Michael Halewood, Sociology, Essex, UK

9:28. Nathan Brown introduces the publications of Halewood. (Note: Halewood was in attendance at the inaugural 2007 Speculative Realism workshop at Goldsmiths; I believe he knows Alberto Toscano pretty well. Halewood was also the moderator of last night’s Haraway/Stengers panel.)

9:29. Pleasant self-deprecating humor from Halewood.

9:29. In 2004 Latour came to Goldsmiths and said that “the weather” doesn’t exist; he also criticized Durkheim’s sociology.

9:31. But there are productive ways to draw out insights on the thingness of things not only from Durkheim, but from Marx as well.

9:32. Whitehead’s remarks on “objects” have much in common with Norman Kemp Smith’s remark commenting on Kant’s First Critique: an object is that which compels us to think it a certain way. The main difference is that Whitehead replaces “thinking” with “experiencing”, thereby allowing non-human entities into the picture.

9:35. Importance of distinguishing between “thing” and “object”. [Note: I couldn’t disagree more. Too many people insist on disliking “object” terminologically over its supposedly toxic connotations. But I see no real problem here.]

9:39. Durkheim says that the totem (e.g., a photograph of a tribesman or his totem kangaroo) is not just fabricated by humans, which obviously sounds Latourian. So, why does Latour oppose Durkheim? Because Durkheim only makes these sorts of remarks a few times.

9:41. (Missing PowerPoint slide briefly throws a wrench into the works. It’s happened to me before too.)

9:43. Halewood’s hat tip to Shaviro’s book for insisting that we should not underestimate the importance of the aesthetic in either Whitehead or Kant.

9:44. Religiosity without the religion of the Church. Things themselves are religious, but they have no religion. Take the risk of thinking what this would mean.

9:48. Various remarks on Marx on commodities.

9:50. Nathan Brown, asked how much time Halewood has left, says 5 minutes.

9:52. Whitehead: The concept of God is an essential element in religious feeling, but the converse is not true– religious feeling is not an essential element in the concept of God’s function in the universe.

9:53. We can overcome the secrecy of things in themselves by allowing them to enjoy their own life of interrelations. Human religious capacity is too narrow a frame to achieve this goal. Humans are not the fount of the divine. We need to adopt a secularized concept of religious feeling as applying to the thingness of things.

9:54 Halewood stops.

9:54. Nathan Brown says we have 35 minutes for questions.