Archive Fire

Jon Lindblom on DeLanda

2012-01-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

I just want to make sure everyone interested was in the know about Jon’s latest post over at Intensive Thinking which includes a transcript of a brief presentation he did about the neo-materialist philosophy of Manuel DeLanda. I couldn’t find a damn thing I disagreed with in his presentation (and I tried).

Below are some highlights, but for Shiva’s sake go read it for yourself:

“[H]ow should we explain the workings of a complex and mind-independent reality? In other words, the first question which any speculative realist thinker has to pose is: what is it that gives reality structure once we have removed the human/world-correlate, and dogmatism, from the centre stage? It’s here that DeLanda introduces his neo-materialism, which, as the name implies, is different from Marxist materialism, in that it ditches the dialectic simply as a transcendental illusion, and also argues that matter not only exists independently of our minds, but also has the capacity to express itself independently of our minds. So this is how he manages to circumvent the deadlock between idealism and naive realism, that is, by understanding matter as morphogenetically charged, or synthetically potent, with autonomous self-differentiating capacities.” ?” [source]

I’m intrigued by Jon’s use of the word potency throughout his post, and hope this might somehow 'catch on', resulting in some serious thinking about what that term has to offer speculative ontography.

“[E]ven if it is true that scientific theories can never give us a complete account of the real that doesn’t mean that they are completely wrong, or inadequate to draw ontological consequences from, as the speculative realist philosopher Ray Brassier has pointed out in response to similar criticisms: ‘The fact that our best current science will probably turn out be only partly true does not license the conclusion that it is all wrong and that it has no authority whatsoever’.” [source]

Check it out: Here

Slavoj Žižek - Catastrophic But Not Serious

2012-01-27T00:14:00.001-07:00

...

Slavoj Zizek: Catastrophic But Not Serious from The Graduate Center, CUNY on FORA.tv

Location: New York, NY / Event Date: 04.04.11

Summary: The Committee on Globalization and Social Change will launch with a special lecture by philosopher and critic Slavoj Zizek who will speak on "The Situation Is Catastrophic, but Not Serious." This alleged message of the Austrian military headquarters during WWI renders perfectly our attitude towards the ongoing crisis: we are aware of the looming (ecological, social) catastrophes, but we somehow don't take them seriously. What ideology sustains such an attitude?

[ h/t DMF ]

On Precarious Causation – Part 1: Epistemic and Causal Relations

2012-01-25T15:24:00.000-07:00

Continuing our discussion on the notion of ‘withdrawal’ in the context of object-oriented philosophy (OOP) Adam Robbert has a fine post up (here) probing deeper into the differences between ‘contingent’ and ‘absolute’ withdrawal. To reiterate, I like this distinction and would certainly count myself as firmly within the contingency camp, with one caveat: I advocate contingent withdrawal at the level of structural causality and complexity, while, at the same time - following Wittgenstein, Derrida, Rorty and others - accepting ‘absolute’ withdrawal at the level of episteme, conceptual knowledge and representation. And the separation here makes all the difference.

Let me explain: I maintain that entities can (and must) have direct causal access to each other's substantial being via causally affective force, but that such access is always limited, partial and precarious due to the differential capacities, sensitivities and vulnerabilities embodied by particular assemblages. Moreover, epistemic capacities, especially in humans, should never be confused for or reduced to basic structural relations (e.g., physical contact), if only because the defining (onto-specific) operations of human thought are not primarily material and causal, but mental, projective and imaginal. Put another way, assemblages can affect, associate, amplify, augment, absorb, and in some cases obliterate each other directly at a non-symbolic level of causal relation, with respect to their defining compositional arrangements (or substantial integrity), despite escaping the totalizing gaze and schematic intentions of conceptual thought as such. Objects can and do affect each other in all sorts of ways while remaining obscure and only abstractly apprehended by symbolic consciousness.

In this post and subsequent related posts I want to circle around my thesis of precarious causation by contrasting this position with Graham Harman's thesis of 'vicarious causation' and object-oriented philosophy more generally. In doing this I do not attempt to definitively refute Harman’s framework but, instead, take advantage of the ongoing discussion about ‘withdrawal’ and objects as an opportunity to render my own conceptual biases more explicit and begin articulating what I believe is a more consistent and empirically grounded realist philosophy. Along the way I hope to address either directly or indirectly much of what Adam, Matt Segall (here) and Jeremy Trombley (here) have recently added to the debate.

As touchstone, here is a characteristic description of absolute withdrawal taken from Guerilla Metaphysics:

“Objects withdraw absolutely from all interaction with both humans and nonhumans, creating a split between the tool-being itself and the tool-being as manifested in any relation. And along with this rift between objects and relations, objects are also split in themselves between their sheer unity as one object and their multiplicity of traits” (p. 5).

To begin with, as stated in my last post on this topic (here), I think the fatal flaw with the thesis of ‘absolute withdrawal’ is that it conflates ‘knowledge’ (epistemic activity) with ‘contact’ (structural relation) in a way that can often disrupt our ability to think the messy, co-implicated, participatory and complex nature of reality. By inflating phenomenology to the level of self-referential metaphysic Graham Harman deemphasizes the structureality of material instantiation (embodiment) and overemphasizes epistemic inadequacy, leading would-be ontologists through a series strange logical maneuvers and alienating assumptions. [see, for example, Harman’s ad hominem and condescending attack on materialist explanations of causality in Prince of Networks (2009), p.109]

Ultimately, I believe, Harman’s fusion of Husserl’s phenomenology of ‘intentionality’ (with all its Cartesian-Lockean assumptions) with Heidegger’s observations on cognitive apprehension serves to con-fuse perspective with proximity and qualitative experience with causal indirection. With this conflation Harman sets to work the assumption that human knowledge is no different in capacity and operation from the structural vicissitudes of material life.

Notice, for example, how Michael Austin characterizes Harman’s position in his essay, ‘To Exist is to Change’ (here):

“When I experience a tree, I have in mind not the real tree, but the intentional tree. The real tree is saturated with detail, the angle experienced, the lighting, my mood, etc, while the intentional tree is stripped of these. Changing any of these details does nothing to the intentional tree in my mind, “which always remains an enduring unit for as long as I recognize it as one.” The real me cannot interact with the real tree, but rather, we interact on a phenomenal level through the mediation of the intentional object. This intentional object relation is asymmetrical however, the real me only ever interacts with the intentional tree and never the tree in-itself.”

What stands out here is how Austin’s caricature seamlessly slips from a description of what is going on in the mind of an observer when he is witnessing a tree (i.e., moods, intentions, qualitative apprehensions) to a statement about a supposed inability of direct interaction without explaining why simply looking at a tree should be considered the paradigmatic example of encounters per se. On what grounds should we consider the cognitive experience of observation at a distance as the primary mode of access in every instance? None, on my account – and I will explain why later in this post.

There are several assumptions in Harman’s four-fold which I reject, especially the split between the Real and the Sensual (which I will address later), but what I want to emphasize at this point is that Harman is taking what is essentially an epistemological argument developed from particular lines of phenomenological thinking and transmuting them into a series of ontological claims.

Now, I can think of two possible genetic reasons for this “radical” move:

First, I believe Harman is influenced by Heidegger’s absolutization of Dasein as the fundamental structure of the Being of all beings. That is to say, Harman following Heidegger willfully ignores the characteristic and relevant differences between the particular (onto-specific) nature of human existence and the constituent natures of other modes of existence by way of privileging conceptually delineated (supposed) ontological conditions while under-estimating sensually disclosed ontic actualities.

Second, Harman’s epistemic/causal conflation seems to be a direct consequence of an adherence to panpsychism (via Whitehead). Panpsychism, of course, is the stance that some capacity akin to mentality or consciousness, or perception is inherent throughout the cosmos. If Harman does subscribe to such a position then it should come as no surprise that he assumes that causal relations operate in near identical fashion as human cognition. Every occasion of relation becomes, under such a view, an instance of intention laden apprehension, or “translation”. Take for example the indicative title of Harman’s unpublished work, “Intentional Objects for Non-Humans” mentioned in Austin’s Speculations essay cited above.

The mix of these two sets of supposed background assumptions (phenomenological inflation and panpsychism) offers plenty of conceptual opportunity for positing ontologies of disjunctive relations and “hidden” and “absolutely withdrawn” realities. If Being as such is believed to be fundamentally structured the way human-beings are, and if the cosmos is shot through and through with mentalistic capacities and activity, then the limitations of animal cognition and human mental operation can be assumed (wrongly) to simply be one instance of a more general, universal or transcendental tendency of all things.

To unpack the details of both these claims would take a book length treatment in itself, and I’m completely unmotivated to take on such project, because, as I have said, my interest is not in providing a sustained critique of Harman’s work (nor object-oriented ontology generally) but to contrast as sharply as possible his views with my own. As supplement and excuse I will irresponsibly say that much of the confusion inherent to the claim of ‘absolute withdrawal’ stems from, I believe, both Heidegger and Harman investing all their analytical powers and metaphysical faith in the phenomenological method – at the expense of various other methodological practices, informative injunctions, analytical resources and invariant corporealities.

The problems with this investment are many, but what I suggest is that we need not accept such “radicalizing” and conflating maneuvers. From an empirically-informed position, ‘knowledge’ and ‘contact’ are not identical operations in the world. Knowledge takes place at the level of abstract significations. And signification involves very different processes than those involved in basic physical interactions. Whereas ‘knowledge’ involves detached (intangible) linguistically dependent projective imaginings, ‘contact’ involves material-energetic (tangible) structurally affective catalytics. The former results in a symbolic event, involving memory, signs and abstraction, whereas the latter results in a physical and electric event, involving multi-scaled causal chains and structural vulnerability.

To be sure, I believe ‘knowledge’ is also an embodied capacity activated by brains, but it is not strictly material in that animal gestures can be externalized, or as I like to say tokenized, through socially mediated linguistic and conceptual markers (schema, metaphor, etc.) in a way that detaches them from rudimentary biological intentionalities, and then requiring personal negotiate through memory, recursion, plasticity and projection (as imagination, or what I call phantasy). [see, for instance, McLuhan’s ‘extensions of man’ arguments, or the whole corpus of literature relating to the 4EA paradigm in cognitive studies.]

It is important to understand that I am not simply relying on my own implicit theory of human cognition here because I could just as easily suggest bundling the assumptions embedded in that last paragraph into the rather innocuous and singular claim that ‘knowledge’ involves extra-biological, extended or symbolic capacities irreducible to the less complex processes of non-cognitive materials. Thus, the kernel of my main argument here is that human cognition and conceptual thought (‘knowledge’) entail onto-specifically emergent and extended – and withdrawn - capacities that do not obtain at the level of composite base materials. This, I argue, is the difference that makes all difference. And by confusing cognitive events (intentionality and symbolic relation) with causal events (materiality and structural relation) OOP mistakes the ‘absolute’ limitations of perspective and detached, tokenized (form-al) thought for the defining features of ‘contingent’ causal interaction.

Unraveling exactly how this fatal mistake effects the overall logical machinery of OOP is a massive endeavor, best left to the ingenuities of academic scholars, and so will not be pursued here. Instead, what I would like to pursue in this series of posts is what it might come of a speculative realism that takes into consideration more complex and experientially supported (empirical) understandings of embodied life. By circling back on the notions of ‘access’, ‘materialism’ and ‘relation’ I will argue that avoiding the conflation and subtle correlationism at the core of Object-Oriented Philosophy and reintroducing the distinction between knowing (epistemic relation) and being (structural relation) enables us to conceptualize better the manner in which causation is both direct and partial, as well as precarious.

Resonance & Flow

2012-01-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

from resonance-film.com:

"Resonance is a collaborative project with over 30 independent visual and audio designers/studios. The aim was to explore the relationship between geometry and audio in unique ways."

from mrkism.com:

"The Flow looks at the supervening layers of reality that we can observe, from quarks to nucleons to atoms and beyond. The deeper we go into the foundations of reality the more it loses its form, eventually becoming a pure mathematical conception. Layer upon layer the flow builds new codes that create new codes, each version computing a new, more complex state based on the previous one."

Deleuze Interview

2012-01-19T14:13:00.000-07:00

From the Filmmaker:

This film was made upon an invitation by Anna Powell of Manchester Metropolitan University as a part of her ongoing project on Deleuzians from different parts of the world. We did this short film together with Hüseyin Mert Erverdi who is a MA student at Film and TV Dept., Istanbul Bilgi University. After a series of discussions I decided that I should appear as smoking a cigarette through rhizomatic fumes of which I should be saying "re-so-nance" in slow motion. As for my answers to Anna Powell's questions, Mert invented a flow of paragraphs which resonate well but do not synchronise with the sound track I prepared for the film. The sound track includes some excerpts from KOG, by the.clinamen (Z.Aracagök and Anthony Donovan) released by White Label Music, UK, 2009 and my answers.

.SOURCE: sifir0

Obama rejects Keystone XL Pipeline

2012-01-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

With intelligence and leadership U.S President Barak Obama has rejected the application for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline - a project that would pipe raw Tar Sands materials to the southern United States from Alberta, Canada. Here is Obama's official statement:

The White House - Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release January 18, 2012

Statement by the President on the Keystone XL Pipeline:

Earlier today, I received the Secretary of State’s recommendation on the pending application for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment. As a result, the Secretary of State has recommended that the application be denied. And after reviewing the State Department’s report, I agree.

This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people. I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil. Under my Administration, domestic oil and natural gas production is up, while imports of foreign oil are down. In the months ahead, we will continue to look for new ways to partner with the oil and gas industry to increase our energy security –including the potential development of an oil pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico – even as we set higher efficiency standards for cars and trucks and invest in alternatives like biofuels and natural gas. And we will do so in a way that benefits American workers and businesses without risking the health and safety of the American people and the environment.

Source: Here

UPDATE: An independent analysis performed by University of Nebraska professor Dr. John Stansbury, an environmental engineer, claims that TransCanada’s safety assessments for their proposed Keystone XL pipeline are misleading and based on faulty information. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry crude oil from Alberta, Canada to Texas, crossing numerous states in the U.S. Read the full (PDF) report: here

Onto-Specificity and the Varieties of Assembly

2012-01-16T22:54:00.000-07:00

While discussing the difference between ‘contingent withdrawal’ and ‘absolute withdrawal’ with Adam Robbert (here and here) the always perceptive Jeremy Trombley intervened to highlight a fundamental question:

“[C]ould withdrawal be a characteristic that is not intrinsic to all entities, but which reflects the different ways in which entities are composed?” [source]

In my estimation this is exactly the right question. Jeremy’s question goes right to the core of what I am trying to think with regard to ‘onto-specificity’. My own commitment to onto-specificity (or compositional particularism, if you will) entails that each 'event' must be considered in its own right, and always in context. The argument here is that every entity and situation is irreducibly what it is composed of. And it is the specific composition of things-in-relation that need to be respected, engaged and described in detail if we are going to be able to understand complex nature reality.

However, one might wonder, does this compositional view entail a reductionist formulation where everything is viewed as a mere ocean of atomic combinations? Absolutely not. I fully accept the cosmological emergence of complex phenomena endowed with differential and cumulative capacities and powers. So when I use the term 'composition' here I mean to include the myriad of ways quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, etc., become co-implicated together to form various assemblages at various scales. And when I refer to onto-specfic compositions I am attempting to take seriously and call attention to all those levels of organization and material-energetic associations and expressivities present in particular situations/ecologies. The specificity of complex and emergent beings and capacities is exactly what I do not want to gloss over on the way to reified metaphysical categories. As a result, the ontographic project of 'taking seriously' must entail a ‘partnership’ with scientific modes of practice and thought in an ongoing negotiation of concepts, facts, influences, speech-acts and materials.

But to answer Jeremy’s question more directly: YES, entities/assemblages are unique compositions that can be more or less structurally withdrawn depending on their particular constitution and embodied powers. It seems to me there is a wide spectrum of assemblages which display differential powers and capacities for structural relation with and among each other. An object/assemblage’s ability to enter into relations with another assemblage or group of entities is specific to its material-energetic composition as deployed in particular affording contexts. It is the varieties of onto-specific confluences of embodied properties, expressions and affects that I am trying to map out – and which cannot adequately be described as “objects” in every instance.

This, in general, is the problem I have with metaphysics. Metaphysics is an attempt to abstract general axioms about beings and ‘being-as-such’ in ways that often underdetermine the diversity of things and thus do symbolic violence to the complexity of specific realities. In this case, it provides very little philosophical assistance to posit, project or abstract some a supposed universal (ontological) tendency when dealing with specific events or situations which involve so many different scales of interaction, forces, flows and structures. To universally apply a label such as “object” or “process” to actually existing complexes and assemblages seems merely academic in the presence of so many different sorts of events and situations which otherwise overflow, exchange, transgress and organize.

As Jeremy explains:

“What I mean is that there's so much talk about how objects are withdrawn as if it's an essential and characteristic trait of all objects. Also, it implies that all objects are equally withdrawn in every circumstance. Maybe that's not what anyone is arguing here, but that's certainly the sense that I get sometimes. But why couldn't an object be composed in such a way that it is not withdrawn at all - at least in certain circumstances? Similarly, why couldn't an object be composed in such a way that it is completely withdrawn in almost every circumstance (neutrinos, and dark matter come to mind)? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to say that different entities are differently withdrawn in different circumstances. Maybe this is what you and Adam mean by "contingent" withdrawal?” [source]

That is exactly what I suggest. Withdrawal is contingent upon the onto-specific assemblages and contexts involved. And, again, it helps little for us to have abstract conversations about a particular framework or ontology if our claims are not checked against the background features of existing empirical and theoretic facts, knowledge sets and methods. Without building in a high degree of specificity to our discourse and research we may never be able to understand the rich nuances of both objects and processes as they actually exist.

