{"id":940,"date":"2010-12-08T12:43:49","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T16:43:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=940"},"modified":"2010-12-08T12:43:49","modified_gmt":"2010-12-08T16:43:49","slug":"metaphysics-and-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=940","title":{"rendered":"Metaphysics and Things"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/whiteheadresearch.org\/occasions\/conferences\/metaphysics-and-things\/\">&#8220;Metaphysics and Things&#8221; conference<\/a>, sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whiteheadresearch.org\">Whitehead Research Project<\/a>, was one of the most intellectually intense conferences that I have ever been to. The keynote address was delivered by Isabelle Stengers, with a response by Donna Haraway. This was followed by a day and a half of presentations by several of my fellow Whiteheadians (Michael Halewood, Andrew Goffey, Jude Jones, James Bono, and the conference organizer, Roland Faber), by other theorists whose work I greatly admire (Jeff Bell, Nathan Brown, James Bradley), by some brilliant graduate students whom I had not met before (Michael Austin, Beatrice Marovich, Melanie Sehgal), and by 3\/4 of the OOO crew (Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost). Graham Harman and I were paired in what some characterized (<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/02\/gleanings\/\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/conflictions5.blogspot.com\/2010\/11\/harman-and-shaviro-between-philosophers.html\">here<\/a>) as a grudge match (OK, I&#8217;m kidding), but it was a friendly rather than acrimonious argument, and I think we both agreed that the session went well.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In any case, my own paper for the conference is available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Othertexts\/Claremont2010.pdf\">here<\/a> (pdf) &#8212; though I regard it as a work in progress rather than a polished essay. Though it contains a continuation of my interchange with OOO, the real focus of the paper is on panpsychism, and what it might bring to current debates regarding &#8220;objects,&#8221; &#8220;things,&#8221; and &#8220;life&#8221; (sorry for the scare quotes, but they seem necessary in this context, to connote particular areas of contemporary discussion).&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week&#8217;s &#8220;Metaphysics and Things&#8221; conference, sponsored by the Whitehead Research Project, was one of the most intellectually intense conferences that I have ever been to. The keynote address was delivered by Isabelle Stengers, with a response by Donna Haraway. This was followed by a day and a half of presentations by several of my &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=940\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Metaphysics and Things&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-personal","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}