materialism

I’d actually forgotten that materialism was announced at one point as the theme of the conference. But though Iain Grant was mildly apologetic in the concluding roundtable that we each did our own thing, I thought that we stumbled into a good deal of progress on the materiality question. For instance, I’ve never heard Brassier sounding as hostile to abuses of the concept of matter as he did yesterday– he even said that science needs no concept of matter, along with his (accurate) digs at the use of “materiality” as a placeholder concept for whatever is unintelligible.

My own talk was on the difference between undermining and “overmining” approaches to objects, with all “radical” philosophies choosing one option or the other and either reducing objects downward (whether to physical microparticles or some quasi-articulate pre-individual realm) or reducing them upward (to their relations, their palpable qualities, or their accessiblity to humans). The object, that ultimate middle ground, is what is abandoned by both models.

I already had some things to say about this in the soon-to-be-printed Prince of Networks, but this summer’s project will start out quite strongly on that very note. One of the consequences of looking at things this way is that the realism/anti-realism dispute becomes a bit less central, since there are realists on both sides of the aforementioned divide.

Before my credit runs out on this Bristol Airport machine, let me add that it was great to see so many people come all the way to Bristol– old friends, new friends, strangers. Bastiaan and Roel showing up and producing an Amsterdam flashback was perhaps the highlight for me personally.

And, Iain Grant and John Sellars did a lot of work on this event. Prospective graduate students looking for an interesting place to go ought to take a look at UWE’s (University of the West of England’s) surging graduate program, as I would definitely do if I were at that age.

Also glad to hear Brassier’s Beirut stories. It’s exciting to spend time living in the Middle East, as he now knows as well. Brassier, his AUB colleague(s), and Daniel Dennett driving up to Tripoli is a great image, and I wish I had been there for that. (Dennett grew up in Beirut, oddly.)