Brown’s piece draws some interesting links between the OOO theorists Bogost, Harman and Bryant and Rhetoric. I’d like to add to this a little bit and also pose some questions about the possible relationship between a (newly copious) rhetoric and ontology.

For Harman, something about an object always withdraws from relations with any other object. In fact, this is what makes it an object as such. Harman has a long running dispute with Bruno Latour (and other, smaller worker ANTs) on this very point—for Latour and smaller worker ANTs, an object is nothing but the sum of its relations. Harman replies that such a conception leads to absurd results—in a universe where everything was merely the sum of its relations nothing could grow, change or even move, because every object would be caught in and overcoded by the thick web of relations. An object has to “withdraw” or hold something in reserve from what it deploys to its observable local manifestations to explain a dynamic universe.

Harman loves to tarry with Heidegger’s workshop full of tools. The craftsman interacts with a hammer, but is only interested in the wooden handle and the metal head’s ability to pound things. The nail only interacts with the hardness of the metal head, If the workshop caught on fire, it would appreciate a very different aspect of the hammer’s being, namely the capacity of the wooden handle to serve as fuel. A spider might experience an idle hammer for its sturdiness as a web anchor. Objects are interesting for their potential to reach into their withdrawn reserve and inflict a new cut or blow upon reality.

Taking withdrawal seriously, we might say that all of these actants approach the hammer “rhetorically,” i.e. they “persuade” the hammer to engage in various relations. Since the hammer always holds something of its nature back, we might say it is persuaded into various relations.

In Onto-Cartography, Levi Bryant is keen to mark a difference between semiotic and thermodynamic politics. The archetype of semiotic politics is to protest a corporations activities with traditional forms of rhetoric—marching making signs, crafting arguments, etc. A thermodynamic politics would recognize that a corporation is not a machine readily persuadable by semiotic meanings and human rhetoric—it is fundamentally not human, but a machinic amalgam of humans and non-humans that doesn’t care about anyone’s protest in the least. We might say, “corporations do not understand human language.” Thermodynamic politics would seek to attack (or persuade, if you like) the corporation at the level of inputs and outputs that are legible to it, such as labor and revenue. A strike or a boycott are archetypal examples of thermodynamic politics when directed against the corporation—they translate the human perspective into something the corporation can understand.

Computer code brings us to an interesting case—in Bryant’s dichotomy, is it semiotic or thermodynamic? On one hand, as we have discussed, we have to admit that it is a language. On the other hand, it indisputably makes things happen in the world and inflicts direct cuts upon reality. A computer code can tell a missile to launch or a robotic drill to operate. Computers seem to lie right at the borderland of this division. The OOO sympathizer in me wants to ask what exactly happens when you press enter and run your code? We could answer that question in regards to language of Python, or we could ask what is really happening under the hood with whatever blinks of light or electrons that race around the silicon (I really haven’t a clue what is going on in there). Semiotic or thermodynamic machine?