I stumbled over a post by Levi Bryant at his blog Larval Subjects which seems to me to address a number of the issues which we have all been raising over the last four days both in our curations and our comments. Before I draw out some of the important threads I'll link to the full post by Bryant which can be found here: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/unit-operations/ The first thing I noticed was the way Bryant talks about mess as something we abhor in our research practices, a term he takes from the social scientist John Law, who in his book After Method: Mess in Social Science Research makes a case for "quieter and more generous methods". This might make us think about the debate around the terms feminism, new feminism, and postfeminism which has emerged in and around the comments on Jessalynn's post. Bryant writes: "What we abhor, to use John Law’s apt term, is a mess. Everywhere we think in terms of relations between form and content, form and matter, where one key term functions as the ultimate form (which for Aristotle was the active principle and associated with masculinity) and where all else is treated as matter awaiting form (which for Aristotle was the passive term and was associated with femininity). In short, our theoretical framework tends to be one massive metaphor for fucking and the sexual relationship. Of course, it’s always a fucking where the men are on top in the form of an active form inseminating a passive matter. And again, that active form can be the signifier, signs, economics, the social, form, categories, reason, etc. What’s important for masculinist ontology is that form always be straight and one. I’ll leave it to the reader to make the appropriate phallic jokes here". What Jessalynn and Dom and Karin have been arguing for has been a way to think in terms other than this masculinist logic, in terms of waves, or a diversification away from a hierarchized model of feminism (towards new feminisms) or a hierarchized model of method (Jessalynn's girl studies method being just as useful and valid as the Butler-inspired ones deployed elsewhere this week). What Law argues for is "symmetry" as opposed to a phallic ontology/methodology and he calls for a wide ranges of metaphors for both imagining and responding to our worlds (he calls these "method assemblages"). Among his metaphors for imagining and taking responsibility for our worlds are "localities, specificities, enactments, multiplicities, fractionalities, goods, resonances, gatherings, forms of crafting, processing of weaving, spirals, vortices, indefinitenesses, condensates, dances, imaginaries, passions, interferences". These all seem like good ways and good words to use in order to think about researching, relating to, and responding to Gaga. They are metaphors, Law says, for "the stutter and the stop" much like the "eh...eh...eh" in Gaga's "Telephone". The second thing which struck me was the potential resonance between Bryant's post and Kris Cannon's question in response to Kirsty's curation where he writes: “I really enjoyed your post Kirsty, especially with an artifact that would seemingly get less public visibility than her music videos. I like the comments from Karin & Michael and find them interesting in relation to your statement about her existing "as" spectacle. I have been toying with the idea of how Gaga becomes an object simultaneous to her offering-up objects with subjectivity (Jack Halberstam has mentioned this in relation to the glasses that smoke in the Telephone video). It seems that you suggest that something (performance as spectacle) is coming undone for her to become something else (spectacle itself), and Michael also draws attention to transformations taking place (pop to art and blurring subject and image). Do either of you think that this might also be a "becoming spectacle," "becoming spectacled object," or… If she draws attention to the transformative, transitional and temporal unfolding (enfolding? undoing?) of these boundaries, she also seems to offer images attentive to object-orientation—illuminating, enacting and potentially embodying objectivity or object-ness”. Levi Bryant, of course, coined the term “Object Oriented Ontology” (OOO) and has done much to shape the development of this nascent field in ways that are messy. Moving on from his discussion of our abhorrence for mess in favor of a phallic univocity, he says: “What the masculinist passion for ground abhors, however, is the idea of a multiplicity of heterogeneous actors acting in relation together. It is not economics that determines all else. It is not biology that determines all else. It is not neurology that determines all else. It is not signs and signifiers that determines all else. It is now cows and roads that determine all else. It is not history that determines all else. No, the world is populated by chairs, cows, neurons, signs, signifiers, narratives, discourses, neutrons, chemical reactions, weather patterns, roads, etc., all mutually perturbing one another in a mesh. In other words, we have all sorts of negative and positive feedback relations between these different spheres functioning as resonators for one another”. Gaga's videos are peopled by a variety of objects in a dance of relation with eachother and many of these have been mentioned during the curations and comments this week. Among the litany we might think of dresses, hair, wigs, glasses, cigarettes, crutches, heels, body suits, wheechairs, telephones, and so on. These objects are enmeshed and mutually perturb each other. As Bryant goes on to write: “What we have here is a mesh of non-linearities without ground. What we have here are all sorts of agencies and objects feeding back on one another, modifying one another, perturbing one