Archive for the ‘Object-oriented philosophy’ Category

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Architecture on Harman, Harman on Architecture – The Architecture Exchange, London, May-June, 2013

1 May 2013

From Joseph Bedford and Jessica Reynolds:

The Architecture Exchange, a new platform aimed at fostering serious debate between architecture and newly emerging ideas in other fields, founded by Joseph Bedford (doctoral candidate at Princeton University) and Jessica Reynolds (director at vPPR Architects). The Architecture Exchange will begin as a public lecture-based and on-line institution with the aspiration to become a gallery/event space in London in the future. The format for each series is that a carefully selected group of architectural thinkers are invited to discuss the ideas of a contemporary thinker in relationship to architecture, with a final talk by the thinker him/herself responding to the architectural papers previously presented. These presentations are filmed and uploaded on to the website, and the papers are compiled into a new publication series.

We are excited to announce that the first series focuses on the philosophical work of Graham Harman, the leading figure in the Speculative Realist movement, as we believe that his object-oriented philosophy offers a new and vital framework that might stimulate thought in architectural discourse around the topic of the real and the sensual. Responding to the series’ question,  “Is there an Object-Oriented Architecture?” Graham Harman’s radical reading of Heidegger is discussed in relationship to architecture during three events in May by six eminent architectural thinkers: Peg Rawes (UCL), Patrick Lynch (Lynch Architects), Jonathan Hale (Nottingham University), Adam Sharr (Newcastle University), Lorens Holm (Dundee University), and Peter Carl (London Met). The fourth and final event of the series invites Graham Harman to respond to the speakers, concluding with a round-table debate with all the participants. All talks are free and hosted at the Swedenborg Society (20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH) on the dates listed below.

7pm, Wednesday 1 May 2013

Peg Rawes – Nonhuman Architectural Ecologies
Patrick Lynch – The Resistance of Things

7pm, Wednesday 15 May 2013

Jonathan Hale – Coping without noticing?: Buildings as Tool-Beings
Adam Sharr – A House With One Wall

7pm, Wednesday 29 May 2013

Lorens Holm – Architecture and Its Objects
Peter Carl – A Punkt in Spice

5.30pm, Saturday 22 June 2013

Graham Harman – What Objects Mean for Architecture
+ debate with Peg Rawes, Patrick Lynch, Jonathan Hale, Adam Sharr, Lorens Holm and Peter Carl

Venue:
The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London WC1A 2TH

Free entry
Doors open half an hour before the start time

In Collaboration with the Swedenborg Society

Refreshments available

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Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, by Timothy Morton

14 February 2013

Timothy Morton’s new book, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, is the latest in the New Metaphysics series at Open Humanities Press. The open access HTML version is now available here. PDF and paperback to follow.

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, OOO, is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.

Cover art by Tammy Lu, cover design by Katherine Gillieson.

Realist Magic - Timothy Morton

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Object-oriented sociology and the material turn

14 December 2012

Pierides, D. and Woodman, D. (2012). “Object-Oriented Sociology and Organizing in the Face of Emergency: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and the Material Turn.” The British Journal of Sociology, 63 (4): 662-679. H/t Ecology without Nature.

This paper explores the material turn in sociology and the tools it provides for understanding organizational problems highlighted by the Royal Commission into the 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires during which 173 people died in the Australian State of Victoria. Often inspired by Bruno Latour’s material-semiotic sociology of associations, organization scholars employing these tools focus on the messy details of organization otherwise overlooked by approaches assuming a macroscopic frame of analysis. In Latour’s approach no object is reducible to something else – such as nature, the social, or atoms – it is instead a stabilized set of relations. A Latourian approach allows us to highlight how the Royal Commission and macroscopic models of organizing do unwitting damage to their objects of inquiry by purifying the ‘natural’ from the ‘social’. Performative elements in their schemas are mistaken for descriptive ones. However, a long standing critique of this approach claims that it becomes its own form of reduction, to nothing but relations. Graham Harman, in his object-oriented philosophy develops this critique by showing that a ‘relationist’ metaphysics cannot properly accommodate the capacity of ‘objects’ to cause or mediate surprises. Through our case of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, we argue that a purely relational model of objects loosens a productive tension between the structural and ephemeral that drives sociological analysis. By drawing on elements of Harman’s ontology of objects we argue that it is necessary for material-semiotic sociology to retain a central place for the emergence of sociological objects.

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, Organization studies | Leave a Comment »

Somewhere in Russia…

14 July 2012

…to be more precise, at the Piotrovsky Bookstore in Perm, books on speculative realism, ANT and the like are part of the effort to restore “book culture to its height during the Soviet times.” Hat tip OOP.

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Books, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, philosophy, Sociology, STS | 1 Comment »

The Secret Life of Objects

6 July 2012

“The International Symposium ‘The Secret Life of Objects: Materialities, Medialities, Temporalities‘ will take place in Rio de Janeiro, between August 1st and 3rd. (…)  The keynote speaker will be the French sociologist Bruno Latour and several other participants have already confirmed their presence (Graham Harman, Siegfried Zielinski, Joachim Paech, Richard Grusin, Steven Shaviro, Ian Bogost etc.).” Here is the programme (in Portuguese).

