminist thinkers such as Butler that place almost all their emphasis on discourse and discursivity, feminist thought (and here I am not even beginning to do justice to the richness and sophistication of this thought and what has arisen out of these inquiries) forces an encounter with the real of the biological body and the difference it introduces into the world, the real of the sexed body, that exceeds the being of the phenomenological lived body and the discursive body, while somehow still being intertwined with these other two bodies. The real of the sexed body becomes something that must be thought and that cannot be reduced to a discourse or a lived experience. Moreover, feminist thought inevitably requires a forced encounter with nonhuman technological actors like various forms of birth control or aspects of abortion and fertilization technology that, at the social level, produce profound effects in the status of subjects (creating or generating new types of social subjects), that exceed the mastery of discourse and intentionally structured lived experience. If there is genuine justification for the thesis that ontotheology, the metaphysics of presence, correlationism, and anti-realism are necessarily masculinist forms of thought, then this is because the conception of the subject upon which these orientations of thought are founded are premised on a forgetting of the real of the body.” From Feminist Metaphysics as Object-Oriented Ontology—OOO/OOP Round-Up. Retrieved from http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/feminist-metaphysics-as-object-oriented-ontology-ooooop-round-up/.

⁴See Levi Bryant, Lacan's Graphs of Sexuation and OOO, retrieved from http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs-of-sexuation-and-ooo/ and Phallosophy, retrieved from http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/phallosophy/.

⁵But isn't there a danger in holding to this realist ontological position that, as Paul Reid-Bowen suggests, object-oriented ontology might “run afoul of ethical, political and social feminist critiques of objectification”? (Paul Reid-Bowen, Foreshadowing Dundee. Retrieved from http://paganmetaphysics.blogspot.com/2010/01/foreshadowing-dundee.html). However, Harman insists that “the objects of object-oriented philosophy have nothing to do with objectification. In fact, they are what resist all objectification. To objectify someone or something is to limit it, to reduce it. … By contrast, object-oriented philosophy is by definition an anti-reductionist philosophy. It holds that all things must be taken on their own terms. The reason for complaints about ‘objectification’ is that a false split is made between people and maybe animals who cannot be objectified, and inanimate objects which can. My thesis, by contrast, is that even inanimate objects should not and cannot be objectified. It's not about ‘reducing people to objects,’ but about raising the status of objects to the level of people.” Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Feminism. Retrieved from http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/object-oriented-feminism/.

⁶Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology: Toward a Pragmatic Speculative Realism. Plenary address at the annual conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, November 2009, Atlanta, GA. I thank Graham Harman for this reference.

⁷Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things. Retrieved from http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/Things.pdf.

⁸In her paper “Let Us Stipulate That What Is Left in a Point of View Is a Subject: Language and Object-Oriented Ontology,” Patricia Ticineto Clough has taken up “the move from the linguistic turn to the speculative turn of an object-oriented ontology” and revisits “those psychoanalytically informed descriptions of infant-child and mother that have been a starting point in discourses about the constitution of the human as a (speaking) subject.” In making this move to an object-oriented ontology or object-oriented feminism, Clough asks, “How is a subject to be understood?” Retrieved from http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml.

⁹See also Giffney, Mulhall, and O'Rourke (this issue, pp. 74–78).

¹⁰Levi Bryant, Unit Operations. Retrieved from http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/unit-operations/.

¹¹Levi Bryant, Unit Operations. Retrieved from http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/unit-operations/.

¹²Ian Bogost, Object-Oriented Feminism. Retrieved from http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml.

¹³“In my own work I have striven to maintain a rich place for antirealist Marxist, feminist, queer, and semiotic, etc., critique, while simultaneously blunting its overwhelming tendency towards erasure of the alterity of the world and nonhumans. … Wilderness invites us to think this thing-power without endlessly indexing this power to human representation. Wilderness strives to think—drawing on Karen Barad's concept—the entanglements of thing-power.” Levi Bryant, Wilderness Ontology. Retrieved from http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/wilderness-ontology-cuny-talk/.

¹⁴Ian Bogost, Object-Oriented Feminism. Retrieved from http://www.bogost.com/blog/object-oriented_feminism_1.shtml.

¹⁵Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Speculating in New York. Retrieved from http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2011/09/speculating-in-new-york.html.