Nick over at Accursed Share has a terrific post up about realist and ontology. He takes me to task for my Principle of Irreduction, but, as I remark in his comments, I don’t think the Principle of Reduction says what he thinks it says.
Jon at Post-Hegemony rifs on Nick’s post, expressing some concerns about the Speculative Realist thesis that ontology isn’t inherently political. Incidentally, Jon, I agree with your observation that agency is not the burning question of political theory. Rather, I see the question as one of how it’s possible to form collective assemblages, which I suspect are related to what you’re getting at with multitudes. Can’t wait for your book!
Over at the OOP, Graham responds to some of my worries about his vacuum packed objects, and also responds to Reid’s post on object-oriented philosophy (here, here and here). I do not yet have a rejoinder to Graham’s critique of my position, but I suspect part of the dispute arises from my position that the minimal unit of an object is not the object itself, but the objectile-field relation. For me an object is always attached to a world, which is not, of course, the same is claim that an object is its relations. Graham also has a very nice list of ways in which people sucker punch objects. This sentence alone makes it worth the read.
January 12, 2009 at 5:13 pm
[…] 12, 2009 Levi has a Monday Morning Roundup of the latest SpecReal blog action. You can see it all on his page, but you might also want this […]
January 14, 2009 at 9:41 pm
[…] out the entire post on the so-called “hegemonic fallacy,” as Sinthome dubs it. But his other posts are also worth checking […]
August 12, 2009 at 5:26 am
hi Levi,
This is going to sound like I’m kidding but I’m not, though in a way I guess it’s a sort of joke. There’s this author I like, John Green, who is also a video blogger (vlogbrothers on youtube). Through him I learned about a web game with an AI of 20 questions http://www.20q.net/ It’d be fun to teach it (the 20q people game) about various contemporary philosophers and philosophical movements, in a coordinated way, and to teach it about philosophical concepts (the original 20q classic).
What do you say?
cheers,
Nate