London Event: Object Oriented

If you are in London this looks like an awesome event:

OBJECT ORIENTED

A conversation between art, philosophy and programming

Exhibition 4rd and 5th June
Opening Friday, 3rd June, 18h - 21h
Saturday and Sunday, 11h - 18h

Talks 4th June
11h00 - Introduction
11h10 - 11h50 Mark Sowden
12h00 - 13h00 Philip Jones (+ workshop)
14h30 - 15h10 Gisel Carriconde Azevedo
15h20 - 16h00 Hilan Bensusan
16h10 - 16h50 Tim Weston

Leighton Space
At 3 Leighton Space, Kentish Town, NW5 2QL
http://www.leightonspace.org.uk/

Continental Realism released in the US

OK so today is the 'official' release date for Continental Realism (Amazon US link) although it has been available on Amazon UK and others sites for a couple of weeks now. It seems there is already only 1 copy left in stock! This is presumably good news, but you can also buy it on sites like The Book Depository aswell which has free worldwide shipping. So far the responses have been good although I have been too scared to read my copy.

You can pick up both Continental Realism and Post-Continental Voices together for a reasonable price. Sales of the latter have been picking up again now that CR is out and again there is not a huge amount of stock on Amazon but it can be picked up in a lot of places at this stage.

Seeing Through Objects event

Seeing Through Objects: a group discussion in the context of Corban Walker’s exhibition at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Organised by MA Art in the Contemporary World, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland and MA: Art and Process, Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork. Lead by Francis Halsall, Lucy Dawe Lane and Declan Long

Irish Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Sat. June, 4th, 2011, 11am-12.15pm

What kind of object is Corban Walker’s Please Adjust?

For the Irish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, Corban Walker has created a large-scale sculpture composed of 160 inter-connected open-framed stainless-steel cubes. As the exhibition statement describes, it is an art object in which many elements ‘combine to form a fragile structure that supports itself, though one alteration could destroy the existing configuration and create a new one’. Whilst appearing fixed, Please Adjust is also precarious, and though physically transparent it is, also, quite deliberately, not ‘clear’.

Using Please Adjust as a context, this discussion will explore multiple theoretical and historical approaches to definitions of, and encounters with, objects. What is at stake here is identifying the focus of aesthetic attention — in other words, how do theories of objects impact on the theories, practices and experiences of art?

The multiple, transient, performative and dematerialized forms that art objects have taken after modernism and since the late 1960’s demonstrate how the problems in defining what an object is are exemplified in the context of art. This historical moment is still with us. At the very least it is now taken for granted that an art object is not definable as a discrete, material thing that is independent from its situational and historical context(s).

However, relatively recent discussions of what Graham Harman has called both Object Orientated Philosophy and Speculative Realism offer the promise of ‘adjusting’ how objects are considered within contemporary art discourse. As Harman has claimed, “the dithering agnosticism of recent philosophy, its obsession with tedious questions of human access to the world, can be replaced by a high rolling metaphysics of objects. The spirit of the archive can be replaced by that of the casino”. (from Towards Speculative Realism, Zero Books, 2010). This means not only to address how art as a practice of object making constructs complex, relational objects but also how such objects might engender and demonstrate certain forms of thinking about the world.

This discussion will build on the recent series of presentations on the subject of ‘What is an object?’ lead by the MA Art in the Contemporary World in response to Richard Tuttle’s exhibition Triumphs at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Spring 2011. It also follows from a previous MA ACW session at the Irish Pavilion at Venice in 2009.

All are welcome to attend this discussion. Please get in touch if you would like to participate.

Contact: Francis Halsall (halsallf@ncad.ie); Lucy Dawe Lane (lucy.dawe-lane@cit.ie); Declan Long (longd@ncad.ie; twitter: @declanlong).

We would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of Corban Walker, Eamon Maxwell, and Jennifer Marshall in the staging of this event.

