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Naming guidelines (or, easy ways to get a phd)

January 26, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

From “Naming Your Child: Guidance for Vermont Birth Certificates”, published by the Vermont Department of Health, 2009:

“2) The name should use only letters, and should not include numbers (numeric characters) in it. As with other alphabets, if you want to include a number in your child’s name, you should spell it out in letters. For example, use Numerouno or Childnumbereight, but not Roger47 or 101110.

“5) The name should not contain any handwritten notes, comments, or drawings. Federal and states agencies are not able to accommodate unique drawings or other symbols or pictures [….].

“6) The name does not include titles. By definition, a title is not a name. You may use a word that is used as a title (e.g., King, Queen, Count, Duke) as one of you child’s names. For example, Duke (first name) Jones (last name). Similarly, an academic honorific title (e.g. PhD, MA) after the last Name is not a part of the name. However, you may name your child Thomas Jonesphd.

“7) The name may use any English word. […] You may use trademarked names (e.g., IBM), diseases (e.g., Anthrax), obscenities, etc., but we highly recommend against it.”

So, “Count Anthrax Raskolnikof-PhD” is okay (hyphens are allowed), though the Dept. of Health recommends against it.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Emergence

January 23, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

a new fold in the fabric of things, a novel bifurcation opening onto potentials of experience heretofore unexperienced. the many become one and are increased by one.

zoryán 1 23 11

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

Post-Cinematic Affect in the era of plasticity

January 19, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

It’s probably inappropriate to review a book about four films when one has only seen one, and by far the shortest (it’s a music video), of the four. So this isn’t a review so much as an appreciation of Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect, along with some half-digested notes I made while reading it, but which I haven’t been able to synthesize into what would constitute a proper review. Due to time constraints (which will continue for a while), I’ll share them as is. (I would also recommend Chris Vitale’s response to the book.)

I’ve been a fan of Shaviro’s work since a web search for “Dhalgren” led me directly to Shaviro, who it turned out was a fan of the book by Samuel Delany that was formative in my early intellectual development. I was 13 at the time I read Dhalgren, and I hadn’t read anything quite like it until then (or much like it since). I had come across Shaviro’s writings earlier, but I’ve followed them more diligently — and been inspired by his writing on science fiction, films, music, politics and culture over the years (his Stranded in the Jungle provides a great snapshot of how widely his tastes range) — since chancing onto his site. His turn to Alfred North Whitehead in the book Without Criteria accompanied a move in my own thinking toward Whitehead’s process-relational understanding of the universe. Since then, Shaviro and I have found ourselves on the same side of the process-objects debates that have been staged here and on other blogs.

Post-Cinematic Affect is a short work. Much of it appeared as an extra-length article in Film-Philosophy, and most of the rest is readable here and there online, but I would urge you to buy the book to support Zero Books’ laudable effort to make philosophy affordable. Its shortness, however, and the small sampling of films it discusses, belies a depth of argumentation that generates rich insights on media, capitalism, affect, allure, celebrity culture, and much more. Continue Reading »

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

A world of becoming

January 19, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

William Connolly’s A World of Becoming arrived in the mail yesterday. It looks wonderful, and only two chapters appear to include material that has been previously published in any form (both very recent), which means this is all quite new. If I had the time and the energy, I would try to organize a cross-blog reading group or something of the sort, as was done with the book that serves as its “companion piece” (of a sort), Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. (On that reading group, see here and follow the links.)

Just as Bennett had included her own “credo” in the latter part of her book, Connolly includes something like that in his “Postlude”:

Do you know what the world is to me?

A colossus of diverse energies, without beginning or end, with each flowing over, through, and around others, generating new currents and eddies.

A play of waves, forces, and perceptions on different scales of complexity, endurance, and time, with some swelling as others subside, with perhaps long cycles of repetition, but none that simply repeats those preceding.

[. . .]

The longest index entries include the names Nietzsche, Whitehead, Deleuze, Charles Taylor, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and the terms time, process, becoming, capitalism, force-field, God, faith, perception, agency, human predicament, and of course immanence. I will have more thoughts on it as I read it (informed no doubt by the anticipated objections of the objectologists, which I have internalized by now), but I have little doubt that it will be a significant contribution to process-relational theory as this blog has defined it.

