Progressive Geographies

From Speculative Heresy – helpful for those who couldn’t make the events in London last week; and potentially good news with a publication from the second event.

The podcast for the Dark Materialism event is now available online here. The Natural History Museum was a perfect venue for discussions of the ancestral realm, and there was a number of interesting pieces ranging from dark gnosticism, to topological voids, and the subtractive regime of anorexia.

Friday’s Speculative Medievalisms event was also a big success, thanks to the conference organisers’ hard work. Podcasts of the event should be up soon, but for now I’ve posted my PowerPoint online here. There’s talk of a publication eventually being formed from the presentations (including one from the absent Reza Negarestani), which will hopefully make a great collection.

I didn’t get the chance to ask my general question of the whole day. (I didn’t get the chance I’d have liked to ask Nick Srnicek a question either, but I’ll send him that privately.) My question, or more of an observation, is that speculative realism has sometimes been portrayed as a movement away from commentary on texts within philosophy. Look at the blurb for The Speculative Turn, for example:-

 It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts… As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself.

What was interesting about the collision of medievalisms and speculative work in yesterday’s conference was the continuation of the commentary on texts. All the participants had provided a package of writings online for people to read in advance (you can find the links here). I have no problem with this – on the contrary, one of the things I most admire in medieval scholarship is its attention to texts. But I thought it was an interesting tension and I’d have been interested in hearing different responses to the question. This goes back to the question I posed in the summer:

Another is the question of access at a historical distance. How can I write about ‘territory’ as a word, concept and practice, in the early modern period, for instance, without the mediation of texts of some sort? They might be works of political theory, they might be treaties or lawbooks, they might be technical manuals of landsurveying or maps, but in some sense they would be textual, and textual strategies would be the way of access. I want to write about something that isn’t itself a text, but the historical approach seems to direct a way of accessing it. I raised similar questions before in relation to Jane Bennett’s book.