SR/OOO tutorial flashback

My old July 23, 2010 post on the different meanings of the terms “speculative realism” and “object-oriented ontology” is getting a lot of traffic today, and it looks like Tim Morton’s blog might be responsible.

In case you want to review it, it’s HERE.

The one thing that’s changed since July 2010 is that some of the non-OOO people connected with speculative realism have distanced themselves ever further from the term “speculative realism,” meaning that it’s no longer nearly as incorrect as it was a year ago to treat SR and OOO as synonyms.

It’s still not quite right, though. To count as speculative realism, a philosophy need only reject idealism and the correlationist alibi designed to cloak it (“we can’t think human or world in isolation, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two”). OOO is a far more specific view, since it requires that one treat the human-object relation as no different in kind from the object-object relation. And this is not true, for instance, of Meillassoux.

In fact, Meillassoux is clearly a speculative realist by the definition just given, though I believe he only referred to himself as a speculative realist once– in the transcript of the 2007 Goldsmiths SR event. And we can view that as a friendly piece of diplomacy on Meillassoux’s part, since speculative materialism is the term he prefers for his own system.

And I think that’s both instructive and correct. I happen to think Meillassoux is not a full-blown realist, for the same reasons that I don’t think Badiou is one. I’m not sure materialism is quite the right term either, but it’s the one they prefer.

the tides

Nearly trapped by them after walking along the sea to the south, towards the cliffs.

another C.P. art installation

Footage of an art installation listing Circus Philosophicus as one of its influences. The artist is Candida Powell-Williams.

It’s the video at the top of THIS PAGE.

Looks like a good, fun time. (A bit noisy, so not to be watched in a place where quiet is expected.)

Tamanya goes after a cartoon character

Wafaa sent me this. You can’t see Tamanya that well (though maybe you can get some idea of how much she’s grown) but you can see her preparing to go after the cartoon character.

hotel showers

It’s not hard to design user-friendly shower controls, and since hotels don’t have their guests for long, you’d think they would want to keep things simple enough to master within seconds.

Instead, many hotels (including this one) seem to take a perverse delight in designing shower controls of a degree of geometrical abstraction worthy of Braque and Picasso in the prime of their collaboration.

science fun fact

Many of you may not know this (I didn’t until a couple of years ago), but Olivia Newton-John is the granddaughter of Göttingen quantum theorist and 1954 Nobel Laureate in Physics Max Born. Olivia Newton-John’s mother was named Irene Born, and was the eldest child of the scientist. Her father was Welsh.

debt to English Romanticism

That’s what I find most intriguing in this forthcoming (or recently published?) essay by Steven in Theory and Event.

“Steven Shaviro’s essay makes this claim explicit through its engagement with recent developments in speculative realism and object-oriented-ontology. Specifically focusing on the work of Graham Harman, and his debt to Whitehead, Heidegger, and English Romanticism, ‘The Universe of Things’ unpacks the vitalist dimensions of an object-oriented-ontology as well as its political challenge: the world of politics may not simply be a world of human subjects, but an interactive world comprised of a ‘democracy of objects,’ including those objects we call ‘humans.'”

It’s quite possible that I’ve already read this piece in manuscript form and am simply having one of my increasingly frequent attacks of absent-mindedness (I just wrote Steven to ask), but I have no memory of reading it.

And once again, I was not able to make a trip without forgetting at least one important item. This time, for the second time in a year, I forgot to pack any pants to augment the ones I was wearing, and had to buy more in duty-free, which was pretty ridiculous. I also forgot one other important written document related to the trip, but am reconstructing it from memory over a drink right now.

If I could afford a full-time secretary, I’d hire one right now.

seagulls

Many seagulls at the English seaside.

Basel, September 2012

The conference page is already up, HERE.

I didn’t realize that I.H. Grant & Katherine Hayles were also coming. Great! I know Iain very well, of course, but have never met Hayles and have long wished to do so.

Woran glauben ide Motten…?

Ralo Mayer discusses the new catalog from his recent show in Linz, which contains an essay by me among others.

HERE.