Gaia and AttendantI appreciate your distinction between OOO objects, objectification, and subject/object dichotomies; I've been working on ways to put these types of distinction in dialogue with contemporary US women-of-colors theorizing. I have a question: I’ve noticed that OOO seems to view holism with great suspicion. For instance, you write, “ the appropriate philosophy for an ecological era is an object-oriented ontology (OOO) that respects the withdrawn strangeness of objects while simultaneously 1) not discriminating against them in any way (reductionism, holism, anthropocentrism, biocentrism).” I can understand why reductionism, anthropocentrism, and biocentrism could be seen as discriminating against objects, but why holism? Or maybe I should be asking, what is the definition of holism you guys are using?Good questions. And I'm really glad that the commenter is thinking OOO issues through race and gender.
Before I even got into OOO I was doubtful that holism was a great model for ecological philosophy. (There are some arguments about it in The Ecological Thought.) Mostly this is because holism imagines that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and so, ultimately, the whole is separate from the parts in some sense. In other words, you can replace the parts and the whole would remain the same.
Aldo Leopold's land ethic, for instance, states this quite firmly: “good” means whatever is good for the biotic community as a whole. Or think of Gaia: it doesn't matter if humans go extinct, Gaia will persist.
Of course that also means it doesn't matter if coral or polar bears go extinct. Do Gaians really believe that?
Holism, then, is a form of mechanism in disguise. (Usually a nice dark green leafy disguise with heavily reverbed tribal drums beating slowly in the background.) Just as the parts of a machine are replaceable without changing the machine, so the parts of Gaia or the biotic community are replaceable. Do you want to be a replaceable component in a machine? Is that where ecological philosophy should point us? Haven't we had enough of that?
Isn't holism, then, another mode of modernity, and thus especially unsuited to the time of hyperobjects, the time of coexistence with strange strangers?
From here we can proceed quite fast to OOO. OOO states the problem more simply and more profoundly—the reason we can't be holists is because of the nature of reality as such.
For OOO-ists there is no bottom object, so reductionism is untenable as the commenter states. But there is also no top object, for the same reason. As well as reducing things downward to tinier objects (reductionism, undermining) you can also dissolve them upwards into holistic systems.
This upward dissolution is what Graham Harman calls overmining.
In the name of the medium sized objects that coexist on Earth (Aspen trees, polar bears, nematode worms, slime molds, coral, mitochondria, Starhawk and, sadly, Glenn Beck), we should forge a genuinely new ethical view that doesn't reduce them or dissolve them.