Weimar tomorrow

At the “Black Box: Life” conference. I’ll speak about Maturana and Varela, since I haven’t weighed in on them yet.

I’m becoming more and more interested in studying the contrasts between the currently available forms of what used to be called “regional ontologies.”

There is the “modes” approach of Souriau and Latour, the “spheres” approach of Sloterdijk, the “worlds” approach of Badiou (and to some extent in Meillassoux), autopoietic closure in Maturana/Varela and Luhmann (extended into architecture by Patrik Schumacher), and soon enough you’ll all be reading about “fields” thanks to Markus Gabriel’s new ontology, set to appear in the Edinburgh Speculative Realism series next year.

I’m not yet sure what I think about all of these approaches, but it’s remarkable how they’re now raining down in droves.

Terence Blake outdoes himself

Blake’s blog has now pretty much become a full-time anti-OOO blog. It’s certainly not the first to meet that description in the past four years, but at least Blake has the courtesy to formulate  twenty anti-Harman theses, HERE.

Have a look, if you wish. I have answers to all 20 points, but plan to save them for a book coming soon called Skirmishes, where other critics will be addressed as well.

It would be faster just to respond here, of course. But back-and-forth blog debates always seem to take a wrong turn that simply clouds debate rather than refines it. Though Levi Bryant remains a fine counter-example, I’ve found it generally to be the case that blogs are a good medium for dissemination and quick ripostes but not for debate.

Thanks to Blake for giving thumbnail objections. It should make for a fun response chapter in Skirmishes. (I have yet to read his presumably negative review of Bells and Whistles, but will respond to that in the forthcoming book as well, along with his negative review of “The Third Table” –which I have read– if it proves to make any points worth a response.)

Daniel Barnes lecturing on Speculative Realism on January 8

The announcement is HERE.