Rolling Philosophy

(although he was chair of philosophy at the ENS!)

i know someone, a serious fellow himself, who takes badiou seriously

and actually i heard tell of a younger person from my own program, very much a mainline high church logician type, who also had an interest in OOP and probably all this other junk, so who knows where such people will land us in 10-20 years of redrawing connections and boundaries

Does Eagleton really rate him as highly as it says in one of those links?

Is Ignatius of Loyola really that amazing?

from my days as a c++ programmer I admit that something called object-oriented philosophy could be interesting, but as it's been practiced until now, I'd just like to read on it that's relatively low on specialist jargon.

As a pure dilettante I read Ian Bogost's "Alien Phenomenology" recently and found it accessible and fun.

http://retractionwatch.com/2016/04/07/philosophy-journal-spoofed-retracts-hoax-article/

Given our stance as a journal that aims to dispel the celebrity fetishism surrounding Badiou (in our journal ethos), we of course support the intentions of the authors. However, unlike significant work done to challenge Badiou’s thought philosophically (some of which is published in our journal), we regret that the authors chose such a dated method of attack. In an age when the pressures on independent Open Access publishing include underfunding and time-pressured staff, Sokal-style exposés become easier to perpetrate even as their philosophical payoff becomes less and less. The experimental nature of the issue in question made it particularly vulnerable to such an assault, which seems designed less to ‘undermine the foundations on which the ontology of the Master rests’ (whatever that means) than to use Badiou’s name to promote the authors’ own careers.

They're the ones who fell for the dated method of attack. Is it dated if it keeps working?

i'm inclined to agree that this has much more to do with the various understandable and less understandable inadequacies of peer review than it does with work on badiou per se, but nevertheless that's not a very good defence

(whatever that means)

oh now that the cows have fled the barn they're all skeptical of meaningless jargon

feel like all these people would benefit from reading our thread on academic jargon.

i feel like object-oriented ontology is the philosophy version of when my 3rd grade teacher told us to write a story from the perspective of a paperclip.

more or less

Like, geometry?

Overheard some friends talk biology based philosophy lately. So many metaphors. Rhizomatic, fermentation, stratification. And somehow they all end up describing capitalism.

more like that a paperclip has the same relationship to disclosedness/hidden-ness (ie, that it's both) that we'd normally reserve for something like a human subject. an object more or less always holds something back in its phenomenal manifestations, a kind of reservoir of potentiality. harman, the big dog in OOO, basically takes this to a logical endpoint and argues that objects are "vacuum sealed" from each other (humans being one object among other), but im not sure what his account of the relationships between objects might be--though id guess it's equally unenlightening. (actually he might say that there is NO relationships between objects)

OOO is (imo) another in a long line of "re-enchantment" philosophies designed to supplement (or, in more aggressive varieties, overturn) a purely mechanistic "scientific" point of view. it's like heidegger's beef with technological enframing taken to a kind of extreme.

holds something back from who? from itself, or from a human observer? what does it hold back? is potentiality just a way of saying "i don't know but maybe something"?

an object is something that is also always otherwise than what it is. does that make sense?

for them im not sure it makes sense to talk about observers just yet--since they are doing ontology it's not how the object is observed so much as what it is.

Counter-reification, a materialist account of strangeness. NB not saying it's not coloured with dishonesty but

"an object is something that is also always otherwise than what it is."

it seems paradoxical to me - an object is what it is and also is something otherwise to what it is. and that something otherwise is unfathomable? you might as well be talking about dualism for objects.

yeah kinda. an early impression of mine was that it was universalizing the kantian phenomenal/noumenal split to apply to more than the transcendental subject.

btw i've read Tool-Being and been exposed to some of this stuff but I am far from an expert. it's just not my thing, right or wrong.

when people use the word "weirdness" in an academic as if it denotes something useful i just have to leave the conversation. tired of the pursuit of vagueness as an end in itself.

academic discourse

Of course an object is what it is, otherwise it wouldn't be what it is?

