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Chapter 3 looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory’s engagement with the world of objects. The chapter begins by outlining the recent upsurge in theoretical writing on objects/things, especially within the much-hyped field of ‘object-oriented ontology’ or ‘speculative realism’. After drawing attention to the major social and political deficiencies of these contemporary approaches to objects, the chapter offers an account of early critical theory that draws out a more philosophically viable and socio-politically engaged orientation toward the object world. To make the case, the author recovers elements of Siegfried Kracauer’s materialist film theory, before exploring two complementary concepts from Adorno’s work, namely, the preponderance of the object, and mimesis. Offering a staunch critique of Habermas’s rejection of mimesis, the chapter considers critical theory’s emphasis on a political and affective aesthetics as playing a crucial part in how one conceptualizes and experiences objects. As a result, a key distinction is drawn between today’s avowedly post-critical, non-humanist ontologists on one side, and the critical proto-humanism that motivates the early Frankfurt School on the other.

Gina Caison coins “feather method,” an object-oriented ontology that considers the feather itself as a lens for reading several of O’Connor’s stories. Rather than seeing the peacock feather as a metaphor for the author’s work or as a religious symbol, as many readers have, Caison takes the feather as a meaning-making object in its own right and uses its characteristics to reconsider O’Connor. Caison argues that O’Connor’s writing both upholds and challenges an object-oriented ontology that rejects status hierarchy. Thus, her essay uses O’Connor’s work to further theorize object-oriented ontology.

The conclusion to The Politics of Pain closes with a reflection on the many overlaps among new materialist, nonmodern, and biopsycosocial approaches to rhetorical studies, science and technology studies, and pain medicine. In so doing, the conclusion argues for an end to the cycle of hypercorrections as disciplines oscillate from realist modernist positions to anti-realest postmodern theories. Additionally, the conclusion revisits the different modes of calibration, authorizing resources, and discursive instantiations explored in the book. This calibration suite is presented as a useful resource for future inquiry. And, finally, the conclusion closes with suggestions for future horizons of inquiry within a fully rhetorical-ontological idiom.

The Introduction outlines the purpose of the book, which is to model an object-oriented approach to grace. Its approach is object-oriented in that it gives full metaphysical credit to the multitude of individual objects that compose the universe for the collective formation and continuation of their own existence. This book experimentally frames the meaning of grace in a post-Darwinian world. This book' experiment aims to follow an analogous path with respect to grace. It hopes to operationalize grace. The book wants to port it out of a traditional theistic framework and into the immanent domain of a non-theistic, object-oriented ontology. Doing so involves a shift from thinking about grace in terms of unavailable and transcendent “large-scale forces of cosmic progress” to treating it as a palpable, ubiquitous, and available “small-scale force.”

The chapter elaborates how the Object Oriented Ontology’s universe of things works too closely with financial capitalism, as both generate a posthuman reality. The OOO seems too preoccupied with the industrial capital of modernity and its production of stuff (objects and services) to mark its postanthropocentric ontology to consider how financial capitalism, now accounting for over 33% of the profits in the economy despite 7% of the real economy and 4% of the jobs, operates ontologically not through physical objects but through leveraging debt and hoarding value. Indeed, the immaterial objects that the OOO celebrate may include derivatives and hedge funds (themselves often pools of immaterial value). The shift from industrial capitalism’s organization around the production of objects and capture of labor to financial capital’s debt and leveraging marks what I call a movement from the logic of the object and capture of labor to the logic of the derivative and hedging of debt/value. I discuss how the reification of life works in both these contexts, and show how reification is a necessary term for thinking humans rendered into a field of assets and shares of value.

In the concrete poem, language is not a representation of extra-poetic objects, feelings or ideas but an object all its own. In this chapter, Brazilian concrete poetry by Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and Décio Pignatari is compared with other analogous forms – from Hellenistic pattern poems to Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams and Louis Zukofsky’s objectivism – to emphasise that what’s unique about Brazilian concrete poetry has to do with an insistence on the object as resistant to relation. In critical conversation with object-oriented ontology, this chapter shows that Brazilian concrete poetry manages to think the object’s resistance by thinking language. Without renouncing language’s ‘virtuality’ – its ability to mean – early concrete poetry stakes out a space for the poem-object to achieve a mode of autonomy akin to what theorists like Graham Harman describe. Though the poem relates by nature to the things it represents and to its writer and reader, this chapter explores concrete poetry’s self-theorisation and practical realisation as a form capable of existing autonomously from its representation of external objects. Ultimately concrete poetry even finds ways of existing apart from an authorial or reading subject when the poem, and its materiality, creates itself and determines its own readability.

This introductory chapter provides a historical overview of the emergence of new realist movements in contemporary continental philosophy, focusing in particular on speculative realism and materialism, object-oriented ontology, and transcendental nihilism. Provided also is a conceptual introduction to recent realist critiques of the correlationism of post-Kantian philosophy as well as its supposed fideism, anthropocentrism, and anti-scientific bias. This introduction also contains an overview of the volume and the included chapters.