another, translating one another”. And what this has to do with our post on Gaga’s phallicity becomes apparent when Bryant sets out his agenda for castrating a certain Lacanianism. He claims that: “What I’ve tried to formulate is an ontology without phallus in the Lacanian sense of the term; or rather an ontology where phallus is recognized properly as the masquerade that it is (here an analysis of projective identification in the portrayal of woman as masquerade is an appropriate critique of psychoanalysis). The point is not that the signifier and fantasy do not play a role, but rather that we must see the role that these things play as a role among other actors in a complex network of feedback relations. An ontology without phallus is an ontology where there is no fundamental interpretant, no ground of all else, no final explanatory term. In this regard, the idea of nature as Goddess is every bit as much a phallic fantasy as the idea of the signifier overdetermining all else. We need to learn how to think in terms of amongstness rather than beneathness (or aboveness, returning to the analogy to the missionary position?)”. Our reading of the sliding significations of the phallus in Gaga's “Telephone” precisely reads her phallus as being “in a complex network of feedback relations” with other body parts (breasts, ass, and so on) and objects (shoulder pads, glasses, hair clip, and so on). And we do so in terms of “amongstness”. And this brings me to a comment which Dom made in response to Madison’s post (but which could just as easily have referred to ours) about collaboration and objects. Dom writes: “Madison and friends, I’d like to point out another tool that Gaga uses in her image play- collaboration. Whether in videos with high profile directors and costars, performance art, or fashion an already established culural player is never far from Gaga’s latest production. Butler’s "Undoing Gender" stresses the importance of a call and response element to performativity, which can be seen in both her collaborations and the mainstream success. Like a true star Gaga’s gravitational pull draws objects, glamour, the grotesque, and various participants in her orbit. As to whether Gaga relies on prior understandings of feminism (instead of creating entirely new ones) this mode of production suggests her methods utililse what is already there. Through these collaborations Gaga raises questions about feminism/anti-feminism variously through her own image, through objects associated with her image (the spiky clutch), and the attraction and repulsion dynamic with both. Karin and Michael have introduced another way to think about what Gaga (un)does by becoming and privileging objects in her work to complicate Butler’s gender as a "drag" performance”. It is at this point that I’m reminded of Bryant’s shift from discussing the phallus to a “review” of Ian Bogost’s book Unit Operations and his alien phenomenology of objects (in Dom’s parlance we might call this a “monstrous phenomenology). Bryant explains that “in Unit Operations, Ian [Bogost] contrasts unit and system. As Ian writes, “Unit operations are modes of meaning-making that privilege discrete, disconnected actions over deterministic, progressive systems… I contend that unit operations represent a shift away from system operations, although neither strategy is permanently detached from the other” (3). This asemiotic understanding of unit operations hinges on the fact that “the unit can always explode the constraints of system, or that systems are always occasional, local stabilities from which units can escape to create a new surprise”, a sentence which could describe any Gaga video performance and the system of heteronormativity which she explodes. Bryant wants to focus in on the operation part of unit operations and how this leads to messy creativeness and amongstness rather than phallicity. He explains that “In his early work (I suspect we’ll find that he’s of a different view once Alien Phenomenology comes out), Bogost is deeply influenced by Badiou’s concept of the count-as-one (which has been a longtime fascination of mine as well). The count-as-one is, in Badiou, an operation that transforms an inconsistent multiplicity into a consistent multiplicity, literally counting it as one, or transforming it into a unit. The count-as-one is an operation, something that takes place, not something that is already there” and goes on shortly after to say that “In short, unit operations produce, they generate a new entity, whereas system operations re-produce, they iterate an already existing pattern or object. This, really, is what to be thought in the mesh of exo-relations among the heterogeneous actors populating the heteroverse of flat ontology: What are those exo-relations that reproduce existing units and relations and what are the operations that produce entirely new entities or agents? And if we are to think this, we must think a complex interplay of a variety of different types of entities, how they contribute to the production of new entities, and must avoid our phallocentric inclinations that would erect only a single ground of being...we must think processes of unitizing without abandoning objects”. As both Dom and Kris have intuited, Gaga’s unit operations, her video games, produce rather than reproduce and Karin has called this a “new type of creativity” in her response to Dom above. What the various discussions this week have brought home to me is that there is not one "single ground" of Gaga’s being, not one single interpretation of her image or her performances, that there is a mesh of objects in relation to each other and in a gravitational mobility toward her, and that this mess or mesh of "exo-relations" produces a new kind of felicitous phallicity. MOR.

