Driftwork

I read today the following vaguely terrifying statement “It’s becoming clear that moves to cut global carbon emissions are too little and too late for us avoid the worst effects of climate change. “There is a worrying sense that negotiations won’t lead anywhere or lead to enough,” says Lenton. “We can’t change the world that fast,” says Peter Liss, who is scientific adviser to the UK parliamentary committee investigating geoengineering….” …”

Which means that we will have to engage in geoengineering and take direct control of the climate and reduce the planet’s tempreture.

What a shame that I’m the wrong kind of engineer. I would like to sit on the design group that decides the temperature of the planet and builds the required geoengineering systems.

What interests me at the moment seems strangely unconnected to the daily grind of engineering and philosophy. What depresses me, the finiteness of world and the terrifying prospect of only a billion people left after the strange combination of science and global capital fails to correct its excesses. But here and now - why doesn’t the former enable a correction to the latter ? Perhaps there simply isn’t enough time to walk and think through the all to obvious connections. Perhaps realyy I should accept that instead I am really temporarily trapped in a state of melancholy. Being rather than becoming ?

I think I’ll just go and drink a cappucino instead, Sumatran coffee in the fifteen year old Pavoni machine…

The boy band of Speculative Materialism-Speculative Realism

Ray Brassier
Iain Hamilton Grant
Graham Harman
Quentin Meillassoux

are having an event on Friday 24th April 2009 at UWE Bristol, St Matthias Campus UK…

perhaps i’ll go. (From OOP)

Until fairly recently object orientation (OO (Object Orientated Programming OOP)) had a rather specific set of engineering and philosophical meanings which were fundamentally related to the techno-science interests of my engineering practice. Interesting and useful and yet not that much of an improvement over the previous structured paradigm. On the philosophical line of thought I would have understood OO as existing within the line of working knowledge that represents what Lyotard deliberately and negatively referred to as the Inhuman. It is an inhumanism because OO is an engineering paradigm that forces you to think in a particular way and does not adapt to human concerns, rather the ever flexible human has to adapt to it.

Imagine my surprise when I began to come across a new OOP, Object Orientated Philosophy (OOP2), and my still greater surprise that there are no references within OOP2 to OOP. A few of the intellectual roots are the same and yet OO really doesn’t have the same metaphysic as Object orientated Philosophy. If you review the engineering research paper attached to this post and compare the exactitude of the language with Harman’s treatment of Objects in Guerilla Metaphysics and the various blogs (start here) you will begin to undetand why the difference fascinates me.

In the early 90s I was told that OO was a paradigm that engineered difference, it has never as far as I can ascertain fulfilled this ideological dream but still it’s fascinating to begin to reconsider this logic.