Orientation in Onto-Epistemology

Abstract

This conference asks: what is the potential of new materialism for historical research, on the one hand, and, on the other, for teaching and learning history? What are the opportunities and limitations of taking material sources (objects) not as passive remains but as actors of the past, in the present and for the future? How do objects participate in reflection on history as constructed? I want to answer these and slightly other questions by focusing on methodology, because not only do objects participate in reflection on history as constructed, but also are objects themselves historical, contemporary and speculative material. Objects participate in constructing history. Given that this hinders any form of direct engagement, naturally, the scholar is urged situate her knowledges. Objects exist in duration (ontology, aesthetics) and they are sensitive to the temporalities imposed on them (epistemology, ethics). Aesthetic and academic measurement is necessarily involved in our, and others‹, spatiotemporal and (inter)disciplinary engagement with objects. Hence, neither objects‹ descriptive, prescriptive or visionary labeling, nor their durational dimensions, shared with other matter, and with humans, animals, plants, genes, atoms, quanta, code, in multi-leveled interand intra-acting networks, are objective in the sense of neutral, disinterested. Choosing an approach, then, is unavoidable. Here, I choose to approach objects as embedded in, and embodied by, a specific historical, present and future time, and a specific temporality of theory, and I choose a location. Quite obviously, as I do my research in an entangled web of connections, the decisions I take for this talk do not exhaust the performativity (the doings) of objects, concepts or my measurement apparatus more widely conceived. They may travel to any discipline or discussion whatever. I would suggest that each of you here present and presenting reveals and releases her orientation in onto-epistemology (meaning quite simply: knowing in being).