Tag Archive: process-relational thought


How a film becomes a subject

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A key question for a process-relational account of a film is the question of how that film shows objects and subjects in the process of being made — how it shows subjectivation and objectivation arising together. Much of Ecologies of the Moving Image is about this, but what remains more implicit throughout the book is the way in which film itself expresses subjectivation.

I thought of this while re-watching Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang’s documentary about a “farewell cruise” on the Yangtze River before the completion of the final phase of the Three Gorges Dam.

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This continues the consideration of subjectivity begun in the last post (on Zizek and Buddhism). It also continues the series on process-relational ecosophy-G, or pre-G.

 

 

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This started out as a response to Slavoj Zizek’s recent talk here at the University of Vermont on “Buddhism Naturalized,” but evolved into a consideration of subjectivity, which happened to be the topic of my next post in the pre-G (process-relational ecosophy-G) series. So this can be considered part 1 of a 2-part series.

 

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“Craziness” & habit

In a process-relational view, there are no crazies. There are those who subjectivate with the aid of habits developed in response to conditions that have changed sufficiently that those habits are no longer very effective, or are not considered appropriate by others.

Calling someone — and treating someone as — “crazy” is a way of reifying a particular relationship between one’s own subjectivity and that other’s objectivity. In a process-relational understanding, their objectivity is an artifact of our subjectivation. In reality, they subjectivate as much as we do. Within their own history of subjectivation the habits they have developed make perfect sense. They indicate options selected from an array of possibilities to shape a certain array of subjective propensities.

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For the moment

Now that a very busy semester has ended, I can return to the constructive speculative-metaphysical strand of this blog, in which I work out the process-relational philosophy I’ve tentatively labelled Ecosophy-G. A suitable acronym for this project might be “pre-G” (process-relational ecosophy-G), pronounced “pree-jee,” with the “pre” also indicating that the philosophy is a form of pre-articulation, a work in progress, and the “ge” referring, among other things, to the “Ge-” of geography, geophilosophy, and geode.

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“Ultimately, the thinking of speculative pragmatism that is activist philosophy belongs to nature. Its aesthetico-politics compose a nature philosophy. The occurrent arts in which it exhibits itself are politics of nature.

“The one-word summary of its relational-qualitative goings on: ecology. Activist philosophy concerns the ecology of powers of existence. Becomings in the midst. Creative change taking place, self-enjoying, humanly or no, humanly and more.”

These two short paragraphs close the Introduction to Brian Massumi’s recent, and thoroughly Whiteheadian, book Semblance and Event. They serve as a good epigraph to what I’d like to discuss here, which is the “neo-Whiteheadian wave” I see arising in cultural theory and its connections to ecology and to “speculative realism” (which, in Massumi’s hands, becomes speculative pragmatism; the differences are worth exploring).

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One of the things that Ecologies of the Moving Image has left unresolved, and left me needing to think more about, is the extent to which my Peircian “triadism” holds up.

Philosophically, the case for some sort of triadism as a way of getting around dualisms is, at first blush, appealing. But there are triads, and there are triads.

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The preliminary schedule is out for The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies.

The list of speakers reads like a “who’s who” of the neo-ontological, speculative-realist crowd in cultural and media theory: Steven Shaviro, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Mark Hansen, Ian Bogost, and Tim Morton are among the keynotes, while lesser mortals like myself, Mackenzie Wark (not so lesser last time I checked), and others known to the philoso-blogosphere (Woodard, Stanescu, Denson, et al.) are also scheduled to present.

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Life outside the lava lamp

Over at Naught Thought, Ben Woodard (sorry, Ben, for the earlier misspell) wants “to know what the Process/Relational folks think” of his thoughts about philosophies of process versus philosophies of objects or substances (or something like that). What follows is one quick and dirty way of thinking of a certain key difference between these two approaches.

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The Speculative Realist blogosphere has recently been alight with debates over the role of religion, God, theism versus nihilism, the secular and the “post-secular,” and other such things. Since these are topics I’m naturally interested, and somewhat invested, in, I ought to participate, but time constraints have made that all but impossible for me recently.

(One of those constraints is a trip this week to the Rachel Carson Center in Munich for “Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, and Ecocinema,” about which I intend to blog, and perhaps live-blog, while there. I leave tomorrow, so stay tuned for more on that.)

Adam’s post Knowledge Ecology provides a useful way into these discussions, but see also these posts at Footnotes to Plato (and this one), Plastic Bodies, Immanent Transcendence, Larval Subjects, and After Nature.

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