another OOO note

Here’s BOGOST WITH A POST ON THE CURRENT ATLANTA CONFERENCE, not to be confused with the one in April. Ian lives in Atlanta, and Shaviro just happened to go to this weekend’s SLSA conference, which Levi and I did not attend. Sounds like Whitehead is getting pretty big in that group.

As for the April event, we’ve more or less decided that the theme should be something like “OOO and the Humanities,” because philosophies need to be fruitful in order to gain traction, and we all think we have things to say to all the humanities. That’s one of the virtues of the object-oriented approach.

As for my own talk there… With a title like “object-oriented ontology,” there would be the easy chance of getting some “reinventing the wheel” critiques, because there is already the brilliant Austrian tradition of theories of objects (Twardowski, Meinong, the early Husserl). So, since I’m probably the one in the group who has studied that material the most, the onus is on me to make a pre-emptive strike against the “copycat” claim. The differences between the two object-oriented approaches are pretty overwhelming once you hear them, but let me save that for April so as not to steal my own thunder.

I don’t think it will be that hard to pivot from that topic into a more general discussion of the humanities, for reasons pertaining to the difference between the two approaches.