“Now that the SR/OOO wave has crested, crashed, and receded, we can start to evaluate it with the advantage of perspective. I won’t attempt to offer an autopsy here, but I do want to address a few points and then offer a prediction for the future. I’ll refer to some details about SR/OOO, but I also want to consider it more broadly as symptomatic of the new ontological turn or “that thing that happened after poststructuralism.” In other words, while some of the specific issues within SR/OOO are important, I think that the advent of SR/OOO is most useful for marking an historical boundary, even if it can’t explain the larger state of theory and philosophy today.
The first general point, one that I already made a few years ago, is that what began as realism has ended as materialism. We’ve seen this happen with the “new ontology”: what began…