I became spokeslad for OOO at a wonderful dinner last night. Robert Rosenberg, Vinicius Navarro, Qi Wang and sci fi novelist Kathleen Ann Goonan were at the controls. Rarely does one enjoy such effervescent company. As the day proceeds I'll try to reconstruct our conversation. In sum: I found affinities between Robert's phenomenological approach and my OOO, and Qi noted affinities between OOO and Buddhism.
I'm not sure what it has to do with OOO, but here's a recent post in which I discuss four texts that have absorbed my fullest attention over the years. They are what I call ontological texts because they seem to be using a 'story' as a device to lay out an ontology, rather than using an ontology as the framework within which to tell a story. My concern -- which is not necessarily the concern either of those who created these texts nor of those who encounter and absorb them -- then is not directly with ontology, but rather with how we deal with matters ontological. As I said at the opening of an early paper of mine (on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of those ontological texts):
ReplyDeleteThe philosopher of science can address himself to the question, “What is the ontological status of the sign?”, and thereby initiate an inquiry into the metaphysical presuppositions of the semiotician. The semiotician can initiate a rather different sort of inquiry, an inquiry into the semiotics of ontology, a study of the systems of signs by which we indicate and order the various realities in which our experiences occur—the ordinary world, the world(s) of dreams, the various fictive worlds created by poets and story tellers, the realms open to shamans and mystics.