On Matters of Concern: Ontological Politics, Ecology, and the Anthropo(s)cene (pdf)
for more of Adrian Ivakhiv’s ideas see http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/
Ontology has become an issue (again) among philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers,science and technology scholars, and others, in a way that it has not been for perhaps a century.This paper arises from an entanglement of conversations in ecologically informed philosophy. Most specifically, it emerged from debates within the movement of “speculative realism” around the subspecies of that genre known as Object-Oriented Ontology(“OOO”) and its defense of an ontology of objects rather than processes.
More broadly, the paper attends to conversations in the “ontopolitical” milieu of contemporary social, cultural, and environmental theory, a milieu in which posthumanism, critical animal studies,actor-network theory,assemblage theory,critical realism,agential realism,nonrepresentational theory,enactive and embodied cognitivism, post-phenomenology,multispecies ethnography,integral ecology,and various forms of “new materialism,” “geophilosophy” and “cosmopolitics” fashion themselves as intellectual responses to the predicament indicated by such terms as the ecocrisis, the climate crisis,and the Anthropocene.
ANTHEM 