The Irish Pavilion at Venice is located at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, 3703 Calle della Pietà, Castello. Calle della Pietà is mid-way between Piazza San Marco and the Arsenale, off Via Riva degli Schiavoni.

http://www.acw.ie ; http://media.cit.ie/maap/; http://www.irelandvenice.ie/

Some more details about the Eco-Tone event

from the page:

We are pleased to announce participants for Eco-tone 1. Main day is 28 June. The live exhibition Calendar Variations happens the evening before. Venues for both events will be at Nottingham Trent University City site...[list of participants at the link]

Call for SR/OOO Panel Participants

I was just put on to, via Tziovanis Georgakis and Christos Hadjioannou, this conference being organized by Marianna Papastephanou and Ezra Talmor called The Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling ‘The Three Narratives’—Art, Science, and Philosophy. The keynote speaker is none other than Irish philosopher Richard Kearney.

I've been told that if we manage to get a panel proposal in before the deadline before May 31st it will be possible to have a speculative realism/object oriented/new realism workshop. We would need roughly 8-10 people who would be broadly interested (abstracts welcome, but not expected so close to the deadline). If you are interested you can either comment here, email me, or drop a line on twitter/facebook and I'll see what I can arrange. There are no travel funds sadly.

EcoTone 1: Object, Space and Entanglements

Robert Jackson has just posted up the details of an event I'm very excited to be attending. I'm looking forward to meeting everyone and being exposed to some properly creative people. Here is the abstract for my own paper:

Melancholic Coexistence amongst Objects

Paul J. Ennis

Timothy Morton, in his recent article ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,’ has set in motion a discussion of the implications for humans once the object-oriented perspective is taken into account. Against the ‘aesthetics of dejection,’ to borrow a phrase from Dominic Fox, the melancholia in question is to be differentiated from the humbling of the human one finds in other strands of speculative realism. This melancholia arises precisely because one gains a glimpse of a reality that churns below – this being the reality described in the metaphysics of Graham Harman. In this paper my intention is to demonstrate how the melancholia exhibited in object-oriented ontology, and this melancholia remains always in tension with the object-oriented celebration of objects, is better suited to addressing ecological crisis than the standpoint of dejection offered to us by the other variants of speculative realism.

Continental Realism back in stock (Amazon UK)

Just an update that there are now more copies of Continental Realism on Amazon UK - at the moment there are 9. You can get the book elsewhere but I know a lot of people tend to stick with Amazon for various reasons. I'm in the odd situation where a number of my friends have copies before I do. This is not to say that I looking forward to it arriving. It may be a while before I will be able to summon up the courage to read it.

Speculations II Out

Speculations II has just gone live. It is available in a bunch of formats thanks to our wonderful designer Thomas Gokey. I think the journal speaks for itself so do go and check it out. I want to extend a big thanks to the team - Thomas again and also Michael Austin and Fabio Gironi.

Basel Talk 'Speculative Realism and Aesthetics'

Here is a link to the details for a talk I will be giving in Basel on the topic of Speculative Realism and Aesthetics.

It takes place on Wednesday, 11 May 2011 at 12:15 – 13:00 at Dept. of English, Room 111 at Universität Basel. I'd like to extend a thanks to Ridvan Askin for setting this up. If you are in the area do come along.

The abstract is as follows:

The noted speculative realist Graham Harman has called aesthetics ‘first philosophy.’ But speculative realism is not concerned with a new aesthetic theory gifted from philosophers to artists. Rather speculative realists see aesthetics as a practical aid in getting their point across – they see themselves almost as artists in the craft of metaphysics. In this precise sense aesthetics becomes for speculative realism the practise of philosophical argumentation itself whether that manifests as Harman’s willingness to use wit in the service of expression or Ray Brassier inviting readers to imagine the end of the Universe in order to drive home the blunt fact of extinction.