Jeremy then goes on to clearly state the main thrust of my comments regarding the problem with conflating 'knowledge' and embodied experience:

Also, I think there's still some ontological confusion about the nature of knowledge in this debate, and I think you're right to point out the conflation between, as you say, "understanding" and "grasping." The gap between "essence and appearance" exists, I believe (and have argued on my blog, briefly), because the thing-itself and the knowledge-of-the-thing are ontologically distinct entities. The one can never become the other, and so the gap will always persist. Whereas the apple and my body can become intimate through the process of digestion. I'm not sure where to go from there, but I'd be interested to see where you and Adam take that. [source]

This is it precisely: if we willfully ignore the characteristic differences between the capacity for knowledge (cognitive powers) and the capacity for contact (powers of the flesh) we generate unwarranted and empirically invalid assumptions about the nature of object-object relations. Just because we can never "completely" or "totally" or "absolutely" or "exhaustively" know or symbolic code the inherent structurally withdrawn complexities (depths) of an object does not mean we are unable make direct contact with their substantial being. It simply means that both humans and non-humans only have partial access to them. Mistaking the natural limits of conceptuality for the supposed limits of embodied experience is a fatal mistake for any serious realist philosophy. These capacities obtain at very different levels of organization.

Rather, in order for us to build a robust realist ontology attention must be paid to specific assemblages (and their potencies: materials and expressions) as well as the particular “event mechanics” they are enmeshed within - regardless of the fact that we can never truly step outside our networks and constitutional relations to get a intellectual ‘view from nowhere’. We are of this world in a way that simultaneously destroys our fantasies and affirms our ancestral flesh. The way out of correlationism is through.

Ontological Intimacy, Depth and Deployment

2012-01-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

portrait of a mosquito on display at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington

Over at Knowledge Ecology Adam Robbert has responded to my recent post on the notion of ‘withdrawal’ by reframing the discussion with an important distinction. Adam writes,

“I would like to suggest that we can frame this discussion within two conceptions of withdrawal: absolute and contingent (the first associated with the work of Tim Morton and Graham Harman, the second with Michael and Levi Bryant).” [source]

I support Adam’s distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘contingent’ withdrawal. And I am willing to admit favour for a version of withdrawal consistent with a materialist understanding of contingency. I believe entities are withdrawn, but not in the sense Graham Harman and Tim Morton seem to advocate. I believe entities are ~~‘actual occasions’~~ assemblages and events with material and organizational depth often exceeding the grasp and understanding of other entities - but which are nonetheless substantially accessible.

I want to highlight two assumptions embedded in these statements:

1. I’m making an important distinction between “grasp” and “understanding” which seems to become confused in Harman’s extension of Heidegger’s tool-story.

Understanding (as 'translation') is not equivalent to structural relation (“grasp”). Understanding is a 'second-order' emergent capacity of recursive biological memory, gesture and symbolic projection coded (abstracted) and afforded by interpersonal (cultural) networks. And the cognitive operations of 'understanding', classification and representation cannot possibly determine or “exhaust” the complexities of things encountered. The incompleteness of language and symbolic representation renders our translative capacities partial and limited. Embodied symbolic apprehension is inherently non-equivalent and token.

Yet, without some type of 'access' to the encountered objects of our embodied experience - and therefore access generally between objects - abstraction, codification and semantic approximation (intelligibility per se) would not be possible. As I attempted to argue in my last post on this topic, cognitive apprehension is possible be-cause symbolic understanding and intentionality are not the only ways objects or assemblages relate. Entities also often relate in various non-intentional and non-symbolic (structural) ways at different scales of material extension and organization. Direct relation is both necessary and possible viz. the emanating, composite and substantial elements of any two (or more) entities that have casual influence on the structural arrangement or unique determining patterns of another. [*]

My argument here can be folded into an appeal to the existence of obliteration and absorption events.

Steven Shaviro’s mosquito bite example (mentioned in my last post on withdrawal) is an example which demonstrates how human flesh obliterates the functional operation and substantiality of a mosquito's composite affective capacity.

human digestive process

And I would cite animal digestion as a significant example of an absorption event where the material and organizational depth and unity (complexity) of an entity is directly encountered, disassembled and redistributed. Would the empirically informed critic argue that metabolic processes fail to directly penetrate the structure and capacity of the food animals ingest? Probably not. And are those penetrating (affective) metabolic capacities integral to an animal's embodied and substantial composite powers? Indeed they are. So not only do animal bodies directly encounter, for example, an apple according to capacities essential to their continued operation, but animal bodies can also completely obliterate an apple’s compositional integrity by absorbing the apple's elements and potencies into its very own system. If this doesn’t convince us of direct causal relation (or what I like to call ontological intimacy) I’m not sure what could?

The take-away point here is that structural encounters are direct by virtue of their causal efficacy - the differential ability to affect the structure and composite powers or capacities of others - whereas the translations, apprehensions and phantasmic representations generated by particular encounters are necessarily “selective”, obscure and partial. That is to say, causality and relation are always direct but partial. The so-called “rift between essence and appearance” applies generally to symbolic operations but not necessarily to material relations and structural causality as such, because cognition, gesture, intentionality and conceptuality are different kinds of powers or capacities than physical contact and embodied relation. And by conflating the limitations of cognition and representation (epistemology) with embodied experience and causality in general (ontology) the notion of "absolute withdrawal" fails to convince.

To return briefly to the examples above, if a mosquito lands on my arm and penetrates the structural integrity of my skin with his snout we can say the mosquito and I are in direct contact or relation. But we must also say that such contact is only partially because both of us are accessing only a limited portion of the other’s total 'depth' of being. The mosquito may be ingesting my blood but it is not penetrating the structural integrity of my spleen and other aspects of my being. And the mosquito may be resting on my arm with a portion of its extensive composition beneath my skin but I have no access to its internal organs or substantive depths. Our encounter is limited by the inherent organizational and material complexity of both mosquitos and I, and therefore by the availability or lack thereof of our components. And this is what I mean by 'withdrawal' or contingent depth.

2. My appeal to depth is meant to call attention to an entity's uniquely "withdrawn" complex compositional assembly. Every 'object' or assemblage has a contingent and expressive potency particular to its material-energetic composition and capacities. 'Potency' is offered here as a technical term in my discourse referring to the affective, embodied and expressive properties of individual assemblages. Thus individuality as temporal singularity is to me an object or assemblage's unique potency, in the sense that a giraffe has a particular potency, likewise with uranium and a collection of H2O molecules. "What can a body do?" Depends on its composite onto-specific potency. And it is in the direct but partial mingling of material-energetic assemblages where potencies of all sorts often relate, combine, collaborate, conflict, constrict, or otherwise affect, augment, amplify and generate the myriad of evolved ecologies and terrains.

So I agree with Levi Bryant in that entities can only ever have “selective” access to each other based on each object’s particular (onto-specific) organizational and material-energetic depth, or endo-complexity. There will always be a certain degree of withdrawn substantiality in relations of contingent material objects/entities corresponding to the endo-complexity (depth) of any particular assemblage - just as there will always be some 'distance' between signifiers and objects of signification. While at the same time, I reject the notion that entities are absolutely withdrawn from each other.

As I argue above, entities can and do interact (penetrate, exchange, affect, obliterate, absorb, etc.) directly according to their unique structural compositions and expressive (sensual) substantiating properties - the same qualities that constitute the very fabric and flesh of their actual existence. And it is the primordial accessibility and vulnerability (ontological intimacy) of elemental life which affords each and every affective and consequential event, encounter and relation. Which is to say, it must be the case that entities are capable of affecting each other directly and substantially, if only partially, lest the notion of causality become unintelligible and knowledge itself be rendered impossible.

As Adam writes,

“Michael’s concern here, as I read it, is that it makes no sense to experience and grapple with a relational, contingent world of affect whilst at the same time suggesting that this panoply of activity is the result of objects that do not touch–clearly all kinds of beings are crashing into one another everywhere! What a mess! So, if real entities everywhere are touching each other nowhere, than how is that anything is happening at all? And further, if it is the case that entities are withdrawn absolutely from one another then what possible sense of responsibility can we have towards such entities (a necessary question indeed)? Can we even be responsible to such entities?” [source]

The answer is, of course, that if objects ‘absolutely withdraw’ both causality and responsibility break down, leaving us with a cosmos full of alienation, Platonic caves and ineffectual vicars. But we don't inhabit that cosmos do we? Withdrawal is necessarily contingent, finite and never absolute.

Adam continues,

“In my understanding, Bryant is arguing not for an absolute withdrawal, but a contingent withdrawal wherein a real object is deployed in and through its relations, though never fully so in any specific set of relations. What does this amount to? It seems to me, if I am reading Bryant correctly, that this form of contingent withdrawal suggests not the absolute absence of the real object, but a real object always-already deployed amidst a “regime of attraction;” objects are withdrawn in the sense that they are irreducible to relations and contexts, but not fully departed from all relations and contexts.” [source]

This is how I read Levi as well. In fact, the more I try to grapple with Levi’s framework the more I find his conclusions consistent with my own. And, like Adam, I find my own ‘ecological’ sensibilities compatible with the process-relational thinking inherent in Levi’s notion of “regimes of attraction”.

However, I would like to push such conceptions of inter-being even further to try and conceptualize the creative nature of mutuality, co-manifestation, affordance and non-linear causality in an intimate and erotic wilderness of beings, exchanges, flows, depth and networks, rather than overemphasizing the role of the temporal agental powers of specifically withdrawn assemblages. It is the very nature of potent “deployments”, in all their temporal, spatial and material complexity and vulnerability that interests me the most about the cosmopolitics of contemporary life - as access and relation are not simply issues of theory, but of application and possible tactics. The onto-specific nature of contingency, 'deployment', and relation constitute a Wilderness of being, becomings and practice from within which all realties emerge.

In sum, I think the following point stands: ‘withdrawal’ is necessarily contingent and precarious as a result of the ubiquitous ontologically intimacy of this immanent material-energetic cosmos.

The End of Capitalism?

2012-01-10T23:37:00.000-07:00

WOW. That is all I have to say about a recent post at Indecent Bazaar entitled, "The End of Capitalism". Therein the author lays bare the immediate political implications of trying to better understand the amazing complexity inherent to all social assemblages. The author (who are you?) calls upon important work done by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Manuel DeLanda.

I honestly could not articulate a better understanding of the multiplicity of social systems (and indeed all assemblages) at various scales, as well as the need for analytical specificity in terms of both general ontology and political practice.

Below is my favourite passage from the post, but please do go read the entire piece for yourself:

It is illegitimate and inaccurate to speak of capitalism in terms of a unifying entity (in the same way it would be to speak of the US as a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one) because such social descriptors erase and obscure differences. While feminists have long departed from “holistic expressions for social structure”, conceptions of capitalism as hegemonic, ubiquitous, systematic and so on are still prevalent and resilient.It follows from this virtually unquestioned view of capitalism as the dominant form of economy that noncapitalist and anti-capitalist sites come to inhabit the social margins in the realm of experiment (as recently illustrated over at Necessary Agitation). As J.K. Gibson-Graham contend: “it is the way capitalism has been ‘thought’ that has made it so difficult for people to imagine its supersession.” (There is little doubt that the archive of my blog unflatteringly reflects the same point). As the authors go on to argue, what needs to be fostered instead is a theory of “economic difference;” conditions under which the economy might be “less subject to definitional closure,” whose identity is not fixed or singular.The alternative of “theorizing economic difference, of supplanting the discourse of capitalist hegemony with a plurality and heterogeneity of economic forms” is akin to what Manuel DeLanda attempts in ‘Deleuze, Materialism and Politics’. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of double articulation (the selection of materials out of a wide set of possibilities—first articulation—and the arrangement of these loosely ordered materials into a more stable form—second articulation) with which to conceptualize the process through which material form and identity are generated, DeLanda extends this micro-macro distinction to strata operating at infinitely different scales (rather than only two levels of scale: ‘the molecular’ and ‘the molar’).According to DeLanda, “double articulation is, in its simplest version, the process of joining parts to yield a whole with properties of its own. Since most component parts are smaller than the whole they compose, the part-to-whole relation is a relation between small and large scales.” It would be a mistake, however, to treat the macro and micro as absolute scales. There are never only two scales operating in material or social processes: every entity that is perceived as an autonomous whole is itself populated by component parts, and those parts in turn have their own parts…. “A more adequate approach,” argues DeLanda, “would be to treat them as relative to a particular scale.”For this reason it is problematic to employ terms like ‘society as a whole’ in our theorizing, for the largest entities are every bit as singular and unique as the smallest. “In general, what needs to be excluded from a materialist social ontology are vague, reified terms like ‘society’ (or ‘the market’, ‘the state’, etc.) Only hacceities (individual singularities) operating at different spatio-temporal scales should be legitimate entities in this ontology.”

Yeah, I know, pretty damn awesome...

Riffing On Withdrawal: Difference, Embodiment and Access

2012-01-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

In a duo of recent posts at Larval Subjects Levi Bryant takes up the notion of object “withdrawal” in earnest once again by addressing several of the most relevant questions percolating in the thoughts of many critics of object-oriented philosophies.

In these posts Levi not only clearly states the core problem I have with any object-oriented metaphysics but then goes on to skillfully differentiate his own understanding of “withdrawal” from Graham Harman’s by further articulating philosophical commitments consistent with a move towards integrating process-relational thinking with object-orientated investigations.

To begin with Levi states,

“It seems to me that one of the single greatest challenges that proponents of withdrawn objects face is this charge of proposing an empty metaphysical abstraction that makes no difference. I resolve to treat the object as withdrawn from all relations such that we have no access to it whatsoever (this is not, incidentally, my concept of withdrawal). In this way I seek to preserve the object form all erasure under relation. Yet in doing this, what has happened? Have I not won a Pyrrhic victory? Insofar as I’ve claimed that the object is withdrawn from all relation and access, I’m also led to the claim that nothing can be said of the object qua object because the object is withdrawn. As a consequence, the object becomes, at the level of concepts, an empty point. As thoroughly withdrawn, I am unable to say anything of the object. Any quality that I might attribute to its reality is necessarily a quality for me (in relation), and not a quality of the object itself. And this is true both metaphysically (in the non-pejorative sense) and epistemologically. It’s not just that the object is empty for me, the person seeking to know the object. No, it is also that the object is empty for any other object, because the real being of the object is withdrawn from each and every object, existing in a self-contained vacuum, unable to touch any other object.” [source]

This is precisely the crux. If objects, entities, assemblages, etc., are incapable of ‘touching’ or interacting or relating to each other is some sort of direct way there is absolutely no possibility of encountering the things-in-themselves, much less knowing anything substantial about them. As Levi puts it later in the post, “there’s just no way anyone can know anything about it and thus it makes no difference in our thought.” There has to be some sense in which entities make contact or they would never be able to communicate (in the broadest sense of that term). And I would even venture to add that any such world populated by inaccessible, vacuous, isolated objects could only be an alienated, underimplicated prison-house of pure/ideal and forever undetectable substances.

However, fortunately we do not live in such a world. We don’t have to search far to find the myriad of ways humans touch, penetrate, swap materials, propagate, interfere, incapacitate, augment and otherwise intervene upon each other’s substantiality (external and internal), as well as the integrity and constitutional operations of so many other organic and non-organic entities and assemblages. We live in a world with sex, germs and atomic fluctuations. We live in a world of chemical catalytics, metabolic processes, cellular mitosis, symbiotic relations, nuclear fission and co-evolutionary dynamics. Each assemblage of expressive materials enacts a dynamic, or what Levi calls a “regime of attraction”, unique to the wider ecology of flows, exchanges and influences in which particular assemblages are implicated. Our world is extensive, immanent, collaborative, distributed, intensive and enacted all the way down. These facts are as irreducible as any formal metaphysical caricature we might seek to project upon the world.

But the question remains: how best are we to describe and attempt to explain this mix and mingle (and mangle) of things, flows and relations? Is there one great set of signifiers that can explicate and then codify the nature of such a wilderness of being? I can’t imagine there would be since, as Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) remind us, all assemblages and contexts are unique and irreducible to either the processes or elements of which they are composed. Every actual entity is, I argue, a fully embodied material-energetic assemblage with an irreducible onto-specific expressivity, or “individuality” as such.

OOO is right to champion this “withdrawn” onto-specific potency as the flash-point where intensive differences are generated. It is with specific thresholds of actual assembly and organizational unity where causal affectivity takes on its particular character and function. That is to say, the distribution of “objects” and assemblages are difference per se; they are the ‘what’ that makes a difference, and they are the rhythmic punctuations that comprise the song of this cosmos.

However, where I think OOO goes too far (at least with Harman and Tim Morton) is where they assign absolute identities to such potent beings to an extent where there is an imposition of metaphysical boundaries that do not actually exist. Now, to be fair, the understanding of the term “object” varies greatly among the OOO enthusiasts – which, in effect, serves to stretch the term beyond any ordinary linguistic coherence. But what unites these thinkers is a willingness to advocate for the “complete” or “total” withdrawal of all objects/assemblages from each other and even from themselves. This radical boundary-making, I suggest, can only obscure the already complicated project of investigating BOTH the assembled efficacy and individuality of entities (their onto-specific potency, or 'being') and their fully implicated, material-energetic, processual, embedded and temporal relations (their 'becomings') simultaneously. I argue, counter-intuitively perhaps, that it is the onto-specific substantially of entities and assemblages that should caution us to avoid universally characterizing such complexities as “objects” or “relations – and talk more specifically about particular admixtures, alliances, complexes, distributed realities and the ecosystems they enact.

This call for attention to the particular composition of specific entities is echoed in Glen Fuller's recent comments here:

"[T]he composition of matter and energy are entirely compositional and contingent. As energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, then this or that composition of matter and energy is continually being transformed (ie entropy) since the beginning of the universe. The given composition of anything would therefore be a particular contingent composition of matter and energy." (emphasis added) [source]

As well as Jussi Parikka's questionings here:

"I guess OOP wants to treat everything as an object - across scales, genres and epistemological prejudices - and hence bring a certain flatness to the world - to treat humans and non-humans on equal footing, a project which I am in complete agreement with - but does this not risk paradoxically stripping entities, the world of specificity?" (emphasis added) [source]

So as I see it we have two serious sets of problems with OOO at this point: one cluster epistemological and the other ontological. First, as we said above, if all real entities are “totally withdrawn” and inaccessible (and to be encountered as “sensual objects” and only alluded to via metaphor) then, as Levi suggests, we cannot claim to have any real understanding of them. In comparison, however, the related ontological problem of “total withdrawal” is even worse: if we have no substantial, reliable or direct access to real objects then we can have no real affect on them – and thus causality itself breaks down in such an account. Even in Harman’s ingenious “vicar” system of causality the contradiction quickly becomes obvious in that even if we need vicars we must, in some sense, have direct access/contact to/with them. That is, for ontological realism to be intelligibly argued it must be argued that ontological intimacy must be the case. Both contact and access must be possible.

