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Tuesday, June 5, 2012
OOO Class: Aesthetics and Politics (MP3, video)
Apropos of the recent unpleasantness around Graham Harman's interview, I found it telling that Laura Meek, my Anthropology Ph.D. student, told me that she had gotten pretty strongly yelled at for even attending my OOO class. She was yelled at by the Marxists in her department.
I think that's pretty political, don't you? : )
Laura just taught anarchism at Occupy here.
You'll hear her discussion of it with me and the rest of the class about half way through this bumper final issue.
It seems as if Hegelians give us the most trouble, Marxist or no, so I'm not surprised that it was the somewhat nihilist/Hegelian/Žižekian AUFS that put Alex Galloway's response up. Nihilist Christians. I believe in God more than they do, and I'm a non-theist.
BTW I had to change batteries on the MP3 recorder about 2/3 of the way through.
Anyway, if you are looking for an OOO discussion of politics by an OOOer who has read all of Capital, look no further. Although why one hadn't been following Levi Bryant on this is a little bit strange.
There was the most incredible performance piece by my student Kevin O'Connor, called Objects at Rest, Dreaming. I videoed it and it will be up here soon.
Are you referring to this?
ReplyDeletehttp://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/
To me, it just blows my mind how misguided the whole kerfuffle is: the bluster is about how we're deriving the wrong "ought" from an "is", but the point is that you can't.
Of course flat ontology implies hierarchies as well as networks, and there's no a priori or view-from-nowhere way to determine some as politically preferable to others (politically preferable to whom)?
I'm just flabbergasted that this is even a question.
I don't entirely know how my interview was so sparking of controversy. As a dirty post-Hegelian myself, I found a lot of the dialogue to be rather strange.
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