N. Katherine Hayles, “Speculative Realism and Speculative Finance: Exploring the Connections.” The 2013 Dennis Turner Memorial Lecture, Department of English, Wayne State University, 5 April 2013.
[KH abstract: Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) bears some startling similarities to contemporary finance capital, including the construction of objects whose content is obscure, increasing levels of abstraction, and the absorption of relations into objects. What can account for these convergences between two fields that are emphatically not engaged in conversation with each other? In exploring the question, this talk will discuss the economic conditions that currently shape academic employment as well as the financial markets.]
[BW disclaimer: the following are notes taken on my iPad during the lecture. No claims are made to adequately represent the structure and continuity of Hayles’s nuanced argument. Rather, these are “points sublimes” formulated in thinking along with her lecture. New arguments may be built out of them. Remarks in brackets are sidebars for responses or threads to pursue later.]
The Trading Pit and the Ivory Tower
[BW: boom and bust capitalism and devel of new media poetics]
global ecology and global finance as two great anxieties
mediation between/as spec realism [question of mediation; what is it?]
“secret alliances with speculative finance” with OOO [object-oriented ontology] as transducer
= “changing the construction of signals/values”
