the Dublin website

I didn’t know this existed until I saw it on the ANTHEM blog. (Same information as below, but with a more official UCD look to it.)

http://mis.ucd.ie/cito/seminars/20090417_Substance_Seminar

article advice follow-up

It didn’t feel like such a productive night, though actually it was. This is a follow-up post for those who like writing advice.

I used today’s bus rides to and from campus to think through the introduction to my Bristol paper. On the way in I jotted down a lot of notes about the various ways in which objects are belittled by all “radical” philosophies in our time. I was only mildly worried at the time that it was a mere list without a central organizing principle, since I figured that would come soon enough once I had an actual list.

On the bus ride home (which took much longer, as usual), I realized that for all the diverse approaches of banishing objects from a starring role in philosophy, all boil down to two basic possible strategies. I started to type that out here, but prefer to save the point for Bristol.

Upon returning home at around 5:30, I slowly started work on the introduction to the paper. It’s now not quite 5 hours later, and I even had time for dinner and a brief nap and a little bit of web-surfing. Yet I was able to write the first full 7 pages of the lecture.

The key to writing 7 workable pages in a couple of hours is not to care at all about the style. Just follow the outline and get the words on paper. I love crisp, polished style as much as anyone, but this is not the stage at which to do it. I learned this the hard way during dissertation years by doing unwise things like polishing my first paragraph for three weeks before moving on. It’s extremely inefficient. It doesn’t matter if the style in your initial draft is junk, as long as everything is approximately in the right order. (And it will be, provided you move quickly enough, because your unconscious mind has remarkable organizational skills, and whatever you feel the urge to type next probably belongs there, even if the connection seems tenuous at first.)

Translating books helped me learn this quick-drafting skill as well (which several of my fellow graduate students had already mastered by age 23, though it was a long and difficult lesson for me). When you translate, it’s almost impossible to make any progress unless you try to get a more or less accurate translation on the first draft and go for style only on the second and succeeding drafts.

There are two great advantages of having 7 pages already under my belt on this paper, even though the style is atrocious.

(1) Nothingness is the source of all anxiety. 0 pages is highly anxiety-inducing. With 7 pages, there is no anxiety at all. There’s something to work with now.

(2) I now have two options for tomorrow’s work. Either I can press onward from page 8 and new material, or I can polish the first 7 pages for style. The two tasks require different moods, and now I know that whatever tomorrow’s mood may be, it will be well-suited for one of the two options. In other words, there will be no moody procrastination tomorrow (God knows there was plenty of it on the dissertation). Progress will occur on this paper. Even if I’m not in the mood for either of those two options tomorrow, I’ll surely be in the mood for further reading. That should always be the last resort once you get this close to a deadline, since reading is the ultimate procrastination technique for writers, but in the present case it may actually help my cause.

Furthermore, having 7 pages means that the lecture now has a distinguishable “voice”. Before you actually start writing something, it’s hard to know what the tone of it will be. That tone emerges to a large degree from the contingencies that link one sentence to the next, but you have to get things rolling to discover what those contingencies might be.

two talks in Dublin

This just arrived.

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1. SEMINAR
The Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO), in association with the MIS Subject Area and the UCD School of Philosophy, will host a seminar on Friday 17th of April at 2pm (venue in UCD to be confirmed.) The seminar isentitled A New Theory of Substance, and the speaker is Professor Graham Harman from the American University in Cairo. Professor Dermot Moran from the UCD School of Philosophy will be the discussant.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a body of interdisciplinary research which attempts to address perceived limitations in how we conceptualise information and communication technologies (ICT) and their role in the (re)configuration ofsocial/organisational life. This eclectic scholarship directs attention to the material nature of technology as it is experienced by embodied actors, thus offering the promise of more sophisticated analyses of how technologies mediate human action inorganisational settings.

It is within this context, that Professor Harman’s work has gained widespread attention and acclaim for its attempts to develop an ‘object-orientated philosophy’. Much of Professor Harman’s focus is on an interpretation of the tool-analysis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, developed in his book Guerrilla Metaphysics—Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. In reviewing this book, Bruno Latour observes: “This [book] fully deserves the title of guerrilla warfare, though Harman, instead of brandishing Che Guevara’s Kalashnikov, in another futile enterprise of deconstruction, has adopted William James’s splendid style to bring us back to the buzzing, blooming world”.

