Continent + Tristan Garcia

Perhaps long overdue, but I just found out about Graham Harman’s lengthy discussion of a new ‘rising star’ in the movement, event or adventure of French philosophy; Tristan Garcia. Harman critically introduces and summarizes Garcia’s recent Forme et Objet: Un Traité des Choses – an object-oriented, Badiouian/Meillassouxian/’Frankfurter Schülean’ work consisting of several formal meditations on the kinds of objects in the world. As Harman concludes, the book is an ‘intricate piece of work by an emerging philosopher who is now a force to reckon with [..] For those who read French [it] is worth significant reading time during the months to come [..] Tristan Garcia is most likely a name that we will all be pronouncing hundreds or thousands of times in the decades to come’.

It is well worth mentioning the journal in which this article has appeared. Continent is a new (?) on-line, open source and peer-reviewed journal publishing scholarly articles, poetry, fiction, sound etc. You can login and register as either a reader, author and/or reviewer here.

099: Karen Barad (dOCUMENTA)

While visting dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany this weekend I came across this beautifully published essay by Karen Barad – author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. The essay is entitled ‘What is the measure of nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice’ and consists of an attempt to emphasize and conceptualize the importance of (the Copenhagen interpretation of) quantum theory – related to notions such as measurements as ‘intra-actions’, indeterminacy, vacuum fluctuations, Bohr’s principle of complementarity – for a speculative philosophy that, interestingly, positions itself somewhere between OOO and SR. Being concerned with ‘the very nature of nature’ (p. 6) Barad defines objects or phenomena as ‘contingent configurations of mattering’ (p. 7) – which indicates that she is concerned with developing an ontology of becoming, or one that makes the insight that ‘there are no pre-existing individual objects with determinate boundaries that precede some interaction’ (p. 6) into its primordial commitment.

materialism without materials (or; clouds are elementary particles arranged cloudwise)

The most common misunderstanding about object-oriented ontology is probably that it entails a rigid materialism. Since it talks of ‘materials’ and often does this with reference to ‘beings’ it seems not unfair to label it as a contemporary ‘materialist ontology’ (reminiscent of both Lucretius’ atoms and different Marxist positions). And a title like Material Beings would probably count as a good candidate for any object-oriented publication.

The Democracy of Objects by Levi Bryant

Great, but perhaps already old, news – given the buzz that preceded this publication; Levi Bryant of Larval Subjects has published the HTML version of his new book The Democracy of Objects that, as far as I can see, is to become a landmark in the burgeoing field of object-oriented ontology.

Adorno having a few speculative realist and object-oriented moments

While reading Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment I was struck not merely by the complexity of their argument, but by the fact that their analysis of the achievements of Enlightenment shows so many (indirect) affiliations with recent developments in Speculative Realist or Object-Oriented ontologies.

An Epistemology of the Concrete // New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics

Just recently discovered two great new books published by Duke University Press; Hans-Jurg Rheinberger’s An Epistemology of the Concrete and New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost.  

Graham Harman in Amsterdam

On the 11th of March, Graham Harman will give a public lecture on Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy. Undoubtedly, this’ll be an exiting event. See the Spui25 site for more information.

Making Up People

Ian Hacking is well known for his studies on ‘the reality of kinds’; to be sure, given the recent interest in both Tarde and Speculative Realism his ideas seem to be of considerable interest. With regard to Tarde (although not explictly) Hacking can be said to have conceptualized the constructedness and reality of quantification – that is, for instance, statistics and categorizations. His book Historical Ontology in fact should be a must-read for Speculative Realists interested in working towards something called a ‘social ontology’.

Here you can find an interesting article by Ian Hacking, written in 2007, in the LRB.

2x The End of Nature

‘The end of nature’ is – whether as a concept, term or slogan – much used in both academic and ‘popular’ circles. In its most well-known usage, probably by Anthony Giddens, it has been employed to argue that there is now, in our times, no longer any or, at least, few aspects of the physical world untouched by human intervention. This is not to say that there is no ‘natural environment’, but merely serves to highlight a change in subjective attitudes towards this environment; where people, for hundreds of years, worried about what nature could do to us – catastrophes, floods etc. – ‘somewhere over the past fifty years or so’ (as Giddens remarks) people stopped worrying about what nature could do to us, but what we have done to nature.

The Speculative Turn

Finally, The Speculative Turn is available as a free downloadable PDF file on re-press.com. For many reasons, the release of this book can be seen as a major event; just consider the amount of highly relevant and contemporary contributors (from Harman and Latour to Zizek to Bryant to Stengers) and the fact that the book can be seen as the ‘official’ starting point of what is commonly called ‘object oriented ontology’ or ‘speculative realism’. You can find the book here.