'Is' and 'being' are imperfect descriptors, but...

this is ontology, not a form of logic that has to obey laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction (for which i say sure, but we need to devise higher level logics...not talk about "weirdness")

It seems way too generous to talk about 'logic' with this kind of thing to me.

yeah, the pictures are not on trial here

I'm not a philosopher, and when I read philosophy it's mostly continental, or semiotically based, or linguistics. But to me there's a thin border between problems of logic and problems of language. And that upthread seems to be problems of language. There are so many problems with the word 'is', which is why Heidegger/Wittgenstein writes about 'does' or Deleuze writes of 'becoming'. But the problems with the word only doubles if trying to define the things not captured by the descriptions of what things 'are', as being things that they 'otherwise are'.

imho

more like that a paperclip has the same relationship to disclosedness/hidden-ness (ie, that it's both) that we'd normally reserve for something like a human subject. an object more or less always holds something back in its phenomenal manifestations, a kind of reservoir of potentiality.

"Perhaps the answer lies in the thought which now comes to my mind; namely, the wax was not after all the sweetness of the honey, or the fragrance of the flowers, or the whiteness, or the shape, or the sound, but was rather a body which presented itself to me in these various forms a little while ago, but which now exhibits different ones."

ha!

if you want a vaguely sympathetic overview of the whole scene, Steven Shaviro's "The Universe of Things" was a good read, if I remember correctly. (Thought in an aside he gets Niklas Luhmann totally wrong--as does the philosopher he's talking about--and it bothered me so much I hold a slight grudge against the book--but that's literally one sentence.) One thing about shaviro book is that it makes the more recent stuff that quentin meillassoux is up to sound genuinely strange, and not the "aren't I cute" way of some of these guys.

i can't read futures markets that well--but OOO is presently in that broad dissemination stage where it seems like every grad student on the planet is squeezing every last drop out of it. something else will be along shortly.

it's funny b/c quentin m is now my colleague, I could just go "down the hall" and talk to him about this
(except we don't get offices b/c lol Paris)

ha, recent meillassoux is definitely very strange though i'm not sure to what extent it's a merit. my reaction to reading some of his post-after finitude stuff is largely "uhhh...". definitely preferable to the quarks + the united nations + slime molds, oh my! school of things though.

Has anyone checked out this Paul Guyer history of aesthetics? I probably don't need it, even with a price reduction, but I'm curious. 1752 pages!

http://www.amazon.com/History-Modern-Aesthetics-Set/dp/1107643228/

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/labour-members-left-baffled-after-8008287?_utm_source=1-2-2

intended to bring about radical expression

fuckin artists

fuckin students

so there is a conference coming up here organized by a friend that includes among a few others the following speakers
Alain Badiou
Etienne Balibar
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

you guys who are into this stuff: does this promise to be a good time and/or a bunch of bullshit?
kinda open to either really but june is really busy

Balibar is the one i'd be most excited to see out of that list.

a lot of times this just boils down to how good they are at giving talks. i've sat through my last 20 minute paper reading.

yeah that's kinda what I was asking, I don't have any experience of this crowd. guess the talks will be in English?

Balibar and Spivak's talks should be interesting, I think: I don't necessarily enjoy Spivak's prose style, but she's generally politically shrewd.

fwiw the theme will be "contemporary attempts to deconstruct/reconstruct the universal"

from the conference publicity: the numerous undertakings of deconstruction have too often led to the abandonment of all positive reflection on the universal as such, when it wasn't leading to facile forms of relativism. And this, even though the discursive practices of these different disciplines (sociology, literature, philosophy) saw the strong persistence of the same categories that they intended to question. From this has come a palpable tension between the critical rejection of the universal in theoretical planning and its precritical usage in practice.

i would be interested in that topic.

yeah it sounds interesting! one of the organizers is like me a philosopher of math so our questions are in the background here: for on the one hand one says that math concerns the universal but on the other hand we have lots of ethnographic data on math practice now and we see a plurality of practices. how are these to be resolved? this meeting notes that in practice no one really tries to resolve this: we presuppose old-fashioned categories like "objects", "objectivity" etc in trying to theorize about diverse practices; no wonder we end up thinking math is "universal" in an old fashioned sense! and yet: math *seems* to be universal in the following sense: lots of varied practices that end up being...communicable? translatable? As Frege opens the Grundlagen: "Yet if everyone had to understand by this name [`the number one'] whatever he pleased, then the same proposition about one would mean different things for different people,---such propositions would have no common content." The notion of "content", it seems to me, has been problematized like "the universal": one communicates "the same thing" in many ways.

anyway this is what I am & have always been working on so maybe I should go to this conference

on the one hand one says that math concerns the universal but on the other hand we have lots of ethnographic data on math practice now and we see a plurality of practices.

do you have a link on something i can read about this?