Consider, for example, the following argument from Steven Shaviro:

"[W]e do encounter objects all the time, the entire universe is composed of objects encountering other objects. The fact that these encounters do not involve the manifestation of all the powers or capacities of the objects in question does not mean that the objects are somehow failing to encounter one another, or that there needs to be aÂ split between an object and its manifestations, as Bryant and Graham Harman both maintain. When a mosquito bites me, I am changed thereby, although this is only to a relatively minor (albeit irritating) degree. When I slap and kill the mosquito, it is changed so extensively as to be altogether obliterated.

When the mosquito bites me, it only interacts with a few of my qualities (my skin, my blood, my body heat). And even when I murder the mosquito, I only encounter a few of its qualities... [I]n Bryant’s terms, it is precisely because the mosquito interacts with certain of my powers or capacities or local manifestations, and I interact with certain of its powers or capacities or local manifestations, that we must say that the mosquito and I do encounter one another and interact — this is precisely the way that two entities perceive one another and interact.

In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. The mosquito only apprehends particular aspects of me; but it is “me” as a complete object, rather than just those particular aspects or manifestations of me, that is changed by the encounter. To say that objects do not encounter one another, because they cannot entirely know one another, is to reduce ontology to epistemology, once again. [source]

These twin objections to OOO obviously need to be developed further in order to approach academic persuasiveness. However let me go just a little further on the issue of “withdrawal” by suggesting that part of the reason OOO – at least as originally proposed by Graham Harman – continues to assign absolute identities to assemblages in general, despite the obvious objection from anyone with materialist sensibilities that all real “objects” mix, mingle and exchange determining influences, is because of a conflation of cognitive apprehension (epistemology) with structural relation (ontology). Harman graphs Husserl onto Leibniz by way of Heidegger.

In other words, my hunch is that part of the reason Harman and others overextend Heidegger’s hammer-story is that Harman (or is it Husserl?) fails to properly differentiate conceptuality (knowing) from embodied perception (experiencing). Harman seems to assume knowledge equals experience and thereby feels justified in extinguishing all traces of corporeal pre-phenomenological physicality – and its structural-relational quality - from the actual encounters of human objects/assemblages. This conflation of human multiplicity and the elimination of non-cognitive structural relation is then radicalized and projected back unto the physical universe at large. Harman seems to believe that if we or any other objects are incapable of knowing something in its "entirety" we are thus, by logical extension (or conflation), unable to directly encounter it. This completes Harman’s alchemical move of morphing inadequacy (of conceptuality) into inaccessibility, resulting in what I find to be an ultimately alienating discourse that erodes our reckonings of both causality and intelligibility. And this, I think, is a fatal mistake for any kind of realism.

My claims here, of course, remain to be supported with reference to specific passages found within Graham’s work. And I must stress that my intention here is NOT to tear down the house that Harman built. I have learned a tremendous amount from Harman, Morton and especially Levi Bryant. If fact, I consider myself a student of these gentlemen not their peers. But my statements above, as far as they are at all intelligible, reflect my attempt to work through what I think are the main logical inconsistencies and unfortunate rhetorical effects inherent to object-oriented theory.

Fincher's Tattoo

2011-12-26T18:07:00.001-07:00

David Fincher's new film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo expresses a profound sense of female competence. Not only does Lisbeth Salander transform victimization she embodies the greatest virtues of the dark pathos of feminine power. If you haven't seen it you should go now. @brightabyss

#thegirlwiththedragontattoo

dispossessed

2011-12-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

via Ashley Wood

atmospheres unknown

2011-12-22T00:04:00.004-07:00

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.”

- Henry David Thoreau

Letter From Orwell

2011-12-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

A letter from George Orwell to his publisher as he was finishing 1984:

h/t mishearance

War Is a Racket

2011-12-21T00:05:00.002-07:00

In 1935 retired U.S Army General Smedley D. Butler published a book entitled ‘War Is A Racket’ in which he lays bare the economic profiteering and commercial nature of publicly funded state warfare. In the book Butler was shockingly frank about his experience as a career military officer in the midst of a frenzy of wealthy elites clamoring to make profit from all sides of some of the earths most devastating conflicts.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

In an often cited quote from the book Butler says:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Butler then summarizes the main points of his book in the following key passage:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

read the entire book: Here

Daniel Dennett - The Evolution of Purposes

2011-12-20T01:34:00.002-07:00

Intro:

Before there was life on Earth, there were no purposes, no reasons. Things just happened. How could purposes emerge from such purposeless conditions? Looking back at the evolution of life on the planet, we can now see - if only dimly - the patterns that led to the exquisite functional organisations of matter that living forms exhibit. We human beings are the only living things that can represent these reasons, and comprehend them, but that does not make them illusory.

Recorded at the Carillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre at the University of Melbourne on 15 November 2011:

Ted Bundy 1989

2011-12-14T00:37:00.002-07:00

One of the reasons this website has been 'dark' for weeks now is I have started a new project in my professional life related to psychiatric institutions and the policies and practices that animate them. As a result of this new challenge I have returned to the writings of Foucault, Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, but also to media and more popular writings on madness, abnormality and so-called psychotic individuals. I find my best work is done when it is informed by my indirect curiosities. Right now I'm trying to think the relations between flesh, fantasy, deviance, desire, compulsion, moral schema and social influence - and how these mix with institutional efforts to control and regulate the affairs of human life.

Below is an interview with Ted Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell, 1946-1989) the day before his execution on the electric chair, January 23, 1989, for the multiple kidnappings, rapes and murders of young women in the 1970s. Bundy was interviewed by (the self-righteous) Christian apologetic Dr. James Dobson from Raiford Prison in Starke, Florida.

Here Bundy talks at length of the influence of pornography, violent media and images on the evolution of his most deviant desires and murderous behaviours. It is a fascinating confession of a man who came to self-interprete his life through the lens of what seems to be a heightened moral sensibility.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space

2011-11-15T00:23:00.000-07:00

From Michael König:

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 and 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km. All credit goes to them.

WATCH ON FULL SCREEN

Shooting locations in order of appearance:

1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night

[ h/t Tim Morton ]

The Story of Broke

2011-11-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

From The Story of Stuff Project:

"THE STORY OF BROKE - The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better."

Watch More : Here

Gandhi and the Politics of Non-Violence

2011-11-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

The video below is a teach-in presented by Professor Snehal Shingavi @ #OccupyAustin. His talk goes into the history of the India Liberation movement and critically examines the role Gandhi played in it. If we want to effectively call upon the mythos of the Mahatma to affect social change we need to seek honesty and build a space of understanding that compares and illuminates key tactics and strategies against ruling classes, instead of moralistically dismissing those tactics deemed “violent”. Dogmatic pacifists please take note!

'Gandhi and the Politics of Non-Violence'

by Professor Snehal Shingavi at #OccupyAustin:

You Are Not A Punk Rock Band

2011-11-04T00:11:00.000-06:00

FYI Grunge:

You are not a Punk Rock Band.

Just saying.

Not a bad thing (because i actually dislike Punk - although Rock and I are on speaking terms, which is cool since, you know, what happened 'that night' with Jazz at the lake house), but I just wanted to put that out there.   

Yours truly,

Folk.

Operation DarkNet

2011-10-31T12:33:00.003-06:00

"Pedophiles connecting to a concealed child pornography site got an unwelcome surprise last week, courtesy of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Lolita City, a child pornography site run on over a concealed “darknet,” has been taken down by Anonymous members, and account details of 1,589 users from the site’s database were posted as evidence.

The takedown is part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, an anti-child-pornography effort aimed at thwarting child pornographers operating on on the Tor network. Anonymous’ attack was focused on a hosting service called Freedom Hosting, which the group claims was the largest host of child pornography on Tor’s anonymized network. 'By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites,” Anonymous claimed in its statement. “Among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date, containing more than 100GB of child pornography'."

The Life Of The Buddha

2011-10-28T16:58:00.001-06:00

"If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." -Albert Einstein

The following documentary (50mins) covers the life of Siddhartha Gautama, a young prince from India who went out to find the reason for Dukkha [suffering] of human life. He later found the reason of Dukkha and teached a way to live life. He was later known as the Buddha, the founder of "Buddhism".

[ see also the short doc The Buddha (20mins) ]

Bernard Stiegler on Man & Technics

2011-10-27T23:02:00.000-06:00

Bernard Stiegler (b.1952) is a French philosopher currently at Goldsmiths, University of London and the Université de Technologie de Compiègne. He is best known for his major work Technics and Time. Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery.

Below are clips from the film The Ister:

The Rhythm of Data

2011-10-26T16:56:00.001-06:00

Data representation is becoming more and more interesting. In this simple but brilliant video, Alexander Chen shows how he transformed a time-based representation of the NYC subway system map into a model for a string instrument. Each intersection entails plucking, and the length of the plucked string is inversely proportional to the note’s height. Chen's own description of the project is below:

Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli's 1972 diagram. More details at: chenalexander.com

Conductor (2011) by Alexander Chen. Video capture.

Manuel DeLanda on Aristotle and Deleuze's Realism

2011-10-23T17:46:00.001-06:00

From the European Graduate School:

In this lecture, Manuel De Landa discusses metaphysics, universality, particularity, generality, singularity, realism, mathematics, and social science in relationship to Leonhard Euler, Kurt Gödel, Henri Poincaré and Michel Foucault focusing on a priori truths, virtual capacities, affects, differential calculus, necessity and contingency. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011.

Žižek on Ironic Distantiations

2011-10-22T22:58:00.000-06:00

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis.

Thank You #OWS!

2011-10-22T03:29:00.003-06:00

“It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! . . .

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declareth all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.”

- R.W Emerson, from "The Transcendentalist, a Lecture Read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842."

Process, Contact and Simultaneity: Riffing Off Shaviro

2011-10-20T15:28:00.015-06:00

In a recent post responding to Graham Harman’s Cosmos and History article on Thomas Metzinger Steven Shaviro provides a sympathetic reading of Harman’s critique of Metzinger’s more reductionist tendencies as well as certain conclusions Metzinger draws about the essence (or lack thereof) of the human self.

My knowledge of Metzinger’s work is anemic, but if what Harman and Shaviro say about Metzinger’s arguments against the existence of “self” is accurate I would tend to agree that a description of the layered, embedded and processual nature of human cognition and self-consciousness contributes more to explaining what the self actually is (e.g., a distributed network of embodied and effectual activity) than explaining it away.

What interested me most about Shaviro’s post, however, was his lucid revisiting of his long-standing arguments against the “withdrawal” of objects in favor of a more Whiteheadian processual and eventual metaphysical vision. It is a fun day for me when someone as versed and insightful as Steven Shaviro re-ignites a bit of flame under the old ‘process vs. object’ debate.

To be clear, I think the debate almost always approaches a true non-debate from the standpoint of narratives and frameworks flexible enough to accommodate both process and object-hood, or interrelatedness and irreducibility, without dogmatically adhering to either side of such fantasized dichotomies. Entities simultaneously have a unique efficacy and irreducible substantially while being eternally vulnerable and open to the flow of atoms, energy, matter and information. And to privilege either of these facts is to make an undeniably human distinction based almost entirely on temperament. Moving equilibriums, temporal assemblages, open systems, processual events or, to use a term from Ian Bogost, “unit operations” are everywhere apparent and apprehendable: not just within the empirical (and complexity) sciences but also in our immediate awareness where things impinge, extend and interpenetrate our direct experience and lived bodies.

Shaviro then goes on to provide what, in my view, amounts to a definitive rehashing of the most salient arguments against conflating ontological contact with epistemological opacity in accounting for causality generally and how objects interact specifically. Bottom-line in the case of humans: visceral, sensational experience is not identical to “knowledge”. Likewise, encounters between objects can be direct but partial when those encounters result in the meeting of affective forces despite the lack of totality in the mutually responsive and 'translative' nature of those contacts (especially in the case of objects without central nervous systems). Contact and experience need not be encompassing to be 'direct'.

Below are excerpts from Shaviro’s post which get right to the key points:

“[A]ll “things” are “really” processes. But for me, this doesn’t mean that things (or Harman’s objects) are thereby “undermined” by something else that is more essential than they are. For the fact that objects are “reifications” of processes doesn’t mean that they are illusory, or even that they aren’t basic. For the endurance of things, or their establishment of an “identity,” as a result of “reification” (which I think would better be called, in Whiteheadian parlance, social transmission and inheritance) is something that is perfectly real in and of itself. Endurance is an accomplishment, a singular and specific achievement in every case.

Moreover, this endurance is not something that happens (as Metzinger seems to claim, at least according to Harman) in our perceptual process, but actually in reality itself, in the very things which we are in process of perceiving…

We are always in direct contact with reality — since we are a part of this reality, rather than being separate from it (i.e. rather than being “withdrawn”). We are not caught in some Cartesian or Humean mental prison, familiar only with our own sense impressions (or familiar only with our own languages, in the 20th century version of this line of thought). The point, however, is that this contact cannot be reduced to, or captured as, “knowledge"… [O]ur contact with other entities is not restricted just to relations of knowledge. Harman is right to say that my concept of a tree, however full and nuanced, will never be equal to the tree itself. But this does not negate the fact that the tree has “touched” me, and I have “touched” it, non-cognitively and unconceptually…

‘Phenomenal’ contact need not, and cannot, be reduced to “epistemic” contact. Contact among entities is ontological, not epistemological — and this other dimension, which Metzinger at least senses as a problem, is omitted entirely from Harman’s account, when he says that, because we do not actually know other entities, or even ourselves, therefore all entities must ‘withdrawn’ from one another — and even from themselves.” [underlines added]

I must emphasize here (in relation to Shaviro’s metaphor) that humans and other objects are never truly caught in a "prison" of translation, they are that prison. Affective entities are “prisons” (assemblages or apparatuses) situated in place, in the world, with 'doors' capable of being opened. As embodied matrices of capacity and relative depth, objects contact other objects or assemblages directly viz. all those inherent, onto-specific and characteristic sensitivities which define the limits of their constitutions. Yet, it is the relatively circumspect properties of specific sensitivities and capacity for response or adaptation which makes such contacts, exchanges, experiences or encounters partial. That is, interaction and causality are most often direct but partial. [cf. my post Conjuring the Gap - re: what I call ontological intimacy]

There are more riches in Shaviro’s post than I can hope to plunder in this post so I suggest those curious go read the entire offering: here.

Jeffrey Sachs Message to Wall Street

2011-10-19T13:48:00.004-06:00

Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Earth Institute and Professor of Sustainable Development, Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and the founder and co-President of the Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the United Nations Millennium Project's work on the Millennium Development Goals, eight internationally sanctioned objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger, and disease by the year 2015.

Sachs has been strongly criticized for past sympathies for privatization and neoliberal economic ideology, as well as his role in helping American business elites plunder the Russian economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sachs was an adviser to Eastern European governments in the implementation of so-called “economic shock therapy” during the transition from communism to a capitalist market system.

Since that time, and as a result of the overwhelming evidence that neo-liberal policies only advantage established economic powers, Sachs has increasingly advocated for more prudent regulatory practices and the building of an international system of aid and economic mutualism between wealthy nations and institutions and periphery populations in vulnerable geopolitical regions. Sachs now argues for what he calls in his most recent book, The Price of Civilization, a "mixed economy".

Sachs’ recent article in the Huffington Post is a surprisingly frank characterization of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, considering the fairly mainstream financial circles he operates within. Below are a few excerpts from the article, but I urge everyone to read the entire piece:

The protestors are not envious of wealth, but sick of corporate lies, cheating, and unethical behavior. They are sick of corporate lobbying that led to the reckless deregulation of financial markets; they are sick of Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal asking for trillions of dollars of near-zero-interest loans and bailout money for the banks, but then fighting against unemployment insurance and health coverage for those drowning in the wake of the financial crisis; they are sick of absurdly low tax rates for hedge-fund managers; they are sick of Rupert Murdoch and his henchman David Koch trying to peddle the Canada-to-Gulf Keystone oil pipeline as an honest and environmentally sound business deal, when in fact it would unleash one of the world's dirtiest and most destructive energy sources, Canada's oil sands, so that Koch can profit while the world suffers…

Here, then, Wall Street and Big Oil, is what it comes down to. The protesters are no longer giving you a free ride, in which you can set the regulations, set your mega-pay, hide your money in tax havens, enjoy sweet tax rates at the hands of ever-willing politicians, and await your bailouts as needed. The days of lawlessness and greed are coming to an end. Just as the Gilded Age turned into the Progressive Era, just as the Roaring Twenties and its excesses turned into the New Deal, be sure that the era of mega-greed is going to turn into an era of renewed accountability, lawfulness, modest compensation, honest taxation, and government by the people rather than by the banks.

Go read the entire article: here.

[ h/t Edward Berge ]

UPDATE OCT 21.2011:

Jeffrey Sachs at #OccupyWallStreet

Chris Hedges in Times Square, October 15, 2011

2011-10-19T00:19:00.000-06:00

On October 15th Occupy TVNY met with Pullitzer prize-winning author and journalist Chris Hedges in Times Square, New York City where tens of thousands of people assembled on a global day of action. Chris shares his feelings on where the Occupy movement has come from and where it is heading.

Bennett, Bryant and Harman on Speculative Realism

2011-10-16T21:07:00.005-06:00

Below Levi Bryant, Jane Bennett and Graham Harman delivered a series of interesting papers on ontology and speculative realism at The Center For The Humanities in New York on September 15th, 2011:

Speculative Realism
Levi R. Bryant, Jane Bennett, Graham Harman
Moderated by - Patricia Clough

How does the current “speculative turn” that has occurred in philosophy theorize the liveliness of objects? If speculative realism is staunchly non-anthropocentric, challenging Enlightenment notions of the subject, what are the ethical and political implications of such a stance? Join three preeminent speculative realist thinkers, Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman for an evening of conversation, theorization, and speculation drawn from their current writings. Patricia Clough will moderate the conversation. The related exhibition “And Another Thing” is on view in the gallery from September 14 to October 29, 2011.