This is a really great question Kris, thanks. Your comments throughout the week have done much to force a long overdue rapprochement between OOO and queer theory/gender theory and also psychoanalysis. Many of the figures I’ve been mentioning (Vitale, Bogost, Bryant, Harman) have been recently involved in a vigorous debate about both the absence of gender/queerness in OOO and OOP and the masculinism of the field. What has emerged from that vigorous debate is a welcome consideration of the very politicality of Speculative Realism itself. And gender is now firmly on the agenda. To address your question though: I would suggest that yours is a properly object oriented analysis since it thinks from the point of view of the cloth(ing) itself. However, I’d be slightly less likely to subscribe than you are to the idea that the cloth does something *to* Gaga which self-shatters her dick/phallic plenitude. I would suggest, as I have in the previous comments, that the clothing and genitals intra-act, are mutually perturbing each other. I will come back to this shortly. A couple of useful OOP concepts to help with this question are Graham Harman’s "allure"and "vicarious causation" which appear throughout his work since Guerilla Metaphysics and are helpful for queer scholars interested in affect, touch, intertemporality, erotics (all questions you have raised at various points this week). Steven Shaviro—who has been writing about Gaga’s videos— writes both critically and appreciatively about Harman’s ideas. He says: “In his book Guerrilla Metaphysics, Harman writes of allusion and metaphor, and this leads to discussions of humor, tragedy and comedy, and charm, and allure. These aesthetic discussions are among my favorite things written by Harman. Aesthetics, as Harman develops it, is both a way to break out of the charmed circle of correlationist epistemology, and a broader way of discussing how objects interact with other objects on all scales. That is to say, aesthetics is not just a human attitude, but a primordial form of relation and interaction. And this leads Harman to suggest, in a lovely (and justified) hyperbole, that “aesthetics becomes first philosophy” (“Vicarious Causation, in Collapse 2). Now, I find this sort of approach useful and liberating from my own Whiteheadian point of view. Aesthetics describes what Whitehead calls feelings: i.e. the ways that objects affect, and are affected by, other objects, even (and especially?) when there is no cognition going on. The failure of epistemological cognition does not mean the impossibility of ontological interaction. Aesthetic modes of expression correspond to “vicarious” (in Harman’s sense) as well as to noncognitive (in a Whiteheadian sense) modes of interaction — they are ways of positively expressing “what we cannot speak about. So I find Harman extremely valuable on this point of aesthetics — even though I see objects as continually jostling up against one another, “prehending” one another, i.e. primordially relating to one another and defining themselves by means of the multiplicity of their relations — a view which (as I have noted before) is very far from Harman’s vision of objects packed away in vacuums, unable to touch one another except “vicariously.” To recapitulate, Harman proposes a theory of engagement with the world that is based on the autonomous presence of objects, which he calls real objects, and that do not fully relate with each other; instead, Harman imagines what he calls "vicarious causation," that is a relation between a real object, for instance a person, and qualities and surfaces of a second real object, the sum of which he calls a sensible object. Harman posits "five distinct sorts of relations between all these objects": containment, contiguity, sincerity, connection, no relation at all”. The operator that distinguishes among these relations and defines the fullest of them, sincerity, is allure, defined as the distance between the real object and qualities that stream out of it, constituting the sensible object with which we engage: "Whereas real objects withdraw, sensual objects lie directly before us, frosted over with a swirling, superfluous outer shell". At the surface (if I were to borrow Harman’s term), Harman’s philosophy is similar to Bond Stockton’s since her innovation is to write about gender from the viewpoint of the cloth but Bond Stockton and Kris help us to describe the conditions and characteristics of allure in ways which expand Harman’s concept and introduce gender. So, my quick answer to your question would be that the cloth and dick continually jostle and prehend each other, that they are defined by the "multiplicity of their relations" and that, yes, this intra-action does shatter Gaga’s position as a "singular, reducible" object or being. But, and this is where we very slightly differ I think, it is more a question of what is done "with" her than "to" her. MOR.