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Posts Tagged ‘Whitehead’

Artmonks: children of Thoreau & Whitehead

Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , on March 21, 2011 | 5 Comments »

If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately […] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard […]

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s(S)peculative r(R)ealism & philosophy-as-life

Posted in Academe, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , on February 27, 2011 | 7 Comments »

It’s nice to see Speculative Realism capturing the attention of SF writer and all-round idea impresario Bruce Sterling – see his Speculative Realism as “philosophy fiction.” As a long-time SF lover, the idea of “philosophy fiction” has always appealed to me. Some of the best writing in the genre has been profoundly metaphysical, which is […]

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Whitehead & media theory

Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, tagged on February 8, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Jussi Parikka at Machinology is reporting on media theorist Mark Hansen’s move from a focus on media objects to a Whiteheadian focus on media processes. A few quotes: “Well known are the Whitehead writings of Massumi and Manning in Montreal, and of course the recent Whitehead writings of Steven Shaviro, the debates around object oriented […]

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On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2011 | 15 Comments »

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 […]

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On anthropomorphism: making humans, pencils, & souls

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , on December 29, 2010 | 8 Comments »

Tim Morton has recently been suggesting that just as humans anthropomorph (that’s a verb), so pencils pencilmorph. I love this idea, though I’m not sure about its implications, which I want to think through here. Anthropomorphism #1 (traditional, & its extensions) The traditional definition of anthropomorphism is something like “the attribution of human characteristics to […]

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Being knowing, knowing being

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , on December 12, 2010 | 3 Comments »

The debate between relational and objectological variants of speculative realism (for lack of a better characterization) has taken another of its more frenetic turns, which is both frustrating and promising — frustrating because it tends to descend into personally directed pejoratives when it does that, and because, as Steve Shaviro suggests, it seems to go […]

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the attractions of process (metaphysics)

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , on December 9, 2010 | 26 Comments »

With Whiteheadian process philosophers and object-oriented ontologists meeting minds in Claremont, Chris Vitale softening up to OOO, Levi Bryant declaring himself a process philosopher — more precisely, that he’s “always been, [is], and will always be a process philosopher” — and Ian Bogost sharing a very sympathetic attempt to develop commonalities between the two schools […]

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fast thought at Claremont

Posted in Philosophy, tagged , on December 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s UCLA summit on speculative realism, which Tim Morton has been podcasting with relentless (and admirable) abandon, Graham Harman is now at Claremont and appears to be live-blogging the Whitehead conference: Stengers keynote in progress Donna Haraway response to Stengers. And follow it live at his blog. From patient and […]

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the model (Peirce+Whitehead): films, dogs, worlds

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2010 | 4 Comments »

Here’s a version of the theoretical model I develop in Ecologies of the Moving Image. (An earlier version can be found here.) Following Peircian phenomenology (or “phaneroscopy”) and Whiteheadian ontology, that model is process-relational and triadic. (*See Note at bottom for more on the relationship between Peirce, Whitehead, and their leading synthesist, Hartshorne.)

This means:

Everything is three. Or, everything there is can be thought of in terms of three relational processes:

(1) The thing itself, which is a qualitatively distinctive phenomenon. Let’s call it the thing-world, since it is an unfolding of a particular kind, which sets up a formal structure of internal relations and (externally) interactive potentials as it unfolds, and since our relationship to it is generally from its ‘outside,’ though we can enter into a relationship with it.

(2) The interaction of that thing with another. Let’s call this the thing-experience, since we (or others) experience it from the ‘inside.’ This experience is what happens with us when we enter into the relationship with (1). (Other things may be happening with us simultaneously; this thing-experience doesn’t exhaust us. It’s just what we’re trying to understand here.)

(3) The relating of the thing-world and thing-experience with the whole world. To keep things simple, we can call this the thing-world/extra-thing-world relation (with the thing-experience being a subset of this whole relation, and the only piece of it that is distinctly “ours”). Or we can call it the world-earth relation, or the world-universe relation, with the ‘world’ being the thing-world and the ‘earth’ or ‘universe’ being the unencompassable ground (considered either in its earthbound or its cosmic aspect) within which all thing-worlds have their being/becoming. This relation is the full set of connections and interdependencies within which the thing has its action. To map out this relation in its entirety is impossible, but to understand the more proximal and direct parts of it is possible and useful. It is, in effect, the thing come into its fullness: both its full glory and its full dispersion into (other) things.

[. . .]

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Process-relational theory primer

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , , , on November 5, 2010 | 12 Comments »

One of the tasks of this blog, since its inception in late 2008, has been to articulate a theoretical-philosophical perspective that I have come to call “process-relational.” This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that is, it understands the basic […]

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Buddhist objects & processes

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , on September 29, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Does object-oriented ontology = Buddhism? Tim Morton has been making intriguing sounds to that effect, and Levi Bryant has begun to ask him the hard questions about how and whether that might be possible — of how to “square the circle” of independent substances (OOO) with Buddhism’s conditioned genesis (a.k.a. dependent arising, codependent origination). Tim’s […]

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assemblages, species, genres, & cinema

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on September 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »

(Warning: This is a long and involved post.) In reposting Steven Shaviro’s critique of DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society, Levi Bryant has reminded me of one of the impetuses (impeti?) that moved me to a Whiteheadian perspective. Steven’s review is excellent, and it prefigured what eventually became his book Without Criteria, which I think […]

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