Speculative Realism - Part One from The Center for the Humanities on Vimeo.

Speculative Realism - Part Two from The Center for the Humanities on Vimeo.

Monopoly World

2011-10-13T22:05:00.003-06:00

This image has been widely circulated. As it should. If you are not shocked by the implications of what this image illustrates you might just be dramatically under-informed about how economic systems work. Occupy what?

click to enlarge

An Outside Jobs

2011-10-13T21:59:00.003-06:00

On the occasion of getting an email from a reader asking what my thoughts are on Steve Jobs death and the accompanying public lament I only have this to say:

Billionaires don't make the world better.

Striking The Root of Wall Street Corruption

2011-10-08T11:19:00.001-06:00

[ h/t @xenophrenia ]

Striking The Root of Wall Street Corruption from Sean McDaniel on Vimeo.

#OccupyWallStreet

Olbermann reads collective statement of Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-07T12:22:00.000-06:00

#OccupyWallStreet

Trapped

2011-10-07T11:46:00.000-06:00

ARE our prisons becoming the mental asylums of the 21st century? Living under brutal conditions and without access to medications and therapy we lock away people instead of helping to heal them - and by extension ourselves and our societies more broadly.

The 7 minute video below is a stark look at our current "justice" systems:

[ h/t Integral Options Cafe ]

Stock Trader Speaking Truth About the Coming Economic Collapse

2011-09-29T22:11:00.004-06:00

Independent trader Alessio Rastani shocked BBC news anchors and the whole financial community on Monday (Sept 26/11) by speaking the truth about the looming economic crash in Europe and eventually around the world. The video below went “viral” within 24 hours and already has over 2 million views.

Particularly interesting was Rastani’s statement that “governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs does.” I’m still amazed at his candor considering he makes his living within the system he is so brutally exposing.

Martin Luther King Jr Speaks Zeitgeist

2011-09-20T13:35:00.000-06:00

"Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era."

Courtesy of TheFifthGreatApe.

Evan Thompson on Life and Mind

2011-09-18T19:16:00.000-06:00

Evan Thompson is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a leading researcher in theories of "enactivism" and embodied cognition. Thompson has written extensively on cognitive science, phenomenology, and the philosophy of mind. He is the co-author of the groundbreaking work The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), and his most recent book, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (2007) is a brilliant update on his version of the embodied mind thesis.

Evan Thompson: "Mind in life and life in mind" from eSMCs on Vimeo.

Protevi on Embodiment, Enaction and Deleuze

2011-09-16T20:08:00.002-06:00

I'm rebooted this post in order to present each of the eSMCs talks on their own. Below is a stimulating presentation by Lousiana State University philosopher John Protevi delivered at the eSMCs Summer School seminar "The Future of the Embodied Mind" in San Sebastián, Spain, September 5th-9th, 2011. Enjoy. [ h/t New APPS ]

Deleuze’s contribution to an enactive approach to biology
by John Protevi

Abstract: I will preface my presentation with a brief outline of the three-fold ontology of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Deleuze’s formula is that (1) intensive morphogenetic processes follow the structures inherent in (2) virtual differential multiplicities to produce (3) actual localized and individuated substances with extensive properties and differenciated qualities. Simply put, the actualization of the virtual, that is, the production of the actual things of the world, proceeds by way of intensive processes. Various authors have shown how this scheme provides an ontology for dynamic systems theory.

I will then suggest three ways in which this schema can provide a conceptual framework for an enactive approach to biology, keeping in mind at all times the tradeoff between the effort necessary for learning a new vocabulary and new ontological scheme versus the benefits of adopting that new framework. My model here is the work of Hubert Dreyfus in making the vocabulary and ontological scheme of Martin Heidegger relevant for cognitive science.

First, I will discuss Deleuze’s notion of a “larval subject” accompanying “spatio-temporal dynamisms” (= intensive morphogenetic processes) in relation to the sense-making of autonomous systems, as laid out in Thompson’s synthesis of Varela’s notion of autopoiesis and Di Paolo’s notion of adaptivity.

Second, I will discuss Deleuze’s notion of “counter-effectuation” (roughly speaking the feedback from actual and intensive to the virtual) in relation to Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s notion of environmentally induced phenotypic variation (= “developmental plasticity”) as the leader in evolution.

Finally, I will discuss two notions associated with Developmental Systems Theory in Deleuzean terms: a) the heterogenous nature of the developmental system (intra- and extra-somatic elements) in terms of Deleuze’s notion of “assemblage” and b) the notion of niche-construction in terms of Deleuze’s notion of “territorialization.”

from eSMCs on Vimeo.

you can find related videos & resources: here

Embodied Minds and Thinking Bodies

2011-09-15T14:05:00.002-06:00

Cognition at the crossroads:

from embodied minds to thinking bodies

by Michael Wheeler

from eSMCs on Vimeo.

you can find related videos & resources: here

Welcome to Climate Reality Now

2011-09-15T00:25:00.000-06:00

Happening Right Now:

24 Presenters. 24 Time Zones. 13 Languages. 1 Message. 24 Hours of Reality is a worldwide event to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis. It will consist of a new multimedia presentation created by Al Gore and delivered once per hour for 24 hours, representing every time zone around the globe. Each hour people living with the reality of climate change will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events — including floods, droughts and storms — and the manmade pollution that is changing our climate. We will offer a round-the-clock, round-the-globe snapshot of the climate crisis in real time. The deniers may have millions of dollars to spend, but we have a powerful advantage. We have reality.

24 Hours of Reality will be broadcast live online from September 14 to 15, over 24 hours, representing 24 time zones and 13 languages. Watch the Live Stream below:

LEARN MORE: HERE

Talisman Energy Funding Climate Science Denial at the University of Calgary

2011-09-14T15:56:00.018-06:00

From the Ottawa Citizen:

A major Alberta-based oil and gas company helped to kick-start an elaborate public relations project designed to cast doubt on scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming with a $175,000 donation in 2004 channelled through the University of Calgary, a newly-released letter has revealed.

The donation from Talisman Energy was the largest single contribution to a pair of trust accounts at the university that received $507,975 in donations to produce a video and engage in public relations, advertising and lobbying activities against the Kyoto Protocol and government measures to restrict fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Read More: Here

Some context from Wikipedia:

The August 2007 Newsweek cover story "The Truth About Denial" reported that "this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks, and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change." "As soon as the scientific community began to come together on the science of climate change, the pushback began," according to University of California, San Diego historian Naomi Oreskes. The article went on to say that individual companies and industry associations—representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, among others—formed lobbying groups to enlist greenhouse doubters to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," and to sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research.

The Democracy of Objects

2011-09-13T19:34:00.003-06:00

Just returned home to find out Levi Bryant's Democracy of Objects is now available online for free. For those of you who don't know, Bryant is a philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalyst at Colin College whose work focuses on object-oriented ontology and social theory. His popular blog Larval Subjects is an inspiring example of a public intellectual applying his trade in a open, accessible and endlessly thought-provoking manner. Do yourself a favor: read, consider and buy his book.

The Buddha

2011-09-10T00:54:00.002-06:00

Watch the full episode. See more The Buddha.

[ h/t Leon - After Nature ]

Tom Sparrow on Sensation and the Elements

2011-09-08T14:18:00.009-06:00

I’m still waiting for an acquaintance to unlock the secret chambers of my former CPU’s operating system to gain access to my documents (including forthcoming posts on Integral Ecology), but at least I’m getting around to a lot of desired reading while I wait.

Currently I’m enjoying a few amazing essays by Tom Sparrow. Sparrow is a philosopher currently teaching at Slippery Rock University. And I couldn't be more excited about his forthcoming book, Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology. He blogs at Plastic Bodies.

Below is an extraordinary passage from Tom’s essay, “Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis”, where he is riffing off some core ideas in Lingis's work - talking up elementary life and sensuality as a fundamental mode:

“The elements that give life to each one of us by offering themselves as the very stuff of our existence are sensuous material—luminosity, tactility, and sonority bathe our sensitive bodies. As the real source of our nourishment, they lend us sensibility and illuminate our world. Through the elements, the affective quality of sensuality—the unbearable or ethereal modes of bare life—is able to condition our “spontaneity.” No one can spontaneously wrest their psyche from a depressive state or truly induce a rapturous joy within themselves without the influence of some external power. Sensibility is not formal in its pure state, as Kant thinks. It does not come from inside and project itself outward; it does not derive from some transcendent location, over and beyond the sensuous manifold. The perceived sensuous manifold is always immersed within a sensuality which generates a creature whose sensibility emerges with its ripening.” – Tom Sparrow, p.113

I’m enthralled by Tom’s developing aesthetic/metaphysic and intend to follow is project intensely. I have also discussed his work previously here and here.

Cross-fertilize Tom’s words with those of Lingis on “the elements” below:

“Life lives on sensation; the elements are a nourishing medium…The light is not just transparency which the gaze slips through on its way to distant surfaces; our gaze delights in the vivacity of the light itself. It assimilates in its languor the soft depths of the dark. The sonority is not just a succession of sense data which the hearing identifies as signals and information-bits; the ears are contented with the resonance of realm beyond realm as with a content. The touch lets go of things to relish the terrestrial and solar warmth. The earth extends its indefinite expanses before the steps of the nomad who is not scouting for any retreat, moved by his appetite for open roads and uncharted deserts. Erotic sensuality is not a hunger…It surges in a vitality that lacks nothing, is fed and sheltered and contended, a vitality that greets the earth, the skies, the day and the night with the ardor of kisses and caresses.” [Alphonso Lingis]

[ Lingis quote courtesy of Adam Robbert of Knowledge Ecology – a blog any thinking primate needs to follow ]

Debunking the "Ethical Oil" Myth

2011-09-08T00:13:00.001-06:00

Author and activist Naomi Klein debunks 'Ethical Oil' at the Tar Sands Action.
Klein was arrested at the White House with a delegation from the Indigenous Environmental Network on Friday, Sept. 2, 2011, during the two weeks of sit-ins to halt the tar sands pipeline. They were among 1,252 people arrested:

Unintended Consequences

2011-09-07T21:56:00.001-06:00

Every new invention changes the world -- in ways both intentional and unexpected. Below historian Edward Tenner tells stories that illustrate the under-appreciated gap between our ability to innovate and our ability to foresee the consequences.

Edward Tenner is an independent writer, speaker, and editor analyzing the cultural aspects of technological change.

“everything is affective”

2011-09-02T09:53:00.003-06:00

Below is Steven Shaviro riffing on affect and politics – taken from Adrian Ivakhiv's recent post updating us on the symposium exploring Shaviro’s book Post-Cinematic Affect:

“For we do not live in a world in which the forces of affective vitality are battling against the blandness and exhaustion of capitalist commodification. Rather, we live in a world in which everything is affective. What politics is more virulently affective and vital than that of the American Tea Party? Where is intensive metamorphosis more at work than in the “hyper-chaos” (as Elie Ayache characterizes it, following Quentin Meillassoux) of the global financial markets? It is not a question of a fight between affect and its “waning” or exhaustion (whether the latter is conceived as the actual negation of the former, or just as its zero degree). Rather than being on one side of a battle, affect is the terrain itself: the very battlefield on which all conflicts are played out. All economic and aesthetic events today are necessarily aesthetic ones, both for good and for ill." [also see here]

Adrian has also commented extensively on Shaviro’s book in a previous and highly stimulating post entitled, "Post-Cinematic Affect in the Era of Plasticity". Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for Adrian’s book exploring cinema, affect and ecology (Ecologies of the Moving Image). My brain drools just thinking about it.

UPDATE: From a physicist's viewpoint...

“From a physicist's viewpoint, though, biology, history, and economics can be viewed as dynamical systems. Each system consists of many individual parts that interact with each other. In economics there are many agents, such as consumers, producers, governments, thieves, and economists. These agents each make decisions optimizing their own idiosyncratic goals. The actions of one agent affect other agents. In biology, individual organisms - or from a more general perspective, individual species - interact with one another. The actions of one organism affect the survivability, or fitness, of others. If one species changes by mutation to improve its own fitness, other species in the ecology are also affected.”
– Per Bak and Maya Paczuski, 1994

Properties, States and the Ubiquity of Change

2011-08-31T15:41:00.002-06:00

From Larval Subjects:

In Book I of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius writes,
A property is that which not at all can be disjoined and severed from a thing without a fatal dissolution: such, weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow to the wide waters, touch to corporeal things, intangibility to the viewless void. But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth, freedom, and war, and concord, and all else which come and go whilst Nature stands the same, we’re wont, and rightly, to call accidents.
A property is something that is intrinsic to the thing such that it really is in the thing. Within the framework of my onticology I quibble with this a bit because I hold that what is really in things is powers or dispositions, not qualities or properties (the latter of which I call “local manifestations”). The weight of a rock is not in the rock itself, but is a relational property that emerges in relation to where the rock exists. This weight or local manifestation is different on the planet earth and the moon due to the different masses of these planets. Moreover, this weight or local manifestation differs with the speed at which the rock moves. Most qualities or local manifestations are, I believe, relational in this way. They are not in the things themselves, but rather emerge in and through the relations the entity entertains with other entities.

art by Vitor Bosshard

And I, of course, side with Lucretius in that properties, or what Levi calls 'qualities' above, are not 'other than' the emanating substantiality of the thing itself. The complex strata of material and expressive potencies (or what Tom Sparrow might call "sensations") that constitute an object-assemblage's substantial being are identical to its intrinsic properties, with no remainder. [also see here]

However, I'm not at all convinced of an ontological split between "properties" and "states" - considering the vulnerability and openness of actual object-assemblages. Object-assemblages always exist under particular conditions. And their existence is contingent upon the "cooperation" between conditions, existing affective forces and their assembled properties. Indeed, every actually existing entity persists through relations that not only augment or amplify or otherwise change its properties and capacities - it's potency - but also afford those capacities, and provides the context in which the properties of object-assemblages can be expressed in the first place. That is to say, 'thingness' is always a relational affair with coalescing properties (what i call elements) forming temporal (temporary) object-assemblages (matrices) through intensive and material-energetic processes. In my thinking "powers" or "dispositions" are animated by a collaboration between both the qualities or properties inherent in the material composition of onto-specific entities and the ever-present conditions in which they exist. So, no, properties are not in things, they are those things as they exist in relation.

In the context of Levi's example, then, I also argue that the weight of a rock is not "in the rock" itself, but instead, for me, is a compound event/actuality that emerges in relation to both the rock's constituent properties and capacities (its potencies) and its relational situation within the wider field of affective forces. Both the intrinsic properties of an object-assemblage and particular background conditions must be present for weight to occur.

But Levi continues:

Setting this aside, what is really interesting in this passage is Lucretius’s discussion of states. In effect, Lucretius observes that the social position of women, the proletariat, minorities, kings, the wealthy, is not a property of these entities, but a contingent state that can pass away or be changed.

And I argue that the properties of kings and proletariats, for example, do enter into the contingent dynamics of particular states. It is the specific material, relational and historical combination of the properties of kings, weapons, energy supplies, horses, ecosystems, castles and such flowing into and augmenting or amplifying each other that generates the particular "state" of affairs of any given situation. Each object-assemblage contributes its own affective potencies and material vibrancies to the compositional character of the larger field or matrix of action in their own onto-specific ways, while simultaneously being vulnerable (capable of being changed in unexpected ways) to the emergent dynamics loosely contained within. It is this inherent dynamism of actual occasions that allows change (social or otherwise) to not only be possible, but in fact inevitable.

Agency, Substantiality and Potent Alliances

2011-08-30T15:12:00.009-06:00

DMF on the agency of objects:

I'm all for seeing the world of objects as having their own physical capacities but I think that they are truly alien and have nothing like interests, hell I don't even think that most of the objects/processes that make up our own bodies, even at the level of our kluged non-conceptual neurofunctions have interests/intents...

Without a doubt I share Dirk’s hesitation about granting ubiquitous “agency” to non-sentient beings. Yet, I’m not sure that proponents who argue for the general agency of things are in fact seeking to project “intentions” as they are traditionally or commonly conceived. I believe such theorists are in pursuit of a more mutinous reevaluation of the efficacy of things.

That said, I think we might resolve some of the hesitation about the agency of objects by relaxing (or stretching?) what we mean by both ‘agency’ and ‘intentionality’. For example, we could ask, “does a machete have intentions?” Within a certain frame of reference we might reply, “of course not”. A machete doesn’t have the requisite capacities (e.g., plasticity and recursivity) to expressively ‘want’, ‘desire’ or be interested in objects outside its bounded substantiality. So in a traditional sense a machete is not a will-full entity. However, a machete does have certain irreducible (onto-specific) properties that define its intrinsic boundaries and capacities. And these assembled “physical capacities”, as Dirk calls them, are affective - that is, they make differences in the world in terms of where they came from, how other entities or assemblages encounter them (e.g., passively or actively), and the relations they enter into. That is to say, a machete brings with it a material-affective substantiality with capacities (to cut, to threaten, etc.) unique to its individual existence. Such substantial capacities inherent to assemblages is what I call potency. [see here]And it is the general potency of actual entities, I think, is what theorists mean when they refer to a thing’s “agency” (e.g., Bennett’s “thing-power”). A machete’s potent capacities are a kind of rudimentary agency.

So it’s not a matter of, say, my spleen having “intentions” all its own, but about my spleen expressing partially “withdrawn” capacities and properties irreducible to (but simultaneously enmeshed within) its functioning in my body. Likewise for machetes. Machetes have a potent materiality specific to their actual existence and irreducible to the relations they enter into – despite the crucial relational character of actual temporal consistency.