See the Connolly tag for previous mentions of his work here.

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged | 4 Comments »

End of an ear…

January 16, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

I’ve added a menu of links to some of the key posts on this blog in process-relational theory: see “P-R Theory 101” in the right-hand column (scroll down). This is a somewhat random sample, and readers with the patience for it can find much more by following other links and tags on this blog. A more systematic and refined exposition will come in time.

As a final comment on OOO (because I too am tired of that discussion), I’ll just say that readers interested in the objects-processes/relations debate can revisit my review of Harman’s Prince of Networks, which launched (as far as I can tell) a long series of back-and-forth exchanges on that topic more than 16 months ago, to see to what extent the questions posed there have been answered. That review begins here and ends here; my questions/objections come mostly in the latter segment. With that I’m signing off from that particular debate on this blog.

By the way, the title of this post isn’t a misspelling; it’s the name of Robert Wyatt’s first solo album after he left The Soft Machine. It’s a good one (as are the Softs‘ first four, up until Wyatt left).

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

Paradigms, productivity, perspective

January 15, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Levi Bryant responds to my last post (and by extension to Chris Vitale’s) here. I agree with him that he and Graham Harman have made worthy efforts at addressing concerns that are central to process-relational philosophical communities (e.g., in Bryant’s Difference and Givenness and in the books of Harman’s that I’ve lauded on this blog); nowhere did I claim they have “made no arguments.” My point in the comparison was not to “appeal to authority,” as Levi claims. It was simply to point out the fact that one could fill a modestly sized room with the books that have been published by Deleuzians, Whiteheadians, Peircians, Bergsonians, Jamesians, neo-Spinozans, Hartshornians, Batesonians, panpsychists, biosemioticists, affective materialists, etc. etc. (not to mention Buddhist nondualists and other non-Western-based philosophers, at which point we would need a modestly sized building, not just a room). One could not fill a small shelf yet with OOO books.

This says nothing about the quality of any of these books. But it does say that the former (process-relational) traditions have been productive research programs (in philosopher of science Imre Lakatos’s terms), which is almost as good as one could hope for in a field as paradigmatically pluralistic and divided as philosophy. The difference between a productive and a moribund research program is not always easy to tell except in retrospect, but the level of continuing idea-generation and publishing, including efforts that traverse between and across the various sub-traditions I’ve just mentioned, is relatively healthy. Given that state of the field, Kuhnian paradigm shifts are probably not on the philosophical horizon anytime soon. But I admire OOO-ists’ efforts (and enthusiasm) to cut a wide swath through current philosophical discourse, and I actually cheer them on in doing this (since I share at least some of their interests). But let’s keep things in perspective.

On an unrelated note: my blogging will likely be minimal over the coming weeks. I may polish off a few half- or mostly-written posts from my drafts folder, and I will continue to update my Shadow Blog (since that takes no time at all). You may see a few guest bloggers here as well. But otherwise, don’t expect too much activity here, especially on this objects-processes debate.

Posted in Blog stuff, Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

Vitale throws down the gauntlet…

January 14, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Chris Vitale has “thrown down the gauntlet,” as he puts it, to the object-oriented ontologists to finally respond in a satisfactory way to process-relational critiques. (I admire his Sicilian bravado!)

Chris is obviously writing in a somewhat feverish mode, blogging at the speed of thought rather than in the tempered and cautious tone written philosophy has traditionally favored, and this no doubt accounts for a certain repetitiveness in what he’s laid out — which is itself a characteristic of the philosophical blogosphere (and therefore relevant to what I’m about to say). But he makes some very important points, which I would reiterate as follows: Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged | 5 Comments »

Reply to Harman

January 14, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Graham Harman has written a post about me in which he says that I was trying to “refute” OOO in my “2 cheers” post, and that I “claim[ed] quite frankly that OOO is wrong.” I thought it worth pointing out that nowhere in that post did I mention OOO, or Graham’s philosophy under any other name. Those three magical letters appear in a quote from Tim, but I don’t take that part of the quote up in my comments afterward, which are about music. My entire post was a reply to Tim Morton’s 11-paragraph rejoinder to four short sentences I wrote in a comment on Tim’s blog. Those sentences concerned stability and instability, stability being an achievement, and the role of his “lava-lampism” notion in OOO. Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged | 9 Comments »

34 warm years & counting

January 13, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The results are in and both NOAA and NASA agree that 2010 is statistically tied (with 2005) for the warmest year on record, globally.

