Žižek after Speculative Realism
This paper is an attempt to square the circle of Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO) with the psychoanalytic theory of the object or thing through a dialogue between Žižek and OOO. I first use Bogost’s discussion of visual culture as a way to think about Thomas Hirschhorn’s film Touching Reality by showing how Bogost’s “flat ontology,” and Levi Bryant’s “democracy of objects” helps us or doesn’t help us to think about what the objects or things are in media culture. I then turn to objects in the fiction of Tao Lin, where all objects are presented as a flat terrain. Lin’s novel is in some ways wholly in the “tradition” of post-ironic or postmodern American fiction and cultural production, where characters’ actions and objects are presented without help of a moralizing voice. I will show how it is arguably a matter of a Žižekian “overidentification” which dismantles the sinthome of the object’s enjoy-meant. For Žižek, the object itself is constitutively lacking, does not posses the solidity that underwrites Harman and Bogost and their fantasy of a “carpenter’s ontology.”
Clint Burnham is an associate Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver. He has a PhD in English from York University. Clint Burnham has taught at Capilano College, the Emily Carr Institute, and UBC. Clint’s research interests are modernism, theory, visual culture, and popular culture. His novel Smoke Show (Arsenal) was shortlisted for the 2005 BC Book Prize and his latest book of poetry, Rental Van, was just published by Anvil. Clint has published essays, reviews, and articles in English Studies in Canada, Open Letter, Flash Art, fillip, The Vancouver Sun, and The Globe and Mail. He is also the author of a study of Steve McCaffery (ECW) and The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (Duke U.P.). Burnham is also the author of Fatal Femmes: the poetry of Lynne Crosbie, two collections of poetry, Be Labour Reading and Buddyland, and numerous chapbooks. Clint has served on the editorial collective of Fusemagazine, was a contributing editor for Paragraph, and the editorial collective of Boo.