Driftwork

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.