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A Recipe for Disaster: Practical Metaphysics: Response to Julian Yates

Chapter of: Speculative Medievalisms: Discography(pp. 201–205)

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Metadata
TitleA Recipe for Disaster: Practical Metaphysics: Response to Julian Yates
ContributorLiza Blake(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0021.1.18
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/speculative-medievalisms/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightBlake, Liza
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2013-01-17
Long abstractThere are two ways of approaching the topic of Speculative Medievalisms. On the one hand, one might consider the role of the medieval or medievalism within speculation or the speculative. Allan Mitchell offers a version of this approach in his piece in this volume, “Cosmic Eggs, or Events Before Eve-rything,” when he reflects on how the medieval is already to be found in the speculative, whether consciously or uncon-sciously. Another way of approaching the topic would be to consider how the theses, ideas or propositions found in specu-lative realism translate to a medieval—or in Yates’s case, an early modern—literary critical practice. This second approach serves as the focus of Yates’s essay, and so it will be the subject of my response. In this response I will re-compose Yates’sessay, schematically restructuring it so as to draw out the im-plications for speculative medieval critical practice.Harman’s technique in his book Prince of Networks is a complicated one, but one whose mechanisms are worth study-ing.1 Harman takes as his starting point Bruno Latour’s critical practice for, and as, sociology, science studies, and actor network theory (among others). From Latour’s practice, Harman then extrapolates its underlying, more or less explicit metaphysics. In Part II of the Prince of Networks, Harman tweaks this metaphysics slightly to present a new or slightly modified version of Latourian metaphysics, and this tweaked Latourian metaphysics becomes Object Oriented Ontology. The end of the book leaves readers with one critical practice (Latourian practice, as embodied in his work) and two meta-physics (the Latourian metaphysics Harman describes and the metaphysics he himself elaborates). The third section of Har-man’s book—the section of the book where he works back from Part II’s metaphysics to a critical practice—has not been written yet. If Latourian critical practice can produce or imply a metaphysics, then what are the contours of the critical prac-tice that might correspond to the metaphysics of Part II? What is a Harmanian or speculative realist critical practice?
Page rangepp. 201–205
Print length5 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)