Professor Harman has engaged, with Bruno Latour, in a number of recent management debates at the London School of Economics on the subject of Actor-Network Theory (http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/newsAndEvents/2008events/HarmanLatour.htm), and he co-edits, with Latour, the ‘New Metaphysics’ series. In May of this year Professor Harman will publish his latest book, Prince of Networks—Bruno Latour and Metaphysics.

Abstract
The concept of substance has relatively few defenders in present-day philosophy. I happen to be one of them, though I also believe that several features of the classical concept of substance (simplicity, naturalness, and eternity) must be discarded. For me, the necessity of a new concept of substance (or “objects,” as I prefer) comes from Heidegger’s tool-analysis. With this analysis Heidegger does not just show that invisible human practices come before conscious human awareness. Instead, the analysis shows that objects exist as something over and above all their relations to other things (the exact opposite of Bruno Latour’s relational model of actors). Most contemporary philosophies are simply variant “radical” attempts to deny the existence of objects. Objects are reduced either to their relations, or to how they are manifested in human consciousness, or to tiny material particles, or to “pre-individual singularities,” or to a shapeless, formless rumbling of inarticulate being. I oppose all such radical models, and insist on a “polarized” model of philosophy in which objects can never be reduced to any of their specific incarnations in the world.

Please Note
To help us choose the venue, we would be obliged if those interested could signal their intention to attend by emailing peadar.oscolai@ucd.ie

2. WORKSHOP
The seminar will be followed on Monday 20th of April with a half-day workshop entitled ‘Object-Oriented Philosophy’. The workshop will provide an opportunity to discuss the relevance and contribution of this perspective to our conceptualisations of information systems and technology in organisational contexts. Topics of discussion will include attempts to position Professor Harman’s contribution within the current debates in management/ organisation studies that revolve around materiality, practice theory, neo-institutionalist theory and elements of Actor Network Theory.

During this workshop PhD students will discuss a number of ongoing projects, including healthcare innovations and reconfigurations associated with the introduction of telemedicine systems, knowledge work and technologies involved in Ireland’s new Deep Brain Stimulation programme, and software development as distributed, collective work.

Please Note
Contact peadar.oscolai@ucd.ie if you have an interest in attending.

it’s not enough to be right

This may sound strange, but it’s relatively rare when reading intellectual work that I encounter outright errors. (I think Deleuze said this too, probably at the beginning of Difference and Repetition, and Whitehead said something similar as well.) Mistakes actually aren’t that big a deal. In most cases they are easily fixed (which is why I loathe people who get all aggressive about typographical mistakes, since they can be fixed in a matter of seconds).

What happens more often is that a piece of writing is boring.

What happens even more often, and to all of us, is that we write something that’s not boring, but that somehow misses the point. This is what I lose sleep over whenever writing… not making mistakes (that’s inevitable within certain limits), not boring readers (I never do), but missing the larger point at issue.

The great philosophers are not the ones who made the fewest mistakes, but the ones who missed the point less than anyone else. Of all debates currently underway in philosophy, 98% will turn out to be wastepaper of no relevance 50 years from now; it is focused on transient, inadequate formulations of philosophical problems and missing a deeper framing of the problem that would be worth chewing on for decades.

It’s very difficult not to miss the point, but that should be our aim in everything we write. But even the best philosophers sometimes only got right to the point in 10 or 20 pages over the course of a career. Many misfires may be needed.

Truth does not mean accurate content. But neither does truth mean “originality,” assuming that originality is defined in the usual manner as “unheard-of content”. Truth is, quite simply, not a content of any sort. You cannot put truth in a proposition (as Whitehead saw), not because there is no truth and everything is a language game, but because propositions are too abstract to do justice to the truth.

Truth means: getting the point. It means focusing on what is decisive.

