the “positivism” of s.r.

Levi responding to the SUPPOSED POSITIVISM OF SPECULATIVE REALISM.

Whenever this issue comes up, I laugh and shake my head. Even to respond to it risks creating the impression of defensiveness about a charge that is too weird to earn a full-blown response. If someone criticized me for eating excessive amounts of meat (I haven’t eaten a bite of it since age 7) that would be about as accurate as calling me a positivist. They may as well say: “Harman, one of the new generation of analytic philosophers from Korea.” Why not? That’s about as accurate as calling me a positivist.

First of all, it’s a complete misuse of the word… Positivism is not realism, but almost the opposite. But let’s forget about that misuse of the word, because it’s not the main point, and we know what they mean.

What they mean by positivism is that “we” want to privilege scientific access to the world over all other kinds.

All they have to do is read any random 10 pages of my work, or possibly less, not only to refute the claim, but to see it as the sort of critique a shoddy artificial intelligence program would make. And it wouldn’t pass the Turing test.

What these people seem to mean, sadly, is that any philosophy that doesn’t place the human/world coupling at the center of everything must be positivism.

Yep, I’m just a mainstream scientific naturalist. Don’t all scientific naturalists agree that occasional causation needs to be revived, and that armies and Popeye have reality just as neutrons do?

Me and my slavish mainstream positivism.

a bit more about yesterday in Oxford

ANTHEM describes it.

another rare check-in

Three times visiting the Geography Department at the Open University in three straight years, three great conversations. Only place I’ve been invited three separte times. (Well, I spoke at Goldsmiths three separate times, but in that case was not invited by the same people each time.)

Now I’m in total isolation in a good hotel at the edge of Milton Keynes, with sheep grazing in the field next door. Ten minutes of internet credit remaining, so here goes.

Last night’s “port talk” was held at Goodenough College in Bloomsbury. Most people haven’t heard of it; it’s not an academic college, but a residential one for international students at various universities around London. It has that Oxford/Cambridge look and feel with brick buildings and a courtyard, and several satellite buildings that various people live in. They also have a hotel across the street, where I stayed, and will help academics visiting London find apartments.

The “port talks” have that name because glasses of port are served throughout the event. Most of last night’s audience consisted of graduate students, many of them from Architecture or Anthropology.

They took very good care of me. The lecture was organized by my friend Katherine, a Goodenough resident, and she had placed flyers on tables throughout the dining hall. A table of undergrads next to us, not knowing who I was, entertained me with jokes about the flyer.

Undergrad (sarcastically): “So John, what is your interpretation of ‘speculative realism.'” With speculative realism said in the same tones as ‘quantum theory’ would be sacrastically uttered. It was a fun moment.

As for the actual talk, I will let you see for yourself once it is on line.

They day before I was at the Architectural Association, where I spoke in April 2007, and they burned me a CD of my lecture,. It is reportedly uncensored, meaning that once it is on line, you will be able to hear a loose cannon of an architect dropping F-bombs on me and one other audience member, trying to nail me on something called “Russell’s categorical imperative”, and finally getting up and trying to charge me while shouting after I said that he could dish it out but not take it. (A friend grabbed him and held him back.)

We all forgave him afterwards and invited him out to dinner to make up, but he and his friend repeated the performance at dinner, which unfortunately is not on tape and hence cannot be podcast. Infinite Thought (the blogger, not infinite thought itself) was also present for these incidents.

Tomorrow I will sweep toward Suffolk after a longish stop in London.

still on the road

In fact, I enjoy the suitcase lifestyle of the visiting speaker. The event last night in London was great fun, and should soon be available both in audio and video format on the web.

Today I’m up in Milton Keynes at the Open University, speaking to the Geography Department here.

The only downside of last night’s talk was an obnoxious carload of people that kept circling past the lecture room. Turned out to be one of those hummersines, a combination of the very bad limousine with the execrable Hummer, one of the most detestable objects ever fabricated by humans.

(One of the most viscerally angering things I ever saw was a music-blaring Hummer, with California license plates, driving rudely through the streets of Vilnius freakin’ Lithuania. Taking your Hummer from L.A. to the Baltics does not make the world a better place.)

More later, busy days coming up, including the festivities on the coast this weekend.