Witmore on ancestrality, Meillassoux, and the rest of us

Michael Witmore, now at the University of Wisconsin but soon to be Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington (my hat is off to him for that stunning move) makes THE FOLLOWING POST about ancestrality, which mentions Meillassoux, me, SR in general, and other things.

I’d love to read it this very instant, but need to get some sleep in preparation for tomorrow’s festivities.

calling it a night

That was a great conference dinner, which I pretended was a birthday dinner. And it wasn’t all pretense– they actually sang me the “Happy Birthday” song, and the neighboring table joined in as well. The dinner was at the Cherwell Boathouse in a fairly remote portion of Oxford. I’d never been anywhere close to that area before; it was quite a walk.

Good three-course meal with sufficient vegetarian options. Carrot salad, followed by linguine of some sort, followed by a peanut butter/caramel brulée for dessert.

I think this was a very good plan for a conference. Bring in lots of people from multiple fields with a loose shared interest (objects, in this case). But we have to communicate with each other, so we’re all expelled from our terminological comfort zones. And we’re all being confronted with strange objects, which means that we can’t superimpose any pre-conceptions upon them but must improvise in the face of the real. It ends up being quite a brain workout. All of the people are very nice as well, so it’s a pleasure to spend time in this group.

It is not a virtue when philosophy is unable to communicate with any other disciplines. This leads only to a thin layer of arrogance covering massive strata of intellectual decadence concealed by over-professionalized precision.

apparent title change for Wednesday

Our only free time this week from the Pitt-Rivers Museum and related venues is on Wednesday afternoon, and of course I promised to go over and give a talk at Oxford’s Said Business School.

I thought the title was “Things and Practice” (at their request) but on their website HERE it looks like the title is now “Object-Oriented Philosophy and its Relation to STS.”

That’s actually an easier talk to give, so I don’t mind the change.

Oh yes, STS means “Science, Technology, and Society,” in case you were unfamiliar with the term.

Oxford, Oxford

Just received a very helpful list of “Best of X” in Oxford. Thanks, Tim Webmoor. Best food, best drink, etc. Looking forward to trying some of it.

OOO hip-hop

For those who don’t know the song, here it is: “Object Unknown” by DJ Spooky. Just wait for the refrain, which first occurs at the 1:05 mark.

gmail

Anyone else finding gmail unusually unreliable lately?

The main problem is that it seems to take forever to send messages, and sometimes never succeeds at all and you have to log out and log back in.

Day 1 wrap-up

The unusual format of this weeklong event in Oxford, combined with several quick warnings that we would be videotaped and the tape might appear somewhere (even on television, I think it once said) actually had me speculating seriously as to whether we were being lured into an academic reality show and were going to be voted off one-by-one throughout the week.

But no, it’s actually just a very well-organized and innovative event using Mellon-Swayer funds. Everyone they invited (and we’re from numerous different fields) has some sort of professional interest in objects. For example, Jane Bennett is here, just to mention the one person who works in closest proximity to me in professional terms. Ian Hacking should be showing up tomorrow, to mention the other person from a “Department of Philosophy” background.

There are around 20 people involved in total, many of them either currently at Oxford or former students at Oxford, and a few of us are total outsiders. I’m one of only three who have never set foot in the Pitt-Rivers Museum before. It’s quite an impressive collection of millions of different objects from around the world– a case filled with knives from around the world, another with snowshoes/skis/ice skates from around the world, etc.

They first split us up into eight pairs and assigned each pair an object. I was paired up, as I knew in advance, with Oxford musicologist Eric Clarke. The object we were assigned was– a musical instrument, the LESIBA, said to be the only stringed wind instrument currently in use in the world. It is the national instrument of Lesotho.

We couldn’t play the one we were given, of course. It dates to 1905. But we did hear a recording, and the basic sound is surprisingly harmonica-like, though given the circular breathing of the musician there’s also a bit of a didgeridoo undertone.

Oh yes, the photo that I linked to isn’t very good. The lesiba looks like a bow for shooting arrows, though the string is much closer to the wood then on a bow. A small vulture feather is attached to one end of the string (which is twisted to a certain degree), and the musician blows on the feather. There are actually three sounds at once: that made by the feather, that made by the harmonics of the string, and that made by the vocal cords of the musician while playing. A Pitt-Rivers staff member there has built a replica and tried to play it, and he says it’s almost impossibly demanding.

In any case, it was an intriguing and challenging first day, and I look forward to tomorrow.

A big group dinner is coming up at a boathouse on the river, and I will pretend that it’s for my birthday.

the problem with Blackwell in Oxford

I did find two of the seven books I was looking for: one on Duns Scotus, the other on Napoleon. They probably had the others too, but the experience was too frustrating, so I left.

The problem with Blackwell is simple: they overcategorize everything. I’m sure they think they are being helpful, but all it really does is curtail the sense of plenitude in each subject area, and change the experience from fascinated browsing into a sort of brain-teaser exercise where you have to imagine things like: “If I were a Blackwell manager, what section would I put that book in?” And that’s no fun. So I left.

Anyway, it’t time for what I came to Oxford for.

cold in Oxford!

Lots of sun pouring through the window this morning, so I dressed accordingly. Big mistake: big chill here for early May. I keep forgetting how far north this is.

Baked goods at hotel breakfasts are normally just as mediocre as the pasta I had last night. But the birthday gods are smiling upon me in small ways, and served up a superb apricot danish. A really fabulous pastry. In fact, I’m sorry to say I had two, and I’m not even sure if that was allowed.

excellent CD

THIS is the CD I bought last night after the concert; it was one of those things where the artist stays afterwards and autographs every purchase. Ruth Palmer is a very powerful player. My favorite thing after a first listen-through is that she seems to be in control of the tempo herself at all times, rather than slavishly following an internal metronome.