Three Notes, Three Questions

When I was invited to respond to a talk to be given by Gra-ham Harman at a conference on Speculative Medievalisms, my first thoughts were not about Aristotle. My first thoughts were about Harman’s work on Bruno Latour, who has fa-mously claimed that we have never been modern. So perhaps we are becoming medieval, I thought: circuiting back through the Enlightenment and the Renaissance to a future age where darkness is to be revalued, with speculative realism, the meas-ure. Although I first read Latour in the late 1980s when some few sociologists studying science and technology were doing so, Harman’s reading of Latour was pleasantly surprising on two counts. His positioning of Latour as a philosophical thinker who is essential to the current ontological turn was resonant with my own early situating of Latour not only in science and technology studies but also as part of the philo-sophical debates of the late 1980s and 1990s around post-structuralism. However, Harman’s Latour offered another pleasant surprise in that it re-oriented my thoughts about phi-losophy and sociality, giving them a new direction beyond social construction, discursive construction, psychic or unconscious construction, and finally deconstruction. Harman’s Latour instead points to a rethinking of sociality that necessi-tates an ontological re-booting that aims to restore the won-der of objects, conceive of a causality of allure, and offer a take on aesthetics. In all this a refreshing aporia is inserted between ontology and epistemology, such that objects are allowed to be re gardless of our consciousness of them.