The University of New South Wales
Faculty Member, School of English, Media and Performing Arts
Professor of Writing
About
My EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES project develops an interdisciplinary strand of thinking in the humanities. It is primarily theoretical, and aims to draw together and consolidate work going on in various sub-fields: certain branches of continental philosophy, ‘radical empiricism,’ ‘ecological humanities,’ and ‘science and technology studies.’ This theoretical alliance is nonetheless conceived of in relation to practical and applied problems, most notably with ecological issues and pedagogy.
The Humanities, for this project, is conceived of within fields circumscribed by cultural studies, literary studies, some kinds of ethnography and some kinds of continental philosophy. The dominant paradigm, against which it is working, and which it sees in dire need of innovation, is a humanities predicated on humanist phenomenology and replicative hermeneutics. By this is meant, 1) a subject-object conceptual structure which not only centres human agency, but also limits the very appearance of knowledge to its relation to human consciousness; and 2) a linguistic focus which makes the search for meaning, in relation to texts or events, the primary procedure.
While the highly productive turn to ‘affect’ in recent years may well be in the spirit of my project, most of that work is still be predicated on phenomenological reductions, even as it takes Merleau-Pontian or Deleuzo-Guattarian directions. This project, on the other hand, is unified theoretically and methodologically by its development and adaptation of Bruno Latour’s new metaphysics concerned with ‘different modes of existence’ (Latour, forthcoming). My project will not just rely on Latour. It will also bring to bear the ‘speculative metaphysics’ of Harman, Meillassoux, Goffey, et al; the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and the new pragmatics of the radical empiricists who are reviving A N Whitehead and William James.
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