OOO, Guerrilla metaphysics, and the allure of children’s musical play

ABSTRACT

Inspired by Graham Harman’s philosophy of human access, and within the ‘flattening ontology’ of Object Oriented Ontology, Ring o’ Roses is speculated about as a finite object with ontological independence from humans, repertoire, song, utility, and cultural context. Ring o’ Roses playfully dances us through an introduction to OOO, and on to the idea of young children’s early musical play as something different from its qualities and benefits. Indeed, the reality of musical play can be speculated about as ontologically irreducible, and as having a weird and vast, yet fragile, interior which is announced by allure. Allure is composed of charm, courage, and humour, and is responsible for causation.

KEYWORDS:

• Object Oriented Ontology
• children’s musical play
• allure
• charm

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks to my supervisors, Dr. Emily Ryall and Dr. Wendy Russell. The author would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the original version of this article, and to acknowledge their contributions to this revised version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Graham Harman coined the descriptive term ‘philosophy of human access’ for his take on OOO. The alternative term ‘correlationism’ was coined by Quentin Meillassoux. Both are concerned with the Kantian notion that knowledge is exclusively based on how the world correlates with human thought, and both consider this limiting to thought. Meillassoux accepts that ‘to be is to be a correlate’ (Meillassoux 2008, 28), and correlationism is inevitable and comes in different intensities (Young 2020). Harman suggests that correlationism, or finitude, is not exclusively human, but is inevitable for all objects. As such, objects, without any help from a human, take part in each other’s sensual engagement (Yoran 2021).

2 Harman employs metaphor to express the tension between perceived objects and their manifold tangible properties. To observe something is not to be something, but to observe something is to be an executant actor of that thing. Furthermore all objects, including inanimate objects have their own ‘I’ as they execute themselves. As Harman writes: Ortega’s ‘the cypress is a flame’ is thus the poetic creation of a new object without tangible qualities which draws us into the sensual tree (Harman 2005).

3 Bogost coined the term ‘Latour Litany’ for lists of objects within OOO writing (Bogost 2012). Bryant suggests that the lists perform an object-oriented epoché (Bryant 2010), so that the reader resists the notion of one object standing in for all objects.

4 There is much more to explore on the topic, in that aesthetic interactions of musical play, these artified interactions, are responsible for the creation of space and time (Harman and Witmore 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison Harmer

Alison Harmer MA(Ed) Early Years Music is a PhD student at the University of Gloucestershire. She uses playful methods to research affiliations and tensions between play and musical play in early childhood.