Search Results for humanities

In recent days there’s been a flare-up of discussion about speculative realism and politics. It’s a more mild and reasoned one than previous debates, with contributions well worth reading. First read Chris Vitale’s post Queering Speculative Realism. Then read Diversifying Speculative Realisms on Archive Fire. After that go read Levi Bryant’s post, which responds to the first two. The argument… read more

A while back Jim Brown mentioned to me that there would be an object-oriented rhetoric panel at this year’s Rhetoric Society of America conference. Jim attended RSA but wasn’t able to make the panel; still, he’s managed to dig up the papers and he wrote up a summary over on the RSA’s Blogora. I’m not yet sure what object-oriented rhetoric… read more

As Levi has revealed, he and I are putting together a book, Object-Oriented Ontology. It will carry both the proceedings of last week’s symposium, as well as new contributions from Katherine Behar, Melanie Doherty, Katherine Hayles, and Adrian Ivakhiv. We may add at least one more contribution as well, stay tuned. The collection will be published in the Open Humanities… read more

Via Bryant, I just discovered the blog Struggles with Philosophy. I’m not sure who the author is, but as Levi points out, discussion there has recently taken up Object-Oriented Ontology. Here’s an excerpt from the latest salvo. At one level I want to differentiate between the theory (or philosophy) of OOP and the praxis of OOP, which will be designated… read more

In a reflection on all the recent hubbub about the sordid state of the humanities and the recently proposed possibility of a cure in the form of the “digital humanities,” Cathy Davidson offers the following lament: When I think of what the humanties offer…it is astonishing to me (and tragic) that we are not central. We are very, very good… read more

I’ve been a bit of a mess this week, as I’m finishing up the Newsgames book with my two graduate students and preparing my keynote for SLSA the week after next. Fortunately, interesting things have gone on without me. As I previously mentioned, on Monday, we hosted a colloquium on “how to think about narrative and interactivity,” featuring Espen Aarseth,… read more

A brief history. Back in the late summer of 2006, a few months after the publication of Unit Operations, I exchanged a few emails with Graham Harman, whose book Tool-Being I had cited in the early pages of mine. We talked about a few things, including Leibniz, Badiou, Heidegger, Meillassoux, D.W. Griffith, and McLuhan. Sometime in early 2007, over a… read more

In a lengthy comment on my pragmatic speculative realism post, philosopher Levi Bryant asks what issues in technology and media studies prompted my interest in object-oriented ontology. I’d like to try to answer the question for the benefit of readers finding their way here from sources in philosophy rather than game studies. In some ways, I think I was doing… read more

Last week I had the opportunity to visit in Cairo with philosopher Graham Harman, someone whose work I’ve known and admired for some time now. It was nice to meet him in person for the first time, not to mention having a local guide for getting around this enormous, insane city. I also got to deliver Graham’s first copy of… read more