the UCLA event page

Can be found HERE.

Turns out I’ll be speaking twice. In the morning I’ll give a general historical/theorteical overview of SR/OOO, and in the afternoon some reflections on method.

The idea of the latter is as follows. It is sometimes falsely claimed that I think that “unicorns are just as real as atoms,” or something of that sort. That’s the early Latour, not me. The early Latour (in Irreductions and also later) thinks that all actors are equally real, but not equally strong. For the early Latour, then, being is strictly univocal. All things are real in the same sense: namely, they are able to affect other realities. Since an atom has effects on other atoms, and since the unicorn has effects on the 8-year-old girl who demands unicorn items for her birthday, the unicorn turns out to be just as “real” (in the early Latourian sense) as atoms.

But that has never been my own position. All I say is that philosophy must account for all real and unreal things. Philosophy can’t simply sneer at unicorns, Batman, Pizza Hut, and armies while praising neurons, quarks, and mathematical structures.

Nonetheless, I don’t believe that being is univocal at all. Instead, I hold that it is bivalent (or even tetravalent, but nothing more than that). Most relevantly here, there is a difference between real and sensual objects. Sensual objects exist only as the correlate of some perceiver, while real objects withdraw from every perceiver.

This confronts me with a problem that the early Latour never needed to face: namely, how in methodological terms do we try to distinguish between real objects and pseudo-objects? (The latter can be described more positively as sensual objects.) In fact, we can never be entirely sure on this front. All of our best current scientific theories might be falsified. All of our true friends may turn out to be backstabbing machinators and sophists. Everything we hold dear may turn out to be nothing but a hollow shell. We are masters of nothing.

That said, it is not entirely beyond our human powers to develop methods for sorting the relatively solid, real things from the relatively superficial and transient ones. In my second talk at UCLA I’m going to take a first crack at laying down some rules for doing this.