Dundee conference: Day One

We’re still at the bar/restaurant for post-conference socializing, and the main conversation has simply drifted a bit to the side of the room, so I have time for a quick recap of the day’s events.

This is an exceptionally good conference, for the usual reason that conferences can be good: a lively and enthusiastic grad student presence. If it were just all of us oldies, we’d already be at home sleep, wouldn’t be asking lots of questions 3 hours later because we wouldn’t want to bother each other, etc. Instead, we get things like Pete Wolfendale not allowing me to leave the room until I answer a potential Brandomian critique of my position, etc. It keeps things really lively.

Nice late start at the conference today. Dundee’s own James Williams kicked off the day with a panpsychist sort of talk about pebbles. Plenty of Whitehead and Deleuze in this talk. One of the positive things I’ve noticed about Williams is that, even though he is capable of being quite critical at times, there is a real generosity to his discussion of other Deleuze commentators. Rather than wanting immediately to tear everyone down, he allows himself to be impressed by people’s strengths in the field.

After lunch, a three-person panel featured Nathan Coombs of Royal Holloway, Sid Littlefield of Georgia State, and Mike Olson of Villanova. Olson spoke about Kant. Coombs and Littlefield both talked about me extensively, and Coombs is the one who had the “Badiou contra Harman subtitle.”

Rather than try to summarize those talks, perhaps I should just record the two questions/comments I had for each, which give a good idea of what their talks were about.

Coombs: 1. He’s right that I agree with Badiou about something lying outside all mathematization, that the ascending and descending chain of entities in Logics of Worlds is congenial to position, and also (which he didn’t mention) there are parallels between Badiou’s theory of the event and mine of allure. However, the reason he’s not quite on my list of heroes is the subject-centered model and also the fact that his inconsistent multiple is not articulated into parts as it should be (cf. Latour’s “plasma”). Coombs stated that he doesn’t understand Badiou’s claim that the inconsistent multiple can be retroactively affected, and Peter Hallawrd (from the audience) said no one understands it. 2. In response to Coombs’s expression of displeasure that I say poetic language is needed for many situations that scientific language can’t handle, I suggested that the resistance often stems from a model of the poetry/philosophy relationship based largely on Heidegger’s self-indulgent treatment of Hölderlin. If instead we look at Aristotle’s Poetics (where he says that metaphor is the greatest gift, not correct logical deduction skills) and the Rhetoric (the whole point of which is to explain how you can say things without directly saying them) then poetic language looks a lot more impressive for philosophical purposes than when reading Heidegger’s account of the matter.

Littlefield: a skeptic of the theory that tool-being means withdrawn reality. He has a more scientistic take on what the evasion of presence by tools means. My responses… 1. Praise is due to Littlefield for taking Islamic philosophy seriously. His comparison between al-Ghazali and Meillassoux was especially interesting (and valid). 2. Littlefield is as unjustified as every other such critic when he accuses me of anthropomorphizing the inanimate sphere when I say that they encounter intentional objects. Littlefield is begging the question, I said.

Then my paper. It ran to 35 pages, a bit too long, but people listen to me patiently. 12 or so pages of it was a critical (even highly critical) treatment of the Ladyman/Ross book Every Thing Must Go, one of the new canonical favorites of the scientific nihilist wing of speculative realism. I’ll try to publish it soon, though I noticed the usual numerous typos while reading it that will need to be fixed. Quite amazing that there are still so many typos, after so many revisions.

Tomorrow, keynotes by Adrian Johnston and Peter Hallward, plus other papers.

I’d say anywhere from 50-70 people are in attendance. That’s a good rough estimate, anyway.