Objects galore

And yet another object-related essay to be read, this time at Push and Pull Redfern, focusing on the object in Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson by way of process-philosopher Alfred Whitehead’s theory of the object, using his lecture ‘Object’ as a point of departure.

Whitehead nonetheless remains what Quentin Meillassoux would call a correlationist, that is, still prioritizes the relationship that the perceiving subject has to the object:

Whitehead’s ‘object’ theory emerged from a desire for a philosophy of perception and cognition that engaged with materiality in a way that didn’t relegate sensual and psychological experience as mere “psychic additions” to an external, concrete reality. In other words, Whitehead was interested in a philosophy that took the realness of perceptive, cognitive, imaginative and creative experiences as stuff of the world, as objects of sensual engagement and conscious inquiry. This philosophy wholly rejects the bifurcation of nature and mind/body dualism. Whitehead’s focus wass process, convergence, encounter, flux, extension, simultaneity, regeneration and transformation.

The same problem that, again according to object-oriented philosophy, one might locate in Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s conflation of the object/subject as the  ‘Sobject’ (in the recent Notes on Conceptualisms).