Now this is where it can get very interesting for social theory, because no object is an island. And no potent assemblage exists in a vacuum. Every actually existing entity is implicated (to varying degrees) in forces and relations with a multiplicity of other processes, flows, networks and objects that embody basic forms of “agency” or potency in their own right. This implicate primordial plurality or cosmopolitanism of differential properties constitutes the context in both individual objects and ‘societies’ of entities become possible. What we get, then, at a fundamental level, is a series of inter-acting and intra-acting potencies capable of coalescing into contingent assemblages (what Latour calls compositions) and ecologies expressing differential degrees of affective force, and thus distributed agency. These substantial matrices (or alliances, complexes, societies, ecologies, situations, contexts, etc., etc.,) of affective force and extensivity operate on all scales of reality.

Each object-matrix contributes its own agentic potency (material and expressive capacities) towards that alliance - thus creating novel material-energetic dynamics and amplifications of affective force hitherto not possible. No ‘virtuality’ needed; only relatively individuated matrices of affective potency colliding and catalyzing to generate unique combinations and assemblies of capacity.

Human agency and cognition is a great example of this: without the affordances of interobjective support, extended symbolic networks, social communication, group affective resonance, etc., humans would have very rudimentary “agency” with relatively unrefined cognitive capacities. It is because we are nurtured and connected beings perpetually implicated in ecologies with potent affordances that we can amplify our abilities and acquire relevant instantiated skills, historical understandings and communal participations. (see the growing 4EA paradigm for details).

To provide one (morbid) example of this analytic, we can understand how the irreducible proto-agency or potency of machetes combined with the agency or potency of humans, combined with the diminished potency of depleted ecological “resources” generated a matrix/situation or “regime of attraction” (Levi Bryant) where 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda in 1994. Without the affective potency of machetes or the weakened potencies of humans, or the scarce potencies of Rwandan subsistence conditions, genocide may not have actually occurred. And without an acknowledgement of the irreducible “agencies” of all these elements we can’t truly understand what and how it happened, and how to decrease the possibility of it ever happening again.

So, without going too much into here, what fascinates me, first, is how objects/complexes/processual-units/matrices enter into specific, historical “alliances” or networks with other complexes to form complex, potent (“agentic”), novel, distributed and emergent assemblages with irreducible capacities and properties specific to those alliances - and then secondly, what worldly affects and effects (consequences) do specific matrices or assemblages and their alliances have on the evolution and cosmopolitical trajectories of humans and non-humans alike.

[ see also: The Dynamics of Affective Objects ]

James Hansen on Alberta Tar Sands Action

2011-08-29T22:31:00.003-06:00

Dr. James Hansen is a giant in the scientific community and widely recognized as one of the first internationally respected scientists to begin recognizing the dangers and effects of global warming. Hansen has appeared in front of congressional committees and advised heads of state on numerous occasions.

Needless to say, when Hansen speaks both climate change denialists and the scientific community listen:

tarsandsaction.org / StopKeystoneXL

Connolly, Bryant, Lucretius and the Wild

2011-08-26T16:27:00.001-06:00

With any luck I will be have my new computer (finally switching to Apple!) later this evening – as my laptop gave up the ghost over a week ago. Being without internet access at home is an odd feeling for me. The good thing about being un-linked, however, is that I finished reading William Connolly’s A World of Becoming. I always enjoy Connolly’s writing and this book is a well-crafted rendering of the kind process thought I can certainly support. I’ll post more on this sometime soon.

Meanwhile, Levi Bryant has a great post up on reading Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura ('On the Nature of Things'). My favorite passage in this post (one which I entirely agree with) is his last:

With Lucretius, by contrast, we get nature as absolute interactive immanence where whatever comes to be is but one of the possibilities of nature. Within this nature there is no outside or other (there is no culture, for example, that is something “other” than nature), but rather there is just The Wild. Culture too is a part or manifestation of the wilderness. One cannot travel to the wilderness or wild because wherever one is they are already in the wild or wilderness. Our building of houses is no more unnatural than beavers building damns. And this conception of nature, without teleology or divinely decreed ought is the condition and mark of any genuinely emancipatory project.

Wherever you go, there you, as nature, are. The wilderness of being is immanent to itself – dynamically so. Go read the rest of Levi’s post here.

Four Horsemen - Official Trailer

2011-08-18T00:56:00.000-06:00

We will not return to 'business as usual'. The Four Horseman is an independent feature documentary which lifts the lid on how the world really works.

Demand the movie now: http://eventful.com/fourhorsemen
Website: http://www.fourhorsemenfilm.com
Official Facebook: http://facebook.com/fourhorsemenfilm

Coming Autumn 2011.

Directed By: Ross Ashcroft

Featuring: Noam Chomsky, Max Keiser, Joseph Stiglitz, Prof. Herman Daly, Dr. Ha-Joon Chang, Simon Johnson, Michael Hudson, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, John Perkins, Tarek Al Diwany, Camila Batmanghelidjh, James Turk, David Morgan, Hugo Salinas Price and more...

Bridging Life, Time and Blogging?

2011-08-15T14:04:00.013-06:00

I am conflicted. I feel as though I should apologize to all you anonymous and not so anonymous readers for my recent inactivity, while simultaneously wanting to extend my hiatus after the last 2 weeks or so spent traveling more or less off the grid. Time away from electro-digital entanglements has always reinvigorated my interests in blogging in the past but something is different this time around. This time I can imagine myself walking away (so to speak) from twitter, from wordpress, from tumblr, from blogger, from Google – from all of it.

This is a strange ‘sensation’. What perplexes me most here is how a few weeks away can influence my perception of my online activities so much. For a person who loves research and access to information as much as I do why would I now consider walking away from it all? Pondering this I can conjure three possible (and interrelated) motivations for this new attitude:

1. Deluge: being bombarded relentlessly with all sorts of information, updates, emails and comments is becoming increasingly hard to accept. It is simply no longer possible to read, respond, answer and/or engage with all of the bits and bytes showering my inbox and google reader on a daily basis. I was off the grid completely for about 10 days and I had 800+ new emails waiting from me – 200 of which were relevant and interesting enough to warrant engagement.

2. Inauthenticity: with the little time I have to freely interact with people on the net I find it increasingly difficult to have authentic communications, conversations and exchanges, let alone develop personal relationships. One of the main reasons I started spending so much time on the internet in the early 90’s was to be able to communicate with people who shared my interests, wherever they may be. As a frequent user and abuser of early chat rooms in my 20’s I met a wide range of often wonderful (but sometimes insanely maladjusted) people who shared my passions and interests - and who taught me so much on so many fronts. Accept for a few low intensity acquaintances this rewarding aspect of my online participation is now almost non-existent.

3. Incompetence: very much related to the first two problems, I believe, is my growing concern for the quality of my contributions. As time constraints limit my capacity to properly think through certain issues and then construct and review my posts I become frustrated by the lack of depth and clarity in what I write. I have so many concepts, arguments and original thoughts swirling around in/as my psyche yet only less than an hour a day to formulate and craft them into anything approximating an intelligible offering. I’m a person who thrives on transforming insight into praxis so constantly missing the mark in this regard is torturous.

In addition to a personal drive for quality it is also becoming harder to keep up with all the interesting posts and productive discussions happening on my favorite blogs/websites (see the sidebar list titled ‘rhizome’ for links to some of the best blogs in existence). This is increasingly frustrating because I feel compelled to weigh-in on the issues but usually unable to do so. If I take the time to read such posts (as I usually do) I’m then unable to respond. Moreover, I haven’t even been able to produce the bare minimum of posts and responses I’ve committed myself to generating - as evidenced by my lack of participation in the Integral Ecology reading group.

As a result of these difficulties I’m now reconsidering my future online. Seeing as though I’m unwilling to sacrifice family time, unable to decrease work responsibilities, or limit my activist involvements, and as I’m learning to embrace the necessity of sleep, what role can blogging and online activities have in my life? How does the (post)modern citizen bridge a full and rewarding life with an authentic and stimulating online presence?

In the next few days I’ll be posting some additional thoughts on this issue along with the promised chapter summaries of the Integral Ecology book. I’d be especially interested in hearing from any of you who also struggle with these questions, or have successfully integrated online activities (blogging, etc.) with family and work life.

de Certeau on Foucault: popular procedures and power

2011-08-04T23:29:00.001-06:00

Michel de Certeau on Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish:

"In this work, instead of analyzing the apparatus exercising power (i.e., the localizable, expansionist, repressive, and legal institutions), Foucault analyzes the mechanisms (dispositifs) that have sapped the strength of these institutions and surreptitiously reorganized the functioning of power: "miniscule" technical procedures acting on and with details, redistributing a discursive space in order to make it the means of a generalized "discipline" (surveillance). This approach raises a new and different set of problems to be investigated. Once again, however, this "microphysics of power" privileges the productive apparatus (which produces the "discipline"), even though it discerns in "education" a system of "repression" and shows how, from the wings as it were, silent technologies determine or short-circuit institutional stage directions. If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also "miniscule" and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what "ways of operating" form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or "dominee's"?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.

These "ways of operating" constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. They pose questions at once analogous and contrary to those dealt with in Foucault's book: analogous, in that the goal is to perceive and analyze the microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of "tactics" articulated in the details of everyday life; contrary, in that the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of "discipline:" Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline..." (The Practice of Everyday Life)

Read More: Here

Black Holes, Event Horizons and Spacetime

2011-08-01T00:15:00.000-06:00

Below is a Discovery Channel documentary about the relationship between Supermassive Black Holes and the evolution of the cosmos.

A black hole, according to the general theory of relativity, is a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape. It is the result of the deformation of spacetime caused by a very compact mass. Around a black hole there is an undetectable surface which marks the point of no return, called an event horizon. It is called "black" because it absorbs all the light that hits it, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect black body in thermodynamics. Under the theory of quantum mechanics black holes possess a temperature and emit Hawking radiation. Despite its invisible interior, a black hole can be observed through its interaction with other matter. A black hole can be inferred by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit a region in space.

Alternatively, when gas falls into a stellar black hole from a companion star, the gas spirals inward, heating to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts of radiation that can be detected from earthbound and Earth-orbiting telescopes.Astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates, and have also found evidence of supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. After observing the motion of nearby stars for 16 years, in 2008 astronomers found compelling evidence that a supermassive black hole of more than 4 million solar masses is located near the Sagittarius A* region in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The no hair theorem states that, once it achieves a stable condition after formation, a black hole has only three independent physical properties: mass, charge, and angular momentum.Any two black holes that share the same values for these properties, or parameters, are classically indistinguishable.The simplest black hole has mass but neither charge nor angular momentum.

The defining feature of a black hole is the appearance of an event horizon — a boundary in spacetime through which matter and light can only pass inward towards the mass of the black hole. Nothing, including light, can escape from inside the event horizon. The event horizon is referred to as such because if an event occurs within the boundary, light from that event cannot reach an outside observer, making it impossible to determine if such an event occurred.

“Get Rid of Yourself”

2011-07-31T21:55:00.001-06:00

Get Rid of Yourself from zoo on Vimeo.

Bernadette Corporation - featuring Chloe Sevigny and Werner von Delmont. (2003, 61 min)

Description:

Get Rid of Yourself is a video-film-tract addressed to those who anonymously embody the return of political activism within Empire. While its initial sounds and images were filmed during the riots in Genoa, 2001, these materials are pulled apart and recomposed in order to locate the intensity of a shared experience, rather than producing one more documentary version of the programmed and hyper-mediatized confrontation of the G8 counter-summit. Elaborating a complex and rhythmic form of address via sound/image disjunctions, cheap video effects and performance, the film declares its own exile from a biopolitical space-time where nothing ever happens. The crisis it announces is the sudden return of history, but this time without characters or a story, and of a politics without subjects.

Provisionally aligning itself with the so-called ‘Black Bloc’ movement – with the arrogance of its discourse as well as the force and style of their resistance – Get Rid of Yourself is an encounter with emerging, non-instituted or identity-less forms of protest that refuse the representational politics of the official Left. Edited in the aftermath of 9/11 – a period of doubt, reflection and heightened security measures worldwide – the film also attempts to measure the strange distance these events have crossed, and the increasing repression under which the feeling of ‘civil war’ has been buried in the meantime. A filmed essay that works by betraying its own form, Get Rid of Yourself tries to approach what is most open in an event, rather than capturing and completing it as something recognizable.

Sperber and Narvaez on Human Rationality

2011-07-31T21:26:00.001-06:00

Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. Sperber was trained in anthropology at the Sorbonne and the University of Oxford. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics where he works on an approach to cultural evolution known as the "epidemiology of representations". perber currently holds the positions of Directeur de Recherche émérite at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

Darcia Narvaez is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Collaborative for Ethical Education at the University of Notre Dame. Her research explores questions of moral cognition, moral development and moral character education. She has developed several integrative theories: Adaptive Ethical Expertise, Integrative Ethical Education, Triune Ethics Theory.

Bellow Sperber and Narvaez talk human cognition, animal intelligence and argumentative reason.

h/t DMF

DeLanda on Deleuze and the becoming of the world

2011-07-17T00:01:00.004-06:00

Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World

by Manuel DeLanda

The distinction between the possible and the real assumes a set of predefined forms (or essences) which acquire physical reality as material forms that resemble them. From the morphogenetic point of view, realizing a possibility does not add anything to a predefined form, except reality. The distinction between the virtual and the actual, on the other hand, does not involve resemblance of any kind (e.g. our example above, in which a topological point becomes a geometrical sphere) and far from constituting the essential identity of a form, intensive processes subvert identity, since now forms as different as spheres and cubes emerge from the same topological point. As Deleuze writes,

"Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. In this sense, actualization or differentiation is always a genuine creation."

Deleuze criticism of nineteenth century thermodynamics should be understood in this context. By concentrating on the final, extensive form achieved once the intensive process is finished, thermodynamics failed to see that, before the differences in intensity are canceled, the final form (or more exactly, its topological counterpart) is already there, guiding (or acting as an attractor for) the morphogenetic process. In other words, seemingly abstract topological attractors have a perfectly real existence, as virtual entities, even before a given geometrical form becomes actual. And this simply emphasizes Deleuze ontological attitude towards the world: he is not only a realist regarding the actual, but also a realist towards the virtual...

The problem is now, of course, that we have made the world open at the expense of giving up its objectivity, in other words, the world becomes open only through human intervention. For some this relativism may not seem like a problem, particularly when the only alternative is believed to be a realism based on a correspondence theory of truth, a realism deeply committed to essentialism and rationalism. Clearly, if the idea of material objects independent of human experience is based on a conception of their genesis in terms of preexisting essences, then we are back in a closed world where all possibilities have been defined in advance by those essences. Similarly, if the world is pictured as a fixed set of beings to which our theories correspond like a reflection or a snapshot, then that world would be hardly capable of an open becoming.

Yet, the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze makes it clear that a belief in the autonomous existence of the world does not have to based on essentialist or rationalist views. It will be the task of this essay to make a case for what we may call Deleuze’s "neo-realist" approach, an approach involving a theory of the genesis of form that does away with essences, as well as a theory of epistemology that does not rely on a view of truth as a faithful reflection of a static world of beings. I would like to begin with a quote from what is, in my view, Deleuze’s most important work, "Difference and Repetition". It is traditional since Kant to distinguish between the world as it appears to us humans, that is, the world of phenomena or appearances, and those aspects of the world existing by themselves and referred to as "noumena". Deleuze writes:

"Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given…Difference is not phenomenon but the nuomenon closest to the phenomenon…Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned…Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity."

There are several things to notice in this quote. First of all, it is clear that for Deleuze noumena are not (as they were for Kant) beyond human knowledge. On the other hand, that which is beyond what is given to us in experience is not a being but a becoming, a difference-driven process by which the given is given.

Read More: Here

DJ Monk One's deep Gil Scott Heron revolutionary mix from WBAI 99.5 FM

2011-07-16T14:52:00.000-06:00

from Ill Doctrine:

The Gil Scott Heron mix by jsmooth995

Harman on McLuhan and “technological determinism”

2011-07-12T11:26:00.001-06:00

I have always thought of Marshall McLuhan as a quintessential assemblage thinker. Reading McLuhan started me thinking of technology and media as something 'weird', almost alien - as something that abducts our biology and hooks it up to the non-human. Of course, this thought leads to thinking about humans as primal technologies in our own right, or as extended mediums hooked to cellular communities that can't 'perceive' the effects we have on their capacities, just as we humans fail to perceive the effects our technologic assemblages have on our community until the technology has already become obsolete. McLuhan brings that and more into the mix.

Below is Graham Harman riffing on the mistaken view that McLuhan was a "technological determinist". He wasn't. I'm excited to see/read what Harman and company do later this year, and next, with McLuhan's work. No doubt something strange this way comes.

"McLuhan’s chief idea is the overwhelming power of background conditions over any conscious surface content. The content of television shows is no more important than graffiti on an atomic bomb, and so forth. We see this idea not only in the signature phrase “the medium is the message,” but also his praise of rhetoric and grammar in the old Trivium over dialectic, as well as his greater interest in formal than in efficient causation.

However, unlike Heidegger (another thinker obsessed with the greater importance of the background than the surface), McLuhan is in no way an advocate of passive awaiting. While it is true that the background medium is all-important for McLuhan, he also thinks it is well within our power to change the background medium. For McLuhan unlike Heidegger, it’s not Being itself that sends epochs. It’s primarily artists, but ultimately anyone else who generates new media."

Read More: Here

The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism

2011-07-10T23:38:00.003-06:00

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001), and is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

From Truth Out:

The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.

Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt. I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy – or at least the economies of Europe and America, where these ideas continue to flourish.

Read More: Here

George Lakoff on The Political Mind

2011-07-10T15:13:00.000-06:00

George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind". Below Lakoff discusses concepts from his book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain:

American politics explained

2011-07-09T17:35:00.000-06:00

Sometimes polls work. Here is all of modern American politics explained in a single handy chart. From Mother Jones:

Wendell McShine

2011-07-07T12:56:00.008-06:00

Today I discovered the work of the brilliant young multimedia artist Wendell McShine. McShine’s artistic output mixes the harsh textures of street culture with unique blends of Caribbean and Mexican sensibilities. His vast body of work might be described as both political shamanism and mystical realism.