One of the most repellent strategies, in my mind, is to debunk exisiting philosophical problems as “false problems.” If many people have done batttle for centuries over a specific problem, then there is probably something to it. False dissolution of problems is a far bigger danger than false problems. We need ways to maximize or “nectarize” traditional problems to make them even more cutting, rather than looking for facile ways to dissolve them altogether.

autonomy and sincerity

Instead of looking for artificially skillful starting points for any piece of work, it’s best simply to begin with whatever is truly most on your mind at the time of writing. This is the same basic principle as my idea (expressed several times on the old blog) that a good outline is the key to a good style. Style comes not from crafty choice of adjectives, but from articulating a problem or situation in the way that seems simplest and most reasonable to us, since no one else will choose the same manner of articulation as being the simplest and most reasonable. Despite the idea that logic is universal, we are never more idiosyncratic than when we think logically.

What is most on my own mind these days is that every new philosophy that gets introduced is in some way a slap in the face of the autonomy of objects. Many new philosophies appear, but all agree in “radicalizing” objects by trying to derive them from some primary radix from which they are derivable. I’ve dealt with this theme on the former incarnation of the blog, a bit more in the final chapter of Prince of Networks, and will do it again in Bristol a month from now. (And by the way, I’m pretty sure Toscano will be standing in for Meillassoux, a worthy replacement.)

For various reasons I also need to write a whole new book this summer as well, and I’ll probably start that book with the same phenomenon… Everyone gets the adrenaline rush of conquest whenever they can start a new philosophy by slapping around autonomous individual objects from page 1. The earlier blog already listed some of these ways…

*”objects are nothing but their relations and effects on other things”

*”objects are nothing but how they appear to us; we don’t need to believe naively in things-in-themselves anymore”

*”objects are nothing but bundles of qualities”

*”objects are just crystallizations of a deeper, pre-object realm”

*”objects are derivative of a primal flux”

*”the world is actually one; objects exist only as surface-configurations of this deeper unity”

*”objects are always reducible to more fundamental, tinier objects”

*”objects are reducible to a process of historical sedimentation that must be unearthed by genealogy”

There are others, but this is a good opening sample. Objects are always called upon to be the reactionary straight man for whatever new radical philosophy is hot at the moment. Objects are reminiscent of Aristotelian substances, and everyone knows what an arid, reactionary model that is.

Except– it’s neither arid nor reactionary. There is nothing more weird than an object with is both autonomous in its own reality, and (insofar as it does interact with other things) non-autonomous.

A certain form of this paradox can already be found in Plato’s Meno, I have mentioned, when Socrates says that we have to know what virtue is before we can know what qualities it has. The “radical” approach to philosophy would call it “meaningless” to say that we can know a thing before knowing its qualities. I disagree with that complaint, and agree with Socrates. A thing is different from its qualities, as well as from its relations, accidents, moments, history, and pieces. The maximum allowable autonomy must be granted to objects, for a variety of reasons that this summer’s book will develop.

To grant autonomy to the things means to adopt an attitude of sincerity rather than one of aloof critique and smirking transgression. Our goal is no longer to say “the object is nothing more than X, Y, or Z”, thereby disintegrating it. Our new goal is to articulate the fault-lines in any given object. The sneer must be banished from the register of recognized intellectual gestures.

Dictionary of Non-Philosophy

Taylor Adkins, the most energetic French translator it’s possible to meet, has now made available an English version of François Laruelle’s Dictionary of Non-Philosophy on the Speculative Heresy blog, as a PDF.

Here it is:

http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/dictionary-of-non-philosophy/

things you don’t know about people

I’ve often been struck by how frequently facts emerge about people we’ve known for awhile that utterly amaze us. Yesterday, for instance, I was shown an internal university news article about a friendly Senate colleague, an American woman. She and her late first husband rowed across the Atlantic Ocean and then the Pacific Ocean, the first couple ever to do so. WHAT?!

At first I thought “rowing” must have been meant in a loose sense, meaning only that they toughed it out in a small boat. But then she happened to call a few minutes later on Senate business, and I asked her about it, and they literally rowed with paddles, taking turns. The Pacific trip took a year.

How did this never come up during all of my conversations with Kathleen over the years? And this sort of ignorance about colleagues we know well comes up quite often, I find.

Here’s a weblink on the story:

http://www.hwwilson.com/Currentbio/rowing.html

Curtis, unfortunately, became lost on a Sinai hike during my first year in Egypt, and was found by Bedouins too late to be saved. He taught rhetoric & composition at the University, as Kathleen still does.