April 23rd (*NOT* 24th) in Atlanta

Since I’ve received an official invitation letter, I suppose I can now say, after several past hints on this blog, that the inaugural Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) conference will take place in Atlanta on April 24 23. [Note: My bad. It’s the 23rd of April, not the 24th.]

In some ways this will be the first officially constituted “splinter group” from Speculative Realism– I wish the others well, and continue to keep track of their work with interest (and will be writing a whole book on Meillassoux shortly). But philosophically I have a lot in common with Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant, who will be fellow participants at the conference. Steven Shaviro is the fourth invited participant, though Steven is more of a friendly and respected inside critic of the new movement than an actual adherent. His criticisms are tenacious but never posturing, and that’s why we all want him there.

It’s funny how Atlanta, a city I have never yet visited, is playing such a central role in all of this, beginning with Ian and Steven’s OOO talks at the conference there in recent days. Another funny thing is that I have still never met Levi or Steven in person, though I feel like I know both of them quite well through e-mail.

Ian I did meet, of course, during his brief visit to Cairo this July as judge in a Microsoft-sponsored competition. He was kind enough to hand-deliver my first printed copy of my own book, Prince of Networks. I also took him and two other friends on a tour of my office and building at the new campus of AUC. And three of us had a nice Lebanese dinner late the first night on a riverboat on the Nile.

It’s always possible to compare and contrast the virtues and vices of various forms of Speculative Realism. But among the key advantages of the OOO strand, I think, is that it already has wide-ranging appeal throughout the humanities, which is generally the site (not Philosophy Departments) where new continental philosophy waves catch on. OOO doesn’t tell sociologists or music theorists that their subject matter is derivative, but grants that their objects are just as worthy as those of neurology or as the structures of transcendental philosophy.

Ian, Levi, and Steven are all great fun to read, with large readership bases already in place in a variety of genres. I got lucky once with the SR group at Goldsmiths in 2007 (Brassier deserves the majority of the credit for that), and am incredibly about to be equally lucky with my new “band” (and here Bogost deserves the majority of the organizing credit).

This will also be a rare all-American continental philosophy movement, which –whether it succeeds or fails– is another interesting sign of the times. This factor is of interest mostly because an education in continental philosophy has until now largely been an education in the idolizing of French and German authors. Atlanta seems like an appropriately irreverent place to start something different.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, this won’t be my first intellectual liaison with people I’d never or barely met. I met Iain Hamilton Grant for the very first time at SR I, and had met Meillassoux only once before that, at a Paris café in July 2006. And if memory serves, Meillassoux hadn’t met either of the others until showing up in London for that event.]