This talk introduces the audience to the relatively young philosophical field of speculative realism using the aesthetic and literary practises of the four original speculative realists (Harman, Brassier, Meillassoux, Grant) as a linchpin, but it will also take time to explore a world inhabited with colourful characters ranging from transcendental nihilists, neo-vitalist quasi-Deleuzians, object oriented ontologists, speculative materialists, Lovecraftian weird realists, and other assorted continental realists on the fringe not only of mainstream philosophy but even on the fringe of continental philosophy.

Why does speculative realism matter? Part 1

The next few posts are notes based on a series of questions Richard Burt was kind enough to ask me on Facebook that expanded into something a bit unwieldy for that format. So I have transferred them to the blog. This is part 1 of 2. Richard was inquiring about what it is that I feel I have gained from being exposed to speculative realism and since we are both people with an interest and background in the world of Heidegger/Derrida that forms much of the sub-text here (and should explain the abundance of Heidegger-Derrida references).

The first thing to register about speculative realism is that it is not entirely a clean break from tradition and that, in many ways, it is often quite traditionalist – which I count as a positive for the most part. Like all radical philosophies there is an attachment to what came before, but it is an attachment akin to that between siblings that tips between bouts of mutual dependence and petty simmering dislikes. Most breaks with tradition, including those undertaken by Heidegger and Derrida, were once considered extraordinarily radical and yet, in hindsight, we can now see how utterly indebted to the tradition they are.

The second thing to register then is that the anti-traditionalist strain in speculative realism is precisely its realist or, as is more often the case, its anti-antirealism since it is difficult to say whether Meillassoux, for instance, counts as a realist, but it is less controversial to claim that he opposes the ‘naive’ default antirealism of traditional continental philosophy. But this anti-traditionalist strain is also clearly determined by the traditional debate between realism and antirealism that remains for (a lot of) us utterly Kantian.

This is quite explicit in Meillassoux, Grant, and in Brassier’s latest work. Object-oriented ontology is the form of speculative realism that is the least bogged down in the Kantian paradigm and this is why I find it so liberating to read OOO from time to time. When I first read Tool-Being toward the end of my thesis the bit that grabbed my attention was precisely the lack of anxiety concerning transcendental questions.

In this sense I think those who come to OOO from outside philosophy are perhaps luckiest because there is nothing harder than overcoming the paradigm you are trained in and for me that is a broadly Kantian one and no matter how far I stray from this to me the unfulfilled promise of modern philosophy is precisely the possibility of a ‘Copernican’ or Kantian metaphysics.

This is why I firmly believe there will need to be some fence-mending in the future, but the first thing we have to dispel is the idea that there is a fundamental opposition between transcendentalists and metaphysicians. I think there is enough content in our world for both.

I’ll try to explain how this might happen, but in a basic sense I believe our world is complicated enough that a ‘division of labour’ (Peter Gratton) between aspects of our world is not only welcome, but necessary given the fractured nature of contemporary human existence and the overflow of information.

The question I get asked the most from fellow continentalists is how does one get from continental idealism or antirealism to continental realism? To understand this question it is helpful to look not at speculative realism, but at some of accusations often thrown at them from continental philosophers.

Those who oppose speculative realism often claim that it paints many philosophers in a naïve light. According to this critique it is simply not true that Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida are idealists. I agree, but here we have a blind-spot arising (often) from an unwillingness to engage in the nuance of the speculative realist arguments on the matter – ironic given most defences against the idealist charge as it relates to Husserl, Heidegger or Derrida depend on the idea that their positions are more nuanced than the simplistic SR reading.

This is not to say that there are moments of rhetorical excess where speculative realists lapse into shorthand by calling certain thinkers idealists as when continentalists caricature analytics are language obsessed or science as cold-hearted objectivism.

Leaving that aside the point being made by speculative realism here is that thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida are so entrenched in an antirealist nexus that their qualifications concerning knowledge of the real renders them idealists for all intents and purposes. Or, putting it the other way, whatever form of realism one might claim for them is so compromised as to render their realism inert.