Nine of the last ten years are among the ten warmest years on record. (The exception was 2008. The records go back to 1880.) And the last time we had a year in which the global average temperature was BELOW the twentieth-century average was 1976. That’s 34 warm years in a row. And counting.

(And in case you’re prone to making some comment about the snow, we’re talking global climate, not local weather. If you don’t know the difference, you’re not qualified to comment on it.)

Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture | 4 Comments »

Puzzles

January 13, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Graham is “puzzled that Ivakhiv thinks OOO can be refuted by the fact that objects have histories.” I’m puzzled why Graham would think that I think that. I’m also puzzled why my brief comment (on Tim’s blog) about stability and instability, and about stability as an achievement rather than a default mode, should have set off such a volley of responses (e.g. here and  here). Continue Reading »

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2 cheers for lava lamps & Lego blocks

January 11, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Tim Morton seems not to have liked my comment suggesting that reality is a mix of stability and instability, and that stability is an achievement rather than a default position.

The universe, I would say, is an achievement as well. His much-loved (?) lava lamps are achievements, as are Graham Harman‘s Lego blocks. They don’t fall from the sky; they are made into objects that withstand a fairly high degree of turbulence in their environments. Humans have become great producers of such things — of things that can be shipped all the way from China (as Leonard Cohen used to sing) and that work for a little while according to their instructions, before we tire of them and order next year’s model.

But even in a world without humans, there are achievements aplenty: planets and galaxies (amazing achievements, they); oceans teeming with life, some of it organized into social groups; and ecosystems, geological formations, bacterial networks, individual organisms, and all the rest. Even the things that do fall from the sky — asteroids and meteorites, for instance — are achievements, though the more impressive achievement is the atmosphere that protects those other things from the onslaught of the meteorites. They all take a fair bit of work being made and maintained — not necessarily work by “themselves” (though that, too), but work on a multitude of levels and scales. And they are all in process (or, to be more precisely, in various kinds of process), always modulating between stability and instability but, fortunately (for us) crafting enough stabilities to make a pretty richly diverse world possible. Continue Reading »

Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments »

On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics

January 10, 2011 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Since there isn’t much available in English about Philippe Descola’s writings on animism, I thought I would share a piece of the cosmopolitics argument I mentioned in my last post. It will appear, in modified form, in the concluding chapter of the SAR Press volume mentioned there. Most of the volume will consist of ethnographic case studies from around the world, but these will be informed by the theoretical conversations of the week we spent at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe.

Following this excerpt I have added some comments relating the ideas (discussed here) of Descola, Latour, and Stengers to some of the concepts I’ve been working with from Whitehead, Peirce, and the fields/discourses of biosemiotics and panpsychism. I haven’t seen these connections made (in this way, at least) in any of the literature by or on these authors, and I’m still working out these ideas myself, so that part is work-in-progress.

From animism to cosmopolitics

Animism, like the “primitive,” “pagan,” and “savage,” but also like “religion” itself, is a term has been used to classify cultural difference into a hierarchically valenced series: animists, for Edward Tylor and other evolutionists, were thought to have maintained a “lower” and more “primitive” conception of the universe, one peopled by spirits and with objects being ascribed human characteristics. In Tylor’s view, the animist “stage” of belief was followed by a polytheistic one, and in turn by a monotheistic one. This evolutionism has since been largely rejected, and more recently, a loose coterie of anthropologists and scholars of religion have reappropriated the term “animism” to mean something rather more interesting (Bird-David 1999; Descola 2005, 2006, 2009; Harvey 2006; Ingold 2000; Viveiros de Castro 1992, 2004). Continue Reading »

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments »

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