The videos below showcase two separate collections of work McShine put together a few years ago. Here is how Wendell describes the first:

There is a natural synchronicity, in Mexico referred to as “Mayan Timing”, that connects my latest body of work, “La Puerta Abierta” (The Open Door) and Sheldon's song “Prosper”. The coming together of our work in this special animated music video can be seen as an emotional out pouring of healing words and visuals stitching together the delicate fabric of the human condition and Trinidadian nationalism.

Prosper - Wendell Mc Shine

Prosper from wendell mc shine on Vimeo.

The Offering - Wendell Mc Shine

THE OFFERING from wendell mc shine on Vimeo.

Technology, Modes and Marxism: Some Cursory Notes

2011-07-06T16:23:00.001-06:00

Technologies are not neutral and never innocuous. We prioritize, focus, value and engage very different aspects of the world depending on our particular technic extensions and technological orientations. These life-priorities are framed (structured) and unfold in relation to our infrastructural conditions and the resultant cognitive skills and technical procedures.

Heidegger talked about the ge-stell to describe what conditions come into being when technology arises and how certain technic configurations frame (or enframe) what we do, think and how we relate. McLuhan was pretty clear about how technology extends and augments human life. And several people, not the least of which Braudel, Serres and Foucault, have laid bare the power relations involved in acquiring and maintaining certain technological regimes.

We could talk about all this in terms of ‘modes’: modes of production, modes of communication, modes of semantic evaluation (cultural schema), modes emotional regulation (habitus), modes or energy utilization (extraction and deployment), etc., etc. The key is that any change in a particular mode can affect the overall configuration of modes. So if we change particular technic modes there is a change in certain cognitive modes (skills, assumptions, values, etc.).

Supplemental to this point, if different modes of being or social assemblages generate different aesthetic-existential relations, and therefore ways of understanding the world, then particularly dominating modes of being and becoming foreclose the possibility of honoring and incorporating beneficial instances of alterity. That is to say, the sprawling technical regimes of late capitalism (“the machines”) have proven to be brutal interventions into so many intrinsically valuable – although never completely positive or healthy - life-ways that have existed on this planet. The vicious expansion of capitalistic technic modes have decreased the diversity of modes in general and therefore decreased our capacity for recognizing and generating alternatives.

Moreover, Marxism, broadly conceived, is a paradigm that also originates from within the matrix of brutal ethnocentric technical and cultural assumptions. Evidence of this comes from Marx’s own writing on India and his denigration of non-urban, non-industrial life. And Marxists of many variations have continued to denounce different modes of being as mere “backwardness”. This, coupled with Marxism’s metaphysical faith in technology and the progressive dialectic of history, is in many ways both a reaction to and continuation of historically dominating techno-cultural modes of being. Marxist imperialism is still imperialism it would seem.

But we need not bow down to the master narrative (religion?) of Marxist doxa, in order to be against capitalism or against brutalizing modes in general, but, instead foster an openness for hybrid narratives and more complex understandings on the way towards materially instantiating more mutualistic modes of being.

A reinvigorated revolutionary stance, then, would interrogate the assumptions and ontology of existing paradigms and modes, and open itself to minor revisions viz. alternative (non-western, non-phallocentric) ways of knowing, being and relating. Far from being an “unthinking”, a pluralistic ethical and practical assessment of oppression and politics would be a conscious and multi-rational projekt of reflexivity and praxis that attends to the most appropriate and pragmatic practices and insights of all available modes.

to have done with life

2011-06-28T09:47:00.007-06:00

You can now listen to audio of the recent conference in Zagreb on 'neo-vitalism' and 'anti-vitalism' entitled "to have done with life" here: June 17-19, 2011.

I’ll summarize: “we’re all really smart and if we can’t construct a coherent metaphysics of difference with regards to the properties of a crow-bar and a crow, then you can’t either. ” Biotech, biopolitics and the will to speculation converge into a frenzy of post-Heidegger, post-heuristic cyborg fantasy.

And what is with the world’s top ~~grad students~~ intellectuals asking unintelligible questions? Every time I listen to the Q&A at one of these conferences I want to gag at least once. Why can’t these people formulate questions that make sense? Even the panelists can’t figure out what the question is. Is it a competition of who can ask the most complicated question as a means of impressing their advisor?

To be fair, there was some good stuff about “Life” being the contemporary equivalent of a previous preoccupation with “Being”. Evan Caulder Williams’ work is always fascinating and politically poignant, and Adrian Johnson’s talk was also characteristically lucid and great for thinking about “second natures” as continuous extensions of complex matter.

[ h/t immanence ]

Grandeur In This View

2011-06-27T23:59:00.002-06:00

Celtic Tree of Life

One of my favorite passages ever written is the final paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection:

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

Adrian’s excellent new post (here) about Malik’s The Tree of Life led me to these words once again. I never cease to be inspired by this passage.

War on the Earth

2011-06-27T09:27:00.000-06:00

From ZMagazine:

War on the Earth: David Barsamian interviews Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva provides an international voice for sustainable development and social justice. She's a physicist, scholar, social activist, and feminist. She is director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi and a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Prize. She is the author of many books, including Water Wars, Earth Democracy, and Soil Not Oil.

BARSAMIAN: On receiving the Sydney Peace Prize in November 2010, you said, "When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the bigger war is the ongoing war against the Earth. This war has its roots in an economy which fails to respect ecological and ethical limits." Tell me more about this war.

SHIVA: This war is being fought, for example, in India across the country, wherever there are minerals, which happens to be where there are forests, which happens to be where tribals live. And it's fueled by the very investor-speculators who brought down the world economy. Huge money is to be made out of iron ore and bauxite mining. And then to push consumption, to use more and more of these nonrenewable resources.

India until 20 years ago never had landfills. But our laws are now saying they want us to move from 1 kilogram of aluminum use to 15 kilograms per capita of use. Fifteen kilograms multiplied by a billion Indians means that every mountain will have to be mined, every forest will have to be destroyed. This generates war against nature because it devastates ecosystems. But it's also a war against people, because every human right must be violated, and a war economy, in a real sense, has to be created.

Read More: Here

Marijuana: A Chronic History

2011-06-25T16:20:00.000-06:00

A brief history of marijuana via the history channel:

Fukushima: "worst industrial accident ever"

2011-06-23T13:57:00.001-06:00

On June 21, 2011 famed physicist Michio Kaku told CNN that Japanese officials have been lying throughout the nuclear crisis and still don't have control of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Kaku reports Fukushima is "a ticking time bomb":

Former Intelligence Operative Calls for P2P Revolution

2011-06-23T11:20:00.003-06:00

“Modernity…based on a autonomous self in a society which he himself creates through the social contract, has been changing in postmodernity. The individual is now seen as always-already part of various social fields, as a singular composite being….Atomistic individualism is rejected in favour of the view of a relational self, a new balance between individual agency and collective communion.” – Jane Jones

Robert David Steele is a former CIA operations officer and senior civilian responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center. In 1988 he realized that the US Government was spending all of its intelligence money on secret technical collection and virtually nothing on open sources of information. He became the global proponent for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and from there advanced to M4IS2 Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing and Sense-Making. He is currently working on Manifesto for Truth: Intelligence with Integrity in the Public Interest.

Steele's talk below is currently being circulated both in video and audio format by Anonymous and LulzSec hackers and sympathisers, who have recently announced via video "Operation Anti-Security and their joining of forces. The June 20 announcement of Operation AntiSec contained justification for its ~~attacks~~ displacements of government sites, citing governmental efforts to "dominate and control our Internet ocean" and accusing them of corruption and breaching privacy:

[ h/t P2P Foundation ]

Conversation of the Arche-fossils

2011-06-23T10:10:00.001-06:00

“Confronted with the arche-fossil, every variety of idealism converges and becomes equally extraordinary – every variety of correlationism is exposed as extreme idealism, one that is incapable of admitting that [which] science tells us about these occurrences…And our correlationist then finds himself dangerously close to contemporary creationists: those quaint believers who assert today, in accordance with a ‘literal’ reading of the Bible, that the earth is no more than 6000 years old, and who, when confronted with the much older dates arrived at by science, reply…[that these radioactive compounds were placed there by God]…in order to test the physicist’s faith. Similarly, might not the meaning of the arche-fossil be to test the philosopher’s faith in correlation, even when confronted with data which seems to point to an abyssal divide between what exists and what appears?”
- Meillassoux, After Finitude, pp.16-17

Integral Ecology Reading Group – Week 3

2011-06-20T11:18:00.002-06:00

Coming back to the sharp angles and buzz of urban life after a few days deep in the backwoods of Banff National Park I find myself playing all sorts of catch-up with the fantastic commentary taking place on this week’s readings.

First, Adrian Ivakhiv has two excellent posts up with his commentary on chapter 3 (“A Developing Kosmos”) and 4 (“Developing Interiors”). Tim Morton then weighs in with some critique of AQAL’s generalizations and categories (here) and Adrian responds (here). Adam Robbert adds to the discussion with with talk of noospheres and the nature of subjectivity (here).

As I’m still going through everyone’s contributions I will only quote one passage from Adrian’s post that to me deserves special attention and discussion:

“[T]here is no such straightforward sequence (ego-ethnos-world-planet) written into nature, because “ego,” “ethnos,” “world,” and “planet” are constructs that are relative to particular kinds of societies, or more precisely to socio-material-technological networks or collectives. Generally, I would suggest, “ego” (selfhood) always co-emerges alongside some form of collectivity, and collectivities take various forms depending on the type of society, its relationship with the nonhuman world, and its conception of the cosmos.”

This is an amazingly important point. I have always felt a bit uneasy about Wilber’s presentation of individual development. I think ego-generation is a much more tangled affair - with parallel development, co-local interactions and non-linear dynamics – so even very broad generalizations must be qualified. I don’t have an opportunity to offer my thoughts on why this is so just yet, but I will dive a little deeper into issues of individuation and interior development as soon as possible.

Thinking Nature - Volume 1

2011-06-16T16:28:00.002-06:00

I’ve been eagerly waiting for Volume 1 of the new journal Thinking Nature to come out, and today it did just that! The journal is edited by Timothy Morton and Ben Woodard. Ben provides a note to the reader in lieu of an editorial or introduction here:

I hope that readers will find that the essays address the larger problem of trying to think nature in philosophical and ecological means and display the need for further inquiry into the conceptual monstrousness of nature.

As of tonight I will once again be embedded deep in the rocky mountains for the next 4 days, but reading these essays is a priority when I return home. Enjoy:

Thinking Nature - Volume 1

Essays

/1/ – What did the Early Heidegger Think about Nature? – Paul Ennis

/2/ – Being and Counting: Speculative Materialism and the Threshold of the Given – David Lindsay

/3/ – Unthinking Nature: Transcendental Realism, Neo-Vitalism and the Metaphysical Unconscious in Outline – Michael Austin

/4/ – Philosophies of Nature in the Differentials of Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier – Himanshu Damle

/5/ – Ecological Necessity – Tom Sparrow

/6/ – Six Myths of Interdisciplinarity – Ted Toadvine

/7/ – Some Notes Towards a Philosophy of Non-Life – Timothy Morton

/8/ – Towards a Philosophy of (Dejected) Nature – Ben Woodard

/9/ – Man and Nature – Ross Wolfe

Reviews

/10/ – Review of Thinking with Whitehead by Isabelle Stengers – Leon Niemoczynski

Integral Ecology Reading Group – Week 2

2011-06-16T11:30:00.003-06:00

As usual I’m a bit behind with contributing to the reading group, but I would like to draw attention to Sam Mickey’s excellent post at Knowledge Ecology (here) on Chapter 2 of Integral Ecology entitled, “It’s All About Perspectives: The AQAL Model”.

The chapter goes through the basic tenets of Ken Wilber’s ‘integral perspectival’ AQAL (“all quadrant, all level”) meta-framework which attempts to synthesize and organize as many different perspectives as possible. Following Max Weber and Jurgen Habermas, Wilber argues for the modern differentiation of three major epistemic modes: the subjective (1st person perspective), the intersubjective (2nd person perspective) and the objective (3rd person perspective) – or, the beautiful, the good and the true. From these 3 basic modes of knowing the world Wilber adds the interobjective (3rd person plural) perspective to create what the authors believe is a "post-disciplinary" 4 quadrant model capable of integrating data and knowledge from every major discipline in the sciences and humanities.

Ambitious? Surely. Hubris? Perhaps. But the model does have its strong points. For example, the AQAL framework does seem to allow us to sort various approaches according to their methodologies and domains of interest. Behaviorism (Skinner) clearly took a 3rd person perspective with its focus on the objective, observable behavior of organisms, whereas hermeneutics (Gadamer) focuses squarely on the dynamics of intersubjectivity using a 2nd person, interpretive methodology. And conventional ecological sciences, as the authors are quick to point out, focus of the inter-objective processes of the world from a 3rd person perspective, whereas existentialism or introspective psychology investigate subjectivity from a 1st person perspective.

What is important here is that the authors believe taking a multi-perspective and integral approach to ecology and environmental issues helps us identify blind spots, and important points of consideration, and therefore better equips us in our effort to understand the many dimensions and complex relationships involved in such issues. What the AQAL framework does, so it is argued, is prompts us to include multiple perspectives, and therefore multiple methodologies in our investigations.

There is much more to the AQAL model than I have time to go into, but you can learn more about Wilber’s meta-framework here.

SO what I’ll leave you with is some excerpts from Sam’s post, and some interesting tid-bits from the resulting comments:

After proposing post-disciplinarity, E-H&Z describe two aspects of perspectivalism, ontological and epistemological. First, an ontological claim (“sentient beings are capable of taking a perspective, or opening a clearing that allows phenomena to present and reveal themselves”) (48). The phrase “opening a clearing” sounds suspiciously Heideggerian to me (especially knowing that Zimmerman is a Heidegger scholar). In any case, this claim implies that perspective (like interiority) isn’t exclusively human. Rather, the world is made of perspectives. [Sam]

…the second aspect of perspectivalism, an epistemological claim (“all knowing is perspectival”) (48-49). We are told not to “confuse the map with the territory” but, instead, to recognize how “the map is a performance of the territory,” such that all knowledges (all maps) are situated in the concrete limits of perspectives (50, 55). Against postmodern relativism (a straw man, to be sure), perspectivalism asserts that the partial truths of perspectives can be arranged according to nested hierarchies (holarchy) in which truths transcend and include any less comprehensive truths (63f). [Sam]

The authors keep reminding us not to take their framework too literally and not to mistake the map for the territory. They reassure us that the flat representation of the AQAL model is “not a Cartesian grid” but is more of a “Buddhist mandala,” which is full of multidimensionality and depth that are only discerned in light of meditative engagements (59).[Sam]

And from the comment section:

It is quite apparent that the AQAL model is very heavy on classification, possibly at the expense of adequate description. Sam, I think this goes some way to further pushing your point that AQAL can be both “too precise” and “not precise enough.” I would say it is too precise in classification and not precise enough in description. [Adam Robbert]

I really do find the quadrants helpful, but beyond that the AQAL system feels very heavy to me- almost like an OS that takes up so much space on a computer that it can’t actually perform any of the functions it is designed to run. [Adam]

Along with the tri-ecological vision found in Guattari and of Wilber’s big three, the integral ecology model proposed by Leonardo Boff brings together the mental, social, and environmental dimensions of ecology. Boff is influenced by Guattari’s three ecologies and by the cosmogenetic principle of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, which is a threefold principle involving autopoiesis, communion, and differentiation (mental, social, and environmental, respectively). [Sam]

I think…the AQ can be made to work like a Guattarian machine, or a Peircian semiotic hub (Wilber’s “big three” being analogous to Peirce’s triadics). But it’s the hierarchic developmentalism that has always been Wilber’s hallmark. On the other hand, submitting those (AL) parts of Wilber’s model to empirical data might result in a loosening of some of its built-in assumptions, e.g. into a more horizontal understanding of hierarchies (a la DeLanda). [Adrian Ivakhiv]

All the context you need and much more substance can be read in the original post and comments. Please check out the rest here. [And be sure to look for Adrian Ivakhiv’s summary and comments on chapter 3 and 4 in the next few days…]

Adrian Ivakhiv on Ingold and Liveliness

2011-06-14T15:24:00.002-06:00

Dr. Timothy Ingold

On the occasion of anthropologist Tim Ingold’s new book Being Alive Adrian weighs-in on the irreducibility of life as animate process:

Ingold has always been very much his own thinker, never part of any school (to my knowledge) — which means he’s always been good at finding the limitations of any train of thought. And as a social anthropologist working with herders and hunters, he’s always maintained an empirical groundedness that’s kept his theorizing from getting too abstract. (That’s another thing I’ve tried to emulate, though my “one foot in empirical research” has moved around restlessly between landscape and place conflicts, cultural identity, religious practice, and media and visual culture.)

Over the last dozen or so years, it seems that Ingold’s trajectory has paralleled my own push into Latourian, Deleuzian, and Whiteheadian process territory. His general theme, as developed in his 2007 book Lines, has become that life is lived along lines, or paths, or “wayfaring,” and that “to move, to know, and to describe are not separate operations that follow one another in series, but rather parallel facets of the same process — that of life itself” (p. xii).

This work, to my mind, provides a useful corrective to those who would seek to “flatten” our ontologies so as to erase the differences between living and those things that mediate the living, but do not, in and of themselves, initiate it. There are reasons to question the division between “life” and “non-life” (as Jane Bennett and the object-oriented ontologists have done, among others), but there are also reasons to think carefully about what it is that makes life lively.

My assessment of Ingold’s work would mirror Adrian’s, with the added assertion that before being directed towards his research as an undergrad by a sensitive and astute professor I had no sense of my own intellectual trajectory. In addition to contributing to the development of a conceptual space where I could investigate my own deep intuitions and interests, Ingold’s work directly led me to the groundbreaking work of both Martin Heidegger and J.J Gibson – two thinkers who have had an enormous formative influence on me.

Now go read Adrian’s entire post: here.

"Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections"

2011-06-14T11:28:00.000-06:00

From Mediacology:

A powerful example of combining the printed word with audiovisuals. Here Bill McKibben’s Washington Post op-ed, “A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!,” is narrated and enhanced by plomodmedia. This has the right balance of research and emotional appeal to help get the message across.

