I've been trying to think through the relationship between Latour's critique of modernity and the now-familiar issue of correlationism. While I am certainly not trained as a philosopher, I can count, so it's clear that Kant's arguments, which Meillassoux identifies as the inauguration of correlationist thinking, develop in the 1780s, while Latour focuses on Hobbes […]
Category: object-oriented rhetoric
I'm going to be answering a question like this in video format for the new journal Itneration (maybe I'll get my haircut first), but in the meantime I thought I'd visit the question here. I am in the midst of a book project on this matter and it is useful to get big picture/back-to-basics as […]
I have been giving a lot of thought to Levi Bryant's recent post on writing and incorporeal machines. Obviously (at least from my perspective), understanding symbolic action's (e.g. writing) ontology is central to my work, and I have been trying to work through the implications of the Deleuzian notion of incorporeal transformation (and the broader, […]
By now, no one really imagines that presidential debates are really, well, debates. Instead, we want a line going up and down measuring "undecided" voters. Are we measuring galvanic skin response? The raw, exposed nerve of collective unconscious? In our fantasies about debating, rational arguments are provided, suppositions are considered, evidence is evaluated, and conclusions […]
Levi Bryant has a couple good recent posts on this and I want to draw in Steven Shaviro's fantastic recent SLSA talk (I wasn't there but it's a great read). These conversations interest me greatly in that they focus on relations and thought, two principle issues for an object-oriented rhetoric. I'll start with Bryant and […]
Tim Morton gave a talk yesterday at UB. It's up on his blog, so I will spare you my re-hash of it. I will say I find his argument about the role of agriculture in climate change provocative, as well as his adoption of the Oedipal detective as a central trope. The investigator who discovers […]
I'm not sure I would go so far as to call this a debate, but the flurry of posts on the topic of object-oriented ontology and politics has resurfaced again. Ian Bogost posts about here, and includes a link to Alex Galloway's Facebook page, where there is another discussion). Levi Bryant has several posts: here's […]
Perhaps some of you OOO folks out there can help me think through this question. In OOO we are familiar with the concept of redundant causation which indicates that an object can change its parts without becoming a different object. For example, my department can change faculty and students over time but still remain the […]
Morton has a piece in the latest New Literary History (behind the Project Muse paywall I'm afraid) that investigates an OOO literary criticism and takes up Shelley's Defence of Poetry. I'm sure the piece will evoke the now familiar concerns, complaints, and critiques regarding questions of politics/ideology, so I will leave those matters for others today. […]
Categories
on politics and things
As seen recently on Larval Subjects and as partially captured in this Storify, the conversation over the political/ideological implications of OOO rolls along. I am tempted to say "roles" along as undoubtedly it seems as though people have parts to play. Maybe this is my part. So here are a few basic premises. There is […]
Alex Reid 