3 thoughts on “video of December 1 Munich discussion with Slavoj Žižek”
I always prefer to talk about how things escape our grasps as a limit and not a blank canvas to project whatever onto and I’m with Wittgenstein as being tempted to make the motto “I will teach you differences” from King Lear tho for me more about tending to the actionable particulars at hand than something broadly therapeutic.
The grammar of speculation has always sounded to me as something intransigently true, and yet, if I push it to its logical conclusion, I would have to conclude that I am speculating about speculation, which leads to speculating about speculating about speculation, and so on. Reasonable as it is useless, in that regard. If it is all speculation with no Cartesian or otherwise root base, then what do I need speculation for (note: no question mark).
Language games in the second point are also noteworthy — essentialism is an odd road in that discussion. Seems like it was selected for its counter-intuitiveness more than anything else.
The commitment of “translation” and “relational materiality” is a nasty brew. “relational translationality” and “relational materiality” might help that distinction, but “down with distinctions” is the name of the game in ANT. A poverty of methods and a multitude of papers, for Latour, anyways.
From dmf over email:
at one point the host tries to get GH to explain why we should give any credence to the idea physics is lacking and we should entertain the idea that interactions are “aesthetic” by asking what grounds his speculations and he dodges it by saying that we don’t have any privileged access to any dimension (subjective or otherwise) of existence, there is a red-herring in all of this waxing philosophical (including the so called hard problem of consciousness) which is that we don’t need metaphysical certainty or the like to engineer (or test) any of the non-philosophical tasks that we are interested in doing in our lives, yes sorry my old soapbox about being bewitched by grammar.
Along those lines both GH and Zizek make a very weak (but characteristically self-congratulatory) argument for essentialism by pointing to social trends/norms in nations/cultures but pointing to such bits of socialization as they do isn’t really about essentialism at all unless one wants to make the case that say what a cab driver in Egypt is likely to ask you or not is somehow something other than what we make of what we are taught something more fixed like gravity or even genetics.
My main issue with GH and folks like Latour is the mistake of taking figures of speech (like the East Indian trading co) as literally being objects/networks as opposed to being aware/explicit that these are just ways of framing things that have certain affordances and resistance depending on uses, contexts, etc, and this applies to our current discussion here of models/modeling what if rather than trying to make the case that we have captured something (or something coming) we talk in terms of how framing things as this or that allows us to do somethings but not others?
Installing (Social) Order 
I always prefer to talk about how things escape our grasps as a limit and not a blank canvas to project whatever onto and I’m with Wittgenstein as being tempted to make the motto “I will teach you differences” from King Lear tho for me more about tending to the actionable particulars at hand than something broadly therapeutic.
Click to access 90295_330874.pdf
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The grammar of speculation has always sounded to me as something intransigently true, and yet, if I push it to its logical conclusion, I would have to conclude that I am speculating about speculation, which leads to speculating about speculating about speculation, and so on. Reasonable as it is useless, in that regard. If it is all speculation with no Cartesian or otherwise root base, then what do I need speculation for (note: no question mark).
Language games in the second point are also noteworthy — essentialism is an odd road in that discussion. Seems like it was selected for its counter-intuitiveness more than anything else.
The commitment of “translation” and “relational materiality” is a nasty brew. “relational translationality” and “relational materiality” might help that distinction, but “down with distinctions” is the name of the game in ANT. A poverty of methods and a multitude of papers, for Latour, anyways.
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From dmf over email:
at one point the host tries to get GH to explain why we should give any credence to the idea physics is lacking and we should entertain the idea that interactions are “aesthetic” by asking what grounds his speculations and he dodges it by saying that we don’t have any privileged access to any dimension (subjective or otherwise) of existence, there is a red-herring in all of this waxing philosophical (including the so called hard problem of consciousness) which is that we don’t need metaphysical certainty or the like to engineer (or test) any of the non-philosophical tasks that we are interested in doing in our lives, yes sorry my old soapbox about being bewitched by grammar.
Along those lines both GH and Zizek make a very weak (but characteristically self-congratulatory) argument for essentialism by pointing to social trends/norms in nations/cultures but pointing to such bits of socialization as they do isn’t really about essentialism at all unless one wants to make the case that say what a cab driver in Egypt is likely to ask you or not is somehow something other than what we make of what we are taught something more fixed like gravity or even genetics.
My main issue with GH and folks like Latour is the mistake of taking figures of speech (like the East Indian trading co) as literally being objects/networks as opposed to being aware/explicit that these are just ways of framing things that have certain affordances and resistance depending on uses, contexts, etc, and this applies to our current discussion here of models/modeling what if rather than trying to make the case that we have captured something (or something coming) we talk in terms of how framing things as this or that allows us to do somethings but not others?
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