This chapter explores some of the ambivalent potential of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology for thinking about human beings as objects and about being with human beings as objects. In particular, it employs feminist phenomenological theories of objectification, such as those of Beauvoir, Young, and Bartky, as both already object-oriented and as already contesting the idealist tendencies opposed by Harman. Objectification often produces ‘double-consciousness’, and objectified human beings inhabit a site of ontological duality, often knowing themselves as objects for others. The chapter suggests that the absence of these analyses in object-oriented ontology constitutes an important oversight since such work not only draws attention to object relations among human beings but also points to ways of understanding human relations with non-human objects.

In Chapter III contains an explication Garcia’s model of objects as differentiators between that which they comprehend and that which comprehends them. Garcia’s model is then contrasted with other canonical theories in the new continental metaphysics, showing how a defining feature is the manner in which metaphysicians can be interpreted as responding to an enclosure paradox concerning metaphysical explanation. This allows the foregrounding of Garcia’s dialetheist paradoxico-metaphysics, and also one to see clearly how Garcia’s achievement should be interpreted alongside related meta-metaphysical developments by Graham Harman and Graham Priest, as well as other recent speculative philosophers such as Alain Badiou, Markus Gabriel, and Paul Livingston. In addition, it allows one to begin to appreciate the fact that Garcia is contributing to contemporary analytic metaphyics.

The introduction to the Politics of Pain traces the recent history of simultaneous efforts in pain science as well as rhetoric of science and science and technology studies to develop new integrated non-dualist approaches to inquiry and practice. Specifically, this section introduces readers to the calls for a biopsychosocial approach to pain medicine and a nonmodern or new materialist approach to rhetoric of science and science and technology studies. In so doing, the introduction argues that the time is right for renewed inquiry into pain from a hybrid rhetorical-ontological perspective. Such an approach offers great potential for reciprocal engagement between the differing areas’ overlapping calls for new foundations for inquiry and practice.

This essay proposes that Virginia Woolf’s foregrounding of objects exposes the threat posed by human technology between the World Wars. It suggests that the most unsettling depictions of object encounters appear in her experimental inter-war writing and Between the Acts (1941) because the risk of a second devastating war was very much present—real but incalculable—in the years following the Versailles Treaty. There is an ethical dimension to her object-oriented writing of risk and crisis; such an ethics, this essay argues, can be traced notably in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse (1927), the interludes of The Waves (1931), and in Between the Acts.

This chapter considers the relevance of speculative realism and object-oriented ontologies to Greek and Roman thinking, focusing on the phenomena known as hyperobjects. Are these theories of the posthuman entirely postclassical, or do they have ancient counterparts? Porter responds in the affirmative, showing that, beyond the inspirations occasionally cited in support of the new materialisms (most frequently, Aristotle’s theory of substance and ancient atomism), there are solid grounds to support this claim in numerous thinkers, including Empedocles, Lucretius, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. He investigates three trajectories: views of nature in which we encounter some conception of a hyperobject; a collection of materialist and sensualist perspectives on nature in which matter is conceived as operating independently of a human phenomenology; and object-oriented philosophies of nature that treat human phenomena as one object among others.

This chapter calls for an emergence of an "affective multitude," an assemblage that is not organized according to the imagined binary between the universal (the West) and the particular (Asia). Instead, such an affective multitude produces its own resonance through an endless distribution of singularity to all sentient beings that traverse the presumed division between humans and nonhumans, and life and matter. Aligning Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna's notion of "dependent origination" to Althusser's concept of "over determination," Foucault's reconceptualization of Kant's notion of "enlightenment," and a more recent strand of object-oriented theorizations about causation as a constitutively aesthetic event, this chapter rethinks "enlightenment" as an irruption of singular beings that are solitary but never alone, always undergoing and practicing change through their mutual exposition and articulation. In doing so, this chapter reveals ways of thinking and feeling beyond imperial aesthetics, simultaneously contesting the biopolitics of East Asia and opening up more capacious links among material beings.

Here, the author presents a critique of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO). His primary argument is that some flavors of OOO are not philosophy at all, but a form of poetic discourse that is at once nihilistic and animistic. The author compares this type of OOO discourse with Romantic idealism and surrealist fantasy.

In this final chapter, the author speaks out against what he calls “horror philosophy,” a type of discourse that threatens the ontological dignity of the human being for the sake of celebrating a speculative sort of animism. The author admits the humanist taint of his claims while suggesting that a recognition of the vulnerability of all things must not come at the expense of human vulnerability. The chapter is bookended by discussions of two video art projects: Dust by Herman Kolgen and Datamatics v2.0 by Ryoji Ikeda.

The second essay takes up both physical and literary examples of childish things. The anarchic forces of miniature matters are palpable even as such small-scale things articulate with human fantasy. Mitchell also explores literary miniaturization in Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Usk.