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.

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.

Reblogged from Knowledge Ecology:

Contents:

Note on Contributors 1. Introduction Part 1: Events, Suggestions, Accounts 2. Suggestion and Satisfaction: On the Actual Occasion of Agency by Paul Stronge and Mike Michael 3. Science, Cosmopolitics and the Question of Agency: Kant’s Critique and Stengers’ Event by Michael Schillmeier 4. Questioning the Human/Non-Human Distinction by Florence Rudolf 5. Agency and “Worlds” of Accounts: Erasing the Trace or Rephrasing the Action? by Rolland Munro Part 2: Contribution, Distribution, Failures 6. Distributed Agency and Advanced Technology, Or: How to Analyze Constellations of Collective Inter-Agency by Werner Rammert 7. Distributed Sleeping and Breathing: On the Agency of Means in Medical Work by Cornelius Schubert 8. Agencies’ Democracy: “Contribution” as a Paradigm to (Re)thinking the Common in a World of Conflict by Jacques Roux 9. Reality Failures by John Law Part 3: Interaction, Partnership, Organization 10. “What’s the Story?” Organizing as a Mode of Existence by Bruno Latour 11. Researching Water Quality with Non-Humans: An ANT Account by Christelle Gramaglia & Delaine Sampaio Da Silva 12. Horses – Significant Others, People’s Companions, and Subtle Actors by Marion Mangelsdorf

Reblogged from Speculative Heresy:

Reblogged from Object-Oriented Philosophy:

Bournemouth Safe Bus aims to help drunken party-goers

POLICE in Bournemouth say the Safe Bus will be hitting the town centre every Saturday night this year to help the town’s vulnerable people and drunken partygoers. (…) Inspector Dean O’Connor, of Bournemouth and Poole Police, said: “The Safe Bus helps people who are drunk, injured or lost. Those who have come out, had too much to drink, lost their mobile phone and can’t get home. It’s for those who have fallen over and are injured, those who have become a victim of an assault, or those who are just so intoxicated they are unable to look after themselves.”

OCCUPY protesters yesterday ended their 18-day long protest at Bournemouth University. The group moved from their temporary home at the Talbot Campus entrance near the Boundary Roundabout shortly before bailiffs arrived at 2pm. It followed a hearing at Poole County Court where a district judge granted Bournemouth University a full injunction to exclude the protesters from university land. The judge also issued court costs against the protesters.

As far as I understand, there were two different legal proceedings, one brought by the owner of the land, Talbot Village Trust (which concerned the actual eviction), and the other concerned the above-mentioned injunction by Bournemouth University, to prevent the protesters from relocating to other parts of the campus.

Talbot Village Trust is a charity that was established in the 19th century by aristocrats to provide social housing for the poor in the area, so it is somewhat ironic that this time they were involved in chasing a protest movement off their land that also concerns itself with social and economic inequality.

Here are a few more articles on the key moments of the occupation:

Bournemouth Uni fences in protest – The Breaker

Protesters willing to leave ‘if Chancellor listens’ – The Breaker

Student union’s statement

UCU lecturers’ union motion

Occupy Bournemouth protesters to be evicted – BBC

Reblogged from Tammy Lu: