For anyone interested in the growing dialogue between Whiteheadian process philosophy and post-Continental metaphysical realism — a dialogue that, in my view, is at the philosophical cutting edge for ecological thinking — the Claremont conference seems as good as it gets, perhaps even a turning point. The dialogue between hard-core Whiteheadians like Roland Faber and […]
Archive for 2010
planetary alignment in Claremont?
Posted in Philosophy on December 4, 2010 | 4 Comments »
welcome to immanence 2.0
Posted in Blog stuff, Uncategorized on December 3, 2010 | 6 Comments »
This is the new, improved version of Immanence. If you came here from the old one and had been a feed subscriber, blogroll linker, or just a regular reader of that one, I would love it if you’d do the same here. I’ll still be tweaking things here and there for a while as I […]
fast thought at Claremont
Posted in Philosophy, tagged Harman, Whitehead 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 […]
gleanings
Posted in Climate change, Uncategorized, tagged anthropology, Cancun, Harman, Shaviro on December 2, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Scientists found that Asian and American brains respond completely differently when faced with images of dominance and submission, and when evaluating character traits of themselves as opposed to other people. Asians and Americans gathered with other world leaders to fiddle at a Mexican resort while buildings burned. [. . .] Graham Harman and Steven Shaviro got ready to slug it out in the middleweight neo-realist philosopher category of the international thought-wrestling society. [. . .]
the model (Peirce+Whitehead): films, dogs, worlds
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged Agamben, Deleuze, Hartshorne, Peirce, Whitehead 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.
[. . .]
those potent French narcotics…
Posted in Academe, tagged actor-network theory, Francophobia, Latour on November 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Himanshu at Doxic Shock shares a couple of great Latourisms… The details may be past their expiry dates (the generalities less so), but they’re still pretty funny.* For a French person, saying that facts are constructed is a banality. Relativism is like an infantile disease: for us, who contract it in our high school philosophy […]
cinema as Prospero’s organic machine
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged film-philosophy on November 28, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Here’s a fragment from Chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image. This chapter covers cinema’s “geomorphism,” by which I mean the part of cinema’s world-making capacity, its becoming-world-ness, that presents us with an objectscape, a territory within which things happen and action occurs. This is in contrast to cinema’s “anthropomorphism” (a subset of “subjectomorphism”), which refers to the cinematic production and distribution of agency, the capacity to act (which is the film-world’s subjectscape). Between these two poles is the “biomorphic field,” the interactive liveliness within which subjectivation and objectivation are distinguished and separated from each other, moment to moment. [. . .]
It is here, in the factory -– the central production site of modernity, but here in its double aspect as organic-mechanical construction site and as imagistic and imaginal production workshop, the center from which images are produced and disseminated — that Prospero’s Books most literally takes place. Here is Jonathan Beller’s ‘cinematic mode of production,’ turned to the deconstructive ends of staging modernity’s own unraveling.
manuscript update
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Philosophy, tagged film on November 24, 2010 | 3 Comments »
I’m recovering from a hard drive crash that occurred late last week. The only significant part of Ecologies of the Moving Image that I’ve completely lost are some fairly substantial recent revisions and additions to Chapter Six. I can reconstruct other pieces from earlier saves and from revisions made on hard copy print-outs. The crash […]
261 millionnaires in Congress
Posted in Politics on November 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
No comment. (Except this.)
puppets & mediums in the battle over Amerika
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged America, Glenn Beck, Jon Stewart on November 20, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Jon Stewart does Glenn Beck (again), spinning his George-Soros-as-Darth-Vader routine to its logical culmination… “Only Rupert Murdoch” — well, with this ragtag bunch of conservative billionnaires, media organizations, PACs, et al. — “stands between George Soros and Amerika.” This is laugh-(or-cry)-out-loud hilarious. Part 1: Part 2: Or watch the whole episode at the Daily Show […]
things
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought on November 19, 2010 | 3 Comments »
. . . scribbled on a restaurant napkin: 1. Things are always already in process. 2. More complex things are more in process, or in more (and different) processes, than simpler things. 3. Growing/developing/evolving things tend to become more complex. Other things tend to become less so. 4. Being in process, things elude capture. Those […]
U of Alexandria hits the big time?
Posted in Academe on November 17, 2010 | 1 Comment »
When I first heard that an Egyptian university placed fourth worldwide in scholarly productivity, and that it was due to the work of a single scholar, I couldn’t help thinking of Graham Harman churning out brilliant philosophical tomes out of American University in Cairo… Turns out this guy beats Graham handily in quantity and — […]
Categories
- Academe (108)
- Anthropocene (73)
- Blog stuff (51)
- Cinema (88)
- Climate change (74)
- Cultural politics (43)
- Eco-culture (174)
- Eco-theory (53)
- Manifestos & auguries (41)
- Media ecology (119)
- Music & soundscape (39)
- Philosophy (261)
- Politics (164)
- Process-relational thought (101)
- Science & society (35)
- Spirit matter (128)
- Uncategorized (57)
- Visual culture (88)
Translate
Archives
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Subscribe2
Top Posts & Pages
Popular resources
Books & articles
Interviews & music
Associated sites
Immanence on Facebook
-