Japan Finally Admits Meltdowns and Major Radiation Leaked into Ocean

2011-06-13T21:16:00.000-06:00

From Democracy Now:

Almost three months after the earthquake and tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in Japan, new radiation "hot spots" may require the evacuation of more areas further from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility. Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency recently admitted for the first time that full nuclear meltdowns occurred at three of the plant’s reactors, and more than doubled its estimate for the amount of radiation that leaked from the plant in the first week of the disaster in March.

“What they failed to mention is that they discharged an equally large amount into the ocean,” says our guest Robert Alvarez, former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy. “As [the radiation] goes up the food chain, it accumulates. By the time it reaches people who consume this food, the levels are higher than they originally were when they entered the environment.” Alvarez also discusses his new report on the vulnerabilities and hazards of stored spent fuel at U.S. reactors in the United States. Then we go to Tokyo to speak with Aileen Mioko Smith, executive director of the group Green Action. She says citizens leading their own monitoring efforts are calling for additional evacuations, especially for young children and pregnant women:

On Feral Philosophy – Part 1: Deviant Engagements

2011-06-09T12:58:00.006-06:00

“The age of philosophy is in a sense, again, that we are confronted, more and more, often with philosophical problems on an everyday level. It is not just that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary: you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time where everyone is in a way forced to be some kind of philosopher.” - Slavoj Žižek

Sometimes I get emails from strangers who prompt me to reflect on what it is I am attempting to do here. As an applied anthropologist gone public health technocrat I no longer have strong attachments to my disciplinary roots. At times this distance gives me a profound sense of isolation from the fertile environment where I learned my most valuable and applicable skills and lessons. So when someone questions me about my background or theoretical commitments it agitates me to reconsider my positions and current inspirations. Such was the case with a recent email that included the following question:

“I have been reading you blog for some time now and I wonder why you post more about philosophy than anthropology, when you describe yourself as an anthropologist. Where are all the anthropology related posts?”

My initial reaction was to argue that what I do here is not strictly a disciplinary project. This blog is a laboratory for theory and collection site where I explore all sorts of issues and topics, including blogging about philosophy. When I venture into ontography and/or critical theory I do so from a decidedly post-disciplinary perspective. The only label I have yet to come up with for this is: feral theory.

Feral theory, or ‘feral philosophy’ operates outside of the civilizing processes of institutional and canonical strictures, and attempts to think wildly through the exigencies of practical and political life in opposition to homogenizing conventions. Of course, such theorizing is not without its influences, or founding premises, but it radicalizes those legacies, resources and logics by forging monstrous alliances between discourses and paradigms, while intentionally mutating them for explicitly pragmatic and strategic purposes. A feral theorist, then, is a bricoleur who preys on the theoretical fauna of numerous authors and subsists by plundering the cultivated fields of all available disciplines, carving out niches of praxis and resistance.

At least this is how I frame what I do.

And this is not to say that I think disciplined discourse specialists are somehow less important, or are “sell-outs” to “the system”, because without the scholarship and rigor of these trained professionals the feral theorist would be unable to sustain their activities at the fringes. The academic and professional knowledges and products afford the feral theorist their sometimes oppositional, sometimes participatory opportunities for conceptual license and strategic deviance.

Regardless, the reader’s question is an appropriate one and deserves an answer. Why would a confessed practicing applied anthropologist focus so much on discussions with professional philosophers about seemingly strictly philosophical issues? My answer: because the philosophers I read and engage are thinking and doing work which stimulates my own mutant praxis the most. And the practical work that I am employed to do and the political work I am compelled to do is fueled by such deviant engagements.

Natural Cultures and Dark Ontologies

2011-06-09T11:00:00.005-06:00

ROSS: I’ve said this elsewhere, in various places, but I reject ontological thinking (especially in the vein inspired by Heidegger) as unhistorical. Its concept of “historicity” attempts to freeze the inherent fluidity of historical time by assimilating its to the existential structures of presentistic being, and thus dilutes the richer and more dynamic understanding of the world as historical and the qualitative changes brought upon by the forces of world-history.

MICHAEL: You must not have had too much exposure to Bergson or Whitehead or Deleuze for that matter. Those guys have very “fluid”, diachronistic visions of the world. It’s true that Heidegger drew some strange and abstract conclusions from his investigations, many of which I do not support, but his interrogation of ‘the meaning of being’ was groundbreaking – and I believe the only starting point for a properly reflexive theoretical deliberation of existence.

And I think you go too far in assuming you can simply “reject ontological thinking” Ross. All belief systems, including Marxist ideologies, have at their conceptual core ontological commitments. All schematic thought, worldviews and paradigms necessarily operationalize certain basic assumptions. If you are not interested in investigating those assumptions and beliefs by engaging in thinking about ontology, or more fundamental, doing ontography then those guiding assumptions about the structure of the world will remain unexamined and taint everything you think.

Regarding the “forces of world-history”, I have developed my own ecological realist orientation which holds process, transitions, events and assemblages as fundamental features of the real world, and rejects the primacy of the existential analytic (correlationism) in favor of an (re)evolutionary, participatory, communialistic focus.

ROSS: In terms of our connection to nature, no one will deny humanity’s origins in the natural world, out of a long evolutionary process of biology. Yet the reason why I say that the nature/culture split is real is that it has become real, through a process of historical alienation. The moment that humanity becomes self-conscious, achieves systematic thought, and instrumental rationality — as well as begins to repress its more natural instinctual drives — humanity begins to differentiate itself from nature. At first this alienation is minimal, as even in primitive agricultural societies one remains tied quite immediately to the natural rhythms and cycles of existence.

Once human society becomes increasingly denaturalized, once its interaction with the nature from whence it sprang becomes more and more mediated through social processes and the built environment of towns and cities (artifice), the alienation rises to the level of consciousness. I believe that historically this took place most noticeably after the Scientific Revolution and capitalist rationality/intellectualization began to disenchant nature of its mysterious properties, such that the early Romantics began to feel a profound sense of estrangement and distancing from nature. Since then, this consciousness has gone through a variety of ideological mutations, all the way into the present.

That is why I affirm the division between nature and culture, not as an absolute, insurmountable opposition, but as one which has arisen historically and might be historically overcome. Human beings themselves cannot be called wholly “unnatural.” Our bodies are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of natural biological evolution. But the world which we create for ourselves, and with which we are more immediately familiar than “original” nature, cannot be said to be entirely “natural.” There is something about a skyscraper that is profoundly unnatural, with its ferro-concrete frame and huge glass facades. The anthills and honeycombs of Levi’s example pale in comparison to these designed artifacts, being as they are the creations of the unconscious social instincts of ants and bees.

MICHAEL: That’s all well and, for the most part, historically accurate, but in the last instance not at all a defensible position in light of contemporary science. Nor does the promotion of such a binary follow from a thorough-going investigation of our being-in-the-world. There is no-thing in existence which is un-natural. Everything is composed of the known cosmological elements and forces. The ‘wilderness’ of being is an immanent matrix which generates the full range of potencies we call reality. Anthills, beaver dams, bird songs, chimpanzee tools are expressions of material assemblages and intensive properties no less than primate sweat lodges, kula rings, international banking systems, pornography and skyscrapers. Ants do “design” hills, beavers do “design” dams, birds do “design” songs, etc. Bower-bird culture, for example, is just as expressive, interpersonal and natural as any human culture. The full litany of existing flows, objects and assemblages in existence are ‘Natural’ occurrences. The differences between humans and non-humans are the result of differences in composite substantiality - the relational organization of their extensive and intensive properties.

That said, we can also step back and appreciate the truth of your statements. Humans have fundamentally changed the ecological composition of the planet. And we have indeed alienated ourselves in disastrous ways. But we have not alienated ourselves from “Nature” in any ontological sense. What we have done, however, is organized our realities in ways that not only disrupt the functionality inherent in non-human ecological systems (as if that wasn’t dangerous and insane enough), but also distance us mentally and aesthetically from being able to sense and experience those systems in an adaptive manner. Alienation is a problem of intimation not metaphysical rupture. And it remains a problem whether or not we subscribe to any particular proto-modernist, romantic, theistic, or normative variations of the subject/object, culture/nature binary.

And to continue to perpetuate such binaries is to reproduce and reinforce the kind of alienated modes of being, consciousness and, yes, ontologies we seek to overcome. It is the kinds of ideations which posit a split between “nature” and “culture” that facilitate both our maladaptive domination (“sovereignty”) of ecosystems and our maddening fantasies of separation.

ROSS: I agree that the world is composed of a variety of distributed forces, entities, networks, energies, and existential spontaneity. There are, of course, regularities and rhythms to this distributions that can be understood, whether as the “natural laws” of physics or as biospheric tendencies. Within this sublime order of calm predictability, there are of course also countervailing forces that are extremely chaotic, disruptive, and destructive, abiding by their own sets of laws, which can radically reshape the distribution of natural entities. It is not, of course, this fragile equilibrium hanging delicately in the balance. If that were the case, species extinction and environmental transformations would be impossible.

MICHAEL: Agreed Ross. The cosmos is a dark and relentless (and ‘wild’?) place with chaos and order swirling inside us and around every galactic fold. Adapting to both the “regularity” and the “spontaneity” of the affective forces of reality is the core imperative of sentient beings.

ROSS: [H]uman society has displayed an increasingly marked ability to affect the total environment of the Earth. While every biological organism seeks to exploit its environment in order to survive and perpetuate itself, humanity is able to do so on an unparalleled level.

MICHAEL: Yes, we certainly are talented primates. We’re especially good at hording and killing.

ROSS: Particularly following the advent of capitalism, the rate of revolutionary technological innovations has accelerated at an astonishing pace. Our ability to extract natural resources, whether from the bottom of the ocean or buried beneath layers of Siberian permafrost, is astounding. We can shear off the sides of mountains with dynamite, drill tunnels and subterranean underpasses, redirect the course of rivers, and create artificial lakes. And while this happens in a hyperexploitative, individual, and anarchistic fashion under capitalism, such monumental forces of production and environmental transformation could be directed to literally reshape the globe according to human need and taste. Humanity would have to attain a more complete mastery over its own form of social organization, such that it could self-consciously exert its energies in the most sustainable, and yet efficient, ways. I dare say that we could even enhance nature, not only for our own sake, but for nature’s sake as well.

MICHAEL: Without wanting to be interpreted as being a complete jerk-off, let me say that I find your assessment of humanity’s “progress” sad. In an age where over 50 industrial toxins can be detected in the breast milk of every new mother in North America, where much of the world’s fresh water sources are being either depleted or irreparably polluted, where childhood obesity is on average 300% more prevalent, where global warming is rapidly accelerating beyond any kind of control, etc., etc., I find it hard to believe anyone as smart as you can still support the under-critical Marxist article of faith in (post)modern technology. The myth of unrelenting progress is alive and well with you then?

Sure, we could direct all our technological innovations towards building more just and efficient subsistence systems, systems where societies are organized to maximize the allocation of resources and social solidarity, but not without first brutalizing the historically evolved and entrenched life-ways of so many people all over the planet. What you are implying is a total reorganization of human life around a technocratic machination of existing ecologies and territories based on a culturally specific instrumental rationality. This sort of undertaking would forcibly penetrate all aspects of other people’s mental and material lives, presumably without their consent. I couldn’t possibly think of a more monstrous, degrading and life-destroying endeavor.

Again, humans are only one kind of entity within a vast parliament of things, flows and forces. We would do well to set aside our violent interrogations and understand deeper the wilderness of being with all its beings and learn to adapt to it in more mutually supportive ways. Notions such as “mastery” and “enhancement” are the buzzwords and keystones of mentalities that seek to dominate, control and impose not liberate, reconcile and co-create.

ROSS: I agree that Heidegger’s thought has many facets and that one cannot uniformly label them all as fascist. I believe that much of his romantic emphasis on the “poetry” of being, “pathways” through the forest searching for “the clearing” in which beings unconceal themselves, these concepts have dangerously völkisch undertones. The simplicity of wisdom, Heidegger’s anti-intellectualism, setting itself apart from the “idle talk” of the “they” (those alien, overly-verbose Jewish cosmopolitan types), all this is extremely problematic. The problem is that many of his successors, even if they espoused different political ideologies, carried over these mute fascisms from Heidegger’s unique spin on phenomenological thought.

MICHAEL: To some extent I can see your point Ross, but, again, Heidegger’s thought can be worked several different ways, and not all of them are fascistic. I think you only read him through the Nazi lens, whereas I choose to read him through the ecological lens. There is nothing inherent in talking about ‘the clearing’ and ‘pathways’ that makes it dangerous. It is all a matter of how you deploy such thought and, more importantly, for what ends.

I’m not going to defend Heidegger the person Ross. He is indefensible. I only disagree with you about what his thinking can possibly do.

ROSS: The concept of a “wilderness” in which all beings are entangled, bound up, and which through struggle manifest themselves, this bears too much similarity to the kinds of speeches he delivered to young Nazi volunteers during his (brief) career as the rector of Freiburg.

MICHAEL: I sympathize with why you would rail against this then. But let us not give in to the Nazis. Let us not allow those monsters of history and flesh foreclose thought and the possibility of meaning because we are disgusted or afraid. Let us reclaim and eradicate their power over us. Let us chose exactitude in the face of the Real instead: because if being is fundamentally ecological, and ontology is simply an abstracted formalism of empirical investigations of ontic reality, then the notion of ‘the wilderness of being’ is entirely appropriate to the practical task of exploring, adapting and getting along in a world such as ours. The cosmos is quite literally a wild matrix of forces, flows, beings, possibility-spaces and becomings. And understanding just how this is so is indispensable.

Walter Kaufmann - Nietzsche and the Crisis in Philosophy

2011-06-07T15:45:00.003-06:00

Walter Kaufmann spent 33 years teaching philosophy at Princeton. More than anyone else, Kaufmann introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to the English-speaking world and made it possible to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker – something there wasn’t always room to do in American intellectual circles up until that time.

Kaufmann saw Nietzsche as an early existentialist, whose writings broke with convention and attempted to interrogate what it meant to be a free thinker in an age of conformity and stagnation.

Below is an audio recording of Kaufmann lecturing on those strains of thinking in Nietzsche’s work that were the most focused on existential topics. The lecture was delivered and recorded in 1960:

Integral Ecology Reading Group - Week 1

2011-06-07T11:18:00.002-06:00

“We define ecology as the mixed methods study of the subjective and objective aspects of organisms in relationship to their intersubjective and interobjective environments at all levels of depth and complexity” (2009:11).

For those of you interested and/or following along, Adam Robbert has posted an excellent opening summary with comments (here) on the Introduction and Chapter One (“Whose Ecology Is It?”) of Michael Zimmerman and Sean Esbjorn-Hargens’ 2009 book Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World.

Adam’s summary is succinct and he highlights the overall aims of the authors quite nicely. Simply put, Zimmerman and Esbjorn-Hargens seek nothing less than to integrate the core insights from all the major branches of the ecological sciences using a meta-framework developed over the last 35 years by American theorist Ken Wilber. Such integration, the authors believe, would be comprehensive enough to include the wide range of perspectives and methods currently deployed which investigate the natural world.

The main thrust of Chapter One, however, is to argue that ‘interiority’ (or, more specifically, first-person and second-person perspectives) has been excluded from ecological thinking for quite some time. The authors’ suggest that in order for ecology to become as comprehensive as possible and mature as a research project it will have to take into consideration all dimensions of living ecologies, including the irreducible features of "interiors", perspectives and consciousness.

One of the most rewarding parts of reading Chapter One was going through the author’s arguments for ‘perspectives all the way down’. As Adam was right to explain, the authors’ are not simply arguing for a standard panpsychic view - which usually suggests that a particular type of interiority, say ‘consciousness’, is a basic feature of reality at all scales – but, rather, that all objects, or entities, or complexes have an intrinsic interiority based on their own constitution and appropriate to their capacities and functioning. I tend to be very suspicious of theories that entertain a strong perspectival focus, but the inherent perspectivism at the heart of the author’s framework is more nuanced and qualified than I had anticipated. The broad manner in which the authors’ frame their view of interiority leaves room for a far richer interpretation than the traditional subject-object schema.

Here is a particularly striking passage with implications I would like to explore further as this reading group moves along:

“Although interiority – the capacity for opening a perspective or clearing – is not an exclusive human capacity, humans are endowed with a distinctively rich, linguistically articulated mode of interiority. Humans can even become aware that they are aware, thereby enabling them to deliberately alter how they think and act, and to question their origin, constitution, and purpose. This is a special evolutionary advancement” (2009:41)

I won’t comment on this now, but expect that i will be coming back to this passage and topic to discuss in more detail by Chapter Three.

For now here is Adam weighing in on the topic and asking strong questions with regards to how we are to understand ecology from an integrationist perspective:

Interiority is perhaps the most central and unique contribution integral ecology is making to the larger field of ecological theory. Recent studies in cognitive ethology suggest that there is a great deal of scientific reasoning for attributing interiority to all animals, as the forward by Marc Bekoff can attest to. The larger question is then an ontological one: what does it mean for atoms to have interiors?

[…] Integral Ecology is positing both a multiple epistemological and ontological system, and yet, despite this nod to ontology, are we really talking about anything more than “multiple perspectives?” Second, if we accept that interiority is a fundamental feature of the cosmos, operating at different levels, how do we approach the relationship between internal and external dimensions of a given entity? The AQAL approach seems to imply a consistent, geometric symmetry between inner and outer, or individual and collective, in what sense is this accurately descriptive of the terrain it is trying to map? Third, integral theorists are generally critical of those who are themselves critical of hierarchical or developmental schemes. Without rejecting the hierarchical nature of many natural phenomena, how do we critically think the notion of “levels” in the AQAL model with specific regard to how these distinctions manifest in intercultural environments and other contested areas of dialogue, where difference is a significant feature of the encounter?

Go read the rest of Adam’s fantastic summary, as well as the excellent discussion taking place in the comments section, at Knowledge Ecology.