…what, without constituting meaning per se, contributes nonetheless to the production of meaning? What is a medium and how mediation processes unfold? In what ways does technological materiality inform cultural worlds and determine forms of cognition? What new models of historical research of techniques and culture are emerging within the current epistemological paradigms? In what ways is the material dimension of experience combined with the intangible dimensions of culture? What does it mean to purport an “object-oriented” philosophy? In what sense does the category of the human reconfigure itself in light of our new relations with objects and nonhuman entities? How important is the legacy of the genealogy and archaeology of knowledge (Nietzsche, Foucault) to a perspectivization of the impacts of “new” digital culture? By means of interdisciplinary panels, in which philosophers, anthropologists and scientists will discuss with experts in media studies, we intend to address these issues in order to elaborate a preliminary cartography of an epistemological territory still in its early stages of exploration.

Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy | 1 Comment »

Transcendence and Immanence

11 June 2012

The 2011 vol. 3 issue of Analecta Hermenutica is now open access with downloadable PDFs. It contains a number of contributions on speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory, including a piece by Jay Foster, “Ontologies without Metaphysics: Latour, Harman and the Philosophy of Things,” which discusses at length the February 2008 debate between Harman and Latour at the LSE (published as The Prince and the Wolf).

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, speculative realism | 2 Comments »

Everything Is Not Connected

14 May 2012

” Everything Is Not Connected:” audio of Graham Harman’s keynote at transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2 February 2012

The idea that everything is interconnected has become a staple of intellectual life. As a related phenomenon, “contextualisation” is now the method of first resort throughout the humanities. This lecture opposes the general trend of emphasising systems and wholes over autonomous individuals. Among the greatest drawbacks of holistic ontology is its inability to explain disruptions and surprises in any system it studies. At best, one posits some sort of “materiality” lying outside all formatted systems that serves as their underground source of change, a theory that fails for a variety of reasons. The only alternative is to adopt an object-oriented model of fully formatted entities lying beyond the grasp of the human mind and even of each other. After providing some theoretical background for this claim, I will consider several recent political phenomena that are better understood by an object-oriented approach than a holistic one.

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Posted in Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy | 4 Comments »

The Object Strikes Back

2 May 2012

Excerpts from Lucy Kimbell‘s forthcoming interview (in Design and Culture) with Graham Harman:

Objects are the anti-reductive principle par excellence. They exist midway between their tiny components and their palpable external effects. In this way they resist reduction both downwards and upwards– neither undermined nor overmined, neither undercut nor “overcut,” to coin another new term. Objects occupy the middle range in any situation, lurking beneath their outward effects, but they are also something real that cannot be decomposed into tinier elements. (…)

I think one of the weaknesses of the heavily relational approach of ANT (Actor Network Theory) is that it cannot adequately deal with the parts of the object that exceed its current relations. Latour’s best case studies (Pasteur, for example) are about things that have already happened. All the relations and translations have finally done their work, and we can use Latourian tools to explain how it occurred. …

Yet I’m not sure that ANT is quite as useful at counterfactual cases. What counterfactual cases do is allow us to look at the innate powers of a thing that might not have been expressible in their actual environment, and ask how things might have played out differently. …

The danger of relationist thinking is that it focuses too much upon reciprocal interactions in the “now” and too little on what things should be doing that they are prevented from doing by the accidental set of physical and social relations in which they are now entangled. The term “essence” gets a bad press these days, because it has come to be associated with all kinds of oppressive and reactionary dogmas, but if we take “essence” in a more minimalistic sense to mean “what a thing is quite apart from its current accidental situation,” then a certain essentialism is unavoidable.

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Posted in Actor-network-theory, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy | 4 Comments »

T for Thing

29 January 2012

Under the letter “T” in David Evans’s Critical Dictionary, “Thing” is represented by Tammy Lu and Katherine Gillieson’s cover design for Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects book, accompanied by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour’s prospectus for the New Metaphysics series at Open Humanities Press. Hat tip to Tammy Lu.

Abandoning the conventional format of the dictionary, Critical Dictionary is an ambitious cornucopia of ideas, images, and illustrations, that emphasise the open-ended, provisional and unfinished nature of language, communication and meaning. Inspired by the mock dictionary Georges Bataille edited for ‘Documents’ in 1929 and 1930, Critical Dictionary is an adventurous title, aiming to puncture pretension, and declassify terms in a playful, humourous manner. Bringing together newly commissioned work, material gathered from online art magazine criticaldictionary.com, and featuring elements such as a retrospective assessment of the ZG magazine by former editor Rosetta Brooks, one of the seminal products of the art scene in the 1980s, and catalyst to the development of the so-called ”Pictures Generation”, Critical Dictionary is a rich exploration of ideas and language in all its forms.

Update: 

The Critical Dictionary exhibition had just opened at the WORK Gallery in London and will be on until 25 February 2012.

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Posted in art, Books, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Object-oriented philosophy, philosophy, speculative realism | 1 Comment »

The multiple Democracy of Objects

19 December 2011

Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects has now been well and truly published: in HTML, PDF (2.7 MB), and the good old paperback format with Amazon’s Look Inside feature. I’m looking forward to the Kindle edition with readers’ favourite highlights.

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