Bell/Halewood question period

9:55. Almost raised my hand first to ask Bell how he can defend a middle ground between correlationism and realism, but Donna Haraway, sitting in the back row, beat me to it (not the same question, though).

9:55. Haraway addressing Halewood’s paper, speaking highly of Rane Willerslev’s book Soul Hunters.

9:56. Haraway says Whitehead is wrong that God is necessary for religious feeling. She says Willerslev’s book demonstrates the contrary.

9:58. Haraway gets very nervous about terms like transubstantiation. She hints that she’s trying to get away from a Catholic background of her own.

10:00. Halewood: yes, I am deliberately trying to be both Christian and shocking in my concept of transsubstantiation. We take capitalism for granted and don’t see that transsubstantiation is truly at work in commodity formation. Halewood grew up Catholic too.

10:01. Halewood cites Durkheim to warn Haraway against valorizing animism. Durkheim: animism is often not an explanation in and of itself, and may just be a transposition of human reality onto inanimate things. Just as Haraway is wary of transsubstnatiation, Halewood is wary of animism.

10:03. Question from the floor to Halewood about the Genesis account of creation. Do Durkheim, Whitehead, or Marx do any exegesis of Genesis? Halewood says, hesitantly, “not that I’m aware of.” Stengers says: yes, in Marx’s Whitehead’s case. The six days of creation. Halewood: “Oh yes, Isabelle Stengers has written about this, of course.”

10:04. Another question from the floor, this one for Bell, about why metaphysics needs science at all.

10:06. Bell responds that Deleuze approaches this question in a Bergsonian sense. Summary of Bergson’s views on the topic.

10:07. Judith Jones thinks Hume is actually more reductionistic than Bell admits. She gives examples: “thought is a petty agitation of the brain,” etc.

10:08. Bell: there is a fresh new Hume debate underway about this. Some of these people think that Hume is not really so optimistic about scientific reductionism. At moments Hume seems more troubled about this, and Bell sides with those scholars who emphasize these moments of uncertainty by Hume.

10:09. James Bradley (Michael Austin’s advisor from Newfoundalnd). Asks Bell if correlationism means that things exist only for us, or does it mean they exist for anything else at all? (I jump in here and explain that Latour jokingly called himself a correlationist at the Meillassoux salon at his home in 2007, but that Meillassoux agrees with me that Latour is not a correlationist.)

10:13. James Bradley, another question: even if contingency requires the law of non-contradiction, what about the law of excluded middle? The two do not imply each other.

10:15. Nathan Brown takes up the question by repeating Meillassoux’s argument to see if it will shed light on Bradley’s question. We all agree to think about it further.

10:18. Brown explains Hume’s example of the missing shade of blue for the benefit of those in the room who might not know it. He explores the possible implications of it for Hume’s possible realism, and asks Bell to clarify.

10:19. Bell in response… Unlike the missing shade of blue, which any of us can infer according to Hume, there is also Hume’s example of the Laplander trying to guess the taste of wine, which is impossible according to Hume. Brown responds briefly.

10:21. Melanie Seghal asks Halewood to repeat the difference between objects and things. She thinks there may be some implications here for the rest of the conference, and so we ought to get it straight.

10:22. Halewood– Whitehead tends to speak of objects only in connection with Kant [note: I think this is true of Badiou as well]. But when Whitehead talks about things, he’s talking about different concrete things. “Object” pertains to the old subject/objet trouble, whereas “thing” refers to the multifariousness of things in the world.

10:24. Steven Shaviro: the OOO people will also say that fairies and unicorns are objects. Shaviro prefers the weird “thing”, but admits this may just be his own stubbornness in wanting to distinguish himself from me, Ian, and Levi.He thinks it’s an arbitrary terminological distinction.

10:26. I intervene to say that Heidegger uses thing positively and object negatively, whereas Husserl and the Austrian tradition use object positively.

10:26. Ian Bogost uses “unit” to avoid the whole problem.

10:27. Question from the back row. What about “enduring objects” in Whitehead?

10:27. Argument ensues in the crowd about whether Whitehead uses the term “enduring object” in Process and Reality. Judith Jones, James Bono, and I all insist that he does. (And I remember it clearly, having just reread the book on this trip.)

10:29. James Bono questions Bell’s use of the term “monism” for Whitehead. Ambivalence of the term monism, which Bell says he has argued with Levi Bryant. Bell doesn’t mean the one homogeneous substance (which obviously does not apply to Whitehead). What Bell means by monism is the Deleuze/Guattari sense from A Thousand Plateaus, in which “monism=pluralism”, a Jamesian sense of pluralistic monism. (Note: I agree with Bono here. I think “monism” should be used for the homogeneous substance theory only.)

10:31. Judith Jones: “things” usually occurs in Whitehead in his more cosmological moments.