Another section I will be commenting on down the road is the authors’ discussion from page 23 to page 33 on the conception of ‘Nature’ among both Modernists and the Romantics. Tim Morton already commented on this topic on his weblog here and here. I will come back to these sections and Tim’s comments in my next post. [also read Adrian Ivakhiv's comments on the Intro and Chapter One here]

Also interesting for me was the suggestion of prioritizing a willingness to enter into the cultural worldspaces of various stakeholders by those who seek to build solutions to today’s worse ecological problems. This is an important point, and one which I confront on a regular basis in my work. If we are to be successful solution-designers and collaborators it is essential to dialogically engage and attempt to understand the “interior” depths of those people participating and/or most affected by our designs and projects. Complex ecological issues are entangled with multiple perspectives, agendas, commitments and interests, and therefore require sensibilities and capacities that can assess and accommodate such diversity.

As a parting note, i must say i am finding Zimmerman and Esbjorn-Hargens’ presentation of the material so far very clear and concise. It’s obvious the authors’ are as intimately knowledgeable about the AQAL model as they are with ecological topics when they glide effortlessly from fine point to example.

I look forward to this week's reading on Chapter Two (“It's All About Perspectives: The AQAL Model”) as presented by Sam Mackey on Adam's site Knowledge Ecology. After that Adrian Ivakhiv takes the helm with Chapters 3 and 4 over at Immanence. If you get a moment please let us know your thoughts, if you have read the book or not. More perspectives the better, remember...

George Carlin - We Are Part of Nature

2011-06-05T20:32:00.002-06:00

Or, rather, there is no 'Nature' - everything is an outgrowth of the cosmic matrix.

In an epic time of extreme weather and global warming

we are all in this together. Know your world.

The Secret Life of Chaos

2011-06-04T15:50:00.002-06:00

Below is the outstanding 2010 BBC documentary called 'The Secret Life of Chaos'. The film traces the history and major discoveries of what has become known as chaos theory. I found it informative, incredibly interesting and amazingly accessible.

Here is the official description from the BBC:

Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand.

In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science - how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?

It's a mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern.

And the best thing is that one doesn't need to be a scientist to understand it. The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity. From trees to clouds to humans - after watching this film you'll never be able to look at the world in the same way again.

[ h/t Integral Options Cafe ]

Wilderness Thinking, Ontology and Heidegger

2011-06-03T14:22:00.018-06:00

In relation to Levi’s post on ‘wilderness’ (here) Ross Wolfe makes the following comments:

This is your typical anti-anthropocentric fare. Humans are just one sort of being amongst a multiplicity of beings, etc. Fairly predictable. But just how comprehensive is this “wilderness”? What exactly can it be said to “contain”? What constitutes its “parts”? [source]

Humans are just one sort of being among a multiplicity of beings Ross. In an ontological sense we are of this world in the same way moss or beetles are of this world. This doesn't mean we are devoid of special talents and significance. Only that our talents are generated and enacted within a complex but thoroughly natural matrix of extensive and intensive properties. We are amazing animals, no doubt about it. But just because we have developed frontal lobes, social techne and symbol manipulating capacities doesn't mean we are ontologically different.

The sort of ‘wilderness thinking’ I support is not simply based on metaphors but evokes and enacts the literal and empirical sense of the term. Our planet is a vast ecological niche with wild (untamable) processes and entities. And as we emerge from this generative matrix of material-energetic (ecological) potencies we find ourselves thrown into a dark and tangled reality. This sometimes obscure, sometimes illuminated field of possibilities is literally a wilderness full of objects, flows, agencies, complexes and differential powers. And we are literally animals coping and adapting to these ‘forces’ through whatever means available. We are, as it were, necessary explorers in the wilderness of being. That is to say, being as such – as the totality of distributed beings and the possibility spaces between them - is fundamentally ecological.

For me, this is not an ontological-metaphysical (onto-theological) statement; it is an ontic statement subject to empirical investigation. For me, metaphysics is a purely speculative project secondary to the more pragmatic practice of investigating the actual conditions of human praxis. And so I think ‘wilderness thinking’ can bring us down to earth (and out from within the fog of our various transcendentalist and metaphysical fantasies) and compel us to stop merely interpreting and reifying the dynamic character of nature and start living it.

To be sure, the nature/culture binary is illusory – a heuristic couplet that obscures the cosmological character of things. It is part of a pre-modernist schema predicated on the solipsistic fantasies of a species that believed itself to be the offspring of Gods, and then later reconfigured by proto-modernists as part of self-validating ‘humanism’.

What could possibly be outside of nature? Can we identity one tangible aspect of human life that is entirely or purely cultural? I strongly doubt it. Every-thing, every experience, every utterance, every symbol is composed of the same cosmological properties which occasion reality. Thus, all consequential and therefore meaningful action takes place on the same plane of immanence.

And so if I choose to operationalize the notion of wilderness in order to frame my ontographic endeavors I do so because for pragmatic and poetic reasons (listed above).

Like Dante stopping at the cusp of a dark forest, I seek to orient myself to the reality in which I find myself as a means of engaging the all too human tasks I have chosen.

In the same post Ross then comments on my associating wilderness ontology with Heidegger’s early work:

The idea of a “wilderness-ontology,” Heidegger’s pathways leading from his hut up in the Black Forest out into thick of the woods, from which he could always search for “the clearing” in which beings disclose themselves — all these metaphors can be very easily traced to Nazi ecological thought. Knowing fully well the dangers of such accusations, I say this with complete seriousness. The Germanic naturalist fetishization of nature, the Nazi concept of the perpetual forest Dauerwald as the sort of Ursprung of the Teutonic spirit, this is the source for Heidegger’s early “fundamental ontology.”

Heidegger was indeed a Nazi. And his philosophy, arguably, does have affinities with fascist modes of thinking. But these facts do not define the totality of his thought and conceptual achievements. As discerning thinkers we can take what is of value in Heidegger and discard the rest. It’s never an all or nothing affair.

Were Sartre and Merleau-Ponty fascists? No. They were communists. But they were also heavily influenced by Heidegger. Same goes with Derrida, Dreyfus, and countless others: influenced by Heidegger without being nazis. And Heidegger is a major influence on my thought but I’m not a fascist, or at least I don’t think I am. (Alternatively, were Emerson or Thoreau fascists? Nope. But they were quintessential wilderness thinkers.)

The link between fascist thought and ecological thought is not causal but incidental. Truly realist ecological thinking flows from the confluence of embodied experience and the methods, conceptual resources and insights of particular sciences and humanities – if it is ever generated at all

The Wilderness of Being

2011-06-02T14:02:00.007-06:00

One pattern that continually astonishes me is how much we are often unconsciously drawn to people and ideas that seem to confirm to us what we had been thinking and feeling all along. Jung talked about a synchronicity at work when seemingly disparate insights and activities come together. I’m too much of a skeptic to entertain the notion of the presence of unverified cosmic laws, but it does make me wonder how certain things seem to arrive at the same place and at particular moments.

The impetus behind these thoughts is the latest burst of insight from Levi Bryant: the notion of wilderness ontology.

Here are a few extracts from the original post:

Wilderness ontology or thought would consist of a radical posthumanism wherein philosophy no longer begins from the standpoint of anthropocentrism, humanism, or the subject-object, nature-culture couplet…

As an ontological concept, “wilderness” should not be taken to signify the opposition between civilization and nature, but rather two distinct ontological orientations: the vertical ontologies of humanist, correlationist thought where being is a correlate of thought versus posthumanist orientations of thought advocated by flat ontologies or immanence. In a “wilderness ontology”, humans are not sovereigns of being, but are among beings with no particularly privileged place…

[W]ilderness ontology should not be conceived as the absence of humans, but rather in terms of a flat plane of being where humans are among beings without enjoying any unilateral, overdetermining role. Just as the fur trappers of the early European Americas brought culture and civilization along with them while dwelling in an alien nature (what Morton-Badiou would call a nature populated by “intensely appearing” strange strangers) humans dwell in the wilderness without the wilderness being reduced to a correlate of thought or a vehicle for human intentions, meanings, signifiers, concepts, norms, etc. Civilization is a part of the wilderness. Culture is a part of the wilderness. Nature is a part of the wilderness. The subject is a part of the wilderness. The difference is that there is, in a wilderness ontology, no categorical distinction between the natural and the cultural, the human and the natural…

There is so much more so go read Bryant’s post in its entirety: here.

Besides the many interesting points Levi raises, what really knocked me for a loop was the fact that Levi arrived at the exact same set of conceptual resources I have been working on in private for years: the idea of the wilderness of being. I have only ever posted on this notion once (here), but failed to develop it in any way as powerfully and coherent as Levi now has.

I cannot emphasize enough how important this conception is in my theoretical repertoire. That Levi has now articulated what I was never willing to, and in a manner I am probably incapable of doing, is both alarming and liberating. It is alarming in that some of my deepest concerns have been generated from a subjectivity not my own; and it is liberating in through the confirmation that comes from knowing there are brighter souls out there coming to near identical conclusions. Perhaps I may not be as fundamentally delusional as I tend to assume.

Below is extracted from statements I made in August of 2010:

What this latest trip really brought home, however, in just how much a need to think through and develop my central theoretical project: the pragmatic implications of an ontographic approach to the wilderness of being. As entities 'thrown' into the world we must find and make our way in a world full of wild, uncanny and strange beings and environments. We are confronted on all sides by forces, objects, flows and contexts which exceed our control, overflow our understandings and often try to destroy, devour or entangle us. Yet, there is also an abundance to Being that affords us the conditions from which we can build our lives. The rich flora and fauna of Being is simultaneously our mother, our matrix, and our calling. And everything hinges on how we explore this vast and intimate wilderness and what we can enact within it.

This manner of framing is at the core of everything I say, write and do. And I hope to develop my thoughts further whenever possible.

I can’t help but directly relate much of this to Heidegger’s early attempts at tracing out a “fundamental ontology”. In this context, “wilderness” is a particularity apt term for thinking the spaciousness, ‘wildness’ (precariousness, chaos) and only partially knowable nature of existence.

The Heideggerian nuance here is that ‘Being’ does not signify some all-encompassing absolute but, rather, it is a term deployed to prompt us to reconsider the fundamental nature of the very background conditions which allow beings (actual entities) to exist and be disclosed in the first instance. And, for me, the process and practicality of reconsidering the raw vicissitudes of reality is decidedly cosmo-political. Without a developed ontographic imagination how are we going to be capable of engaging and exploring - and therefore intervening or adapting to - the realities of power, agency and change?

For me the notion of “the wilderness of being” evokes an deep ecological and anarchic sensibility at the core of material and existential life. Investigating the world through wild-thinking is essential for a pragmatic reconfiguration of everything hitherto assumed by our decadent and dying civil society.

Concepts Are Tools

2011-06-02T13:10:00.000-06:00

Here is Bryant regarding the supposed transcendental structure of rationality or Truth:

“Concepts are not representations, nor are they ideas in minds. Rather, they are lenses and tools. They are apparatuses, every bit as tangible and real as hammers. It makes as much sense to ask “is this concept true?” as it does to ask “is a hammer true?” Drawing a concept from Ryle, this question constitutes a category mistake. And it is a category mistake that constitutes some of the most tiresome and fascistically terrifying attitudes in all of philosophy. Everywhere with this question of whether a concept is true, whether it represents the world, we encounter the desire to police, dominate, subordinate, and render subservient. Like Kafka’s Court or Castle, these philosophical technologies everywhere seek to trap, ensnare, halt, and limit. They create the illusion of free movement and autonomy, while everywhere weaving a semantic web about engagement seeking to fix it. The question “is it true?” is the insecure and narcissistic fantasy of academic philosophy wishing to redeem itself by functioning as master discipline, legislator, and judge of all other disciplines, practices, and experiences. The artist, physicist, ethnographer, and activist get along just fine without this type of “philosopher” to examine their papers. The proper questions when encountering a hammer is not “is it true?”, but rather “what does it do?”, “what can I do with it?”, “is it put together well for these tasks?”, and so on.” [source]

I pretty much agree with this statement in its entirety.

UPDATE / Graham Harman weighs in:

"Nothing is more boring to me than epistemological police work. There’s a reason why this sort of thing is never read outside narrow insider technical cadres.

Stated differently, it is nothing to be proud of when a philosophy is read only by professional philosophers. The pride some take in this outcome is based on a false analogy with the exact natural sciences, where it can possibly be a good sign if only 5 or 6 people in the world read your articles. In philosophy, by contrast, it’s probably the sign that you’re a pompous and over-professionalized bore who doesn’t realize that everyone at the table is bored and no longer listening."

Reading Integral Ecology

2011-05-31T16:00:00.003-06:00

In 1999 I read my first Ken Wilber book. I had never heard of Wilber before the day a surprisingly assertive old hippie struck a dialogue with me in my favorite reading nook at the local library. “You have to read this book son”, declared the bearded stranger. “It will change the way you exist.” Fantastic, I thought. I had been hunkered down with Alan Watts and D.T Suzuki for weeks and was certainly open to a good mind-thrashing alternative. So I accepted the slender paperback from the grinning coyote, asked a few utterly twenty-something questions, and then sat back to digest. I had no expectations.

Until I cracked the cover of The Marriage of Sense and Soul (1998) I had no idea of what to expect from the American philosopher. I hadn’t known at that point he’d written 12 previous volumes over 23 years, exploring everything from altered and mystical states of consciousness, to human development more broadly, to the evolution of the kosmos as such. I would soon learn all that and more.

Only a few pages into the book Wilber gives up the gambit completely: “Fools rush in where angles fear to tread; therefore, the integration of science and religion is the theme of this book.” (p.xi) In my opinion Wilber went a long way to fulfilling that aim. In the book he lays out a panoramic vision which arguably makes room for the co-existence of a wide range of “religious experiences” and practices, while honoring the achievements of human rationality and secular wisdom. Our world is composed of a wide spectrum of ways of being in the world, Wilber argues, and each offers us unique glimpses into the time-less and the developmental dimensions of human life. And for over 35 years Ken Wilber has been taking inventory of the key insights from both science and religion, East and West, and attempting to design tools with which to develop a more humane and sane worldview.

Did the book change the way I existed? Maybe a little. But, more importantly, it offered me an initial glimpse of what a truly synthetic narrative might look like. That first glimpse lead me on a path through all of Wilber’s previous books (including Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and A Brief History of Everything), and the handful he would publish afterwards (including my favorite Integral Psychology), and towards a deep and persistent appreciation for integrative thinking and research generally.

But this is not the place for an overview or critique of Ken Wilber’s work. I bring this anecdote up as a way to contextualize several posts forthcoming as part of a reading group for the book Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World, by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman. The authors use Wilber’s "integral" meta-framework (AQAL) to analysis dozens of ecological paradigms and case histories for the expressed purpose of extracting the core insights of each and reconfigure them together in such a way as to provide a more comprehensive view of the natural world than has yet been available. Do they succeed in bridging the gaps between scientific disciplines, eco-science literatures and research methodologies? That remains to be determined. But, no doubt, the journey of discovery that such a project and book entail will make for an exciting foray into the realm of environmental philosophy and ecological science.

The Integral Ecology Reading Group (IERG) will unfold between several blogs and will include a number of people intimately familiar with both Ken Wilber’s theory and environmental studies more generally. Each week a participating blog will review that week’s readings and host discussion for the larger group.

The schedule for the reading group is as follows:

June 1 – 7
Introduction/Chapter 1 - The Return of Interiority and Conceptual Framework of Integral Ecology
Host Blog: Knowledge Ecology (Adam Robbert)

June 8 – 14
Chapter 2 - It's All About Perspectives: The AQAL Model
Host Blog: Knowledge Ecology (Sam Mickey)

June 15 – 21
Chapter 3/4 - A Developing Kosmos/ Developing Interiors
Host Blog: Immanence (Adrian Ivakhiv)

June 22 – 28
Chapter 5 - Defining, Honoring, and Integrating the Multiple Approaches to Ecology
Host Blog: TBA

June 29 – July 5
Chapter 6 - Ecological Terrains: The What That Is Examined
Host Blog: Mediacology (Antonio Lopez)

July 6 – 12
Chapter 7 - Ecological Selves: The Who That Is Examining
Host Blog: Immanence (Adrian Ivakhiv)

July 13 – 19
Chapter 8 - Ecological Research: How We Examine
Host Blog: Integral Ecology Center (Nicholas Hedlund-de Witt)

July 20 – 26
Chapter 9 - Ecological Harmony and Environmental Crisis in a Post-Natural World
Host Blog: Ecology Without Nature (Tim Morton)

July 27 – Aug 2
Chapter 10/11 - Practices for Cultivating Integral Ecological Awareness/Integral Ecology in Action
Host Blog: Archive Fire (Michael)

It's a massive book at almost 800 pages, so it should make for interesting comments, divergencies and perspectives. Anyone who wants to participate is more than welcome to post their comments or questions on individual host blogs. Also, a big thanks must go out to Adam Robbert for organizing and facilitating the group. I’m very excited about having such knowledgeable participants as co-discussants, and hope some of you find the time share your thoughts.

Documentary: WikiSecrets

2011-05-25T19:26:00.012-06:00

In the documentary below FRONTLINE investigators attempted to reveal the 'inside story' of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and the biggest intelligence breach in U.S. history. WikiLeaks has put out a statement on twitter saying PBS "distorts" the facts surrounding the Manning case and paints a superficial picture of the organization. I found the video interesting none-the-less. Duration: (53:40) - Premiere Date: 05/24/2011

Watch the full episode. See more

Also Watch: WikiRebels: The Documentary

support WikiLeaks with your donations: here

Henry Rollins on Being Cynical

2011-05-25T13:51:00.014-06:00

"Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be." — Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)

There is so much superfluous pain and suffering that I struggle every day to keep from falling into the abyss of cynicism and nihilism. Cynicism breeds compartmentalization and apathy via our need to cope with the stress of this dark world. I can only distract myself by working both within and on the fringes of the dominant systems to catalyze a shift, but is such work making a difference at a systemic level? I’m not convinced it ever has.

So why not just give-in and give-up? Because I can’t. I’m but one tiny shard of impulse in a much greater process of life. Every part of me – every constituent particle and complex – is a riotous life-affirming force that refuses to be snuffed. For me resistance is therfore inevitable.